Emerging from Anonymity: a portrait of Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode

Maurizio Nobile Fine Art

Over time, the gallery has made of portrait one of its specialties.

The portrait raises a dual challenge that consists of a double identification effort: to simultaneously acknowledge the author of the work and the identity of the model.

A riddle that we often get to solve, other times only halfway or, at worst, remains unsolved, especially on the front of the sitter identification.
So who is then this young violinist who stops for a moment studying a music score and with a proud gaze and friendly glance allows himself to be portrayed?

At first look, what information does the picture convey to us?
The long fingers as well as the dust of the strings released on the violin tell us that the sitter is a trained violinist.
Questions of style bring us to France in the late 18th and the beginning of the 19th century.
One detail allows us to circle the years of the painting's execution between around 1800 and 1804- is the hairstyle shown by the young man so-called in the Brutus style.

It was the hairstyle that the newly-consul Napoleon adopted after his return from the campaign in Egypt; he cut off his fogey ponytail, shortened his hair and wore it forward, in the manner of an ancient Roman Consul.

Among his supporters, this hairstyle quickly became fashionable, in contrast to the so-called Titus hairstyle worn by the more moderate revolutionaries who kept the ponytail, but always wore the consular earring.

Nevertheless, this trend quickly fell into disuse with the advent of the Napoleonic Empire in 1804.
Nothing more seems possible to say.

But as it often happens while presenting artworks in the various international fairs we take part in, there is plenty of opportunities to come into contact with visitors involved in various fields of interest, and thus potential investigation paths, little by little, emerge.

It seems, therefore, that the man featured in this superb portrait would be a French violinist, the French virtuoso and Academician of the newly established Music Conservatory in Paris, Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode (1774-1830).

How did we arrive at this hypothesis?

It was thanks to a tip made by a professional violinist from La Scala in Milan, to whom goes our gratitude, that we were given the path to perhaps solving one part of the rebus to try to achieve the identification of the man portrayed in the painting.

Given the role still played today by Rode's musical inventions in the technical/practical learning of the musical instrument - with his colleagues Pierre Baillot (1771-1842) and Rodolphe Kreutzer (1766-1831) , Rode developed a method for the violin published in 1803 that is still in use today - an aspiring violinist, still in his early childhood, is certainly aware of the facial features of the great French violinist.

The twenty-four Capricci for violin he composed, in fact, are still considered propaedeutic to a solid technical and musical training in learning to play the instrument.

Searching for well-known portraits of the violinist to verify the reliability of this suggestion, what appeared to be an artist's clumsiness in making the foreshortening of the figure's right eye turned out to be a physiognomic characteristic of the subject.
A portrait of the violinist engraved by Henri Grevedon in 1827, comes to our aid, as does a very small black chalk drawing now in the Musée de la Musique in Paris showing a very young Rode perhaps in a moment shortly before the dates of our portrait; the profile of the nose, the lips outline and the pointed chin would seem to be echoed in the face portrayed in our painting.
Widely admired for his extraordinary technical skill and compositions, from around 1790, the time of his professional affirmation, Rode lived the itinerant life of an acclaimed virtuoso everywhere in France and beyond. In 1800, he was appointed violin Soloist for the musique particulière of the First Consul, Napoleon, and was briefly solo violinist at the Opéra. Between 1804 and 1808 he stayed in Russia, where he was appointed court violinist to Tsar Alexander I (1777-1825). After returning to Paris, he began to travel around Europe. In Vienna, at the end of 1812, he performed with the last son-in-law of the Emperor Leopold II, the Archduke Rudolf Johann of Habsburg-Lorraine, who accompanied him on the piano; between 1814 and 1821 he was in Berlin, where he met and married his wife and became a close friend of the Mendelssohn family.
Our painting would therefore portray a young Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode in his early 26s or early 30s at most, at the time that he was appointed violin soloist particulière to the First Consul Napoleon or shortly before his departure for Russia in the service of Tsar Alexander I.

Perhaps a portrait he commissioned shortly before he left for Russia to follow up another dazzling moment in his career?

What about the author of the painting?

Who was the painter who created this remarkable portrait?

Will the second part of this rebus be solved?
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Given the high standard in the rendering of complexions and clothes materials, almost tactile painterly quality, or of the liveliness of the face expression, the author is certainly an experienced portrait painter. Indeed, a few pentimenti - around the hair, the right shoulder, the fingers of the left hand, the violin, and the music stand - would seem to suggest that the author was most likely more familiar with smaller portrait formats. This series of adjustments in fact intends to reposition the figure on a lower level compared to an earlier stage, with the intention to better relate it to the observer in a more spontaneous as well as informal dialogue.

A very interesting path, but still to be examined in terms of style, was provided by Mister Philippe Nusbaumer (written communication).
Mr. Nusbaumer informs us that, in 1810, the portrait painter Jacques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine (1751-1824) exhibited a portrait of the violinist Rode at the Paris Salon together with another portrait of the well-known violoncellist Jean-Henri Levasseur, dit 'le jeune' (1764-1826).

Could our painting be identified with the Rode portrait exhibited at the Salon in 1810 by Lemoine?

Recorded together with the portrait of the violoncellist Levasseur under no. 111 of the list of works deposited to be exhibited at the Salon, no information is given regarding their measures; it is therefore impossible to know their real size, whether they were small or large works as in the case of our painting.
While awaiting further research regarding the style, the attribution of the portrait to the painter Jacques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine remains therefore purely hypothetical, however, it remains fascinating to realize how much even the smallest detail can affect the resolution of this rebus.

This is just the narration of what we have come to conclude as of today on this extraordinary portrait, research continues, and whoever may have new paths to suggest to us, we are always ready to hear.