Févret de Saint-Mémin

Born into an aristocratic family from Dijon, Charles Balthasar received a refined education and entered the Military School in 1784 as a cadet. In 1789, his family emigrated, and while the Févret de Saint-Mémin family took refuge in Switzerland, their property was confiscated and their collections — including a natural history cabinet purchased from Jehannin de Chamblanc — were reserved for public instruction. Part of their art collection, inventoried by the painter and first director of the Dijon Academy François Desvoges, was retained for the museum installed in 1787 in the eastern wing of the Palais des États. The Févret de Saint-Mémin family then emigrated to the United States, intending to reach Saint-Domingue where they owned property. As the political situation there was equally unstable due to the slave liberation movement led by Toussaint Louverture, Charles Févret de Saint-Mémin remained in the United States, where he found himself compelled to earn a living.

Having learned to draw under François Desvoges, he had also become familiar with the physionotrace process used to produce profile portraits in series and popularized by Edme Quenedey des Riceys. Fond of mechanical sciences, Févret succeeded in reconstructing this instrument and earned his living by producing numerous portraits of American high society. The process combined the art of drawing — necessary to create a refined and accurate likeness — with the ability to reproduce it in several copies thanks to reduction and engraving. From the original drawing, called the “grand trait,” the artist produced about a dozen engravings in the form of circular medallions approximately 55 mm in diameter. For the sum of 25 dollars for men and 35 dollars for women, he sold the grand trait together with the twelve engravings derived from it and the copper plate used. Several collections of his engraved portraits exist: the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington holds eight hundred, while the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque nationale contains four hundred and fifty. Portraying much of American society at the time, from Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin to Native American chiefs, Févret de Saint-Mémin also produced landscapes as well as illustrative vignettes.

After a first return in 1810, Févret returned permanently to France in 1814 to replace Claude Houin as curator of the Dijon Museum. There, he found several of his own paintings, now the property of the museum. Holding this position until his death, he had many works restored and made the notable acquisition of the Nativity by the Master of Flémalle. He initiated the arrangement of the great Guard Room of the former ducal residence, opened in 1827, with numerous tombs of the Dukes of Burgundy, altarpieces, and Gothic woodcarvings, thus helping to revive the taste for the Middle Ages. He was also the founder of the Dijon Society of Friends of the Arts in 1837.

The two beautiful portraits presented here bear labels, probably from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, identifying the sitters as “Georges Fitzwilliam, an Englishman” and his wife Eleanor Ramsay Fitzwilliam. However, the portrait corresponding to that of Georges Fitzwilliam, held at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, bears on its original mount an inscription in the artist’s hand mentioning Wm Ramsey, which may suggest that this information is incorrect. In reality, as Ellen Miles has shown in her work devoted to the artist, these autograph inscriptions sometimes contain errors; these portraits do indeed depict, as confirmed by family archives, Georges Arnold Fitzwilliam, an English merchant born in Shoreditch who settled in New York and later moved to Trinidad after marrying Eleanor Ramsay in 1794. Eleanor Ramsay, for her part, was born in New York in 1772 and died in the same city in 1844. She was the daughter of John and Elisabeth Ramsay and the sister of Charles Ramsay, whose portrait was also made the same year by Févret de Saint-Mémin.

The portraits drawn by Févret de Saint-Mémin were almost always executed with a mixture of black chalk and white chalk, which, on the pink prepared paper, produced a very soft gray effect. They are both accurate and stylized, and their original frames — often black and gold, like those of these drawings — make them objects of great elegance, undoubtedly one of the reasons for their great success in American society and particularly in New England.