Getty Museum

Musical Trio in an Interior

Date

about 1755

Medium

Oil on canvas

Culture

French

Department

Paintings

Institution

Getty Museum

A trio sits comfortably in a simple but classically beautiful interior enjoying a folio of sheet music held by the central female figure in pink. To her left, a middle-aged man sits cross-legged in a chartreuse three-piece suit, casually leaning onto her chair, his other hand clasping a gold-topped cane. His posture conveys dominance of the space around him through a leisurely posture. The man on the right is an Abbot, engrossed in the music that has been pulled from the large portfolio to the right, splayed open underneath the neck of a stringed instrument tied with a bright blue ribbon. The Abbot leans forward gently on his fist, physically balancing the reclined posture of the figure on the left. Between them sits the woman in pink, whose gown contrasts with the green to her left and the brown to her right, while everything stands out against the cream, wood-paneled walls. In one hand, the figure of the woman holds the sheet music and, in the other, a round, wooden snuffbox. The viewer has entered a space of provincial aristocratic sociality and erudition. Long believed to depict Étienne François, Duc de Choiseul (1719-1785), French Foreign Minister and art patron, *Musical Trio in an Interior* may instead depict a different family more connected to the home region of the artist, the Ardennes, which sits in the Northeast of France and extends into modern-day Belgium and Germany. This painting offers insight into the amusements of the aristocracy beyond the borders of Versailles. In the chartreuse three-piece suit (left), we may be looking at Pierre François de Bourgongne (1693-1757), who received an important royal commission in Lyon collecting taxes on the King’s behalf. This task frequently took him far from his family home, the Château de Courmelois, near Reims. If Bourgongne is the figure in green, the man in the brown habit (right) is likely his son, Marie Nicolas Bourgongne (1724-1804), Canon of Reims, Abbot of Sablonceaux. His clerical status is made clear by his *calotte* cap. The central woman in pink remains the most difficult attribution to date as sources suggest she could be either Pierre François de Bourgongne’s wife, Marie-Anne Ledoux (1707-1738), who died prematurely before the creation of this portrait, or his daughter, Marie Anne Andrienne Danré d’Armancy (née Bourgongne, 1728-1797). The carved look of her face does not inherently imply that this was a posthumous portrait, however, as this was quite common for the artist to paint some faces smoothly and others with more weathering. Her *robe à la française* bedecked with bows down the stomacher was very up to date in the 1750s and shows that the sitters had access to finery. Wilbault’s figures strongly resemble those in other works by him, which mostly reside in Reims, nearby the artist’s hometown of Château-Porcien. Though not definitive, the family’s ownership of this painting and the artist’s dedication to painting the aristocracy of Reims have provided the strongest argument for identification to date.

The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.