[MELBOURNE] Portrait of Jules Joseph Lefebvre, the French artist who painted “Chloé”. Paris, circa 1879.

A$450 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 104 x 62 mm; verso with the imprint of the photographic studio of Ferdinand Mulnier, 25 Boulevard des Italiens, which also mentions the gold medal awarded to him at the Exposition Universelle of 1878, and with contemporary captions in ink and pencil identifying the sitter as Lefebvre ; in fine condition. The creator of a Melbourne icon. Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836-1911) trained as a painter at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in the early 1850s. Between 1855 and 1898, he exhibited no fewer than 72 works in the Paris Salon, the majority of them oil portraits of exotic women. In the Salon of 1875 he exhibited Chloé , an evocation of a pastoral idyll from classical antiquity, inspired by André Chenier s poem Mnazile et Chloé . The painting a full-length nude portrait won Lefebvre the prestigious Gold Medal of Honour. The beautiful young model who posed for Lefebvre was a 19-year-old Parisienne identified only as Marie, who is reputed to have committed suicide out of unrequited love at the age of 21. The painting s association with Australia goes all the way back to 1879, when it was brought out for exhibition in the French gallery at the Sydney International Exhibition of that year. The following year it was part of the Melbourne International Exhibition. The painting won a gold medal at both events. Chloé was then purchased by Dr. Thomas Fitzgerald of Melbourne, for 850 guineas an astronomical sum for the time, part

• Binding: Hardcover

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