Portraits of Mr and Mrs de Pont by the pastel artist Joseph Ducreux

These two family portraits relate to Henriette Onslow (1814–1883), who married the Marquis Joseph de Pierre (1807–1885) in 1839. They depict Henriette’s maternal great-grandparents. Her mother, Delphine de Fontanges, was the daughter of Justin de Fontanges and Adélaïde Pauline de Pont, and these portraits are of Adélaïde Pauline de Pont’s parents. They are listed by Neil Jeffares in his dictionary of pastel artists as being by Joseph Ducreux, a well-known portraitist of the late^18th century.

Joseph Ducreux probably first studied under his father Charles, a painter in the service of Stanislas Lesczynsky in Nancy; then, from 1760 onwards, he is thought to have worked with the famous pastel artist Quentin de La Tour, though this connection is now regarded as doubtful. It is more certain that he was a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Greuze in painting. In 1769, Joseph Ducreux was sent to Vienna to paint a portrait of Marie-Antoinette prior to her marriage to Louis XVI. In gratitude, he became the Queen’s principal painter, even though he was not even a member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.

From the late 1780s onwards, he produced numerous self-portraits in unusual poses (laughing, yawning, looking pensive), demonstrating his intention to break with tradition by drawing on a new, fashionable science, physiognomy, which claimed to be able to define a person’s character solely through the study of their appearance.

The French Revolution led him to settle in London, but he returned to Paris in 1793 with the support of the painter Jacques-Louis David, who was close to the Jacobins. He then exhibited at the Salon Libre that same year, with a thoroughly provocative self-portrait in a mocking pose. Joseph Ducreux was a man with a wide network of contacts: having painted at the courts of Germany, England and France, he knew all the important figures of his time, whether they were aristocrats or sympathisers with the ideas of the Revolution.

Émilie-Juliette Gauby, Joseph Ducreux 1735–1802. Portrait painter, dissertation, Blaise Pascal University of Clermont II, 2004.

Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800 [published online]