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(1) Hubert Drouais [Drouais le père]
(b Saint-Samson-de-la-Roque, Eure, 5 May 1699; d Paris, 9 Feb 1767). He began his artistic training in Rouen and moved to Paris in 1717, where he entered the studio of the portrait painter François de Troy, who employed him principally as a copyist. Besides painting portraits in oil and pastel, Drouais also took up miniature painting. For his acceptance into the Académie Royale in 1730, however, he presented two large-scale portraits, of the painter Joseph Christophe (Versailles, Château) and the sculptor Robert Le Lorrain (Paris, Louvre). Whereas the painter is shown in front of his easel, dressed informally, the sculptor is depicted in more official garb and pose, with a model of his statue of Hebe for the château of Marly. At this same period Hubert Drouais was also successful with his portraits of ladies. His painting of the singer Mlle Marie Pélissier as Flora (before 1736; Paris, Louvre) is characteristic, with its fashionable, light-hearted mythologizing. At the Salon, where he exhibited regularly between 1741 and 1757, Drouais achieved particular renown with his miniatures. A representative example, combining portraiture with chic eroticism, is his Portrait of a Lady in the Guise of Venus (Paris, Louvre). His work in oil, in which the colouring often imitates the nuances of pastel, was equally popular, and he achieved success at court from 1749.
Part of the Drouais family
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