The Sculptor René Fremin in his Studio

On 10 October 1656, Nicolas de Largillierre – the son of a hat maker – was baptised at Saint-Barthélemy in Paris. By 1657, the prosperous merchant family had relocated to Antwerp. There, Nicolas became a member of the painter’s guild in 1672, and worked for the court of Charles II in London as early as 1674 in the workshop of Sir Peter Lely as student of Van Dyck’s. After the Largillierres returned to the city on the Seine in 1682, Nicolas was accepted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture on the recommendation of Adam Frans van der Meulen, a renowned Flemish painter of battle pieces. Between 1683 and 1686, Largillierre worked on the piece that was required for this admission, a life-sized portrait of Charles Le Brun (Paris, Musée du Louvre). Henceforth, Nicolas de Largillierre bore the title “Peintre de Portrait et d’Histoire”. As the leading French painter outside of the court of Versailles, he also received high honours from the Paris Academy: he was a professor beginning in 1705, a rector beginning in 1722, director from 1728 until 1732, and chancellor of the institution beginning in 1743. Documented in Paris and the Île de France alone are approximately 1500 portraits from Largillierre’s hand. The present portrait of a sculptor was long regarded as depicting Nicolas Coustou. However, doubts accumulated concerning this identification, and by 2003, researchers (Nicolas Sainte Fare Garnot and Dominique Brême) came to recognise the sitter as René Frémin (1672–1744). Frémin was a nephew of Madame de Largillierre, and a student of François Girardon und Antoine Coysevox, both of whom contributed so much to shaping the grand goût of Louis XIV. Here, Nicolas de Largillierre celebrates the Baroque topos of artistic genius. The sculptor René Frémin “moves” here with nonchalant confidence between shapeless material, i.e. the rough, broken stone in the foreground, and consummate form in the background, namely the so-called Belvedere Torso. At that time, a rigorous academic canon demanded a programmatic orientation towards Hellenistic and Imperial-Roman art, as well as their sublation in contemporary artifacts. It is against the background of this ideal that the artist works on the clay bozetto representing Zephir and Flora, which rests on the modelling trestle. Demonstrating the form-giving process, René Frémin lays his hand, which holds a modelling tool, on the sculptural study. The piece might represent the preliminary stage of a work – probably never completed – that was commissioned from Frémin in 1713 for the Grand Trianon in the park at Versailles. Perhaps this circumstance is connected with his invitation in 1716 by Philip V of Spain to the Iberian Peninsula, which René Frémin (“Premier Sculpteur du Roi de France”) followed in 1721.
Visible on the shelf in the background are two putti and a reduced copy of the celebrated Antinous, an ancient sculpture in the Vatican Museum that was highly prized after its rediscovery in the 16th century. The three sculptures are attributed to the Flemish artist François Duquesnoy. Nicolas de Largillierre also used the “Antinous group” in a self-portrait executed in 1707 (French private collection). Altogether eleven paintings by Nicolas de Largillierre are found today in German public collections. In addition to the portrait of the sculptor René Frémin, the Berlin gallery also owns a portrait of the landscape painter Jean-Baptiste Forest (Kat. Nr. 484A). Rainer Michaelis | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019