Deux italiennes

Painted during François-Joseph Navez’s four-year residency in Rome from 1817-1821, which was sponsored by the Belgian Société pour l’encouragement des beaux-arts, and appearing at auction for the first time in more than a century, Deux italiennes is a wonderful example of Navez’s early Neoclassical style. Navez was born in Charleroi and trained at the Brussels Académie des Beaux-Arts. After winning first prize at the 1812 Ghent Salon, Navez received a grant to visit Paris. He trained there with the great Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David and returned to Brussels with David when he was exiled there in 1816. In technique and naturalism, Navez's works strongly reflect David's influence, and the elder artist considered Navez his heir-apparent and encouraged his travel to Italy to continue his artistic education.
While the historic art and architecture of Rome made a significant impression on the young Navez during his time there, so too did the contemporary artists living and working in the Eternal City. There he met and came to admire Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Navez’s more naturalistic tendencies in the work of this period strongly reflect the impression Ingres made on the young artist. His work was further influenced by the lively community of younger artists living in Rome at the time, including the French artists in residence at the Académie de France’s Villa Medici as well as the mostly German artists associated with the Nazarene movement. During his time in Rome, Navez continued to produce the portraits and history paintings he had favored in Paris and Brussels, but also began painting genre scenes featuring contemporary Romans from various levels of society, like the present work.
Navez worked regularly with the same models during his time in Rome, and it has been suggested he had dalliances with them as well. These two sitters are most probably two sisters known to have modeled for the artist, Maria Grazia and Térésina, as this work has also been known as Deux sœurs in the past. The woman in the foreground, with her distinctive almond-shaped eyes and peineta-style comb also appears in Navez’s Scène de musique, also painted in 1821, now in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Unlike many of the artist’s other works from this period, Deux italiennes eschews any obvious Italian landscape or architectural motifs to indicate the setting, leaving the focus on the beautiful faces and elegant costumes of the sitters. Much like the setting however, the costumes are remarkably spare, differentiating this work from the elaborate costumes typically found in Navez’s other compositions of this period. The beautiful modelling of the women’s features is typically Neoclassical in style, but the strong chiaroscuro reflects Navez’s response to Italian painting as well. What is most striking in the present work is the psychologically tense charge of the two figures’ inscrutable expressions, further enhanced by the dramatic lighting. As much an intimate portrait as it is a genre scene, Deux italiennes is among the most modern and distinctive pictures in Navez’s Italian oeuvre.
Examination of the painting reveals that the artist attached several extensions onto the canvas along the top, bottom, and right edges, possibly after the the central area of the canvas was already primed and painted. The right and bottom additions extend the canvas by several inches, while the extension at the top of the canvas is smaller. The fact that these additions were made by the artist himself is evidenced by a letter Navez wrote to his friend and future brother-in-law, Auguste-Donat de Hemptinne on 21 July 1821, telling him that he had begun three paintings on canvases that were too small and he would need to enlarge them (L. Alvin, Fr. J. Navez, Sa vie, ses oeuvres et sa correspondance, Brussels, 1870, p. 123).
Navez’s contemporary genre scenes were popular among collectors, and indeed the present work was acquired from the artist by the great collector Johan Steengracht van Oostcapelle not long after it was painted. Baron Steengracht became the first director of the Mauritshuis from 1822 to 1840 and was considered among the foremost art connoisseurs in the Netherlands. He formed a renowned collection of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, many of which were exhibited in a private picture gallery on the Vyverberg in The Hague, which opened to the public in 1823. These paintings passed through his family before being sold in a blockbuster sale at Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1913. This sale seems to be the last time the present picture appeared on the market, as it appears in all the contemporary literature on the artist as ‘location unknown’. Baron Steengracht also acquired two other pictures by Navez during this same period, including the aforementioned Scène de musique now at the Clark Art Institute.