Rediscovery of the lost original!

Rediscovery of the lost original!
Jean-Frédéric Schall
Strasbourg 1752 – 1825 Paris
Paul et Virginie
From the eponymous series, c. 1790–95
Oil on canvas, relined
111 × 171 cm; with frame 123 × 183 cm
Signed lower centre

Jean-Frédéric Schall (1752–1825), an Alsatian painter and draughtsman, was among the most sought-after artists for gallant and sentimental subjects in the late eighteenth century. Working between Rococo and early Romanticism, he combined the grace of courtly pictorial language with the new sensibility of his time. Schall was particularly renowned for translating literary and moral themes into finely tuned, theatrical compositions.

In connection with “Paul et Virginie” – the 1788 best-selling novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre – Schall created several paintings and drawings that were later disseminated through engravings. Saint-Pierre’s “Paul et Virginie” criticises the social inequalities of eighteenth-century France, presenting Mauritius as a utopian counter-image of a harmonious, classless society. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas, the novel embodies the ideal of the “noble savage”: people living in harmony with nature, sharing property and labour, and guided by natural virtue. Despite the presence of slavery, this colonial world is portrayed as a morally purified idyll – a sentimental yet critical mirror of European civilisation. Schall’s depictions illustrate key episodes from the novel: the childhood of the lovers on Mauritius, their farewells and reunions, and the dramatic shipwreck scene. His compositions, reproduced by engravers such as Antoine-Louis Romanet, Pierre-Gabriel Berthault, and Nicolas Colibert, decisively shaped the novel’s visual reception. Hallmarks of Schall’s style are his delicate line, refined colour palette, and stage-like arrangement of figures, all contributing to an idealised vision of colonial innocence that exalts virtue, purity, and tragic devotion.

The present painting depicts a scene from “Paul et Virginie” set in a tropical landscape with green trees, palms, moss-covered hills, and rugged rocks, rendered in earthy tones dominated by deep browns and illuminated by a warm light. In the centre, Virginie kneels before a tree, her figure bathed in this soft illumination; a walking stick lies to her right. She has long blonde hair and wears a blue dress with an ochre shawl. Beside her kneels Paul, dressed in brown trousers and a red jacket over a white shirt, his shoulder-length brown hair softly framing his face. The young man rests his right hand protectively on Virginie’s arm and raises his left in a gesture of surprise or alarm. A dog leaps onto his bent left knee as he begins to rise, while his stick and hat lie on the ground before him.

From the right, a dark-skinned man approaches in a wide stride, arms outstretched as if to reach or rescue them. He wears blue trousers, a white shirt, and an orange sleeveless vest, with a large woven basket tied with a ribbon on his back and a gourd flask slung across his chest – likely a water container. The scene suggests a moment of reunion or rescue and, following the narrative of the novel, is set on Mauritius. The man may represent Domingue, the fictional Wolof slave from the Île de France, a loyal companion to Paul and Virginie. The painting may capture the moment when Domingue discovers the two lovers in the forest – an act of care that vividly embodies the ideal of the noble, nature-bound man and the humanistic spirit of Saint-Pierre’s narrative.

The painting was examined in 2023 by Claudio Falcucci through extensive photographic and technical analysis, including raking light, macrophotography, infrared reflectography, and UV-induced fluorescence. The results revealed that the work was executed on a plain-woven canvas prepared with a reddish ground beneath the paint layer. Infrared imaging uncovered an underdrawing along the figures’ profiles, especially around Virginie’s left hand, the dog, and the vegetation. The signature was confirmed to be contemporaneous with the paint layer, showing identical craquelure and fluorescence behaviour.

Falcucci also noted parallels with a series of six engravings executed by Charles-Melchior Descourtis between 1795 and 1797, based on compositions for “Paul et Virginie”. Comparisons with prints in the British Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée historique de Villèle in Saint-Gilles-les-Hauts, and the Civic Museums of Monza reveal a remarkable consistency in subject, format, and detail, suggesting that all derive from the same prototype – most likely the present painting, which was considered lost for over two centuries. In contrast to later, variant painted versions appearing at auction, this work remains strikingly faithful to the engraved compositions in both format and iconography.

As an authentic expression of Jean-Frédéric Schall’s refined sentimentalism, this rediscovered painting unites painterly virtuosity with literary sensibility and colonial imagination. It exemplifies the aesthetic and ideological tensions of the late eighteenth century – an idealised colonial idyll in which nature, innocence, and morality coalesce into a harmonised vision of exotic purity.

Literature: André Girodie, Un Peintre de Fêtes Galantes. Jean-Frédéric Schall, Strasbourg 1927.