File:Orpheus (Attributed to Hugues Jean François Paul Duqueylard).jpg

English: Hugues Jean François Paul Duqueylard

Orpheus

oil on canvas

This remarkable painting was long considered to be the work of Jacques Louis David (1748-1825), the greatest and most influential neoclassical painter of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As such it formed one of the highlights of the extensive collections housed at Romanów castle in Poland (now the Ukraine) by General Count Jozef Ilinski and his son Henryck in the early 19th century. More recent scholarship has however placed it among the so-called Barbus or Primitifs, a brief but fascinating association of painters from the studio of David, with whom Paul Duqueylard was closely linked.

The Barbus or Les Primitifs were formed in reaction to David's Intervention of the Sabine women of 1799 (Louvre, Paris), and were linked by a striving for ideal beauty and principles of extreme simplicity in art. Rejecting their Master's work as too ' Vanloo, Pompadour, Rococo' their leader Pierer-Maurice Quay (c.1779-1802/4) sought to reform the corrupt state of contemporary art by a return to the fundamentals of archaic Greek art. Clarity of design was valued above all else, and the use of colour and line reined back in the service of simplicity and grandeur. Duqueylard's most important work from this period - and indeed one of the first from the Barbus group to appear in an official exhibition - was his Ossian reciting his poems, exhibited at the Salon of 1800 and today in the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence (fig. 1). The strong clear colours and simple but striking design of this Orpheus clearly reflects this work with its strong large scale nudes and indeed strong parallels can be drawn between this and the figure of the seated boy, also seen in profile to the left of the canvas in Aix. A similar date around 1800 can probably therefore be proposed for the present work. Though Les Primitifs seem to have exercised some influence over contemprary painters, their formation was unproductive and shortlived. After 1801, having left David's studio, they withdrew to a Parisian suburb, where for a couple of years they wore ancient Greek dress, organised esoteric rituals and practised vegetarianism.

General Count Jozef Ilinski and his son Henryck amassed a considerable collection at Romanów in the early 19th century. Apart from the present work, a total of 295 paintings were seen there by Jan Duklan Ochoki around 1820; these apparently included a portrait of Willem of Orange by Van Dyck, a Batoni portrait of Pope Pius VI, as well as works by or attributed to Poussin, Claude-Joseph Vernet, Jozef Grassi, Giovanni Battista Lampi and Salvator Rosa. Both General Ilinski and his son saw service at the court of Czar Paul I and the Grand Duke Constantin, the former in a military capacity and the latter as a Kammerjunker at the Russian court after 1816. Ochoki noted that much of the collection had been purchased in France after the French Revolution, and again after the emptying of the Mikhailovsky Palace in Saint Petersburg after the assasination of the Czar in 1801.