This Jan–Feb 2024 issue of NGV Magazine is the second of three dedicated to the NGV Triennial 2023. We explore one of the Triennial’s thematic pillars, Magic. We also introduce more artworks and projects by the more than 120 creative leaders included in the exhibition including include Swiss artist Franziska Furter and Japanese artist Azuma Makoto writing about their own works.
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To accompany the essay on page 90 in your Jan–Feb 2024 magazine, watch Dr. Petra Kayser, NGV Curator, Prints and Drawings, introducing Elisabetta Sirani’s Head of a boy (recto); Compositional study for classically attired male and female figure (verso), 1653–63.
The port of Le Havre (Le Port du Havre) 1892
Eugène Boudin
On page 64 of your Jan–Feb 2024 magazine, we celebrate the life and legacy of French artist, Eugène Boudin. Mentor to Monet and an expert rendering of ‘all that goes upon the sea and along its shores’, as writes Jessica McEwen, NGV Project Officer. Boudin was a marine painter and one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors.
Read on for information on the painting’s frame.
The frame is an original by Cézare Dutocq, Paris. This small, handsome, somewhat out-of-scale frame is a fine example of a Louis XIV frame built with the manufacturing processes of the nineteenth century. Just as the original frames on which it is modelled aspire to the appearance of cast metal, this frame suppresses the nature of the materials used in the construction to create the illusion of a more expensive article. The finest Louis XIV frame in the collection is on Nicolas Poussin’s The Crossing of the Red Sea (1843-4). It is carved in oak and gilded to appear as solid metal. A less elaborate rendering is found on Nicolas de Largilliere’s Crown Prince Frederick Augustus of Saxony (1819-5). Both frames provide reference points for the strengths and shortcomings of the Cézare Dutocq frame. A paper label centre top reverse identifies the framemaker.1
Framemaker: Cézare Dutocq, 38 Rue Lafitte, Paris
Date: 1892
Dimensions: 53.3 x 62.0 x 8.5 cm; sight 31.3 x 39.4 cm
The frame is built from a wooden profile cut from a single section of timber. The corners are mitred and fixed with tapering dovetail splines. The decorative work of the frame is made from composition but has a refined quality. Every surface has been articulated in some way. The small flat is textured with fine sand, the ogee panel is worked with scrolled strap work, which sits on a finely dimpled surface. The flat sections of the large corner and centre sections carry an incised diaper pattern. The surface appears to be gold leaf throughout. The leading edge is burnished, as are the outer scotia through to the working edge and the highlights on the decorative work.
The frame is in good original condition with small losses and repair to the large ornaments. The composition elements on the corners are cracked, following the mitres of the underlying wooden chassis.
See Eugène Boudin’s The port of Le Havre (Le Port du Havre) 1892 and Low tide at Trouville (Trouville, Mareé basse), 1894 on display on Level 2 at NGV International.
1 Though now damaged, the label previously transcribed as: Cézare Dutocq, Dorure-ENCADREMENT, MIROITERIE, 38, Rue Lafitte, Paris.
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