“Courty Love” by Alonso-Perez

Colour- and joyful 18th century style scene in the garden of a French castle. The young lady escapes the supervision of her chaperon the discretely passes a love letter in the hands of a gentleman. Oil on canvas. Signed lower left. Exceptional frame. The work has been professionally cleaned, and the frame has been regilded. Canvas relined.

Size: H 73 cm x W 60 cm – H 101 cm x W 88 cm

Spanish school, the painter has mainly worked in France.

This scene represents the refined ideal of courtly life, where courtly love placed the beloved lady in an unattainable position.

Lit: Alonso-Pérez was born in a family of artists in 1881 in Saragossa, Spain. His father, Mariano, was also a painter and took most certainly his son as a pupil. Mariano’s style included anecdotal costume scenes. Alonso-Pérez is 20 when he participates at the Paris Salon in 1901. Artistically, Alonso-Pérez followed in his father’s footsteps by painting light-hearted genre scenes that were based on eighteenth-century models. Pérez also painted contemporary life in Paris, often using a blend of late nineteenth century settings and fashionable costumes from an earlier period.  Pérez also designed tapestry models for Neyret Frères et Cie of St. Etienne in the Rhone Valley region. Pérez was an engraver, creating lithographs such as the Bal époque Louis XV now in the Louvre’s collection, and prints for publication in a variety of art journals. He dies in 1914 at age 33.

European and American art collectors at that time were fascinated with nineteenth-century evocations of eighteenth-century genre paintings. That trend called “the rococo revival” will eventually lead to the development of art nouveau in the 1880s.