Jerome V. Jacalone

Sebastien Bourdon was born in 1616 to Protestant parents living in Montpellier. He was apprenticed to a painter in Paris from age seven to fourteen (1623-30), and worked in France until his arrival in Rome in 1636, where he gained a reputation as a painter of bambocciante (genre) scenes. Bourdon was forced to flee Rome in 1638 to escape denunciation by the Inquisition for his Protestant faith. Following his return to Paris Bourdon continued to paint Italianate genre scenes, but after about 1645 the influence of Nicholas Poussin became more pronounced in his works, as evidenced in their geometric compositions, with clearly designed planes and brighter palettes. In 1648 Bourdon was one of the founding members of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and was named rector of the Academie in 1654. In these later years, due to his great success and recognition, he abandoned painting genre scenes altogether and his works were mostly comprised of commissions of a biblical or historical nature. Only about a dozen bambocciante by Bourdon are known to exist and most depict military bivouacs or itinerant figures at rest beside Italianate ruins, a predilection perhaps ascribable to the fact that, at a young age, he enrolled as a soldier in Toulouse.

In this work the artist has depicted an interior scene showing a group of soldiers at rest in a guardroom as evening falls after a long day in the field. On the left of the composition we see a pair of young men engaged in a scuffle over a game of cards with one of the protagonists dealt a losing hand apparently unhappy with the outcome. The two senior men, still wearing partial armor, observe without intervention while drinking wine and eating bread, while one of their fellow soldiers kneels before a fire to warm and dry himself. The young shepherd boy tries to avert his gaze from the ongoing tussle while one of his sheep grazes on the crumbs below the table.

What is considered the autograph picture of this composition resides in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, England with a smaller version having been in the Wildenstein Collection and exhibited there in 1935. The location of the Wildenstein painting is now not known. In the catalogue raisonne on Bourdon by Jacques Thullier it is noted that other versions exist of which this is one. Of the note is the larger size of the present work which could suggest that it possibly could have been the initial picture painted by the artist with the smaller works of a slightly later date.