[...]
The late portraiture of Joseph Vivien, however well spoken of, has (partially owing to the same fact) the predicable near-rococo flim typical of contemporaries in the likes of Wattaeu and to a lesser extent Gillot. In his waning years, though hard-sought for his remarkable skill in pastel, Vivien’s portraiture never, one might faultless discept, regained the depth and timbre with which his earliest paintings were cast; no doubt the now famed later works such as his depictions of the Archbishop of Cambrai, Maximillian Emanual, and the mysterious Portrait of a Man deserve (from a arguable standpoint of palette choice and composition), at least in parts, the veneration they have inherited, there is much of Vivien’s early work that has, for the better part, been perhaps sadly left to the sagging reaches of an anonymous attic stair or some webbed janitor’s den in the bowries of Ornan.
Jean Francois Felibien (whom few may recognize as the son of the great art historian) would of interest remark in letters upon one of those fabled early paintings, himself having had the undue fortune of meeting the then young Vivien before his acceptance into the
Wherever such a splendid portrait may now lie in dusted rest is all but unknown to us, though its sole character stands of no mystery at all. Guy Van Menard, a then well regarded draftsman and friend of Vivien had been present at the surprised encounter with Felibien, to whom we owe the fortune of an only verbal portrait detailing both that swell picture and simultaneously, it’s handsome sitter whose features, though aged by many and toiled years, the reader would do well to affix upon that crooked silhouette witnessed atop the mountainous ruin within our earlier imagined scene, to whose company we shall shortly return...
[1] Schwender indicates by footnote within his manuscript that the following passage was quoted from the 1812 edition of Portraiture and the Able Critic.
