Lot 1504 Dα

Pliny the Elder tells the story of the invention of art in his Naturalis Historia (XXXV, 43): The daughter of the potter Debutades was deeply in love with a young man who planned to undertake a long journey. She drew around the shadow that he cast upon the wall when he sat beside a lamp. Debutades later used the silhouette as the outline for a relief by filling it in with clay and heating it up.
This motif was highly popular among Neoclassical painters, as it appeared to prove that drawing was the base of all artistic endeavour. Louis Ducis was a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, and thus it seems only natural that he would also paint this subject. Ducis follows the ideals of Classicism in the depiction of the scene, setting his sharply contoured, reliefesque figures in a broad stage-like setting. The work was exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1808 alongside “Orpheus and Euridice” and “Hero and Leander” (cf. XXXX, op. cit., p. 941).
The work belonged to the collection of the Grand Dukes of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach for a long time, before changing hands in 1920/21 to enter the collection of the architect Hermann Muthesius who was friends with Grand Duke Carl Alexander.