Jean Edmé Pascal Martin Delacluze

JEAN EDMÉ PASCAL PASCAL MARTIN DELACLUZE (France, 1778-1858).
"Male portrait".
Miniature.
Signed and dedicated.
Measurements: 14 x 11,5 cm; 15 x 12,5 cm (frame).
Since the Renaissance, miniature portraits, framed in a circle or oval, were pieces for private contemplation. Considered as jewelry, in the seventeenth century they became pieces of personal adornment or a gift object, being mounted as jewelry. They were made in a great variety of techniques, such as oil on copper, tin or ivory, gouaches on parchment or cardboard and, since the 18th century, watercolor on ivory. This delicate art will be lost since the second half of the 19th century, in parallel to the development of photography.
The most common in this type of pieces during the 19th century were historicist representations, often set in the preceding century. However, the portrait presented here picks up the spirit of the eighteenth-century portrait-jewel and applies it to modern times, capturing the image of a real woman of her time, no longer an ideal recreation of a romantic type.
Jean Edmé Pascal Martin Delacluze, born in France in 1778 and died in 1858, was a painter and miniaturist who dedicated his career to a genre that was highly appreciated in the intimacy of the 19th century: the miniature portrait.