Portrait d'Augustus Gurnee

Painted in 1910, this late portrait of Augustus Gurnee — a name suggesting American or Anglo-American origins — represents Carolus-Duran's work in his early seventies, when he had been Director of the French Academy in Rome since 1905 and his Paris portrait practice had necessarily contracted. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris's holding of the work suggests either a donation or official acquisition, and the persistence of his direct alla prima technique into his eighth decade demonstrates a painter who had fully internalized his method. By 1910 Carolus-Duran had outlived many of the contemporaries whose portraits he had painted and had watched his most famous student, John Singer Sargent, surpass him in international reputation. His late portraits retain the directness and tonal intelligence of his mature work while showing the simplified economy of a painter who had decades before shed every unnecessary elaboration from his approach.

The late date does not diminish the handling's confidence: Carolus-Duran's brushwork in 1910 retains the decisive, alla prima directness of his mature style, the paint placed with authority rather than labored over. The portrait of a man — likely elderly, given the painter's own age — would have been handled with the same unsentimental physiological honesty that Carolus-Duran brought to the portrait of Préault thirty-three years earlier. The canvas and composition likely show the simplified economy of late mastery.