Official records are the only documents that mention the actual first name of “B. L. Prevost”, as the engraver signed his plates. It was “Bonaventure Louis” and not “Benoît Louis”, as he was dubbed by Georg Kaspar Nagler and Louis Le Blanc, as well as most subsequent commentators. Furthermore, Prévost’s post-death inventory dates from 30 March 1816 and the death and inheritance tables of the city of Paris indicate that he died on 19 March 1816 at the age of 83, contrary to the details given in most biographical dictionaries.¹

With the help of a few quotations, we can draw a brief portrait of Bonaventure Louis Prévost, engraver, draughtsman, print dealer and collector. In his catalogue of the work of Charles Nicolas Cochin, for whom Prévost was the engraver of choice, Charles-Antoine Jombert states that “he also acquired various other plates that form part of the work of M. Cochin fils, & which he is selling together or separately, for the convenience of collectors.”² His activity as a dealer, the scale of which is difficult to quantify, probably enabled Prévost to assemble a handsome collection of prints. For the most part these were etchings by painters, as Prévost was “convinced that an etching engraved by the artist himself can be likened to a drawing in which the artist has preserved the first draft of his ardent imagination, and fixed, as it were, the rapid flight of his thought.”³ This collection, along with a few paintings, more than two hundred drawings – some from the Crozat, Gouvernet, Mariette and Lempereur collections – as well as a number of books, were offered for sale in January 1810, probably at the time when he was making arrangements for his estate.^4 5

As the title of that sale indicates, Prévost was also a draughtsman and not just an engraver, although the latter activity seems to have been predominant. In particular, he engraved the famous frontispiece to Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie after a drawing by Cochin, of which there are two versions, one completed in 1772, the other in 1775.⁶ He also engraved plates of drawings by Moreau le Jeune for the Encyclopédie (in particular for the chapter in volume III devoted to “drawing”, for which Prévost also wrote the commentaries) as well as vignettes, for example for Desormeaux’s Histoire de la Maison de Bourbon, a substantial illustrated book, which also featured work by Boucher, Fragonard, Vincent and Choffard.

Prévost excelled in “small engravings”, the precision of his burin enabling him to accurately transcribe every detail of a composition despite the constraints of a small format. That is how he was described in a 1776 Almanach devoted to the arts, where he was also credited with being a “proper and elegant draughtsman”.⁷ An echo of the “refined and sensitive tact” with which he seems to have been gifted.⁸

In parallel with his engraving work, Prévost also worked as a draughtsman-portraitist, as testified by a dozen surviving sheets. The only exception is the equestrian statue of Louis XV after Edmé Bouchardon, in pen and grey ink, dated 1764, a preparatory drawing for a plate reproduced in a book, published in 1768, by Pierre Jean Mariette on the making of the same statue.⁹ Although there is a pair of portraits in profile drawn in black chalk, in the manner of Cochin, the other drawings are in pen and grey ink, sometimes retouched with black chalk. Among them, Prévost’s tribute to his friend, the publisher and print dealer Jacques François Chéreau, engraved in aquatint by Antoine Carrée (ill. below), ought to be the most famous.^10 11 In fact, Prévost sometimes seems only ever to use the tip of the brush, as is the case in our portrait of a young boy, in stark contrast to his practice as an engraver, but nonetheless with the same acute sense of light and shade. It was almost certainly this sensitivity – which will have been evident from the comments above – that established his discreet reputation as a portraitist.

Bonaventure Louis Prévost, Portrait of Jacques François Chéreau, circa 1780, pen and grey ink, grey wash, 170 x 150 mm, present location unknown. © Rights reserved.

Vincenzo Gemito’s was born from unknown father and mother. The day after his birth, he was left on the steps of the Real Casa Santa dell’Annunziata, a church that took in abandoned children. He was then adopted by Giuseppina Baratta, whose second husband, Francesco Jadiccio, who Gemito called Masto (or Mastro) Ciccio, became not only his adoptive father but also, years later, his assistant in casting bronzes. His childhood and adolescence were marked by poverty and a hard life. The many portraits of young models he met on the streets reflect his everyday surroundings, an attention to life that he will always cherish. At thirteen years old, he met Antonio Mancini, they both enrolled at the Istituto di Belle Arti, Mancini studying painting, Gemito studying sculpture, under the tuition of Domenico Morelli. Gemito soon made his mark and began exhibiting at the Società Promotrice di Belle Arti in 1870. In Paris, he presented the bronze of Il Pescatorello (“The Neapolitan Fisherboy”). It was exhibited at the third Paris World’s Fair in 1878 and met with great success. From then on, despite the tragic loss of people dear to him − Mathilde Duffaut in 1878, then, in 1904, his wife Anna Cutolo, who ran the foundry he had constructed in 1883 − and despite psychological instability, Gemito regularly exhibited bronzes that enjoyed a certain fame.

Although he practised drawing throughout his career, Gemito spent more time on this practice during the last thirty years of his life. He worked with chalks rather than with pen and ink, mixing techniques liberally. Apart from commissions from public figures, he drew numerous portraits of the people around him, mainly his nieces, or female models he had seen in Naples neighbourhoods and in the countryside. Gemito was particularly attentive to volume and shape which he brought out with light and shadow, thus intensifying the physical presence of his subjects.
This portrait of a girl, with dishevelled hair and a rebellious air, is a kind of counterpoint to the portrait, executed a year earlier, of his niece Anita with her hair neatly tied up with a striped bow. Gemito belongs in the tradition of verismo portraits of ordinary people; the exaltation of their raw, unadorned beauty places him in the tradition of 17th-century Neapolitan naturalism.