Portrait of Jean Léglise, Merchant, Mayor of Saint-Martin-de-Seignanx (1868): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Jean Léglise, Merchant, Mayor of Saint-Martin-de-Seignanx (1868) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Léon Bonnat (French, 1833–1922).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Jean Léglise (1813–1876) was the mayor of Saint-Martin-de-Seignanx, a small town near Bayonne in southwestern France. A trader in wood, he made a fortune from the construction of the railroad between Bayonne and Bordeaux. Bonnat painted a companion portrait of Léglise's wife, Maire-Augusta-Julie Léglise (1812–1894). The latter portrait, also signed and dated 1868, was donated to the Musée Carnavalet in Paris in 2001.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Jean Léglise, Merchant, Mayor of Saint-Martin-de-Seignanx
• Date: 1868
• Creator attribution: Léon Bonnat (French, 1833–1922)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Unframed: 80.1 x 65.3 cm (31 9/16 x 25 11/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1980.232

A detail from the museum

Bonnat was an academic painter as well as a teacher who encouraged freedom of expression and execution. He recommended traveling to Madrid to visit the Prado Museum, introduced Paris to Spanish painting technique, and influenced the evolution of French painting.

Collection credit

Bequest of Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hôtel Drouot. Tableaux modernes. March 14, 1973.
• Louise d’Argencourt, letter to François-Gérard Seligmann, Aug. 3, 1995, in CMA curatorial file.
• François-Gérard Seligmann, letter to Louise d’Argencourt, Aug. 9, 1995, in CMA curatorial file.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.