Pierre FILLOEUL
(1696 Abbeville - 1754 Paris)
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Le faiseur de chateaux de carte [The Maker of Card House] – 1737
Engraving on laid watermarked paper. After Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699 - 1779). Published by Jacques Philippe Le Bas (French, 1707–1783).
Size of sheet : 37 x 48.5 cm.
Bocher 20 A; IFF 144.
Beautiful crisp impression with full margins around this deeply impressed platemark, still printing with the delicate strokes within the lettered margin, before the change of title and address. Minimal traces of age, otherwise impeccable and original condition
Pierre Filloeul: Le faiseur de chateaux de carte [The Card House]
Un jeune homme s’amusant avec des cartes (‘a young man amusing himself with some cards’) was one of the Chardin’s paintings exhibited in 1737, at the first Salon exhibition since 1704. Chardin painted at least four versions of this subject in different formats, one of which was also engraved by Lépicié in 1743.
The theme of a child building a house of cards was familiar to Chardin’s contemporaries from 17th- and 18th-century images, which were often accompanied by moralising verses. The inscription below the image in our print warns grown men not to mock this boy’s precarious creation, as they themselves often build even more ridiculous castles in the air.
Pierre Filloeul initially studied with his father Gilbert Filloeul and in the studio of Jacques-Philippe Lebas. His oeuvre of prints comprises around 150 sheets, including numerous works after Jean-Bapriste Pater, but also after Chrisophe Huet, and Antoine Wattteau, as well as four sheets after compoistion by Jean-Siméon Chardin.