Les Portraits de MM. De Béthune Jouant avec un Chien
Les Portraits de MM. De Béthune Jouant avec un Chien ("Children of the Marquis de Béthune Playing with a Dog") is a 1761 painting by French artist François-Hubert Drouais (1727–1775) which is part of the Eugenia Woodward Hitt Collection of 18th century French art at the Birmingham Museum of Art.
The 38¼"x51¼" oil painting on canvas depicts Armand Louis II de Béthune and Armand Louis Jean II de Béthune, two of the six children of Armand Louis de Béthune (1711-1788) with his second wife, the former Marie-Thérèse Crozat. Both children are dressed richly in costumes meant to suggest the freedom-loving mountaineers of the Pyrenees. The younger son cradles a pug dog while the older son uses the dogs paw to strum a small guitar.
Drouais exhibited the work at the Paris Salon of 1761. A sketch of the painting by Charles Germain de Saint Aubin is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. By 1925 the painting was owned by London banker Walter Spencer Morgan Burns. He sold it to art dealer S. R. Founes of Paris in 1927. Following the German invasion of France, ownership of the painting was transferred through forced bankruptcy in 1941 to Chancellor Adolf Hitler.
The painting was among the misappropriated artworks recovered by the Allied Forces' Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section (MFAA) in 1945. It was transferred from Munich to the Dutch Stichting Nederlandsch Kunstbezit for processing, and found its way into the hands of a Belgian collector, who loaned it to the Mauritshuis museum on The Hague from 1948 to 1955.
The double portrait was acquired by Eugenia Woodward Hitt in 1963, and bequeathed, with her collection of 18th century French art, to the Birmingham Museum in 1991.
References
- Huebner, Michael (February 7, 2014) "Monuments Man: Birmingham Museum of Art's founding director Richard Howard helped restitute Nazi-plundered art; Clooney film opens today." The Birmingham News
- "Children of the Marquis de Béthune Playing with a Dog" (May 19, 2020) Birmingham Museum of Art