Armand LELEUX - The Abbot's Maid

Armand LELEUX
Paris, 1818 - Dardagny (Switzerland), 1885
The Abbot's Maid
Oil on canvas signed lower right "Armand Leleux ".
73.5 x 61 cm (87 x 70.5 cm with frame)
Exhibited at the 1876 Salon
Very fine 19th-century gilded wood frame
Very good condition

Younger brother of Adolphe Leleux, also a painter, Armand Leleux was a genre, portrait and landscape painter of the nineteenth-century realist school.
Like his brother, Armand Leleux painted genre scenes in a realistic style. But he also produced more intimate paintings of Flemish and Dutch-style interiors. Examples include "Jeune petite fille à la tasse du chocolat" (Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie Joseph-Déchelette, Roanne) and "Intérieur de cuisine du château de La Moustière" (Musée Bertrand, Châteauroux).
He exhibited regularly at the Paris salons from 1839 onwards. A pupil of Ingres and trained in Rome, where he had visited, he married Émilie Giraud from Geneva, also a genre painter. Armand Leleux was part of this first movement in the realist school, which let reality speak for itself without putting itself forward, while using its academic know-how to idealize form.
Armand Leleux was not just a Parisian painter. He lived regularly in Dardagny, near Geneva, where he entertained friends including Camille Corot, Théophile Gautier and Eugène Sue. He is the author of "Souvenirs d'artiste".
Our painting depicts a young girl with a feather duster, seated in an armchair in a bourgeois interior. Doubtless a good all-rounder, she is either resting or pining for her social situation. A true social portrait of the condition of children in the 19th century, and at the same time an interior painting in the Flemish or Dutch tradition.
In the Revue des Deux mondes, art critic Victor Cherbuliez wrote of the 1876 Salon: "Few artists know how to paint an interior as well as M. Armand Leleux, and make us take all their subjects seriously, even a Curé's Maid, who, duster in hand, is lounging in an armchair."

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