Jean Louis Demarne

Demarne is a scarcely known but competent artist who emerged from Jean-Baptiste Isabey's atelier and produced Dutch-tinged rustic landscapes in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. Born in Brussels, he relocated to France to study painting when he was twelve. Although he failed to win the Prix de Rome in 1772 and 1774, he was provisionally accepted to the Académie in 1783 yet never became a full member. Commercially minded, he showed his work at the Exposition de la Jeunesse and the Salon de la Correspondance. While he seems to have sat out the Revolution of 1789, he managed to build a market for his works, especially among Russian collectors such as Prince Nikolai Yusupov (1750-1831) and Anatoly Demidov (1813-1870), Prince of San Donato.
This drawing is a particularly developed and finished example by the artist. It features several elements that are motifs in his paintings, including livestock drinking at a well, women riding on horseback or carrying their wash or produce, a young man with a cape and hat watering his horse, and a shepherd and his flock in the open landscape. Some of the artist's studies were reproduced in lithograph by one of its earliest practitioners in France, Comte Charles Philibert de Lasteyrie du Saillant (1759-1849).