How does Two Studies of an Actor elucidate its Identity of the sitter?
Aside from Goncourt's notes, it is thought that in an 1896 article published in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, the playwright and poet Gaston Schéfer was the first to try and identify the sitter of the drawings, available to him through Boucher's etchings. In a copy of the Figures de différents caractères held by the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Schéfer discovered that the impression of folio 198 has an inscription by eighteenth-century hand, thought to be that of Pierre-Jean Mariette, saying "Portrait de l'abbé Larancher (struck-through) Haranger Chanoine de Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, ami de Watteau." From the inscription, Schéfer suggested that while the attire appears to be a theatrical one, the sitter was actually a priest, namely the Abbé Pierre-Maurice Haranger (ca. 1655–1735), canon at the Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois who was one of Watteau's closest friends. It has been stated by Schéfer that to Watteau, it was not a controversial thing to depict a Catholic priest wearing an unusual attire, for it wasn't so to the Church; Schéfer provides a similar example of Charles-Nicolas Cochin who produced a drawing of his priest friend, the Abbé François-Emmanuel Pommyer, wearing a peasant dress. Aware of Du Bosc's print, Schéfer said that the priest's appearance was fine enough to make one confuse him with an actor; it has also been presumed by Schéfer that a study of Haranger, similar to the Berlin sheet, was probably used for the rightmost figure in a painting by Watteau, The Coquettes.In the 1920s, Schéfer's point was objected by Émile Dacier, Albert Vuaflart and Jacques Herold — the group behind the four-volume study of prints after Watteau's paintings; Dacier, Vuaflart, and Herold suggested that Watteau would hardly had an intention to depict a priest in what the scholars supposed to be a peasant or theatrical dress. In contrary to Schéfer's attribution that was based on a hand-written inscription, they relied on the engraved inscription from Du Bosc's copy after Boucher that claimed the Comédie-Française player Pierre Le Noir, sieur de la Thorillière (1659–1731), to be the sitter. These objections caused a debate among Watteau scholars, noticeably complicated by the lack of surviving and/or authentic portraits of both supposed sitters; part of scholars accepted Schéfer's attribution, while some other authors have adopted Dacier and Vuaflart's one.
Berlin Charles-Nicolas Cochin Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal The Coquettes Pierre-Jean Mariette Gazette des Beaux-Arts Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois Catholic Comédie-Française