Antique 19th-Century French Oval Gentleman Portrait with Blue Eyes and Blue Cravat

He meets your eye before you have decided to look. A young man in a dark coat and a deep blue cravat, pinned at the throat, set against a ground of near-total shadow. Everything in the painting is muted, the coat, the background, the soft brown of his hair, so that the one bright note, the clear blue of his eyes, carries the entire portrait. The painter built the whole picture around that gaze.

The evidence of where and when he was painted survives on the back of the canvas. It bears the stamp of its Paris canvas maker, Fabrique de Toiles, A. Binant, 7 rue de Cléry, a maker who worked at that address in the mid-nineteenth century. That places the canvas, and the portrait on it, around the 1850s, and the sitter's high collar and softly knotted cravat belong to precisely that decade.

A second label gives him a name. Michel Geiger, born in Mannheim in 1802, died in Paris in 1874. A German who made his life in France and sat, in middle age, for a French painter working on a French canvas. 

The oval giltwood frame is antique and original to the portrait. A band of soft turquoise runs along its inner edge, against the gold.

Why We Love It
Look at that turquoise band, then look at his eyes, then at his cravat. They are the same blue. Whoever framed this portrait chose a color pulled straight from the painting, so that frame and picture read as a single, deliberate object, tuned end to end to one note. We absolutely love details like these.

Then there is the man himself. His expression sits just short of a smile, and his eyes hold yours with a directness that feels less like a painting than a person about to speak. He has presence, the quality that makes a portrait an occupant of a room rather than a decoration on its wall. He will do that in your home, exactly as he has done it in ours.

Key Features:

• Origin: Paris, France
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Period: circa 1850s
• Dimensions: 28.25" × 24.25" 
• Condition: Excellent antique condition. One area of earlier paint loss has been sensitively touched up, visible on close inspection and in raking light. Please see photos for details.
• This piece will be shipped from Los Angeles