Adèle Romanée ROMANY 1769-1846 workshop "Portrait of Auguste Vestris" oil on canvas original and its Empire period frame (dim: 43x51cm) Natural son of Gaëtan Vestris and Marie Allard, Marie-Jean-Augustin Vestris, said Auguste Vestris and nicknamed Vestr'Allard, is a French dancer born in Paris on March 27, 1760 and died in Paris on December 5, 1842. Trained by his father, he started at the Paris Opera in 1772 and is engaged as a soloist in the Ballet in 1776. His brilliant career takes place mainly in Paris, but he also performs in Lyon, Montpellier and Bordeaux, as well as at King's Theater in London. It is Pierre Gardel who will offer him his most beautiful roles, especially in Psyche, Télémaque on the island of Calypso and La Dansomanie. He retired in 1816 to devote himself to teaching dance at the Paris Opera, and become one of the most renowned teachers of all time. Inventor of a multitude of new steps, Auguste Vestris is among those who, first, were able to integrate the old dance of the eighteenth century "down to earth", brilliant and fast, with new steps of great elevation (big allegro) aroused by the musical advances of the time, including those of Beethoven. Among his students, the Franco-Danish choreographer Auguste Bournonville (1805-1879). The latter devotes several very interesting and detailed pages in his memoirs My Theater Life, reissued in London in English in 1968. The act I ballet Bournonville The Conservatoire, still danced nowadays, reproduces faithfully a lesson given by Vestris at the Paris Opera in 1820, and still remains, for our generation, an extreme technical requirement. Nicknamed "the god of dance", Auguste Vestris has marked the spirits and the history of dance by his interpretation of the gavotte of Grétry Panurge's operatic comedy on the island of lanterns, in 1785: since then, this passage is known as the gavotte of Vestris.
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