Adèle Varillat

Adèle Varillat is the name most commonly used in the art market for the French portraitist and genre painter born Adélaïde Tornézy, also catalogued as Adèle Tornézy-Varillat. She was born on 22 March 1769 in Fontaine-Française, in the Côte-d'Or region of France. She trained under the history painters Jean-Baptiste Regnault and Guillaume Guillon Lethière in Paris and made her Salon debut in 1795, according to her French Wikipedia biographical entry. Bridgeman Images lists her period of activity as circa 1795 to 1833, and exhibition records associated with the name Varillat show work at the Royal Academy in London in 1817, including a Portrait of a Gentleman, a Portrait of a Lady, and a Portrait of the Duc de Chartres, followed by further Royal Academy showings in 1818, 1822, 1823, 1825, and 1832. Her Wikipedia entry, separately, describes her exhibiting portraits at the Royal Academy between 1816 and 1820 while she stayed in London after her husband's death. The two sources give overlapping but not identical date ranges for this London period, and the exact exhibiting years have not been independently reconciled.

She died on 1 December 1861 in the 8th arrondissement of Paris and was buried in Montmartre Cemetery, according to structured data on Wikimedia Commons, consistent with the 1769 to 1861 lifespan given in her Wikipedia entry.

Formal critical writing on Varillat is limited, and no verbatim, attributable critic quotations from major outlets could be located. The main documented critical framing comes from Artprice's own coverage of the November 2025 sale, headlined as revealing a painter of the Revolution, which situates the self-portrait within the visual culture of the French Revolutionary and early nineteenth-century period. Gazette Drouot's coverage similarly frames her as a little-known figure whose market presence is only now beginning to take shape.

Varillat's market is thin but has produced one striking result. Her auction high is Portrait of a Woman, known as Self-Portrait of the Artist at the Age of 26, sold at Artcurial in Paris on 25 November 2025 for a hammer price reported by Artprice as USD 509,524, or USD 674,610 including premium, about five times the pre-sale estimate. MutualArt's account of the same Artcurial sale cites a realized price of roughly USD 672,963, a small variance from Artprice's figure likely tied to currency conversion or rounding rather than a separate sale. Gazette Drouot has described her as a rarity on the auction block, noting that Artprice records only about ten sales of her work since 1991.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Varillat and no confirmed gallery or estate representation; her works surface primarily through major French auction houses such as Artcurial, and attribution rests on auction-house and archival research rather than a published scholarly catalogue. With only about ten recorded sales since 1991, her one large result should be read as a single strong data point rather than an established price level, and no museum collection holdings for her work have been confirmed in available sources. Collectors considering her market should expect thin comparables, reliance on provenance research for each individual work, and a reputation still being actively reconstructed by dealers, auction houses, and researchers.