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This study of a draped figure was made by a student of the Académie de France in Rome in the years 1750-1770. It was under Natoire’s directorship ( 1750 - 1774) that was reborn a tradition inaugurated some fifty years before by Vleughels (director 1725 - 1737), the drawing of draped figure : « j’ai fait revivre un usage d’étude qui se fesoit de mon tems à l’Académie,dans le tems des vacquances, où nous dessinions d’après le modèlle des figures touttes drappée, variés dans touttes sortes de genres et de differents habit, surtout des habit d’église qui occasionnent de fort beaux plis. La séance n’ait que d’une heure, car le modelle ne peut pas se reposer » (letter by Natoire to the marquis de Marigny dated 18 october 1758). In our drawing, it is not a liturgic, but rather a theater costume. Those drawings are not easy to attribute, for they are by young students many of whom are now almost totally unknown (what do we know of Renou, Sané, Chardin fils, or Tiersonnier ?).
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We know very few abou this drawing, not even its subject : is the chariot guided by the standing woman, or does she try to stop it ? Who are the two figures in the chariot : one could see Mercury driving, his winged helmet on the head, but why drive when one can fly ? Is this a copy of an antique sculpture we have been unable to identify, then it would date from Sergel’s Roman sojourn (1767-1778), or is it a dismissed project for a relief ? The framing line makes clear the relation with sculpture.
The sitter, born 1705, is here represented the year of his 60th birthday, which is also the year of his second wedding with Octavie Belot, author of many books concerning British history. An emblematic figure of Parisian parliamentary nobility, Durey de Mesnières was president of the second Inquiry chamber at the Paris Parliament, and an obstinate opposite to the royal power, which led him, and colleagues, to exile first in Moulins(1732), then in Bourges. He published, anonymously, with lawyer Louis-Adrien Le Paige, a Histoire de la détention du Cardinal de Retz (1755), conceived as a violent critic of monarchic arbitrary. He was also an erudite man, owing one of his times most important juridical library, corresponding with Voltaire, and esteemed by Diderot.
The year of this portrait, Frey is at the best of his art, received as associate member at the Académie de Saint Luc, and mostly "peintre de Mesdames"(the King's daughters), replacing Maurice Quentin de La Tour. After a modest beginning in Strasbourg in the 40's, Frey is in Paris from 1754, working for "les Bâtiments du Roi" to copy official portraits, which gives him a technical skill that will won him the prestigious title of "peintre de Mesdames". In 1776 and 1777 he will also be painter to the prince of Zwei Brücken.
Hans Garnjobst studies decorative painting in Basel from 1879 to 1881, before attending in Paris the lessons of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) at the famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, from 1881 to 1883, date of his departure for Italy (mainly Florence, Rome, Naples) until 1889, year of his return to Basel (again for a period of three years). Since 1889, he shares his time between his Minusio house (Canton Ticino) and Paris in winter. He settles definitively in Paris in 1935. In 1886, he sent three works (151 Fantasy ; 152 Roman landscape,watercolor ; 154 Head of an old man, watercolor) to a travelling exhibition in Switzerland (exhibition of the Société Suisse des Beaux Arts ; in the Zürich exhibition catalogue, he is described as « Hans Garnjobst aus Basel in Rom »). In 1898, Emile Hinzelin, writes for La Lorraine-Artiste dated 16 January, reviewing an exhibition in Basel mentions « Hans Garnjobst, qui restitue aux femmes leur physionomie d’attention un peu étonnée ». He participated to the Exposition Internationale Universelle of 1900 in Paris with three works, My Mother, Primitive period, Autumn morning, Locarno, watercolor (respectively n°71, 72, 73, of the official catalogue which introduces him as « élève de M. Gérôme », he was then living 12 rue Boissonnade in Paris). In 1901 il he had a personal exhibition in Munich, and in 1909, he loaned for the 8th Biennale in Venice a Léda, by his friend Albert Besnard (1849-1934, catalogue n° 28). The works we present, some of which are signed or annotated by his wife (Rosalie Moglia, 1888-1972, they had a daughter Hélène, 1916-1999), date for the main part of the South Italy trip, views of Pompeii or the Naples bay.
The Thieme-Becker dictionary reports that our artist began in a style close to his compatriot Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), to evolve, probably due to his Paris, sojourn, towards Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) or Albert Besnard (Garnjobst’s friend, as we saw). Nothing such appears in the works we present which seem to us eventually closer to another compatriot and contemporary (they both exhibited in Basel in 1898), the ticinese Augusto Giacometti (1877-1947). But, above all, if we compare to French painting, anticipating the colorful Fauve explosion.
Medium and Condition:
black chalk with some red chalk used for the ear and mouth and around the eyes and faintly visible on the face. There is white heightening on the left side of the forehead, the edge of the collar, on the bridge of the nose, and two small patches on the ear. Black chalk is also used to suggest a shadow on the right side rising in a slant to the right from the shoulder before it stops. The paper is light beige and unevenly trimmed at the corners.
Provenance: French private collection; its sale Paris Enchères, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 13 March 2019, n° 17 (« école florentine du XVIIème siècle »)
This portrait drawing is a very early work by Bernini. It must be earlier than his Self-Portrait in the Uffizi, with which it has important elements in common. However, it is less confidently drawn and less finished throughout. The most significant shared element is the drawing of the ear that is exceptionally detailed in the earlier drawing but differs from Bernini’s own ear that, like the other ear, seems to be a life study of a body part rarely given much attention. There are only two other visible ears in Bernini portrait drawings - one of an “elderly man with mustache and small painted beard” in a private collection in New York; the other with Colnaghi’s in 1993. Neither work can be precisely dated but the first was probably made by 1625, the second a little later. The remaining portrait drawings – all of male sitters – have ears covered by their hair.
The treatment of the eyes of both sitters reveals Bernini’s careful study of this crucial feature in any successful portrait of the human face. In this early one, Bernini has placed the eyes in a suggestion of an oval hollow with a line on the lower edge of the upper lid but otherwise only white chalk beside the pupils and even a bit of white on the lid of the left [proper right] eye to define them. The far eye has a curved brown chalk line below the brow that seems too neat for Bernini but the same chalk is used for the nostrils. There is a well-defined eyebrow over the far eye but little visible hair over the near eye that may have been damaged by rubbing. Finally the pupils are correctly placed to make us believe the sitter is looking at us. In Bernini’s own portrait, however, he has not managed the foreshortened eye on our right – it needed to be a bit smaller and less oval.
The nose in the early drawing is beautifully realized: the shadow on its right side defines the length of his elegant nose and a few white marks define its width. The nostrils are reddish-brown marks in the right spots but the mouth seems too small. The moustache and small goatee below also lack the brio of the black chalk describing the sitter’s hair. Perhaps they were done after the sitter left. Finally the far side of the sitter’s face is defined by an almost invisible contour line.
An important difference between these two drawings concerns an element that other artists making 3/4 view portrait drawings often get wrong, namely judging the scale between the head and the supporting neck and shoulders. In the earlier drawing the neck seems too short and the width of the shoulders not wide enough to match the size of the head. Bernini’s treatment of the collar and shoulders in his own portrait has more generous proportions. His neck and chin are above the collar and his more skillful treatment of the collar seen in partial foreshortening allows us to imagine its hidden forms behind him and his upper torso. And one final difference – the earlier drawing uses trois crayons but Bernini uses them to greater effect in his own self-portrait.
The discovery of this drawing allows us to watch Bernini learning how to draw the head and torso of a male sitter and doing it before he began to do it in three dimensions. The unknown sitter who patiently sat for the teenage genius may have been a family friend. His small white collar and buttoned jacket implies that he was educated, and was maybe a minor cleric.
Ann Sutherland Harris
Professor Emerita, University of Pittsburgh
We propose attributing this extremely clean-lined drawing to Nicolas Poussin. Probably a fragment of a larger drawing, it is very certainly a copy of an antique motif, which we have been unable to identify. The firm line, which breaks off in certain places, and the extremely rapid way of indicating the eyes with a simple stroke are found in several drawings between 1635 and 1637: A Man Healing a Lion (Orléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts; see Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665, catalogue raisonné of drawings, vol. I, Milan, Leonardo, 1994, no. 130), Sheet of Studies after the Antique, Inspired by Reading Pliny (Paris, Prat Collection; see Rosenberg/Prat, op. cit., no. 131, who mention the “firm pen and the succinct way in which the figures are depicted”), The Satyr and the Peasant (Paris, private collection; Rosenberg-Prat, op. cit., no. 192), and Christ with St Peter (Saint Petersburg, Hermitage; Rosenberg-Prat, op. cit., no. 244). The fact that these examples are copies of antique monuments (and we have not cited them all) supports our theory that the sketch here is also a copy of some detail in a mosaic or bas-relief.
The son of master plasterers from the Landes, young Despiau comes in Paris in 1891 and enters the year after the Ecole nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, then in 1895 the Ecole des Beaux-arts in the workshop of sculptor Barrias who teaches him the stone carving technique. Despite some participations at the Salon des Artistes Français (from 1898 to 1900), it is not a very opulent period until 1907, when Rodin, who had noticed the young artist, asks him to work for him. After the war, there is a « boom » for public commissions, and his native city asks him in 1920 for the war memorial. He still carves portraits, but doesn’t anymore present them to salons, exhibiting only in galleries. In 1923, he creates, with Maillol, Bourdelle and Wlérick, the Salon des Tuileries. He exhibits for the first time in New York in 1927, the in 1937 at the Exposition Universelle at the Petit Palais, 52 works, a consecration. He dies in his Parisian workshop in 1946. Though forgotten by the critic, probably because of wrong choice during the Occupation, he is one of the major sculptors of the first half of twentieth century, together with Maillol and Bourdelle, representing a kind of happy classicism, sometimes called « retour à l’ordre ».
