IV. The Art of Drawing in the Romantic Era

 

IV. The Art of Drawing in the Romantic Era

The illustrators of the 19th century captured the world around them with keen eyes and virtuoso pens. The art of drawing had reached the zenith of its development - before the implementation of photography it was simply the popular medium in book illustration. Moreover, what drawing had over the new photomechanical imaging process was that it was not bound to merely documenting reality: anything that the artist could imagine, no matter how fantastical, could be drawn.

In this respect, the medium of drawing itself has a special affinity with the Romantic epoch. The artists’ diligence and energy that went into the 1600 original drawings compiled in our collection, is nowhere better exemplified than in the 260 original drawings mostly by Édouard Wattier, for the 1840 edition of Arabian Nights by Ernest Bourdin [no. 447]. Drawn in pencil and pen, washed in brown and heightened with white, these works with their lively “oriental” colours are, like the tales themselves, the product of a vivid imagination. The same is true for the illustrations for Charles Perrault’s Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals (Histoires ou contes du temps passé) in the style of the Barbizon school [no. 494]. The copy that belonged to Henri Cherrier and Henri Bonasse includes eleven watercoloured “preliminary drawings” by Hippolyte Pauquet, which are incomparably more detailed, multifaceted, striking, and atmospheric than the etchings found in the text.

The Romantic period also inherited certain large scale projects from the Enlightenment that sought to understand and organise the world around them. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon had started begun work on his monumental defining work on natural history (Histoire Naturelle) in the middle of the 18th century. Our copy from the last edition with steel engravings (1855-57) has been supplemented with 121 original drawings; and our display includes two illuminated images by the main contributor Édouard Traviès [no. 96]. By showing the animals in their natural habitat, he is giving even these zoological drawings a Romantic feel, turning them into independent works of art rather than clinical illustrations to a scientific work.

In his fables, Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian related human behaviour with examples from the animal world, and so when it came to illustrating these stories, Grandville, the inventor of the animal-human caricature [see more in case no. X], was a perfect choice. The copy that once belonged to Léopold Carteret also uniquely includes an artist’s preliminary drawing for the advertising poster, where the mirrored design is executed in pencil and sepia ink [no. 206]. Grandville's Public and Private Life of Animals (Scènes de la vie privée and publique des animaux) not only returned to the animal kingdom, but their comprehensive and systematic approach to representation recalled the distant model of Buffon. On show is one of Grandville’s scénes, out of a corpus of 35 pen drawings in total [no. 313].

Pierre-Jules Hetzel’s Le diable à Paris presented a panorama of society without the disguising veils utilised in animal fables. The 1845-46 edition includes a total of 212 plates by the subtle ironist Gavarni (born Guillaume-Sulpice Chevallier). An album with 52 originals, which the artist gifted to his colleague Paul Delaroche, contains 48 preliminary drawings for this work alone, two of which can be seen here [no. 249].

Gavarni was particularly interested in portraying women, which is evident in his albums depicting the lorettes, a type of prostitute. Charles Baudelaire described Gavarni’s vision in one of his essays: “The Lorette is somebody who is free. She comes and goes. She has an open house. She doesn’t have a master; she frequents artists and journalists.” This display includes a watercolour from the later years of his career, depicting a pensive looking young girl on the “route de Paris” [no. 257].

 
Heribert Tenschert