The "Semaine du Dessin" in Paris galleries (4)

22/3/24 - Art market - Paris - Rarely has drawing week seen so many exhibitions in Parisian galleries. We need the time to see them and write the articles, which sometimes explains why publications are spread over several days, leaving our readers little time to visit them.

: 1. Michel Martin Drölling (1786-1851)
Vanity with Violin, c. 1805-1810
Black pencil - 15.7 x 19.5 cm
Galerie La Nouvelle Athènes
Photo: Galerie La Nouvelle Athènes; See the image in its page

However, La Nouvelle Athènes gallery, one of the most regular exhibitors and always publishing a catalogue, inaugurated its new display a while ago, on the eve of the opening of Tefaf. But there’s still a week to go.
Visitors will be able to discover a strange work by Michel-Martin Drölling (ill. 1). Strange not because of its subject - Vanités are legion in French art - but strange because this type of work is rather typical of 17th-century art, and quite rare in the 19th century, particularly in the case of a so-called "academic" artist like this one who, although he painted genre scenes, is also known as a religious painter. The skull and the violin (with its notes that disappear as soon as they are played) naturally evoke the brevity of life, and the composition itself, very simple, refers to French painting of the first half of the 17th-century.

: 2. Anne Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson (1767-1824)
Mars and Venus surprised by Vulcan, c. 1815-1820
Black chalk - 19.7 × 15 cm
Galerie La Nouvelle Athènes
Photo: Galerie La Nouvelle Athènes; See the image in its page

: 3. Tony Johannot (1803-1852)
Portrait of the Actor Edmond Geffroy as Hamlet, c. 1829
Black pencil, white chalk and red chalk - 32 × 25.5 cm
Galerie La Nouvelle Athènes
Photo : Galerie La Nouvelle Athènes; See the image in its page

Romanticism is consubstantial with the La Nouvelle Athènes gallery area, as it is with the eponymous district where many artists lived. Girodet, of whom two…

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