6/4/23 - Acquisition - Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum - We mentioned it in the news item we dedicated to the large drawing attributed to Robert Lefèvre acquired by the Getty Museum (see news item of 23/3/23), a charcoal study by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (ill. 1) has also recently joined the remarkable French graphic corpus already conserved by the Californian museum. Like the recently acquired large portrait and superb landscape by Victor Hugo (see news item of 31/10/22), it has temporarily taken its place in the West Pavilion.
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- 1. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898)
Man’s head in profile, c. 1875
Charcoal - 32 × 24 cm
Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum
Photo: The J. Paul Getty Museum - See the image in its page
Acquired from the Hamburg gallery Le Claire Kunst, this squared charcoal Head of a Man in Profile is a preparatory study for the head of the young fisherman depicted in the centre of The Fisherman’s Family. This large canvas was exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1875 and then at the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris before being acquired in 1901 by the Königliche Gemäldegalerie in Dresden where it was destroyed during the Second World War. As the Le Claire Kunst Gallery’s detailed notice states, the large missing composition is known (ill. 2), reproduced in colour in a 1921 catalogue of the Dresden museum [1]. The young fisherman is depicted in profile, naked, tying his nets to the branches of a gaunt tree. Seated to his right is a naked young woman discreetly draped in red, presumably his wife, holding with her left hand a small child playing with shells. To the right of the composition, a sleeping old man, wrapped in a large blue cloth, is resting against the wreckage of a boat.
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- 2. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898)
The Fisherman’s Family, 1875
Oil on canvas - 260 x 218 cm
Formerly Dresden, Gemäldegalerie
Destroyed in Dresden in 1945
Photo: Le Claire Kunst - See the image in its page
The life study acquired by the Getty bears the artist’s signature at lower right and the model’s name and address, "de Cioja / r. Saint-Victor 45" in the upper right-hand corner. Sketched with great precision, this male profile is a highly accomplished preparatory study that was probably transferred in its entirety to the final canvas. Other preparatory studies for The Fisherman’s Family are known. The Cleveland Museum of Art preserves a very precise study also squared for the figure of the mother, while the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon preserves a more summary charcoal study of the old man in bust form. Mention should also be made of the large-scale study kept by the Musée Saint-Nazaire in Bourbon-Lancy. Made in black pencil and red chalk wash on canvas, this card details the group of four figures but none of the elements of the decor. Although the composition is largely in line with that of the final canvas, a few differences are notable. The standing child is finally seated and the old man’s bare legs are covered with a wide drape. In the collections of the Fogg Museum at Harvard another small-scale general study executed in red chalk with white chalk is more broadly consistent with the 1875 painting.
In addition to these preparatory drawings, later variants of the subject are known. Thus, the Art Institute of Chicago holds a small red chalk, probably from the early 1880s, with the motif of the mother and child standing alone in front of a fisherman’s hut, as well as the second version of The Fisherman’s Family painted by Puvis de Chavannes in 1887, twelve years after the original, from which it differs greatly. Finally, let us mention the famous Poor Fisherman that the artist exhibited at the Salon de la Société des artistes français in 1881, now in the Musée d’Orsay, inspired by the same subject.