A man, leaning on his arms, looking up to the right

Details

FRANÇOIS BOUCHER (PARIS 1703-1770)
A man, leaning on his arms, looking up to the right
black and white chalk, on light brown paper, corners cut
7 5⁄8 x 9 ¼ in. (19.4 x 23.5 cm)

Provenance

Charles Gasc (1822-after 1869), Paris and Spain (L. 542).
with Wildenstein & Co., New York.
Howard Page Cross (1910-1975), New York; by descent to his heirs; Sotheby’s, 5 July 1976, lot 81.
Gerald Bronfman (1911-1986) and Marjorie Bronfman, née Schechter (1917-2012), Montreal; by descent to
Corinne Bronfman (1947-2022), Washington DC; by descent to the present owners.

Literature

A. Ananoff, L’Œuvre dessiné de François Boucher, Paris, 1966, no. 904, fig. 155.
A. Ananoff, with D. Wildenstein, François Boucher, Lausanne and Paris, 1976, II, p. 1753, under no. 423, ‘Dessins’, no. 7, fig. 1210.
J. Ingamells, The Wallace Collection. Catalogue of Pictures, III, French Before 1815, London, 1989, p. 76.

Exhibited

Washington, National Gallery of Art, and Chicago, Art Institute, François Boucher in North American Collections. One Hundred Drawings, 1973, no. 70, ill. (catalogue by Regina Shoolman Slatkin).
New York, Stair Sainty Matthiesen, François Boucher. His Circle and Influence, 1987, no. 30, ill. (entry by Regina Shoolman Slatkin).
Montreal, Museum of Fine Arts, From Boucher to Vuillard. French Master Drawings from the Collection of Mrs. Marjorie Bronfman, 2000 (without catalogue).

Conditions of sale

Brought to you by

Giada Damen, Ph.D. AVP, Specialist, Head of Sale

gdamen@christies.com +1 212 641 7532

Lot Essay

This powerful drawing is a study for a figure in one of Boucher’s greatest masterpieces, The Setting of the Sun, in the Wallace Collection, London (fig. 1; inv. P486; S. Duffy and J. Hedley, The Wallace Collection’s Pictures. A Complete Catalogue, London, 2004, pp. 52-53, ill.). Together with the equally celebrated Rising of the Sun in the same collection (inv. P485), the picture was commissioned in 1752 and served as a cartoon for a tapestry destined to King Louis XV's bedroom in the Château de Bellevue.

The figure on this sheet corresponds to the triton at lower left in the painted composition. Several other drawings related to Boucher’s painting survive, among them the study of the triton rising from the sea and holding a conch, Klassik Stiftung Weimar (inv. KK 9000; see P. Rosenberg in De Callot à Greuze. Dessins français des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles des musées de Weimar, exhib. cat., Weimar, Stiftung Weimarer Klassik und Kunstsammlungen, New York, The Frick Collection, and Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, 2005-2006, no. 53, ill.).

Fig. 1. François Boucher, The Setting of the Sun. Wallace Collection, London.

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