Deux baigneurs (recto); D'après Marcantonio Raimondi: Caryatide (verso)

Details

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Deux baigneurs (recto); D'après Marcantonio Raimondi: Caryatide (verso)
pencil on paper (recto and verso)
8½ x 10¾in. (21.5 x 12.5cm.)
Drawn circa 1875-1878 (recto); drawn circa 1877-1880 (verso)

Provenance

Paul Cézanne fils, Paris.
Acquired from the above by Paul Guillaume, Paris.
Acquired from the estate of the above by Adrien Chappuis, Tresserve, in 1934.
By descent from the above to the present owner.

Literature

L. Venturi, Cézanne, son art-son oeuvre, Paris, 1936, no. 1299, p. 309 (verso); no. 1298, p. 308 (recto) (verso illustrated vol. II, pl. 352).
A. Chappuis, Dessins de Paul Cézanne, Paris, 1938, no. 35 (recto illustrated).
G. Berthold, Cézanne und die alten Meister, Stuttgart, 1958, no. 262 (verso illustrated pl. 92).
T. Reff, 'Cézanne's Bather with Outstretched Arms', in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, March 1962, pp. 173 and 188, n. 13 (recto).
T. Reff, 'Cézanne, Flaubert, St. Anthony, and the Queen of Sheba', in The Art Bulletin, June 1962, p. 121, n. 77 (verso).
A. Chappuis, The Drawings of Paul Cézanne, A Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1973, vol. I, no. 389, p. 129 (recto); no. 481, p. 146 (verso) (illustrated vol. II, nos. 389 and 481).

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis

Lot Essay

The recto of this sheet was page XLIX from the sketchbook CP II.

Chappuis' dating of the recto sketches makes this young male bather figure the earliest of the versions offered in this sale, and it is concurrent with Rewald's dating of the two painted compositions of Baigneur aux bras écartés (see note to lot 322). The landscape background is more closely related to the larger oil painting (R 370) than the smaller one (R 369). The bather's physique is remarkably robust, as seen in R 370, and the resemblance to Cézanne's source, the Hellenistic marble Satyr with Cymbals in the Louvre, is clearly apparent.

The second figure, a seated bather, is on a smaller scale than the young bather, a discrepancy that does appear to have concerned the artist as he combined the two figures in close proximity to each other on the same page.

The verso study is a rendering after the left hand caryatide in Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving (see lot 324).

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