Le Petit Vent du Nord

This elegant, graphic drawing is likely to be a design for an advertisement for fans, taking the form of a portrait mask. This was a theme Hawkins explored extensively from around 1900 onwards, producing drawings of portrait masks for advertising images and magazine illustrations, as well as designs for fans and mirrors, and occasionally as illustrations for menus and programmes. The best known is perhaps that created for Christofle et Cie. and used as a souvenir for the Exposition Universelle of 1900.

The present drawing balances the Symbolist fascination with the mask as artistic device with stylised vegetations and curving lines derived from Art Nouveau.

The model for this drawing may have been the artist’s daughter Jacqueline, born in 1892, who posed for a number of her father’s works of this period, and owned this sheet.