Delacroix 2018

drawings can still appear on the art market that are the potential good fortune of private collectors, having not been snatched up by a public institution. The selection curated by Jill Newhouse Gallery and Galerie de Bayser thus allows us the discovery—or the rediscovery—of forty works spanning nearly the entirety of Delacroix’s career. Their provenance can in many cases be followed from the Delacroix studio sale in 1864 through the illustrious collections of artists, amateurs, or historians: Edgar Degas, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, the Count Charles Edgar de Mornay, the Baron Joseph Vitta, the Doctor Georges Viau, Paul-Arthur Chéramy, Philippe Burty, etc. Finished sheets or rapid sketches, copies, studies for well-known paintings or decorative cycles, landscapes tied to the recollections of youth or to the voyage to Africa, copies, cats and horses . . . so many witnesses attesting, as if there were a need, that the assiduous practice of drawing was for Delacroix the regenerating catalyst that allowed him to bring to the highest level the diverse resources of his art. For the quality of execution in uniting linear force and subtle touch, for the unique mise en page , for the rendering of movement or of light, for the refinement of details or the suggestive power of quick, sinuous lines, I would like to mention in particular the Studies of Figures for the Ceiling of the Salon du Roi, Palais Bourbon (Assemblée Nationale), Paris (cat. no. 21), Lion Attacking a Serpent (cat. no. 33), the Sheet of Studies of Horses, a Moroccan Man in a Turban, and a Landscape Drawing on Stationary from the French Ministry (cat. no. 27), Interior of a Moroccan House (cat. no. 9), and Military Chief ben Abou in a Morrocan Interior (cat. no. 7) .

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