Théodore Géricault from Private Collections

1 . Seated Male Nude

Black chalk, pen and brown ink on paper 6 ⅜ x 4 ¼ inches ( 16 . 3 x 11 cm) Collection stamp lower center: Lugt 464 (Collection Coutan-Hauguet) Inscribed on recto: ‘ in mar./consi ever/no ti ’ (?) Numbered lower left: 30 Inscribed on verso: portions of a numbered list (illeg.)

provenance L.J.A. Coutan; sale, Coutan-Hauguet Collection, Hôtel Drouot, December 16 – 17 , 1889 ; sale, Paris, November 21 , 2000 , lot 11 .

l i terature Bazin, VII, no. 2690 .

Thomas French Fine Art

Dated c. 1810 by Bazin, this vigorously handled drawing of a muscular, bearded nude, seated on a bed in an ancient Roman interior, seems to have been inspired by The Return of Marcus Sextus , a famous painting by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin of the 1799 Salon (Musée du Louvre). From 1810 to 1812 , Géricault studied regularly in the studio of Guérin, a Neoclassical painter of historical and mythological subjects. After around 1812 he studied increasingly on his own. The sculptural character and heroic proportions of the dynamically posed figure in this drawing may point to a somewhat later date, perhaps around the time of his painted Académies, to which scholars have assigned dates ranging

from c. 1812 (Grunchec) to c. 1816 (Eitner). The drawing was part of the Coutan collection, one of the great private collections of Romantic art acquired during the Restoration. In 1889 , after inviting the Louvre to choose works for the museum, Coutan’s descendants sold the remains of the collection at auction. (AK)

verso