Eugène Delacroix

Possibly, Artist's Studio: Sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, February 17-19, 1864, as part of lot 302 (as La Vierge des Moissons. Études pour l'un des premiers tableaux exécutées par Eugène Delacroix.  Dessins et croquis.  4 feuilles)
Sale: Étude Marc Arthur Kohn, Drouot Montaigne, Paris, June 12, 1995, lot 1, illustrated

This exceptionally large pen and ink drawing is a full scale model for the figural group in Eugène Delacroix's first commissioned painting, an altarpiece, La Vierge des moissons, painted in 1819 for the parish church at Orcemont, near Rambouillet.  The altarpiece, still in situ, depicts the Virgin seated on a brick wall and supporting the Christ Child as He raises His arm to bless an assembled bundle of sheaves beneath His feet.  Drapery and a basket of field flowers rest on the wall to the left of the Child. 

Study for "La Vierge des Moissons" probably represented the penultimate stage in Delacroix's development of the composition, coming just between a small scale oil study (Johnson, L106) and the artist's transfer of his final design to canvas.  Although lacking the sheaves of wheat that extend the bottom of the altarpiece and the floral detail at left,  Study for "La Vierge des Moissons" otherwise conforms very closely to the design and the dimensions of the corresponding section of the final painting (especially when one acknowledges the approximately 2 cm. overlap at center where the upper and lower sheets were pieced).  Between his oil sketch for the composition and the altarpiece, Delacroix introduced a number of small changes: dropping the Child's left hand on to the Virgin's knee, shifting the Child deeper between his mother's legs, and broadening the Virgin's hips and shoulders -- all changes that strengthen the intimacy between Mother and Child and the monumental impact of the figure group.  The full scale drawing Study for "La Vierge des Moissons" may well have been intended to show Delacroix's patron or the artist may have undertaken it simply to persuade himself of the suitability of his first grand design.

The circumstances of the command for the Orcemont painting, arranged by a friend of the young artist, are known from the Piron biography of Delacroix, in which the author quotes Delacroix describing the request as 'a gift from above' at a moment when he was near despair, watching his plans for his future crumbling.  The price offered for the painting, 15 francs, was very, very modest but the significance of the recognition to Delacroix was quite real.  He had not yet exhibited any work at the Salon, he was short of funds, and, as Lee Johnson speculates, the benefactor who secured this commission for an altarpiece may well be the same maecenas who, pleased with a first benefaction, went on to arrange a second decorative commission for the 21 year old artist just a few months later.

Only a few preparatory works for La Vierge des moissons are known today:  An independent sheet of compositional studies belongs to the Cabinet des dessins, Musée du Louvre, as does a beautiful large study from life of a young girl which was utilized for the figure of Christ and a full-scale drawing on tracing paper that records the upper body of the Virgin and the head of the Child. Several smaller studies for the Virgin, her hair, and her draperies have been identified in various Delacroix sketchbooks; and a small oil study of the entire composition that may once have belonged to Alfred Robaut came to light in 1979.  In addition, early records compiled by Robaut and Adolphe Moreau, Delacroix's first cataloguers, supported by late nineteenth-century sale catalogues, suggest that there are other related works yet to be found.  In Lee Johnson's modern cataloguing of The Virgin of the Harvest (J151), he sets out the known record of related drawings (L. Johnson The Paintings of Eugene Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, 1981, vol. I, p. 162).

Johnson was not aware of the existence of this Study for "La Vierge des Moissons" but his parsing of the various records for the Delacroix vente makes clear that something more than the four sheets of studies recorded under lot 302 in the February 17-19, 1864 sale catalogue were probably sold, a not infrequent occurrence in artist's estate sales, where drawings and studies were often bundled under single lots or added on the day of the auction (as happened in the sales of Théodore Rousseau and Camille Corot, Delacroix contemporaries).  Robaut accepts the catalogue's mention of four drawings and notes they were sold in two lots, to himself and to Grzymala, although his catalogue independently lists only three; Johnson points out that Philippe Burty's annotated catalogue of the sale mentions seven sheets; and Madame Arlette Serullaz has kindly confirmed that she owns an annotated Delacroix vente catalogue that breaks catalogue no. 302 into three lots.  These small differences are significant because the previously unrecorded Study for "La Vierge des Moissons" has the number 302 pencilled in very faintly just at the top of the enframing arch, possibly as a direction for the auction's art handlers.