- 137
Jacques-Louis David Paris 1748 - 1825 Brussels
Description
- Jacques-Louis David
- recto: view of a road passing through rocky cliffs; verso: dancing maidens and studies of their heads
numbered and indistinctly inscribed on the verso in black chalk;
grey wash over black chalk (recto);
black chalk (verso)
Provenance
As for the previous lot
Catalogue Note
See the note to the previous lot.
Pure landscape drawings do exist among the album pages, in various media, but this is a particularly fine and unusual composition. Two similar in style are Rosenberg-Prat, op. cit., p. 618, no. 896 and p. 734, no. 1170. It is not possible to identify the location of the view. Rosenberg and Prat suggest that David drew in chalk on the spot, and worked up his sketches with wash in the studio. They also feel that the landscapes were always taken from nature, or occasionally from other paintings, and are not fanciful as previous writers have suggested (op. cit., p. 400).
The figures on the verso are almost exactly copied from Baldassare Peruzzi's Dance of the Muses with Apollo, in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence (see C.L. Frommel, Baldassare Peruzzi, Vienna 1967/68, p. 114, no. 78, reproduced). There is an engraving after that painting by Philippe Thomassin, a printmaker active in Rome in the early 17th century.