Charles Frédéric Soëhnée

Sale, New York, Christie's, 28 January 1999, lot 182

All hinge mounted. Each sheet has discoloured along its four edges, most probably due to their previous mounts. Otherwise in good condition with the medium fresh and vibrant throughout each sheet.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

These sheets belong to a group of four albums, some of which were dismembered, all dated between May 1818 and May 1819, that constitute the core of Soehnée's graphic work.

Born in Landau, Germany, in 1789, the year of the French Revolution, Soehnée grew up in Paris and trained initially with Anne-Louis Girodet. Better known today for his watercolours and prints of fantasy subjects influenced by Hieronymus Bosch's work, in his lifetime the artist was more widely acclaimed for a brevet that he obtained for a varnish much appreciated by fellow painters such as Eugène Delacroix.

All executed in watercolor and brown wash, this group of drawings reveals the impact that the imagery of artists such as Francisco Goya, especially his Caprichos, and Bosch had on Soehnée's work. At the same time, they reflect a kind of poetic vision of the misery and disasters of his troubled times that have a close parallel in Jacques Callot's prints of beggars and hunchbacks.

After the Hundred Days War and the second restoration of the monarchy in 1815, France was still living through a difficult political transition, the awkwardness and at times gruesome reality of which Soehnée manages to encapsulate through his peculiar menagerie of fantasy creatures.