PIERRE PARROCEL | Mary Magdalene with two Angels at the tomb of Christ

Laid down. Little brown staining at the bottom right and center. Some brown stains top left near the corner. Smaller scattered foxing. Overall media fresh and in quite good condition. Sold unframed.
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This sheet can be related to a group of compositional studies with scenes of the New Testament, now in various public and private collections, with which it shares the same technique, and roughly the same dimensions.¹   The series, drawn in black chalk heightened with white chalk, constitutes an exceptional ensemble, which must originally have included about eighty drawings,² of which fewer than twenty sheets are known today, the majority of them preserved in French museums.³    The traditional attribution of these drawings to Pierre Parrocel was challenged by François Marandet in a 2009 article in Master Drawings, where he attributed to Parrocel’s nephew Etienne Parrocel (1696-1775) two groups of drawings he had discovered in the Albertina, which bear a close stylistic resemblance to the New Testament studies,⁴ but Yves Di Domenico and Olivier Michel have indisputably settled the matter in favour of the elder Parrocel, by showing that one of the sheets from the New Testament series, Saints Peter and John healing the paralytic, is dated 1704, when Etienne Parrocel would have been only eight years old.  Furthermore, when the dated sheet, now in a private collection, was removed from its mount, an inscription by the famous collector Philippe de Chennevières (1820-1899) was revealed, reading: ‘St Pierre et St Jean guérissant les malades/Ce dessin m’a été donné par Fréd. Legrip/ Il est du peintre provençal Pierre Parrocel…../Le dessin est signé et daté 1704’.⁵  

The Adrien sheet displays exactly the same rationality of execution and controlled handling of the black chalk as the rest of the group, and the whole composition, dominated by the geometry of the open tomb, has a strongly sculptural feel.  The purpose of these drawings remains unknown, but they were very possibly made to be engraved as the illustrations to a new edition of the New Testament.

^1. The dimensions of the present drawing are in fact very slightly smaller than those of the others in the group, suggesting it could have been slightly reduced on the sides

^2. See Yves Di Domenico in, Une Dynastie de peintres, les Parrocel, exhib. cat., Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris, and Musée Calvet, Avignon, 2007-8, p. 34; Di Domenico mentions the numbering ‘ottanta’ visible on the sheet depicting St. Peter resurrecting the Tabitha, in the Musée Calvet, Avignon (inv. no. 996-7-83)

^3. Ibid., pp. 34-39, reproduced

^4. François Marandet, ‘New Proposals for Drawings by Etienne Parrocel’, Master Drawings, vol. XLVII, no. 2 (2009), pp. 174-190

^5. See Y. Di Domenico and O. Michel, ‘A Final Word on Pierre Parrocel’ (Letters), Master Drawings, vol. L, no. 2 (2012), pp. 262-263