PAUL DELVAUX, CLOTHBOUND SKETCHBOOK CONTAINING ARCHITECTURAL AND FIGURE STUDIES, [C.1925?]

oblong 4to (160 x 240mm.), 54 pages in total, containing 46 pages of studies mostly in pencil and some in ink on paper, often multiple studies on the same page, together with five loose sketches, inscription on pastedown "Album de bocetos + croquis de Paul Delvaux - 1926 - Payró"

Jules Payro, acquired directly from the artist c. 1926

Philippe Roberts-Jones, "Delvaux's sketchpads" in Paul Delvaux 1897-1994, exhibition catatalogue, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (Womelgem, 1997), pp.48-53

Condition is described in the main body of the catalogue, where appropriate
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Paul Delvaux produced numerous sketchbooks over his decade-long career and he valued them greatly. To prevent dispersion the majority of his sketch-books was donated by the artist to the Belgian state and is now on deposit at the Royal Library and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts.  According to Philippe Roberts-Jones, Delvaux’s sketchbooks "constitute a kind of palette of feelings, forms and images; they form the precious depository which houses reflections of the first feeling or the initial idea, the place where the gamut is run, where the theme is conceived" (Roberts-Jones, p.49).

In this sketchbook Delvaux approached two of his main personal themes: women and architecture. As evident in other sketchbooks from the 1920s Delvaux repeatedly made use of a perspective grid to develop compositions, many of them complex entanglements with numerous figures. One of the drawings in the sketchbook relates very closely to the finished painting "Portrait de famille" dated 1925 (cat. rais. 1975: no. 28), which provides a potential date of origin for the sketchbook as early as 1925.

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Fondation Paul Delvaux, Saint-Idesbald.