The Fondation Custodia, Paris, has an
exemplary history of researching and
publishing its collection of works of art on
paper. This long-standing commitment
continued undiminished under the energetic
directorship of the late Ger Luijten, from
2010 to 2022, enhanced by the dissemination
of collections-based research via email
newsletters and online catalogues, many of
recent acquisitions.[1] The catalogue Dessins
français du XIXe siècle, which accompanied an
exhibition of the same name in 2022, focuses
on a group of 138 works selected from the 1,800
nineteenth-century French drawings in the
collection. Frits Lugt (1884–1970), the founder
of the Fondation Custodia, collected few
works by French artists of this period, judging
himself to be too much a product of the
nineteenth century to be able to discriminate
with appropriate historical perspective,
although he made a few exceptions: drawings
by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Edgar
Degas, Jean-François Millet and Théodule Ribot feature in this volume as exemplars of
his taste in this field. Lugt’s general preference
for landscape, portrait and figure drawings,
as opposed to preparatory compositional
drawings or genre scenes, determined the
choice of subjects in the exhibition and
accompanying book, even if they are not
rigorously presented in these terms.
Within each of these thematic groups
there are strengths: a sequence of watercolour
landscapes by François Marius Granet (cat.
nos.15–19), for example, some showing the
imposing Montagne Sainte-Victoire, and
others by the brothers Flandrin (nos.46–52);
seascapes by Eugène Isabey (nos. 86–89);
and a wide range of views made by artists
in Italy. Following Lugt’s cue in acquiring
Ingres’s pencil portrait of the Prix de Rome
winner François-Édouard Picot (1817; cat.
no.41), the Fondation has assembled a strong
group of portraits of artists: Amaury-Duval’s
painting of the suave-looking and seriously
moustachioed Adrien Dauzats (1840; no.43),
Félix Bracquemond’s friendship portrait
of Charles Daubigny (1853; no.85) and Paul
Delaroche’s minuscule but moving pen-andink
portrait of the elderly Granet (no.44) stand
out, as do self-portraits by Louis Lamothe
(no.40) and Ker-Xavier Roussel (c.1887–88;
no.119), and what could be described as a
portrait
in absentia, in watercolour, by Henri-
Joseph Harpignies (1909; no.101), depicting
the corner of his studio. But some of the most
memorable drawings are
hors catégorie, perhaps
best characterised by their powerful presence
of absence: an anonymous piece of drapery by
Pauline Auzou (no.5), all sfumato stumping;
Horace Vernet’s study of wickerwork gabion
fortifications on the Crimean front (1854–55;
no.59), devoid of combatants; a beautiful
graphite drawing of overcoats and top hats
by James Tissot (no.131; Fig.5), suspended on
an invisible cloakroom rail, waiting to resume
human form; and Albert Besnard’s battered
but lovingly painted slippers (no.138).
Media and techniques are wide-ranging:
black and coloured chalks, pen and ink, sharp
graphite pencil, watercolour, pastel and even
a ‘painted drawing’ (p.162) in oil on panel
by Théodore Rousseau (no.62) – a nod to
the extraordinary collection of oil-on-paper
sketches that have been the focus of the
Fondation’s acquisition campaign in recent
years. In some cases, the supports also range
beyond paper. Notable in this respect are
Eugène Carrière’s oil-on-parchment portraits
of Gustave Geoffroy (1891; no.123) and Edmond
de Goncourt (1892; no.124), commissioned
by the latter and painted – or drawn, despite
the medium? – on the bindings of their own
publications. The index of artists includes
many of the great French draughtsmen one
might expect to find in a survey of this kind
– in addition to those mentioned, there are
drawings by, among others, François Bonvin,
Eugène Boudin, Eugène Delacroix, Camille
Corot, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Achille-Etna
Michallon – but these appear on an equal
footing with lesser-known artists, whose star
has unjustifiably faded, many working outside
the capital. Foundational research on the
work and lives of Caroline de Fontenay, Lionel
Le Couteux, Pierre Letuaire, Paul Coulon,
Jean-Pierre Monseret and Auguste Cabuzel, to
name but a few, provides invaluable building
blocks for further study.
Impressively, just under half the drawings
presented were acquired during Luijten’s
tenure as director. Provenances of the
drawings suggest that he and his team kept a
close eye on the art market at all levels, from
international auction houses and dealers to
runners who frequented house clearances; he
also inspired a series of important gifts. It is
noteworthy that several drawings were bought
in 2022, some just a matter of weeks before the
catalogue was published. But this is no vanity
publication. A multi-authored volume, it also
consciously foregrounds the achievements
of previous staff and directors from 1970s
onwards, and in not a few cases shows how
more recent acquisitions have built on these
earlier initiatives in meaningful ways. The
catalogue fully acknowledges the contribution
of various enterprising dealers, in particular
Jacques Fischer and Chantal Kiener, who have
done much to advance knowledge of neglected
artists. A minor criticism about the design
concerns the arrangement of the catalogue:
the entries for each work are separated from
the main text and image and published
together with the footnotes at the end of
the volume, which means a deal of hopping
between the front and back of the book to
assimilate all relevant information. But this
is a piffling gripe, not least since the designer
gave their time for free to bring about this
substantial and richly illustrated volume.
True to its vocation to broaden the
art-historical canon, the Fondation staged
concurrently with this varied but coherent
display a monographic exhibition devoted to
one such unsung hero, Léon Bonvin (1834–66).
Or almost unsung, since in the early 1980s
he was rescued from the art-historical abyss
by Gabriel Weisberg, co-editor and also an
author of the present volume, who staged
a small monographic exhibition on Bonvin
and included the artist in a wider travelling
group show,
The Realist Tradition: French
Painting and Drawing, both of which opened
at the Cleveland Museum of Art.[2] The Bonvin catalogue raisonné, which doubles
as a catalogue for the exhibition, draws on
Weisberg’s decades-long research.[3] A section
of catalogue entries is amplified by a list of
unlocated and destroyed works and is followed
by appendices that record works sold between
1866 and 2020, prints after watercolours
Bonvin made for the 1885 Christmas edition of
the American
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
the artist’s marriage and death certificates,
a transcription of the sale catalogue held to
support the artist’s family after his premature
death and – from the Fondation’s own
holdings – letters (given here in English
translation) from Léon’s half-brother, the artist
François Bonvin, to the critic Philippe Burty,
an enthusiastic supporter of Léon’s work.
Much is made of Léon’s struggles. An
innkeeper and a wine merchant by profession
his path to becoming an artist was complicated
by his all-consuming day job and, after 1860, by
the demands and expense of family life. Those
who knew him commented on his heightened
sensitivity and insecurity. In January 1866
he hung himself in the forest of Meudon,
about an hour’s walk from his home. He was
thirty-one. One of the most touching drawings
in the volume – a rare drawing of a person
rather than a plant – is the portrait he made
of himself, dedicated to his wife, made only
ten days before his suicide and acquired by the
Fondation in 2016 (1866; cat. no.113). Yet the
challenges Bonvin faced also furnished him
with creative constraints that give his work a
distinctive intensity and emotional potency.
His quiet studies of resonant banalities in
daily life and the natural world he observed
around his base in the plains of Vaugirard
celebrate the overlooked. Wild thistles,
eryginum, feverfew and other native plants
too easily trodden under foot are elevated in
his watercolours to the status of rare blooms.
The little that is known about Bonvin’s life and
character means that much of the biographical
account is given in the conditional or past
conditional tense and necessarily deals with
hypotheses that are difficult, if not (currently)
impossible, to prove. But informed guesswork
is underpinned throughout by solid research
that examines and illuminates Bonvin’s work
in the context of his artistic peers and the
mechanics of the contemporary art market.
Weisberg expertly disentangles from a
dearth of factual information the psychology
of Bonvin’s complex personality and his
motivations, drawing on such correspondence
and published articles as exist as well as
the sometimes opaque and occasionally
contradictory accounts of contemporaries.
Modest recognition came, however, from
the early 1860s, fostered in large measure by
the art agent George A. Lucas, through whom
the American William Walters of Baltimore
commissioned a dozen watercolours from
Bonvin and continued avidly to collect his
work after the artist’s death. Walters is the
reason that the gallery in Baltimore that bears
his name holds the most significant collection
of Bonvin’s work anywhere (fifty-six of the
112 surviving watercolours as well as his only
known oil painting). In her catalogue essay, Jo
Briggs provides a nuanced study of the taste for
his works in the United States. She highlights
Lucas’s dealings with other American clients
who were eager to acquire Bonvin’s work and
with individuals who supported Walters in
promoting it by publishing journal articles and
reproducing it as wood engravings.
Maud Guichané, co-editor of the
volume, tackles the challenge of examining
the complex relationship between the artist
and his better-known older brother, François,
who by his own account was at once a
source of advice and support and a helpless
onlooker, although his references to his
sibling are at times obscure and frustratingly
allusive. Wisely, she stays on solid material
ground, basing her account on what unites
– and separates – their work in terms of
iconography and technique, as well as on
the influence on their respective drawing
styles of such past masters as Chardin and
Dutch painters of the seventeenth century.
In Léon she detects a spirit less worldly
and ‘erudite’ (p.94) than his brother, one
whose work should be valued precisely for
its sincerity and unaffected vision. A short
essay by Michèle Quentin considers Bonvin’s
work in the light of the growing popularity
of natural garden design in mid-nineteenth
century France. Although she acknowledges
that the artist worked independently of this
movement, she sees his sensitive studies of
native species as anticipating the naturalistic
planting design that has dominated urban
planning since the 1990s, as it surely does
contemporary environmental concerns and
the vogue for wilding.
This book-cum-catalogue raisonné,
with its assiduous research assembling all
surviving evidence about Bonvin’s work and
short life, is a labour of love, finally giving a
distinctive place to an artist who was for too
long as underappreciated as the wildflowers
he painted.
[1] See the obituary of Ger Luijten by Peter Hecht in
this issue, pp.675–76.
[2] G.P. Weisberg: exh. cat.
The Drawings and Water Colors of Leon Bonvin, Cleveland (Museum of Art) and
Baltimore (Walters Art Gallery) 1980–81; and
idem, ed.:
The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing,
1830–1900, Cleveland (Museum of Art), Brooklyn
(Brooklyn Museum), Saint Louis (Art Museum) and
Glasgow (Kelvingrove Art Gallery) 1980–82.
[3] Published in French as Léon Bonvin, 1834–1866:
Une poésie du reel. ISBN 978–2–9583234–1–7.
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