11256

History picture

Preparatory work

L’Incroyable, also known as 1793 1892

A man seated full length, looking to the right, on a plain wooden chair placed sideways to a table, wearing a redingote with wide collar, a white cravat tied in a large bow, pale breeches and calf-length boots with tassels, his right hand resting on his left leg which is crossed over his right, his left arm on the table on which is also a decanter and glass, a sign for absinthe behind him top left.

Graphite on paper, 43.2 x 30.5cm (17 x 12 in.)

Private Collection

This is the third recorded preparatory drawing for L’Incroyable [111787]. Apart from the lower right section of the sketch, which de László left blank, the composition is almost identical to the finished oil painting. It is worth noting that during the next decade, as he grew more confident as an artist, de László made fewer and less detailed preparatory drawings. Instead he focused on the overall composition in very free sketches before commencing the main work.^[1]

In this third attempt, de László captured the intense and angry expression of the sitter, getting closer to the figure of the condemned man in Munkácsy’s celebrated The Condemned Cell.^[2]

For more information on the subject of the painting, see [111787].

PROVENANCE:        

Sir Arthur Guinness, K.C.M.G., nephew of the artist’s wife Lucy

EXHIBITED:        

•Christie’s, King Street, London, A Brush with Grandeur, 6-22 January, 2004, no. 7

LITERATURE:        

•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1939, pp. 79-81

•De Laszlo, Sandra, ed., & Christopher Wentworth-Stanley, asst. ed., A Brush with Grandeur, Paul Holberton Publishing, London 2004, p. 72, ill.

•Hart-Davis, Duff, in collaboration with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, De László: His Life and Art, Yale University Press, 2010, p. 24

CC 2008