Jean-Michel MOREAU dit MOREAU le Jeune (1741-... Lot n° 13

Jean-Michel MOREAU known as MOREAU the Younger (1741-1814) Thirty original drawings by Moreau for the Kehl edition (1789) of Voltaire's La Pucelle; album large in-4, old calf, spine decorated with grotesque and bearing on the first cover, in gilt letters: Mr Moreau-le-Jne, 1785; red tr. (Rel. anc.). - Bookplate of Henri Beraldi - Bookplate of Raphaël Esmerian Black stone and sepia 27,5 x 19,8 cm each For songs 1 to 5 Caption at the bottom of each drawing and indication of the Song at the top. The album with the original title "La Pucelle d'Orléans, 1787" contains unused blank sheets; frames are drawn on a few. In his book "Estampes et livres, 1872 - 1892", Henri Beraldi describes this collection: "The volume remains in its old calf binding, on which is pushed in gold the name of M. Moreau le Jeune. It is an album that Moreau had established to draw in first drafts all the illustration of the Pucelle, in-4, edition of Kehl; illustration conceived primitively on the foot of at least one hundred to one hundred twenty drawings for all the poem: five or six plates by song. This figure was too considerable, and one had to return soon to the more reasonable figure of one plate per song. Moreau abandoned his album after having executed thirty drawings for the first five songs. They are drawings at the same time thrown of verve and neat. They are very thorough, but not meticulous. The subjects are very varied and often very gallant. One cannot enumerate all, but it is necessary to quote: Modesty passes and love alone remains, - One leads them to the baths, - Makes violate convents of nonnains, - Twenty bellows distributed to the dazed whose indiscreet hand, - The monk wins, - Denis arrives and Jeanne wakes up, - The French lilies on an English buttock, - The pure and noble breast of the amazon to their looks delivered, - A happy dream recalled pleasures to him, - It is thus done, she says, one betrays me! - Of Jean Chandos takes the breeches, - While crying was between his arms, - And of the tendron contemplating the ugliness, - Jeanne which animates a Christian rage, - Stop, keep you impale. Given that the original drawings of the Voltaire of Kehl are now destroyed, those of the Monument du Costume dispersed, those of Rousseau and La Borde placed in collections from which they will not emerge, this series of thirty drawings was the most important piece I could obtain of the great vignettist. And the very curious side of this projected illustration of the Maidens is that it forms a strangeness in Moreau's work; he has pushed here, not to the free genre, but to the light genre. He has done nudes with a lot of casualness. Of Moreau leste! Unique specimen." Provenance: Former Mahérault collection His sale, 27-29 May 1880, n° 147 Former Henri Beraldi collection His sale, Paris, May 29 - June 1, 1934, n° 186 Former Raphaël Esmerian collection Its sale, third part, Paris, June 6, 1973, n° 105 Bibliography : J.F. Mahérault, L'oeuvre de Moreau le Jeune. Paris, 1880. N° 420. Henri Cohen, Guide de l'amateur de livres à gravures du XVIIIème siècle. First part. Paris, 1912. Quoted in column 1034.