CORDAY (Charlotte). - RAFFET (Auguste). Original... Lot 42

[CORDAY (Charlotte)]. - RAFFET (Auguste). Original drawing. July 2-6, 1847. Graphite, 14 x 10 cm on paper, mounted in a window on a sheet of folio paper. PORTRAIT OF CHARLOTTE CORDAY TAKEN TO THE ECHAFAUD. A pupil of Baron Gros and Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, history painter Auguste Raffet (1804-1860) chose to depict the young woman here when, on July 17, 1793, she was carried to the scaffold in an open cart, dressed in the red shirt of the assassins - and thus offered up to popular vindictiveness. But the symbolic charge of this infamous device was reversed by royalist propaganda, which successfully reactivated the imaginary surrounding the martyrs of Christian history. It was this drawing that served as the model for the copperplate engraving by Félicie Fournier for the gallery of Portraits-vignettes that Auguste Raffet published in 1848 with Furne et Cie POUR ACCOMPAGNER L'HISTOIRE DES GIRONDINS by ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE, which had appeared the previous year with the same publisher. Provenance: "VENTE RAFFET 1911" (stamp; Catalogue des peintures, aquarelles, dessins lithographies de A. Raffet [...] forming the estate of the late M. Aug. Raffet fils, Paris, Drouot, Loÿs Delteil, expert for drawings, March 15, 1911, no. 117). - Arthur MEYER (Mes livres, mes dessins, mes autographes, Paris, s.n., 1921, no. 123, drawings, 3; Paris, Drouot, Francisque Lefrançois and Noël Charavay experts, June 3-6, 1924, no. 129, drawings, 3). - Banker Christian LAZARD (Paris, Drouot, May 19 1967, no. 62). - Robert GERARD (Paris, Drouot, June 19-20 1996, no. 226).