Resté dans la descendance de l’artiste, le cachet de la succession de l'artiste (Lugt L.2104) en bas à droite

Collection de Mlle Jordan, rue Madame, Paris, 1972

Galerie Aaron & cie, Paris

Acquis auprès de cette dernière par l'actuel propriétaire lors du Salon du Dessin, le 28 mars 2019

Collection Louis Grandchamp des Raux

Paris, Galerie Jacques Blot, Quelques dessins et peintures de Puvis de Chavannes, préfacé par Maurice Denis, 4-9 mars 1941

Paris, musée Galliera, Dessins et petits tableaux de Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, 1952, n° 99

Paris, Grand Palais, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, Puvis de Chavannes 1824-1898, novembre 1976- mai 1977, p. 137, n° 112, reproduit p. 141

H. Puvis de Chavannes, "Peintures et dessins de Puvis de Chavannes", in Beaux-Arts, 7 mars 1941, reproduit p.5

Journal de l’Amateur d’art, n° 89, 25 avril 1952, reproduit p. 17

L’Estampille l’Objet d’art, n° 554, mars 2019, reproduit p. 76

L’authenticité de cette œuvre a été reconnue par le Comité Pierre Puvis de Chavannes dans un certificat établi le 16 février 2019 sous le numéro 19-02-16. Il pourra être remis à l'acquéreur.

The Panthéon, commissioned from the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot in 1755, has oscillated between political and religious functions from the reign of Louis XV to the Third Republic. As regimes changed, the Panthéon’s interior decoration continued to evolve. Our drawing takes us back to 1874, when Philippe de Chennevières, having just been appointed Ministre des Beaux-Arts, commissioned an important series of works retracing the national and religious history of France for the Eglise de Sainte Geneviève, which became the Panthéon in 1885. Puvis de Chavannes, as well as eleven other artists, were invited to contribute to the project described as “a vast poem of painting and sculpture in honour of Saint Genevieve who will remain the most perfect figure from our people’s earliest days, a poem in which the legend of the patron saint of Paris is interwoven with the wondrous history of France’s Christian origins”. The aim of the Third Republic was, in fact, to completely reshape the national narrative and to reaffirm the Christian dimension of the nation’s past. After so much turmoil and violent political upheaval, there was a need and a desire for calm and unity.

A first group was imagined around the childhood of Saint Genevieve, centred on the Rencontre avec Saint Germain d’Auxerre. The painting representing Sainte Geneviève en Prière, intended for the southern wall at the entrance to the monument, is described by the cartouche on the canvas: « From a very young age, Saint Geneviève showed signs of fervent piety; constantly in prayer, she filled all who saw her with awe and admiration”. The finished work, of monumental size, was exhibited at the Salon of 1876, then installed in situ on 22 May 1877.

Puvis de Chavannes offered a new sort of iconography - his composition was poetic, depicting the child saint in a garment of immaculate white, kneeling in prayer before a wooden cross. The atmosphere of the scene is bucolic, a peasant in the background has ceased his labouring, the sheep are grazing and a couple are watching the young girl. Identified at times as the parents of the saint and at others as a couple of woodcutters, the latter are there as witnesses and cautionary figures, inviting the viewer to follow their gaze. The present drawing is a study for the head and the right hand of the woman in the foreground. Another preparatory sketch for this figure can be found at the Musée Sainte-Croix in Poitiers (1). These two drawings show the artist’s creative process and careful preparation, revealing the fundamental importance of drawing in the development of his murals. Puvis de Chavannes meticulously traces the details of this woman’s face on a squared sheet of paper, rendering the shadows by using a vast network of hatching and the light by means of white chalk. It is the full delicacy and power of Puvis de Chavannes’s gesture that is expressed here, and which never ceases to captivate us.