1866
Fusain sur papier
45 x 60 cm - 17 3/4 x 23 5/8 in.
Collection particulière
Dernière mise à jour : 2022-03-16 06:34:57
Référence : MSb-103
Famille de l'artiste, Montpellier - Collection particulière.
Paris, galerie Wildenstein, 1950, n° 22.
Sarraute, 1948, p. 160 - Daulte, Bazille et ses amis, 1952, n° 25, p. 197 - Schulman, Frédéric Bazille : Catalogue raisonné, 1995, n° 15 des dessins, repr. p. 247 - Schulman, Frédéric Bazille : Catalogue raisonné numérique, 2022, n° 103.
The man, half lying on a sofa, supports himself with his right arm. In his left hand, he holds a kind of cane or riding crop.
We have no indication of this drawing, which Daulte dates to 1869. The only clue we can reasonably trust comes from Bazille's correspondence. Indeed, in a letter to his mother from January 1866, he speaks of a painting that is "two meters in one direction and 1m50 in the other" and for which one of his friends "posed for the young man half lying on a sofa listening to the piano". This is the Young Girl Playing the Piano, a painting sent to the 1866 Salon, rejected, and which has since disappeared but has been traced under the Ruth and Booz in the Fabre Museum thanks to X-rays made on the occasion of the 2016-2017 exhibition. It is important to note here the appearance of the character, obviously from a well-to-do background. His clothes, the cane or the riding crop, give him a dandy look that we find in Manet and Degas. The drawing of the nude above is perhaps a preparatory sketch for the Reclining Nude (6), other than the previous one. It is, however, much less accomplished, the forms being barely sketched.
