A Salon du Dessin à Mille Legs
About the Salon du Dessin which takes place from 18 to 23 May at the Palais Brongniart in Paris.
After painting, it seems that drawing is coming back to the forefront more than ever. And as it is a fragile art, since the leaves must regularly return to the shelter of the light, it is necessary to benefit from it when they are out! In any case, the Salon du Dessin, which has been moved this year from March to May, will have some incredible works of art for sale! 39 dealers have been selected, including 19 foreign art galleries and 5 new entrants, to grace the Palais Brongniart from 18 to 23 May in Paris. Other ancient, modern or contemporary drawings can also be found on the virtual edition of this 30th edition.
The majestic "Chouette effraie" (barn owl) by the naturalist draughtsman Nicolas Robert (1614-1685) adorns the poster, which is a perfect reflection of the Salon 2022's tendency to give pride of place to animal representations. It must be said that among the greatest animal artists, Emmanuel Marty de Cambiaire, dealer in old paintings and drawings for the Baroni & Cambiaire art gallery, cites Uccello, Vinci, Dürer, Snyders, Oudry, Desportes, Huet, Rubens, Delacroix, Géricault...
Needless to say, Leonardo da Vinci's "Bear's Head", on display at the Salon du Dessin, will not go to just anyone with its 8.7 million euros! However, it is still possible to take some of the other works of art on display for a few hundred euros. "Between these extremes, the prices of beautiful animal studies generally range from several thousand to several tens of thousands of euros, depending on the reputation of the author, the composition, whether or not it is linked to a painting, the strength of the work, the animal represented (dogs, horses, lions, tigers are popular)," explains the expert interviewed by Marie Potard for L'Oeil.
In any case, this is a good opportunity to (re)discover the work of contemporary artists such as Nicolas Robert, Victor Koulbak (born in 1946), Luigi Sabatelli (1772-1850) or François Boucher (1703-1770). The spectacular representation of a crocodile by the latter, reproduced in L'Oeil, is a preparatory study for "The Crocodile Hunt" commissioned by Louis XV and now kept in the Amiens Museum. For the drawings are often sketches made before the painting of the pictures. This makes them even more moving, like involuntary traces left by the artist's hand, forgotten behind him, sacrificed in the name of his great work. What precision, what pure beauty, what delicacy! Everything is there and everything is yet to come.
Beware, there are not only animals at the drawing room either! It's just that the tendency to take an interest in nature, and therefore in the fauna that populates it, is bound to be on the rise in view of the threats that man poses to his environment. And it's about time. Because when you think about it, didn't prehistoric man already pay homage to other living beings than himself, by making their decorated caves into moving paintings?