Master Art

A splendid, fresh example of Alfred De Dreux’s watercolour technique, the present sheet is unrelated to any surviving oil painting by the artist, and is likely to have been produced as a finished work of art for a collector.

The first known owner of this watercolour was the noted 19th century French collector Alexis Hubert Rouart (1839-1911), who assembled a choice group of lithographs, paintings, drawings and watercolours, including numerous works by such artists of the Romantic period as Eugène Delacroix, François-Marius Granet, Eugène Isabey, Camille Roqueplan and others. (The present sheet does not, however, appear in the posthumous sale of paintings, drawings and watercolours from the estate of Alexis Rouart held in Paris in May 1911, although two paintings and another watercolour by De Dreux were included.) This drawing was later in the collection of the French auctioneer Michel Bivort (1904-1989).