Edmé BOUCHARDON

Drawn during Edmé Bouchardon’s time in Rome, the present sheet is a proposed design for an unidentified chapel or church, in which the artist seems to have included two different options for the vaulted dome. The use of black chalk, instead of the red chalk that Bouchardon preferred for almost all of his drawings, is a characteristic of 18th century architectural draughtsmanship, since it allowed for revisions and corrections to be made more easily. The artist also used black chalk for a handful of drawings of copies of other sculptor’s works.

Bouchardon’s extensive corpus of drawings includes very few architectural studies, among which is a sketchy design in red chalk for the Trevi Fountain in Rome, today in a private collection. That the artist was nevertheless capable of such ambitious architectural projects as seen in the present drawing is evident in the fact that his proposed plan for the renovation of the Trevi fountain in Rome involved the reconstruction of much of the building behind the fountain itself.

The present sheet once belonged to the 18th century collector and connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) and remains on his distinctive blue mount, although it does not bear his collector’s mark. Mariette was one of Bouchardon’s closest friends and most fervent admirers and also became the foremost collector of his drawings. As Mariette recalled of Bouchardon, ‘during his lifetime, he had distributed practically all of [his drawings] to his friends, and especially to me, as I have the greatest number of them.’ Mariette came to own well over seven hundred drawings by the artist, which were dispersed at auction some two years after his death. At the Mariette sale the present sheet is likely to have been part of a lot of fifteen drawings by Bouchardon acquired by one of the major buyers at the auction, the engraver and collector Abbé Charles-Philippe Campion de Tersan (1736-1819).

A later owner of this drawing was the Parisian solicitor Eugène Rodrigues (1853-1928). Along with Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, Walter Gay and other connoisseurs, Rodrigues was a founder member of the Société de Reproduction des Dessins de Maîtres in 1909. His large collection of drawings dating from the 15th to the 19th centuries, which included numerous architectural and ornamental studies, was dispersed at several auctions in Paris in the 1920s. At one of the sales of Rodrigues’s collection in 1929 the present sheet was paired with another drawing by Bouchardon; a study in black chalk for the tomb of Clement XI. This drawing was then acquired, probably at the 1929 sale, by the Genevan bookseller, publisher and art historian Charles-Jean Eggimann (1863-1948), who had settled in Paris in 1905. Eggimann’s collection, like that of Rodrigues, included a large number of ornamental and decorative drawings.