Paris (AFP)
After Caravaggio, Delacroix: a dazzling Orientalist canvas of lively vivacity, preparatory study to the famous "Women of Algiers" of the Louvre, is exposed from this Thursday in Paris after being found a year and a half ago and recognized as a authentic Delacroix.
46 cm by 38, painted in hues and bright touches, she shows a woman sitting in a lascivious pose next to a black slave who looks at her with her back to him, in the grazing light of an end after -midday.
Philippe Mendes and Delacroix's specialist art historian, Virginie Cauchi-Fatiga, analyzed and retraced the history of this lost painting, which is a study for the "Women of Algiers in their apartment", exhibited at the Louvre.
"All Delacroix is here! The colors pulsate, the light vibrates", enthuses Mr. Mendes, who tells how he had "the intimate conviction" by discovering the dusty canvas that it was an authentic Delacroix.
A private collector had brought him to him to get his opinion. "My conviction has been confirmed by a year and a half of historical research," he told AFP.
"Full of little clues - the red spot under the white of the earring of the slave (a way to enhance the white) or the red lines between the fingers - are typical of Delacroix", note-t- he, believing that doubt is not allowed.
Fascinated by the Orient, Delacroix (1798-1863) went to Algiers in June 1832, after a stay in Morocco. Painted around 1833-1834, this painting figured in the collection of Count de Mornay, a diplomat he had accompanied in North Africa. In January 1850, the count had auctioned part of his collection including seven paintings by Delacroix.
Three of these paintings are now exhibited in French museums: the Louvre painting, a painting at the Fabre Museum in Montpellier and another at the Beaux Arts in Rouen.
The number 118 of the sale Mornay that one identified until now like the table of Montpellier turned out to be the one brought to Philippe Mendes by this woman who kept him hooked in his parisian apartment.
On the back of this study is number 118 stenciled.
At the Mornay sale, this painting was bought by a certain "Symonet jeune" for the sum of "450 francs". He had since disappeared.
-Vivacity of a preparatory work-
The X-ray showed that this scene covered another scene painted by Delacroix - a seated old man holding a bird - which he had probably covered because she did not satisfy him.
This oil (which follows a first study - that in watercolor and lead pencil) shows several repentances (rectifications), which characterize a preparatory work.
In the final work exhibited at the Louvre, more elaborate, polished, but less spontaneous, the women represented in this bourgeois interior (and "not in a brothel," says Mendes) are no longer two but four. The two seated in the middle appeared in the preparatory canvas at the Musée Fabre.
"In this scene, time has stopped.The painting, with the dark door gaping in the middle, wields the imagination" on the East, says the Paris gallery owner.
The table should be presented soon outside Europe: "It will surely travel.Private collectors and national museums have positioned themselves.We enter the negotiations.In the Middle East, there is an interest of institutions" museums, highlights Mr. Mendes.
The state has not classified it as a "national treasure", which allows it to leave the country.
The Louvre, the first French national museum founded to claim it, already had its canvas of larger size. Why would he seek to acquire another. "It's good that this painting leaves in a museum elsewhere," says the gallerist.
This presentation of the Delacroix until July 11 in Paris is a few days later than the one at the Hotel Drouot with a beautiful painting, Judith and Holofernes, attributed to Caravaggio. This painting of 1607 is to be sold on June 27 in Toulouse, where she was found.
From Leonardo to Caravaggio, paintings attributed to old masters emerging from the shadows are now rare.
JLV / ial / nm
? 2019 AFP