Exciting New Addition: Original drawing by Louis Boulanger

Louis Boulanger, Untitled drawing of an unidentified woman. (c. 1827–1867.) Pencil and conte on paper, 11" x 16".

 

Though he has since been written out of art history, from the late 1820s to the mid-1830s Louis Boulanger was one of the most influential and progressive visual artists in France, usually grouped with Eugène Devéria and Eugène Delacroix as the three leaders of the Romanticist revolution in the plastic arts. His large-scale history paintings, particularly his violent and colourful 1827 Torture of Mazeppa, did much to establish the visual tropes that would come to define mainstream French Romanticist painting, while his weird, dark prints of demons, ghouls and murderers made him one of the leading exponents of underground Frenetic Romanticism. Like many artists of the first-generation avant-garde, he was taught by Achille Déveria (Eugène's older brother), and helped to determine the form of avant-garde art as a co-founder of the Petit-Cénacle group, later renamed the Jeunes-France and the Bouzingo.

This original portrait is undated, and its subject unidentified. As most of the original sketches in the Revenant Archive show, female relatives and friends were frequent subjects for drawings not destined for sale, probably in part as a reflection to the hegemony of the male gaze at the time, but also because they were often sketching or drawing at home while socializing, and hence drew whomever was present. This example is pretty finely rendered, and evinces a particularly sensitive attention to rendering and line, including highlights in white conte. The drawing has markings of previous archivists – a catalog No. 30 in the top left corner, and a hardened glob of mounting wax in the top right.