Edouard Detaille, The Professor - Caricature, Circa 1900, Drawing

Edouard DETAILLE 
(Paris 1848 - 1912)
The teacher - caricature
circa 1900
graphite pencil and black ink on paper 
sheet measuring 46 x 36 cm folded in half, forming four pages with a sketch of knives and pieces of bread on the fourth page
traces of folding on the sheet, on the back graphite sketches of flowers 
unsigned, unframed
Provenance: Georges Lemaire collection, by descent

Édouard Detaille was an academic artist and illustrator, a pupil of Ernest Meissonier, best known for his military scenes. Renowned for his historical realism and eye for detail, he was particularly famous for his work on uniforms, and was asked by the Ministry of War to design certain outfits. Highly involved in the artistic life of his time, he took an active part in the Salons de peinture, was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1892 and chaired the Société des Artistes Français from 1896 to 1900.

Dressed in a truncated cone-shaped robe and cap with a deliberately large skullcap, Detaille is undoubtedly caricaturing a teacher. The Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris holds an epilogue cap that belonged to a certain Mr Diehl, a professor at the Faculté de Lettres.  
The subject's humour is particularly appealing, especially with its disproportionately large nose! It was most likely one of his teachers. But who? The mystery remains. 

A few words about the Georges Lemaire collection (Bailly 1853 - 1914 Paris):

A member of the Société des artistes français from 1887, Georges Lemaire soon became a member of the jury.He attended many of the sessions, and his presence is attested to, among other things, by the numerous reports in which he appears alongside the greatest artists of his time.

He soon set about methodically collecting the sketches and sheets of paper left by his colleagues at the end of these sessions.Between 1892 and 1913, he compiled them in his personal collection.

These sheets clearly reflect the artists' urgency to create, produce and represent what they were observing, or perhaps their need to escape during the long sessions they attended.

A collection that is plural in terms of the number of artists it features, it also has several common denominators that help to make it utterly unique. Firstly, there is the temporal and spatial context of production: these drawings were all produced in the context of the meetings of the Société des artistes français. There is also the medium, as most of the sheets collected by Lemaire are of the same workmanship: medium-quality paper, most likely distributed at the beginning of the session. The artists sometimes used other printed materials, such as menus, agendas or the society's financial statements.

The drawings in this collection are extremely varied: small sketches, caricatures, attempts to revive style, sometimes close to automatic writing...

Some of the drawings are signed by the artists themselves, while the others are listed thanks to the collector, who took care to note the names of the artists whose sheets he collected.