Drawing By Guillaume Dubufe - Frontispiece To The 'hours Of The Most Holy Virgin'

Guillaume DUBUFE (Paris 1853 - 1909 Buenos Aires)Preparatory drawing for the frontispiece of "Heures de la Très Sainte Vierge"1895grease pencil on paper62 x 49 cmstudio stamp 'Guillaume Dubufe' on the back; paper merchant's stamp top leftComing from a line of illustrious Salon painters, Guillaume Dubufe was trained by Alexandre Cabanel at the École des Beaux-arts in Paris, and by the decorative painter Alexis-Joseph Mazerolle. He exhibited for the first time at the Salon in 1877. Made an Officer of the Legion of Honour at the end of the 1900 Universal Exhibition, Dubufe largely pursued a career as a monumental decorator for official buildings under the Third Republic. He is responsible for the ceilings of the buffet at the Gare de Lyon, the library at the Sorbonne, the foyer of the Comédie Française, the ballroom at the Élysée Palace and the Lobau gallery at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. The final version of the drawing presented to you is also the result of a commission which was not, however, intended for monumental decoration. A letter kept in the national archives (code F/21/2131) and written in April 1898 by Léonce Bénédite, who was then president of the Luxembourg Museum, deals with an unexpected subject and provides us with important information about our drawing. The author tells us that the final version of the latter, presented as “a graphic work mounted in a monumental white Renaissance-style frame by Guillaume Dubufe, entered into the collections on December 19, 1895 (...) called “Frontispiece de la Vie de la Vierge” “had still not been settled at the time of writing the letter. Part of the problem came from the fact that the purchase should have been made directly to its creator and not to the dealer who, in this particular case, was the owner. Indeed, this large watercolor had been exhibited in February-March at the Boussod, Valadon et Cie gallery, which had commissioned it from Guillaume Dubufe to serve as a frontispiece for the Hours of the Most Holy Virgin that it was going to publish (Asnières-sur-Seine, Boussod, Valadon and Ce, 1895). During this exhibition, the originals of the twenty plates relating to this theme were exhibited. Our drawing is therefore preparatory to this frontispiece, today preserved at the Musée d'Orsay under the n°RF24033. Made in grease pencil, it is most certainly the last version imagined by the artist before the realization of his final project, so faithful are its composition and its iconography.