Warrior In Antique Style / Dated May 3, 1791 / Eugénie Raffeneau Delile (1775-1810) / Drawing

This drawing, dated May 3, 1791 and produced by Mrs. Eugénie Raffeneau Delile, is fully in line with the neoclassical movement which, at the time of the French Revolution, drew from Antiquity models of virtue, grandeur and heroism. The figure of the helmeted warrior, drawn with three pencils (very fashionable in the 18th century (black stone, red chalk, white chalk), takes up the noble and idealized profile of ancient cameos or Roman reliefs, typical of heroic imagery. The helmet surmounted by a mythological animal (griffin or dragon) evokes power and divine protection. The crenellated crown, inspired by the iconography of fortified cities, symbolizes royal or civic power, while the laurel branch refers to victory and eternal glory. These attributes, combined with the formal rigor and expressive economy of the style, recall the direct influence of the painter Jacques-Louis David, a major figure of neoclassicism, whose heroic compositions dominated the art of the time. The fact that this drawing is the work of a woman, probably trained in a Parisian academy, underlines the progressive but still rare access of women to academic spheres and to the heroic imagination, generally reserved for artists masculine.

50 x 40 visible
76 x 66 with frame (Restoration period) very carefully framed.

Eugénie Raffeneau Delile (Versailles, 1775 – Paris?, around 1810) Eugénie Raffeneau de Lille was born around 1775 in Versailles, into a cultured bourgeois family. She was the daughter of Jean-Baptiste-Élie Raffeneau Delile (1726–1815), a lawyer, and Marie-Catherine Bar (1746–1814). Her younger brother, Alire Raffeneau Delile, would become a renowned doctor and botanist. Raised in a well-to-do and literate environment, Eugénie showed a real talent for drawing from a young age. Although her name does not appear in the registers of the Académie royale de peinture, the academic quality of her works — studies from live models, copies after Boucher or Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre — suggests that she received artistic training in a private Parisian studio, probably around 1788–1792, at the heart of the pre-revolutionary artistic effervescence. At this time, she produced a series of drawings (between 1789 and 1791), in black chalk, red chalk and wash, mixing studies of heads, mythological figures, and allegories inspired by Rococo art. Among her identified works are Two Angels in the Sky, Head of an Old Man, and a Venus on a Dolphin after Boucher. On 20 Floréal Year IV (May 9, 1796), she married Jean-Baptiste Louis Pinsot, a lawyer, in Paris. Widowed in 1807, she remarried shortly after to another lawyer, Nicolas Antoine Macips, in 1808. Eugénie Raffeneau Delile died prematurely, probably in Paris, around 1810. She left behind a sensitive and masterful graphic work, recently rediscovered on the art market, which bears witness to a neo-classical art of drawing, at the crossroads of the late 18th century and the beginnings of the 19th.