Eugène Robert Poughéon - Nude Woman With Arms Outstretched ; Knight - Drawing - Art Deco

In 1918, Poughéon was commissioned to create a series of illustrative drawings for an anthology of Italian poetry. The volume was never published, but the project came a long way, as the 146 drawings were engraved. While these prints are now housed at the National Library, we have been able to locate only two original drawings, in addition to our own. (Roubaix Museum Inv. 990-5-335, and public auction, Artcurial, 2025)

The scene depicted—a nude woman with her arms outstretched beneath an overturned chair, with a knight in armor at her feet—would give even the most accomplished iconography specialists a run for their money. The artist’s marginal notes add to the confusion: “Florentine lady / Domenico Ghirlandejo.”

One must read Louis Deltour’s essay to understand Poughéon’s artistic approach: “From the very beginning of his career, collage gave rise to strange compositions that bring together, in an undefined space, various characters and objects that evoke a sense of strangeness, similar to that conveyed by Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘metaphysical painting.’ To illustrate an anthology of Italian poems that was never published,” Poughéon assembled vignettes of characters that bear no relation to one another in terms of scale or narrative, following a principle he reused in 1935 for the decor of the 14th arrondissement town hall. This collage aesthetic, made possible by the use of tracing paper, is even more evident in the *Fantaisies*. Here, the artist takes a mischievous pleasure in baffling his audience by bringing together in a single scene elements drawn notably from antiquity and the modern world. (Robert Pougheon, *A Classicism of Fantasy*, exhibition catalog, Paris, 2017, p. 55)