Summer, By Léon Bénouville (1821–1859)

Black pencil on bluish paper; Léon Bénouville’s stamp on the front, lower left; Paul and Laurence Vercier Collection stamp (L.3607) on the back; view size 21.4 x 33.4 cm

Exhibition: Drawing Through a Le Havre Collection (16th–20th Centuries), Maison de la Culture du Havre, 1987

François Léon Bénouville (known as Léon Bénouville) was an academic painter trained notably by Léon Cogniet. He won the first Grand Prix for historical painting in 1845 and resided at the Villa Medici in Rome from 1846 to 1850. Despite a short career (he died at the age of thirty-eight), he left behind a substantial body of work, notably religious and Orientalist scenes. His paintings and drawings are housed in numerous prestigious institutions: the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Condé Museum in Chantilly, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, etc.

It is highly likely that the drawing presented here is a preparatory study for a fresco that once adorned the former Paris City Hall and was destroyed during the Paris Commune. Indeed, in 1852, Léon Bénouville participated in the decoration of City Hall alongside Delacroix, Ingres, and Cabanel. He was entrusted with the task of decorating the arches of the Hall of the Caryatids. There he painted allegories: Abundance, Agriculture, Spring, and so on. The drawing shown here is an allegory of Summer. Art critic Marius Vachon describes the fresco as follows: “Overcome by the day’s hard labor and the scorching heat, a reaper dozes on a sheaf of wheat; her workmate, bent under the weight of several sheaves, gazes at her lovingly .” This companion, a putti, does not appear in the drawing shown here.

An ink drawing bearing strong similarities to this one and dating from 1852 is housed at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris.