LOUIS BRANDIN | Recto: Battle scene with men on horsebackVerso: Partial study of a draped figure

Acquis à Londres auprès de Seiden en 1979

Rennes, 2012, n°34 (notice par Diederick Backhuys et Emanuelle Brugerolles)

Hinge mounted to a modern mount. There is some slight buckling to the sheet and a number of small, sensitively repaired old holes, where the ink has sunk into the sheet. There is some very minor surface dirt, particularly to the extremities, however the pen and ink medium remains strong. The artist has pricked the sheet for transfer and this is evident when one studies the sheet from the verso. Sold unframed.
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Until the reappearance of a sheet depicting a Battle against the Turks¹ that was gifted, in 1975, by Henri Baderou to the musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, the drawings of Louis Brandin were a totally unknown quantity. However the Rouen drawing, elegantly signed by the artist in the lower left corner, established the basis for a small corpus of works, to which the Adrien sheet is an exciting addition. Executed in an energetic combination of pen and brown ink and wash over traces of black chalk, the Adrien drawing can be compared very closely on stylistic grounds to the Rouen sheet, where, like here, soldiers on foot and horseback are depicted in the heat of battle. The Adrien sheet is also particularly fascinating, on a more technical level, due to the fact that many of the outlines are pricked for transfer, suggesting that Brandin may have intended for this relatively small design to be transferred, either onto another sheet of paper in order to further elaborate on the composition or alternatively to be used as the basis for a small textile or embroidery.

The slightly less legible figure study on the verso, drawn entirely in black chalk, provides a different view of Brandin’s graphic oeuvre, perhaps more revealing of the fact that the artist spent much of his life in Rome, working in the orbit of Giuseppe Cesari, called Il Cavalier d’Arpino.  With time, and the identification of further drawings by his hand, the artistic personality of this talented artist will surely come to be more fully understood.

^1. Exhib. cat., Rennes, op. cit., p. 105, fig.1, reproduced