Jacques Barraband
A Male Blue-Throated Barbet (Megalaima asiatica)
Period Late 18th century to early 19th century
Origin French
Medium Watercolour and gouache over an underdrawing in black chalk
Dimension 52.2 x 38.6 cm (20¹/₂ x 15¹/₄ inches)
As one writer has noted of Barraband’s watercolours for Levaillant, ‘they are considered among the most beautiful bird drawings in existence. Barraband often showed his subject in profile, perched on a short tree branch jutting into the empty space of the sheet; no one else equalled his mastery in the rendering of feathers, in evoking their fragility, stiffness, or incredible lightness. He displayed a preference for harmonies of blue and green…The evocative power of these realistic and precise works, featuring all the colours of the rainbow, is almost dream-inducing.’
The present sheet was once part of the exceptional collection of French ornithological watercolours of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries - including some three hundred works by Jacques Barraband - assembled in the 1920s and 1930s by the French industrialist and bibliophile Marcel Jeanson (1885-1942).
Period: Late 18th century to early 19th century
Origin: French
Medium: Watercolour and gouache over an underdrawing in black chalk
Signature: Signed Barraband in brown ink in the centre.
Numbered No.21 in pencil at the lower right, and 24 / x245 in pencil at the upper right.
Dimension: 52.2 x 38.6 cm (20¹/₂ x 15¹/₄ inches)
Provenance: Marcel Jeanson, Paris
Thence by descent until 1988
Jeanson sale (‘Bibliothèque Marcel Jeanson, deuxieme partie: Ornithologie’), Monaco, Sotheby’s, 16 June 1988, lot 241
W. Graham Arader, New York
Private collection.
Literature: François Levaillant, Histoire naturelle des oiseaux de paradis et des rolliers, suivie des celle des toucans et des barbus, Vol.II, Paris, 1806, pl.21.
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