Charles-Dominique-Joseph EISEN

Charles Eisen was highly regarded as a draughtsman and illustrator, and his work appeared in some four hundred books during his lifetime. As one early 20th century writer has opined, ‘The art of Charles Eisen overflows with grace, delicacy and ingenious handling of themes that would be inartistic but for a magic pencil…At the same time as some of his finest illustrations were executed, Eisen painted sacred, mythological, and other subjects in oil colours…small paintings in oil or water colours, etchings, drawings in Indian ink, or in sanguine passed from the artist’s hand to exhibition, engraver, publisher, author and patron, incongruous in media and so varied in subjects that they might easily have been by different artists, were it not for the uniform charm and beauty apparent in all Eisen’s good work...There is a grace and fascination in his work, especially in his small drawings, that would captivate any lover of the beautiful…Ingenuity, good composition, originality, life, soft gradation from silvery lights to dense velvety shades, are the characteristics of Charles Eisen’s art.’

Drawn in 1777, the year that Eisen settled in Brussels, this highly finished, signed and dated sheet is a very late work by the artist, who died a few days into the following year.