Rodolphe BRESDIN

As a draughtsman, Rodolphe Bresdin seems to have been fastidious in his choice of materials, preparing his tools - almost certainly using fine steel nibs - and mixing his inks with care, as well determining the surface on which he was to draw. The present sheet is drawn on an uncoated smooth paperboard known as Bristol board, which the artist often used for highly finished drawings made for exhibition or sale. As has been noted, ‘Bresdin used a smooth vellum, cream or ivory, for his finished ‘presentation’ drawings; and he often...used Bristols with decorative raised edges, perhaps originally made for mounting photographs or other souvenirs to be framed or placed in albums.’

The present sheet may be grouped with a number of elaborate drawings and etchings of battle scenes and vast armies on the march, often placed in barren surroundings or against a rocky mountain landscape, produced by Bresdin in the 1850s and 1860s. Drawings of similar subjects, usually on a small scale, are to be found today in the British Museum in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, as well as two sheets, one dated 1864 and the other 1865, that were in the Pierre Lafargue collection in Bordeaux in 1978.
 
As the print historian Maxime Préaud has pointed out, while he was undergoing treatment in a hospital in Paris in April 1870, Bresdin wrote a letter to a newspaper editor in Bordeaux describing his condition, albeit somewhat fatalistically, the tone of which finds some echoes in his drawings and prints of crowded battle scenes: ‘The battle has lasted 48 years. Unless there is a miracle, it is going to end and there is going to be peace. The enemy’s last battalions are preparing to charge; probes, scalpels and lancets are about to rush into my body, which is already so tired and weary. The last combatants gather for a final and decisive effort. As if that’s all it would take to bring me down.’

The present sheet is one of a handful of drawings and prints by Rodolphe Bresdin owned by the 20th century French engraver Emile Philippe Magadoux, known as Philippe Mohlitz (1941-2019), who created a number of fantastical prints and drawings.