Léon Bonvin (1834-1866) - Study Of Hands - Circa 1850-1855 - Charcoal And Blur Drawing

Voluntarily excluded from Salons and official exhibitions, from worldly honors, Léon Bonvin only knew posthumous glory. A cursed artist found hanging from a tree branch in his thirty-third year, Léon Bonvin only produced about one hundred and twenty works. His watercolors and drawings are today mainly distributed between the Musée d'Orsay and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. (Henry Walters having been the artist's main and first collector)

Introduced to drawing by his half-brother François, Léon Bonvin shaped a work in harmony with his life. A bistro owner on the outskirts of Paris by necessity, Léon Bonvin was an artist by vocation. He knew how to make the poverty and simplicity of his life the motifs of a luminous and deeply personal work. A very close attention to what is weak, fragile and ephemeral characterizes his art. Here, the strong hand of an adult covering the feverish hand of a child reveals to us the sensitivity of an artist concerned with modest destinies.

This sheet is part of his early works. It is taken from a precious notebook dated from the years 1850-1855, and kept until this year by the family. Marked by an astonishing sincerity, it testifies to the precocity of the artist and his luminous mastery of blacks. When we see it, we share the impressions reported by the watercolourist Hennet after a visit to Bonvin: "I never tired of leafing through the cardboard (...) of things seen, looked at for a long time, taken in the narrow radius of his everyday life. All this had the intimacy of a confidence; we felt there the solitary, concentrated effort of a contemplative soul". Our drawing is referenced, as an unlocated work, in the latest catalogue raisonné published in 2022 on the occasion of the exhibition dedicated to the artist by the Custodia Foundation.

Bibliography:
-M. Guichané, “Léon BONVIN, une poésie du réel”, 2002, 127, p. 260
-G. Weisberg, Small works and simplified forms in the Art of Leon Bonvin, 1987, 117, p. 57