Louis émile Adan - Artists Wives - Ink And Pencil On Paper

Louis Émile ADAN (1839-1937)
Artists wives
Ink and pencil on paper
26×18 cm / 44.5×34.5 cm framed
Signed lower left "L. Emile Adan / women of artists"

Renowned painter and watercolourist, Louis Émile Adan also distinguished himself in the illustration of books and this drawing offers an insight of this part of his production. The pencil annotation under the signature indeed suggests that this ink wash was produced to illustrate the collection of short stories Les Femmes d'artistes by Alphonse Daudet. This is indeed the case since the composition appears, with a few variations, among the engravings[1] adorning volume 3 of the complete works of Daudet published by Houssiaux in 1900.
More precisely, Adan visually reinterprets here the short story entitled "Fragment of a letter from a woman found in rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs”. Written as a letter, it recounts in a rather comical way the first visit of a young woman returning from her honeymoon to the studio of her husband, a sculptor by profession. Ignorant of artistic practice, she is outraged to surprise him working on the live model, facing a naked woman posing for a "Roman lady coming out of the bath" intended for the Salon. Faithful to the text, Adan transcribes by the gesture of her hand the bewilderment of the young woman from a good family discovering her husband modeling clay "in a white coat like a mason, badly combed, hands dirty with earth, having in front of him a woman, […] a tall creature standing on a trestle, hardly dressed, and looking calm in this outfit, as if she had found it perfectly natural”.

[1] Etchings engraved by Léon Salles