Coqs et poules : Étude 9

Original pencil drawing heightened with watercolor, mounted on cardboard.
Stamp signature of the artist in the lower right corner of the work, and stamp signature of the studio on verso.
A light central fold mark, otherwise very fine condition.
Provenance: artist's studio, referenced in the catalogue Atelier Louis Anquetin (Thierry de Maigret, 28/11/08).
Louis Anquetin, born in Étrépagny in 1861 and died in Paris in 1932, is an important French painter.
He began his career alongside avant-garde painters such as Vincent Van Gogh or Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. With Émile Bernard, he invented Cloisonnism.
From 1884 to 1893, Louis Anquetin continuously explored the new possibilities offered by the liberation introduced by Impressionism in French painting.
From 1893 onwards, following a long confrontation with the "old masters," he adopted a pictorial stance that would place him on the margins of the general art movement and distance him from his friends.
Dazzled by baroque art and its creative vigor, he then thought that his youthful friends had embarked on a path that would lead to the death of painting. He believed in a "perfect painting" embodied in the remembrance of the lessons of Michelangelo and Rubens in particular. His work thus became more classical; he advocated a return to craftsmanship, proposing to reflect on the a priori conditions of any possible form of art while respecting the rules of perspective and anatomy as practiced by the masters of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Leaving only a few works that could be qualified as monumental, Anquetin proved prolific through his numerous studies and sketches, he who considered drawing to be "an all-powerful means of expression," the obligatory foundation of all plastic arts.
By deliberately working against his era, Louis Anquetin made possible the existence of an original modern figuration. Through his obstinacy and passion for painting, he indeed prevented the complete obstruction of the path of the great Western tradition.
His works can be admired in numerous and prestigious museums such as the Musée d'Orsay or the Louvre in Paris, in San Francisco or Detroit, at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, at the National Gallery and the Tate in London, etc.