Coqs : Étude 8. - Crayon sur papier

Original pencil drawing, mounted on card. Artist's stamp signature in the lower right corner of the work, and workshop stamp signature on verso. Very fine condition. Provenance: from the artist's workshop, referenced in the Louis Anquetin Workshop catalogue (Thierry de Maigret, 28/11/08). Louis Anquetin, born in Étrépagny in 1861 and died in Paris in 1932, was an important French painter. He began his career alongside avant-garde painters such as Vincent Van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. With Émile Bernard, he was the inventor of Cloisonnism. From 1884 to 1893, Louis Anquetin constantly 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 approach that would put him on the margins of the general movement in art, and distance him from his friends. Dazzled by Baroque art and its creative vigour, he believed that his youthful friends had embarked on a path that would lead to the death of painting. He believed in a "perfect painting" that was embodied in the memory of the lessons of Michelangelo and Rubens in particular. His work thus became more classical, advocating 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 can be described as monumental, Anquetin proved prolific through his numerous studies and sketches, he who considered that drawing was "an all-powerful means of expression", the obligatory foundation of all plastic arts. By deliberately working against his time, Louis Anquetin made possible the existence of an original modern figuration. Through his obstinacy and his passion for painting, he indeed prevented the path of the great Western tradition from being totally obscured. His works can be admired in numerous and prestigious museums such as the Musée d'Orsay and the Louvre in Paris, in San Francisco and Detroit, at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, at the National Gallery and the Tate in London, etc.