Nu au sabre

Original pencil drawing, mounted on tab on cardboard. Signature stamp of the artist's signature in the lower right corner of the work, and signature stamp of the studio on the verso.
Very handsome 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 is the inventor of Cloisonnism. From 1884 to 1893, Louis Anquetin never ceased exploring the new possibilities offered by the liberation introduced by Impressionism in French painting. From 1893, following a long confrontation with the "masters of yesteryear," he adopted a pictorial stance that would put him on the margins of the general movement of art, and distance him from his friends. Dazzled by baroque art and its creative vigor, he then thought that his childhood 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 remembrance of the lessons of Michelangelo and Rubens in particular. His work therefore became more classical, he advocated a return to craftsmanship, by proposing to reflect on the a priori conditions of any possible form of art in respect of 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 qualified 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 working deliberately against his time, Louis Anquetin made possible the existence of an original modern figuration. Through his obstination and his passion for painting, he indeed avoided the total 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.