Dessin original préparatoire du chasseur du Petit Prince, à la mine de plomb

Original preparatory drawing in graphite pencil, study for the Hunter of the Little PrinceA preparatory sketch by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in graphite pencil, showing a standing figure with caricature proportions.

“I don't know what came over me, I drew all day and the hours accordingly seemed shorter. I realized what I was made for: a Conté graphite pencil.” From sketches of fellow soldiers in their barracks at Casablanca done when he was a young conscript to the watercolors of The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry was motivated by the marginal but ever-present activity of drawing. In letters to his friends, in the margins of his literary manuscripts, at the beginning of the books he gave away, on telegrams he got, bills, tablecloths, brochures, on everything that passed through his hands and prompted his imagination, Saint-Exupéry would draw, sketch, caricature, doodle, illustrate, invent, dash off beings living or imagined, friends and girlfriends. Then he would absentmindedly throw away these ephemeral objects, extensions of his momentary moods and reveries. Among all his incredibly varied drawings, there was nonetheless a recurring figure, a humorous self-portrait which over time transformed into a benevolent, child-like silhouette accompanying the intrepid aviator of Southern Mail on his adventures, the Humanist comrade of Wind, Sand, and Stars or the freedom fighter of Night Flight. There was no one close to him who did not know the silhouette of the future Little Prince, that companion of the author's in good times and in bad and who would, in the end, become his literary testament, melancholy homage to his childhood wish: “please draw me a sheep”, and his first artistic vocation (“It was thus that I abandoned, at the age of six, a magnificent career as a painter.”)

It was in New York, while his masterpiece of a Humanist fairytale was developing that Saint-Exupéry began systematically to archive his sketches. Essentially, he destroyed the major part of his drawings, apart from those in the margins of letters or manuscripts, that predate his American exile. But from 1941, Saint-Exupéry seemed to have kept certain sketches deliberately, done on a material he cared for, a very thin – almost translucent paper – Esleeck Fidelity onion skin Made in U.S.A, a watermarked paper on which he wrote his articles, his letters, and above all Flight to Arras and The Little Prince. Several sketches and manuscripts were thus gathered in folders and numbered in ink. Unfortunately now dispersed into a number of collections, including the noted collection of Philippe Zoummeroff, these sketches and Romanesque notes following a fixed type are punched with three eyelets and numbered. Though we have not found any information on this singular filing system, one can reasonably suppose that it was the work of Saint-Exupéry himself. Essentially, posthumous numbering was done in red or purple pencil and not in ink. At the same time the holes, made by pressing the paper directly onto the rings of the binder, are probably not the work of a literary executor.

All leaves of this sort come originally from the collection of Comtesse Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry (her sale of 6 July 1984), whose admiration for her husband's work is well known. Exceptional drawings by Saint-Exupéry done during his American exile, early graphic sketches in the process of composing The Little Prince which, more than a fairytale illustrated by its author, is a work born of Saint-Exupéry's closeheld passion for drawing, which is threaded throughout the story and present in one of the principle dramatic touches: “draw me a sheep.”
This sheet numbered 49 is part of a series of graphic and literary research sheets on he Little Prince. Before this one, we know that leaf 43 consists of a series of full-length Little Princes all with different hairstyles, more or less exotic, including one with long curly hair and one with a Tintin-style cow-lick.

Unlike many sheets that served as a first draft for Saint-Exupéry's other intellectual or daily activities, this carefully preserved sheet contains only this character sketch, which therefore seems to be a preparatory study of his work in progress more than a distraction doodle.

Rarer, the build and proportions of the figure are very strongly evocative of the future hunter in the tale, down to the position of the hands and feet, but he is here not yet a fully-formed character, merely an attribute without attribution. His face seemed to be born of a doodle to which the author has added figurative elements and then the body in a lighter pencil. Aside from the final watercolor, one does not find similar character sketches in the drawings referenced and published in the catalogue raisonné by Delphine Lacroix, Dessins, aquarelles, pastels, plumes et crayons.