Dessin original préparatoire du visage du Petit Prince à la mine de plomb et manuscrit autographe

Original drawing by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

New York [ca 1942]| 22 x 28 cm| one single sheet

Preparatory drawing in graphite by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's hand representing a face, three lines of text and numbers.

«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 leaf, numbered 0111 in red pencil is preparatory research, literary and artistic, for he Little Prince.his leaf has a drawing and manuscript annotations whose meaning remains unknown. Lower down, there is a series of numbers that remind one of the mathematical riddles of whichSaint-Exupéry was a fan and with which he would come up regularly to entertain his comrades in arms, like the famous riddle of the Pharaoh which he invented during a stay in Cairo.
Not obviously connected with these letters and numbers, the head sketched here at an angle is an early, but nonetheless developed study for the Little Prince. The traits of the nose and eyes are characteristic of the finished figure, while the three locks of hair differ radically from the famous blonde hairstyle adopted for the fairytale.Another known leaf, numbered 091 in red pencil has a description of a character and other studies of childlike heads.

Exceptional drawing of Saint-Exupéry made during his American exile, early graphic research of the Little Prince.