Personnage à la mine de plomb et crayon de couleur

Original signed drawing in pencil and pink crayon by Antoine de Saint-Ex­upéry, on “Navarre” watermarked paper. Horizontal fold, annotation in pencil in upper left-hand corner, min­ute tears in lower margin.

Precious drawing signed by Saint-Exupéry – the writer-artist very rarely signed his graphic works – of a caricature character, sharing some of the writer's own features.

"I don't know what came over me,” he says, ”I draw all day, so the hours don't seem so short. I discovered what I was made for: the Conté pencil”.

From the sketches of barrack mates that Saint-Exupéry, then a young conscript, made in Casablanca during his military service to the watercolors of 'The Little Prince', the writer's life was marked by the marginal but omnipresent activity of drawing. On letters to friends, in the margins of manuscripts, in donated books, on incoming telegrams, invoices, tablecloths, leaflets - on everything he could get his hands on to support his imagination - Saint-Exupéry drew, sketched, caricatured, illustrated, invented, doodled living or imaginary beings, friends and girlfriends. Then, absent-mindedly, he threw away these ephemeral works, an extension of his moods and reverie of the moment.

Among these sketches of inspired by circumstance, which seem to foreshadow in one way or another his immortal masterpiece, very few are fully claimed by the artist-dilettante as his own. Although all of Saint-Exupéry’s graphic work is highly sought-after today, full-page drawings signed by the author of The Little Prince are extremely rare and bear witness to his passion for Man in all his expressions.

Among all these incredibly varied drawings of Saint-Exupéry, a recurring character emerges, a hu­morous self-portrait he transforms into an infinite number of silhouettes and characters. Sometimes, as it is the case here, he transforms himself into a ferocious caricature, or into the childlike, benevolent figure of the Little Prince. Executed broadly and quickly, this drawing shares a great deal with a comical full-length self-portrait, also in the same shades with furious striated lines (Bibliothèque R. Et B.L. auction sale, October 7, 2014, lot 196). Several of its attributes can be compared to the writer's own face: the shadow of hair on either side of a round skull, or the famous V-shaped arched eyebrows that would later become characteristic of the Little Prince's face.

It is difficult to date the writer's drawings precisely. Saint-Exupéry only began to keep his sketches more systematically in New York, when The Little Prince was coming of age. Apart from doodles made in the margins of letters and manuscripts or given to friends, he destroyed most of his drawings prior to his American exile.
This precious portrait fortunately es­caped Saint-Exupéry's merciless liqui­dation. The comical silhouette exudes a familiar air of self-mockery, often hovering over the drawings of a writ­er-aviator who never quite believed in his talent as a draughtsman.