DOI Heft:
Nr. 160 (June 1910)
DOI Artikel:Frantz, Henri: The charcoal drawings of Henri Harpignies
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19866#0365
Charcoal Drawings by Henri Harpignies
that M. Lhermitte heard from the lips of his old
friend that he had taken up drawing in charcoal.
"Je vais maintenant pouvoir faire comme vous,"
added the aged artist, with his customary irony
and humour.
Charcoal as a medium has been used before
with much success by other artists. Georges
Michel, the earliest of these, for he was born in
the second half of the eighteenth century, had
fixed upon paper in delicate charcoal drawings
impressions of the glades in the forest of Fontaine-
bleau. Corot had used charcoal in drawings of
trees with their foliage lightly stumped in on white
paper. Rousseau had vigorously depicted in the
same material silhouettes of his favourite oak-trees.
Allonge made a speciality of this technique, and his
works remain charming specimens of the genre.
M. Henri Harpignies spends several months
each winter at Beaulieu, near Nice, and here the
veteran artist loves to work all day in the open-
air among the olive-trees. Here it was that
formerly he used to execute so many of his water-
colours, while now it pleases him to make with
266
strong, firm strokes his large charcoal sketches.
Returning to the studio he finds in these a kind of
repertoire or dictionary of motifs and impressions
of scenery in the neighbourhood, and they enable
him to work effectively in his studio, and there
to execute pictures with the greatest fidelity to
nature. His eye is so susceptible to all the colour
effects in nature that he can see in these simple
studies in black - and - white all the most subtle
nuances of colour.
There is much pleasure and much profit to be
gained in looking at these fine drawings, which
speak so eloquently for themselves that there is no
necessity to praise their charm and perfection, and
as one looks at them one cannot help admiring the
character of a man who at such an advanced age
seeks still to learn—still to teach himself; and
surely it is the more significant at a time when so-
many young men blossom forth- as artists, and
believe themselves to have probed, after a few
months of work, all the intricacies and secrets of a
metier which a Harpignies hardly thinks he has
mastered after seventy years of toil!
that M. Lhermitte heard from the lips of his old
friend that he had taken up drawing in charcoal.
"Je vais maintenant pouvoir faire comme vous,"
added the aged artist, with his customary irony
and humour.
Charcoal as a medium has been used before
with much success by other artists. Georges
Michel, the earliest of these, for he was born in
the second half of the eighteenth century, had
fixed upon paper in delicate charcoal drawings
impressions of the glades in the forest of Fontaine-
bleau. Corot had used charcoal in drawings of
trees with their foliage lightly stumped in on white
paper. Rousseau had vigorously depicted in the
same material silhouettes of his favourite oak-trees.
Allonge made a speciality of this technique, and his
works remain charming specimens of the genre.
M. Henri Harpignies spends several months
each winter at Beaulieu, near Nice, and here the
veteran artist loves to work all day in the open-
air among the olive-trees. Here it was that
formerly he used to execute so many of his water-
colours, while now it pleases him to make with
266
strong, firm strokes his large charcoal sketches.
Returning to the studio he finds in these a kind of
repertoire or dictionary of motifs and impressions
of scenery in the neighbourhood, and they enable
him to work effectively in his studio, and there
to execute pictures with the greatest fidelity to
nature. His eye is so susceptible to all the colour
effects in nature that he can see in these simple
studies in black - and - white all the most subtle
nuances of colour.
There is much pleasure and much profit to be
gained in looking at these fine drawings, which
speak so eloquently for themselves that there is no
necessity to praise their charm and perfection, and
as one looks at them one cannot help admiring the
character of a man who at such an advanced age
seeks still to learn—still to teach himself; and
surely it is the more significant at a time when so-
many young men blossom forth- as artists, and
believe themselves to have probed, after a few
months of work, all the intricacies and secrets of a
metier which a Harpignies hardly thinks he has
mastered after seventy years of toil!