Le Chevalier Errant
Le Chevalier Errant is an intimate oil sketch by the protean French 19th century artist Gustave Doré. It was acquired through Nicholas Hall by a private collection.
Signature
Signed, lower left: ‘G. Doré’
Provenance
Paul-Arthur Chéramy (1840–1912), Paris
his sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 5–7 May 1908, lot 194
Private Collection, Paris; sold at
Artcurial, Paris, Maîtres anciens & du XIXe siècle, 21 March 2018, lot 164
acquired by Nicholas Hall, New York, 2018; sold to
Private Collection
An alluring and evocative oil on panel work by 19th century artist Gustave Doré, Le Chevalier Errant stands as a unique work in the artist’s oeuvre. Best remembered for his skill and prolific work as an illustrator, Doré was also a gifted painter and sculptor whose works reflect a wealth of artistic experimentation in medium and technique. While Doré painted many monumental landscapes and mythological scenes in oil and watercolor, such a naturalistic, freely rendered and nuanced work on the scale of Le Chevalier Errant is a rare find in the artist’s known body of work.
Recently restored, Le Chevalier Errant’s thick white impasto gleams from the crests of the ocean waves, offset by the adjacent turquoise hues and the golden touches of the marshy midground. This traditional handling of oil is contrasted against a more textural application of the paint in the vegetal foreground, which lends an immediacy and depth to the painting with a technique almost akin to Max Ernst’s later frottage. Using a smoother approach to the sky, Doré lays down paint and then scrapes away the excess, causing the thinly layered golds and greys to recede into the distance while the resulting marks add a sense of movement and luminosity to the atmosphere. Awash in dusky blues, the background of this painting stands in contrast to the dark and tawny hues of the itinerant chevalier, whose figure is formed and framed by the artist’s pulling of the darker paint through the surrounding oceanic pigments.
Le Chevalier Errant’s vague crepuscular scene elicits a sense of Romantic heroism from his solitary protagonist, as the lone traveler competes with a demanding, unknown landscape. Avian companions frame the wanderer on either side, further adding to the sense of isolation as they fly away from the central figure. The artist’s warm palette and soft rendering of light, paired with the directional brushwork and pronounced handling of the paint, creates a sense of a depth and suggests a sweeping landscape far grander than the physical scale of the work itself.
This small work’s rendering in oil on panel is rare for the artist’s oeuvre, which is dominated by prints, drawings and large-scale paintings on canvas. Though many of Doré’s works feature dramatically lit multicolored backgrounds, this work departs in technique and substance from his highly detailed multi-figure oil on canvas compositions, which often feature literary or religious figures with clear referents. Such typical examples include the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s work, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Entertained by Basil and Quiteria, circa 1863, and L’ange de Tobie, a circa 1865 painting in the French national collections.
More closely related in style to Le Chevalier Errant are Doré’s hazy landscapes, like the Toledo Museum of Art’s Scottish Highlands of 1875, which features a vast and idealized countryside untouched by man, though on a much larger scale and within a specific geographical context. Most akin to the textural rendering of the vegetation of Le Chevalier Errant is perhaps the large, undated oil on canvas work, Mont Sainte-Odile with the Pagan Wall at the Musée d’art Modern et Contemporaine in Strasbourg. With a similar dotted application of the paint accentuating the landscape’s ferns, flowers and moss-covered rocks, the large landscape reiterates the almost stucco-like foreground of Le Chevalier Errant. The dearth of comparable works of this scale and varied texture, as well as the absence of a dated inscription and literature, leaves the time period for this work unclear.
Le Chevalier Errant originally belonged to Paul-Arthur Chéramy, a French lawyer, avid collector, and member and administrator of numerous arts organizations, including the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Société des Amis du Musée du Luxembourg. A close friend and supporter of many Impressionists, and personal lawyer to the Manet family, Chéramy acquired his works directly from artists, as well as from notable dealers Paul Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard. His remarkable holdings were dispersed in sales in Paris in 1908, from which this painting was acquired, and after his death, in 1913. His impressive collection also included works by Rembrandt, Delacroix, Gericault, David, Ingres, Goya, Corot, Manet, Degas, and Chardin among others, many of which hang today in public institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the French national collections. After the Chéramy sale in 1908, Le Chevalier Errant remained in a private collection in Paris for over a century, until a March 2018 Artcurial sale.
Though Doré enjoyed longstanding appreciation as an illustrator during and after his lifetime, it was not until Annie Renonciat’s monograph on the artist in 1983 that a reconsideration of his oeuvre renewed public interest and increased the market value of Doré’s paintings, with many major institutions acquiring his large-scale works. Two years later, Paris’s Petit Palais featured the artist’s religious paintings, followed by the 1993 exhibition of Samuel Clapp’s collection in Doré’s hometown of Strasbourg at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporaire, and further subsequent European exhibitions. In 2014, the Musée d’Orsay hosted the artist’s first retrospective in over thirty years, Gustave Doré (1832-1883): Master of Imagination, which highlighted the visionary nature of the artist’s lifetime production; it was one of the top ten most visited exhibitions in Paris that year.
Like many of the artists presented in Endless Enigma, Doré was heavily inspired by literary giants both before and of his time. He rose to prominence as a draftsman with the illustration of numerous books and poems including the Bible, Danté’s Inferno, Poe’s The Raven, and the works of Lord Byron, Milton and Rabelais among others. The subject matter of Le Chevalier Errant recalls the same scenery and emotion of Victor Hugo’s the famous poem, Demain dès l’aube, in which a sorrowful solitary figure traverses the French coastal landscape, undeterred by sound or sight, to visit the grave of his beloved. Doré’s twilit scene indeed captures a moment amid one man’s journey that is perhaps less an aimless wandering than a purposeful expedition, with destination unknown to all but the traveller.
Demain, dès l’aube…
Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m’attends.
J’irai par la forêt, j’irai par la montagne.
Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.
Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,
Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,
Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,
Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.
Je ne regarderai ni l’or du soir qui tombe,
Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,
Et quand j’arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombe
Un bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.
3 septembre 1847
At dawn tomorrow…
At dawn tomorrow, when the plains grow bright,
I’ll go. You wait for me: I know you do.
I’ll cross the woods, I’ll cross the mountain-height.
No longer can I keep away from you.
I’ll walk along with eyes fixed on my mind –
The world around I’ll neither hear nor see –
Alone, unknown hands crossed, and back inclined;
And day night will be alike to me.
I’ll see neither the gold of evening gloom
Nor the sails off to Harfleur far away;
And when I come, I’ll place upon your tomb
Some flowering heather and a holly spray.
3 September 1847
– Victor Hugo, published in Les Contemplations, 1856[1]