Paul-César Helleu

Private collection, France;

sale, Paris, Christie’s, 24 March 2021, lot 121.

L. F.-F. Goyau, Chansons simplettes pour les petits enfants, Paris 1906;

R. de Montesquiou, Paul Helleu: Peintre et Graveur, Paris 1913, p. 91;

F. de Watrigant, Paul-César Helleu, Paris 2014, p. 77, reproduced

This large sheet is one of a handful of drawings used as illustrations to Chansons simplettes pour les petits enfants (‘Simple Songs for Small Children’), a book of nine songs or ‘little poems’ published by Lucie Félix-Faure-Goyau in 1906, containing seven full-page illustrations of young girls drawn in trois crayons by Helleu. In the book, this drawing accompanied the song Fermez les rideaux (‘Close the Curtains’). As Robert de Montesquiou noted, in his 1913 monograph on Helleu, ‘Fermez les Rideaux…is a small masterpiece. In the evening, at her window, the child invincibly turns her eyes to the darkness that both attracts her and terrifies her, for… ‘At the top of the curtains is a heart. This dread black heart against pink curtains is terrifying…Between the curtains lo’ how night peers in like a prisoner from his cell.’’¹

The model for the present sheet may have been the artist’s elder daughter Ellen, born in 1887. Two other drawings by Helleu for the Chansons simplettes pour les petits enfants are illustrated in a recent monograph on the artist².

^1.De Montesquiou, op. cit., p.91

^2.Watrigant, op. cit., p.77