François Bonvin

Sale, Paris, Sotheby’s, 25 June 2003, lot 96;

with W.M. Brady & Co., Inc., New York, French Drawings 1600-1900, 2004, no. 28,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

This lively drawing of a mustachioed man playing the mandolin reflects the Parisian vogue for Spanish art and culture during the Second Empire. Though somewhat of a departure from the quieter, more contemplative figures typically depicted in François Bonvin’s oeuvre (see lot 114) there are other precedents for this subject matter, such as Le Guitariste,¹ an 1851 oil painting in the collection of the Musée Rolin, Autun and the 1861 etching, Le Joueur de mandoline,² an impression of which is in the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris.

Though it is hard to imagine that Bonvin was not inspired by Edouard Manet’s The Spanish Singer, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,³ the present work in fact predates Manet’s masterpiece of 1860 by some five years, showing Bonvin to be an original as well as a highly talented artist.

^1.See G. P. Weisberg, Bonvin, L'Oeuvre et la vie, Paris 1979, p. 166, no. 10, reproduced

^2.Ibid., p. 310, no. 348, reproduced

^3.New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 49.58.2