10 - Claude MONET (1840-1926) Recto: Dandy with a pipe (figure 1a…
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Estimate €10,000 - €15,000

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Claude MONET (1840-1926) Recto: Dandy with a pipe (figure 1a) About 1857-1858 Graphite, brush and brown and grey wash, watercolour and gouache on paper Signed lower left: "O. Monet Verso: Man with top hat (figure 1b) Graphite on paper 246 x 188 mm Expert : Mr Hubert DUCHEMIN [email protected] We invite amateurs and potential bidders to consult or download the full description of the comparative elements (on request from the firm or by clicking on the following download link: https://www.transfernow.net/dl/202606036S6jdEzP Born in Paris in 1840, Oscar-Claude Monet grew up in Le Havre, where his parents, Adolphe and Louise Monet, moved when he was five. Adolphe was reunited with his own parents, Pascal and Catherine, and his half-sister Jeanne. Jeanne's husband, Jacques Lecadre, a shop owner who supplied ships with groceries, associated his brother-in-law with his flourishing business. At the time, Le Havre was France's second-largest port and enjoyed a particularly advantageous economic situation. The Monet family moved into a large house on the heights of Ingouville, on the outskirts of Le Havre. In 1851, young Oscar entered the local secondary school. There he took drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard, a former pupil of Jacques-Louis David. A dunce at heart, with little interest in school, he liked to draw in the margins of his notebooks and sketch his teachers with humour and derision, then distribute the portraits to his classmates. His talents as a caricaturist soon made him a household name in Le Havre. He began signing his drawings with his usual first name, Oscar, "O. Monet" - "Claude" did not replace "Oscar" until around 1864. Initially drawing small comic figures, he moved on to portrait-charges, a type of caricature that was very much in vogue in the mid-nineteenth century, in which the figures were given disproportionately large heads. He exhibited his drawings with a paper and frame maker called Gravier - where he met Eugène Boudin, who insisted that he abandon caricature and instead devote himself to landscape painting. Although it was his landscapes that made him famous, it was his caricatures that the teenager managed to sell to the enthusiastic and demanding people of Le Havre. Monet took great pride in his early career. In an interview in 1900, he recalled: "My reputation was so well established that I was solicited flatly, from all sides, for portrait charges. The abundance of commissions [...] inspired me to make a bold decision [...]: I would pay for my portraits. Depending on how people looked, I charged ten or twenty francs for them, and the process worked wonders for me. Within a month my clientele had doubled. I was able to adopt the single price of twenty francs without slowing down the orders at all. If I'd kept going, I'd be a millionaire today. While benefiting from additional family support, he would have built up a sum of two thousand francs through his drawings, with which he left to study in Paris in the spring of 1859. As part of this Le Havre context, these three beautiful, previously unpublished sheets belong to an initial corpus of drawings dated by specialists to between 1855 and 1857. Most of them are held by the Musée Marmottan-Monet, as part of the André Billecoq donation, whose family, close to the Monets, had received them as gifts from the young Oscar. These sheets depict humorous faces, without being caricatures in the strict sense of the term. Although he rarely depicted real, identified people, Monet nevertheless drew his inspiration from the society of Le Havre at the time, a mix of residents and travellers attracted by the booming seaside town. Dandies in various headgear (ills. 1 and 2), Norman women in traditional dress (ill. 4), and Englishmen in striped trousers (ill. 5) are just some of the social types Monet enjoyed sketching. Our first drawing shows an elegant figure, standing on one leg, smoking his pipe, wearing a top hat and a bright red bow (fig. 1a); the second shows another, stiffer man, cigar in mouth, wearing the same hat and wrapped up in his scarf and coat (fig. 2); the third shows a similar male figure, standing next to a young woman in an imposing dress, whom he seems to be calling out to or accompanying (fig. 3a). Two of the leaves have a more summarily treated reverse, one showing another man in a 'dandyish' style (figure 1b) and the other a couple embracing or dancing (figure 3b). As well as the similarity of the subjects, the technique used is also characteristic of this first set of caricatures: Monet drew his figures in pencil in a lively style, and applied watercolour with gouache highlights to some of them. He highlights some details of the clothes in blue or green, the collars in white, the hair in brown and the noses and cheeks in a characteristic orange-red (ill. 3). However, our caricatures appear to be more elaborate, ambitious and advanced, probably the latest in the series and probably dating from 1857. The watercolour takes precedence over the pencil line, which becomes more refined and even disappears altogether in places. The young Monet also seems more at ease with the feet and hands, which are usually poorly represented in this corpus, often cutting off his figures at calf level and making them bury their hands in their pockets (ills. 4 and 5). Our drawings are therefore similar to Painters with Pointed Hats (ill. 6), also dated by specialists to around 1857, a work in which the figure is entirely coloured and his hands and feet are clearly visible. Our sheet depicting a couple out for a walk is also the only known drawing in the group in which several figures are depicted, indicating Monet's desire for a more narrative composition. Finally, the signature confirms the later nature of these three sheets. Like any young artist, Monet's quest for his own identity led him to change this one several times. While he always signed "O. Monet", his early signatures were removed and leaning to the side, whereas some of his portrait-charges, as well as the only known red chalk drawing in the corpus (ills. 7 and 8), bear a clear, horizontal signature, identical to those on our three drawings. Our sheets are thus almost certainly among the last known drawings from this corpus of physiognomies, and thus chronologically predate his first portrait-charges. Many aspects of this caricature production - both in terms of its scale and the ways in which it was distributed and preserved - remain to be elucidated, however. The output that is known and studied is certainly very small, even though Monet seems to have been particularly prolific. On the basis of his own statements, it is estimated that he sold between one hundred and two hundred cartoons for money, in addition to those he gave to friends and family or kept with him throughout his life. Daniel Wildenstein's catalogue raisonné of the artist lists around sixty of these, classified in different groups, not counting the few sheets that appeared very sporadically on the art market. As a result, there are still many gaps in the collection. This rarity is due primarily to the fragility of the leaves, but also to the fact that they probably remained in the families of the models. Because of their low monetary value at the time, the heirs either kept them, without seeing any point in selling them, or got rid of them. As 80% of the town of Le Havre was destroyed during the Second World War, it is also likely that the caricatures depicting the people of Le Havre suffered the same fate. However, Monet's clientele was not restricted to Le Havre, and some of these works can probably still be found in the homes of models who were simply passing through the town. In the face of such a fragmentary corpus, our three sheets add to our knowledge of this somewhat unknown production by the young Monet. In this sense, their quality and maturity of execution make them an essential milestone.

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Auction time 06/16/2026 at 2:00 PM

Lot description modified on 06/03/2026 at 11:45 AM

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10 - Claude MONET (1840-1926) Recto: Dandy with a pipe (figure 1a… See original version (French)

10 - Claude MONET (1840-1926) Recto: Dandy with a pipe (figure 1a…
See original version (French)