Music-Making Angels: recto
Studies of Hands and Drapery: verso
Recto: Black chalk with white heightening on beige paper.
Verso: Counter-proof of red chalk reinforced with white chalk.
280 mm x 410 mm.
Paris 1642 ~ 1708 Paris
Michel Corneille II worked with his father, Michel Corneille I, before becoming a pupil of Charles Le Brun and then Pierre Mignard. In 1659 a special prize from the Académie Royale gave him four years at the French Academy in Rome as a pensionnaire du roi. While in Italy he copied the Old Masters and was particularly inspired by the work of the Carracci. Upon his return to France, he was made a member of the Académie in 1663 due to the importance of his painting, Christ Appearing to Saint Peter in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes. He became an associate professor in 1673, a professor in 1690 and a counsellor in 1691. In the early 1660s the wealthy French banker, Everard Jabach, employed both Michel II and his brother, Jean-Baptiste Corneille, to copy his stupendous collection of drawings, and make engravings, before this collection was sold to Louis IV. A large number of Corneille's copies after the Jabach collection are in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.2
Although Corneille executed a number of important paintings for churches and decorated the Salon du Mercure in the Queen's Apartments at the Grand Trianon, Versailles, and worked on the decoration of the Château at Meudon and various hôtels particuliers in Paris, he is especially well-known for his prolific and varied draughtsmanship. Our sheet of studies is apparently one of a number he made in order to work out the poses of heads, hands, angels' wings, draperies and other component parts for his compositions.3 It is hard to decide whether each sheet represents ideas for one picture or whether he used these studies as a repertoire to draw on for a variety of works.4 On both our sheet and the Horvitz sheet, one finds the repetition of heads from various angles and details of those heads with special attention to the eyes. Also, the head of the figure holding the bow, in our sheet, is close to the head of the boy, lower right in the Prat sheet. However, our sheet is clearly distinquished from the others in that it shows almost whole figures with musical instruments - the violin twice, its bow and an angel playing the organ. Thus further research may lead to its identification with a specific painting. The general tenor of the figures in this drawing is reminiscent of the Carracci paintings Corneille had so admired in Italy.
1. The Prix de Rome had not yet been established at this time.
2. Le Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre. Cf. Jean Guiffrey and Pierre Marcel, Inventaire général des dessins du Musée du Louvre et du Musée de Versailles, Paris, 1928, vol.3, cat. nos. 2320-2680.
3. Comparable studies are in the Louvre, (Guiffrey and Marcel, 1928, cat. no. 2680); the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, (Bjurstström, 1976, cat. nos. 328-31; the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich (Rosenberg, 1971, fig. 46); the National Gallery of Art, Washington (cf. sale, Christie's, London, 11-13 December, 1985, lot 171); Collection of Louis-Antoine Prat, Paris (cf. Pierre Rosenberg, Dessins français de la collection Prat XVIIe - XVIIIe - XIXe siècles, exh. cat. Paris, 1995, cat. no. 21, p.76; Margaret Morgan Grasselli in Mastery and Elegance, Two Centuries of French Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz, exh. cat., ed. Alvin L. Clark, Jr., Harvard University Art Museums, 1998, .cat. no. 24, p. 148.
4. M.M. Grasselli, op.cit., cat. 24, p.148.
