MICHEL CORNEILLE THE YOUNGER (PARIS 1642-1708)

The rigorous style of this drawing lends support to the old, probably eighteenth-century, attribution at lower right, as comparisons with the many drawings in the Louvre by the most outstanding painter in the Corneille family (for one example, see inv. 35175). An inscription in the same hand as seen here at lower left, possibly a signature, appear on several, usually finished drawings by the artist, among others on drawings in the Louvre (inv. 25654, 25647) and in the British Museum (inv. 1971,1211.1; for the latter, see P. Stein, French Drawings from the British Museum. Clouet to Seurat, exhib. cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and London, British Museum, 2005-2006, no. 35, ill.).

The sheet’s composition, however, corresponds to a drawing by Nicolas Poussin, unrelated to any known painting by his hand, in the Musée du Louvre and previously in the ‘second’ collection of Everhard Jabach, dated in the second half of the 1630s (inv. R.F. 17; see P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, Nicolas Poussin, 1594-1665. Catalogue raisonné des dessins, Milan, 1994, I, no. 103, ill.). Corneille is known to have copied (and retouched) drawings in Jabach’s collection (C. Monbeig Goguel, ‘Taste and Trade: the Retouched Drawings in the Everard Jabach Collection at the Louvre’, The Burlington Magazine, CXXX, no. 1028, November 1988, pp. 831-835). Although Poussin’s drawing cannot with certainty be related to any painting known today, its renown is evident from the number of other copies that were made after the composition, and from the engraving (in reverse) by Gérard Audran (Rosenberg and Prat, op. cit., I, p. 188, figs. 103c-103f, ill., II, nos. R 80, R 163, R 336, R 965, ill.). Unlike these copies, the version by Corneille offered here adds detail and technical richness by translating Poussin’s pen and wash sketch in his signature combination of pen and white heightening, and here also using blue paper as support.