GROUX Henry de (1866-1930).

Lot 93
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Estimation :
500 - 600 EUR
GROUX Henry de (1866-1930).
3 L.A.S. and 6 L.A. (minutes), Paris 1919 and n.d.; 14 pages in-8 or small in-4. Minutes or drafts of letters from the painter to ladies and young ladies, some incomplete. He thanks and congratulates a lady for sending his "beautiful and poignant book which was to me in this solitude, and in the middle of the vicissitudes of this arid labor, nothing less than a heavenly manna", which found him in Vernègues where he had been working for several weeks on "my great statue destined for the War Memorial of La Roque d'Anthéron", which he finished and molded, alone and without the help of assistants, a "work of a convict"... To a lady [the Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre?] who had asked him to paint her portrait. He would like a decor worthy of her but has nothing suitable in his studio: "I have in Brussels the most considerable studio equipment and quite a few precious objects, which it is not certain that I will ever see again, not to mention my paintings, marbles, bronzes, abandoned to problematic solicitudes". He finds himself in Paris "in the condition of a beginner". He begs her not to give him any commission, as Mrs. de BRIMONT for his portrait, and not to fix a price: "the commission has always been for me a poisoning and the obligation to succeed a portrait, [...] a kind of hindrance to my freedom". He prefers to make the two portraits first for himself, and if he succeeds according to him, to give them to them then "at the price of war"... - Very ill, he warns her of the delay and that he has taken for "the small portrait started after you" that he is finishing. He apologizes for having introduced her to a merchant "of prints and objects, most of them fake", a swindler whose disappearance he welcomes... To a friend: he is quite ill, and finds himself "a morose taster of a bunch of spurious and debilitating drugs, which seem, as Bloy says, to "want my skin". [...] my whole household is, moreover, at this moment, only a dark sickness", and he does not manage, in these conditions, to work... January 15, 1919: "In the immense and delectable nocturnal solitude of my workshop, how much it is deeply joyful for me to think of you"... Vernègues December 4, 1919. Letter of recommendation to a lady in favor of her daughter Marie-Thérèse, on a trip to Rome... We join 1 L.A.S. of the baroness of BRIMONT addressed to him, and 1 L.A.S. of the Committee of the Monument of La Roque d'Anthéron.
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