Works on Paper 2019 - Jean Luc Baroni

E. Le Sueur, St. Protasius, detail, Paris, Musée du Louvre. E. Le Sueur, Preparatory Study for St. Protasius.
Female Winged Flying towards the right in the Louvre
(Inv. 28867). Charles and Antoine Coypel almost
systematic combined red, black and white chalk
in their drawings. It seems therefore unlikely for Le
Sueur to have limited himself to drawing solely in
black chalk. In his monograph, Alain Mérot analysed
the painter’s attitude towards colour. Although during
his lifetime Le Sueur was not considered a colourist
in the Venetian sense of the term, it nevertheless
appears that his knowledge of colour – skilfully
applied in “light, vague and precious mixtures” with
an “originality that catches all eyes” 5 – did not go
unnoticed by the commentators, artists and critics of
the 19 th century. To dispel the misunderstanding that
the painter was not interested in colour, Alain Mérot
refers to him as a “harmonist”. The fact that Le Sueur
was, on the contrary, concerned with colour, even
at the early stage of drawing, as clearly expressed
on a sheet at the Louvre (Inv. 30 683), dated by
Mérot to around 1652, preparatory to the Moses
Saved from the Nile in The Old House (Betchworth,
Surrey), and which bears an autograph inscription
referring to colour: “lacquered green under green”.
A more pragmatic motive could perhaps explain the
use of pastel in the present unicums: with a project
such as the one for the church of Saint-Gervais,
which involved producing paintings of considerable
dimensions (3,57 x 6,84 m) and equally large
tapestries, the execution of which would have
required the intervention of assistants, the use of
colour on the preparatory drawings would have
been of significant technical use.