Lot 134: BOUTET DE MONVEL, LOUIS-MAURICE. 1850-1913. Original drawings of three Fr

BOUTET DE MONVEL, LOUIS-MAURICE. 1850-1913. Original drawings of three French peasant boys and two girls, 229 x 298 mm and 311 x 203 mm, pencil and/or ink on two sheets of paper, some soiling and smudges; crease across center drawing of girls which is mounted on gray card. Provenance: 2016 estate stamp, lower right hand corner . Maurice Boutet de Monvel was the first French master of the picture book and arguably the greatest of all French children’s book illustrators. He profoundly inspired Maxfield Parrish, Henriette Willebeek le Mair, Maurice Sendak and Hilary Knight’s concept of Eloise. He became famous for his portraits of young people and often sketched peasant boys and girls as well as children of the bourgeoisie. Future Nobel Prize Winner Anatole France was so charmed by Boutet de Monvel’s pictures of rural and city children that he proposed writing a series of sketches to accompany them. Their collaboration was published in one volume as Nos Enfants in 1887; and later as two separate books, Nos Enfants and Filles et garçons. Evidently this drawing of two little girls served as the study for a watercolor and demonstrates the artist’s method of working: he cleaned the nib of his pen in the margins as he went along and covered the back of the sketch with pencil to transfer his precise outline drawing to a piece of watercolor paper for the final painting.