Roger Chapelain-Midy : Tête couronnée de feuillage (Head Crowned with Foliage), 1968 (Watercolour)

By CHAPELAIN-MIDI Roger (1904–1992)

Roger Chapelain-Midy (1904–1992)
Tête couronnée de feuillage (Head Crowned with Foliage), 1968
Watercolour
Dedicated, signed and dated by hand, lower right: “pour Monsieur et Madame Yves Guérin, en souvenir amical de mon exposition au Palais”, signed “Chapelain-Midy”, dated “68”

Dimensions:
Sheet 29.7 × 21 cm (11 ⅝ × 8 ¼ in.)

Condition: good condition, unframed

Provenance: Livre d’Or de Yves Guérin, compiled 1963–1992 (single-owner provenance). The dedication records a souvenir of the artist’s exhibition “au Palais” — in this context the Palais de la Méditerranée in Nice, which the collector directed: a direct documentary link to that venue.

Description: A poetic watercolour — the head and shoulders of a youthful, dreaming figure crowned with a wreath of leaves and laurel and garlanded with ivy, drawn in fluid washes of green and pale ochre: an Arcadian, oneiric image characteristic of the artist’s poetic vein. Roger Chapelain-Midy was a major French painter, lithographer, illustrator and stage designer, trained at the Beaux-Arts de Paris where he later taught (chef d’atelier, 1955–74); a defender of the classical French tradition of Poussin and the Renaissance, infused with mystery and the marvellous, he won the Carnegie Prize (1938) and designed sets and costumes for the Opéra de Paris and the Comédie-Française. His work is held at the Centre Pompidou. Signed, dated and dedicated by hand.

Price : 150,00 € ( 170.00 USD )