?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
GEORGES ROUAULT Le condamné s'en est allé<>.
Aquatint and roulette, 1930. 502x343 mm; 19 7/8x9 5/8 inches. Artist's proof, aside from the edition of 425. From Miserere<>. Printed on the verso of a French tourist print from the early 20th-century.
Vollard commissioned Rouault's work on the Miserere<> series in the early 1910s and the artist produced 58 prints for the series between 1916 and 1927 (originally the publisher and artist had agreed on naming the series Miserere et Guerre<> with both sections consisting of 50 prints). The printing of the plates was completed in 1927, but then World War II and Vollard's untimely death intervened in the publication and the portfolio was not isued until 1948 by Édition de l'Étoile Filante, Paris.
The current work, with the artist's dating in the plate lower left, is interestingly enough a proof made after<> the published state, a phenomenon made possible by the delayed publication of the Miserere<> series. Eight years after Jacquemin had printed the required impressions, Rouault reworked the plate making the subject darker with roulette. In the preface to Miserere<>, Rouault wrote that he often reworked the plates for this series as many as 15 times. Presumably he was referring to reworking the plates prior to their published states and not the rare instance of reworking the plate after the published state, as in this proof. Capon/Rouault 71; Wofsy 125.
