Intimité

Overview

Intimité is a small drawing of a young woman lying half-stretched on a sofa, about 29 × 26 cm. It belongs to the French national collections and is catalogued by the Musée d'Orsay under RF 39090. It is one of only three or four drawings by Marie known to survive in public hands, out of the 118 numbered drawings and the eighty-odd academic studies listed in the 1885 memorial catalogue.

The record

The two official records differ slightly. The Orsay record dates the sheet c. 1881 and gives the medium as graphite or lithographic crayon with scraping, on card, 29 × 25,9 cm. The older Joconde notice, made when the sheet was in the Louvre's Département des Arts graphiques, calls it Intimité : jeune femme à demi étendue sur un canapé, black chalk (pierre noire), 28,5 × 25,7 cm, pasted onto another sheet, with the earlier inventory number JdeP 517 (Jeu de Paume). Both records say it came to the State in 1908 as a gift from the artist's mother, and was kept at the Jeu de Paume and the Musée d'Art moderne before it reached the Orsay collections.

It was reproduced in 1885. The 1885 catalogue ends with "Quatre dessins d'après nature", four drawings reproduced as plates. The one captioned Endormie ("Asleep") shows the same composition as this sheet: the woman slumped on the sofa, the open book at her head, the same fall of the skirt (Gallica views 45–48). Which number in the list of drawings it carries is not printed on the plate. Le Sommeil (no. 114) fits the plate's title and Soirée intime (no. 109) fits the museum's, so neither can be preferred.

References in Diary

No passage in the diary has been tied to this sheet. Marie mentions her drawings constantly but rarely by subject, and nothing in the 1881 carnets describes a woman on a sofa in a way that can be matched to it.

Related Entries

Sources