A Locanda outside Rome

Member of a multigenerational family of artists, Vernet was trained by Claude-Joseph Vernet, a successful marine painter, and ultimately guided his own son Horace and Horace’s contemporary Théodore Gericault. Carle is best known today for drawings and lithographs, especially involving horses engaged in battle or sport. Vernet was both an accomplished rider and a breed connoisseur, and therefore his horses exhibit a spirit that surpasses mere adherence to canons of equine proportion.

In 1782, the young Vernet won the highly coveted Prix de Rome, but was fetched home to Paris by his father after just seven months because he became melancholy and tried to take monastic vows. This scene was executed nearly fifty years after this first, ill-fated trip, when Vernet returned in 1828 with Horace.

The composition is sketched lightly in pencil and then completed in pen and wash. Two men with the long prods of cattle drovers share a glass of wine in the porch of an inn or home, while two mules laden with stones or bricks arrive. The baby in the woman’s arms at right appears a late addition, and hints perhaps of a family taking leave. Vernet also differentiates the demeanor of the different animals here—the playful mount of the top-hatted rider versus the obstinate pack animal at left receiving a beating to urge it the rest of the way.

On the verso, a letter from the artist to his printseller Hilaire Aumont places this drawing as the third in a series of four (the others as yet untraced) begun in the spring of 1829 at Aumont’s request.

(“FIGURE/STUDY: Drawings from the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,” text by Andrew C. Weislogel and presented at Carlton Hobbs, LLC January 25-February 2, 2019)