View through Ancient Ruins
  • Charles-Michel-Ange Challe
  • Paris 1718 - 1778
  • View through Ancient Ruins
  • Black chalk, partly heightened with white,
    on blue paper,
  • old inscription on the verso
  • 150 × 240 mm
Provenance:
Hector Lefuel, Paris, 1810 - 1880
(Architecte en chef du nouveau Louvre, 1854),
Olivier Lefuel, Paris

In 1742, Challe received a scholarship for a stay of several years at the famous Académie de France in Rome. There, the buildings of antiquity particularly fascinated him, and their picturesque ruins provided him with ever new motifs. For his drawings, Challe overwhelmingly preferred blue-coloured paper and was a master of lending plasticity and atmosphere to his drawings with black and white chalk alone.