Mont Blanc Seen from the Massif, Les Aiguilles Rouges
Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc
1874 · Watercolor heightened with gouache over traces of graphite on two sheets of blue-gray wove paper (glued together in a vertical seam at left) · Drawings and Prints
One of the nineteenth-century's most influential architects, Viollet-le-Duc, known especially for his restorations of France's greatest churches, was also a prolific author of theoretical writings, as well as a talented draftsman. In this spectacular mountain view he married an architect's understanding of structure and space to an artist's sense of color and line. The drawing dates from the end of Viollet-le-Duc's life, when he was working on a map of the Mont Blanc massif. The map was published in 1876 with a "study of its geodesic and geological construction, of its transformations, and of the old and modern state of its glaciers." Viollet-le-Duc's love for the mountains was born much earlier, however, in 1831, when he took a trip to the Auvergne in central France.
- Artist
- Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc
- Date
- 1874
- Medium
- Watercolor heightened with gouache over traces of graphite on two sheets of blue-gray wove paper (glued together in a vertical seam at left)
- Department
- Drawings and Prints
- Credit line
- Purchase, Isaacson-Draper Foundation Gift, 2005
