Georges Rouault (1878-1951)
Three autograph letters, of which two signed ('Georges Rouault'), to various recipients, Paris and n.p., [c.1911-1928]
In French. Together eight pages, various sizes (from 183 x 138mm to 302 x 205mm), with one envelope. Provenance: 1) Sotheby's, 29 November 1985, lot 384; 2) Christie's New York, 7 February 1986, lot 232; 3) Sotheby's New York, 14 February 1986, lot 508.

Rouault's thoughts on the Mona Lisa, recently stolen from the Louvre, with a response to a critic and a poem of 8 stanzas. Rouault responds to a request for his thoughts on ‘la Joconde’ – the Mona Lisa, which had disappeared from the Louvre on 21 August 1911, around the time that Rouault wrote this letter. He gives a carefully nuanced answer: ‘il est difficile de porter un jugement sur une œuvre d’art véritable … et je sens que plus je connais … plus j’ignore’. He critiques popular opinions on the old masters, for example writing on the idea of artistic individuality that ‘la vrai individualité n’est pas toujours sympathique … elle blesse mortellement les idées de routine, les formules, et aussi il faut bien le dire les intérêts matériels de certains’. He defends himself in a poetic idiom against a critic, giving his thoughts on himself and his relationship with his work: ‘My life and my art are intertwined, like light and shadow …’. His poem opens, ‘Livre bien aimé…’. In a postscript, he apologises to his addressee for exceeding the usual limit of ‘quatre ou cinq vers’.