SARAH SAUVIN

Sarah Sauvin gallery, founded in 2015 by Sarah Sauvin and her father Maurice Sauvin, is renowned for its expertise and the museum-quality works it presents. It is a member of the Chambre Syndicale de l’Estampe, du Dessin et du Tableau (CSEDT) in Paris and the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) in New York.

Each year, we publish two catalogues of fine prints by old and modern masters from the 15th to the early 20th century, which we carefully select for their interest and rarity and the good quality and condition of the impressions.

These rare prints, some of which are extremely rare, are acquired by collectors, institutions and museums around the world, such as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Getty Research Institute, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva, etc. We are available by appointment in Paris, in the 9th arrondissement.

This exceptional lithograph is one of only two known impressions of the only print by Jacques-Louis David.

It comes from the collection of Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain (1754 – 1842), painter, art historian and art critic, who described it as follows in the handwritten inventory of his collection in 1839: ‘David (Louis) author of the Serment des Horaces etc. Lithographic test after the study for Mirabeau in his painting of the Serment du Jeu de paume, at Versailles. This is the only impression of the lithographic pencil by this famous artist, who had the stone broken in front of him after two impressions had been printed’ (Paris, École des Beaux-Arts, ms 329, f° 435, translated by us)

The existence of this lithograph was previously known only from this note in Gault de Saint-Germain’s manuscript inventory, cited by Philippe Bordes in his exhaustive study of Jacques-Louis David’s Le Serment du Jeu de Paume, and then by Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat in their catalogue raisonné of Jacques-Louis David’s drawings, although they knew of no impression. Our impression is therefore, in a sense, a rediscovery. We then had to locate the second impression mentioned by Gault de Saint-Germain. We found it in the collections of the Musée Lansyer in Loches (inventory number 2013.0.780, digitised impression available online).

© galerie Sarah Sauvin