| Note: The drawing represents a view of the Auvergne region, in central France. The foreground is dominated by the crater of an extinct volcano; its greens and browns contrast with the blues and pinks of the background, where a mountain is visible in the distance. Likely drawn on a sketchbook page, the composition was meant as an autonomous work of art. While a number of mountainous landscapes by George Sand have survived, this seems to be her only composition focusing on a volcano. Sand visited Auvergne on several occasions, transcribing her impressions of the region in one of her first literary attempts, an unfinished autobiographical narrative entitled Voyage en Auvergne (1827). The text conveys her pantheistic admiration for nature ('O nature, you are indeed my mother, you move my soul') and hints at her interests in mineralogy. She also makes aesthetic judgments about the landscape: 'Auvergne is pretty, but there is too much green'. Indeed she likes the 'plains...[which] with their bluish horizons imitate the appearance of the vast sea by calm weather, and when the wind softly strokes the heather, it looks like the slow undulation of the water'. In her extensive Histoire de ma vie (1855), Sand cannot help but compare the region with the Pyrénées, the mountain range close to her home at Nohant: 'The Auvergne seemed to be an adorable land. Less vast and less sublime than the Pyrénées, but with the same freshness...' One of the most interesting women of nineteenth-century France, George Sand was a key figure of Romanticism. Her bucolic fictions of rousseauist sensibility are among the classics of French literature. She is known for her relationships with artists as influential as Alfred de Musset, Frédéric Chopin and Eugène Delacroix. A lady of character, she fought for the emancipation of women and for their right to love and passion. Her work as a draughtsman was essentially a private pursuit. She made many portraits of her friends and fellow artists; landscapes were another favorite subject of hers. George Sand's works on paper have been the subject of renewed interest in recent years due to publications (C. Bernadac, George Sand. Dessins et Aquarelles, Paris, 1992) and exhibitions (George Sand. Une Nature d'Artiste, musée de la Vie Romatique, Paris, 2004) which have highlighted the technical and aesthetic originality of her late watercolors. Referred to as 'dendrites' (or 'aquarelles à l'écrasage') these works involved the crushing of watercolor on the page thanks to a sheet of rough paper. This resulted in unexpected nervures and ramifications, which the artist then reworked imaginatively to represent natural features such as lakes, woods or mounts. Here, the technique is noticeable in the crater, where the watercolor surface, while slightly granulated, appears mysteriously vaporous. 'I find that ink and paper were invented to make life poetical and not to dissect it,' the artist conceded. | |
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