PHILADELPHIA — A sketch which was given by the Marquis de Lafayette to George Washington hammered for $1.6 million and sold for $2.09 million with buyer’s premium at Freeman’s Hindman on September 10. Complete sale results for the Books and Manuscripts sale are available at LiveAuctioneers.
Titled The Destruction of the Bastille, the ink-wash drawing dates from August 1789, less than a month after Parisians had stormed the notorious prison that became a symbol of the oppressive power of the Bourbon monarchy during the French Revolution.
Measuring approximately 13 by 21in, it was drawn by Étienne-Louis-Denis Cathala, an architect and inspector who was tasked with overseeing the prison’s demolition.
While little is known about the artist, as an eyewitness study with huge historical interest, as well having a connection between two towering figures in the American Revolution, meant it merited an estimate of $500,000-$800,000.
At the auction it drew interest from several bidders, which carried it to more than double the top estimate with buyer’s premium.
The original owner of the sketch was the Marquis de Lafayette, who had been placed in command of the Paris National Guard after the fall of the Bastille. After keeping it for some time, Lafayette sent it, along with the main key to the prison, as a gift to his friend and comrade in the American War of Independence, George Washington.
The drawing and key were among Washington’s most cherished possessions. They were kept in the presidential house during his two terms in office and then moved to Mount Vernon, where the drawing was proudly displayed in the entrance hall.
While the key to the Bastille remains part of the collection at Mount Vernon, the drawing left the Washington family when it was sold at auction in 1891. It was owned by publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst in the 1930s and then by the Carswell family of Connecticut, who donated it to the current vendor, the Shriners Hospital for Children and the Masonic Charity Foundation of Connecticut.
Freeman’s Hindman described the condition of the drawing as “very good,” although it had some conservation done to it in 1988.
The drawing itself shows the demolition of the Bastille taking place — a process authorized by the municipal government of Paris only days after the storming on July 14, 1789.
Lafayette supervised the prison’s orderly demolition and in turn signed an order authorizing the architect Pierre-Francois Palloy to work to raze the building that had so inflamed public sentiment.
Less than four weeks later, on August 8, Étienne-Louis-Denis Cathala, one of the site’s six demolition inspectors, created this drawing for Lafayette. Once an imposing fortress and symbol of the French monarchy’s tyrannical oppression, here Cathala shows the “citadel of arbitrary power”, as Lafayette called it, in complete ruin at the hands of the French citizenry.
