Jean-Jacques Henner

These twenty-eight drawings come from the collections of the former Musée des Beaux-Arts de Mulhouse, then administered by the Société Industrielle de Mulhouse: sheltered from the bombardments of the Second World War along with the museum's most precious items, the collection of around 180 drawings from the 16th to the end of the 19th century, bought in their time by Mulhouse industrialists or donated to the Société Industrielle by artists, was only rediscovered in the early 1970s. The collection was then entrusted to the Bibliothèque municipale, which had already received the Société Industrielle's rich collection of prints a few years earlier.

Within this collection, all the drawings attributed to J.-J. Henner bear the studio stamp "J.J. HENNER" indicating their provenance, but not how they entered the Mulhouse collections. Traces of them can be found in the catalogues of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Mulhouse and the invaluable Bulletin de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse. In 1905, the year of the artist's death, we read that "Messrs Jules Henner & Wetzel are sending us two paintings and some drawings from Henner's studio in Bernwiller".

The collection at the Mulhouse Municipal Library offers a diversity which is characteristic of Henner's art of drawing: to begin with, a diversity of subjects (women, nymphs, bathers, portraits, landscapes), as well as a diversity of uses (from quick sketches in charcoal to precise studies in pencil on tracing paper). But there is also a diversity of media, which can be divided into three categories: first of all, there are drawing papers, most often vellum, but also laid paper (whose watermark, figurative or purely typographical, is a sign of the paper-maker's production).
Tracing paper, or transparent paper, was another medium regularly used by Henner for preparatory pencil drawings or, conversely, for studies based on certain paintings, in order to produce a replica or variant.

Lastly, reused or recovered paper form the third category represented among the drawings at the Library. They bear witness to the vigour with which Henner sketched on a daily basis, sometimes offering two sketches juxtaposed or even on both sides of the support. Of particular note is the series of sketches and drawings made on wrapping paper, such as this study for Nymphe couchée (1896), on the back of which remains a piece of printed label. But the most unusual is undoubtedly the set of three sketches done on glass paper, such as this charcoal sketch of a half-naked woman, standing, in the style of the antique, evoking La Nymphe (1901), but above all, this interesting pair of sketches of flautists, figures from Idylle (1872) or Eglogue (1879), drawn in charcoal, red chalk and white chalk on the non-abrasive side of glass paper. The Musée Henner holds only a few examples of this unusual type of support.

Finally, the Mulhouse Library's rich collection of prints includes a number of prints after works by J.-J. Henner (woodcuts, etchings, heliogravures and photogravures by the Mulhouse artist Adolphe Braun), proof that J.-J. Henner's drawings aroused the interest of his contemporaries.

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