Paper Conservation: Decisions & Compromises

The Restoration of Cartoons
at the Department of Drawings and Prints in the Louvre
Valentine Dubard
Département des arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France
Fig. 1: Ambassadors’ staircase, Château de Versailles, after treatment
Fig. 2: Rolled cartoons before treatment
Charles Le Brun was named Director of the Royal
Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris in
1663. The following year, he entered the service
of Louis XIV, becoming First Painter of the king
and chief official responsible for the painted decoration
of the royal residences, a position which
led him to undertake projects that became emblematic
of the reign of the Sun King such as the
Hall of Mirrors and the Ambassadors’ Staircase
at Versailles (Fig 1). This last decoration was destroyed
during the reign of Louis XV in 1752; all
that remains are the preparatory drawings and
later prints that record the overall composition.
Upon the death of Charles Le Brun in 1690,
the superintendent of buildings, art and manufacturing
in France, François Michel Le Tellier de
Louvois, seized all works of art found in the artist’s
studio, including works made while he was
First Painter as well as works made prior to his
appointment.
About 3,000 drawings and 700 cartoons thus
entered the royal collection in 1690, spanning
more than forty years of the artist’s career. The
size of the collection is exceptional; it comprises
not only composition studies but also drawings
after live models as well as cartoons as large as 5
by 3 metres. As exceptional as the drawings’ quality
is the light they shed on the successive design
stages of his grand scale decorative projects.
Indeed, in Charles Le Brun’s studio, the works
were kept together in “packets” 1 which probably
served as repository of formal ideas for the instruction
and use of his assistants and students.
The fact that in certain sheets the drawn lines
have been retraced, and that traces of repeated
transfer on to the walls can be found, suggest the
reuse of specific cartoons. Their early entry into
the collection meant that, unlike many other
works preserved in the Department of Drawings
and Prints, they were never the object of collectors’
changing tastes, but were acquired fresh
from being used.
The history of the conditions under which the
works by Charles Le Brun were conserved, once
they had entered the royal collections, is known
through archival records and through the traces
of changes and damages left on the works themselves.
Their state of conservation was regularly
noted in the reports that successive keepers of
the King’s paintings and drawings addressed to
the monarch, asking for the means to conserve
them. The cartoons were for a long time stored
rolled up or folded, and some still are (Fig. 2);
they bear stains that indicate water damage at
some point and tears that show careless handling.
The small and medium-sized drawings have
ICOM-CC Graphic Documents Working Group Interim Meeting | Vienna 17 – 19 April 2013
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