16. Pierre Lelu
(1741-1810)
A Town in Portugal

(click on image to print)
Lelu, A Town in Portugal

A Town in Portugal

Drawing in grey wash over pencil on laid paper, ca.1775, 380 x 520 mm., ex collection A. Sauz or Sanz, 1886 (not in Lugt). Lelu was a student of François Boucher and a well-known painter of history, a draughtsman and print maker. Rather unusually, for a French, eighteenth-century artist, he made a trip to Portugal in or around 1775. The Metropolitan Museum owns a view by him of a church in Sintra (in Portugal) with clear similarities, but a contact of ours in Sintra has assured us that our drawing is not a picture of that town. Precise location aside, it is quite fascinating how the drawing still tells us that this is a warm country: the vegetation lush but low, the buildings stone or brick but with open-air terraces and carelessly straw- or vine-covered roofs, the open well, the parasol, the very lightness of the drawing, as if to suggest bright sunlight and heat. As the MMA drawing is known to be an exact depiction of the place, perhaps this place too will be identified. The drawing must, at any rate, be a souvenir of Lelu's Portugese excursion.