Since 2006, the Salon du dessin organizes every year international meetings around a theme.
"Travel drawings" will be the theme of the study days in 2024 and 2025.
Palais Brongniart / Petit auditorium, 1st floor
Free access for Salon du dessin visitors, subject to availability.
Reservation recommended
Conference chaired by Pierre Rosenberg, Académie française
Scientific Direction: Marco Simone Bolzoni,
curator of Old Master and 19th century drawings from the Debra and Leon Black collection, New York.
Until the middle of the last century, traveling, covering long distances from one continent to another, from one country to another, from one region to another, discovering and exploring them, coming into contact with different cultures, equally different traditions, all constituted a rare experience and a unique personal enrichment, but one that was difficult for the vast majority of women and men to access.
Nowadays, on the contrary, in a globalized world, continuously interconnected, where communications encounter no obstacle, moving has become an ordinary activity.
It is not only the travel itself that has been facilitated thanks to more efficient and cheaper means of transport, it is also the invention and widespread use of new electronic devices that have contributed to recording and recording on the spot each of these moments of discovery through a simple mechanical action. This was not the case in the past - at least until the invention of photography.
Indeed, it was drawing practice that allowed the traveler to entrust this manual technique with the visual memory of his experience.
However, this act required a certain form of optical and intellectual concentration, far from digital instantaneity, and above all, essential knowledge to master the gestures.
![John Frederick Lewis, Mendurah dans ma maison du Caire, vers 1843, aquarelle, 381 x 549 mm (Londres, Victoria & Albert museum, inv. 717-1877 [E.5679-1910])](https://www.salondudessin.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/JE-2025-Lewis.jpg)
John Frederick Lewis
Mendurah dans ma maison du Caire
c. 1843
Watercolour, 381 x 549 mm
(Londres, Victoria & Albert museum, inv. 717-1877 [E.5679-1910])
Jean-Édouard Vuillard
Paysage de Suisse (Rheinfelden)
c. 1900
Watercolour and graphite, 65 x 106 mm
(private collection)
The main objective will be to question the forms and functions of this type of drawing, whether they were made by artists, antiquaries (in the old sense of the term), writers, explorers, or scientists who, during their travels, felt the need to graphically record in sketchbooks or on isolated sheets the forms of the visible world surrounding them.
The two study days scheduled for 2024 focused more particularly on the period from the Renaissance to the seventeenth century, while those planned for 2025 will address the same subject from the eighteenth century to the present day.
Paul Gauguin
Page of the notebook Avant et après
1903
Pen and black ink, grey watercolour, 202 x 157 mm
(Londres, The Courtauld Gallery, inv. MS.2020. XX.1.159)
Curator of Old Master and 19th century drawings
from the Debra and Leon Black collection, New York
Introduction
Student curator at the Institut national du patrimoine
Les carnets romains d’Hubert Robert
Researcher, in charge of studies and research at the Louvre Museum
Carnets d’artistes français en voyage en Italie sous la Révolution
Gallerist, Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd
Joseph Wright of Derby in Italy
Lecturer and researcher at the Università IUAV in Venice
Canaletto in England
Professor of French, University of Michigan
Delacroix à Londres: carnets de voyage
Independent art historian
“Travel Art” or Images of Home?: Reconsidering John Frederick Lewis's Egyptian Drawings”
Independent art historian
Encountering Egypt: George Frederic Watts in Egypt
Curator of the Doge's Palace and the Correr Museum, Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia
“Dessiner des yeux” : les carnets de voyage d’Hippolyte et Paul Flandrin, 1855-1885
Art historian, responsible for the Vuillard Archives
Visions fugitives : les carnets de Monsieur Vuillard
Curator, Martin Halusa Senior Curator of Drawings, The Courtauld Gallery, Londres
Paul Gauguin in the Marquesas: strategies of adaptation (and re-adaptation)
Eugène Delacroix
Vue du pont de Westminster et de l’abbaye de Westminster depuis le pont de Waterloo, 29 May 1825
Graphite on paper, 120 x 195 mm
(Paris, Musée national Eugène Delacroix, inv. MD 2019.3)
Dear visitors,
Due to the gravity of the international situation resulting from the spread of COVID-19 and in order to protect the health of all parties concerned, we have decided to cancel the 29th edition of the Salon du dessin.
France officially declared a state of health emergency on 24 March for two months and there are still numerous uncertainties regarding the evolution of the pandemic over the coming months. These factors make it impossible to reprogram the Salon before the summer of 2020 and the Salon du dessin, which usually attracts numerous other events in Paris for a week, will therefore not take place this year.
Louis de Bayser, President of the Salon du dessin said “this is a difficult decision to take with regard to all those who worked hard for this edition, but our priority is to protect the health of all our exhibitors, visitors and partners”.
We send our thoughts to all those affected by this epidemic and hope that this unprecedented health situation will quickly change favorably.
The organizers of the Fair