1919?

For a Portrait of Félix Barré

French, 1875 - 1963

While this drawing is definitely related to Villon's 1913 drypoint of the actor Félix Barré, it bears a date of 1919, which the artist may have added later, perhaps in error. It demonstrates the elaborate experimentation with perspective construction that contributed to Villon's finished Cubist compositions. The sharply receding lines of the space in this drawing seem to be based on a basic perspective construction explained in Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting. Villon plotted the figure on the perspective diagram with dots and then connected them, a method that follows one established by Leonardo for measuring the distance of any given point of an object on a foreshortened plane.