Charles MOZIN

(Paris 1806 - Trouville-sur-Mer 1862)

A Coastal Cliff in Normandy

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Pencil and white bodycolour on brown paper.
Inscribed Charles Louis MOZIN on the verso.
359 x 264 mm. (14 1/8 x 10 3/8 in.)
Charles Mozin made numerous drawings and paintings of rocks and coastal cliffs. The cliffs depicted in this drawing are reminiscent of those at Étretat, and similar cliffs appear in several paintings by the artist, such as a painting recently acquired by Musée Villa Montebello in Trouville-sur-Mer, which houses several paintings and drawings, as well as over a hundred lithographs, by Charles Mozin. Among the drawings by the artist in the museum’s collection is a stylistically similar study of a small fishing village at the foot of a sea cliff, with small huts cut into the rock face; the door to one such cave-like abode also appears in the present sheet.



This drawing was at one time part of the exceptional collection of 18th and 19th century French drawings and prints assembled by the Parisian antique dealer Alfred Beurdeley (1847-1919). While part of his collection – comprising mostly decorative and ornamental prints and drawings – was sold to a museum in St. Petersburg and is now in the Hermitage, the bulk of his collection was dispersed at auction in France in 1920 and 1921.

 
Born into a family of musicians, Charles-Louis Mozin studied with the landscape and genre painter Xavier Leprince. Primarily a painter and lithographer of coastal landscapes, harbour views and seascapes, particularly in Normandy, he exhibited at the Salons in Paris between 1824 and 1861. Along with Eugène Isabey and Richard Parkes Bonington, Mozin was one of the first artists to paint landscapes depicting the beach and fishing port of Trouville, which he discovered around 1825, and where he eventually settled in 1839. He also travelled in Germany and Holland, where he frequently exhibited his work between 1840 and 1850. A number of aquatints were published after his paintings. In 1865, three years after Mozin’s death, a sale of the contents of his studio was held in Paris, amounting to over two hundred paintings, drawings and watercolours, as well as several models of boats. Landscape paintings by Mozin are today in the museums of Amiens, Honfleur, Rouen, Toulon, Versailles, and elsewhere, while a number of views of Paris are in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris.

Provenance

The studio of the artist (Lugt 1829b)
The posthumous vente Mozin, Paris, 7-8 April 1865
Alfred Beurdeley, Paris (Lugt 421)
Thence by descent.
 

Charles MOZIN

A Coastal Cliff in Normandy