Design for a book illustration: the effect of bombs falling on a town

Although Cochin’s designs are unlike any other images of war produced by him or his contemporaries, the scale, format and interest in the physical and psychological realities of war recall Jacques Callot’s celebrated prints "Grandes misères de la guerre" (1633). Ironically, they also demonstrate the lessons Cochin learned from drawing and engraving the spectacular effects of gunpowder harnessed for fêtes and royal fireworks displays.

This drawing startles the viewer with the force of an exploding mortar shell, expressed by a luminously blank circle at the centre of the composition, from which segments of black and rays of white radiate outwards. When he came to etch the plate for the printed book, Cochin made changes that emphasised the urban, civilian nature of the target and the fear the attack engendered. He added more archways and more fleeing figures scrambling over and under them.

There are three drawings at Waddesdon for designs for this book (see also acc. no. 1014). The three vignettes at Waddesdon served as headpieces to the individual sections: on gunpowder, missiles and bombs (see Michel, 1987, cat. no. 18). Two of the engravings were reused as illustrations to Surirey de St-Remy, "Mémoires d’artillerie", 3rd ed., 3 vols., Paris, 1745.

Juliet Carey, 2012

Other exhibition labels

• Travelling Drawings Exhibition, 2007
• Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Younger [le jeune] (1715-1790)
• Design for an illustration: The detonation of a mine blowing a battery of cannon sky-high[Footnote:“Explosion d’une mine qui fait sauter une batterie”.]
• c. 1740-41
• Graphite on vellum; framing lines in black ink
• 95 x 178 mm
• Provenance: possibly Charles-Antoine Jombert (1712-1784); his sale, Paris, 15 April 1776 and following days (Lugt no. 2528), lot 90; Charles-Gilbert, vicomte de Morel-Vindé (1759-1842); bought by baron Edmond de Rothschild from Henri Lacroix in October 1890 for 500 francs
• Literature: possibly F.C. Joullain, Catalogue de tableaux, sculptures, desseins, estampes … du cabinet de M [Jombert], Paris, 1776, p. 15, lot 90; Christian Michel, Charles-Nicolas Cochin et le livre illustré au XVIIIe siècle …, Geneva, 1987, pp. 186-87
• Accession number: 1012
• Design for an illustration: A battery of mortars firing projectiles at night[Footnote:“Tir de batterie de nuit”.]
• c. 1740-41
• Graphite on vellum; framing lines in black ink
• 97 x 175 mm
• Inscribed: verso, top middle, in red crayon: 1 [encircled]
• Provenance: Charles-Gilbert, vicomte de Morel-Vindé (1759-1842); bought by Baron Edmond de Rothschild from Henri Lacroix in October 1890 for 500 francs
• Literature: Christian Michel, Charles-Nicolas Cochin et le livre illustré au XVIIIe siècle …, Geneva, 1987, pp. 186-87
• Accession number: 1014
• Design for an illustration: The effect of bombs falling on a town[Footnote:“Effets de bombes éclatant dans une ville”]
• c. 1740-41
• Graphite on vellum; framing lines in black ink
• 102 x 172 mm
• Inscribed: verso, top middle, in red crayon: 3 [encircled]
• Provenance: Charles-Gilbert, vicomte de Morel-Vindé (1759-1842); bought by Baron Edmond de Rothschild from Henri Lacroix in October 1890 for 500 francs
• Literature: Christian Michel, Charles-Nicolas Cochin et le livre illustré au XVIIIe siècle …, Geneva, 1987, pp. 186-87
• Accession number: 1011
• A prodigious engraver and draughtsman, Cochin depicted all the major court celebrations for the Menus Plaisirs du Roi and illustrated more than two hundred books. After travelling to Italy (1749-51) with the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot, the abbé Jean –Bernard Le Blanc and Abel-François Poisson de Vandières (the future Directeur des Bâtiments du Roi) he became a central figure in the administration of the arts in France and exerted further influence through his publications on art.
• These three drawings are designs for engraved vignettes for Joseph Dulacq’s Théorie nouvelle sur le mécanisme de l’artillerie, published in 1741.[Footnote:Published in Paris, by Jombert; see Michel, 1987, cat. no. 18. Two of the engravings (figs. 24 and 25) were reused as illustrations to Surirey de St-Remy, Mémoires d’artillerie, 3rd edn, 3 vols., Paris, 1745.] The vignettes served as headpieces to the individual sections: on gunpowder, missiles and bombs. Unlike Puységur’s luxurious L’Art de la guerre (see cat. nos. 35, 36), even in its more serviceable quarto edition published in 1749, this portable volume was designed to be taken into the field. The soldiers who handled artillery required expert mathematical and mechanical knowledge. As Capitaine d’Artillerie de sa majesté le Roy de Sardagne, Dulacq well knew the dangers of gunpowder. In the introduction he urged all soldiers to learn the mechanics underlying its use if they were to unleash its power on the enemy rather than bring accidents upon themselves. His book is full of diagrams of cannons, shells, angles of trajectory, measuring instruments and angles of projection. The frontispiece (fig. 27) shows soldiers at rest, lolling in front of an elegantly classical powder magazine. If the volume as a whole presents its technical subject-matter with cool authority, Cochin’s startling vignettes evoke spectacle and horrors of war. They were made at the beginning of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), which followed hard upon the War of the Polish Succession (1733-38) and that of the Spanish Succession (1702-14). The changes Cochin made to the final illustrations, which he etched himself, underline his preoccupation with the human aspect of his subject.[Footnote:Christian Michel has suggested in correspondence (May, 2007) that the drawings might have been prepared for a volume in-folio and the changes related to publication in-quarto.]
• Although these designs are unlike any other images of war produced by Cochin or his contemporaries, their scale, format and interest in the physical and psychological realities of war recall Jacques Callot’s celebrated print series, Grandes misères de la guerre (1633). Perhaps ironically, they also demonstrate the lessons Cochin learned from drawing and engraving the spectacular effects of gunpowder harnessed for numerous fêtes and royal fireworks displays.
• In the extraordinary first drawing (cat. no. 32) Cochin froze and delineated with startling clarity the effects of a mine being detonated. Using the full range of graphite’s possibilities, he suggested the fragility of the human body and the intractable weight of falling wood, metal and stone. Cochin paid attention to the spaces between forms as well as their violent collision in an almost abstracted arrangement of bodies, artillery and broken rock. He reserved the hardest marks of the sharp point of the graphite to show the outlines of the body - bent or straining limbs and fingers outstretched in pain or terror. In the printed vignette (fig. 24), Cochin added more men moving towards the shattered gun-position.
• The second drawing (cat. no. 33) depicts a group of soldiers firing mortar bombs into the night sky, standing behind protective whicker-work gabions, filled with earth. Men and equipment are illuminated by the explosions with which the shells are launched. Essentially weapons of siege warfare, the hollow iron bombs filled with powder were thrown at a high trajectory to sail over walls and other obstacles. In the printed illustration (fig. 25), Cochin made clearer the town walls in the distance and the black shell itself.[Footnote:See John A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle. The French Army, 1610-1715, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 507-08] Cochin differentiated the roles of various individuals - measuring the angle of a mortar with a gunner’s sextant, lighting a fuse, giving a command. Cochin darkened the sky with long, soft strokes, then smudged them and erased them to create the arching missile-trails.
• Although the summary of the section of Dulacq’s book which the third image (cat. no. 34) illustrates promises highly technical information (for example, the impact of bombs on vaults and their supports, the best way of constructing powder magazines and the mechanics of aiming), the vignette with which it opens startles the viewer with the force of an exploding mortar shell, expressed by a luminously blank circle at the centre of the composition, from which segments of black and rays of white radiate outwards. Cochin’s changes in the finished etching (fig. 26) are more elaborate than in the other vignettes and emphasized the urban and civilian nature of the target and the fear the attack engendered. He added more archways and more fleeing figures scrambling over and under them.
• Theatres of Life, 2009
• Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Younger [le jeune] (1715–1790)
• Design for a book illustration: The effect of bombs falling on a town c.1740–41
• Graphite on vellum; framing lines in black ink
• Theatres of Life catalogue no. 34
• The section about missiles in Dulacq’s book contained highly technical information about the impact of bombs on vaults and their supports, the construction of powder magazines and the mechanics of aiming. However, this design for the opening vignette startles the viewer with the sheer force of an exploding mortar shell, expressed by a luminously blank circle at the centre of the composition, from which segments of black and rays of white radiate outwards.

Dimensions (mm) / weight (mg)

102 x 172

Signature & date

not signed or dated

Inscriptions

3 [in a circle]
Inscription
verso, top middle, in red crayon [?]

Provenance

• Owned by Vicomte Charles Gilbert Morel de Vindé (b.1759, d.1842) before 1890; acquired by Baron Edmond de Rothschild (b.1845, d.1934) through Henri Lacroix in October 1890 for 500 francs as by Cochin; by descent to his son James de Rothschild (b.1878, d.1957); bequeathed to Waddesdon, The Rothschild Collection (The National Trust) by The Treasury Solicitor in lieu of taxes on the Estate of James de Rothschild in 1963.

Exhibition history

• Theatres of Life: Drawings from the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor. Wallace Collection, London 8 November 2007 - 27 January 2008; Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham 12 April - 1 June 2008.

Collection

• Waddesdon (National Trust)
• Accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to the National Trust for display at Waddesdon Manor, 1963

Bibliography

• ♦; Christian Michel; Charles-Nicolas Cochin et le livre illustré au XVIIIe siècle : avec un catalogue raisonné des livres illustrés par Cochin, 1735-1790; Geneva; Librairie Droz; 1987; pp. 186-187.
• ♦; Juliet Carey, Theatres of life: drawings from the Rothschild Collection, World of Antiques & Art, 73, 2007, 148-50; pp. 138-140.
• ♦, ♦, ♦; Juliet Carey; Theatres of Life: Drawings from the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor; The Wallace Collection, London, 8 November 2007 - 27 January 2008, The Djanogly Museum and Art Gallery, Nottingham, 12 April 2008 - 1 June 2008, Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, 2009.; London; Paul Holberton Publishing, The Alice Trust; 2007; pp. 94-98, cat. no. 34, ill.

Subjects

• Architecture/Ruins
• Figures/Male
• Architecture/Town or Village Scape
• Figures/Female
• Military & War/Siege
• Objects/Armour & Weaponry/Bomb
• Nature, Landscape & The Elements/Fire
• Figures/Group
• Architecture/Buildings/Public, Municipal & Entertainment

Genres

• Genre Subjects
• History Subjects