La Corvée interrompue

The drawing is constructed around a calm and composed presence: a young woman is captured in a supporting pose, her torso facing forward, her head slightly turned, her gaze escaping to the right. The charcoal line, precise without being tense, emphasizes the clear contours of the face, arms, and legs, while broader smudges make the background vibrate and give the body a supple grounding. The elegantly compact silhouette belongs to those studies where latent movement is as important as the subject. The objects placed on the right — a roll or cylinder, a soft shape evoking a headpiece or fabric, and then a bottle — introduce a note of discreet, almost silent everyday life that balances the figure and avoids any heavy stage effect. The sheet retains a beautiful graphic frankness; some marks of time and a slight patina of the paper do not alter its readability, and the very sober glass framing keeps the image in the foreground. The visible inscriptions at the bottom of the sheet, including the signature and the number 56, complete a simple, direct presentation without emphasis. About the artist — Benjamin Vautier (1895-1974) belongs to the lineage of the Vautiers, a well-documented family of Swiss artists. Institutional sources place him in Geneva, where he was born in 1895 and died in 1974; they define him as a painter and attest, through a work preserved at the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva, the use of the signature "Benj. Vautier". This reference is valuable here, as it confirms the coherence between the presented sheet and a graphic corpus from Geneva in the mid-20th century. His known work includes figurative scenes, landscapes, and still lifes, with a constant attention to drawing and the organization of the surface.