The Coutyard of the Dragon

Plate printed by Vernant for l'Estampe Moderne, printed at 75 on laid paper and 10 on japon. The proofs bear the dry stamps of the artist and of the Cercle de la Librairie. The plate is described in the Bibliographie de la France (7 August 1925: M. Brouet, 4 rue Camille Tahan, La Cour du Dragon, 112 proofs on paper and in various states, at 600 and 700 fr.; and 14 May 1926, n°200: Cour du Dragon, engraving by Brouet, price 500 fr. The plate was sold to the Chalcographie in 1932 (inv. no. 7164) under the title Chaudronniers, cour du Dragon. A drawing of the same subject, dated 1925, was sold at PIASA in June 2006 (n° 27, reproduced in the catalogue). The setting of the cour du Dragon is found in the plates of the Musiciens Ambulants (Ba 273) and the Vieux Musiciens (Ba 274). At the beginning of the Revolution, [the Cour du Dragon] was hardly home to anything but scrap metal merchants, boilermakers, plumbers and sheet metal workers [...] The very picturesque 18th-century complex that this courtyard formed was demolished between 1930 and 1935. Its gate and the dragon which surmounted it were dismantled stone by stone at the end of 1955 (Hillairet, 1954, article rue de Rennes).