Viewing page 96 of 219

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

August 10, 1955

Dear Henry: 

Though your good lines of July 14th were duly acknowledged by Mrs. T. D. Parker, I apologize for not having answered earlier, but I count upon you to blame it on the lenitive effect of the vacation spirit!

I am happy to read of the interest Mr. Milliken and you are taking in the Gros exhibition and I have made a note of the dates you ahve chosen. March 8 to April 15, 1956, which is entirely agreeable to me. For my own convenience, or I should better say for the sake of the lenders, I would have preferred an earlier date in order to reduce the gap between the showing at my gallery and yours, for though I have set no definite date yet, I assume that we will hold it around the latter part of November. However, if one of the other museums, whom I have not yet approached, should have it in between, it will fill in the hiatus. 

We are also agreed on the title as you have it, "Gros, Painter of Battles - the First Romantic Painter".

Over the telephone I gave you a general outline of the paintings I expected to have included. WE can count on (this is all from memory as the gallery is closed until after Labor Day): 

1 - as a spiritual as well as aesthetic background, the full length portrait of Napoleon in Coronation robes by Lefebvre, signed and dated 1808. 
2 - th efirst sketch (rejected) of the Pestiferes of Jaffa
3-4 - the two monumental sketches which were intended to go to Versailles to complete Gros' Battle of the Pyramids. 
5 - Portrait of Chaptal 
6 - three small oil sketches - Head of a Horse
7                              Portrait of Murat 
8                              Portrait of his aide-de-campe
9 - Small oil sketch for the "Meeting of the Emperors after Austerlitz". The large version is in Versailles and this sketch has never been published. 
10 - the small Christine Boyer, preliminary sketch for the portrait in the Louvre. 
11 - Portrait of the Duchesse d'Angouleme. 
     Six or eight drawings from a private collection in Paris. 
     Two or three drawings which I expect to be able to find here. 
Thus we definitely have eleven paintings and roughly ten drawings.