Provenance:

Mrs. D. K. Este Fisher, Jr., Garrison, Maryland.

George L. Small, son of the above.

Sotheby's, New York, Sale of May 21, 2003, Lot 229.

Acquired directly from the above sale.

The Kelly Collection, Virginia.

Literature:

James Branch Cabell, "In Necessity's Mortar," Harper's Monthly Magazine, October 1904, p. 708, illustrated.

James Branch Cabell, The Line of Love, New York, 1905, illustrated.

Paul Preston Davis, Howard Pyle. His Life-His Work, vol. 2, Wilmington, 2004, no. MBPI0915, pp. 458; 667; 705, illustrated.

Lot Note:

A master of literary illustration, Howard Pyle excelled at unfolding narrative through attentive pictorial language. Here, the image becomes the purveyor of a pivotal moment in James Branch Cabell’s short story In Necessity’s Mortar, the making of Villon the poet. The story centers on François de Montcorbier, a bard whose doomed love for the beautiful Catherine de Vaucelles nearly causes his demise and lands him in jail. The ineluctable trials of love and life in Medieval Paris—"Fate grinned and went on with her weaving”—mold the poet into a multi-faceted figure, deserving of both pity and comeuppance, as described here:

Yonder is Paris—laughing, tragic Paris, who once had need of a singer to voice all her splendor and all her misery. Fate made the man; in necessity’s mortar she pounded his soul into the shape Fate needed. To kings’ courts she lifted him; to thieves’ hovels she thrust him down; Lutetia’s palaces and abbeys and taverns and lupanars and gutters and prisons and its very gallows—Fate dragged him past each in turn that he might make the Song of Paris. He could not have made it here in the smug Rue St-Jacques. And now the song is made, Catherine. So long as Paris endures, Francois Villon will not be forgot. Villon the singer Fate fashioned to her liking; Villon the man she has damned, body and soul.

In the painting, Villon is portrayed in a dark setting overwhelmed with deep, ominous hues ranging from red to brown, possibly a prison cell or a tavern. A manuscript in his hand, he is presented as a mature, solitary figure engrossed in poetic rumination, as if conniving against the powers that “thrust him down” with his written word. François Villon was indeed a real poet, a foundational figure of French medieval literature, and has arguably become an enduring archetype of the poet. Remembered for his run-ins with the law, he was an irreverent figure who spoke frankly and freely. Here, Pyle presents him—and by extension the archetype of the poet—as a tragically ironic figure, an eternally controversial individual only because his work in fact speaks truth to power and reveals the flaws of a society built on entrenched iniquity, perhaps the deep-seated flaws of humankind as a whole.