Self portrait evoking the Little Prince
[circa 1940-1942].
Ink on paper (230 x 160 mm), framed.
A spectacular drawing by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, depicting himself in a hilly setting. The writer and aviator is shown standing at the top of a small grassy hill in bloom. In the background, a small house with a smouldering fireplace, flanked by a fir tree, under a radiant sun.
We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.
Saint-Exupéry always sketched and drew. All media were good: margins of his drafts, in letters to his friends, on received telegrams, invoices, receipts, tablecloths, leaflets, and of course in his manuscripts and in the dedications of his books. Every medium offered his imagination a space in which he could express, often through sketches and caricatures, characters both real and imaginary. These ephemeral works are catalogued in the work Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Drawings, Watercolours, Pastels, Pens and Pencils (Gallimard, 2006); those particularly related to The Little Prince are also reproduced in the wonderful catalogue of the 2022 exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts, Encountering the Little Prince.
This previously unpublished drawing is one of the most accomplished of the American period preceding the creation of The Little Prince. The character’s face is similar to that of the drawing made in a letter to Léon Werth dated 1 June 1940: the jacket, the belt, the face, the bow tie, everything is identical in this additional stage, where Saint-Exupéry this time depicts his character in a cloud, and where he appears, on the ‘land of men’, with tufts of grass, flowers, a sheep, a hut and a smoking chimney (Album Pléiade, 267, also reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition The Little Prince at the Museum of Decorative Arts, 2022, p. 163).
And among them, our drawing is even closer to the time when the Little Prince was written: Saint-Exupéry got rid of the elements of war, to focus only on the tranquillity – or anxiety – of his character, lost in the middle of this setting. Numerous sketches, with the same features, were produced from New York during the years 1941-1942, when the writer was fully engaged in writing his tale.
“We can see it in the features of the Little Prince himself: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry gradually simplified the face. He removes his eyebrows. He gives him his famous neck scarf, as he calls it in the book, that is to say his scarf. There is a lot of work and results that do not come immediately. […] All this shows that graphic work is at the source of his literary reflection’ (Alban Cerisier). As confirmed by Olivier d’Agay, the author’s grand-nephew and director of the Saint-Exupéry estate, ‘he is the Little Prince, he is Saint-Ex obviously. He is depicted in situations in a plane, on a cloud. He stages him, he stages himself. This Little Prince is him as a child, him as an adult. It is he as an adult meeting the child within him, as had happened in the desert. It all started there, after the plane crash on 31 December 1935, between Paris and Saigon. In his delirium, he met the Little Prince and for him it was a shock that would generate the tale, six years later’ (Radio France interview, 5 April 2022). The author’s identification with his character is discernible and confirmed in several other New York drawings. A mirror of his soul, this Little Prince who is not yet a Little Prince is more than a travelling companion: he is a poetic double, a link between the imaginary and real life, amplified by the episode of the war.
“Captain Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a reservist, was mobilised in September 1939, on his return from a stay in New York […]. He carried out missions over France and neighbouring countries, and to keep his loved ones up to date with these very risky flights, he got into the habit of drawing scenes representing not aeroplanes, but characters, perched on clouds, hills or mountains […]. What if the little prince had no age? […] For his book, the writer made a decision, giving his character the features and silhouette of a child […]. The youth of the little prince is none other than the youth of his gaze on the kingdom of the world. He is a child as a symbol. He is not a child in the name of belonging to an age group’ (In Search of the Little Prince, p. 163 and 205). From then on, and well before he set to work on the colour illustrations and watercolours that would adorn the book, Saint-Exupéry never stopped drawing, throughout 1942, these little characters, half-man, half-child, whom he most often depicted alone, on a hill or a patch of grass. As he wrote his stories, the writer added the familiar attributes: the scarf replaced the bow tie, the blond, curly hair grew, and the planetary settings replaced the terrestrial universes.
A rare and marvellous representation of the author, of which there are few equivalents in this format and due to its accomplished nature.
Certificate enclosed (Thierry Bodin expert).
Delphine Delcroix & Alban Cerisier, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Dessins, Aquarelles, pastels plumes et crayons, Paris, Gallimard, 2006; Librairie Forgeot, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Cat., 2023, no. 23 (reproduced); Saint-Exupéry, Album Pléiade, p. 267.
