Dessin original
Hyères, Mauvanne, France, circa 1935.
1 leaf (130 x 205 mm) in black ink on blue paper with the letterhead and vignette of the Domaine de Mauvanne, Salins d'Hyères. Framed.
A precious signed drawing given by Charlie Chaplin to his friend, the French actress Simone Berriau, whose guest he then was at her Mauvanne estate: he drew for her his hat, his cane and his shoes, three of the attributes of his famous silhouette.
Chaplin was then a guest of Simone Berriau in the south of France, near Hyères, where the French actress had just acquired a vineyard: the magnificent Domaine de Mauvanne. Max Ophüls would later film Divine there, and Charlie Chaplin stayed for several weeks, enjoying the small beach that Berriau rented near her estate, at the Vieux Salins d’Hyères.
After the Second World War, Mauvanne, the scene of a bloody battle, was occupied and looted by the Germans. Nothing of the library or archives survived, and Simone Berriau, who ran a theater in Paris (she was director of the Théâtre Antoine from 1943 to 1984), probably saved this drawing by taking it back to Paris in the late 1930s.
#26875
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