Mathurin MEHEUT (Lamballe, 1882 - Paris, 1958)... Lot 214

Mathurin MEHEUT (Lamballe, 1882 - Paris, 1958) - Painter for the Navy in 1921. The crow and the fox - The cat, the weasel and the little rabbit. Monochrome watercolor on paper, recto/verso. Preparatory work for a plate decoration, unsigned. Height: 27.5 cm. Width : 30.7 cm. Provenance: private collection, Lamballe. This plate decoration based on La Fontaine's Fables for Faïencerie Henriot seems to have remained a project, or at least never produced in series. "Méheut proposed many other motifs, [...] fables by La Fontaine (for a series of small blue monochrome plates)" (in D. Delouche, A De Stoop and P. Le Tiec, Mathurin Méheut, Le Chasse-Marée/Ar Men, Douarnenez, 2001, p. 140). Two earthenware examples were presented at auction: "Le renard et les raisins" (The fox and the grapes) and "La grenouille qui voulait se faire aussi grosse que le boeuf" (The frog that wanted to be as big as the ox).