François BONVIN (Paris, 1817 - Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 1887) The Smoking Cup, October 26, 1879 Black pencil. Signed and dated lower right: "f. Bonvin 26 8bre 1879". Numbered lower left: "n° 3". 15 x 20,4 cm Provenance: Anonymous sale, Pau, December 14, 2019, no. 44. Son of a former grognard of Napoleon, who was a forest warden during the Restoration and who became an innkeeper in Vaugirard, François Bonvin was attracted to drawing at a very early age and practiced it as a self-taught artist. As a young man he enrolled in the Petite École de Dessin de Paris. He sold his first watercolors to a collector named Laperlier, who passed on his passion for Chardin. He frequented the Andler brewery and met Courbet and the critics of the realist school, Champfleury and Castagnary. From 1847 onwards he exhibited his realistic subjects at the Salon. In 1866, his half-brother Léon, for whom he was the main supporter, disappeared. In 1867, he went to the Netherlands to discover the works of the masters of the Golden Age, which inspired him. His last years were overshadowed by illness. Bonvin then drew in small notebooks of everyday objects, with a wonderful sense of chiaroscuro and a subtle philosophy of the ephemeral passage of time, as in this drawing with the smoke escaping from the cup.