Portrait à l'aquarelle et à l'encre de Paul Verlaine

Ink and watercolour portrait of the poet Paul Verlaine by his friend Marie Crance, bearing the artist's signature and the handwritten caption “Paul Verlaine à l'hôpital”.

A single sheet, presented in a frame with a mount. An inscription on the back of the frame—“written in the margin (by the framer): ‘For Messrs. Thénot and Lercey, 25 April 1894’”—provides a likely terminus post quem for the drawing.
 
Marie Crance (1860–1945), nicknamed Marie-aux-fleurs, was at the time the companion of the illustrator Frédéric-Auguste Cazals, whom she married in 1912. A laundress, maid, and occasional singer in the poet’s favourite dives, she was also a loyal friend and caretaker to Verlaine. She tended his ailing leg when he avoided doctors and took refuge in modest hotels on the outskirts of Paris. Cheerful, unpretentious, and full of life, she also visited him during his hospital stays at Broussais, Tenon, Cochin, and Saint-Antoine, where she made this bust portrait of the poet—his piercing gaze and stiffened figure shaped by age and chronic rheumatism. Verlaine dedicated a sonnet to her in the second edition of Dédicaces, along with a charming drawing (Verlaine, Lettres inédites [...], ed. Georges Zayed, 1976, p. 45):
 
« Je veux donc dire de ma voix la mieux timbrée,
Et les tracer du bec de ma meilleure plume,
Vos mérites et vos vertus dans l’amertume
Douce de vous savoir d’un autre énamourée
Mais d’un autre... »
 
A moving portrait of the wandering poet, curiously resilient, his form dissolving into the softness of the watercolour.