L'Ambulant (The Wanderer)

Executed in 1957, L’Ambulant is an exquisite relic from Jean Dubuffet’s long sojourn in the South of France. With his right arm raised across his body, a lone figure stands amidst an empty field, rendered in delicate strokes of gouache in rich, earthbound hues. Prompted by his wife’s illness to seek fresher climes, the artist relocated to the rural setting of Vence, whose natural, uncultivated landscape spoke directly to his fascination with raw visual languages. Presaging the flâneur-like figures who roamed the streets of his Paris Circus works, L’Ambulant offers a bucolic idyll: a vision of pastoral innocence executed with free, untamed brushstrokes. The figure’s distinctive posture later became the inspiration for a large-scale Hourloupe sculpture of the same name which, along with Clochepoche, was installed at the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Japan as part of the group L’Ambassade. Prior to its acquisition by Leslie Waddington, the work spent over thirty years in the collection of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty: the mining magnate, celebrated collector and connoisseur of books and manuscripts. Throughout his lifetime he worked in close partnership with the British Museum, where he served as a patron, and later donated nineteen Egyptian papyri to its holdings.