ABSTRACT
Vincent van Gogh was one of Paul Renouard's earlier admirers, and a devoted one: he mentioned the artist more than twenty times in the course of his correspondence, first in the spring of 1882. In Renouard's drawing, van Gogh found the text for a little sermon on the superiority of nature over art in the creation of art itself, and the opportunity of administering a gentle admonition to those whose contradictory judgment controlled the art world. The drawing clearly synthesizes, in a single image, two realms of subject matter which deeply moved him: the old, working-class man, and the weavers. The image of the weaver obsessed him during his stay in Nuenen. The ambiguity of Renouard's attitude toward the weavers he depicts in his "Industrial Crisis in Lyons" series is compounded by the dedication inscribed on the original drawing of Sans Travail: "a Monsieur Depaepe: souvenirs affectueux".
