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The Dreyfus Collection contains twenty-nine original drawings and sketches documenting the Affair. Though the majority of the illustrations are signed by or attributed to particular artists, the images themselves are not dated, and in some cases, the subjects depicted are not identified.
The noted French illustrator Louis Malteste (ca. 1870-1920) is represented quite well in the collection; indeed, 21 of the 29 illustrations are his creations. Malteste contributed illustrations to numerous publications, including Le Monde and Le Rire, ably working in both a journalistic and satiric style. The courtroom drawings in the collection are of note because of their impartiality, especially when compared to the anti-Dreyfusard caricatures in the Musee d'Horreur series. Indeed, Frank L. Emanuel, an art critic contemporary to Malteste, praised his illustrations of the Dreyfus Affair:
Among the workers on the French illustrated papers none produces a steadier flow of thoroughly conscientious, sound work than Louis Malteste. His are no chance effects, no tours deforce of mere eccentricity or charlatanism, but are the outcome of knowledge, hard work and assurance. He is a splendid draughtsman, unerring and direct, a seeker and finder of individual character, who does not attempt to electrify the world with his audacity, or his at-any-cost originality; for he is content to delineate for us, in masterly fashion, specimens of humanity as they appear to the man of keen discernment. At the time of the loathsome trials of Dreyfus, Malteste was one of several artists who specially distinguished themselves by splendid sketches of the actors concerned therein. In the writer's possession is a collection of these spirited and life-like drawings.
They are doubly admirable when one considers under what disadvantages they were produced. The task of the artist, told off to a sweltering, over-crowded court-house, surcharged with violent excitement, and commissioned to make portrait groups of interested persons, who are incessantly changing their positions, is none too easy. Yet these drawings show no hesitation; in each case some fleeting gesture or attitude is caught in a vigorous drawing, and fixed forever.1
Among the Malteste illustrations in the Collection are depictions of Dreyfus, Forzinetti, and Labori, among others.
Other illustrations in the Collection are by Moulignie and Louis Tinayre, both of whom were members of the Societe Artistique du Livre Illustre. Of particular interest is a portrait of Zola by the illustrator Couturier. Couturier, a prominent Dreyfusard, whose drawings of the Affair were popularized in postcards, was adamant in both his admiration of Zola and his belief that Dreyfus was a victim of grave injustice.
1 Emanuel, Frank L. The Illustrators of Montmartre. NY: Scribners, 1904. Accessed via Google Books, 29/03/2008.
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