Discover original sketches of The Little Prince | He was…

Sketches of The Little Prince, made by its author Antoine de Saint-Exupery, were discovered in an old building in northern Switzerland, where they had been stored by a real estate mogul among tens of thousands of people. 39, works of art.

Acquired more than 30 years ago at an auction in Switzerland, the sketches were kept in a cardboard binder and "are in very good condition," said Elisabeth Grossmann, curator of the Winterthur Foundation for Art, Culture and History. (Canton of Zurich). "On the other hand, many other works are in bad condition," he added, adding that the collection had been deposited in several parts of the city.

The binder contained three drawings related to The Little Prince – the drinker on his planet, the boa digesting an elephant with handwritten notes, the little prince and the fox – as well as a poem illustrated with a small drawing and a letter of Love addressed to his wife Consuelo.

As revealed by the local newspaper Landbote, the sketches, which are not dated, were made on paper-plane with Indian ink and watercolor.

The Zurich collector Bruno Stefanini, who died in December 2018 at age 94, had bought them at an auction in 1986 in Bevaix (West). Owner of one of the largest art collections in Switzerland, Stefanini created in 1980 this foundation in Winterthur to manage his heritage.

The Little Prince, written in New York by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry during the war and illustrated with his own watercolors, was published in 1943 in New York, then in 1946 in France, after the death of the aviator on 31 July 1944, on the coast of Marseille (south of France). The writer lived two years in Switzerland, from 1915 to 1917, in a religious institution in Friborg (center).

The original illustrations of his book are held at the Morgan Library in New York. Curator Elisabeth Grossmann told the Landbote newspaper that the Foundation would contact the Morgan Library to inform them of this "discovery".