After training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the studios of Jules-Élie Delaunay and then Gustave Moreau, Maxence spent his entire career trying to distance himself from academicism, without denying its contributions to his art. Recognisable by his winged helmet, which is barely traced out in the mass of the curly hair, the figure of Mercury is cast in profile. The undulating, spontaneous pencil strokes, render the floating hair with relative imprecision, compared with the finely modelling of the face. His dreamy, even enigmatic expression is similar to that of a likely Mercury, Tête divine ca. 1907 (private collection), in three-quarter pose, and a Fauness (private collection) in red chalk. The androgynous and timelessness features of the models stimulate Maxence’s imagination to reinterpret symbolic or legendary figures. His bourgeois and Catholic culture collides thus with a pagan and sensual iconography. Far from the subdued lyricism he brings to his elegant dames, heirs to the Pre-Raphaelites, Maxence smoothes the background and successfully renders the subtleties of flesh.

Part portrait, part symbol, this small format “tête de fantaisie” (fantasy head) is a reminder that Maxence won first prize for expressive head painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1894, despite criticisms of the immobility of his models. The homogenous composition that distinguishes the Mercury of 1907 is brought out even more subtly here. Where his vaporous brushstrokes accentuate the oneiric atmosphere in his paintings, they appear velvetier in this drawing, which seems detached from a study for a completed canvas. Sometimes reproached for his painting of absence, the artist creates here a sense of emptiness in an unreal space, where Mercury’s flowing hair and airy cape merge with the hazy landscape.

An accomplished portraitist, Maxence is also a skilled landscape draughtsman, as was pointed out by a painter visiting his studio in the Vaugirard, filled with “studies of landscapes and glaciers ”. Maxence outlines the profile of Mercury on an arid landscape, deepened by the blue summits reached by the meandering lines of a stream in a chromatic contrast with the warm shades of the face. These rocks are similar to the bluish glaciers Maxence paints in his Mercury and, more steeply, to the backgrounds of his Heracles Destroys the Birds of Stymphalos, ca. 1893 (Musée d’Orsay). Made up of echoes and borrowings from his own canvases, this uncanny study by Maxence contributes to the creation of a dense aesthetic whole.