Balthus is the pseudonym of Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola (1908‑2001). Born in Paris into a family of Polish descent, he came to the attention of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke when he was only 13 years old and all his life enjoyed the friendship and admiration of some of the greatest creative minds of his day, including Pierre Jean Jouve, Antonin Artaud, René Char, Alberto Giacometti, Georges Bataille, Federico Fellini and Albert Camus.
His career as a painter, too, was marked by places of outstanding beauty: Italy, where he spent the period from 1961 to 1976 as Director of the Villa Medici in Rome; the Morvan, where he lived from 1954 to 1961; and the Swiss Alps, which answered his need for solitude and grandeur. He lived in Switzerland with his wife, the artist Setsuko, from 1977 until his death.

Whether portraits, landscapes, city streets or interiors, Balthus’ work is classical in its restraint and its subject matter, its mastery and its composition, echoing the Italian Quattrocento, Courbet and Cézanne. But the sense of tradition is transmuted by his feeling for the secret life of people and things, by a sorcery that fixes silhouettes on canvas in a single moment of eternity in which, as Verlaine put it, “the indefinable and the precise are one”.

The drawing for Mouton Rothschild 1993 returns to a recurrent motif in his work: the dreamy adolescent girl, graceful and fragile…

The label is unusual in being one of the few for which two different versions exist. Shortly after its release in the United States, and although it had been approved by the American Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the label caused affront in certain circles. In response to the controversy, Baroness Philippine de Rothschild decided to withdraw the bottles released onto the American market and asked the BATF to rescind its approval of the label. She then created a special label for the US market from which Balthus’ drawing had been removed, leaving only the pastel background.