This large original double pencil drawing of James Watt’s Beam Engine was created by the young Baron Andre- Paul Bigot de Morogues in 1825 while studying at the Ecole Polytechnique. This famed Parisian Military School was a training ground for the best French military and civil engineers of its day, so it is unsurprising Bigot would be reproducing and learning about Watt’s ground-breaking engines which were still transforming Europe and the world at the start of the 19th Century.
Bigot himself was from a very influential French Noble family with his father (also Paul) a politician and important agrarian social reformer of his day, his mother a famous composer and his grandparents influential architects.
Dated and officially stamped by the School for 1825 the same year Bigot graduated, this steam engine drawing was most likely part of his final graded coursework. He would subsequently go on to join the Army as a Captain where he would sadly die in Algeria merely 6 years later. This has been drawn in pencil onto quality watermarked paper and was folded and carefully attached into his folio.
I have had this mounted as one double drawing, but you could just as easily cut the paper in the middle to frame both images separately. It is offered in very good condition with minimal browning.
Dimensions of mount: 50 cm wide x 63 cm high.
