George Sand (1804-1876), the pen name of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Franceuil, was one of the most important French novelists of the nineteenth century. Her life dovetailed with a tumultuous period in French history that was bracketed by the Napoleonic Empire and the Third Republic, with revolution, war, and seesawing regimes in between. Her parents were from opposite classes, representing the two poles of French society frequently in conflict during this era. Her father was an aristocrat and a distant relative of the King of Poland, while her mother was the working-class daughter of a billiard hall owner and bird vendor. Though born in Paris, Sand spent much of her childhood at Nohant, the family estate in Berry where she was raised by her paternal grandmother. This house, surrounded by gardens and a woodland park, was enormously important to Sand, serving as a refuge and a source of inspiration for her myriad creative pursuits.

Sand’s extraordinary biography -- full of passionate love affairs, adventurous travel, and tireless productivity – reads like the stuff of Romantic novels. Indeed, her experiences informed many of her most famous literary works. Sand’s output is staggering – she wrote seventy novels in addition to numerous novellas, plays, criticism, and travel journals – testifying to her prodigious energy as well as her popularity. She was a friend to almost every important artistic and cultural figure of her day, including Balzac, Liszt, Delacroix, Flaubert, and Saint-Beuve, and a lover to Chopin, Musset, and the stage actress Marie Dorval. In an era when women had very little agency, she possessed remarkable independence and freedom. She actively engaged with current events, her political pragmatism extending to her personal style as she donned men’s clothing when riding horses or attending the theater, flouting French sumptuary laws. Most remarkable of all, she obtained a divorce from her husband, Casimir Dudevant, and won a series of legal battles to gain financial autonomy as well as custody of her two children, Maurice and Solange. Though she struggled at times, Sand was able to support her family through her work as a successful novelist. And yet, for all her achievements in the literary, political, and personal realms, her work as a visual artist remains little-known.

Like most women of Sand’s class, drawing instruction was a core component of her formative education, along with music and dance. Indeed, Sand drew consistently throughout her life, experimenting with a range of techniques and subject matter, and she often carried a sketchbook with her on her travels. Sand’s sharp eye for physiognomy and the expression of individual character served her equally well as both a writer and an artist. For instance, a series of early figure studies displays a remarkable facility with capturing likenesses, and she considered a career as a portraitist before her first novel appeared in 1830. During this period Sand also drew numerous flowers, plants, landscapes, and architectural views, the latter sometimes conjured from her imagination.  Sand’s attentiveness to the texture and detail of the world around her – that is, her ability to describe things using formal means of line, color, and shading -- parallels her facility with words, phrases, and figurative language in her writing. However, none of the drawings she produced before the 1860s prepares one for the radical inventiveness of her taches and dendrites, for it is these works that reveal the true force and originality of Sand’s gift as an artist.

Sand referred to her late watercolor and gouache drawings as “dendrites” (the term derived from her study of natural history and refers to mineralogical elements) or “aquarelles à l’écrasage” (crushed watercolors). She made them by applying dollops of pure pigment to a piece of thick Bristol paper, then pressing a second moistened sheet on top. When the sheet was lifted, a series of abstract, textured zones of color were revealed which she then augmented with watercolor and gouache additions. As Sand wrote, “This crushing produces ridges that are sometimes curious. With the aid of my imagination, I see woods, forests or lakes, and I accentuate these vague forms produced by chance.” The images found in the dendrites are thus a fusion of the real and the imaginary. 

Sand made these remarkable drawings during the last two decades of her life, but the majority were produced during the 1870s, a period of relative calm and stability. Sand spent her days at Nohant, enjoying the company of her grandchildren, pottering in the garden, creating amateur theatrical productions with her son, Maurice, and working on her dendrites and taches.