However, Carle Vernet's true vocation lay more in drawing and lithography. He illustrated horse races, street scenes, salons and cafés, and contributed to the magazine Journal des dames et des modes, mainly presenting models of men's costumes. During the years of the Directory and the Consulate (1795-1804), the artist produced drawn studies and engravings representing the fashion extravagances of his contemporaries and Parisian society. From this period date the caricatures of the Incroyables, a series of satirical portraits of young socialites of the Directory who usually met in fashionable cafés or at the theater. Engraved in 1796 by Louis Darcis (1760-  1801) after Carle Vernet's drawings, these illustrations met with immediate popular success.



The drawings presented here illustrate two studies of a figure of Incroyable, represented in profile and from the back.  The drawings show an eccentric young man with a "dog-eared" hairstyle, a tie up to the lips, wearing a waistcoat with large turned-up lapels and a bicorne decorated with a cockade. He has a haughty air, holding a spiral cane in his hand. These two sheets were part of an album containing various sketches of uniforms, costumes and caricatures done in pen with a spontaneous and subtly elegant stroke. A very similar drawing also appears in the collections of the Musée du Louvre.



These two sheets, never engraved, constitute today a precious testimony to the critical spirit and the vivacity of this artist, capable of subtly sketching the expressions of the human being. His talent even amazed the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), who wrote this about him: "An astonishing man was this Carle Vernet. His work is a world, a little Human Comedy."