Avions reposant sur le terrain (recto)

When World War I began in August 1914, Lepère — then sixty-five years old — was too old to serve but too much an artist to ignore the transformation of French life. This drawing of airplanes resting on an airfield (recto) and its companion (verso) are among his earliest responses to the war. The early military aircraft, still crude and fragile, are depicted with Lepère's characteristic precision: the guy wires, the fabric-covered wings, the wooden propellers. But the drawing is also an elegy: these fragile machines, which Lepère draws with the same care he gave to Parisian street furniture, will be flown into combat by young men who will not return.

Lepère's war drawings are among the most affecting visual documents of 1914-18. Unlike the official war artists who were commissioned to produce heroic images, Lepère recorded what he actually saw: airplanes on a field, not airplanes in battle. This observational honesty — the same quality that made his Paris street scenes so valuable — gives his war drawings an authority that propaganda images lack.

Avions reposant sur le terrain records the moment when the airplane — still primitive, still almost hobbyist — became a weapon of war. Lepère draws these machines with the care of a man who understands that they will change the world.