Master Drawings 2010

STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART

Front cover: Pavel Tchelitchev (1898-1957) Portrait of a Young Man No.35

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Edgar Degas Coastal Landscape at Sunset No.26

STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART AN EXHIBITION OF

MASTER DRAWINGS NEW YORK 2010 at Mark Murray Fine Paintings 39 East 72nd Street New York, NY 10021

20th to 30th January, 2010 Weekdays 10:00 am - 6:00 pm Saturdays 11:00 am - 5:00 pm

A selection of the drawings will also be exhibited at The Salon du Dessin Place de la Bourse Paris

24th to 29th March, 2010

and in our London gallery at Riverwide House 6 Mason’s Yard Duke Street St. James’s London SW1Y 6BU

1st to 24th July, 2010

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am very grateful to my wife Laura, as well as to Lara Agius and the following people for their help and advice in the preparation of this catalogue and its accompanying exhibition: Lisa Banner, Deborah Bates, Gustavo Bestani, Babette Bohn, Hugo Chapman, Glynn Clarkson, Caroline Corrigan, Prudence Cuming Associates, Edouard Dumont, Gino Franchi, Andrea Gates, Dean Hearn, Andreas Heese, Emily Jones, Richard Kendall, Diane de Loës, Colin McCarthy, Elizabeth McKeown, Alexandra Murphy, Mark Murray, Anna Ongpin, Michelle Schröer Ongpin, Monica Ongpin, Guy Peppiatt, Emily Peters, Sophie Richard, Andrea Rico, Larry Sunden, Marlise van der Jagt, Jorge Virgili, Sarah Vowles, Aidan Weston-Lewis, Jenny Willings, Jennifer Wright and Ariel Zylberberg.

Stephen Ongpin

Dimensions are given in millimetres and inches, with height before width.

Unless otherwise noted, paper is white or whitish.

Please note that drawings are sold mounted but not framed.

Nos.18 and 33 in the catalogue are sold in association with EDIA, Paris.

All enquiries should be addressed to Stephen Ongpin or Lara Agius at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art 6 Mason’s Yard, Duke Street St James’s, London SW1Y 6BU Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 or [+44] (7710) 328-627 Fax [+44] (20) 7839-1504 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com or during the exhibition in New York [January 2010 only] at Tel. [+1] (917) 587-1183 Fax [+1] (212) 585-2383 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com

MASTER DRAWINGS PRESENTED BY

STEPHEN ONGPIN

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RIDOLFO DI DOMENICO GHIRLANDAIO Florence 1483-1561 Florence The Virgin and Child Pen and brown ink, the outlines pricked for transfer. Laid down on an 18th century English mount.

112 x 57 mm. (4 3/8 x 2 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: From an album of drawings compiled in England in the 18th century; Jonathan Richardson Senior, London (Lugt 2183 and on his mount); Probably his sale, London, Christopher Cock, 22 January to 8 February 1747; Ray Livingston Murphy, New York; His estate sale, London, Christie’s, 12 December 1985, lot 152 (as Fra Bartolommeo); Private collection, until 2008.

LITERATURE: William M. Griswold, ‘Early Drawings by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio’, Master Drawings, Autumn 1989, No.3, pp.218-219 and pl.25b; Roberta J. M. Olson, ed., The Art of Drawing: Selections from the Wheaton College Collection, exhibition catalogue, Norton, MA, 1997, p.44, under no.52.

Born in Florence in 1483, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio was the son of the eminent painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. Following his father’s death in 1494, Ridolfo continued his training with his uncle Davide, who had taken over the Ghirlandaio workshop. Vasari noted that Ridolfo also studied with Fra Bartolommeo, and indeed the influence of the latter is evident in much of his early work, as is that of Piero di Cosimo and Raphael, with whom Ridolfo was friendly during the latter’s stay in Florence. Ridolfo soon gained a measure of independence within the Ghirlandaio bottega, and several paintings of the early 1500s commissioned from Davide would appear to be by his nephew. As an independent artist, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio enjoyed a long and highly successful career, with a number of significant public commissions in Florence, including the fresco decoration of the Cappella della Signoria in the Palazzo Vecchio, begun in 1514, and two paintings for the Compagnia di San Zanobi, painted between 1516 and 1517. Ridolfo had a large and busy studio in Florence and counted among his patrons members of the Medici, Antinori and Ricasoli families. He produced altarpieces and frescoes for such Florentine churches as Santa Maria Novella, Santo Spirito and Santa Maria degli Angeli, as well as altarpieces for several towns outside Florence, and also enjoyed a particular reputation as a portrait painter.

Drawings by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio are rare, and only a handful of drawings have been firmly attributed to the artist. While determining a firm chronology for his style as a draughtsman is difficult, the present sheet would appear to be an early work, datable to the first decade of the 16th century. With its fine penwork applied with regular hatching and crosshatching, this small drawing is typical of the Ridolfo’s draughtsmanship, which ultimately derives from the example of his father Domenico’s drawings. The present sheet also displays the particular influence of the pen drawings of Fra Bartolommeo, to whom it was once attributed. Indeed, the drawing is derived from a pen and ink study of the Virgin and Child

by Fra Bartolommeo in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin1, which in turn was used for the figure of the Virgin in two early paintings of c.1497 by the Frate; an Annunciation in the Cathedral at Volterra2 and a Holy Family (fig.1) in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art3.

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A stylistically comparable pen drawing by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio of A Bishop and a Priest, with the same Richardson and later provenance as the present sheet, is in the collection of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts4. It has been suggested that both drawings may have been trimmed from the same sheet. Among other comparable pen drawings by Ridolfo is a study of The Virgin and Child with Saints Onofrius and Augustine in the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum in Budapest5 and a Saint Sebastian formerly in the Habich collection in Kassel6.

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ATTRIBUTED TO DAVID JORIS Ghent c.1501-1556 Basel The Raising of Lazarus Pen and brown and grey ink, with grey and red wash and touches of white heightening. Inscribed holbenis in brown ink at the lower centre. Signed or inscribed davit iores gelaessrijuer in brown ink on the verso.

219 mm. (8 5/8 in.) diameter.

David Joris (or Jorisz) was described by the early 18th century Dutch art historian Arnold Houbraken as an ingenious stained glass painter working in Delft, and he further noted that in his own day there were still extant examples of windows by the artist to be seen. According to a brief autobiographical account, after completing his training as a glazier in Antwerp, the young David Joris joined a group of Flemish craftsmen who left the city for Calais – then an English territory – where they were commissioned by a member of the court of Henry VIII to produce stained glass windows for a chapel. Joris claims to have accompanied his colleagues onwards to London in 1522, although there he fell ill and decided to return to Antwerp in 1524. As a stained glass painter, Joris’s work is close to that of Dirick Vellert of Antwerp, who may have been one of his teachers, as well as Barend van Orley (with whom Joris is thought to have travelled to Calais and London) and Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Apart from his work as a stained glass painter, Joris also provided a few designs for woodcuts to illustrate his own treatise, the allegorical Wonder-boeck (Book of Miracles), first published in Deventer in 1542.

Although he was by trade a glass painter, David Joris was better known in his lifetime as one of the most prominent Anabaptist leaders in the Netherlands. Baptised into the sect in 1533, he was regarded by its members as a prophet. He published over two hundred theological texts, often with reference to his visions and prophecies, of which the Wonder-boeck is the best known. Joris served as a bishop of the sect in Delft, and also presided over an Anabaptist congress in Bocholt in Westphalia in 1536. In 1538, however, he was condemned as a heretic and fled Delft, living first in Antwerp before eventually settling in Basel in 1544. He remained there, living under the assumed name of Johann van Bruck and amassing considerable wealth, until his death in 1556. Three years after his death, when it was discovered that the so-called ‘Devil from Delft’ had been secretly living in Basel, his body was disinterred (identified by his distinctive long red beard, as seen in a splendid portrait of Joris in the Öffentliche Kunstsammlungen in Basel), and was publicly burned.

The present sheet, which is a design for a stained glass roundel, is inscribed on the verso ‘davit iores gelaessrijuer’ (‘David Joris glasschrijver’, ie. a designer of glass windows) in a 16th century hand (fig.1). An attribution to the artist must remain tentative, however, as firmly attributed drawings by Joris are very rare, and only a handful of examples are known. Houbraken mentions two drawings by Joris, then in Dordrecht collections, which are known today; a Christ and the Centurion in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin1 and a study of Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter in the Detroit Institute of Arts2. Both drawings would appear to be early drawings by the artist, datable to the 1520s. A drawing of The Freeing of the Captives in the Kupferstichkabinett in Basel has also traditionally been attributed to Joris3. More recent scholarship has attributed to the artist, albeit tentatively, a group of four drawings of scenes from Genesis, previously given to Swart van Groningen, in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen4, as well as six drawings for stained glass roundels in the Historisches Museum in Basel5. Houbraken noted of Joris’s drawings that ‘they stand close to Lucas van Leiden and are done with the pen and lightly washed with the brush’6, while stylistic similarities may also be noted with the drawings of Jan Swart van Groningen – particularly evident in Joris’s early work – and Dirick Vellert.

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SEBALD BEHAM Nuremberg 1500-1550 Frankfurt-am-Main Recto: A Putto Beside a Flaming Urn Verso: Four Studies of Men’s Heads Pen and black ink, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk.

149 x 158 mm. (5 7/8 x 6 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester (according to an inscription on the former mount); August Grahl, Dresden (Lugt 1199), his stamp on the verso; Private collection, Europe.

Sebald Beham1 and his younger brother Barthel, together with Heinrich Aldegrever, Georg Pencz and other German printmakers active in the first half of the 16th century, were known as the ‘Little Masters’, due to the small size of much of their work. Both Beham brothers are thought to have studied with Albrecht Dürer in Nuremberg, and Sebald produced his first prints in 1518; engravings which were strongly indebted to the example of Dürer. Barthel Beham’s first prints date to around 1520, by which time Sebald had also taken up etching, again probably inspired by Dürer. (The younger Beham’s output as a printmaker was, however, considerably less than that of Sebald.) Sebald also worked as a designer of stained glass panels, with considerable success. In 1525, however, both Beham brothers were expelled from Nuremberg on the grounds of sedition, and Sebald spent much of the next ten years working in Augsburg, Ingolstadt, Munich (where a woodcut was commissioned from him by the Emperor Charles V) and Mainz, where he entered the service of the archbishop, Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, for whom he painted The Story of King David, now in the Louvre. Sebald Beham eventually settled in Frankfurt around 1530, taking up citizenship there in 1540. He developed a close collaboration with Christian Egenolph, founder of the first printing press in Nuremberg, for whom he illustrated several religious books. Beham produced a large number of prints of ornamental and decorative designs, many of which were reproduced by goldsmiths, while other prints by him were copied by later artists.

He is also known to have received commissions for manuscript illuminations, including two prayer books for Cardinal Albrecht, completed in 1531. In his lifetime, Beham produced some 270 engravings and etchings, and designed over a thousand woodcuts.

Drawings by Sebald Beham are relatively uncommon.

Only a few may be related to his prints, and the present 1. sheet is one of these. Both sides of this fine drawing are preparatory studies for two woodcuts2 used as illustrations for Das Kunst und Lehrbüchlin Sebalden Behams, a treatise on design and draughtsmanship written and illustrated by Beham. First published by Christian Egenolph in Frankfurt in 1546, the book was illustrated with twenty-six woodcuts by Beham; it proved very popular, and was reprinted several times until an eighth edition in 1605.

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The related woodcut of the putto with a flaming urn (fig.1) in the Kunst und Lehrbüchlin is signed with Beham’s monogram and dated 15463. A stylistically comparable drawing by the artist of a putto holding a sickle and a bunch of grapes (fig.2), dated 1542, was formerly in the Edmund Schilling collection and is today in the British Museum4.

The woodcut of the four male heads (fig.3) is signed with the artist’s monogram, but undated5. It is also inscribed Hie sihest du die vier angesichter ausgemacht und abgesetzt mitt / scharpfierung und schatten ausserhalb der linien reiß sie nach (‘Here you see the four faces which are offset with shading and shadows trace them outside of the lines’) in letterpress above the image. In the Kunst und Lehrbüchlin the woodcut follows another, related print of the same subject of four heads drawn within a single grid, but without hatching6. Thirteen of the twenty woodcuts in the 1546 drawing manual are also studies of heads, and indeed Beham’s interest in expressive heads can also be seen in his earliest known drawing, a sheet of studies of eight heads, dated 1518, in the collection of the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig7.

Although the drawings on each side of the present sheet are in the same direction as the woodcuts and slightly larger in scale, the several slight differences between them, as well as the evident pentimenti (particularly visible in the right hand of the putto), point to the fact that this double-sided drawing is an autograph study for the two Kunst und Lehrbüchlin woodcuts. The attribution of the present sheet to Beham has been further confirmed by Dr. Matthias Mende and Dr. Kurt Löcher.

The verso of this drawing bears the collector’s mark of the 19th century German portrait painter August Grahl (1791-1868), who worked in Vienna, Berlin and Dresden, as well as in England. Grahl began collecting drawings on a visit to Italy in 1821.

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GIULIO CAMPI Cremona c.1508-1573 Cremona A Putto Carrying a Basket of Fruit Red chalk, with touches of white heightening. Squared for transfer in black chalk. Laid down. Inscribed Parmigiano in brown ink at the lower right.

177 x 102 mm. (7 x 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Grand Ducal Collection of Saxe-Weimar, Weimar, until c.1918; By descent in the Saxe-Weimar family until 1999; Anonymous (a Saxe-Weimar descendant) sale, London, Phillips, 7 July 1999, lot 132; Trinity Fine Art, London, in 2001.

LITERATURE: Giulio Bora, ‘La collezione Clary-Aldringen. Integrazione e aggiunte’, in Maria Grazia Balzarini and Roberto Cassanelli, ed., Fare storia dell’arte: Studi offerti a Liana Castelfranchi, Milan, 2000, pp.117118, fig.69.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Trinity Fine Art Ltd. at the Salon du Dessin, Dessins Anciens de l’Ecole Lombarde, 2001.

Giulio Campi probably received his initial artistic training, alongside his younger brothers Antonio and Vincenzo, with his father Galeazzo Campi in Cremona. He worked mainly as a fresco painter in the churches of his native town, and his chief works include scenes from the life of Saint Agatha in the church of Sant’Agata, completed in 1537, and a series of frescoes in the transepts of the monastic church of San Sigismondo, painted between 1539 and 1542. He collaborated with Camillo Bocaccino on the temporary decorations for the entrance of the Emperor Charles V into Cremona in 1541 and also worked as an architect, involved in the rebuilding and decoration of Santa Margherita in Cremona in 1547. Both Giulio and Antonio Campi received a number of significant commissions beyond Cremona, notably in Milan – where their work was to have an influence on the young Caravaggio – and in Brescia, where they painted a number of canvases for the Palazzo della Loggia from 1549 onwards. Giulio is likely to have made a trip to Rome in the middle of the 1550s, and in 1557 undertook the fresco decoration of the first bay of San Sigismondo, for which he also painted an altarpiece in 1565. Near the end of his career he painted a several works for the Duomo in Cremona, notably the large organ shutters, and worked in the church of Santa Maria di Campagna in Piacenza.

Drawings in red chalk by Giulio Campi are rare. The present sheet is a preparatory study for part of the decoration of the abbey church of San Sigismondo, just outside Cremona, painted in 1542. The putto in this drawing appears as part of the decorative border on the right hand side of the transept, adjacent to a fresco of Saint Augustine (fig.1). The drawing displays the particular influence of Parmigianino, to whom the sheet was in fact once attributed. Campi’s frescoes at San Sigismondo, with their combination of Mannerist elements inspired by Giulio Romano, Parmigianino and Pordenone, were to have a significant impact on Cremonese painters of the succeeding generation.

This drawing was part of the Grand Ducal Collection of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach at Weimar until 1918, when the grand duchy came to an end and the collection was divided between the SaxeWeimar family and the Schlossmuseum in Weimar.

The present sheet remained in the possession of a descendant of the Saxe-Weimar family until its appearance at auction in London in 1999.

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DANIELE RICCIARELLI, CALLED DANIELE DA VOLTERRA Volterra 1509-1566 Rome A Striding Figure, after Francesco Salviati Black chalk. Made up at the top edge with another strip of paper.

432 x 255 mm. (17 x 10 in.) [sheet, including made-up area] PROVENANCE: Francis Abbott, Edinburgh (Lugt 970), his drystamp at the lower right; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 9 April 1981, lot 76 (as Francesco Salviati); Yvonne Tan Bunzl, London, in 1984; Acquired from her in 1984 by Jeffrey Horvitz, Beverly Farms, Massachusetts (his collector’s mark, not in Lugt, stamped on the verso).

LITERATURE: Linda Wolk-Simon, Italian Old Master Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz, exhibition catalogue, Gainesville and elsewhere, 1991-1993, pp.14-17, no.4 (as Francesco Salviati); Luisa Mortari, Francesco Salviati, Rome, 1992, pp.225-226, no.322 (as a fine copy after Francesco Salviati: ‘un bel disegno, di grande vigore . . . con ogni probabilità una copia di buona mano da un disegno del Salviati.’); Alessandro Nova, ‘Santa Maria dell’Anima: Cappella dei Margravi’, in Anna Coliva, ed., Francesco Salviati: Affreschi romani, Milan, 1998, p.45.

EXHIBITED: London, Yvonne Tan Bunzl, Old Master Drawings, 1984, no.9 (as Francesco Salviati); Gainesville, FL, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, and elsewhere, Italian Old Master Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz, 1991-1993, no.4 (as Francesco Salviati).

Daniele da Volterra was trained in Siena and arrived in Rome in the mid-1530s, working as an assistant to Perino del Vaga. He was to have a career of nearly thirty years in Rome, and soon began receiving significant independent commissions from such noble patrons as the Massimi and Orsini families. Around 1543 he painted a Deposition for the Orsini chapel in the church of Santa Trinità dei Monti, which is today his best-known work; other frescoes by the artist for the same chapel are now lost. In the 1540s Daniele became a friend and protégé of Michelangelo, and towards the end of the decade had begun to work in collaboration with the master, using the latter’s drawings for his own compositions. Later commissions included a fresco for the Palazzo Farnese, completed by 1548, and an Assumption of the Virgin for the Della Rovere chapel, also in Santa Trinità dei Monti, which was completed in the early 1550s. In the later part of his career Daniele was more active as a sculptor and stuccatore than as a painter, although in 1564 he was tasked with the commission to overpaint the genitalia of the figures in Michelangelo’s fresco of The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel.

This large drawing is a copy after a figure of an apostle in the fresco of The Pentecost (fig.1) painted by Francesco Salviati (1510-1563) on the apsidal vault of the Margrave chapel in the church of Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome1. (The fresco is today in a poor state of conversation, and this apostle – which appears at the right-hand edge of the composition – is very difficult to see clearly today, apart from the head, bent right arm and torso of the figure.) Previously thought to be a preparatory drawing by Salviati himself, the present sheet has only recently been attributed to Daniele da Volterra, here copying the work of one of his artistic contemporaries in Rome. Salviati worked on the Pentecost fresco between 1541 and 1543, after which he returned to Florence for a brief period before completing the project in 1550. Daniele was working at Santa Trinità at the same time, and may easily have studied Salviati’s vault fresco in Santa Maria dell’Anima soon after it was finished. It is perhaps more likely, however, that Daniele was here copying a now-lost drawing by Salviati, rather than the fresco itself.

The precise technique of this drawing, with fine and delicate strokes of black chalk applied with a precision that allows for subtle tonal effects, is typical of Daniele da Volterra’s refined draughtsmanship. Daniele was particularly influenced by the robust chalk drawings of Perino del Vaga and, in particular, Michelangelo, several of whose drawings he is thought to have owned. (The 17th century biographer Giovanni Baglione noted that Daniele’s drawings, like those of Michelangelo, were greatly admired by collectors of the period.) The drawings of Daniele da Volterra, which are almost always in black chalk, may be divided into two main groups; large-scale, highly finished individual figure studies and smaller compositional sketches. The drawings are characterized by a solidity of form and a certain emotional restraint; as Paul Joannides has noted, ‘That Daniele produced some of the most beautiful drawings of the mid-Cinquecento can hardly be doubted, but they strike the viewer, as Daniele’s art in general struck Vasari, as the product of effort and labor rather than inspiration. But if they lack vivacity and sprezzatura, they possess, in compensation, a density which is as much that of thought as of technique, and a clarity and precision so far transcending craftsmanly care to suggest emotion regulated.’2 Among stylistically comparable black chalk drawings by Daniele da Volterra is a study of the Virgin and Child in the Uffizi3, which is preparatory for an early altarpiece of The Virgin and Child with Saints, dated 1545, and a study of an Apostle in the British Museum4, which was used for the Della Rovere chapel Assumption of the Virgin of c.1550-1552. Another black chalk drawing by Daniele formerly attributed to Salviati is an Aeneas in the Albertina in Vienna5, which is a preparatory study for a painting of Mercury and Aeneas of c.1556 in a private collection in Stockholm.

Although the careers of Daniele da Volterra and Francesco Salviati were closely intertwined, in later years the relationship came to be particularly strained. The two artists were in competition for a number of important Roman commissions, notably the decoration of the Sala Regia in the Vatican. Daniele had originally won the commission from Pope Paul III to complete the work left unfinished by Perino del Vaga at his death in 1547. He started working on the room around 1549, but the death of the Pope led to a renewed rivalry for the commission, and after a delay of ten years Salviati was eventually awarded the project. His decision to destroy part of the decoration earlier painted by Daniele only intensified the animosity between the two artists.

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JACOPO LIGOZZI Verona c.1550-1627 Florence Ocnus: An Allegory of the Futility of Labour Pen and brown ink and wash, heightened with white, over an underdrawing in black chalk, on blue paper. The outlines of the main figure indented for transfer and the verso washed red. Inscribed Giorgio Vasari [cancelled] in brown ink at the lower right.

200 x 151 mm. (7 7/8 x 6 in.)

PROVENANCE: Marie-Guillaume-Thérèse de Villenave, Paris (Lugt 2598); Possibly his posthumous sale, Paris, 84 rue de Vaugirard, 1-5 February 1847; Louis Valentin, Paris (Lugt 2498), his mark on the old mount; Francesco Dubini, Milan; Ulrico Hoëpli, Milan; Anonymous sale, Milan, Finarte, 21-22 April 1975, lot 43; Marcello Aldega, Rome and Margot Gordon, New York, in 1987; P. & D. Colnaghi, London; Private collection, Connecticut, until 2007.

Although born and raised in Verona, Jacopo Ligozzi spent almost the entirety of his long career in Florence, where he arrived in 1577. Trained as a miniaturist (it is interesting to note that even in his large paintings he often signed his name as ‘Jacopo Ligozzi miniator’), he was admitted into the Florentine Accademia del Disegno in 1582. Ligozzi worked as court artist for four successive Medici Grand Dukes, from Francesco I to Ferdinando II, executing numerous designs for tapestries, furniture, glass, pietra dura and metalwork. According to Medici inventories, however, much of his work took the form of small-scale paintings, often of a devotional or emblematic nature. Ligozzi’s first important public commissions came in the 1590s, when he painted two large historical scenes on slate for the Salone dei Cinquecento of the Palazzo Vecchio, and he later painted altarpieces for such local churches as Santa Maria Novella, San Marco and San Giovannino degli Scolopi. He also painted altarpieces for churches elsewhere in Tuscany; in Bibbiena, Poppi, Arezzo and at Monte Oliveto Maggiore. Ligozzi’s best-known works as a painter are, however, a series of seventeen lunette frescoes of scenes from the life of Saint Francis for the church of Ognissanti in Florence, completed in 1600. Among his late altarpieces is a Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence for the Florentine church of Santa Croce, painted in 1611.

Jacopo Ligozzi was a superbly gifted draughtsman, and was esteemed as such by his contemporaries.

As one modern scholar has noted, ‘The most authentic, coherent vein of Jacopo’s work is expressed in his graphic output: he was a born draughtsman, a draughtsman of immense precision, of drawings so meticulous as to occasionally become for the artist and his commissioners works of art for their own sake, and sought after as such.’1 It is interesting to note that, when Ligozzi was engaged as a court artist by the Medici Granducal court in the early 1620s, the terms of his employment were tied to his output as a draughtsman. As the document noted, ‘If there is no occasion to employ him, have him do drawings to keep him in the gallery . . . just have him draw, leave it up to him, whatever he does he will produce sheets worth keeping, and for that very reason we want him at court.’2 Ligozzi’s drawings exhibited a wide range of subject matter that included religious scenes, allegories and costume studies, as well as literary subjects, notably a series of episodes from Dante’s Divina Commedia, drawn between 1587 and 1588. In keeping with Grand Duke Francesco I’s interest in natural history, Ligozzi also produced a large number of scientific drawings depicting specimens of fishes, birds and flowers in the Granducal collections. An album of such drawings is recorded in the Medici Guaradroba in 1619, and a large number of natural history drawings by Ligozzi are today in the Uffizi; some of these drawings were used to illustrate the treatises of the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldovrandi. Ligozzi also provided a number of designs for printmakers such as Agostino Carracci, Philippe Thomassin and the

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chiaroscuro woodcutter Andrea Andreani. Whatever the subject, Ligozzi’s drawings are invariably highly finished, often heightened with touches of gold, and combine a meticulous technique with a miniaturist’s attention to detail.

In its use of blue paper and its stylistic relationship with late 16th century Veronese and Venetian draughtsmanship, the present sheet may tentatively be dated to the early part of Ligozzi’s career, while he was working in Verona or shortly after his arrival in Florence in 1577. Jennifer Montagu has pointed out that the unusual subject of this drawing derives from an ancient Greek painting by Polygnotus of the mythological character of Ocnus (or Oknos); a figure symbolic of futility, or unending labour. Ocnus was condemned to spend eternity weaving a rope of straw which, in turn, was eaten by a donkey almost as fast as it is made. As Montagu notes, Ocnus ‘had an extravagant wife who spent everything he earned by his labours; he is represented as a man twisting a cord, which an ass standing by eats as soon as he makes it, whence the proverb ‘the cord of Ocnus’ often applied to a labour which meets no return, and is totally lost.’3 This unusual subject is extremely rare in 16th or 17th century Italian art.

Many of Ligozzi’s highly finished drawings were executed as independent works of art, and this may be true of the present sheet. However, the partially incised contours of the figure, and the red wash applied to the verso of the sheet, would suggest that the drawing may have been preparatory to a print, possibly a chiaroscuro woodcut. A handful of allegorical drawings by Ligozzi were in fact reproduced as chiaroscuro woodcuts in c.1585 by the Mantuan engraver Andrea Andreani (c.1546-1623)4, and the artist’s technique, with its emphasis on strong lines and tonal contrasts, lent itself well to the particular demands of the chiaroscuro medium.

Ligozzi’s reputation as a designer of innovative allegorical compositions was well established early in his career and, as one scholar has recently noted, he ‘produced (and was most probably the originator of) ingenious allegorical compositions . . . The content of Ligozzi’s drawings is often very unusual and their sources are extremely unexpected.’5 Similar allegorical subjects occur in other finished drawings by Ligozzi, such as an Allegory of Envy and an Allegory of Vanity in the Kestner Museum in Hannover6, both signed and dated 1590, as well as an Allegory of Avarice in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.7 and an Allegory of Charity, Justice and Strength in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris8.

Marie-Guillaume-Thérèse de Villenave (1762-1846) formed a collection of books, drawings and more than 30,000 portrait engravings. The present sheet does not, however, appear among the almost seven hundred drawings from Villenave’s collection sold in 1842, four years before his death9. The drawing later passed into the collection of the late 19th century wine merchant and collector Louis Valentin, who owned a large and important group of Old Master and 19th century prints.

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CARRACCI SCHOOL c.1580-1600 The Head of a Sleeping Boy Red chalk. A study of a neck and chin (a fragment of a larger drawing) in red chalk on the verso.

111 x 121 mm. (4 3/8 x 4 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Part of an album assembled before 1729 by François Desmarais, Nantes; The album broken up and sold (‘Collection de dessins anciens des ecoles françaises et etrangeres des XVIe. XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Le Blanc], 2 March 1984, the present sheet as lot 99 (as School of Veronese, 16th Century), with the sale stamp D (not in Lugt), stamped in black ink at the lower right; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 12 January 1990, lot 12 (as School of the Carracci).

The attribution of this small and charming sheet has remained difficult to determine, although it would certainly seem to be the work of a Bolognese artist close to the Carracci, and datable to the late 16th century. Indeed, the drawing may be included among a small group of Correggesque figure studies in red chalk that have been variously attributed to Annibale Carracci, Ludovico Carracci or Pietro Faccini; one such drawing is a study of a sleeping youth in the collection of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth, where it has been traditionally attributed to Annibale Carracci1.

On the basis of photographs, Babette Bohn has suggested a possible attribution to Ludovico Carracci for the present sheet. She further points out that that stylistic comparisons may be made with a handful of chalk drawings of the late 1580s by Ludovico, including a study of a nude boy asleep in the British Museum2, a sheet of studies of heads in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles3 and a red chalk study of the head of a sleeping boy in a private collection4. Each of these drawings has previously borne attributions to Annibale Carracci and, like the present sheet, underlines the difficulty of separating the early chalk drawings of Annibale and Ludovico Carracci.

The present sheet was once part of an album of drawings compiled by the 18th century French collector François Desmarais (or Des Marais), the contents of which were dispersed at auction in 1984. The title page of the album bore the inscription ‘Dessins origin:x / des plus fameux / Peintres, Rassemblez / Par M. Des Marais: / 1729:’.

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REMIGIO CANTAGALLINA Borgo San Sepolcro 1582/3-c.1656 Florence A Tuscan Landscape with Figures by a River Pen and brown ink and wash, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in brown ink.

260 x 407 mm. (10 1/4 x 16 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly from an album of 105 drawings of Tuscan views, mostly by Cantagallina, inscribed ‘Vedute di Toscana d’Jacopo Ligozzi’, and with provenance as follows: The Rev. Dr. Henry Wellesley, Oxford; His posthumous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 June 1866 onwards, lot 954 (‘A Portfolio with leaves, containing 105 drawings in Pen and Sepia, Views in Tuscany, by Jacopo Ligozzi’), bt. Noseda for £1.15.0; Sir David Kelly, London; His sale, London, Hodgson’s, 26 November 1954, lot 596 (‘Original Sepia and Wash Drawings of Scenery, Antiquities, Buildings etc. of Tuscany by Jacopo Ligozzi, Remigio Cantagallina and others’), bt. Calmann; Hans M. Calmann, London; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 4 July 1985, lot 45; Private collection, England, until 2008.

Said to be a pupil of Giulio Parigi, Remigio Cantagallina produced his earliest known works, a series of landscape etchings, in 1603. Relatively little is known of his life and career, which was spent mostly in Florence, although a trip to Flanders around 1612-1613 is documented by a number of drawings in a sketchbook today in the Musée Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Described by Filippo Baldinucci as ‘famous for his landscape drawings in pen’ (‘celebre in disegnar paesi a penna’), Cantagallina was particularly influenced by the work of such Northern artists as Paul Bril. He was, in turn, to be an important influence on the later generation of landscape draughtsmen working in Florence, including Ercole Bazzicaluva, Baccio del Bianco and Jacques Callot, whom Cantagallina seems to have befriended on his arrival in Florence in the early years of the 17th century, and may have helped to train.

A prolific artist, Cantagallina produced a large number of highly finished topographical views of Florence and other sites in Tuscany, drawn with warm brown washes, that are among his finest achievements.

Many of these drawings, such as a remarkable large View of Siena in the Uffizi, were almost certainly intended as independent works of art. His draughtsmanship was closely related to his work as a printmaker, and he produced over sixty etchings, mostly of pastoral landscapes and festival scenes. (Only one painting by his hand is known, however; a Last Supper painted in 1604 in collaboration with his brother Antonio, intended for a monastery in his native town of Sansepolcro and now in the Museo Civico there.) The largest collection of landscape drawings by Cantagallina, numbering more than two hundred sheets, is in the Uffizi in Florence; one of these, a drawing dated 1655, is the artist’s last known dated work.

This large, finished landscape drawing is a typical example of the work for which Cantagallina is best known, and for which he was praised by Baldinucci. Almost certainly intended as an autonomous work of art, it is likely to have come from an album of over a hundred landscape drawings, formerly in the collection of the scholar and antiquary Henry Wellesley (1791-1866), that appeared at auction in London in 1954. Although inscribed ‘Vedute di Toscana d’Jacopo Ligozzi’, the album was in fact largely made up of highly finished drawings by Cantagallina of various dates, several of which were signed. The album was acquired by the dealer Hans Calmann and the drawings were dispersed over the next several years; examples are today in the Frits Lugt collection at the Institut Néerlandais in Paris, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Princeton University Art Museum, and elsewhere.

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GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, CALLED IL GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna The Head of a Man Wearing a Hat, in Profile to the Right Pen and brown ink. Touches of red wash at the upper right corner of the sheet, outside the image.

258 x 171 mm. (10 1/8 x 6 3/4 in.)

Watermark: Coat of arms.

PROVENANCE: Miss D. Davin; Her sale, London, Sotheby’s, 20 July 1967, lot 11; Miss Carla Davin1; Her sale, London, Christie’s, 7 April 1970, lot 97 (bt. Woodner for 350 gns.); Ian Woodner, New York; His posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 2 July 1991, lot 109; Private collection, England.

EXHIBITED: New York, William H. Schab Gallery, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum and Indianapolis, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Woodner Collection I: A Selection of Old Master Drawings before 1700, 1971-1972, no.46.

The biographer Giovanni Battista Passeri, on a visit to Guercino’s studio, noted that he saw there ‘a number of drawings by his hand, of dances, festivals, and weddings, all decorously conducted in his Rocca di Cento, imitating the ideas, the demeanour and the appearance of these rustics, and of these foretane of the country, which were, in truth, curious and well-captured.’ The present sheet is a fine example of the type of character drawing Passeri would have seen, and belongs with a group of studies, almost certainly drawn from life, which Guercino produced throughout his career. The result of the artist’s acute observation of the people he saw around him in the small town of Cento, these character studies – of shopkeepers, peasants, labourers, noblemen and so forth – also allowed him to indulge his interest in physiognomy. Such genre subjects were introduced into Italy by German and Netherlandish prints of the 16th century, and seem to have been particularly influential on Bolognese artists. Guercino may also have been inspired by the example of the Carracci, who were among the pioneers in recognizing that peasants, village folk and similar mundane characters were interesting artistic subjects in their own right.

Nicholas Turner has noted of Guercino’s drawings of this type that ‘they are characterized by a rapid touch, an economy of means, and a remarkable acuteness of observation, many of them clearly based on scenes taken directly from life. The foibles of the men, women, and children of all rank who were his unwitting subjects are captured with great immediacy, which has always given these drawings a special appeal.

Although the nobles, gentlefolk, and clergy, largely from his native Cento, came under his powerful scrutiny, the most frequent subjects were the peasant folk, or contadini, for whom it seems the painter had a particular affection.’2 The vigorous pen technique of this drawing provides a fine example of the ‘gustosa facilità’ for which the Bolognese biographer and art historian Carlo Cesare Malvasia praised Guercino’s drawings. The model for the present sheet is identical to that used for the figure of Cato in two drawings by Guercino in the collection of the Royal Library at Windsor Castle3. Both Windsor drawings are preparatory studies for Guercino’s painting of Cato at Utica Saying Farewell to his Son After Having Decided to Commit Suicide of 1637, today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille4, although in the final painting Cato is depicted with a long beard. Another preparatory drawing for the Marseille painting, showing Cato without the cap seen in both of the Windsor drawings and the present sheet, is in the collection of Sir Denis Mahon5.

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FRANCESCO MONTELATICI, CALLED CECCO BRAVO Florence c.1601-1661 Innsbruck Saint Agatha Red and black chalk. Inscribed Montelatici Francesco, detto Cecco Bravo – / fiorentino – m 1661 / ved: Orlandi. 1.195. in brown ink on the backing sheet.

249 x 193 mm. (9 3/4 x 7 5/8 in.)

Little is known of the artistic education of Francesco Montelatici, known as Cecco Bravo apparently on account of his violent temperament. He receives only a passing mention in Filippo Baldinucci’s account of 17th century Florentine painting, as a student of Giovanni Bilivert. Cecco Bravo is also thought to have been a pupil of Domenico Passignano and Matteo Rosselli, under whose supervision he worked on several fresco cycles in Florence in the 1620s. By 1629 he had established his own studio in Florence and was admitted into the Accademia del Disegno. Apart from a few months in Emilia Romagna and Venice between 1630 and 1631, Cecco Bravo worked in Florence and Tuscany for most of his career.

In 1633 he decorated the cloister of the church of Santissima Annunziata in Pistoia with a cycle of lunette frescoes of six scenes from the life of Bonaventura Bonaccorsi. Among his most significant works in Florence were wall frescoes for the Sala degli Argenti in the Palazzo Pitti, painted in the late 1630s, while he also contributed to the decoration of the Casa Buonarroti on the Via Ghibellina. The later years of his career were spent largely painting easel pictures, many of which are recorded in a 1660 inventory of his studio but are now lost. In 1660 he was summoned to the court of the Archduke Ferdinand Karl of Austria at Innsbruck, where he died the following year.

Cecco Bravo has only relatively recently been recognized by art historians as one of the most original and distinctive artists of the Florentine Seicento. As Miles Chappell has noted, ‘his paintings, with their deep, at times passionate expression, forceful figures and impetuous definition with a loaded brush, represent almost a painterly inversion of the Florentine tradition of rigorous disegno . . . a stylistic identity that is at once spirited, elegant and unique in its pictorial dissolution of form.’1 He was a gifted draughtsman, and although a large number of drawings by him survive, only a handful may be related to surviving paintings. Significant groups of drawings by the artist – including numerous studies of male nudes, saints, religious subjects and a series of mysterious allegorical drawings known as the artist’s ‘sogni’, or ‘dreams’ – are in the collections of the Uffizi, the Louvre, the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence, and elsewhere.

The present sheet is a fine and typical example of Cecco Bravo’s manner, characterized by the use of a combination of red and black chalk and a feathery, seemingly insubstantial depiction of form. (Also typical of the artist is the slightly curved posture of the standing saint.) A closely comparable drawing by Cecco Bravo of Saint Bridget of Sweden, also in red and black chalk, is in a private collection in Lisbon2, while another stylistically and thematically comparable drawing is a study of Five Martyr Saints in the Louvre3.

This drawing is unrelated to any surviving painting by the artist. However, it may be noted that in 1655, near the end of his career, Cecco Bravo received a commission for an altarpiece of The Madonna with Saints Mary Magdalene and Catherine of Alexandria for a chapel in the church of San Romano in Pisa, where it remains today4. At the same time, he also painted two canvases of standing female saints for the entrance walls of the same chapel; a Saint Lucy and a Saint Agatha, both of which were still in situ in 1887, when they are mentioned in a guide to the church published that year, but are now lost. The present sheet may have been a preparatory study for the latter painting.

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JOSEPH GOUPY Nevers 1686-c.1770 London A Mountainous Landscape with Figures, after Salvator Rosa Gouache. The verso blackened. Traces of framing lines in gold and black at the edges. Inscribed with initials G(or C?)LN in brown ink at the lower right.

265 x 411 mm. (10 3/8 x 16 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly the posthumous Goupy sale, London, Langford and Son, 3 April 1770; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 26 November 1968, lot 156 (as Marco Ricci, Saint John the Baptist Preaching), bt. Rogers for 420 gns.

Born in France, Joseph Goupy worked as a painter, draughtsman and printmaker in England, where he had settled by 1711, becoming one of the first members of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s Academy of Painting and Drawing in London. Goupy made a particular specialty of small-scale copies in gouache of Old Master paintings; these were greatly admired and avidly sought by collectors and connoisseurs, and several of his landscape gouaches – both original compositions and copies after the work of other artists – were also published as prints. Goupy’s gouache technique may have been influenced by the work of Marco Ricci, whom he met in England and with whose support he was engaged on the painting of sets for the Royal Academy of Music in the 1720s. Goupy became a close friend of the composer George Frideric Handel, and decorated sets for several of his operas. He was employed by King George I on the restoration of four of Andrea Mantegna’s series of paintings of the Triumphs of Caesar, for which he was paid £200, and in 1736 was appointed ‘Cabinet Painter’ and curator to Frederick, Prince of Wales.

Among the contents of Leicester House, the Prince’s London residence, were noted several gouaches after Old Master paintings by Goupy, who also decorated the Chinese Pavilion at Kew Gardens. The artist is only rarely documented after the Prince of Wales’s death in 1751, however, and died in poverty some twenty years later.

The present sheet records the composition of a now-lost painting by Salvator Rosa, which is only known today from an etching in reverse by Goupy himself (fig.1), which is entitled ‘Augures’ (The Augurs) and inscribed ‘Salvator Rosa pinxit’ and ‘Jos. Goupy fecit Londini’1. The fact that the verso of this gouache is blackened would suggest that the present sheet was, in all likelihood, the artist’s preparatory drawing for the etching, which he then worked up with gouache to create an independent, finished work of art2.

Goupy is known to have made etchings after some ten paintings by Rosa, as noted by the 18th century writer George Vertue, who recorded prints ‘Etch’d by Joseph Goupy from several rare original pictures of Salvator Rosa in the Collections of the Curious. This work, gave great satisfaction being done in the stile of Salvator, well imitating his freedom & Spirit.’3 As the contemporary English artist and writer William Gilpin further noted, ‘GOUPY very happily caught the manner of SALVATOR; and in some things excelled him.

There is a richness in his execution, and a spirit in his trees, which SALVATOR wants . . . Landscape is his fort.’4 A modern scholar has echoed this view: ‘If one was to state a preference for an engraver [in reproducing the compositions of Salvator Rosa] then the work of Joseph Goupy stands out for its sensitivity, particularly as he adopts Rosa’s etching style in which to reproduce the paintings – doing Rosa in reverse, as it were.’5 A smaller gouache variant of this composition, with numerous differences and less overtly horizontal in format, is in the British Museum6.

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JEAN-BAPTISTE DESHAYS Colleville 1729-1765 Paris Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife Pen and brown ink and brown wash, extensively heightened with white, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Signed and dated Deshays. 1762. in brown ink at the lower right.

166 x 240 mm. (6 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly the posthumous vente Deshays, Paris, Pierre Remy, 26 March 1765 onwards, as part of lot 39 (‘Cinq autres idem, & la Chasteté de Joseph, faits à la plume, au bistre & rehausses de blanc, sur papier bleu.’) bt. Bourlamaque for 28 livres; Possibly the posthumous Bourlamaque sale, 27 March 1770 onwards, lot 39 (‘Cinq dessins et la chasteté de Joseph.’); Herman Shickman, New York, in 1966; Christian Humann, New York; His posthumous sale, New York, Sotheby Parke Bernet, 30 April 1982, lot 72; Jean Montague Massengale, Darien, CT and Santa Fe, NM, until 2007.

LITERATURE: Marc Sandoz, Jean-Baptiste Deshays 1729-1765, Paris, 1977, p.63, no.5Bb, and p.155; André Bancel, Jean-Baptiste Deshays, Paris, 2008, p.64, p.160, under no.P.123, p.224, no.D90.

After winning the Prix de Rome in 1751, Jean-Baptiste Deshays studied for three years at the Ecole des Elèves Protégés and spent a further four years at the Académie de France in Rome. Agrée at the Académie in 1758, Deshays was reçu the following year, and exhibited three times at the Salon before his untimely death. He gained a reputation as a painter of religious subjects, and received important commissions for Saint-Roch in Paris, Saint-Pierre in Douai and Saint-André in Rouen, for which he painted three major altarpieces between 1758 and 1761. As a painter, Deshays employed a loose and fluid manner that owed much to the example of the Baroque artists he had studied in Italy, as well as to François Boucher (whose daughter he married in 1758) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Writing of the Salon of 1761, the critic Denis Diderot praised his work, noting that ‘This painter, in my opinion, is the nation’s foremost painter; he has more warmth and genius than Vien; he rivals Van Loo in drawing and color . . . There is strength and austerity in his palette; he conceives [the most] striking subjects.’1 Deshays achieved considerable success during his brief career, which lasted only about seven years before his early death at the age of thirty-five. Some six hundred drawings were dispersed at the posthumous sale of the contents of Deshays’ studio, probably including the present sheet which, with its vigorous handling of the pen and brush, is a splendid example of the artist’s bold draughtsmanship.

Deshays is known to have exhibited two paintings of the Old Testament subject of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, both of which are now lost. The first of these is a youthful work shown at the Ecole des Elèves Protégés in 1751, described as ‘la femme de Putiphar, accusant Joseph’. This drawing, dated 1762, is a preparatory study for a later painting of La Chasteté de Joseph, exhibited by Deshays at the Salon of 1763 and in the Seroux d’Agincourt collection by 1769. The painting was widely admired in reviews of the 1763 Salon, with Diderot lavishing particular praise: ‘Si l’on me donne un tableau à choisir au Salon, violà le mien; cherchez le vôtre. Vous en trouverez de plus savants, de plus parfaits peut-être; pour un plus séduisant, je vous en défie.’2 The present sheet, aptly described as ‘fougueux et fort’ by André Bancel in his recent catalogue of the artist’s work, is the only surviving preparatory drawing by Deshays for the 1763 painting. Individual studies of each of the heads of the two protagonists were recorded in the 1765 Deshays studio sale, but are now lost3.

It has recently been noted that ‘Deshays had a predilection for the sketch made with the brush as a preparation technique. The dynamic quality of the sketch accords well with his often dramatic subject matter, and he produced a great number relative to his overall output. They are . . . loose and energetic in their brushwork, yet with a fine sense of proportion and volume often absent in vigorous sketches.’4 It is arguably in his oil sketches and in drawings such as the present sheet, rather in his relatively few surviving finished paintings, that Deshays’ abilities can best be seen to their best advantage.

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FRENCH SCHOOL 18th Century An Emerald Tree Boa Gouache on fine vellum, over traces of black chalk, within a gold border. Laid down on board.

234 x 370 mm. (9 1/4 x 14 5/8 in.) [image] 273 x 408 mm. (10 3/4 x 16 in.) [sheet] The present sheet may be tentatively related to the series of natural history drawings known as the Vélins du Roi, commissioned from various artists for the French Royal Collection. The collection has its origins in the 17th century and the draughtsman Nicolas Robert (1614-1685), the most famous natural history artist of the day in France. Particularly renowned for his watercolours of flowers, plants and birds, drawn on vellum, Robert came to the attention of Gaston, Duc d’Orléans, a devoted botanist whose garden at his château at Blois included several rare varieties of plants. Robert was commissioned to make watercolours of some of these, as well as others of animals and birds. Drawn on fine vellum, these exquisite drawings by Robert formed a major part of the five large folio volumes of vélins in Gaston d’Orléans’s collection at the time of his death in 1660. The collection passed to Gaston’s nephew, Louis XIV. Under the King’s patronage, the commissioning of works to add to the collection, now known as the Vélins du Roi, was continued, and in 1666 Robert was appointed peintre ordinaire du Roi pour la miniature. His contract called for a minimum number of fifty-four vélins to be executed by Robert and his workshop for the Vélins du Roi each year. Botanical subjects were taken from the Jardin Royale in Paris, and the exotic species of birds and animals from the Ménagerie at Versailles. The practice of commissioning additions to the Vélins du Roi continued well into the 18th century, involving such artists as Gerard van Spaendonck and Pierre-Joseph Redouté.

The Vélins du Roi can be identified by the fine quality of the vellum used and the gold borders framing the composition; each peintre du roi had his drawings mounted with his own distinctive gold border.

However, while the vélins in the Royal collection have at best only cursory backgrounds, the presence of a highly finished landscape in this superb study of a snake suggests that it was intended for a private patron.

The snake depicted in this gouache would appear to be an emerald tree boa (corallus caninus), native to South America. Its appearance is characterized by a greenish colouring, yellow belly and white irregular diamond or zigzag-shaped patches down its back.

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CIRCLE OF JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID Paris 1748-1825 Brussels A Young Man Playing a Violin Black chalk and pencil, circular. Inscribed L. David del. on the verso.

198 mm. (7 7/8 in.) diameter.

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 7 July 1992, lot 244 (as attributed to Jacques-Louis David).

LITERATURE: Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825: Catalogue raisonné des dessins, Milan, 2003, Vol.II, illustrated p.1246 (‘Liste de catalogues de ventes consultés, où figurent des dessins de David (XVIII e siècle-XX e siècle’).

The present sheet may be closely compared – in style, technique, medium and overall effect – with a signed circular portrait drawing of a young woman by Jacques-Louis David (fig.1) in the Louvre1. The former frame of the Louvre drawing bears an old inscription identifying the sitter as Suzanne Charlotte Sedaine, and states that the portrait was drawn on the 22nd of December, 1783. Of similar dimensions and drawn with an equally precise handling of black chalk and pencil, both drawings reveal the particular influence of the draughtsmanship of Charles-Nicolas Cochin (1715-1790), who made a speciality of drawn and engraved portraits in this medallion format.

In his later portrait drawings of the 1790s – such as the well-known series of nine roundels of portraits of Jacobin deputies, known as Montagnards, which the artist drew in prison in 17952 – David abandoned working in black chalk in favour of pen with black or grey ink and wash.

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FRANÇOIS-PASCAL-SIMON, BARON GÉRARD Rome 1770-1837 Paris The Head of Venus Black chalk, with stumping and touches of white chalk, on pale grey paper.

215 x 170 mm. (8 1/2 x 6 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: An unidentified collector’s mark stamped in red in the verso.

François Gérard spent much of his youth in Rome, where his father was part of the household of the French Ambassador to the Papal States. He returned with his family to Paris in 1780, and entered the studio of the sculptor Augustin Pajou, later studying with the painter Nicolas-Guy Brenet and, from 1786, with Jacques-Louis David. He was able to spend two years in Italy between 1791 and 1793, and on his return to France won a competition for a painting of the Revolutionary subject of The 10th of August 1792, earning lodgings and a studio in the Louvre. Around this time Gérard produced a series of designs for book illustrations to La Fontaine, Racine and Voltaire, commissioned by the publisher Pierre Didot. He began to establish his reputation as a painter of mythological and historical subjects, typified by a painting of Belisarius, shown at the Salon of 1795, and a Cupid and Psyche, exhibited to great acclaim in 1798. He also gained a considerable reputation as a portraitist, due to the success of such works as the full-length portrait of the painter Jean-Baptiste Isabey and his Daughter, which found considerable favour with critics at the Salon of 1796. Indeed, by the beginning of the 19th century Gérard had became the most fashionable portrait painter in France, rivalling his master David. He received numerous commissions from Napoleon, his family and members of the Imperial court, as well as from significant figures throughout Europe. He also continued to paint large-scale history subjects, notably an Ossian painted for Malmaison in 1801 and several scenes from French history, now all at Versailles. Gérard was the recipient of numerous honours throughout his career, culminating in his ennoblement as a Baron in 1819.

Drawings by Baron Gérard have remained relatively little studied. His output includes portraits, compositional and figure studies for religious and history subjects and several landscapes, as well as designs for book illustrations. While his drawings, and in particular the studies for history paintings and the illustrations from Virgil and Racine for Didot, reveal the particular Neoclassical influence of David’s draughtsmanship, Gérard’s portrait drawings often display a more languid sensuality that anticipates the Romanticism of the succeeding generation of artists.

This fine drawing is a study for the head of Venus in Gérard’s canvas of The Judgement of Paris, painted in 1812; a work that was later destroyed by the artist and is only known today through an engraving (fig.1) after the painting1. (An earlier variant of the subject, painted by Gerard in 1804, was also destroyed by the artist.) Three preparatory drawings for the painting of 1812 – a compositional study in oil and another in pencil, as well as a pencil study for the figures of Venus and Cupid – were on the New York art market in 19922, while another study for the entire composition was on the art market in 19963.

Stylistically comparable chalk drawings by Baron Gérard include a head of a young woman in the Louvre4 and a portrait of the artist’s young assistant, Mlle. Julie Duvidal de Montferrier, in the collection of the Musée Vivenel in Compiègne5.

1.

The attribution of the present sheet has been confirmed by Alain Latreille.

actual size

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ANTOINE-CHARLES-HORACE VERNET, CALLED CARLE VERNET Bordeaux 1758-1836 Paris A Mameluke Mounting his Horse Black chalk. Signed and dedicated à Madame Jacob / Carle Vernet in pencil at the lower left.

345 x 371 mm. (13 5/8 x 14 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to a Mme. Jacob; Private collection, France, until 2009.

The third son of the landscape painter Claude-Joseph Vernet, Carle Vernet was born into an artistic dynasty that was to include his son Horace. A winner of the Prix de Rome in 1782, he spent only a few months in Italy between 1782 and 1783 before having to return to France for reasons that remain unclear. He was, however, to use motifs drawn from his Roman experiences throughout his later career.

While perhaps best known today for his engravings and lithographs, Vernet was, in his lifetime, an important and successful painter. In 1799 he exhibited a number of drawings of Napoleon’s Italian campaigns, and in the succeeding years produced several paintings of military subjects, climaxing in the massive canvas of The Battle of Marengo, now at Versailles. Later in his career he turned his attention to equestrian subjects, particularly scenes of hunting and racing, and worked almost exclusively in this genre from around 1820 onwards. Vernet devoted a considerable amount of time to making careful studies of different breeds and types of horses. The critic Charles Blanc noted of Vernet that, ‘He is the first artist who does not draw inspiration from Van der Meulen or Wouwermans but returns to the stud farm or riding school: he renders the horse’s lively gaits, its expression while waiting, its grace, and its coquetry.’1 Similarly, a more recent scholar has written of Vernet that ‘To his French contemporaries, his brittle, swan-necked horses seemed strikingly natural, because he drew them with the knowledge of the experienced horseman rather than according to the monstrous, Academic formula.’2 The artist’s lifelong interest in equestrian subjects was passed on to his pupil Théodore Géricault, who undertook his earliest artistic training in Vernet’s studio between 1808 and 1810.

An accomplished and energetic draughtsman, Carle Vernet seems almost to have preferred drawing to painting, and is best known today for his works on paper. One of the first artists to take up the practice of lithography, Vernet’s oeuvre includes several drawings of equine subjects, costume studies and genre scenes which were intended for reproduction in the technique.

Vernet produced a number of drawings and watercolours of Mameluke warriors, several of which were reproduced as lithographs or engravings. This large sheet is a preparatory study for one of these prints; a lithograph entitled Mameluck en Vedette (fig.1), part of a series of six lithographs of Mameluke subjects designed by Vernet and published by François Seraphin Delpech3. Popular with collectors and connoisseurs, these large and finished works date from the first decade of the 19th century, and were inspired by Napoleon’s campaigns against Mameluke tribesmen in his conquest of Egypt. For artists such as Vernet, as for the French public at large, the Mameluke and his magnificent Arabian steed stood as a symbol of the fierce exotic warrior; the proud horseman of the desert.

Comparable drawings of Mameluke horsemen by Vernet include two watercolours that appeared on the art market in London in 19754.

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THÉODORE GÉRICAULT Rouen 1791-1824 Paris Scene from the Race of the Barberi Horses Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an extensive underdrawing in black chalk.

353 x 484 mm. (13 7/8 x 19 in.)

PROVENANCE: Gérard Ambroselli, Paris and Saint-Pierre-en Port, from 19731; Private collection, Paris; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby Parke Bernet, 3 June 1980, lot 132; Private collection, until 2009.

LITERATURE: Germain Bazin, Théodore Géricault: Étude critique, documents et catalogue raisonné. Vol. IV - Le voyage en Italie: Étude critique et catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1990, p.68 and p.190, no.1341 (as Deux chevaux au gallop dans la campagne romaine)2; Bruno Chenique, Les chevaux de Géricault, Paris, 2007, p.33, no.30 (as Episode de la course des chevaux libres); Bruno Chenique, Catalogue raisonné des dessins inédits de Théodore Géricault (forthcoming).

In 1816, at the age of twenty-five and having failed in his attempt to win the Prix de Rome earlier in the year, Théodore Géricault decided to travel to Italy at his own expense. He arrived in Italy in October 1816 and settled in Rome the following month. Although he had intended to stay for two years, he remained in Italy for only about a year before returning to Paris in the autumn of 1817. This period in Italy, although relatively brief, was nevertheless of particular importance to the young artist. As one modern scholar has noted, ‘the effect of the Italian stay on his artistic development makes it a pivotal moment for Géricault. In certain respects, it was the year in which he came of age.’3 This very large and impressive sheet may be included among a group of drawings and oil sketches by Géricault relating to the most important project of his Roman years; a monumental painting depicting The Start of the Race of the Barberi Horses. It was in February 1817 that Géricault witnessed the annual event known as the corso de’ Barberi - a race of wild, riderless horses along the Via del Corso, from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza Venezia – that was the highlight of the Roman Carnival. (The untamed horses were of a particular breed originally from the Barbary Coast, and were therefore known, in later years, as Barberi.) As Lorenz Eitner has noted, ‘The gaudy vigour of the show, spiced with danger and cruelty, could not fail to fascinate the ardent sportsman in Géricault, and the artist for whom the horse had always embodied nature’s energy and passion.’4 Géricault seems in particular to have been drawn to the periods just before the start of the race (known as ‘la mossa’), when young grooms would try to restrain the horses behind the starting rope, and at the end of the course, known as ‘la ripresa’, when the grooms would attempt to recapture the stampeding horses.

Géricault worked on a series of drawings and oil sketches on the theme of the Race of the Barberi Horses for most of his time in Italy – a period of some seven months in all – culminating in a huge canvas, which measured some thirty feet in length. On his sudden return to France in September 1817, however, the painting was abandoned unfinished in his Roman studio, and no longer survives. Nevertheless, some idea of the genesis and development of the composition can be had from the approximately twenty oil sketches and sixty drawings related to the project which the artist brought back with him when he returned to Paris. As Charles Clément, Géricault’s early biographer and author of the first catalogue raisonné of his work, has noted, ‘The admirable drawings of the Race of the Riderless Horses which have survived are executed, in pen and ink for the most part, with details indicated very lightly with a few hatchings.

One would be very wrong to regard these as improvisations, or mere sketches.’5

The attribution of the present sheet has been confirmed by both the late Lorenz Eitner, who noted that it is ‘a fairly characteristic example of [Géricault’s] graphic style of ca.1816-17’15 and Bruno Chenique, who describes the present work as ‘ce magnifique et important dessin’ and further notes the ‘exceptionnel qualité graphique’ of the sheet16. M. Chenique will include the drawing in his forthcoming Catalogue raisonné des dessins inédits de Théodore Géricault.

As Wheelock Whitney has incisively written of the drawings brought back by Géricault from Italy, ‘One of the chief benefits of the Italian year was the maturation it brought about in Géricault’s style. The most notable evidence of this advance is the more fluid and confident graphic manner he developed in Italy, in no small part due to his lengthy and complex preparatory process for the Race of the Barberi Horses. The fact is rarely acknowledged, but Géricault was, with Ingres, one of the two greatest draughtsmen of the first half of the nineteenth century. His drawings, whether preliminary studies for ambitious works such as the Race, mere exercises in graphic dexterity or elaborate, finished compositions intended from the outset as finished works of art, fairly vibrate with energy and expressiveness . . . The drawings done in Italy, where Géricault’s graphic style reached its maturity, are marked by an unprecedented freedom of handling and a palpable assurance of touch that he maintained, even as his style evolved, for the rest of his brief career.’14

This remarkable sheet is exceptional among Géricault’s drawings for its size and scale. (Only five other drawings of similar dimensions related to the Barberi race are known, four of which are studies for a crowded composition depicting the start of the race9, while the fifth shows four grooms with a running horse10, and may perhaps depict an idea for a scene at the end of the event.) The bold handling of pen and ink, applied with a reed pen, is a characteristic of Géricault’s draughtsmanship both before and during his year in Italy, and the present sheet may be compared stylistically with such pen studies of the same period as A Man Taming a Bull in the Louvre11, a study of a Nude Horseman in Besançon12, and drawing of Bull Tamers formerly in the von Hirsch collection in Basel13.

That the present sheet is indeed related to the theme of the corso de’ Barberi is seen in the plume of feathers – worn by all of the horses taking part in the race – on the bridle of the nearest horse. This drawing may represent a Barberi horse being exercised by its groom, either before or after the race itself.

As Bruno Chenique has pointed out, however, the same horse is also draped with a richly embroidered blanket, tied with a strap. This is thought to be the attribute of the horse which won the race, and can also be seen in a painting by Géricault of A Groom Leading the Winning Horse, today in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid6, as well as a related drawing in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Besançon7.

Like the Thyssen painting and Besançon drawing, the present sheet may be included among a small group of drawings and oil sketches by Géricault that, while inspired by the events surrounding the race itself, do not seem to relate specifically to the composition of the large, unfinished painting of The Start of the Race of the Barberi Horses8.

The present sheet is among a group of drawings and oil sketches by Pancrace Bessa only recently rediscovered in the possession of the artist’s heirs.

As highly regarded in his day as both van Spaendonck and Redouté, Bessa was, however, less prolific than either. He enjoyed the patronage and protection of the Duchesse de Berri, to whom he was appointed flower painter and drawing master, and also worked for the Empress Joséphine. In 1823 he was commissioned by the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle to produce studies of flowers. Bessa’s most important commission, however, was for a series of 572 watercolours for the Herbier général de l’amateur, commissioned by Charles X for the Duchesse de Berri, his daughter-in-law. The project was begun in 1816 and the artist worked on the series until 1827. Bessa exhibited at the Salons between 1806 and 1831, when he retired to Ecouen.

One the leading painters of flowers and fruit in the first half of the 19th century in France, Pancrace Bessa was a pupil of the engraver Gerard van Spaendonck. He was also influenced by the work of his older contemporary, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, with whom he also studied (one of only a handful of men to do so, as Redouté’s pupils were mostly women). Bessa probably accompanied Redouté as part of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798, and later collaborated with him on the illustrations for FrançoisAndré Michaux’s Arbres forestiers de l’Amérique septentrionale, published between 1810 and 1813, and Aimé Bonpland’s Description des plantes rares cultivées à Malmaison et à Navarre, which appeared in 1813.

PROVENANCE: Among the contents of the artist’s studio, and by descent in the family of the artist at the Château de Castelnau in the Roussillon, until the 1990s.

Watermark: Bunch of grapes?

Oil and gouache on two joined sheets of paper, with made up areas along the bottom edge.

587 x 444 mm. (23 1/8 x 17 1/2 in.)

Study of a Thistle

PANCRACE BESSA Paris 1772-1846 Ecouen

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19

JACQUES FÉLIX DUBAN Paris 1798-1870 Bordeaux Section of One of the Championnet Houses at Pompeii Watercolour and pencil. Inscribed A. and POMPEIA at the top of the sheet and Coupe d’une des maisons Championnet dans son etat actuel. / Sur une echelle de 0,010 p.m. in brown ink at the bottom of the sheet. Further inscribed citerne(?) and perle(?) douce in pencil.

255 x 411 mm. (10 x 16 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Roger Rodière, Montreuil (his collector’s mark, not in Lugt, on the verso); The Artis Group, New York, in 1985.

Félix Duban entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1814, and in 1823 won the Grand Prix de Rome in the category of architecture. He spent the next five years as a pensionnaire at the Académie de France in Rome, and soon after his arrival visited Pompeii with the architect Henri Labrouste. At Pompeii Duban took a particular interested in the houses which had been discovered at the beginning of the 19th century, producing plans and drawings of several of these, as well as of temples, theatres and baths. On his return to Paris, he exhibited elaborate architectural drawings at the Salons of 1830, 1831 and 1833, although he does not seem to have exhibited there in later years. He enjoyed a successful career as an architect, with his best known work the main buildings and courtyard of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, begun in 1830 but not completed until some thirty years later. Duban also worked on the restoration of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris between 1839 and 1849 and the Galerie d’Apollon at the Louvre, begun in 1848, as well as at the chateaux of Dampierre and Blois. In 1854 he was elected to the Institut and appointed inspector-general of public works. In 1872, two years after Duban’s death, a retrospective exhibition of his architectural drawings and watercolours was held at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Duban was a gifted draughtsman, and produced a large body of drawings and watercolours of superb quality. These included not only studies of ancient, medieval and Renaissance buildings in Italy and France, but also imaginative reconstructions of how these buildings once looked. As has been noted of Duban, ‘His draughtsmanship is of exemplary quality and goes far beyond the realm of simple architectural drawing . . . The vacuum left by Duban in terms of theoretical writing seems largely filled by his body of drawings.’1 The present sheet may be dated to Duban’s time in Italy, when he made numerous studies of the newly excavated buildings and houses of Pompeii. As the critic Charles Blanc noted at the time of the 1872 exhibition, ‘L’impression qui firent sur Duban ses etudes à Pompeii fut vive et profonde; elle ne s’effaça plus.’2 Three albums of architectural drawings by Duban from this period, entitled Italie, Rome and Pompeii, are today in the library of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

The so-called Championnet houses at Pompeii were excavated in 1799, during the Napoleonic period, and are particularly notable for the marble paving, known as opus scutulatum, of the atrium, as well as the painted wall decorations of the interiors. The excavation of the two houses, located in the southern quarter of Pompeii, was initiated under the supervision of General Jean Etienne Vachier, called Championnet, the commander of the French army in Naples. Duban made a number of drawings of the Championnet houses, all of which are to be found in an album in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. These include a closely related watercolour of a longitudinal section of the same house, together with details of the paving of the atrium and the decoration in other parts of the interior3. Other drawings of the Championnet houses in Duban’s Pompeii album include a study of the ground plan of the two houses4, a detail of the mosaic pavement of the peristyle of one of them5, and two drawings of the polychrome mural decorations6. These drawings, like the present sheet, may be dated between 1824 and 1825.

This drawing was in the collection of the French architectural historian Roger Rodière (1870-1944).

Rodière owned at least one other drawing by Duban of the same period; a study of a section and floor plan of the House of Diomedes at Pompeii7.

20

FERDINAND-VICTOR-EUGÈNE DELACROIX Charenton-Saint-Maurice 1798-1863 Paris A Mounted Bugler, Accompanied by a Hound Pencil, grey and brown wash, with watercolour and gouache.

208 x 255 mm. (8 1/8 x 10 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s studio, Paris, with the atelier stamp (Lugt 838a) at the lower right of the sheet; The Delacroix studio sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 22-27 February 1864; Louis de Launay, Paris; Thence by descent to a private collection, Paris, until 2008.

One of the finest draughtsmen of the 19th century in France, Eugène Delacroix was adept in a variety of techniques – notably pen, pencil, watercolour, charcoal and pastel – and produced a large and diverse number of drawings of all types. As a modern scholar has noted, ‘For their number, variety and importance he attached to them, drawings are an essential, if not fundamental part of Delacroix’s oeuvre . . . they represent the most faithful testimonies of the man and the artist with his foibles but his greatness as well.’1 However, Delacroix’s output as a draughtsman remained almost completely unknown and unseen by scholars, collectors and connoisseurs until the posthumous auction of the contents of his studio held in February 1864, six months after the artist’s death, which included some six thousand drawings in 430 lots. The sale included not only preparatory compositional sketches and figure studies for Delacroix’s paintings and public commissions, but a myriad variety of drawings by the artist, including studies of wild animals, landscapes, copies after the work of earlier masters, costume studies, scenes from literature, still life subjects and the occasional portrait, as well as finished pastels. In the words of the Delacroix scholar Lee Johnson, ‘It came as a surprise to many that an artist who had been so consistently criticized throughout his career for incompetence as a draughtsman and laxity in composition was revealed by the many hundreds of graphic works, the fifty-five sketchbooks, and scores of oil sketches at his sale to have been a draughtsman of extraordinary versatility and one who went to infinite pains to elaborate the compositions of his paintings through preliminary studies of many kinds, from the inchoate scribbles of an idea in germ, to more articulate designs, to detailed drawings of pose and gesture.’2 The largest single collection of drawings by Delacroix, numbering almost three thousand individual sheets and twenty-three sketchbooks, is today in the Louvre.

A splendid example of Dealcroix’s spirited draughtsmanship, this fine drawing does not relate to any surviving painting by the artist. Unlike scenes of Oriental or medieval horsemen, contemporary military subjects are rare in Delacroix’s oeuvre; another example is a pencil study of a cavalryman on horseback, on the verso of a study of four horses in the Karen B. Cohen collection, New York3. Delacroix’s interest in equine subjects dates from the beginning of the 1820s, when he made numerous studies of horses; as the artist noted in his journal on the 15th of April 1823, ‘Il faut absolument se mettre à faire des chevaux, aller dans une écurie tous les matins’4.

A related pencil study of a Siberian greyhound was in the Arosa and Suchet collections and was recorded in a drawing by Alfred Robaut in his catalogue of works by Delacroix5. Two further drawings of greyhounds were also illustrated by Robaut; one a study of a single hound in profile formerly in the collection of Philippe Burty and the other a sheet of studies of greyhounds formerly in the collection of Georges Villot6. A pencil study of what might be the same dog is in the Louvre7.

This drawing was once part of the extensive collection of drawings by Delacroix assembled by the French geologist Louis de Launay (1860-1938). De Launay was a close friend of the Delacroix scholar and collector Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, and was, like him, a great admirer of the artist and inspired to collect his drawings. Indeed, de Launay is said to have once noted that, ‘I always bitterly regretted not being Alfred de Vigny, Delacroix or Berlioz.’

21

EUGÈNE-LOUIS LAMI Paris 1800-1890 Paris Horace Vernet Out Riding Watercolour and gouache, heightened with white, with pen and brown ink over an underdrawing in pencil. Signed and dated E. Lami 1841 in brown ink at the lower right.

160 x 218 mm. (6 1/4 x 8 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 11-12 December 1925, lot 74; Robert Schuhmann, Paris; His sale, Paris, Galerie Jean Charpentier, 7 December 1934, lot 24 (‘Horace Vernet et ses enfants se promenant à cheval dans la campagne’), sold for 9,350 francs; Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London, in 1986; Private collection, London, until 2009.

LITERATURE: Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Le décor de la vie a l’époque Romantique 1820-1848, 1930, p.66, no.510 (‘H. Vernet à cheval. Aquarelle. Signé. 1841.’)

EXHIBITED: Paris, Pavillon de Marsan, Le décor de la vie a l’époque Romantique 1820-1848, 1930, no.510.

After spending some time in the studio of Horace Vernet, Eugène Lami entered the studio of Baron Gros at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1817. Among his fellow pupils were Paul Delaroche and Richard Parkes Bonington, both of whom were to have an influence on his work. Although he painted military subjects in the early part of his career, notably thirteen battle scenes for Versailles executed between 1824 and 1838, Lami made his reputation as a watercolourist and a master in the depiction of elegant society. His appointment in 1832 as court painter to Louis-Philippe at Versailles gave him the opportunity to draw many scenes of formal and informal court life. He made his first visit to London in 1826, in the company of Camille Rocqueplan, and returned to England between 1848 and 1852, when he followed LouisPhilippe into exile. While in England Lami continued to produce watercolour scenes of the life of the fashionable society of London and the court of Queen Victoria, and sent a constant stream of work back to Paris to be exhibited at the Salons. (Lami was himself something of a fashionable character, and Charles Baudelaire noted that he was ‘the poet of dandyism, almost English in his love of things aristocratic’.)

Among his other major patrons were Prince Anatole Demidoff, who described the artist as ‘one of my good friends and one of the most distinguished French painters of our times’, and Baron James de Rothschild, for whom Lami acted as an artistic advisor, planning and supervising the decoration of the Rothschild chateaux at Boulogne and Ferrières. A founding member of the Société des Aquarellistes Français in 1879, Lami continued to work prolifically until his death. Significant groups of his drawings are today in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

The present sheet is a depiction of Lami’s first teacher, the painter Horace Vernet (1789-1863). The grandson of the landscape and marine painter Claude-Joseph Vernet and the engraver Jean-Michel Moreau, and the son of the military and history painter Carle Vernet, Horace Vernet was well known as a painter of military and equestrian subjects. (In 1822 Vernet collaborated with Lami in providing the illustrations for a book of French military uniforms of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.) A former director of the Académie de France in Rome, Horace Vernet was a distinguished professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the time Lami produced this charming watercolour. Although the drawing has in the past been described as a portrait of Horace Vernet and his children, this is not possible as the artist did not have any sons. One of the boys accompanying Vernet in this drawing may, however, be his grandson, Joseph Delaroche-Vernet, born in 1836.

This drawing was once in the collection of Robert Schuhmann, who formed a highly significant collection of 18th century French books, as well as drawings and pastels by such artists as Barye, Boilly, Boldini, Cochin, Delacroix, Gavarni, Robert, Rousseau and Carle Vernet, among many others.

22

JOHN RUSKIN London 1819-1900 Brantwood The Chateau des Rubins at Sallanches, with the Aiguille des Varens Beyond Watercolour and gouache, over an underdrawing in pencil, on faded blue paper.

215 x 193 mm. (8 1/2 x 7 5/8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Villiers David, Esq.; His posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 19 November 1985, lot 210; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman’), London, Christie’s, 12 July 1994, lot 110; Private collection, London; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 25 January 2002, lot 162.

This splendid watercolour is a view of the Chateau des Rubins in the town of Sallanches in the French Alps, looking towards the mountain peak known as the Aiguille de Varens. Ruskin seems to have taken his view from the gorge of Levaux (fig.1) at Sallanches, in the French département of Haute-Savoie1. The 14th century Chateau des Rubins depicted in the foreground still stands (fig.2); one of the few surviving buildings from a fire that destroyed much of Sallanches in the 1840s. (The chateau today houses a local museum, the Centre de la Nature Montagnard.) David Hill was the first to identify this view as of the Chateau des Rubins, and has dated the drawing to about 1860, when Ruskin spent a considerable amount of time in Sallanches.

Ruskin’s first visit to the area around Sallanches took place during his inaugural trip to France, Switzerland and Italy with his parents in 1833. Two years later, at the age of sixteen, Ruskin returned with his family to Sallanches on a second Continental journey that took up most of the second half of 1835. In a long poem written that year describing his travels, entitled Journal of a Tour through France to Chamouni, Ruskin wrote: ‘Oh, gently sinks the eve, and red doth set / The sun above Sallenches’ mountains blue; / Like regal robes, the purple clouds beset / Mont Blanc; but on his crest, still breaking through, / The last bright western rays are lingering yet, / And the white snow glows with a rosy hue.’2 In 1849 Ruskin made two drawings of the Aiguille de Varens, both of which are listed in the ‘Catalogue of Sketches in neighbourhood of Mont Blanc’ in his diary of 18543.

Ruskin returned several times to Sallanches over the succeeding years, up to his final tour in 1888, and often recorded in his diaries and letters his delight in the views of the mountains from the town and the surrounding countryside. In 1854 he wrote, ‘Sallenches.

How little I thought God would bring me here again just now – and I am here, stronger in health, higher in hope, deeper in peace, than I have been for years. The green pastures and pine forests of the Varens softly seen through the light of my window. I cannot be thankful enough, nor happy enough.’4 In another diary entry of the same year, describing a walk on a hillside near Sallanches, Ruskin noted ‘And opposite always the mighty Varens lost in the cloud its ineffable walls of crag.’5 In the autumn and winter of 1862 and the spring of 1863 Ruskin spent several months in the Haute-Savoie, visiting the sites of Turner’s watercolours and working on a book about Swiss towns. Twenty years later, while staying at Sallanches in September 1882, he wrote that ‘I have never been happier in seeing the Alps once more, nor felt more desire to do better work on them than ever yet.

And I was never so persecuted by the storms and clouds . . . But, at last, 9 o’clock, the dingy clouds seem breaking from the Aiguilles du Goûté and de Bionnassay, and

1.

there is blue sky beyond the Varens.’6 A few days later he added, ‘Mont Blanc entirely clear all the morning; fresh snow in perfect light on the Dorons; and the Varens a miracle of aerial majesty.’7 Ruskin drew constantly, and although he received some training from artists such as Copley Fielding and James Duffield Harding, his talents as a draughtsman were to a large extent the result of natural gifts.

As the young Ruskin noted in a letter of his mother of 1845, ‘Architecture I can draw like an architect, and trees a good deal better than most botanists, and mountains rather better than most geologists.’8 For the most part, Ruskin’s drawings were not intended for exhibition, but rather as a complement to his written work. As Paul Walton has noted, Ruskin’s voluminous writings, in the form of books, diaries, essays, articles and letters, are enriched by the study of his ‘watercolours and sketches of the mountains and skies, cottages and cathedrals, stones and flowers in which he found inscribed the messages that guided his life’s work as an interpreter of nature and art.’9 This fine study is clearly influenced by the late watercolours of Swiss mountain scenes by J. M. W. Turner, which Ruskin had begun acquiring for his collection in 1842. In 1851 Ruskin was appointed an executor of Turner’s estate, and chose the master’s Swiss mountain views as the subject of his first exhibition. In 1856 he decided to embark on a series of Swiss mountain views, which resulted in, as Walton has described them, ‘a series of remarkably expressive drawings . . . and certainly his best work.’10 The present sheet was, in fact, previously identified as a view of Fribourg in Switzerland, and indeed the drawing is close in style to Ruskin’s views of Fribourg dating from the mid- to late 1850s, such as a two studies of The Towers of Fribourg and Houses at Fribourg in the British Museum11 and a drawing of The Augustinian Convent in Fribourg in the David Thomson collection in Toronto12; the latter two drawings are, like many of the artist’s Swiss views, also on blue paper. Such watercolours as the present sheet have been suitably described as ‘Elegant delineations of buildings, mountains and skies [which] were composed with almost oriental fastidiousness within expanses of blank paper, and the effect may be as cool as moonlight or as hot as Mediterranean sunshine.’13 In September 1888, when the aged Ruskin was staying at an inn at Sallanches on his final Continental tour, a fellow guest recalled his brief meeting with him in his memoirs, published many years later: ‘He looked much older than in Oxford ten years ago . . . We were looking across the fertile valley to the red precipices of the Varens, which rose sheer opposite the window, and he said there was no place like Sallanches for beauty and sublimity combined. “And yet”, I said, ‘hardly a soul comes here to stay”. ‘Very few people have souls”, he answered, “and those that have are generally ambitious and want to climb heights. Hardly anyone cares about beauty”.’14

2.

23

ALEXANDRE HESSE Paris 1806-1879 Paris Saint Joseph Black, red and white chalk on light brown paper.

451 x 355 mm. (17 3/4 x 14 in.)

PROVENANCE: Galerie Pierre Gaubert, Paris, in 1979; Private collection, Lyon.

LITERATURE: Marie-Madeleine Aubrun, Alexandre Hesse 1806-1879: Quelques aspects du portraitiste et du dessinateur, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1979, unpaginated, no.31, illustrated on the cover.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Pierre Gaubert, Alexandre Hesse 1806-1879, 1979, no.31.

The son and nephew of artists, Alexandre Hesse entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1821. In 1830 he made his first visit to Italy, and his experiences in Venice inspired his painting of The Funeral of Titian, exhibited at his Salon debut in 1833, where it won a first-class medal. He returned to Italy in the same year, again visiting Venice, where he made several copies after the work of Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese; these artists were to be a particular influence on his own work. In 1836 he received a State commission for a painting of The Body of Henry V Brought Back to the Louvre after his Assassination, intended for the Galerie d’Apollon of the Louvre and today at Versailles, as are two further paintings from French history, commissioned for the Salle des Croisades. Hesse lived and worked in Rome between 1842 and 1847, and on his return devoted much of his later career to providing paintings for chapels in such Parisian churches as Saint-Séverin, Saint-Sulpice and Saint-Gervais. He also worked at provincial churches at Avranches and Chevry-en-Sereine, and decorated the ceiling of the Palais de la Bourse in Lyon between 1868 and 1870. Hesse continued to exhibit at the Salons until 1861, and in 1867 was nominated to the Institut de France, succeeding Ingres. His last significant commission, for the decoration of a chapel in the Parisian church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, was left unfinished by his death in 1879.

This fine sheet is a study for the figure of Saint Joseph at the left edge of Hesse’s large mural painting of The Adoration of the Shepherds (fig.1) in the choir of the church of Saint-Julien, in the town of Chevryen-Sereine, near Nemours1. Signed and dated 1863, the painting is one of four mural scenes from the life of Christ commissioned in May 1861 by Mme. Amélie Brisson, owner of the château at Chevry-enSereine and a longstanding patron of the artist2. Also included in the commission for the decoration of the church, for which the artist received 20,000 francs, were nine paintings of standing saints and a design for a stained-glass window3.

Two preparatory studies for the Adoration of the Shepherds are among the large group of drawings by the artist left to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris at his death in 1879. These are studies for the young child standing at the centre right foreground4 and for the shepherd carrying a sheep, also in the centre of the composition5. Among other preparatory studies for the painting is a drawing for the head of a donkey, on the art market in 19796, and a figure study for the kneeling shepherd in the right foreground, in the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh7.

1.

24

EDWARD LEAR Holloway 1812-1888 San Remo A View from Fort St. George at Mahe, Kerala, India Pencil and watercolour, heightened with white. Signed with the artist’s monogram at the lower left and inscribed Mahee in brown ink at the lower right. Inscribed MAHEE, MALABAR. in pencil on the old mount.

168 x 261 mm. (6 5/8 x 10 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Lady Adelaide Daumay, Baldersby Park, Thirsk, North Yorkshire; Mr. T. Bull; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 22 March 1966, lot 47 (bt. Mrs. Frank for 380 gns.); Mrs. Robert Frank; Martyn Gregory Gallery, London; The Fine Art Society, London, in 1988; Private collection, London, until 2008.

LITERATURE: Vivien Noakes, The Painter Edward Lear, Newton Abbot and London, 1991, illustrated p.93; Peter Levi, Edward Lear: A Biography, London, 1995, p.270 (‘the blue and tawny Mahee, which is a view of mountains over swampy lakes on the Malabar coast’); Rodolfo Falchi and Valerie Wadsworth, ed., Edward Lear, exhibition catalogue, San Remo, 1997, illustrated pp.244-245.

EXHIBITED: London, Fine Art Society, A Centenary Exhibition, August 1988; San Remo, Palazzo Borea d’Olmo, Edward Lear, 1997.

In one of the earliest scholarly appreciations of Edward Lear’s activity as a landscape artist, Martin Hardie noted that ‘Lear, we think, is far greater as draughtsman than has hitherto been admitted. This is to some extent because his work has remained largely in the homes of those who, in a past generation, were his personal friends. With the dispersal of any of those collections comes wider knowledge of his power . . . When the painter of birds’ feathers came to work at landscape his explosive energy and artistic ardour were found to combine with subtle insight, analysis and delicacy of art. He painted for pure enjoyment – lack of sales might discourage him, but had not the slightest effect on his output – and we shall never be wise unless we take him in that category, and not as one of the commercial showmen of water-colour. Like Girtin and De Wint and Cameron, he had the panoramic sense. He was quite at his ease with a wide sheet of paper across which he drew the long lines of receding landscape . . . He liked to be lord of the horizon, to see before him wide spaces through which to roam, broad stretches leading to the misty blue mountains far away . . . Lear as a water-colour painter is not in the highest class with Cozens and Girtin, Cox and De Wint, but this big, ugly man, friend of aristocrats, adventurer and Bohemian . . . was an interesting and outstanding personality.’1 As a landscape draughtsman, Lear developed a method of working that served him well throughout his career. This was usually to make a pen or pencil sketch of a particular view – annotated with extensive colour notes, as well as the location, date and other pertinent information – which would later be elaborated in his studio to produce a highly finished drawing. His young friend and pupil Hubert Congreve later recalled Lear’s behaviour on their joint sketching expeditions; ‘When we came to a good subject, Lear would sit down, and taking his block [of paper] . . . would lift his spectacles, and gaze for several minutes at the scene through a monocular glass he always carried; then, laying down the glass, and adjusting his spectacles, he would put on paper the view before us, mountain range, villages, and foreground, with a rapidity and accuracy that inspired me with awestruck admiration. Whatever may be the final verdict on his “Topographies” (as he called his works in oil or water colour), no one can deny the great cleverness and power of his artist’s sketches. They were always done in pencil on the ground, and then inked in in sepia and brush washed with colour in the winter evenings.’2 Lear’s finished watercolours, of which the present sheet is a particularly fine example, were generally done either on commission or for exhibition and possible sale to collectors.

Edward Lear visited India in 1873 at the invitation of his friend George Baring, Lord Northbrook, who had been recently appointed Viceroy. He landed at Bombay on the 22nd of November 1873 and travelled throughout India and Ceylon for more than a year, until the end of January 1875. This was to be Lear’s last major foreign expedition, as well as the longest trip of his life, and resulted in a large number of splendid drawings and watercolours. At the age of sixty-two, Lear produced over 2,000 drawings and sketches during his stay in India and Ceylon, as well as two volumes of a journal. Most of the preparatory drawings Lear made on his travels in India, as well as the journals, are today in the collection of the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

In October 1874 Lear began his exploration of Malabar, on the western coast of southern India. Despite having already been travelling in India for some eleven months, his reaction to the lush scenery of the coastal region was immediate. As he noted in his journal, ‘Beautiful Indian Claude-landscapes might be made out of Malabar scenes, palms and any sort of vegetation for near and middle distance. Devonshirered soil and wonderful figures in foreground, with pure pale blue heights beyond; but the pictures must be long shaped.’3 In a letter written after his return from India, Lear recalled his visit to the Malabar coast, noting that the area ‘greatly delighted me, as till I saw that part of the world I had no clear idea of tropical vegetation. It was hot though! But I got some capital remembrances of the grand river scenery.’4 At the beginning of November 1874 Lear visited the town of Mahe, a trading post on the Malabar coast in Kerala. Mahe had been under the control of the French East India Company until 1837, and Lear was the guest of a Frenchman, Capt. Gustave Baudry. This splendid watercolour was based on sketches made on the 2nd of November 1874 at Fort St. George on the hill of Cherukallayi, about a kilometer north of Mahe. Built by the French, the fort offered spectacular views of Mahe and its environs. As Lear noted in his diary of that day, ‘After drawing a good bit near the bridge, got to Mr. Baudry’s house in Mahé at 10.30 . . . Gustave Baudry then took me, with much good nature and good manner, to a ruined fort of Tippoo Sahib’s (now called Fort St. George) and certainly the view thence is a stunner. As a river scene can any other equal it? The mountains, however, were not clear, though enough so to enable me to draw them correctly . . . such a scene is wondrous and wholly unlike other landscapes if only from the inconceivably curious and rich texture of the myriad multitude of coco-trees far and wide. These deep gray-green with touches of light, those in the nearer foreground bright green, gold, and orange, melt away into infinite spaces of lilac green coco-forests, beyond which suddenly rise beautiful smooth downs and detached hills, standing out, though remote, from the pale mist beyond, and below the farthest range of mountains that stretch along the horizon in pallid, clouded pearliness.’5 A much larger preparatory drawing of the same vista (fig.1), inscribed by Lear ‘Mahee from Fort St. George, Nov.r. AM 1874’, is in the collection of the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island6.

When Lear left India in January 1875 and sailed back to his home in Italy, he had apparently decided to publish a book entitled Indian Landscape as a summary of his travels. To this end he made a list in his journal of fifty subjects he would use to illustrate the book, of which ‘Mahee’ is listed as No.41. The project was, however, never begun and was eventually abandoned, perhaps because the artist was kept busy with commissions he had received for oil paintings and watercolours of Indian views. Lear spent the next three years working up his Indian sketches and drawings into a series of superb finished watercolours, of which the present sheet is a particularly fine and fresh example.

Finished watercolours such as this remarkable view of Mahe underline Lear’s lifelong passion for landscape drawing, and for picturesque and exotic scenery in particular, which is perhaps best expressed in a letter of 1862: ‘When I go to heaven ‘if indeed I go’ – and am surrounded by thousands of polite angels, – I shall say courteously – ‘please leave me alone! . . . let me have a park and a beautiful view of sea and hill, mountain and river, valley and plain, – with no end of tropical foliage.’7 1.

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JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET Gruchy 1814-1875 Barbizon Landscape near Vichy Watercolour, pen and grey ink. Inscribed (by the artist) Vichy in grey ink near the lower left. Faintly inscribed with notes ciel lourd, bleu gris, prairie and chaumes in pencil by the artist. Indistinctly inscribed (by the widow of the artist’s son Charles) (Environs de Vichy) / Attestation de Mme Vve Charles Mary Millet / bru du maître in brown ink on a label attached to the old backing board.

219 x 307 mm. (8 5/8 x 12 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s studio stamp (Lugt 1460; Herbert 1875A) near the lower left of the sheet; By descent to Catherine Lemaire, Mme. J.-F. Millet; Possibly her sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 24-25 April 1894; The artist’s son, Charles-Marie Millet; Alfred Bourzat, Fontainebleau; By descent in the Bourzat family.

Jean-François Millet was an inveterate draughtsman, whose work ranged from quick sketches to study the pose of a figure in a painting, to landscape studies in pen and watercolour, to highly-finished pastel drawings sold as independent works of art, often for considerable sums of money. In the last decade of his career, landscape began to assume a more important role in his art, inspired in part by his travels beyond Barbizon. Although Millet lived in Barbizon from 1849 till the end of his career, he often spent summers elsewhere, such as his native Normandy and the Auvergne.

The present sheet belongs to a distinctive group of landscape drawings and sketches resulting from Millet’s stay in the spa town of Vichy, in the Allier département of central France, in the summers of 1866, 1867 and 1868. Accompanying his wife to the spas of the resort town, to which she had been sent for her health, Millet made dozens of drawings of the hills and farmland around Vichy – in pencil, pen and watercolour – which were worked up into finished paintings and pastels upon his return to his studio in Barbizon. Soon after his arrival in Vichy on his first visit in June 1866, Millet wrote to his patron, the architect Emile Gavet, in Paris, ‘I have become acquainted with some of the environs of Vichy and have found several very pretty subjects. I make as many sketches as I can, and hope they will supply me with drawings of a different kind from those you already have . . . I want to provide myself with as large a store of documents [ie. sketches] as possible, and I have to look about me, since I do not know the country well.’1 Millet’s practice was to rent a carriage and explore the surroundings of Vichy, in particular the hilly landscape above the nearby town of Cusset. He seems to have been attracted to the scenery around Vichy and the Auvergne region, which reminded him of the landscapes of his childhood in Normandy, and in particular the way in which the undulating features of the landscape would partially hide the farms and buildings beyond them. Typical of Millet’s Vichy landscapes is a subtle tonal palette and a complete focus on the elements of the view, with an absence of human figures or animals. It has also been suggested that the composition of these landscape drawings at Vichy, characterized by high horizon lines, bare foregrounds and a precise but spare use of ink lines, may have been inspired by Japanese colour woodcut prints, which Millet had been studying and collecting with enthusiasm since 1863.

Although he sometimes complained, in his letters back to Barbizon, that the hot weather and the strict schedule of the spas often prevented him from devoting as much time to his drawings as he would have liked, these summers in Vichy were, in fact, to be Millet’s most productive as a landscape draughtsman since the 1850s, and resulted in ink and watercolour drawings that have been described as ‘the greatest in all his oeuvre.’2 (Most of Millet’s Vichy drawings can be dated to either 1866 or 1867, since during his third and final visit in 1868 he was apparently too ill to work.) It was these summers in Vichy that may be said to have led Millet from being a painter of peasant subjects, albeit placed within a landscape setting, to a painter of pure landscapes.

Millet’s practice in making these drawings varied relatively little during his visits to Vichy. Using sketchbooks of various sizes, he would begin a landscape composition with a quick sketch in pencil overlaid with pen and ink, to which he would add colour notes lightly written in pencil. On his return to his hotel room he would sometimes go over the drawing with washes of pale watercolour, often ‘with a sort of straw colour, varying from pinkish-grey to yellow for light areas of ground, used in juxtaposition with a variety of greens for vegetation, ranging from bright green for deciduous trees to the darkest olives and blues for evergreens.’3 The washes were laid over the artist’s handwritten colour notes which, however, often remain visible, as in the present sheet.

The attribution of the present sheet has kindly been confirmed by Alexandra Murphy, who suggests that the drawing may have been completed in Barbizon, based on earlier pen or pencil sketches made in Vichy. A drawing such as this, with evidence of colour notes, seems to have been intended as a working study rather than an independent watercolour, and indeed it has been estimated that up to a quarter of the drawings produced by Millet at Vichy were later developed into finished compositions for sale. As Murphy has noted of Millet’s drawings of this period, ‘the nearly two hundred sketches and polished watercolor drawings that can be connected with his Vichy visits cover an unexpected range of ambition; perhaps as many as fifty of them were turned into completed paintings and pastels at greater leisure in his Barbizon studio.’4 Drawings by Millet of Vichy and its surroundings are today in the collections of the Louvre, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Kunsthalle in Bremen and elsewhere.

The J.F.M. stamp at the bottom of the sheet is the studio stamp or cachet d’atelier applied to the unsigned drawings in Millet’s studio at the time of his death in 1875. Most of these drawings were dispersed in the Millet atelier sale held in Paris in May 1875, or at the sale of the collection of the artist’s widow in April 1894. The present sheet, however, seems to have been retained by the artist’s son Charles before entering the possession of his friend Alfred Bourzat, an art dealer active in Fontainebleau between 1889 and 1936.

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HILAIRE-GERMAIN-EDGAR DEGAS Paris 1834-1917 Paris Coastal Landscape at Sunset Pastel on buff paper, mounted on board. Stamped with the Degas vente stamp (Lugt 658) in red ink at the lower left. Numbered M 4142 and 5532 in blue chalk on the backing board.

232 x 316 mm. (9 1/8 x 12 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Atelier Degas, Paris; The fourth Vente Degas, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 2-4 July 1919, lot 51b (‘Paysage, soleil couchant.’), sold with another pastel for 3,300 francs1 (bt. Comiot); Charles Comiot, Paris; Gustave Loiseau, Paris; By descent to Paul and Madeleine Loiseau; Acquired from them by a private collector in 1974; Private collection, Canada, until 2008.

LITERATURE: J. B. Manson, The Life and Work of Edgar Degas, London, 1927, p.29; Paul André Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre, Paris, 1946, Vol.II, pp.112-113, no.220 (‘Paysage, soleil couchant. Étude au pastel.’), where dated c.1869; Franco Russoli and Fiorella Minervino, L’opera completa di Degas, Milan, 1970, p.100, no.300 (‘Tramonto’); Philippe Brame and Theodore Reff, Degas et son oeuvre: A Supplement, New York and London, 1984, pp.60-61, no.56 (as location unknown), where dated to c.1869; Richard Kendall, Degas Landscapes, New Haven and London, 1993, p.282, note 35.

The present sheet may be grouped with a series of more than forty pastel studies of landscapes and seascapes, probably done en plein air, drawn by Edgar Degas on the Channel coast in the summer and autumn of 18692. Degas spent much of the summer of 1869 at the village of Beuzeval, near Houlgate and Villers sur Mer on the Normandy coast. He spent his time making pastel drawings along the small stretch of coastline between Villers, Houlgate and Dives-sur-Mer to the southwest. (He also paid a visit to Edouard Manet, who was spending the summer at Boulogne-sur-Mer.) Paul-André Lemoisne, the author of the seminal catalogue raisonné of the artist’s works, noted of these Normandy scenes that ‘As he looks at them, Degas’s keen eye also registers the appearance of the countryside, the pale sea-green shore fringed with foam, the curve of a bank of golden sand, the outline of hills, a velvety meadow, the color of the sky. Later, back in the studio, the artist delights in recreating some of these places from memory, attempting to reproduce the colors and outlines with his sticks of pastel.’3 Although until recently regarded by many scholars as having been done in Degas’s Paris studio, Richard Kendall has convincingly argued that a number of these 1869 pastels are topographically accurate and depict actual sites on the Normandy coast, and that most – if not all – of these works must have been done on the spot. Kendall has further suggested that the present sheet is a view taken from just southwest of Houlgate, looking towards the resort town of Cabourg in the distance4. A note in one of Degas’s notebooks of this period underlines the artist’s close observation of his surroundings: ‘Villers-surMer, sunset, cold and dull orange-pink, whitish green, neutral, sea like a sardine’s back and clearer than the sky . . . Line of the seashore brown, the first pools of water reflecting the orange, the second reflecting the upper sky; in front, coffee-coloured sand, rather sombre.’5 This group of small pastels, characterized by a sense of emptiness and an absence of human figures, were never exhibited in Degas’s lifetime and remained in his studio until his death. Even today, they remain relatively obscure within the context of the artist’s oeuvre. The fact that several of these pastel landscapes are both signed and dated 1869 would suggest that the artist may well have regarded them – despite their relatively small proportions and austere compositions – as finished, independent works. As Kendall has noted of these works, ‘Never exhibited as a group and still generally unknown, these pastels can be counted among the seminal achievements of [Degas’s] pre-Impressionist years.’6 Several pastel landscapes

Apart from the present sheet, Comiot owned at least five other pastel landscapes by Degas from the series done around 1869, and Fosca devoted a considerable portion of his article to this group. As he wrote of the landscape pastels in the Comiot collection, ‘They are numerous, because M. Comiot was able to recognize that in this field Degas was no less a master than in the representation of the human body . . . most were executed by the seashore, and show us flat, deserted beaches, dunes with grasses grey and sparse. From such bare sites, so much lacking in plastic elements, Degas brings forth wonders: isn’t that the mark of a great artist?’10 Fosca added that ‘These pastels are quite a bit closer to those of Whistler. Just as the painter of the Nocturnes, Degas withdrew from nature as soon as the sun appeared at its brightest.

An ochre-tinted beach and the stifling blue of the sky when the mist covers the sun; Degas, like Whistler, asked for nothing else.’11

This delicate landscape was one of a large and important group of paintings and pastels by Degas in the collection of the Parisian amateur Charles Comiot8. As the art critic François Fosca noted of the Comiot collection, in an article published in 1927, ‘The artist most widely represented here is Degas. One can sense the predilection that M. Comiot has always had for this great master . . . At M. Comiot’s, Degas is represented in a varied manner: genre scenes, portraits, dancers, nudes, landscapes, interiors, that inform us both of the early years of the painter as well as of his last works.’9

The Normandy landscapes of 1869 represent Degas’s first consistent use of pastel, which by the 1880s was to become his preferred medium. Degas had begun to experiment with pastel in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and he seems to have found the medium to be an ideal means of capturing transient effects of light and atmosphere in a landscape, something he had not always been able to achieve before.

As Kendall writes, ‘In the late 1850s, Degas had struggled with pencil, ink and watercolour to translate his perceptions into two-dimensional imagery, adding vividly written summaries of changing light and weather conditions. Now, he could use the medium of pastel, combining the effects of colour, line and tone in a single process that almost kept pace with his perceptions. With pastel, he could scatter powdery hues across the paper to indicate coffee-coloured sand or silvery-green sea . . . With pastel, too, he could respond to the finest nuances of the atmosphere, working rapidly as wind and weather began to change.’7 In works such as the present sheet, Degas applied the pastel lightly over the warm tones of the pale brown paper, which he left to show through in places, thus adding to the atmospheric qualities of the scene. Pure landscapes remain rare in Degas’s oeuvre as a draughtsman, however, and the subject seems to have really been a feature of his work only for brief periods in the late 1860s, when the present sheet was executed, and the early 1890s, when he produced a group of pastels over monotype bases.

from this small series are today in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, while others are in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal and in several private collections.

This delightful and vibrant watercolour landscape was included in the four-day auction of the contents of Rosa Bonheur’s studio held in Paris in June 1900. A huge success, the sale included a total of 1,835 works by Bonheur, including two hundred watercolours, almost 750 drawings and pastels, and sixteen sketchbooks. Four similar watercolour landscapes by the artist, each with the same provenance from the 1900 studio sale as the present sheet, are today in the collection of the Musée National du Château de Fontainebleau1.

Marie-Rosalie (always known as Rosa) Bonheur was the eldest child of the minor painter Raymond Bonheur, with whom she received her initial training. (Her three younger siblings, Auguste, Juliette and Isidore, were also to become artists.) Developing a particular penchant for animals, landscapes and pastoral subjects, she exhibited for the first time at the Salon of 1841, eventually winning a third-class medal in 1845 and a gold medal four years later. A commission from the State resulted in a large painting of Oxen Ploughing in the Nivernais, exhibited to considerable acclaim in 1849 and today in the Musée d’Orsay. In 1851 she began work on another huge canvas, The Horse Fair, which was completed in 1853 and exhibited at the Salon that year. The painting was eventually purchased for 40,000 francs by the Victorian art dealer and entrepreneur Ernest Gambart, and initiated a long and successful commercial relationship with the artist. At the Salon of 1855 a painting of Haymaking in the Auvergne, commissioned by the Duc de Morny, was awarded another gold medal. This was to be Bonheur’s last contribution to the Salons for several years, however. In 1856, at the instigation of Gambart, she visited England and Scotland, meeting Queen Victoria and several prominent figures in the English art world, including Edwin Landseer – her British counterpart as an animal painter, and equally successful – and John Ruskin. In the succeeding years she began to retreat from the Paris art world, eventually establishing her home and studio in the Château de By in Thomery, at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. She continued to receive numerous honours including, in 1865, membership in the Légion d’Honneur; the first woman artist to be admitted. She again exhibited her work in Paris, after an absence of more than a decade, at the Salon of the Exposition Universelle in 1867. One of the most famous artists of the day, Rosa Bonheur continued to work with great success, enjoying a lucrative market for her animal paintings in France, England and America, until her death at the Château de By in 1899.

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist; The vente Atelier Rosa Bonheur, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 58 June 1900, probably lot 1044 (‘Un massif d’oliviers, en Provence. Plein été. Haut., 22 cent.; larg., 29 cent.’), with the vente stamp (Lugt 274) at the lower right and the associated red wax seal (Lugt 276) on the old backing board.

Watercolour, heightened with gum arabic. Inscribed hauteur / Pion in pencil at the lower left. Stamped with the Rosa Bonheur vente stamp (Lugt 274) in black at the lower right.

227 x 291 mm. (9 x 11 1/2 in.)

A Grove of Trees

ROSA BONHEUR Bordeaux 1822-1899 Thomery

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28

GIOVANNI BOLDINI Ferrara 1842-1931 Paris Two Drawings of the Audience at a Parisian Theatre a. Pencil, drawn on a page from a small sketchbook. Inscribed (by Emilia Cardona Boldini) no 154 n atelier Boldini / Emilia Boldini-Cardona / 1937 in black ink on the verso. Numbered 219 in pencil and 13835652/23 in pencil on the verso.

93 x 150 mm. (3 5/8 x 7/8 in.) b. Pencil, drawn on a page from a small sketchbook. Inscribed (by Emilia Cardona Boldini) no 43 e atelier Boldini. – Emilia Boldini Cardona / 1937 in black ink on the verso. Numbered 175 in red chalk and 43e in pencil and 138-35652/25 in pencil on the verso.

93 x 150 mm. (3 5/8 x 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Among the contents of Boldini’s Paris studio at the time of his death; The artist’s widow, Emilia Cardona Boldini, Ferrara; By descent to her nephew, Mario Murari; Private collection, Italy.

LITERATURE: Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Giovanni Boldini 1842-1931: Catalogo ragionato. Vol.I: La vita e l’iter artistico, Turin, 2002, p.248, fig.D15 (b only); Tiziano Panconi, ed., Boldini Mon Amour: opere note e mai viste, nuove scoperte, fotografie e documenti inediti, exhibition catalogue, Montecatini Terme, 2008, illustrated pp.430 and 433.

Giovanni Boldini settled in Paris in 1871, taking a studio on the Place Pigalle, and made his public debut at the Salon de Mars in 1874. In the late 1870s and early 1880s he produced genre paintings of elegantly dressed women portrayed in lavish interiors; subjects made popular by Alfred Stevens and James Tissot.

By the time he moved to a new studio in 1885, however, he had developed a formidable reputation for his dazzling, elegant depictions of the fashionable women of Paris, painted with a virtuoso technique of bold, fluid brushstrokes. Within a few years Boldini had risen to a position of prominence in Parisian art circles. He befriended other society portrait painters such as Paul-César Helleu, John Singer Sargent and James A. McNeill Whistler, and became a close friend of Edgar Degas. By the turn of the century Boldini had become the most sought-after portrait painter in Paris, achieving a level of success that rivalled that of Sargent in London.

These two sketchbook drawings are related to a series of compositions of a Parisian theatre audience, viewed from the orchestra pit, in which the scroll and tuning pegs of a cello is a prominent element in the immediate foreground. A pair of pencil sketches for this composition, likewise from a small sketchbook, are in the collection of the Museo Boldini in Ferrara1, which also houses an unfinished pastel study for the same composition2. A fluid oil sketch appeared at an auction of the some of the contents of Boldini’s studio in 1933 and is today in a private collection3, as is another unfinished pastel study for the same composition4.

These various sketches and studies – in pencil, pastel and oil – culminated in a large finished pastel (fig.1) of c.1886, today in a private collection5. In each of these works, Boldini focuses his attentions not on the performance itself or the musicians, but on the audience, viewed from an unusual vantage point in a manner akin to some of the theatre paintings of his friend Degas.

1.

a (actual size)

b (actual size)

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GIOVANNI BOLDINI Ferrara 1842-1931 Paris A Parisian Theatre Audience Pencil, drawn on a page from a small sketchbook. Partially inscribed (by Emilia Cardona Boldini) no 104 le at. B. E. [indistinct] in black ink at the lower left margin. Numbered 104 le and 138-35652/23 in pencil on the verso.

151 x 93 mm. (5 7/8 x 3 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Among the contents of Boldini’s Paris studio at the time of his death; The artist’s widow, Emilia Cardona Boldini, Ferrara; By descent to her nephew, Mario Murari; Private collection, Italy.

LITERATURE: Tiziano Panconi, ed., Boldini Mon Amour: opere note e mai viste, nuove scoperte, fotografie e documenti inediti, exhibition catalogue, Montecatini Terme, 2008, illustrated p.434.

This drawing is a preparatory study for a large, unfinished pastel (fig.1) by Boldini, today in the collection of the Museo Boldini in Ferrara1.

Boldini produced a large number of pencil drawings and sketches of audiences at Parisian theatres, and several examples of these are in the Museo Boldini in Ferrara2. Other comparable drawings by the artist include three pages from a similar small sketchbook, each depicting the composer Giuseppe Verdi and his second wife, the former soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, in the audience at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris3.

1.

actual size

30

CASIMIRO TOMBA ALDINI Rome 1857-1929 Rome A Nude Reclining on a Leopard Skin Rug Watercolour and gum arabic, over an underdrawing in pencil. Signed and dedicated all’amico Stefanori / CTomba in black ink at the lower right.

226 x 364 mm. (8 7/8 x 14 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to Attilio Stefanori, Rome; Professor and Mrs. Julius S. Held, Old Bennington, VT (his mark, not in Lugt, stamped in black ink on the verso).

A genre painter and watercolourist, the Roman artist Casimiro Tomba remains little known today, despite the success he achieved in his lifetime. He exhibited frequently in Rome, Turin and Bologna, and in 1928 wrote and illustrated a small book entitled Via Margutta e gli artisti. Tomba was particularly highly regarded for his finished watercolours of Orientalist or genre subjects, which he exhibited and sold as independent works of art.

The present sheet bears a dedication to the artist’s friend, the Roman painter, watercolourist and etcher Attilio Stefanori (1860-1911).

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VINCENZO GEMITO Naples 1852-1929 Naples A Child on a Rocking Chair Pencil and watercolour, heightened with white gouache, on buff paper. Signed and dated V. GEMITO / 1910 in pencil at the lower left.

204 x 270 mm. (8 x 10 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Kate Ganz, New York, in 2000.

LITERATURE: Katherina McArthur and Kate Ganz, Vincenzo Gemito: Drawings & Sculpture in Naples & Rome, New York, 2000, pp.46-47, no.20.

After Antonio Canova, Vincenzo Gemito was perhaps the foremost Italian sculptor of the 19th century.

(Indeed, he was described as such by the 20th century sculptor Giacomo Manzù.) A precocious talent, he received his early training in the studios of the sculptors Fedele Caggiano and Stanislao Lista. In 1868 the sixteen-year old Gemito exhibited a sculpture at the Promotrice di Belle Arti in Naples that attracted the attention of the King of Italy, Vittorio Emmanuele II, who acquired a bronze cast of the work for the palace at Capodimonte. Between 1877 and 1881 Gemito lived in Paris, where he became a close friend of the French painter and sculptor Ernest Meissonier. He continued to participate in the Paris Salons after his return to Naples, winning the Grand Prix for sculpture in 1889 and a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle the following year. Gemito was also an immensely gifted draughtsman, and produced a large number of figure and portrait studies in pen, chalk, pastel and watercolour. Around 1887, after he began to experience bouts of mental illness, he gave up sculpture almost entirely. He nevertheless continued to produce a large number of drawings, mostly portraits of friends and colleagues, as well as studies of street urchins, Neapolitan girls and other city folk. It was not until around 1909 that Gemito again took up sculpture full time, and it was in this later period of his career that he produced some of his finest work in bronze, executed with a delicacy and fineness of detail ultimately derived from his drawings.

Gemito’s drawings were greatly admired throughout his career, and were avidly collected by his contemporaries. (Already in his lifetime, his drawings had been likened to those of the sculptors Auguste Rodin and Constantin Meunier by one Italian scholar, in an article published in 1916.) Yet until relatively recently Gemito’s drawings have remained little known outside Italy, and it may be argued that he deserves to be recognized as not only one of the most significant sculptors of the period, but also one of its most gifted and distinctive draughtsmen.

Young children appear in a significant number of Gemito’s drawings and sketches, such as a series of sketches of two small girls in the Minozzi collection in Naples1, or a study of the head of a sleeping, fifteen-month old baby that was on the art market in 1992 and 19942. The subject of the present sheet, dated 1910 and drawn in a striking combination of watercolour and white gouache, may have been a family member, perhaps one of the four children of Gemito’s daughter Giuseppina.

32

MAXIMILIEN LUCE Paris 1858-1941 Paris Landscape with Trees Oil on stamped Arches paper, laid down on canvas. Signed Luce in pencil at the lower left. Inscribed ‘108 M. Luce. / “Paysage” / yes / Luce’ in brown ink on a label attached to the stretcher.

273 x 370 mm. (10 3/4 x 14 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Galerie Schneider, Paris.

Born in the neighbourhood of Montparnasse, Maximilien Luce displayed a lifelong interest in the depiction of the daily life of the working-class Parisians he grew up with. Trained initially as a woodengraver, he took up landscape painting in the late 1870s. Although best known for his work as a NeoImpressionist painter, Luce often preferred urban subjects to the landscape views produced by colleagues such as Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac. Like Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross, Luce continued to work in a Neo-Impressionist, or pointillist, manner for many years after the death of the group’s leader Georges Seurat, in 1891. He exhibited with the Neo-Impressionist artists at the Salon des Indépendants, and also took part in the exhibitions organized by Les XX in Brussels in 1889 and 1892. His strong leftwing political convictions and his hostility towards the authoritarianism of the Second Empire also found expression in much of his art, and particularly in his graphic work, which included illustrations for several anarchist and subversive broadsheets, including Le Père Peinard, Le Chambard and Le Temps Nouveau.

A member of the French anarchist movement, Luce was briefly imprisoned as a political activist in 1894.

This vibrant oil sketch may depict a view near the town of Méréville, about fifty kilometres south of Paris, where Luce spent several summers in the first few years of the 20th century. Located in the valley of the river Juine, the town is best known for the Chateau de Méréville, surrounded by a Romantic park and gardens constructed in the late 18th century. A comparable landscape painted by Luce at Méréville in 1903 is in the collection of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Weimar1, while a similar work, datable to c.1905 and also depicting the area around Méréville, is in a private collection in New York2. A Paysage dans les environs de Méréville sold at auction in 1990 may also be compared stylistically to the present work3, as can another Méréville landscape in a private collection4.

Denise Bazetoux has confirmed the attribution of the present sheet. She has succinctly described Luce’s landscape paintings of the first decade of the new century as ‘free of the theoretical rigidity of neoimpressionism, but still imbued with the desire to construct the subject carefully, and capture the light.’5

33

HENRI LEBASQUE Champigné 1865-1937 Le Cannet A Seated Female Nude in an Interior Watercolour and black chalk. Signed Lebasque in pencil at the lower right.

205 x 194 mm. (8 1/8 x 7 5/8 in.)

Henri-Joseph Lebasque arrived in Paris in 1885 to study with Léon Bonnat at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, although according to his biographer Paul Vitry he also received some training from Camille Pissarro. He also met and was influenced by the painters Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, leaders of the group of artists known as the Nabis. Lebasque exhibited for the first time in a group show at the gallery of the dealer Louis Le Barc de Boutteville in 1892, and the following year made his debut at the Salon des Indépendants. He exhibited regularly at the annual Salons, where his works were admired by critics, and also took part in the inaugural Salon d’Automne in 1903. Lebasuqe enjoyed a longstanding friendship with Henri Matisse, whom he probably met at the Salon d’Automne in 1905, and had his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1907. He also worked as a decorator, painting mural decorations for private homes and for such public spaces as the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, and provided designs for ceramics, commissioned by the dealer Ambroise Vollard. In 1918 the artist entered into an exclusive contract with the Galerie Georges Petit, through whom his paintings were exhibited and sold in America. Lebasque spent much of the years after the First World War painting in the south of France, and in 1924 left Paris for good to settle at Le Cannet, near Cannes.

An accomplished watercolourist, Lebasque worked frequently in the medium. As a recent scholar has noted, his watercolours ‘have a purity of color and line, and yet a lyrical feeling to them as well . . . while many derive their charm from their elusive, unfinished nature, with figures melting or floating under the Riviera sun, the majority of Lebasque’s watercolors are polished examples of his mastery of the medium . . . Lebasque’s exceptional draughtsmanship enhances the simplicity of [his] compositions, which are clean-lined, with few colors and mesmerizing intense hues.’1 This vibrant watercolour may be related to a series of paintings by Lebasque of female nudes in an interior, painted in 1925 and 1926 at Le Cannet, not long after the artist settled in the South of France.

At this time in his life, Lebasque began employing models, since his two daughters had married and his wife was no longer willing to pose nude for the artist. Little is known of the models who appear in these late paintings, apart from their names; one was named Kiki and another – who was blonde, and whose services were briefly shared with Pierre Bonnard – was known as Marinette. As has been noted of these paintings, ‘The models of Le Cannet are painted with a natural ease and suggestive sensuousness concentrating on the idea of woman as muse – a figure of abstract and majestic fecundity . . . Lebasque painted his young models in poses of penetrating intimacy and subtle clarity...[his] nudes are subtle, relaxed and pensive, and rendered with a sure sense of contour in the figures.’2 The present sheet, which depicts the model Kiki, is particularly close to two paintings of 1926; a Nu a la chemise rose in the Fondation Pierre Giannada in Martigny3 and a Nu au canapé rose in a private collection in Chicago4. In these paintings, as in the present sheet, Lebasque has placed his nude models against colourful and elaborately patterned rugs and cushions in the sunny interior of his home at Le Cannet. A pencil sketch of a seated nude5 may also be tentatively related to the present watercolour.

34

ERNEST STEPHEN LUMSDEN, R.S.A., P.R.E. London 1883-1948 Edinburgh Northern Twilight Oil on canvas, laid down on board.

236 x 327 mm. (9 1/4 x 12 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Fine Art Society, London, in May 1984; Mr. and Mrs. Giorgio Marsan, London.

A gifted printmaker and painter, E. S. Lumsden was largely self-taught as an etcher, learning the craft from the technical guide written by the 19th century French printmaker Maxime Lalanne, which first appeared in an English edition in 1880. He soon became adept in the medium and established a considerable reputation as a printmaker. His earliest work as an etcher dates to 1902, when the young artist was living in Paris and studying at the Atelier Julian. In 1906 six of his etchings were exhibited at the Society of Painters and Gravers and the following year two more were shown at the Salon in Paris. By 1908 he had settled in Edinburgh, where he took up a position at the Edinburgh College of Art, but his wanderlust led him the following year to British Columbia in Canada. From there he travelled on to Japan and Korea, and thence to Beijing and on to Burma. It was in India, however, that Lumsden found scenes and subjects that truly captivated him, and he produced a number of etched views of the cities of Benares, Jaipur and Udaipur. He was to make several trips to India, visiting Jodhpur, Kashmir and Ladak and often returning to Benares. He also spent some time travelling throughout Spain. In 1914 Lumsden was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, and in 1924 he published The Art of Etching, which remains a standard work on the subject. As well as landscapes, Lumsden also etched a number of portraits of friends and fellow artists, among them Frank Brangwyn, Augustus John, Edmund Blampied and James McBey. The 1920s found both Lumsden living in Edinburgh earning a comfortable living from his work, selling his prints through his dealers Colnaghi’s in London. An exhibition of his work at Taylor and Brown’s Galleries in Edinburgh in March 1920 included not only the etchings for which he was becoming very well known, but also a number of drawings and oil paintings. With the decline in the market for etchings in the later 1920s, however, Lumsden began working more as a painter. He was elected an associate member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1923, becoming a full member ten years later. Having moved to Sir Henry Raeburn’s old studio in Edinburgh’s Queen Street in 1927, he worked primarily as a portrait painter, and became curator of the Royal Scottish Academy library in 1935. In November 1935 he showed a number of paintings, including seascapes and other Berwickshire views, as part of an exhibition of the work of a group of eight artists at the New Gallery in Edinburgh. Crippled by arthritis in his later years, Lumsden produced relatively little work in the 1940s before his death in 1948, at the age of sixty-four.

Works by Lumsden are today in the collections of the Tate, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and elsewhere.

35

PAVEL TCHELITCHEV Kaluga 1898-1957 Rome Portrait of a Young Man Brush and black ink, gouache and watercolour on light brown paper. Stamped with the artist’s signature P. Tchelitchew on the verso.

353 x 250 mm. (13 7/8 x 9 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist; Richard Nathanson, London, in 1972; Richard Addinsell, London; His posthumous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 28 June 1978, lot 182; Private collection, Hamburg.

EXHIBITED: London, Richard Nathanson at The Alpine Club, Pavel Tchelitchew: A Selection of Paintings, Gouaches and Drawings, 1972, no.8.

Born into an aristocratic family in Moscow, Pavel Feodorovitch Tchelitchev (or Tchelitchew) fled the city with his family in 1918 during the Bolshevik Revolution. The family settled in Kiev, where Tchelitchev attended drawing classes at the Kiev Academy and, encouraged by the set designer Alexandra Exter, began working on stage sets and poster designs. Working in Berlin in the early 1920s, Tchelitchev achieved some success as a stage designer, and also began painting portraits and still-lives. At the suggestion the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the young artist settled in Paris in 1923. As well as exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne, Tchelitchev was included in a group exhibition at the Galerie Druet in 1926, alongside Eugène Berman, Christian Bérard and other artists who painted in a distinctive, dreamlike manner known as Neo-Humanism or Neo-Romanticism. He was given his first one-man exhibition at the Claridge Gallery in London in 1928, and the same year designed the costumes and sets for Diaghilev’s Ode. In 1934 Tchelitchev moved to New York, where his fantastical paintings of allegorical subjects gained considerable him attention. A one-man show at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1938 was followed four years later by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which acquired one of his best-known allegorical works, Hide and Seek. Collectors of Tchelitchev’s work included such prominent cultural figures as Gertrude Stein, Edith Sitwell (who described the artist as ‘tragic, haunted, and noble’1), Sir Kenneth Clark and Lincoln Kirstein, who published an early monograph on the artist’s drawings.

From 1949 onwards Tchelitchev lived mainly in Rome, where he died in 1957, at the age of fifty-nine.

Dame Edith Sitwell, who owned nearly forty drawings by the artist, praised Tchelitchev as ‘a transcendentally great draughtsman’2, while Lincoln Kirstein described him as ‘one of the most varied and memorable portraitists of his epoch.’3 The present sheet may be dated to around 1927, while Tchelitchev was living and working in Paris. The 1920s were a period of intense interest in portraiture on the part of the young artist, and it was during this period that, as James Thrall Soby has noted, ‘the human face began to fascinate him above all other subjects. In late 1924 and 1925 he finished several self-portraits and a number of portraits of friends with whom his psychological and emotional accord was intimate and continuous . . . In [these portraits] are the unmistakable signs of the expressionist tradition of portraiture which had been developing in Europe since the turn of the century . . . But within the hard, arbitrary contours of Tchelitchew’s portraits there is an implication of tender brooding and reverie which the portraiture of his elders for the most part lacked. By comparison with the latter, Tchelitchew’s portraits are romantic or, as the term came to be, Neo-Romantic.’4 This drawing, which remained with the artist until his death, would appear to depict the American pianist Allen Tanner (1898-1987), a friend and companion of the painter during his years in Berlin and Paris. As Tchelitchev’s biographer has noted of Tanner, ‘An aspiring pianist in those old days, he had been a gilded willowy youth with a shock of black hair, a soft, half-hidden, languishing glance, a handsome face and the primmest lips and largest romantic ideas in the world.’5 Tanner was first introduced to Tchelitchev in Berlin in December 1922, and the two soon became lovers, sharing an apartment and moving to Paris together in 1923. The relationship continued until 1933, when the artist began a liaison with the writer and poet Charles Henri Ford.

36

ESTEBAN LISA Hinojosa de San Vicente 1895-1983 Buenos Aires Recto: Composition Verso: Composition Oil on cardboard.

299 x 228 mm. (11 3/4 x 9 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: The Esteban Lisa estate, Buenos Aires.

EXHIBITED: Madrid, Guillermo de Osma Galería, Esteban Lisa, 1998, no.6.

One of the pioneers of abstract painting in Latin America, Esteban Lisa was born in the province of Toledo in Spain and emigrated to Argentina in 1907, at the age of twelve. He settled in Buenos Aires, and after completing his schooling worked as a postman and, eventually, as the head librarian of the Argentine postal service. At the same time he began teaching drawing classes at a school for adult further education. Largely self-taught as an artist, Lisa is thought to have destroyed much of his youthful work, and his earliest known paintings date from the early 1930s and reveal a gradual tendency towards abstraction. By around 1935, he had begun to produce a distinctive body of abstract paintings; works which were quite alien to the preference for figurative painting among the artists and collectors of his day in Argentina. Indeed, Lisa’s style is of particular interest in that it developed in almost complete isolation from the avant-garde modernism of Europe and America.

In 1955 Lisa retired from his teaching position and established his own art school, the Escuela de Arte Moderno Las Cuatro Dimensiones (Modern Art School of the Four Dimensions), in which his theories of the relationship between science and art – profoundly influenced by the writings of Wassily Kandinsky, particularly the book On The Spiritual in Art, published in 1912 – played a prominent role. He was a demanding yet highly charismatic teacher, and strove to pass on to his students his belief that art was the highest form of human expression. As one recent scholar has written, ‘Because he felt so strongly that art could be used to assist human nature in its further evolution, Lisa dedicated himself to teaching. Using philosophy and aesthetics, his classes often evolved into long discussions on the meaning and purpose of art and life.’1 Lisa’s abstract paintings are characterized by their small scale and intimate nature. His lifelong devotion to abstraction resulted in several changes of direction in his painted output as his career progressed, from Cubist-like compositions of fragmented planes of colour and geometric shapes in the late 1930s, through the more organic forms and clashing colours of his work of the 1940s to the spirited paintings of the 1950s, which Lisa entitled ‘Juego con lineas y colores’ (‘Playing with lines and colours’), and a series of charming, almost childlike drawings in pastel on buff paper. In the words of one scholar, Lisa was something of a ‘chameleon-artist . . . Just when we think we understand his work, he introduces confounding changes or transformations.’2 Lisa continued to paint until 1978, when, at the age of eighty-three, he abandoned painting and drawing altogether. For the artist, painting had always remained a purely private exercise, and he never exhibited or sold any of his work; indeed, he rarely showed his paintings to anyone. At the time of his death in 1983, therefore, Lisa’s small abstract paintings remained unknown to all but his family and a handful of students. His entire oeuvre was bequeathed to two of his loyal pupils, and today forms the nucleus of the Fundación Esteban Lisa in Buenos Aires.

Since the artist chose never to exhibit his works in his lifetime, Lisa’s work has only recently been accorded much critical attention. Indeed, it was not until 1987 – four years after his death – that the first significant exhibition of his paintings was held, in Buenos Aires. This was followed in the 1990s by

recto

museum and gallery exhibitions in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, as well as in Madrid, Barcelona, London and New York. The appearance of such a significant and highly individual body of abstract paintings by an artist all but unknown to scholars and curators of contemporary art was, for many, an event of considerable interest, and more than a little fascination. As a review of one of these recent exhibitions noted, ‘Lisa belongs to the tradition of hermetic artists in Latin America who purposely stay out of the mainstream of the artistic currents and platforms of their time to develop their own paths . . . From our perspective, it is hard to comprehend that there were artists that declined the opportunities the market offered, to pursue an artistic ideal in complete detachment.’3 The present, double-sided sheet is an early work by the artist, and may be dated to between 1936 and 1940. It is a particularly fine and typical example of Lisa’s abstractions of this period, which have been aptly described as ‘quiet meditations on color and form . . . [in which] rectangles, squares, triangles, and trapezoidal planes of muted color fit together like shards of stained glass.’4 At this stage of his career the artist painted on small, thin pieces of cardboard of a uniform size (about 300 x 230 mm.), often using both sides of the board to create two independent, finished compositions, as in the present work. (From the 1950s onwards, however, Lisa painted mainly in oils or pastels on paper.) The way in which the artist allows the rough, textured surface and colour of the cardboard to show through the composition is also typical of Lisa’s paintings of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Comparable works of this period include a Composition in a private collection in Madrid5 and another in a private collection in Holland6; also similar are Compositions included in commercial exhibitions in New York in 20007 and in London the following year8, as well as a pair of paintings recently exhibited in Argentina9. Very few of Lisa’s works of this early period are signed or dated, and it was not until the mid1940s that the artist began to sign his paintings and drawings with some regularity.

Marking the start of his lifelong dedication to abstraction, Esteban Lisa’s small paintings of the second half of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s, typified by the present sheet, are among his most beautiful and elegiac compositions. Not merely explorations of form, colour and geometry, but also manifestations of the artist’s personal artistic philosophy, these works are, in the words of one scholar, ‘the most subdued, classic, and restrained of Lisa’s paintings, and, with their soft color harmonies, function for the viewer like secular, visual prayers.’10

verso

37

ERICH WOLFSFELD Krojanke 1884-1956 London Study of an Moroccan Baby Oil on paper. A sketch of the head of a baby in pencil on the verso. Inscribed Geshenck an / Fol. Irna Schönfeld zu / ihrem Gebürtstag am / 15.12.1943 / 15 Lauderdale Mansions / London W8 / Studie eines marokkanischen Babies / von Professor Erich Wolfsfeld, / Lehrer an der Berliner Kunst- / Akademie bis 1936 in pencil on the verso1.

392 x 281 mm. (15 3/8 x 11 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist in December 1943 to Erna Schönfeld, London; Thence by descent to a private collection, Walton-on-Thames, until 2008.

Erich Wolfsfeld’s early career was largely devoted to printmaking, and it was not until around 1910 that he began painting in oils, although he seems to have preferred to work on treated paper, rather than on stretched canvas. In 1918 he took up a post as a professor of drawing at the Berlin Akademie, and was later appointed to the position of professor of painting and etching. Wolfsfeld travelled widely, in particular to North Africa and the Middle East, and in 1925 exhibited twenty-nine paintings of Turkish or Moroccan subjects in Berlin. In 1928 he published an account of a journey through Egypt and Palestine, entitled Einedrücke von einer Orientreise. Although a popular and highly regarded teacher, Wolfsfeld, as a Jew, was forced to resign from the Akademie in 1935. Three years later he emigrated to Britain, bringing much of his work with him. After a brief period at an internment camp on the Isle of Man, Wolfsfeld settled first in Sheffield and later in London. An exhibition of his work at the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield in 1939 led to a number of portrait commissions, and in 1943 he exhibited his etchings at the Royal Academy. Nevertheless he seems to have been quite unsettled by his uprooting from Germany, and relatively few works may be dated to the war years. After the war he began again to travel, visiting favourite sites in Brittany, Morocco and Spain. A comprehensive exhibition of Wolfsfeld’s work was held at the Derby Art Gallery in 1953, and three years later, shortly before his death, he was made an associate member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers.

Writing shortly after Wolfsfeld’s death, one critic noted that ‘He was an artist who loved drawing for its own sake – who could combine power and sensitivity – who enjoyed describing the human form either with brush or chalk or the etcher’s needle. And he solved the problem of the portrayal of the human race with an intensity of perception that is deeply moving particularly in his studies of old men and young children.’2 More recently, another critic has commented that ‘The simple reality of what he saw on his travels did not move him either to exaggerate or caricature his subject matter . . . His compassionate vision records the dignity of peoples thoroughly accustomed to adversity. Wolfsfeld’s is an outlook with which Rembrandt himself might have sympathised...In [oil paint] and other media, such as chalk or pen and wash, Wolfsfeld demonstrated a wonderful certainty yet fluency in his drawing . . . He was an artist of rare ability.’3 This vigorous oil sketch of a baby, depicted resting on its mother’s back, can be related to a similar figure in a large painting of North African women and children4. The same child also appears in an oil sketch of Arab figures sold at auction in 20095. The pencil sketch of the head of a baby on the verso of the sheet is, according to a label pasted onto the backing board, a portrait of Jill Pomerance, the daughter of the painter Fay Pomerance. Mrs. Pomerance befriended Wolfsfeld soon after his arrival in England, and the artist lived at her house in Sheffield both before and after his period of internment. Pomerance also organized the first exhibition of Wolfsfeld’s work in England, at the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield in 1939. In later years, Pomerance recalled of Wolfsfeld that ‘I think his favourite commissions were those of children, for he delighted in them and in painting them. He first painted our daughter Jill when she was a very small infant – three head studies with a fourth thrown off while he was cleaning his brushes, prompting an enquiry of me following the Graves exhibition as to how my triplets were doing!’6

38

LAURENCE STEPHEN LOWRY, R.A. Manchester 1887-1976 Glossop A Group of Five Figures Watercolour on buff paper. Signed and dated L. S Lowry 1952. in pencil at the lower right. Indistinctly inscribed M. Warburton / 3-4 Bolton Rd. West / Holcombe Brook / Bury / 3/8 / [?] in pencil on the verso.

127 x 177 mm. (5 x 7 in.)

PROVENANCE: Ethelwyn Warburton, Holcombe Brook, Bury, in 1962; Alexander Gallery, Bristol; Purchased from them by a private collector in the 1970s; Private collection, until 2008.

EXHIBITED: Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, L. S. Lowry, A.R.A.: An Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings, 1962, no.160 (lent by Miss E. M. Warburton).

The drawings of L. S. Lowry are usually complete in themselves, and are often not preparatory studies for paintings. As Mervyn Levy has noted, ‘These are a painter’s drawings, but not drawings from which to make paintings.’1 Lowry, as another scholar has written, ‘drew continually and obsessively until the last years of his life, producing work that is surprising in its range of subject matter, medium, process and quality . . . He clearly valued their immediacy and directness and used drawing not only as a necessary means of producing his finished paintings, but as an expressive medium in its own right.’2 In his last years the artist devoted most of his time to drawing.

As a draughtsman, Lowry’s favourite medium was pencil, although he also made use of pastel, chalk, pen and ink, conté crayon and, in the late years of his career, ballpoint and felt-tipped pen. Watercolours such as the present sheet, however, are very rare in his oeuvre (the artist himself recalls producing ‘no more than a dozen’), and all date from the 1950s. As Lowry recalled, at the age of eighty-seven and near the end of his long career, ‘Water-colours I’ve used only occasionally. They don’t really suit me; dry too quickly. They’re not flexible enough. I like a medium you can work into, over a period of time.’3 It has nevertheless been noted of Lowry’s few works in watercolour that, although the artist ‘has no great relish for the medium…he can extract from its fleeting potential a deftness of touch and a shimmering translucency of colour that lends itself especially to beach scenes and seascapes.’4 Among the handful of watercolour drawings by Lowry that have survived, a closely comparable study of seven figures, similarly dated 1952, was exhibited alongside the present sheet in Sheffield in 1962 and later appeared on the art market5. A stylistically comparable watercolour of The Village Green is also dated 19526, while a small group of watercolours in the collection of The Lowry at Salford Quays may similarly be likened to the drawing here exhibited. These include a pair of street scenes with figures and a seaside view with yachts, each dated 19597, and a view of an estuary, dated 1956-19598. An Industrial Landscape in the Manchester City Art Gallery9 is also comparable in technique and handling.

Interestingly, Lowry’s interest in the medium of watercolour may have been inspired by the first owner of the present sheet. Ethelwyn Warburton was the daughter of Percy Warburton, one of Lowry’s teachers at the Salford School of Art. The artist remained close to his former teacher in later years, and would occasionally stay with the Warburton family in Bolton. According to Lowry’s biographer Shelley Rohde, during one of these visits the young Ethelwyn Warburton told the artist: “You can’t be very famous; no one at school has ever heard of you.’ He borrowed her little box of watercolours ‘to try them out’ and gave her the result, travelling years later to visit her in college in Yorkshire and to take her to the cinema.’10 This small, charming study of figures may therefore be regarded as among Lowry’s very first attempts at working in watercolour.

39

ELIOT HODGKIN London 1905-1987 London Five Oyster Shells Tempera on board. Signed and dated Eliot Hodgkin 12.i.61 in pencil at the lower left.

248 x 382 mm. (9 3/4 x 15 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Connecticut; Thence by descent, until 2008.

Eliot Hodgkin studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and, for a brief period, at the Royal Academy Schools, where he learned to paint not only in oils but also in tempera, influenced by the work of Joseph Southall and Maxwell Armfield in this medium. He began his career as a mural painter and fashion illustrator, publishing a book on the subject in 1932, but by the middle of the 1930s was established as a painter of still lives and landscapes, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy. Within a year or two of his first one-man exhibition, held in a London gallery in 1936, Hodgkin had begun working in egg tempera, and many of his finest works were painted in this demanding medium. As he wrote in an essay published in 1967, ‘tempera has no attraction for me simply because it was used by the Italian primitives, most of whose work does not greatly appeal to me. I use it because it is the only way in which I can express the character of the objects that fascinate me. With oil paint I could not get the detail without getting also a disagreeable surface: moreover I should have to wait while the paint dried before continuing.’1 During and after the Second World War, Hodgkin painted a number of views of plants growing amid the bombed wreckage of London, exhibiting some of these works at the Royal Academy. He also regularly exhibited his work at the Leicester Galleries, the Reid Gallery and Agnews in London and Durlacher Brothers in New York. Although he turned down the opportunity of becoming an Academician in 1959, Hodgkin continued to show at the Royal Academy throughout his career, exhibiting a total of 113 paintings at the Summer exhibitions between 1934 and 1981. His subject matter remained largely confined to still life compositions and landscapes, generally on a small and rather intimate scale. Owing to worsening eyesight, Hodgkin gave up painting in 1979, and a sale of the contents of his studio was held in London in 1983, four years before his death.

In 1957, in response to an enquiry from the editors of The Studio magazine, Eliot Hodgkin provided a succinct description of his lifelong interest in still life painting: ‘In so far as I have any conscious purpose, it is to show the beauty of natural objects which are normally though uninteresting or even unattractive: such things as brussels sprouts, turnips, onions, pebbles and flints, bulbs, dead leaves, bleached vertebrae, an old boot cast up by the tide. People sometimes tell me that they had never really ‘seen’ something before I painted it, and I should like to believe this…For myself, if I must put it into words, I try to look at quite simple things as though I were seeing them for the first time and as though no one had ever painted them before.’1 As the artist further noted nearly twenty years later, in a letter written to Brinsley Ford, ‘I like to show the beauty of things that no one looks at twice.’2 Dated the 12th of January 1961, this delightful painting is a splendid example of Hodgkin’s tempera technique, and of his preference for unusual still life subjects. Two other paintings of oyster shells were exhibited in London in 19633, while a painting of four oyster shells was shown at the Royal Academy in 1975.

40

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT Brooklyn 1960-1988 New York Untitled Wax crayon on paper.

317 x 444 mm. (12 1/2 x 17 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Sidney Janis Gallery, New York; Private collection, Europe; James Goodman Gallery, New York; Max Lang, New York, in 1998.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in December 1960 to a Puerto Rican mother and a Haitian father, and from an early age displayed a talent for drawing, an activity he maintained throughout his youth. In the late 1970s he began working as a graffiti artist, and also designed and sold handmade t-shirts and painted postcards. Within a few months Basquiat had begun to make his mark in the downtown art and music world of the day, centred around the East Village, and by the end of 1980 had taken up painting. His first dealer was Annina Nosei, at whose gallery he participated in a group exhibition in 1981. The oneman show that followed a year later was a huge success with critics and collectors, and was followed later that year by shows at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles and with the Zurich dealer Bruno Bischofsberger, who became the artist’s dealer. Very quickly Basquiat’s paintings, which found their inspiration in Black and urban culture, became highly sought-after. The youngest artist to be included in Documenta VII, held in 1982 in Kassel in Germany, Basquiat was given one-man gallery shows in Rotterdam, Los Angeles, Zurich and Tokyo over the next few months. (He was also one of the youngest artists ever to be included in the Whitney Museum Biennial in 1983.) It was also at around this time he met Andy Warhol, who over the next four years was to become a close friend, mentor and sometime collaborator. A steady stream of gallery exhibitions in America and Europe, as well as his first museum shows in Edinburgh and London in 1984 and in California in 1985, continued to raise Basquiat’s profile to new heights. At the same time, however, his drug use became more excessive, and his health started to deteriorate. The death of Warhol in 1987 was a serious blow to the young artist, who became more and more reclusive over the coming months. Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in August 1988, at the age of twenty-seven. His artistic career lasted about nine years, and in that time he produced around a thousand paintings.

Basquiat was a compulsive draughtsman, and produced many hundreds of drawings over the course of his brief career. Indeed, the artist may be said to have been at heart a draughtsman, and his paintings, while resonant with vibrant colour, find their embodiment in line. As one scholar has noted, ‘Basquiat understood color like few others and used it with unbridled temerity, but he was essentially a draftsman . . . In fact, his paintings are drawn as much as painted. Areas of color are scribbled in impatiently, while most everything else in described with quick, confident, linear strokes…If Basquiat had the facility to deploy the power of color, that did not mean that he also needed to spend a lot of time getting it on canvas; he wanted to be drawing.’1 The artist also developed a habit of integrating his drawings into his painted work; photocopying them and gluing the sheets onto his canvases, and then painting over and around them.

Replete with signs, symbols, words, numbers and codes, Basquiat’s drawings were a fundamental part of his artistic process.

It is arguably in his drawings that the creative intensity of Basquiat’s artistic temperament can best be seen.

As the art dealer Enrico Navarra has pointed out, ‘Basquiat’s works on paper, a separate and distinct part of his work, have a very moving spontaneity and deep intimacy. The themes which were dear to him – autobiographical memories, Black heroes, comic book characters, cartoon characters, anatomical plates, graffiti, money, racism, death, etc. – are employed in a manner that is more striking [and] true-to-life in his

The present sheet is accompanied by a certificate issued by Gerard Basquiat for the Authentication Committee for the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The curator and critic Robert Storr has written that ‘Scarred, torn and trampled, much of [Basquiat’s] work on paper bears the direct imprint of his urgency. Drawing, for him, was something you did rather than something done, an activity rather than a medium. The seemingly throw-away sheets that carpeted his studio might appear little more than warm-ups for painting, except that the artist, a shrewd connoisseur of his own off-hand and under foot inventions did not in fact throw them away, but instead kept the best for constant reference and re-use. Or, kept them because they were, quite simply, indestructibly vivid.’7

Datable to 1981, the present sheet is an impressive and vibrant example of Basquiat’s audacious draughtsmanship at the onset of his rise to fame. The skull was a particularly favourite motif of the artist’s, and appears often in both paintings and drawings, often accompanied by words and combinations of letters and numbers. Robert Storr has noted of Basquiat’s imagery that ‘Heads, often skulls, chant his words. Or rather inhale and exhale them through gritted teeth, as if sucking in the variously dense or diffuse atmosphere they create, only to cough it out again in great gusts.’4 The crown drawn in red at the upper right is another motif Basquiat used extensively from around 1982 onwards, and is a legacy of his days as a graffiti artist; this ‘personalized, even trademark, image of a three-pointed crown . . . often accompanied a figure but occasionally appeared on its own throughout the remainder of the artist’s career.’5 The symbol of a heart with a cross also appears in several other works by Basquiat, such as the painted triptych Speaks for Itself of 1982 in the Mugrabi collection6.

works on paper.’2 The range of references in Basquiat’s drawings, as in his paintings, also often included motifs sourced from Greek and Roman, African, Aztec and Hispanic cultures. As one critic noted of the artist’s drawings, ‘A restless spirit roaming the four corners of Arches paper, Basquiat relates the results of his idiosyncratic excavations of pre- and ancient history.’3

Of the Wall of Light watercolours, of which this is a particularly fine and fresh example, one scholar has noted that ‘Graceful and seemingly effortless, these are works Scully says he pursues chiefly for himself as “private” entities. He makes them in a relaxed state of mind, focusing chiefly on the quality of light, and he renders them without vigorous physical action . . . Scully arrives at a remarkable elegance while working in a delicate, extremely temperamental medium . . . His Wall of Light watercolors are poetic studies of light, with a quiet undertone and a subtle, rhythmic quality alive with luminosity.’5

Scully’s watercolours often treat the same themes as his paintings, yet differ from them. On relationship of a watercolour to a painting of the same composition, the artist has commented that ‘One could say it’s a version of the same thing in a different medium, which produces an entirely distinct reality. Because the watercolour is really only staining the paper. You’re working with the light within the watercolour, and you’re trying to articulate that light.’3 He has further elaborated on this theme in a 1995 interview, in which he stated that ‘the watercolors are about the extreme absence of physicality. They are really as close as a painter can get to pure light, an effortless, physically effortless vision. And that’s what’s really interesting about them to me . . . I think the idea of the lack of physicality in the watercolors is crucial to their nature, that the white paper is shining through the watercolor the whole time. And it’s pure pigment, it’s pure pigment suspended in a small amount of gum Arabic and it’s floated onto the paper.’

The present sheet was executed in 1990, and is part of a group of paintings, watercolours, pastels and prints known collectively as the Wall of Light series. These works evolved following a trip Scully took to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico in 1983, where he was captivated by the appearance of the stacked stone walls of Mayan ruins. He produced a number of watercolours during this trip that were his first attempts in the medium, and these served, several years later, as the basis for the Wall of Light series.

Indeed, the artist refers to these irregular rectangles of colour in these works as ‘bricks’; a conscious move away from the broad bands and stripes of colour of his earlier paintings.

Over the course of his career, the Irish-born painter Sean Scully has created a significant body of works on paper – watercolours, pastels and prints – alongside his paintings on canvas. He has referred to his works on paper as ‘complements and antidotes’ to the paintings, and has further noted that ‘the watercolors are very, very personal to me.’1 More recently, Scully elaborated on the importance of his watercolours to him: ‘There’s a big difference between them [paintings and watercolours], the difference between public and private. Because I do things all the time for the public, so there can be exhibitions and people and go and see the paintings. The watercolours are more private . . . But I don’t think any of my work is private anymore. It’s just a different degree, and it’s something I can have and put in a drawer and get the sense at least for a while that I have made it entirely for myself. But of course it’s only a question of time before that little watercolour has to come out of the drawer and go somewhere for an exhibition.’2

PROVENANCE: Galerie Lelong, Paris; Acquired from them by a private collector.

Watercolour on paper (a page from a large sketchbook). Signed and dated Sean Scully 11.17.90 in pencil at the lower right.

275 x 300 mm (10 7/8 x 11 3/54 in.) [image] 306 x 403 mm. (12 x 15 7/8 in.) [sheet]

Untitled (11.17.90)

SEAN SCULLY Born 1945

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42

CHRISTOPHER BRAMHAM Born 1952 The Ducks III, Richmond Watercolour, gouache and pastel on paper. Signed, titled and dated Ducks 3 / Spring 1996 / C. Bramham in black chalk on the backing board.

1613 x 750 mm. (63 1/2 x 29 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Marlborough Fine Art, London; Acquired in 1996 by Elaine and Melvin Merians, New York.

LITERATURE: Patrick McCaughey and Emily M. Weeks, The School of London and Their Friends: The Collection of Elaine and Melvin Merians, New Haven, 2000, pp.60-63, no.29 (entry by Emily M. Weeks).

EXHIBITED: New Haven, CT., Yale Center for British Art, and Purchase, NY, Neuberger Museum of Art, The School of London and Their Friends: The Collection of Elaine and Melvin Merians, 2000-2001, no.29.

Born in Bradford in Yorkshire in 1952, Christopher Bramham studied at the Bradford College of Art in 1970 and the Kingston-upon-Thames Art School between 1971 and 1973. He spent a number of years working as a part-time teacher, and eventually settled in Richmond, Surrey. A friend and disciple of Lucien Freud, whom he met in 1982 and who was instrumental in bringing his work to greater public attention1, Bramham has devoted his mature career to landscape painting. As the artist noted in a recent interview, ‘I paint landscape because I find it endlessly beautiful, birds, trees, mud, wetness, roughness, smoothness. Beauty and shite . . . My boldness and excitement come from looking at my subject . . .; and only when in front of my subject do I forget about the unpleasant things in life. When angry I paint, when afraid I paint, when happy too.’3 After being included in a Young Contemporaries exhibition at Agnew’s in 1986, Bramham had his first oneman exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1988, and over the next several years exhibited at the Marlborough gallery in London2. Throughout the 1990s, his preferred subject matter was suburban London landscapes, and in particular views from the window of his home in Richmond. Studied at different times of the day and in various seasons, the streets and scenery of suburban Richmond are depicted in Bramham’s paintings with an intensity and devotion that belies the apparent mundanity of the subject. In 1999 the artist left London to settle in Cornwall, and his landscapes took on a new dimension, with depictions of farmhouses and rural views.

This very large and impressive sheet, drawn in the spring of 1996, is a remarkable tour de force of pastel and watercolour, and depicts the view from the artist’s studio in Richmond. It is the last and largest of three related works of the same title and subject, the other two having been drawn and exhibited the previous year4; all three are tall and narrow compositions. In more general terms, this monumental drawing belongs with a large group of paintings and pastels, executed in the second half of the 1990s, focusing on the angled view from the artist’s studio window down into his garden, here depicted with its ducks and greenhouse, and beyond the fence a glimpse of a neighbour’s garden, with a child on a swing. The brightness and intensity of the colours in the present sheet, with the garden in sunshine, is unusual in Bramham’s work, in which a more subdued tonal palette usually predominates; as has been noted of the artist, ‘he prefers grayish-greens to pure, brilliant tones and overcast skies to blue; when the sun does shine in Bramham’s pictures, it bleaches rather than illuminates the landscape.’5

When the present work was exhibited at the Yale Center for British Art in 2000, it was noted that, ‘though executed in gouache and pastel, mediums that invite spontaneity and loose strokes, Bramham has not deviated from his usual, laborious style. The odd aerial perspective is testimony to the artist’s practice of painting or drawing what he sees from his upper-story window in Richmond – the ducks, in fact, are family pets. The intensity with which Bramham has studied his backyard, the linear precision of the tree limbs, and the attempt to render every leaf and wisp of straw, pays tribute both to Bramham’s mentors, Dürer and Freud most prominent among them, and to his personal attachment to the landscape…Devotion to and love of the subject matter is what keeps Bramham so intently focused. In painting the world literally at his doorstep, with care and consideration, he discovers the strange beauty of nondescript streets, rows of garages, and railway embankments. It is this ability to render the familiar fresh and new that gives Bramham’s work its power.’6 Bramham’s work, which is sometimes on a grand scale, can best be seen within the English tradition of landscape painting and reflects, for example, the particular and longstanding influence on the artist of the work of John Constable. Yet his work remains largely unknown to all but a few enlightened critics, curators and collectors. In a review of Bramham’s Marlborough exhibition in 2002, the critic Brian Sewell praised the artist as ‘a seriously competent landscape painter . . . Painters of landscapes, however, rate pretty low in the hierarchies of art today . . . and no one among the Saatchi-Serota establishment, or even at the Royal Academy, seems to have recognised Bramham’s substantial qualities. His work has parallels with the landscapes of Lucian Freud and the German painter Anselm Kiefer, both men of outstanding international reputation and in demand. Dare one say that Bramham is technically the best of the trio? That he is may well be the reason for his neglect, for technical skill is now so much despised and official support is reserved for technically incompetent painting – but we should look beyond his ability to represent a tree as a tree and a farmyard as a farmyard, beyond his interest in detail, beyond the seeming delicacy, and see that though the handling of paint is smaller in its scale, it has something of the rough robustness that is the prime characteristic of Kiefer, though without his bleak Weltanschaung, and something too of Freud’s peering intensity with elements that interest him . . . These are undemanding pictures and yet they offer far more reward for contemplation.’7

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PATRICK CAULFIELD London 1936-2005 London A Jug Pencil. Signed with initials PC in pencil at the lower right.

297 x 209 mm. (11 5/8 x 8 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist by a private collector; Private collection, until 2009.

Patrick Caulfield began attending evening classes in drawing and painting at the Harrow School of Art during his National Service in the mid 1950s. He entered the Chelsea School of Art in 1956, first studying graphic design before transferring to the painting department. In 1960 he was admitted to the Royal College of Art, where his fellow pupils included R. B. Kitaj, David Hockney and Allen Jones, all of whom had enrolled the previous year. While still at the Royal College of Art, Caulfield’s work was exhibited at the Young Contemporaries exhibitions in London in 1961, 1962 and 1963. His paintings also figured prominently in the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s New Generation exhibition in 1964, alongside works by Hockney, Jones, Patrick Procktor, John Hoyland and Bridget Riley. At this time Caulfield began to produce the first of many screenprints, one of which was included in his first one-man exhibition in London in 1965, and printmaking was to become an important aspect of his artistic production. In 1967 the Tate Gallery purchased a painting from his second London exhibition, and the following year Caulfield joined the Waddington Galleries, where he was to exhibit for the remainder of his career.

Apart from paintings and prints, Caulfield also produced designs for posters, wall hangings, book covers, tapestries, ceramics and murals, as well as sets and costumes for stage productions at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. A reserved and introspective man, Caulfield worked very slowly, and throughout the last thirty years of his career only rarely produced more than two or three paintings and a few prints each year. At the end of 2002 Caulfield was found to be suffering from cancer of the mouth and throat, and two operations left him unable to speak. Despite his frail state, he was able to complete one large major painting in 2004 before his death the following year, at the age of sixty-nine.

The present sheet, drawn in 2003, shows that the artist’s skills as a draughtsman remained formidable even during his illness. As his friend the art historian Marco Livingstone recalled, after Caulfield underwent a major operation for the cancer diagnosed in November 2002, ‘more than a year passed before he again felt strong enough and sufficiently motivated to return to painting, having made only a few small but typically beautiful pencil drawings in the meantime.’1 The motif of a jug or pitcher had appeared – either individually or as elements in a larger still life – in Caulfield’s work throughout his career. This is particularly true of the artist’s graphic work, such as a series of large screenprints of Jugs, published between 1981 and 19832.

Caulfield’s drawings were, for the most part, private exercises not intended for exhibition or sale. In an interview at the opening of a recent exhibition of drawings by Caulfield, Livingstone noted that ‘It opens his methods up to us, so one can see how he proceeded as an artist . . . They’re very unselfconscious drawings and lines – you can see him thinking, which I find very exciting. I’ve known his work for years and never seen many like this, because he never liked to show them. He used drawings in quite a traditional way of thinking things out. You see him working out options and trying to zero in on paintings. These were purely part of the process for him, not to be seen.’3

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NOTES TO THE CATALOGUE

No.1 Ridolfo Ghirlandaio 1. Inv. 1545; Friedrich Lippmann, Zeichnungen Alter Meister im Kupferstichkabinett der Königlichen Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, n.d. (1882?), Vol.V, illustrated pl.122; Hans von der Gabelentz, Fra Bartolommeo und die Florentiner Renaissance, Leipzig, 1922, Vol.II, p.21, no.7 (not illustrated). The drawing measures 122 x 65 mm.

2. Philip Conisbee, Mary L. Levkoff and Richard Rand, The Ahmanson Gifts: European Masterpieces in the Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1991, p.28, fig.4a; Serena Padovani, ed., L’eta di Savanarola: Fra Bartolomeo de la scuola di San Marco, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1996, pp.61-62, no.7.

3. Ibid., pp.26-29, no.4.

4. New York, Colnaghi, Old Master Drawings, 1987, no.2; Griswold, op.cit., pl.25a; Olson, ed., op.cit., pp.44-45, no.52 (illustrated as frontispiece).

5. Griswold, op.cit., pl.27.

6. Griswold, op.cit., pl.26.

No.2 Attributed to David Joris 1. Inv. 11827; Elfried Bock and Jakob Rosenberg, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Die Zeichnungen Alter Meister im Kupferstichkabinett: Die Niederländischen Meister, Berlin, 1930, Vol.I, p.38, Vol.II, pl.29; Hans Koegler, ‘Einiges über David Joris als Künstler’, Offentliche Kunstsammlung Basel: Jahresberichte 1928-1930, Basel, 1931, illustrated; K. G. Boon, ‘De glassschilder David Joris, een exponent van het Doperse geloof. Zijn kunst en zijn invloed op Dirck Crabeth’, Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, 1988, fig.6.

2. Koegler, ibid., illustrated; W. R. Valentiner, ‘A Painting by Jan van Scorel and a Drawing by David Joris’, Bulletin of The Detroit Institute of Arts of the City of Detroit, October 1934, pp.2-7, illustrated p.3; Boon, ibid., fig.7; Anne-Marie Logan, The Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts: Dutch and Flemish Drawings and Watercolors, Detroit, 1988, p.114, no.56 (where dated 1524-1529).

3. Koegler, op.cit., illustrated; H. G. Wayment, ‘The Stained Glass of the Chapel of the Vyne and the Chapel of the Holy Ghost, Basingstoke’, Archeologia, Vol.CVII, 1982, detail illustrated pl.LI, fig.b.

4. Boon, op.cit., figs.12-15.

5. Boon, op.cit., figs.20-21.

6. Quoted in translation in Valentiner, op.cit., p.5.

No.3 Sebald Beham 1. Although the artist has traditionally been known as Hans Sebald Beham, there is no documentary evidence for ‘Hans’ as his first name, and it has been suggested that the initial H in his monogram may instead refer to the second syllable of his surname Beham.

2. Robert A. Koch, ed,. The Illustrated Bartsch Vol.15: Early German Masters. Barthel Beham, Hans Sebald Beham, New York, 1978, p.238, no.144 and p.244, no.153.

3. F. W. H. Hollstein, German Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts ca.1400-1700, Vol.III, p.267, no.1283, illustrated.

4. Inv. 1997, 0712.11; John Rowlands, German Drawings from a Private Collection, exhibition catalogue, London and elsewhere, 1984, p.20, no.14. The drawing, in pen and black ink, measures 108 x 92 mm.

5. Hollstein, op.cit., p.267, no.1277 (not illustrated).

6. The Illustrated Bartsch, ibid., p.237, no.143p. Similar schematic heads appear elsewhere in the Kunst und Lehrbüchlin.

7. Alison G. Stewart, Before Brueghel: Sebald Beham and the Origins of Peasant Festival Imagery, Aldershot, 2008, p.17, fig.1.1.

The drawing is executed in pen and brown ink on red prepared paper.

No.4 Giulio Campi 1. Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Central Italian and North Italian Schools, Vol.III, London, 1968, pl.1953; Bora, op.cit., illustrated pl.70.

No.5 Daniele da Volterra 1. Luisa Mortari, ‘Francesco Salviati nella chiesa di Santa Maria dell’Anima’, in Mauro Natale, ed., Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Federico Zeri, Milan, 1984, Vol.I p.395, fig.383; Gail L. Geiger, ‘Francesco Salviati e gli affreschi della cappella del cardinale di Brandeburgo a Roma’, Arte Cristiana, May-June 1985, p.183, fig.1; Mortari, 1992, op.cit., p.118, no.27.

2. Paul Joannides, ‘Drawings by Francesco Salviati and Daniele da Volterra: Additions and Subtractions’, Master Drawings, Fall 1994, p.230.

3. Vittoria Romani, Daniele di Volterra amico de Michelangelo, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 2003, pp.58-59, no.2; Roberto Paolo Ciardi and Benedetta Moreschini, Daniele Ricciarelli. Da Volterra a Roma, Milan, 2004, pp.152-153.

4. J. A. Gere and Philip Pouncey, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Artists Working in Rome c.1550-c.1640, London, 1983, Vol.I, pp.63-64, no.76, Vol.II, pl.266; Romani, ibid., pp.108-109, no.26; Ciardi and Moreschini, ibid., p.207.

5. Romani, op.cit., pp.140-141, no.40; Ciardi and Moreschini, op.cit., p.239.

No.6 Jacopo Ligozzi 1. Lucilla Conigliello, ‘“He brought to Florence a candid brush, an intricate composition, a taste for ornament and an indefinable grace and delightfulness that were uncommon in Florence”’, in Lucilla Conigliello, Drawing Gallery: Ligozzi, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2005, p.8.

2. Ibid., p.8.

3. Written communication, 28th January 1987.

4. One such example, an Allegory of Virtue, is dated 1585 and dedicated to Francesco de’Medici (Caroline Karpinski, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch Vol.48: Italian Chiaroscuro Woodcuts, New York, 1983, p.215, fig.9-I).

5. Lubomír Konecny, ‘Jacopo Ligozzi, Dante and Petrarch’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institutes in Florenz, 2006, p.401.

6. Meinolf Trudzinski, Die Italienischen und Französischen Handzeichnungen im Kupferstichkabinett der Landesgalerie, Hannover, 1987, pp.96-100, nos.53 and 54.

7. Larry J. Feinberg, From Studio to Studiolo: Florentine Draftsmanship under the First Medici Grand Dukes, exhibition catalogue, Oberlin and elsewhere, 1991-1992, pp.108-109, no.21.

8. Cristiana Garofalo et al, Le dessin en Italie dans les collections publiques françaises. Le Rayonnement de Florence sous les derniers Médicis: Dessins des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, exhibition catalogue, Bayonne, Musée Bonnat, 2006-2007, pp.28-29, no.4.

9. Villenave sale, Paris, Alliance des Arts, 1-8 December 1842. The present sheet may have been included in the posthumous sale of prints and drawings from the Villenave collection held on 1-5 February 1847, but cannot be identified in the catalogue.

No.7 Carracci School 1. Michael Jaffé, The Devonshire Collection of Italian Drawings: Bolognese and Emilian Schools, London, 1994, p.91, no.496 (Chatsworth 453).

2. Clare Robertson and Catherine Whistler, Drawings by the Carracci from British Collections, exhibition catalogue, Oxford and London, 1996-1997, p.110, no.62 (as Annibale Carracci); Babette Bohn, Ludovico Carracci and the Art of Drawing, Turnhout, 2004, p.150, no.42 (as Ludovico Carracci).

3. George R. Goldner, Lee Hendrix and Gloria Williams, The J. Paul Getty Museum - European Drawings 1: Catalogue of the Collections, Malibu, 1988, pp.34-37, no.8 (as Annibale Carracci); Bohn, ibid., pp.161-162, no.50 (as Ludovico Carracci).

4. Bohn, op.cit., p.163, no.51 (as Ludovico Carracci).

No.9 Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Il Guercino 1. The present sheet is one of a number of drawings by Guercino formerly in the collection of Carla Davin. Three drawings

by Guercino from the same source were sold at Christie’s London, 26 March 1968, lots 163-165, while three further drawings appeared at the same auction as the present sheet at Christie’s London, 7 April 1970, lots 98-100.

2. Nicholas Turner, Guercino: Drawings from Windsor Castle, exhibition catalogue, Fort Worth and elsewhere, 1991-1992, p.36, under no.9.

3. Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge, 1989, pp.50-51, nos.86-87, pls.90-91. One of these is also illustrated in Nicholas Turner and Carol Plazzotta, Drawings by Guercino from British Collections, exhibition catalogue, London, 1991, pp.140-141, no.115.

4. Luigi Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino, Rome, 1988, p.253, no.165; Stéphane Loire, Le Guerchin en France, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1990, p.55, under no.9, fig.33; David M. Stone, Guercino: catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence, 1991, p.166, no.147.

5. Turner and Plazzotta, op.cit., p.140, no.114; Cento, Pinacoteca Civica, and London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Nel segno di Guercino / Guercino as Master Draughtsman. Drawings from the Mahon Collection, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and the City of Cento Pinacoteca di Cento, exhibition catalogue, 2005-2006, pp.112-113, unnumbered.

No.10 Francesco Montelatici, called Cecco Bravo 1. Miles Chappell, ‘Florence: Cecco Bravo’ [exhibition review], The Burlington Magazine, October 1999, p.646 2. Nicholas Turner, European Master Drawings from Portuguese Collections, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, 2000, pp.118119, no.50.

3. Catherine Monbeig Goguel, Musée du Louvre: Département des arts graphiques. Inventaire général des dessins italiens IV: Dessins toscans, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, pt.2: 1620-1800, Paris, 2005, pp.158-159, no.157.

4. Anna Barsanti and Roberto Contini, Cecco Bravo: pittore senza regola, exhibition catalogue, Florence, Casa Buonarroti, 1999, pp.92-93, no.26.

No.11 Joseph Goupy 1. Michèle Hébert et al, Inventaire du fonds français: Graveurs du XVIIIe siècle, Vol.10, Paris, 1968, p.444, no.3 (not illustrated); Luigi Salerno, L’opera completa di Salvator Rosa, Milan, 1975, p.98, no.168; Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times, New Haven and London, 1995, p.227, fig.236. The printed is further inscribed ‘Servatur Exemplar in Ædibus præhonblis Domini D. Cooke. M. Brittaniæ Regis Vice Camerarij’ in the margin.

2. The dimensions of the print are 280 x 410 mm., and thus nearly identical to the gouache here exhibited.

3. ‘The Note-Books of George Vertue relating to Artists and Collections in England’, Vol.VI, The Walpole Society, Vol.XXX (1951-1952), 1955, p.190.

4. William Gilpin, An Essay upon Prints, London, 1768, p.161.

5. Peter A. Tomory, Salvator Rosa: His Etchings and Engravings after his Works, exhibition catalogue, Sarasota, 1971, unpaginated.

6. Inv. Gg, 3.365 (Gernsheim photograph no.05 319). The gouache measures 180 x 223 mm.

No.12 Jean-Baptiste Deshays 1. Quoted in translation in Pierre Rosenberg and Marion C. Stewart, French Paintings 1500-1825: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, 1987, p.153.

2. Denis Diderot, Salon de 1763, p.258; quoted in Bancel, op.cit., p.161, under no. P.123.

3. Bancel, op.cit., p.224, nos.D.91 and D.92. These two drawings may have served as models for a pair of prints of the heads of Joseph and the wife of Potiphar by Louis-Marin Bonnet, one of which is dated 1769, although the prints show differences in pose and expression with the figures in the present sheet (Bancel, op.cit., p.160, figs. P.123a and P.123b.)

4. Mary Tavener Holmes, in Perrin Stein and Mary Tavener Holmes, Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in New York Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1999, p.121, under no.53.

No.14 Circle of Jacques-Louis David 1. Paris, Musée du Louvre and Versailles, Musée national du château, Jacques-Louis David, exhibition catalogue, 1989-1990, p.156, no.63 (as David); Rosenberg and Prat, op.cit., Vol.I, p.85, no.66 (as David, though it is noted that Rosenberg retains a measure of doubt about the attribution).

2. Rosenberg and Prat, op.cit., Vol.I, pp.164-173, nos.147-155. Drawings from this group are today in the Louvre, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and in four private collections.

No.15 Baron Gérard 1. H. Gérard, Oeuvre du Baron François Gérard, Vol.II, Paris, 1856, unpaginated, where it is noted that ‘le peu de renseignements laisses sur ce tableau n’a permis d’en reproduire que la composition’.

2. New York, Galerie Arnoldi-Livie and Jill Newhouse, Baron François Gérard: Exhibition and Sale of Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1992, pp.4 and 36-37 (one not illustrated). The oil sketch and the study of Venus and Cupid later appeared at auction in London (Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 21 November 1996, lot 11).

3. New York, Didier Aaron, Inc. [Brame & Lorenceau, Kate de Rothschild and Didier Aaron], Master Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1996, no.48.

4. Jean Guiffrey and Pierre Marcel, Inventaire général des dessins du Musée du Louvre et du Musée de Versailles: Ecole Française, Vol.V, Paris, 1910, pp.120-121, no.4155.

5. L. Gurdus, ‘Mlle Duvidal de Montferrier, a newly discovered portrait by Gérard’, The Connoisseur, October 1967, p.129, fig.4.

No.16 Carle Vernet 1. Charles Blanc, ‘Carle Vernet’, in Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, III: Ecole française, Paris, 1876, p.2 (‘Il est le premier à ne pas s’inspirer de Van der Meulen ou Wouvermans mais à rendre au Haras ou au manège: il rendit au cheval ses vives allures, son expression dans l’attente, sa grâce, sa coquetterie.’).

2. Lorenz Eitner, Géricault: His Life and Work, London, 1983, p.14.

3. Armand Dayot, Carle Vernet: Étude sur l’artiste, Paris, 1925, p.162, no.191c (not illustrated); Paul Colin, Collection de Rosen; Catalogue analytique de l’oeuvre de Carle Vernet, Brussels, 1928, p.95, no.184C (not illustrated). The print measures 431 x 590 mm. [sheet]. Hand-coloured impressions are known.

4. London, P. & D. Colnaghi, French Drawings: Post Neo-Classicism, 1975, nos.154-155.

No.17 Théodore Géricault 1. According to Bruno Chenique, this drawing was acquired in Fécamp in 1973 by the French painter and sculptor Gérard Ambroselli (1906-2000).

2. In his catalogue raisonné of the works of Géricault, the late Germain Bazin (op.cit., p.68) somewhat confusingly described this drawing as a work partly by Géricault, who he deems responsible for the sketch in black chalk at the upper left corner of the sheet, and an unknown artist, who drew the pen and ink composition. This improbable suggestion has been firmly rejected by both Lorenz Eitner and Bruno Chenique, who have independently and convincingly attributed the entire drawing to Géricault alone.

3. Wheelock Whitney, Gericault in Italy, New Haven and London, 1997, p.1.

4. Lorenz Eitner, Géricault: His Life and Work, London, 1983, p.117.

5. Charles Clément, Géricault: Etude biographique et critique, Paris, 1879, pp.101-102 (‘Les admirables dessins qui nous sont restés de la Course de chevaux libres sont exécutés au trait, à la plume pour la plupart, avec les détails indiqués trèssommairement par quelques hachures. On se tromperait lourdement si on les prenait pour des improvisations, pour des croquis.’).

6. Eitner, op.cit. 1983, p.120, fig.106; Bazin, op.cit., p.221, no.1406 (as not by Géricault); Whitney, op.cit., p.106, fig.131.

7. Bazin, op.cit., pp.221-222, no.1407; Whitney, op.cit., p.106, fig.132.

8. Another work from this group is an oil sketch of a galloping horse with a groom running alongside, formerly in the collection of Maurice Gobin and today in a Parisian private collection, in which the horse wears a similar blanket (Bazin, op.cit., p.192, no.1344 [as not by Géricault]; Whitney, op.cit., p.107, fig.134).

9. Bazin, op.cit., p.195, no.1354 (295 x 460 mm.; Louvre), p.196, no.1355 (368 x 428 mm., Fogg Art Museum), p.197, no.1357 (265 x 490 mm., private collection, Paris) and p.204, no.1369 (360 x 470 mm., private collection); Whitney, op.cit., p.141, fig.179, p.138, figs 176 and 177 and p.149, fig.187, respectively.

10. Bazin, op.cit., p.221, no.1405 (373 x 516 mm.; Whitney, op.cit., p.122, fig.158. The drawing, in the Meyer-Huber collection in Zurich, was developed into a finished oil painting, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen (Bazin, op.cit., pp.205-207, no.1373; Whitney, op.cit., p.123, fig.161).

11. Eitner, op.cit. 1983, p.109, fig.93; Bazin, op.cit., p.145, no.1220; Whitney, op.cit., p.79, fig.106.

12. Lorenz Eitner, Géricault, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and elsewhere, 1971-1972, p.90, no.49.

13. Robert von Hirsch sale, London, Sotheby’s, 27 June 1978, lot 806 (bt. Alain Delon); Whitney, op.cit., p.81, fig.107.

14. Whitney, op.cit., p.199.

15. Written correspondence, 17 November 2008.

16. Written correspondence, 1 December 2008.

No.19 Jacques Félix Duban 1. Benezit Dictionary of Artists, Vol.4, Paris, 2006, p.1196.

2. Charles Blanc, ‘Duban’, Le Temps, 4 April 1872, p.4.

3. Laura Vallet Masconi, ed., Pompeii: Travaux et envois des architects francais au XIX siècle, exhibition catalogue, Paris and Rome 1981, p.218, no.64; Pierre Pinon, ‘Le séjour en Italie: les dessins et les envois’, in Sylvain Bellenger and Françoise Hamon, Félix Duban 1798-1870: Les couleurs de l’architecte, exhibition catalogue, Blois, 1996, p.33, fig.15 (where dated to c.1825); Annie Jacques, Duban et l’Italie, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 2004, pp.18-19. The drawing measures 500 x 340 mm., and is entitled POMPEIA – MAISON CHAMPIONNET. 4. Vallet Masconi, ibid., p.217, no.63.

5. Vallet Masconi, op.cit., p.219, no.65.

6. Vallet Masconi, op.cit., pp.220-221, nos.66 and 67; the latter also illustrated in colour in Jacques, op.cit., pp.42-43.

7. New York, The Artis Group Ltd., Architectural Drawings 1700-1930, 1986, unpaginated, no.34, illustrated. The drawing measures 370 x 485 mm.

No.20 Eugène Delacroix 1. Arlette Sérullaz, “Delacroix’s drawing is to that of Ingres as fire is to ice”, in Arlette Sérullaz, Drawing Gallery: Delacroix, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2004, p.12.

2. Lee Johnson, ‘The Art of Delacroix’, in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eugène Delacroix: Paintings, Drawings and Prints from North American Collections, exhibition catalogue, 1991, p.11.

3. Frankfurt, Städtsiche Galerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut, Eugène Delacroix: Themen und Variationen, Arbeiten auf Papier, exhibition catalogue, 1987, p.188, no.I-4 verso; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ibid., pp.120-121, no.52.

4. Eugène Delacroix, Journal, Paris, 1930, Vol.I, p.37.

5. Alfred Robaut, L’oeuvre complet de Eugène Delacroix, Paris, 1885, p.431, no.1700 (where dated 1840).

6. Ibid., p.375, nos.1396 and 1397 respectively (where dated to 1859).

7. Maurice Sérullaz, Musée du Louvre. Inventaire géneral des dessins, école Française: Dessins d’Eugène Delacroix, Paris, 1984, Vol.I, pp.404-405, no.1124 (where dated to 1855-1857).

No.22 John Ruskin 1. An early 20th century photograph of the same view is illustrated in Roger Tissot, Mont Blanc, London, 1924, p.21.

2. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, ed., The Works of John Ruskin, Vol.II: Poems, London, 1903, p.421.

3. Cook and Wedderburn, ed., op.cit., Vol.V: Modern Painters, Vol.III, London, 1904, pp.xxi-xxii, note 2.

4. Joan Evans and John Edward Whitehouse, ed., The Diaries of John Ruskin, Vol.II, Oxford, 1958, p.500.

5. Cook and Wedderburn, ed., op.cit., Vol.XXXV: Praeterita and Dilecta, London, 1908, p.449.

6. Evans and Whitehouse, ed., op.cit., Vol.III, 1959, p.1023.

7. Ibid., p.1025.

8. Cook and Wedderburn, ed., op.cit., Vol.IV: Modern Painters, Vol.II, London, 1903, p.xxxvi.

9. Walton, op.cit., 2000, p.19.

10. Paul Walton, The Drawings of John Ruskin, Oxford, 1972, p.88.

11. Robert Hewison, Ian Warrell and Stephen Wildman, Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, exhibition catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, 2000, pp.164-165, nos.146 and 147, respectively.

12. Paul Walton, Master Drawings by John Ruskin: Selections from the David Thomson Collection, exhibition catalogue, Oxford, 2000, pp.87-93, no.10.

13. Ibid., 2000, p.22.

14. Henry Woodd Nevinson, Fire of Life, 1935; quoted in Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Later Years, New Haven and London, 2000, p.570.

No.23 Alexandre Hesse 1. Aubrun, op.cit., pl.IV; Emmanuelle Brugerolles and David Guillet, Dessins d’Alexandre Hesse, conservés à l’Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts: Études pour les décorations peintes, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée d’Orsay, 1988-1989, p.23, fig.11. The painting measures 2.66 x 3.84 metres.

2. Beginning in the 1830’s, Hesse had received a number of important commissions - for both portraits and easel pictures from the Brisson family, who had become his major private patrons.

3. Hesse had already produced two paintings – an Ecce Homo and a Flagellation of Christ - for the sacristy of the church at Chevry-en-Sereine as early as 1830.

4. Brugerolles and Guillet, op.cit., pp.23 and 60, no.33.

5. Brugerolles and Guillet, op.cit., p.60, no.34.

6. Aubrun, op.cit., unpaginated, no.32 (not illustrated).

7. ‘Recent acquisitions in Edinburgh museums’, The Burlington Magazine, August 1995, p.681, fig.IV.

No.24 Edward Lear 1. Martin Hardie, ‘Edward Lear’, Artwork, Summer 1930, pp.114-118.

2. Hubert Congreve, in Lady Constance Strachey, ed., Later Letters of Edward Lear, London, 1911, pp.23-24.

3. Journal entry of 28 October 1874; Ray Murphy, ed., Edward Lear’s Indian Journal, London, 1953, p.210.

4. Strachey, op.cit., pp.177-178.

5. Journal entry of 2 November 1874; Murphy, ed., op.cit., p.210.

6. L. Candace Pezzera, How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear: Watercolors by Edward Lear From Rhode Island Collections, exhibition catalogue, Providence, 1982, p.15, no.39 (illustrated in colour on the cover); London, The Fine Art Society, The Travels of Edward Lear, exhibition catalogue, 1983, p.46, no.95 (not illustrated). The drawing, which measures 368 x 628 mm., is further inscribed by Lear ‘Gustave Edward Baudry’ and with colour notes.

7. Letter of 20 April 1862; Quoted in Vidya Dehejia, Impossible Picturesqueness: Edward Lear’s Indian Watercolours, 18731875, Middletown, 1989, p.v.

No.25 Jean-François Millet 1. Letter of 17 June 1866; Quoted in translation in Alexandra R. Murphy et al, Jean-François Millet: Drawn into the Light, exhibition catalogue, Williamstown and elsewhere, 1999, p.103, under no.67.

2. London, Hayward Gallery, Jean-François Millet, exhibition catalogue, 1976, p.183.

3. Bruce Laughton, ‘J.-F. Millet in the Allier and the Auvergne’, The Burlington Magazine, May 1988, p.347.

4. Alexandra R. Murphy, Jean-François Millet, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 1984, p.177.

No.26 Edgar Degas 1. At the fourth and final Degas studio sale, held in July 1919, the present sheet was framed and sold together with a study of houses at the foot of a hill, also in pastel (Lemoisne, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.114-115, no.231). The pair sold for 3,300 francs, and both pastel landscapes shared the same subsequent provenance until 2008.

2. Lemoisne, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.112-121, nos.217-253. An excellent survey of the pastel landscape drawings of this period is found in Richard Kendall, op.cit., pp.85-107.

3. Lemoisne, op.cit., Vol.I, p.61; Quoted in translation in Jean Sutherland Boggs et al, Degas, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Ottawa and New York, 1988-1989, p.154.

4. Kendall, op.cit., pp.90, fig.69 and p.282, note 35.

5. Notebook 23, pp.58-59; Théodore Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar Degas, Oxford, 1976, Vol.I, p.118 (‘Villers s[ur] mer / coucher de soleil / orange rosé froid et sourd / neutre / mer dos de sardine et plus clair que le ciel…band du rivage – brun / premières fleques d’eau / reflêtant l’orangé / deuxièmes reflêtant le haut du ciel / devant de sable café au lait / un peu sombre.’); Quoted in translation in Ann Dumas, ‘Degas, The Secret Landscapist’, in Ann Dumas et al, Edgar Degas: The Last Landscapes, exhibition catalogue, Columbus and Copenhagen, 2006-2007, p.16.

6. Kendall, op.cit., p.86.

7. Kendall, op.cit., p.99.

8. Comiot also owned paintings and drawings by Jean-Louis Forain, Berthe Morisot, Théodore Rousseau and Johan Barthold Jongkind, among other artists. He presented paintings by Degas, Renoir and Corot to the Louvre.

9. François Fosca, ‘La Collection Comiot’, L’amour de l’Art, 1927, p.111 (‘L’artiste qui y est le plus abondamment représenté, c’est Degas. On sent la predilection que M. Cormiot a toujours eue pour ce grand maître, predilection des plus averties, qui lui a permis de ne pas se spécialiser. Chez M. Comiot, Degas est représenté de la façon la plus variée: scènes de mœurs, portraits, danseuses, nus, paysages, intérieurs, qui nous renseignment aussi bien sur les débuts du peintre que sur ses derniers travaux.’).

10. Ibid., pp.113-114 (‘Ils sont nombreux, car M. Comiot a su reconnaître que dans ce domaine, Degas n’était pas moins un maître que dans la representation du corps humain…la plupart furent exécutés au bord de la mer, et nous montrent des grèves plates et désertes, des dunes à l’herbe rare et grise. De sites aussi nus, aussi vides d’éléments plastiques, Degas tire des merveilles: n’est-ce pas là la marquee du grand artiste?’).

11. Fosca, op.cit., p.115 (‘ces pastels sont bien plus voisins de ceux de Whistler. Comme le peintre des Nocturnes, Degas se détournait de la nature dès que le soleil y faisait ruisseler sa plus éclatante lumière. Une plage ocreuse et le bleu étouffé d’un ciel, alors que la brume marine voile le soleil, Degas, comme Whistler, n’en demandait pas davantage.’).

No.27 Rosa Bonheur 1. Francis Ribemont, ed., Rosa Bonheur, exhibition catalogue, Bordeaux and Barbizon, 1997, p.181, nos.116-119, illustrated in colour pls.LXI-LXIV. One of these is also illustrated in New York, Dahesh Museum, Rosa Bonheur: All Nature’s Children, exhibition catalogue, 1998, p.42, pl.XIV.

No.28 Giovanni Boldini 1. Andrea Buzzoni and Marcello Toffanello, Museo Giovanni Boldini: Catalogo generale completamente illustrato, Ferrara, 1997, illustrated p.360.

2. Carlo Ragghianti and Ettore Camesasca, L’opera completa di Boldini, Milan, 1970, pp.101-102, no.132c; Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Giovanni Boldini 1842-1931: Catalogo ragionato. Vol.III: Catalogo ragionato della pittura a olio con un’ampia selezione di pastelle e acquerelli, Turin, 2002, pp.246-247, no.448; Francesca Castellani, ‘“Italiens de Paris?”’, in Ann Dumas, ed., Degas e gli italiani a Parigi, exhibition catalogue, Ferrara, 2003, p.83, fig.42 (illustrated in colour).

3. Milan, L. A. Scopinich & F., Vendita all’asta dello Studio Boldini, December 1933, no.43; Ragghianti and Camesasca, op.cit., pp.101-102, no.132b; Bianca Doria, Giovanni Boldini: Catalogo generale dagli Archivi Boldini, Milan, 2000, Vol.I, no.205, Vol.II, pl.205 (where dated 1886).

4. Dini and Dini, op.cit., pp.244-246, no.445.

5. Ragghianti and Camesasca, ibid., pp.101-102, no.132d; Dini and Dini, ibid., pp.246-247, no.449; Panconi, ed., op.cit., illustrated in colour pp.248-249. The pastel measures 365 x 500 mm.

No.29 Giovanni Boldini 1. Andrea Buzzoni and Marcello Toffanello, Museo Giovanni Boldini: Catalogo generale completamente illustrato, Ferrara, 1997, illustrated p.165; Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Giovanni Boldini 1842-1931: Catalogo ragionato. Vol.III: Catalogo ragionato della pittura a olio con un’ampia selezione di pastelle e acquerelli, pt.2: Addenda al catalogo ragionato, Turin, 2002, pp.244245, no.443. The pastel measures 560 x 370 mm.

2. Buzzoni and Toffanello, ibid., illustrated pp.206-207, pp.314-316 and p.421. Six other pencil sketches of theatre audiences

by Boldini were exhibited in Bologna in 1999 (Bologna, Bottegantica, Giovanni Boldini: Il dinamismo straordinario delle linee, 1999, illustrated pp.82-87 and pp.100-101).

3. Dini and Dini, op.cit., Vol.IV, p.693, no.1384; Francesca Dini, ed., Boldini, Helleu, Sem: Protagonisti e miti della Belle Epoque, exhibition catalogue, Castiglioncello, 2006, pp.104-105, part of no.18.

No.31 Vincenzo Gemito 1. Maria Simonetta de Marinis, Gemito, L’Aquila and Rome, 1993, pls.186-196.

2. Milan, La Portantina, Disegni e stampe dal XVI al XX secolo, 1992, no.49; New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1994, no.53; Denise Maria Pagano, ed., Gemito, exhibition catalogue, Naples, 2009, illustrated p.23.

No.32 Maximilien Luce 1. Jean Bouin-Luce and Denise Bazetoux, Maximilien Luce: catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Paris, 1986, Vol.II, p.326, no.1312.

2. Ibid., Vol.I, p.115, illustrated in colour pl.52, Vol.II, p.325, no.1310.

3. Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 February 1990, lot 45; Denise Bazetoux, Maximilien Luce: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Paris, 2005, Vol.III, p.170, no.703, where dated c.1905.

4. Bazetoux, ibid., p.164, no.665, where dated 1903-1905.

5. Bouin-Luce and Bazetoux, op.cit., Vol.I, p.127.

No.33 Henri Lebasque 1. Lisa A. Banner and Peter Fairbanks, Lebasque 1865-1937, exhibition catalogue, San Francisco, 1986, p.84.

2. Ibid., pp.70, 72, and 74.

3. Paul Vitry, Henri Lebasque, Paris, 1928, illustrated p.184; Denise Bazetoux, Henri Lebasque: Catalogue raisonné, Vol.I, Neuilly-sur-Marne, 2008, p.260, no.1028, illustrated in colour p.50.

4. Vitry, ibid., illustrated p.171; Banner and Fairbanks, op.cit., p.79, no.49; Bazetoux, ibid., p.259, no.1025. What appears to be a painted sketch for this painting was on the London art market in 1987 (Bazetoux, ibid., p.259, no.1024).

5. Vitry, op.cit., illustrated p.223.

No.35 Pavel Tchelitchev 1. Edith Sitwell, ‘Pavel Tchelitchew’, in London, Sotheby’s, The Collection of Works by Pavel Tchelitchew, the property of Dame Edith Sitwell, D.B.E., 13 December 1961, p.5.

2. Ibid., p.7.

3. Lincoln Kirstein, Tchelitchev, Santa Fe, 1994, p.33 4. James Thrall Soby, Tchelitchew: Paintings, Drawings, exhibition catalogue, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1942, pp.1314.

5. Parker Tyler, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew, London, 1967, p.47. A contemporary photograph of Allen Tanner, taken in c.1925, is illustrated between pp.90 and 91. Another gouache portrait of Tanner by Tchelitchev is in a private collection in New York (Kirstein, op.cit., pl.28).

No.36 Esteban Lisa 1. Barbara J. Bloemink, ‘Playing with Lines and Colors: The Art of Esteban Lisa’, in New York, Hirschl and Adler Galleries, The Art of Esteban Lisa, exhibition catalogue, 2000, p.14.

2. Edward J. Sullivan, ‘Esteban Lisa: A View from Abroad’, in Montevideo, Museo Torres García, Esteban Lisa, exhibition catalogue, 1998, p.16.

3. Alberto Barral, ‘Esteban Lisa. Ramis Barquet Gallery’ [exhibition review], Art Nexus, April-June 2007, p.138.

4. Bloemink, op.cit., p.18.

5. Mario H. Gradowczyk, ‘Esteban Lisa: A Diary in Oil and Pastels’, Master Drawings, Summer 2008, p.158, fig.1 (where dated c.1938-1940).

6. Ibid., p.161, fig.4 (where dated c.1935-1940).

7. Bloemink, op.cit., p.12, pl.6 (where dated c.1940).

8. London, Blains Fine Art, Esteban Lisa: playing with lines + colour, exhibition catalogue, 2001-2002, nos.11 and 14 (where each dated c.1940-1950).

9. Caseros, Museo de la Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Esteban Lisa: Abstraccíon, mundo y significando, exhibition catalogue, 2009, pp.24-26, nos.4 and 6 (where each dated c.1935-1940).

10. Bloemink, op.cit., p.18.

No.37 Erich Wolfsfeld 1. The backing board is inscribed Sketch of a Morocco Child on the back of his mother / Given to me by E. Wolfsfeld on my / birthday 1943, Lauderdale Mansion, W.8 London., and Professor Erich Wolfsfeld, / of the Academy of Fine Arts, / Berlin. / Germany / up to 1936. A label pasted onto the backing board is further inscribed At the back of this / sketch is a rough drawing / of baby Jill Pomerance / (Parents Ben and Fay Pomerance / of Sheffield).

2. Michael Chase, ‘Skill and Performance’ [exhibition review], Art News and Review, 25 October 1958, p.14.

3. Giles Auty, in London, Belgrave Gallery, Erich Wolfsfeld, 1995, p.3.

4. London, Agnew’s, Erich Wolfsfeld, Lotte Laserstein, Gottfried Meyer, 1990-1991, no.3, illustrated in colour p.5.

5. Max Block sale, Knutsford, Frank Marshall & Co., 7 July 2009, lot 1194. The sale included a collection of paintings, drawings and prints by Wolfsfeld from the artist’s studio inherited by his stepson, Dr. Max Block.

6. Fay Pomerance, ‘A Personal Memoir by Fay Pomerance’, in London, Somerville & Simpson and Caroline Stroude, Paintings, Drawings, Pastels and Etchings by Erich Wolfsfeld, 1986, pp.16-17.

No.38 L. S. Lowry 1. Mervyn Levy, Drawings of L. S. Lowry, London, 1963, p.7.

2. Michael Howard, Lowry: A Visionary Artist, Salford, 2000, p.113.

3. Lowry in conversation with Mervyn Levy, February 1975; Quoted in Mervyn Levy, The Paintings of L. S. Lowry: Oils and Watercolours, London, 1975, p.11).

4. Levy, ibid., p.25.

5. Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, op.cit., no.156 (lent by Dr. A. W. Laing, not illustrated); Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 7 April 1971, lot 90 (not illustrated). The watercolour measures 267 x 368 mm.

6. London, Richard Green, L. S. Lowry, exhibition catalogue, 2000, no.4.

7. Levy, op.cit., 1975, pls.16 (‘Group of Figures’), 117 (‘Going to Work’) and 28 (‘Yachts’), respectively.

8. Howard, op.cit., illustrated p.109.

9. Levy, op.cit., 1975, pl.118.

10. Shelley Rohde, L. S. Lowry: a biography, Salford, 1999, p.329.

No.39 Eliot Hodgkin 1. Eliot Hodgkin, ‘Painter’s Purpose’, The Studio, July 1957, p.6.

2. Hodgkin in a letter to Brinsley Ford dated 20 May 1975; quoted in Sir Brinsley Ford, ‘Introduction’, in London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, Eliot Hodgkin, Painter & Collector, exhibition catalogue, 1990, p.24.

3. London, Reid Gallery, Fifty Still Life Paintings by Eliot Hodgkin, 1963, nos.48 (Two Oyster Shells) and 49 (Two Views of an Oyster Shell).

No.40 Jean-Michel Basquiat 1. Marc Mayer, ‘Basquiat in History’, in Marc Mayer, ed., Basquiat, exhibition catalogue, Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum, and elsewhere, 2005-2006, p.47.

2. Enrico Navarra, in Paris, Fondation Dina Vierny – Musée Maillol, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Oeuvres sur papier, exhibition catalogue, 1997, p.13.

3. Peter Winter, ‘The Everyday Recycled’ [review], Art International, Spring 1990, p.95.

4. Robert Storr, ‘Two Hundred Beats per Min.’, in New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Jean Michel Basquiat: Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1990, unpaginated.

5. Fred Hoffman, ‘The Defining Years: Notes on Five Key Works’, in Mayer, ed., op.cit., p.132.

6. Künzelsau, Museum Würth, Jean Michel Basquiat. Paintings and Works on Paper: The Mugrabi Collection, 2001, illustrated pp.54-55.

7. Storr, op.cit., unpaginated.

No.41 Sean Scully 1. Ned Rifkin, ed., ‘Interview with Sean Scully’, in Ned Rifkin, Sean Scully: Twenty Years, 1976-1995, exhibition catalogue, Washington and elsewhere, 1995-1996, p.80.

2. Michael Peppiatt, ‘Sean Scully’, in Paris, Galerie Lelong, Sean Scully: Winter Robe, exhibition catalogue, 2004, pp.16-17.

3. Ibid., pp.17-18.

4. Rifkin, op.cit., p.80.

5. Anne L. Strauss, ‘Complements and Antidotes: Works on Paper’, in Stephen Bennett Phillips, ed., Sean Scully: Wall of Light, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, 2005-2007, p.111.

No.42 Christopher Bramham 1. Freud owns several works by Bramham, and has also painted a portrait of the artist with two of his children (Polly, Barney and Christopher Bramham, 1990-1991; illustrated in Catherine Lampert, Lucian Freud: recent work, exhibition catalogue, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, and elsewhere, 1993-1994, no.70).

2. Bramham had five one-man exhibitions, between 1992 and 2002, at Marlborough Fine Art in London, and more recently at Browse and Darby in 2004.

3. William Feaver, ‘Christopher Bramham’, in London, Browse & Darby, Christopher Bramham: New Work, 2004, unpaginated.

4. London, Marlborough Fine Art, Christopher Bramham, exhibition catalogue, 1995-1996, nos.36 (The Ducks I) and 37 (The Ducks II); the former illustrated. The Ducks I is a pastel measuring 1552 x 540 mm., while The Ducks II is executed in watercolour, gouache and pastel, and measures 1295 x 505 mm. Similar views of the garden at Richmond, all executed in oil on canvas, were included in Bramham’s next two exhibitions (London, Marlborough Fine Art, Christopher Bramham, 1999, nos.2-3, 9, 12-13 and 18-19, and London, Marlborough Fine Art, Christopher Bramham, 2002, no.1, entitled Gardens in Richmond, Last View).

5. Emily Weeks, in McCaughey and Weeks, op.cit., p.60, under no.28.

6. Ibid., p.63, under no.29.

7. Brian Sewell, ‘Brilliance unseen for Bramham’, Evening Standard, 26 September 2002.

No.43 Patrick Caulfield 1. Marco Livingstone, ‘Patrick Caulfield’ [obituary], The Independent, 1 October 2005.

2. Alan Cristea et al., Patrick Caulfield: The Complete Prints 1964-1999, London, 1999, nos.65-69.

3. Quoted in Ben Miller, ‘Patrick Caulfield – Between the Lines, Pallant House, Chichester’, Culture24.org.uk, 17 April 2009 (www.culture24.org.uk/art/painting+%2526+drawing/art67715).

INDEX OF ARTISTS

BASQUIAT, Jean-Michel; no.40 BEHAM, Sebald; no.3 BESSA, Pancrace; no.18 BOLDINI, Giovanni; nos.28-29 BONHEUR, Rosa; no.27 BRAMHAM, Christopher; no.42 CAMPI, Giulio; no.4 CANTAGALLINA, Remigio; no.8 CARRACCI School; no.7 CAULFIELD, Patrick; no.43 CECCO BRAVO, Francesco Montelatici; no.10 DANIELE DA VOLTERRA, Daniele Ricciarelli; no.5 DAVID, Jacques-Louis [circle]; no.14 DEGAS, Edgar; no.26 DELACROIX, Eugène; no.20 DESHAYS, Jean-Baptiste; no.12 DUBAN, Jacques-Félix; no.19 FRENCH SCHOOL, 18th Century; no.13 GEMITO, Vincenzo; no.31 GÉRARD, François Pascal Simon, Baron; no.15 GÉRICAULT, Théodore; no.17 GHIRLANDAIO, Ridolfo; no.1 GOUPY, Joseph; no.11 GUERCINO, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri; no.9 HESSE, Alexandre; no.23 HODGKIN, Eliot; no.39

JORIS, David [attr.]; no.2 LAMI, Eugène; no.21 LEAR, Edward; no.24 LEBASQUE, Henri; no.33 LIGOZZI, Jacopo; no.6 LISA, Esteban; no.36 LOWRY, Laurence Stephen; no.38 LUCE, Maximilien; no.32 LUMSDEN, Ernest Stephen; no.34 MILLET, Jean-François; no.25 MONTELATICI, Francesco, Cecco Bravo; no.10 RUSKIN, John; no.22 SCULLY, Sean; no.41 TOMBA, Casimiro; no.30 TCHELITCHEV, Pavel; no.35 VERNET, Carle; no.16 VOLTERRA, Daniele Ricciarelli da; no.5 WOLFSFELD, Erich; no.37

ThĂŠodore GĂŠricault Scene from the Race of the Barberi Horses No.17

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Back cover: Sebald Beham (1500-1550) A Putto Beside a Flaming Urn No.3

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