mASTER DRAWINGS STEPHEN ONGPIN
Stephen Ongpin Fine Art Ltd.
www.stephenongpinfineart.com
2020
6 Mason’s Yard, Duke Street, St James’s London SW1Y 6BU Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com
Stephen Ongpin Fine Art
Front cover: Francesco Paolo Michetti Head of a Youth No.41
Back cover: Franรงois Boucher Study of a Male Nude Holding a Hammer Above his Head No.20
Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) The Call of the Stag No.42
MASTER DRAWINGS 2020
Stephen Ongpin Fine Art
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am, as ever, extremely grateful to my wife Laura for her advice, support and, above all, patience, while I was working on this catalogue. I am also greatly indebted to the gallery team of Megan Corcoran and Alesa Boyle for their invaluable assistance in every aspect of preparing this catalogue. At Healey’s printers, Paul Oakley, Sarah Ricks and Jenny Willings have been splendid colleagues. Andrew Smith has photographed almost all of the drawings, and, with Megan, has been tireless in the vital task of colour-proofing the images for the catalogue. In addition, I would like to thank the following people for their help and advice in the preparation of both this catalogue and the drawings included herein: Laura Angelucci, Emanuel von Baeyer, Deborah Bates, Marco Simone Bolzoni, Darla Boyle, Allie Brandt, Sonja Brink, Alessandra Casti, Hugo Chapman, Miles Chappell, Mathias Chivot, Anthony CrichtonStuart, Glynn Clarkson, Pauline David, Tom Davies, Edith Eustis, Cheryl and Gino Franchi, Meg Grasselli, Eric Greenleaf, John Hawley, Alastair Laing, Thomas Le Claire, Jane MacAvock, Suz Massen, Céline Massoulier, Marie Ohlinger, Tanya Paul, Guy Peppiatt, David Pollack, Isabel Richards, Lucia Rinolfi, Elena Rossoni, Marine Sangis, Livia Schaafsma, Peter Schatborn, Betsy Thomas, Jane Turner, Jack Wakefield, Joanna Watson and Adam Williams.
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. High-resolution digital images of the drawings are available on request. All enquiries should be addressed to Stephen Ongpin at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art Ltd. 6 Mason’s Yard Duke Street St James’s London SW1Y 6BU Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 or [+44] (7710) 328-627 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com Between 20 January and 4 February 2020 only: Tel. [+1] (917) 587-1183 Tel. [+1] (212) 249-4987
Stephen Ongpin
MASTER DRAWINGS 2020 presented by
Stephen Ongpin
1 ROMAN SCHOOL Late 16th Century Study for a Piece of Armour: A Warrior (Mars?) in an Elaborate Frame Supported by Putti Pen and brown ink and brown wash. The sheet irregularly trimmed at the left and right edges, and laid down onto another sheet. Faintly inscribed Tadeo Zuccaro in ink on the backing sheet. Further inscribed (by Sewell) TADDEO ZUCCARO 1529-1609 / Collection: Earl Spencer (Lugt 1530) / Is this the decoration of a triumphal car / or some other temporary element? The / cut out shape is very odd. in black ink on label pasted onto the the former backing board. 241 x 123 mm. (9 1/2 x 4 3/4 in.) at greatest dimensions PROVENANCE: The Hon. John Spencer, Althorp, Northamptonshire; By descent to George John, 2nd Earl Spencer, Althorp, Northamptonshire (Lugt 1530); His sale (‘A Superb Cabinet of Drawings; The Entire Collection of a Nobleman: Formed with Refined Taste and Judgement, about the Middle of the Last Century...’), London, T. Philipe, 10-18 June 1811, lot 837 (as Taddeo Zuccaro: ‘A warrior standing within a grotesque ornament – free pen and bistre’), sold for £0.2.0 to Coxe; Brian Sewell, London. The unusual shape of this spirited pen and ink drawing has led to the suggestion that it may represent a design for part of an elaborate suit of embossed all’antica parade or pageant armour. A product of the Late Renaissance, highly ornamented parade armour was the result of a renewed interest in ‘the splendid decorative armor described in ancient literature and shown in ancient sculpture, worn by victorious generals in triumphal processions.’1 The relief decoration of such armour would have been embossed into the metal, thus achieving a highly decorative, rather than merely defensive, result. Suits of parade armour of this type may be found in the Wallace Collection in London, the Real Armería de Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The present sheet was likely drawn in the last quarter of the 16th century, and the grotesque mask in the centre of the composition, as well as the scrollwork surrounding the cartouche, are drawn from classical motifs. The figure in the centre of the drawing, depicted in full armour with his shield, almost certainly represents Mars, the Roman god of war; a particularly apt motif for a piece of armour. The design depicted is likely to have been used for part of a breast plate or a gauntlet in a suit of parade armour, but could also possibly have been intended as decoration for a related object, such as a shield. As one scholar has noted, referring to an ornate suit of half-armour produced around 1570 by the Milanese master armourer Lucio Piccinino, ‘Every element - even in areas that would ordinarily be covered up by the overlapping of the plates - is decorated with luxuriant designs in relief, drawn from the classical repertory…These feature Medusas, satyrs, sphinxes, putti, bound captives, anthropomorphic lion masks, and figures of Mars and Victory - all derived, or rather adapted, from antique art, for both the choice and execution of these motifs betray a fascination for the grotesque that is characteristic of the mannerist phase of the Renaissance.’2
actual size
2 BARTOLOMEO CESI Bologna 1556-1629 Bologna A Young Man Wearing Pantaloons Red chalk on buff paper. Numbered 53 in brown ink at the upper right. Inscribed Mattia Roselli in brown ink on the former mount. 398 x 256 mm. (15 5/8 x 10 1/8 in.) Watermark: Indistinct. PROVENANCE: An anonymous 17th or 18th century Florentine collection, possibly that of Giuseppe Santini, Florence1; Comte Eugène d’Oultremont, Chateau de Presles, Aiseau-Presle, Belgium2, and thence by descent until 1985; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Nobleman’), London, Christie’s, 12 December 1985, lot 202 (as Matteo Rosselli); Marcello Aldega, Rome, and Margot Gordon, New York, in 1986; Private collection. LITERATURE: Alberto Graziani, Francesco Abbate and Mario di Giampaolo, Bartolomeo Cesi, Bussero, 1988 (1939), p.156, fig.84; Alessandro Zacchi, ‘Bartolomeo Cesi fra tarda maniera e riforma caraccesca: nuove proposte per il catalogo dei disegni’, Arte Cristiana, March-April 1991, p.120; Brookline and New York, Nissman, Abromson & Co., Master Drawings 1500-1900, exhibition catalogue, n.d. (1992), under no.15; Alessandro Zacchi, ‘Bartolomeo Cesi disegnatore’, in Vera Fortunati and Vincenzo Musumeci, Bartolomeo Cesi e l’affresco dei canonici Lateranensi, Fiesole, 1997, p.135. EXHIBITED: New York, Margot Gordon, and Rome, Marcello Aldega, Italian Drawings of the XVI Century, 1986, no.40; Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Classic Taste: Drawings and Decorative Arts from the Collection of Horace Brock, March-May, 2000. According to his biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Bartolomeo Cesi was a pupil of Giovanni Francesco Bezzi, known as Nosadella. His earliest documented works are a series of frescoes in the Vezza chapel in the church of Santo Stefano in Bologna, executed in 1574 when he was only eighteen years old. At around the same time he also worked in the church of San Pietro in Bologna, alongside Prospero Fontana and Camillo Procaccini. While Cesi’s early work reflects the influence of the Bolognese Mannerism of his elders, a presumed trip to Rome in 1591 exposed him to a more restrained, Counter-Reformation style of painting that he adopted in his mature work. In Bologna between 1594 and 1595 Cesi painted a fresco cycle of the Life of the Virgin in the church of Santa Maria dei Bulgari, largely destroyed during the Second World War, and in 1595 also completed an Adoration of the Magi for San Domenico. By this time he was well established as one of the foremost religious painters in Bologna, painting numerous works for local churches as well as smaller devotional pictures for private patrons. At the turn of the century Cesi was employed on the fresco decoration of several rooms in the Palazzo Fava, through which he came into close contact with the work of the Carracci, whose frescoes for the same palace had been completed a few years earlier. This was, however, one of the few secular commissions he undertook. Cesi’s work is almost entirely religious in subject matter, and the artist remained closely associated with several monastic orders throughout his long career. Among his significant works of the 1590s are frescoes for the Palazzo Comunale in Imola and an altarpiece for San Domenico in Bologna. For the latter church he also participated in the decoration of the chapel of the Rosary in 1601, in collaboration with Guido Reni and Ludovico Carracci. Among his more important later projects were several frescoes and paintings of Carthusian saints and subjects for the choir of the Certosa of Bologna, generally dated between 1612 and 1616. After this point, however, his output seems to have declined considerably in the last decade of his life.
Although it remains unconnected to any surviving work by Cesi, the present sheet is a fine example of the artist’s figure studies, which are often drawn in red chalk on blue or buff paper. Inspired by the example of the Carracci, Cesi produced preparatory figure studies for his paintings that were invariably drawn from life, using models – probably workshop assistants – posed in his studio. (Indeed, Cesi’s drawings have often in the past been attributed to one or another of the Carracci, although his drawings may be distinguished by a somewhat lighter application of chalk.) Malvasia writes of Cesi that his drawings of single figures – ‘drawn from the model with so much assurance and facility’3 – were more popular with the collectors of his own day than the artist’s composition studies, which are more often drawn in pen and ink. He adds that, although Cesi always worked from a posed model, due to his innate modesty he almost never drew studies of nudes or anatomical studies, unlike the Carracci. The largest extant group of drawings by Bartolomeo Cesi is today in the collection of the Uffizi in Florence, and significant groups are also in the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa and the Martin von Wagner Museum in Würzburg. Other drawings by the artist are in the Museo Civico in Bassano, the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum and the Courtauld Institute Galleries in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Fondation Custodia and the Louvre in Paris, the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, the Albertina in Vienna, the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, and elsewhere. This large sheet was formerly laid onto a 17th or early 18th century Italian mount which bore an attribution to the Florentine artist Matteo Rosselli (1578-1650)4. Indeed, the drawing displays striking similarities with the work of Tuscan artists of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. As Nancy Ward Neilson has noted, ‘Cesi’s drawing style…is as strongly indebted to Tuscan draughtsmanship – to, for example, that of Jacopo da Empoli – as to any other precedent. Further, Bartolomeo is also documented in Tuscany in the 1590’s, specifically in Siena in 1594 where he was at work in the Certosa di Maggiano. Doubtlessly, Cesi’s experience of Rome and Tuscany were fundamental in his formation of a clear, austere reform style, one which became evident by the 1590’s...’5 A stylistically comparable red chalk study of a reclining male nude is one of several drawings by Bartolomeo Cesi in the collection of the Martin von Wagner Museum in Würzburg6, while a drawing of Two Youths Embracing (fig.1) in the Uffizi7 is also similar to the present sheet, as is a study of a Male Nude Holding a Pole in the Koenig-Fachsenfeld collection at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart8. Cesi often used the same models repeatedly, and the distinctive physiognomy of the youth in the present sheet – who is likely to have been a garzone, or studio assistant – is found in several other drawings by the artist, including a study of an apostle in the Louvre9 and two others (fig.2) at Christ Church in Oxford10.
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3 PAOLO FARINATI Verona 1524-1606 Verona The Virgin and Child with Saints Catherine of Alexandria and John the Baptist, with Two Donors Below Pen and brown ink and brown wash and oil, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, on paper laid down on panel and varnished. Inscribed Paolo Veronese in brown ink twice on the reverse. Two red wax seals, each with the initials HA, on the reverse. 466 x 347 mm. (18 3/8 x 13 5/8 in.) PROVENANCE: Kurt Bauch, Freiburg im Breisgau1; Thence by descent until sold, London, Sotheby’s, 8 July 1998, lot 32. One of the most important artists working in Verona in the 16th century, Paolo Farinati was active as a painter, printmaker, architect and sculptor. A chronology of his long career of some fifty years is relatively simple to establish, since many of his surviving paintings are dated and also because, from 1573 until his death in 1606, Farinati recorded his commissions in an account book that survives today. His first documented work is an altarpiece commissioned in 1552 by Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga for the cathedral in Mantua, while between 1556 and 1558 he worked at the Veronese church of Santa Maria in Organo. In the early 1570s Farinati painted a cycle of frescoes of mythological and allegorical subjects in the Palazzo Giuliari in Verona, and soon afterwards embarked on an important series of paintings and frescoes for the church of Santi Nazaro e Celso in the same city. His style remained fairly constant throughout his mature career, which was largely spent painting works for churches in Verona, as well as frescoes and façade decorations for villas and palaces in the city and the surrounding countryside. By the last quarter of the 16th century Farinati was established as the leading artist in Verona, heading a large and active workshop. It is as a draughtsman that Farinati is best known today. He was fairly prolific, and around five hundred drawings by the artist survive, which are typically executed in pen and brown wash on coloured paper, and often enlivened with a liberal use of white heightening. Farinati kept many of his drawings in albums, and his oeuvre includes numerous studies for altarpieces, easel pictures and fresco decorations, as well as a handful of designs for prints and architectural projects. Most of his drawings are highly finished, and many appear to have been executed as autonomous works of art. As Carlo Ridolfi noted of Farinati, ‘his drawings are greatly admired, and are collected by connoisseurs...His drawings, executed on tinted paper with touches of watercolour and white heightening, were so numerous that it would be impossible to recount their subjects, and many more exist in prints, of which a good number have been collected by amateurs [dilettati], and brought to various places, since Farinati in this matter [ie. his draughtsmanship] was appreciated for his boldness and mastery.’2 Farinati’s drawings were also known to have been greatly admired by fellow artists, including Giorgio Vasari and Annibale Carracci – who once noted that ‘Of this Farinato I saw a huge drawing made with wash of marvellous beauty as I have never seen before on paper’3 – as well as Rubens, who owned several of his drawings. One of the largest extant collections of drawings by Paolo Farinati is today in the Louvre, while another significant group, numbering around fifty sheets, is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. The present sheet is likely to be a study for the type of devotional easel picture, sometimes painted on copper or slate, that Farinati produced for private patrons throughout his career. An interesting feature is the contrast between the highly finished nature of the main part of the composition and the more summary treatment of the donor figures at the bottom of the sheet. Although this large drawing cannot be related to any surviving work by Farinati, some compositional similarities may be noted with a late altarpiece of The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, signed and dated 1603, in the Museo del Castelvecchio in Verona4.
4 DANIEL LINDTMAYER THE YOUNGER Schaffhausen 1552-c.1606/07 Luzern Design for a Stained-Glass Window: Saint Jerome in the Desert with the Annunciation Above, and a Kneeling Donor and a Coat of Arms Below Pen and black ink and grey wash. Signed with the artist’s monogram DL in black ink at the lower right. Inscribed and dated Hieronimus Bor von / Winfelden Pfarerr zu / Wolmatingen. 1595. in black ink in a cartouche at the bottom. Inscribed (in a modern hand) Der bussende Hieronymus / Daniel Lindtmayer and numbered 300- in pencil on the verso. 305 x 203 mm. (12 x 8 in.) Watermark: Two towers (the coat of arms of Ravensburg). PROVENANCE: Johann Wilhelm Veith, Andelfingen and Schaffhausen; His posthumous sale, Leipzig, Rudolf Weigel, 2 November 1835 onwards, probably lot 538 (‘Lindmeier, Daniel…Der heil. Hieronymus von dem Crucifix betend, mit reicher Einfass. Feder u. Tusche’), or else possibly part of lot 10511; Dietrich Schindler, Glarus and Zurich (Lugt 793), until after 1876; Friedrich Bürki, Bern; Probably his posthumous sale, Basel, Kunsthalle [Elie Wolf], 18 June 1881 onwards, probably part of Handzeichnungen lot 5 (‘Heft mit Entwürfen v. D. Lindmeyer, 30 Stück, 16 Jahrhundert.’); Anonymous sale (‘Entwürfe zu Glasfenstern in Original-Handzeichnungen Alter Schweizer Glasmaler des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts’), Berlin, Amsler & Ruthardt, 24 April 1895, lot 14 (‘Reiche Architectur in deren Mitte der büssende Hieronymus vor dem Kreuze kniet, darüber die Verkündigung Mariae, unter der Darstellung eine Kartusche mit der Inschrift “Hieronimus Bor von Winfelden Pfarrer zue Uotmatingen. 1595.”, links und rechts derselben der Donator und sein Wappen. Bezeichnet D. L. Sehr ausgeführte Zeichnung in Feder und Tusche.’); An unidentified collector’s mark (Lugt 168, possibly Amsler & Ruthart or A. Rump) stamped in blue ink on the verso; A partial, unidentified circular mark, incorporating the word WIEN (not in Lugt) stamped in black ink on the verso; Possibly Paul Ganz, Basel, in the early 1920s; Dr. Hugo von Ziegler, Schaffhausen; Thence by descent. LITERATURE: Rudolf Weigel, Kunstsammlung des verst. Hrn. Antistes und Dekan Veith in Schaffhausen, Teil I: Holzschnitte, Originalhandzeichnungen und di Kupferstiche der deutschen Schule..., Leipzig, 1835, no.538; G. K. Nagler, Neues allgemeines Künstkler-Lexicon, Vol.VII, Munich, 1839, p.539, no.6; Paul Boesch, ‘Daniel Lindtmayers Scheibenriß für Pfarrer Hieronymus Bor von Weinfelden 1595’, Weinfelder Heimatblätter, 26 May 1952, pp.301-302; Hugo von Ziegler, Daniel Lindtmayer 1552-1606: Handzeichnungen, exhibition catalogue, Schaffhausen, 1952, no.160; Friedrich Thöne, Zeichnungssammlung Dr. Hugo von Ziegler, Schaffhausen, unpublished MS, 1968, no.78; Friedrich Thöne, Daniel Lindtmayer, 1552-1606/07: Die Schaffhauser Künstlerfamilie Lindtmayer, Zürich and Munich, 1975, p.64, p.109, p.218, no.289, fig.349 and p.217, under no.284. EXHIBITED: Schaffhausen, Museum zu Allerheiligen, Tobias Stimmer 1539-1584: Gedächtnisaustellung zum 400. Geburtsjahr, 1939, no.207; Schaffhausen, Museum zu Allerheiligen, Daniel Lindtmayer 15521606: Handzeichnungen, 1952, no.160. The art of stained-glass design in Northern Europe during the Renaissance may be said to have reached its apogee in Switzerland during the 15th and 16th centuries. Indeed, in Switzerland after the Reformation glass painting was arguably more important than painting on canvas or panel, and it was not until the advent of the Baroque, and the need for works on a much larger scale, that its significance declined somewhat. Long used only for ecclesiastical purposes, by the 16th century small-scale glass panels of secular subjects were also being produced in Switzerland and in the Upper Rhine areas of Southern Germany. Known as Kabinettscheiben, such stained-glass panels were generally intended for public and civic buildings like town halls, and were also often found in private homes. Among the finest
designers of stained-glass windows in Switzerland and Austria during this period was Daniel Lindtmayer, the last and most talented member of four generations of artists that specialized in such designs. The precocious Lindtmayer’s first teacher was his father Felix, who was likewise a glass painter, and he also came under the profound influence of the drawings and woodcuts of Tobias Stimmer. The younger Lindtmayer rose to become one of the leading masters in the field of glass painting, working first in Schaffhausen and then in Basel, where he was established by 1574 and employed as a designer for the city’s glass painters. As has been noted of Lindtmayer, ‘Daniel’s work was far more complicated and ‘literary’ than his father’s. His designs for Kabinettscheiben are deeply influenced by developments in the representation of linear perspective in contemporary prints. The images are far more elaborate and incorporate Renaissance strapwork, Classical elements in the architectural frames and volumetric rendering of the human figure.’2 Lindtmayer’s later travels found him working in Feldkirch, Königsfelden, Lausanne, Schwyz, Wolfenschiessen and elsewhere, although he was, for the most part, based in his native Schaffhausen. In 1595 he was accused of the attempted murder of a goldsmith named Stülz in Konstanz, but escaped punishment on the grounds of insanity. He left Schaffhausen the following year and eventually settled in Lucerne, converting to Catholicism. Lindtmayer’s last known dated work was executed in 1603, and he died three or four years later, leaving behind a large corpus of drawings, as well as a number of prints and at least one painting. This large drawing is a particularly fine example of Lindtmayer’s drawings for stained-glass (Scheibenriss) panels, which are characterized by refined and elaborate compositions with prominent architectural elements and a vigorous handling of the pen. As noted in the artist’s inscription in a cartouche at the bottom of the sheet, the donor of the stained-glass window for which this drawing is a study, who is depicted kneeling in prayer before his patron saint at the lower left of the composition, was one Hieronymus Bor. A native of Weinfelden, in the canton of Thurgau, Bor served as pastor of a church in the town of Wollmatingen, today part of the city of Konstanz in the German province of Badem-Württemberg. At the lower right of the composition is Bor’s coat of arms which, like that of Weinfelden, incorporated bunches of grapes. The present sheet was drawn in Konstanz in 1595, the same year that the artist attacked and attempted to kill a goldsmith working in the city. The present sheet has a long and illustrious provenance, and has figured in several significant collections of Swiss drawings. The first owner of the drawing was the Swiss pastor Johann Wilhelm Veith (17581833), arguably the most important collector of his day in Schaffhausen, who published religious treatises, poems and essays on art and science. As well as paintings and prints, Veith assembled a highly significant collection of around 2,500 drawings, of which stained-glass designs made up only a relatively small part. A large number of the drawings in his collection were purchased, at the posthumous Veith sale of 1835, by the Zurich politician Dietrich Schindler (1795-1882), who collected prints and drawings by Swiss artists. Part of Schindler’s collection was exhibited in Munich in 1876, and not long afterwards his collection was acquired by the Swiss councillor Friedrich Bürki (1819-1880). Bürki had hoped to establish a Swiss national museum in Bern but died shortly after acquiring the Schindler drawings. A sale of his collection was held in Basel in 1881, and included some 450 drawings for stained-glass designs, almost all from the Veith and Schindler collections, including a folio or album containing thirty drawings by Daniel Lindtmayer. Ninety-two of the drawings from Bürki’s collection, including the present sheet, reappeared at auction in Berlin in April 1895. This fine drawing by Lindtmayer eventually entered the collection of the lawyer and art historian Hugo von Ziegler (1890-1966), who assembled a superb group of 16th century Swiss drawings, as well as coins and silverware, between the 1920s and the 1960s. A native of Schaffhausen, von Ziegler collected in particular drawings by artists active in the city. He organized an exhibition of drawings by Daniel Lindtmayer in Schaffhausen in 1952, to which he lent the present sheet. Other drawings of stained-glass designs from the von Ziegler collection are today in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum zu Allerheiligen in Schaffhausen.
5 ABRAHAM BLOEMAERT Gorinchem (Gorcum) 1566-1651 Utrecht Drapery Study of a Seated Figure Red chalk and black chalk, heightened with white, on buff paper, with framing lines in brown ink. A sketch of an arm in black chalk on the verso. Inscribed Abraham Bloemaert, in a modern hand, in pencil on the verso. 121 x 186 mm. (4 3/4 x 7 3/8 in.) PROVENANCE: D(irk?) Harting, Heemstede1; Iohan Quirijn van Regteren Altena, Amsterdam (his posthumous sale stamp [Lugt 4617] stamped on the verso), until 1980; By descent to his wife, Augusta Louisa Wilhelmina van Regteren Altena, Amsterdam, until 2006; Thence by family descent until 2015; The I. Q. van Regteren Altena sale, Amsterdam, Christie’s, 13 May 2015, lot 123; Private collection. LITERATURE: Jaap Bolten, ‘The Drawings of Abraham Bloemaert: A Supplement’, Master Drawings, Winter 2017, p.89, no.A50* and A29*, fig.278 (as location unknown), where dated c.1600. Together with Cornelis van Haarlem and Joachim Wtewael, Abraham Bloemaert was one of the last major exponents of the Northern Mannerist tradition. He received his artistic training in Utrecht and Paris but, unlike many of his contemporaries, never travelled to Italy. Indeed, apart from two years in Amsterdam in the early 1590s, he worked exclusively in Utrecht from 1583 until his death. Bloemaert enjoyed a very long and productive career of some sixty years, resulting in an oeuvre of around two hundred extant paintings, including religious scenes, history subjects, landscapes and genre scenes. A gifted and prolific draughtsman, Bloemaert was praised by his biographer Karel van Mander for his ‘clever way of drawing with a pen, and, by adding small amounts of watercolour, he produces unusual effects’2. He drew numerous studies for paintings and engravings – some six hundred prints after his designs are known – as well as landscape drawings and many sheets of studies of heads, hands and arms. The bulk of Bloemaert’s enormous corpus of drawings, numbering around 1,600 sheets, was retained by his descendants for over fifty years, and it was only in the first half of the 18th century that they began to be sold and dispersed. Datable to the first years of the 17th century, this drapery study is closely related to a drawing of a Seated Woman (fig.1) in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm3. The drapery in both drawings is nearly identical, with only minor differences, and thus the present sheet may have been drawn from a posed model and later served as the basis for the more fully developed study in Stockholm.
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6 GIOVANNI BALDUCCI, called IL COSCI Florence 1560-after 1631 Naples(?) Recto: The Visitation Verso: Sketch for The Visitation and a Design for its Frame and the Altar Chapel Facade Pen and brown ink and blue wash, with framing lines in brown ink, on blue paper, in a fictive mount with an arched top. The verso in red chalk, pen and brown ink and blue wash. 336 x 271 mm. (13 1/4 x 10 5/8 in.) at greatest dimensions. Watermark: A fleur-de-lys over a triple mountain in a circle with an M above (Woodward 113). PROVENANCE: Private collection, South Germany. Giovanni Balducci, known as Il Cosci after the surname of an uncle who raised him, was trained in the studio of Giovanni Battista Naldini, eventually becoming his chief assistant and disciple. Between 1576 and 1579 he also worked under the supervision of Federico Zuccaro on the fresco decoration of the cupola of the Duomo in Florence and assisted Naldini on two frescoes for the church of San Marco in 1580. Balducci also worked under Alessandro Allori on the decoration of a corridor of the Uffizi. He was admitted to the Accademia del Disegno in Florence in 1582, a date which marked the start of his independent activity, and shortly thereafter contributed to the fresco cycle in the Chiostro Grande of Santa Maria Novella. A versatile and gifted painter, adept at both large-scale altarpieces and smaller devotional works for private patrons, as well as fresco painting, Balducci established a successful career, working mainly in Florence, Rome and Naples. In the late 1580s he received an important commission from Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici for three altarpieces and nine frescoes of scenes from the life of Christ to decorate the Florentine church of the Gesù Pellegrino, a project which he completed by the end of the decade. In 1589 Balducci was among a group of artists - including Andrea Boscoli, Agostino Ciampelli, Ludovico Cigoli and Jacopo Ligozzi - working on the elaborate projects for temporary decorations in Florence to celebrate the wedding of Duke Ferdinando I to Christine of Lorraine. In the same year he painted a Crucifixion of Saint Andrew for the cloister of the Oratorio di San Pierino. The beginning of the next decade found the artist working at the cathedral in Volterra, where he painted a Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes for the Serguidi chapel. In 1594, together with his fellow painter Agostino Ciampelli, Balducci was summoned to Rome by Alessandro de’ Medici to contribute to the decoration of his titular church of Santa Prassede. During the next two years in Rome he painted altarpieces for the churches of San Giovanni Decollato, San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, San Giovanni in Laterano and San Gregorio al Celio. He also painted an apse fresco for the cathedral in Velletri, commissioned from him by Cardinal Alfonso Gesualdo and completed in 1595. Soon afterwards, in the spring of 1596, Balducci travelled to Naples, in the retinue of Cardinal Gesualdo, to work on the decoration of the Duomo. He was to work in Naples and Calabria for more than thirty years, receiving numerous commissions for paintings and frescoes, notably a now-lost fresco cycle for the Palazzo Reale. Among the churches where he worked in Naples were San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, Santissima Annunziata, Santa Maria de Monteverginella and, towards the end of his life, Santa Maria del Carmine. Balducci also designed a number of tapestries, known as the Giornata di Seminara, for the Neapolitan nobleman Vincenzo Luigi di Capua. However, very little of his Neapolitan work survives today, and this period of his career remains relatively little known in comparison with his work in Florence and Rome.
Balducci’s early drawings, sometimes on prepared or coloured paper, show the particular influence of his master Naldini. Although he had a fairly distinctive style as a draughtsman, and produced a fair number of autograph drawings, those of his later Neapolitan period are less well-studied. Relatively few drawings by the artist can be connected with finished paintings or frescoes, and therefore establishing a firm chronology of his style as a draughtsman remains a challenge. A small but interesting group of drawings by Balducci is today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille, while other examples are in the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Uffizi and the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, the British Museum and the Courtauld Institute Gallery in London, the Biblioteca Nacional and the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, the Louvre in Paris, the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome, the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, and elsewhere. A preparatory study for a now-lost or never-executed altarpiece of The Visitation, the present sheet may likely be dated to the early part of Balducci’s stay in Naples, around the first decade of the 17th century. It can be compared stylistically with a drawing by the artist of the same subject, executed in pen and brown ink and brown wash over red and black chalk (fig.1), in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York1. Although close to the present sheet in handling and technique, the Metropolitan Museum drawing is, however, quite different in composition and orientation. Silvana Musella Guida has also suggested a further stylistic comparison with a drawing by Balducci of The Marriage of the Virgin (fig.2) in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York2, which shares with the present sheet an identical treatment of the faces, with small dots to mark the eyes, as well as way the hair and drapery is drawn. The verso of the present sheet contains a rapid sketch in red chalk of the composition of the Visitation on the recto, together with a rough design for the surrounding frame for the altarpiece, with its arched top. The verso also shows Balducci’s sketch for the decoration of the chapel façade in which the painting was to be placed, to be surmounted by a coat of arms - presumably that of the donor of the chapel or the altarpiece itself – flanked by spandrels with winged angels. Musella Guida has likened the red chalk sketches on the verso of this sheet with another, albeit earlier drawing by Balducci in the collection of the Morgan Library; a study of The Angels Appearing to Abraham3, which is likely to date from the artist’s Florentine or Roman period.
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7 MARCANTONIO BASSETTI Verona 1586-1630 Verona A Triumphal Procession with Musicians Before a Chariot and Horsemen Behind Pen and brown ink and brown wash, extensively heightened with cream oil paint, on two joined sheets of paper. Laid down on an old mount. 145 x 570 mm. (5 3/4 x 22 3/8 in.) Marcantonio Bassetti trained in the studio of Felice Brusasorci in Verona, where he studied alongside other local painters such as Alessandro Turchi and Pasquale Ottino. After Brusasorci’s death in 1605, he went to Venice, and there met the Venetian painter Palma Giovane, with whom he may have worked as an assistant, and who certainly had a profound influence on his draughtsmanship. While there he also made numerous drawn copies after the paintings of Jacopo Tintoretto. Around 1616 Bassetti travelled with Ottino and Turchi to Rome, where he worked with Carlo Saraceni and became strongly influenced by the Caravaggism of Saraceni and Orazio Borgianni. Between 1616 and 1617 Bassetti participated in the decoration of the Sala Regia in the Palazzo Quirinale, working alongside Turchi and Saraceni, and also collaborated with the latter on two now-lost altarpieces for the church of Santa Maria dell’Anima. He became a member of the Roman Accademia di San Luca and enjoyed a highly successful career, combining in his paintings the Venetian tradition of his upbringing with the radical style and dramatic lighting of the work of Caravaggio and his followers that he encountered in Rome. Bassetti earned commissions from such important Roman patrons as Cardinals Scipione Borghese and Pietro Aldobrandini, and painted a number of significant works, notably a Caravaggesque altarpiece of The Five Bishop Martyrs for the Veronese church of Santo Stefano. He also painted several smallscale cabinet pictures on slate. By 1620 he had returned to his native Verona, where he remained for the last decade of his life, working on several commissions for altarpieces for such local churches as Sant’Anastasia and San Tomaso. He likewise sent work further afield, painting a Martyrdom of Saints Vitus, George and Wolfgang for the Augustinian church in Munich in c.1620 and a massive Assumption of the Virgin for the parish church in Geisenfeld in Bavaria, executed between 1623 and 1625. During this period Bassetti also worked on a series of portraits, most of which are today in the Museo del Castelvecchio in Verona; indeed, portraiture accounts for much of the finest work of the artist’s last years. Bassetti died in Verona during the plague of 1630, at the age of around forty-four. A fervent and gifted draughtsman, Marcantonio Bassetti began to favour drawing over painting in his later years. An important group of monochromatic oil sketches on paper by the artist, similar in technique to the present pair of drawings, is today in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle1. In his catalogue of that collection Anthony Blunt provided a succinct description of Bassetti’s distinctive draughtsmanship: ‘His drawings are executed in the late sixteenth-century Venetian method of almost grisaille oils on paper, but they are characterized by a type of closed composition, with the figures crowded into the front of the space, and by a method of modelling the form in little lumps or nobs, emphasized by the strong highlights added in pure white pigment. The ‘ropy’ treatment of the draperies combines with this to create a curiously broken high-relief pattern of lights and shades.’2
8 MARCANTONIO BASSETTI Verona 1586-1630 Verona A Triumphal Procession with Prisoners and Horsemen Before a Chariot Bearing a Conqueror Crowned by Fame Pen and brown ink and brown wash, extensively heightened with cream oil paint, on two joined sheets of paper. Laid down on an old mount. 140 x 565 mm. (5 1/2 x 22 1/4 in.) Marcantonio Bassetti’s monochromatic drawings, executed with a combination of pen and ink wash and oils on paper, seem to have been done not as studies for paintings but rather as independent works of art. That they were highly prized by collectors, and particularly foreign visitors to Verona, is seen in a comment made by his biographer, Carlo Ridolfi, in his Le maraviglie dell’arte, published in 1648. Ridolfi praised Bassetti’s drawings, ‘which he used to heighten with white and black oil paint on the paper’, and noted that ‘one still sees many drawings executed in this manner and which he mostly made during the winter, displaying them around his studio, and which he still used to sell to those who took delight in studying, and in particular to the foreigners who passed through Verona.’1 The artist himself seems to have regarded his drawings as akin to his paintings, to judge by his comment, in a letter of 1616 to Palma Giovane, that ‘quanto si disegna, si dipinge ancora’ (‘when one draws, one also paints’)2. This pair of processional scenes, which appear to form a continuous narrative composition, may be likened on stylistic grounds to several of the large group of more than twenty drawings by Bassetti in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, and in particular a frieze-like drawing of The Triumph of Caesar of similar dimensions3. The composition of the Windsor drawing ends somewhat abruptly at the left edge, and it has been suggested that the scene may have been continued on another, separate sheet, now lost. Also similar in format is a drawing of a Battle Scene by Bassetti at Windsor4, which, like The Triumph of Caesar, was probably acquired with the collection of Consul Joseph Smith in 1762 by King George III5.
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9 SIGISMONDO COCCAPANI Florence 1583-1643 Florence Susanna and the Elders Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Squared for transfer in red chalk, with framing lines in brown ink. Extensively inscribed with a letter written by the artist in brown ink on the verso. Inscribed Del Cigoli in brown ink on a piece of paper pasted onto the backing sheet, below the drawing. 256 x 193 mm. (10 1/8 x 7 5/8 in.) 273 x 201 mm. (10 3/4 x 7 7/8 in.) [with backing sheet] PROVENANCE: Sigismondo and Giovanni Coccapani, Florence (Lugt 2729), their mark embossed at the bottom centre of the sheet; By descent to Giovanni Coccapani’s son, Regolo Silverio Coccapani, Florence; Probably dispersed with the rest of the Coccapani collection in the middle of the 17th century; Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, London; By descent to her son, Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy, London, New York and Florence (his bookplate on the old frame backing board); His posthumous sale (‘The Collections of the Late Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy C.B.E., F.B.A., F.R.S.L., F.S.A.’), New York, Christie’s, 10 January 1996, lot 23 (as Attributed to Sigismondo Coccapani); Drue Heinz, London and New York. LITERATURE: Miles L. Chappell, ‘Proposals for Coccapani’, Paradigma, June 1990, p.190, fig.108 (as Circle of Cigoli; Sigismondo Coccapani?); London, Christie’s, Old Master Drawings, including 17th Century Italian Drawings from the Ferretti Di Castelferreto Collection, 2 July 1996, p.23, under lot 12; Miles Chappell, ‘The Assumption of the Virgin and the Holy Family in Joseph’s Workshop by Sigismondo Coccapani’, Notes in the History of Art, Summer 2004, p.19; Linda Wolk-Simon and Carmen C. Bambach, An Italian Journey. Drawings from the Tobey Collection: Correggio to Tiepolo, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2010, p.144, under no.43, note 5; Emmanuelle Brugerolles, ed., Le Baroque à Florence, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 2015, pp.61-62, under no.15, fig.2 (entry by Emmanuelle Brugerolles and Constance Guigui); Elisa Acanfora, Sigismondo Coccapani. Ricomposizione del catalogo, Florence, 2017, p.61, p.148, under no.18, p.215, no.D154, illustrated p.62, fig.103 and p.234, pl.153. The son of a goldsmith, Sigismondo Coccapani studied with the architect Bernardo Buontalenti and the painter Ludovico Cardi, known as Cigoli. He was one of Cigoli’s last pupils, and was the only Florentine apprentice working closely with the master on his late Roman commissions. Indeed, as Miles Chappell has noted, Coccapani ‘could be described as the most dedicated and also the most dependent of Cigoli’s disciples.’1 Between 1610 and 1612 he assisted Cigoli on the fresco decoration of the dome of the Cappella Paolina in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. On his return to Florence, Coccapani began his independent practice and in fact seems to have worked almost exclusively in and around the city for the remainder of his career, painting frescoes, devotional works and mythological pictures. His earliest known independent commission was for a lunette fresco in the large cloister (the chiostro dei morti) of the church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence, painted in 1613. Four years later he completed a painting of Michelangelo Crowned by the Arts for the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, soon followed by an Adoration of the Magi for the church of Santa Maria in Castello in Signa, outside the city. His last known work is the decoration of the Cappella Martelli in the Florentine church of Santi Michele e Gaetano, completed in 1642. Coccapani’s paintings show his debt to the manner of his master Cigoli, an influence that may also be seen in the relatively few surviving drawings by the younger artist that are known, of which the largest group, numbering around ninety sheets, is today in the Uffizi in Florence. That many more drawings by Coccapani must once have existed, however, is shown by the comments of the Florentine collector and biographer Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri, who knew of an album of drawings by the artist that had been sold abroad: ‘un grosso libro, nel quale disegnò ogni sorta di animali, che riuscì cosa di gran pregio, il quale poi fù mandato oltre ai monti.’
Like several drawings by Coccapani, the present sheet was once attributed to his teacher Ludovico Cigoli, as can be seen in the inscription ‘Del Cigoli’ formerly on the old mount; identical inscriptions appear on the 17th or 18th century mounts of a number of drawings by both Cigoli and Coccapani2. The close relationship between the drawing styles of the two artists has only recently been made clearer. As Miles Chappell has noted, ‘the connections between Cigoli and Coccapani as draughtsmen are general in that the pupil shows affinities with the manner of his teacher and specific in that there are often complex historical circumstances that relate particular drawings to the name of Cigoli…Through relationships in drawings…it also becomes clear that Cigoli’s great influence on Florentine art of the Seicento was effected as much through his draughtsmanship as through his painting.’3 Many of the most Cigolesque drawings by Coccapani date from the early part of his career, when he was working with Cigoli in Rome, and again at the start of his independent career in Florence. Although squared for transfer, the present sheet cannot be related to any surviving painting or fresco by Coccapani. Elisa Acanfora has dated this drawing to the early 1620s and has further noted some correspondence with Coccapani’s painting of The Toilet of Bathsheba (fig.1) in a Florentine private collection4, which is set in a similar loggia and includes the same fountain with a putto holding a dolphin that is seen at the left of the present sheet. Miles Chappell has likened this drawing stylistically to a drawing of The Assumption of the Virgin of c.1612 in a private collection5 and also notes the two old men are similar to those in a drawing of Figures Meeting at the Entrance to a City in the Louvre6. He has further recently pointed out that the letter on the verso of the present sheet is in Coccapani’s hand and, at least in part, seems to relate to the subject of the drawing on the recto. This drawing bears a drystamp (Lugt 2729), which denotes it as being part of a collection of 17th century Florentine drawings assembled by Sigismondo Coccapani and, possibly, his brother and fellow painter Giovanni Coccapani. (The family collection of drawings and prints was, however, apparently begun by their father, the goldsmith Regolo Francesco Coccapani.) Over a hundred drawings which bear this stamp are known, most of which are by Cigoli, with the bulk of the remainder by the brothers Coccapani and some of their contemporaries in Cigoli’s studio and circle, including Jacopo da Empoli and Matteo Rosselli7. Most of the drawings with the Coccapani mark are in the Uffizi, and must have entered the museum’s collection as part of the Fondo Mediceo-Lorenese in the second half of the 17th century. Other drawings with the Coccapani drystamp are today in the collections of the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Fondation Custodia and the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome, and elsewhere. While the art historian Sir John Pope-Hennessy (1913-1994) assembled a small but choice group of Italian drawings, the present sheet was inherited by him from his mother, the noted historian and biographer Dame Una Pope-Hennessy (1875-1949).
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10 CORNELIS VISSCHER Haarlem 1628-1658 Amsterdam Portrait of a Young Man, Probably a Self-Portrait Black chalk. Laid down. Faintly signed CVisscher / fecit(?) in black chalk at the upper right. Indistinctly inscribed and dated(?) Cornelis Visscher del. / [?] / 16[?] in pencil on the backing sheet. 210 x 176 mm. (8 1/4 x 6 7/8 in.) PROVENANCE: ‘Collection Monsieur Y’. Although Cornelis Visscher enjoyed a brief career of only about a decade, he was one of the most significant portrait draughtsmen and printmakers of the 17th century in Holland. He produced some two hundred prints, often executed in a combination of etching and engraving, alongside over a hundred drawings. Visscher was probably a pupil and assistant of the Haarlem painter and printmaker Pieter Claesz. Soutman, and was working as an independent artist after 1650, entering the painter’s guild in Haarlem in 1653. A few years later, however, he moved to Amsterdam. Active as a prolific printmaker from around 1649 onwards, Visscher was also a celebrated portrait draughtsman. As the scholar William Robinson has noted, ‘The fine, polished manner of Visscher’s drawings simulates the cool, hard light, meticulous finish, and astonishing effects of detail and texture captured in his prints.’1 Visscher produced portrait drawings and prints of both a formal and informal nature, though few of his sitters have been identified. Most of his drawn portraits date from between 1652 and his death six years later. (Only three early drawings dating from between 1649 and 1651 are known.) Visscher’s signed and dated portrait drawings, often executed in black chalk on vellum and highly finished, were likely commissioned by patrician clients and intended as autonomous works of art. Although best known for his accomplished portraits, Visscher also produced a handful of drawings of allegorical and historical scenes, genre subjects, landscapes and animal studies, both of his own invention and based on the work of other artists. Among his students were Cornelis van Dalen and Jan Aelbertsz. Riethoorn. Visscher died at the age of twenty-nine, survived by his brothers Jan de Visscher and Lambert Visscher, who were also artists. The early 18th century Dutch biographer Arnold Houbraken, in his De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, praised Visscher’s particular skill as a portrait draughtsman in charcoal and black chalk. As Carlos van Hasselt has written, ‘Most of Cornelis Visscher’s portrait drawings were made between 1652 and 1658. The fact that so many have survived bears witness to the growing demand of an increasingly well-to-do bourgeoisie for a convenient yet impressive form of portraiture. In many cases the names of the subjects are unknown, which suggests that merchants and others who did not belong to the hereditary magistrature nevertheless had themselves depicted in a pose traditionally reserved for the privileged classes. Besides the influence of Van Dyck and his followers, that of the classical French portrait with its cool contrasting colors can also be felt in a style which, so to speak, anticipates the type of portrait in black chalk that became so popular about a decade later. In his many portraits Visscher avoided stiffness by emulating Frans Hals’s healthy realism and his broad, almost pictorial treatment of textiles.’2 Visscher was highly regarded in his lifetime, and his portrait drawings in particular continued to be sought-after by collectors in the 18th and 19th centuries. Houbraken noted, for example, that several of Visscher’s works were in the collection of the noted connoisseur of drawings Jeronimus Tonneman, a director of the Dutch East India Company, in Amsterdam.
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Although it is indistinctly dated, the present sheet would appear to be a relatively early drawing by Cornelis Visscher. John Hawley, to whom we are grateful for his assistance in the cataloguing of this drawing, has suggested that this drawing may plausibly be regarded as a self-portrait. Visscher produced a significant number of self-portrait drawings, and the features of the youth in this sheet are very close to the artist’s own appearance, as recorded in such self-portraits as a drawing dated 1649 (fig.1) in the British Museum3, which was engraved in reverse by the artist4, as well as a later engraving of 16515 and two self-portrait drawings, one dated 1652 and the other 1653 (fig.2), both today in the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam6. Hawley has further noted that a particularly close stylistic comparison may be made with a drawing by Visscher of an unknown woman, in the British Museum7. An early copy or replica of the present sheet was on the art market in 2008 with an attribution to the Augsburg-born printmaker Jonas Umbach (c.1624-1693), and is today in the collection of the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf8. It has previously been suggested that the Düsseldorf drawing, which is faintly inscribed ‘Visscher’, may have been a self-portrait by Umbach, which would mean that the present sheet is Visscher’s portrait of the printmaker as a young man. Umbach was four years older than Visscher, and while it is possible that the two artists may have met each other, such an encounter seems unlikely. Visscher worked almost exclusively in Haarlem and Amsterdam, and although little is known of Umbach’s life, he was based in Augsburg for most of his career, apart from a period in Italy between 1645 and 1652. The only known lifetime portrait of Jonas Umbach is an engraving by Matthäus Küsel9, dated 1652 and showing the artist at the age of twenty-eight, in which the features of the sitter bears little resemblance to the youth in our drawing. On balance, therefore, it seems more likely that the present sheet is a youthful self-portrait by Cornelis Visscher, by whom more self-portraits are known than by almost any other Dutch artist of the period, save Rembrandt.
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11 Attributed to ABRAHAM VAN DIJCK Dordrecht c.1635/6-1680 Dordrecht A Seated Youth with a Book Pen and brush and brown ink and brown wash, with framing lines in brown ink, on paper with a shaped top. 132 x 79 mm. (5 1/4 x 3 1/8 in.) at greatest dimensions. PROVENANCE: Jacques Bacri, Paris; Thence by descent until 2017. Not much is known of the life and career of the Amsterdam artist Abraham Van Dijck (or Dyck), who remains one of the more obscure artists in the circle of Rembrandt. Relatively few signed or dated paintings and drawings by the artist have survived, and as such a chronology of his career is difficult to establish. The son of a prosperous wine merchant in Dordrecht, he may have studied there initially with Samuel van Hoogstraten, and is thought to have been a pupil in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam studio in the early 1650s. (Van Hoogstraten sent several of his pupils to complete their training with his former master Rembrandt in Amsterdam.) While Van Dijck’s putative period of apprenticeship in Rembrandt’s studio remains undocumented, it is certainly true that his earliest dated painting, a Presentation in the Temple of c.16511, reveals his knowledge of Rembrandt’s style. His work also displays the influence of a number of Rembrandt’s students and followers, in particular Nicolaes Maes, as well as the genre painters Gabriel Metsu, Caspar Netscher and Quentin van Brekelenkam. Following his time in Amsterdam, Van Dijck returned to his native Dordrecht, where he painted numerous depictions of old women and men - in contemplation, prayer, reading or asleep - that are indebted to the example of Nicolaes Maes. The fact that Maes’s paintings were a particular influence on Van Dijck suggests that the two artists were close, and indeed this may also be said of their families. Van Dijck’s parents lived on the same street as Maes in Dordrecht, and his younger brother Hugo owned a pair of portraits of himself and his late wife; the former by his brother Abraham and the latter by Maes. Around 1660 Van Dijck seems to have moved to Amsterdam. Only three dated works are known from the 1660s, however, and none after 1667. The 18th century biographer Arnold Houbraken claims that Van Dijck worked in England, like his more famous Flemish namesake Anthony Van Dyck, but this remains unproven. The artist, described as ‘Abram van Dijck, bachelor painter’, was buried on 27 August 1680 in the Grote Kerk in Dordrecht. Only about forty paintings by Van Dijck are known today, including just a handful of signed works; in the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace, the Mauritshuis in The Hague (on long-term loan to the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam), the Isabel and Alfred Bader collection in Milwaukee (promised to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario), the Fürstlich Hohenzollernsche Sammlung at Schloss Sigmaringen and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, as well as a number of private collections. The attribution of the present sheet to Abraham Van Dijck is due to Peter Schatborn. Van Dijck’s oeuvre as a draughtsman has yet to be fully studied, and only a few drawings by or attributed to him are known today. In fact, Werner Sumowski listed only three authentic or signed drawings under the artist’s name in his magisterial Drawings of the Rembrandt School, published in 1980, together with a further twenty-eight sheets which he attributed to him. One of the few generally accepted drawings by Van Dijck is a study of a seated old woman holding a book, in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York2, which may be regarded as a preliminary study for a painting of an Old Prophetess in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg3. As Felice Stampfle and Jane Turner
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have noted, Sumowski regarded both the Morgan Library drawing and the Hermitage painting ‘to be relatively early works by Abraham Van Dijck, though dating from after c.1650 (the period of his hypothetical apprenticeship with Rembrandt), since, in addition to the influence of Rembrandt, the drawing shows that of Nicolaes Maes…The [Morgan] Library’s drawing provided a cornerstone for Sumowski’s reconstruction of Van Dijck’s drawn oeuvre.’4 Schatborn has compared this fine drawing of a young man reading a book in particular with a drawing by Van Dijck of an old man seated in an armchair (fig.1), datable to c.1665-1660, in the Liberna Collection at the Draiflessen Collection in Mettingen, Germany5. As he notes, both drawings share a similar treatment of the outlines of the figure, areas of diagonal pen hatching and tonal washes applied with a dry brush, as well as a distinctive treatment of the hands. As Sumowski has pointed out, the Liberna drawing, which is probably a study for a blind Tobit, is stylistically comparable to both the Morgan Library drawing of a seated old woman and a signed drawing by Van Dijck of the head and shoulders of a young woman, today in the collection of the Kunsthalle in Bremen6, and the same is true of the present sheet. A somewhat comparable treatment of hands is also found in a drawing of a young man behind a balustrade, attributed by Sumowksi to Van Dijck, which was formerly in the C. R. Rudolf collection in London and was sold at auction in Amsterdam in 19777. Interestingly, Abraham Van Dijck often depicted figures with an open book in his paintings and drawings, as for example in a painting of an Old Woman with a Book of c.1655, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam8.
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12 JACOB VAN DER ULFT Gorinchem 1627-1689 Noordwijk A Procession Before a Circular Temple Pen and black and grey ink and grey wash. Signed and dated J vander Ulft f / 1658. in black ink at the base of the column near the lower left. Inscribed on the verso, laid down. 152 x 210 mm. (6 x 8 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: C. G. Boerner, Dusseldorf; Purchased from them in 1920 by Dr. Curt Otto, Leipzig (Lugt 611c)1, his stamp at the lower left of the old mount; His posthumous sale (‘Sammlung von Handzeichnungen Altniederländischer Meister des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts aus dem Besitz der kürzlich verstorbenen Herrn Dr. Curt Otto’), Leipzig, C. G. Boerner, 7 November 1929, lot 140 (‘Triumphzug in einer orientalischen Stadt. Links ein Triumphbogen, in der Mitte ein Rundtempel. Höhe: 15 cm. Breite: 21 cm. Feder und Pinsel, in Tusche, auf Pergament. Bezeichnet auf dem Sockel einer Säule links: “J. vander ulft f 1658”. Erworben 1920 bei C. G. Boerner.’). Jacob van der Ulft seems to have been an amateur artist and was quite possibly self-taught, since no guild membership is recorded for him. Furthermore, he is known to have worked as a civil servant in his native city of Gorinchem (also known as Gorkum), rising to the position of burgomaster between 1660 and 1679, and appears to have spent his entire career there. Van der Ulft was mainly active as a draughtsman, and dated drawings are known ranging from 1652 to 1688. As well as his numerous drawings, he also produced a number of highly finished watercolours and gouaches. He is recorded in some documents as a painter and architect, and among the few paintings by him are works dated between 1657 and 1674. Much of Van der Ulft’s surviving painted and drawn oeuvre is made up of Italianate landscapes or antique Roman cityscapes and port scenes crowded with figures. His drawings – usually executed in pen and ink wash but also occasionally in gouache – are more highly regarded today than his relatively few extant paintings. While there are numerous quite specific views of Rome by the hand of the artist, many of which are inscribed and dated, it is unclear whether Jacob van der Ulft ever actually visited Italy. The contemporary biographer Arnold Houbraken states definitively that he did not travel to Italy, and further claims that his Roman views were based on the work of other artists. Certainly, Van der Ulft was profoundly influenced by the work of his contemporary Jan de Bisschop, another amateur artist, whose drawings approach his own in both style and handling. (It is likely, however, that de Bisschop himself never travelled to Italy). A number of copies by Van der Ulft of drawings by de Bisschop are known, which suggests that the former may have had access to his studio. An album of forty-three landscape drawings by both Jacob van der Ulft and Jan de Bisschop, mostly views in or around Rome, is in the collection of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth. Another album of Roman views by Van der Ulft is in the Fondation Custodia in Paris. An especially refined example of Van der Ulft’s draughtsmanship, this highly finished drawing – prominently signed and dated in full by the artist – was almost certainly intended as an autonomous work of art for sale. As Michiel Plomp has noted, ‘Jacob van der Ulft produced many drawings and paintings of festive processions in imaginary ancient cities.’2 A particular comparison may be made with a number of other drawings similarly crowded with figures, including a large drawing of Anthony and Cleopatra in the Louvre3 and a Procession in an Imaginary Classical City in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem4, as well as a drawing of A Roman Street with Figures in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin5 and a Flagellation in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York6. Also similar, although somewhat less finished, is a drawing of an Italianate town with a church alongside a round temple or mosque, signed and dated 1666, in the Louvre7.
13 Attributed to ERASMUS QUELLINUS THE YOUNGER Antwerp 1607-1678 Antwerp A Trophy of Armour on a Tree Branch Black chalk and grey wash, heightened with white, on blue paper. 389 x 285 mm. (15 1/4 x 11 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: An unidentified collector’s mark Hugo (Lugt 4609), with associated number No61 inscribed in black ink, stamped on the verso; Galerie Paul Prouté, Paris in c.1976; Paul Mathias Polakovits, New York and Paris (Lugt 3561), by 1984; Thence by descent. LITERATURE: Michael Jaffé, ‘Jordaens Drawings. By R. A. d’Hulst. Jacob Jordaens. By R. A. d’Hulst.’ [book reviews], The Burlington Magazine, December 1984, p.784, note 3, fig.56 (as Jacob Jordaens). The son of a Flemish sculptor of the same name, Erasmus Quellinus the Younger was a pupil and assistant of Peter Paul Rubens. He was one of Rubens’ closest collaborators throughout the second half of the 1630s, working with the master in the last years of his life. Quellinus assisted Rubens on the decorations for the entry of the new governor Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp in 1635 and on a series of paintings for the hunting lodge of the Torre de la Parada near Madrid, executed between 1636 and 1638. Quellinus also provided title pages and book illustrations for the Plantin-Moretus print workshop and publishers in Antwerp, working under Rubens’ supervision but in his own style. He continued to work as a draughtsman and designer for the Plantin-Moretus firm after the death of Rubens in 1640, and was also appointed the official painter of the city of Antwerp, with responsibility for all civic decorative schemes over the next quarter of a century. Quellinus enjoyed a reputation as one of the leading ecclesiastical and history painters in Flanders. Among his largest works are two paintings commissioned by Jesuits, an Immaculate Conception for the church of Saint-Michael in Louvain and an altarpiece of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus now in the cathedral of Lima in Peru. In 1656 Quellinus and his younger brother Artus, a sculptor, were invited to Amsterdam to contribute to the decoration of the new City Hall. Apart from Rubens, Quellinus painted easel pictures in collaboration with such artists as Pieter Boel, Daniel Seghers, Jan Fyt, Joris van Son and Jan Pieter Brueghel. Extant drawings by Erasmus Quellinus the Younger – several of which are signed although none are dated – include studies for paintings and altarpieces, as well as designs for frontispieces, book illustrations and engravings. While chalk drawings by Quellinus are relatively rare, the present sheet may be likened to two drawings in black chalk on blue paper by or attributed to the artist: a study of The Madonna and Child in the Harvard Art Museums1 and a Ceiling Design with Putti which recently appeared at auction2. Similar military trophies are found in a very large signed drawing by Quellinus of a design for a triumphal arch, datable to c.1657 (fig.1), in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg3, while comparable trophies are also found atop a colonnade in the background of a small panel painting of Cybele by Quellinus, signed and dated 1663 (fig.2), in a Belgian private collection4.
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14 GODFRIED MAES Antwerp 1649-1700 Antwerp Phaeton Before His Father Apollo Pen and brown ink and brown and gray wash, with framing lines in brown ink. 177 x 235 mm. (7 x 9 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Part of a series of eighty-three drawings of scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses with provenance as follows: The artist’s widow, Josina Baeckelandt, Antwerp; Sold by her, sometime before 1717, for 800 florins to Jacob de Wit, Amsterdam; His posthumous sale, Amsterdam, de Leth, 10 March 1755 onwards, in Kunstboek U (‘Waarïn de Herscheppingen van Ovidius, in Drieëntagtig uitvoerige Teekeningen, door G. Maas. Welke in één koop verkocht zullen worden.’, bt. Cronenburgh); B. Cronenburgh, Amsterdam; His posthumous sale, Amsterdam, de Leth, 22-25 March 1762, portfolio A, no.1 (‘Drie-en-tachentig Teekeningen uit de Ovidius, alle zeer uitvoerig met Oost-Indische Inkt geteekend door G. Maas, en een weinigje geretoucheerd door J. de Wit.’); The drawings thereafter divided; Possibly Graaf van Neale, Amsterdam(?); Possibly his posthumous sale, Amsterdam, de Winter Zweertz, 28 March 1774 onwards, Portfolio 1, lot 542; Anonymous sale, Amsterdam, Mak van Waay, 15 January 1974, part of lot 1273 (‘Dertig tekeningen met voorstellingen van mythologische scenes o.a. betrekking hebbend op Ovidius’ Metamorfosen’, bt. Dreesmann); Anton C.R. Dreesmann, Amsterdam; His posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 11 April 2002, part of lot 666; Thomas Williams Fine Art Ltd., London, in 2003; Private collection. LITERATURE: J. van Tatenhove, ‘Tekeningen door Jacob de Wit voor de Ovidius van Picart’, Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 1985: Achttiende-Eeuwse Kunst in de Nederlanden, 1987, p.233, note 40; Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 2009, p.97 and p.158, no.133, illustrated p.132. EXHIBITED: Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.133. Still relatively little-known today, the Flemish painter, draughtsman and printmaker Godfried Maes studied in his native Antwerp with his father and with the painter Pieter van Lint. He was admitted into the painter’s guild in Antwerp in 1672, becoming dean of the guild ten years later. Maes spent his entire career in Antwerp, receiving commissions for numerous altarpieces and history paintings for churches and collectors in Antwerp, Brussels and Liège. Much of his work is on a grand scale, typified by a large altarpiece of The Martyrdom of Saint George, painted in 1684 for the Antwerp church of St. Joris, and four paintings of the Evangelists for the Onze-Lieve-Vrouw church in Vilvoorde. Indeed, Maes may be regarded as one the last of the Flemish Baroque artists working in the established tradition of Rubens. Among his important patrons was Eugen Alexander Franz, Prince of Thurn and Taxis, for whose palace in Brussels he painted an allegorical ceiling glorifying the Thurn and Taxis family. Maes worked as a designer of tapestry cartoons, often in collaboration with the tapestry workshop of Urbanus Leyniers in Brussels, and also produced book illustrations and a number of etchings. One of his final major projects was the ceiling decoration of the Palace of Coudenberg in Brussels, on which he worked between 1697 and 1700. A gifted draughtsman, Maes produced numerous drawings, both as preparatory studies for paintings and as finished, independent works1. Arguably the most significant example of the latter group are a series of eighty-three elaborate pen and wash drawings illustrating various episodes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of which the present sheet and the next three drawings form a part.
The story of Phaeton is taken from Greek mythology, and was popularized in the second book of the Roman poet Ovid’s epic narrative poem The Metamorphoses. Phaeton was the son of the Sun-god Apollo (also Phoebus or Helios in Greek mythology) and the Oceanid nymph Clymene. Told by his mother that he was the son of a god, Phaeton ascended to the palace of the Sun to ask Apollo if he was indeed his father. The Sun-god swore to grant him any wish to prove his divine birthright, and Phaeton requested the right to drive the chariot of the Sun for a day. Apollo tried to dissuade him, explaining that not even Jupiter, the king and most powerful of the gods, would dare to drive the chariot and control the fire-breathing horses who pulled it. But Phaeton was adamant, and Apollo was forced to accede to his wishes. In this, the first of this series of four drawings by Maes, Phaeton kneels before Apollo and makes his request. As Ovid describes the scene: ‘As soon as Clymene’s son had climbed the steep path there, and entered the house of this parent of whose relationship to him he was uncertain, he immediately made his way into his father’s presence, but stopped some way off, unable to bear his light too close. Wearing a purple robe, Phoebus sat on a throne shining with bright emeralds. To right and left stood the Day, Month, and Year, the Century and the equally spaced Hours. Young Spring stood there circled with a crown of flowers, naked Summer wore a garland of ears of corn, Autumn was stained by the trodden grapes, and icy Winter had white, bristling hair. The Sun, seated in the middle of them, looked at the boy, who was fearful of the strangeness of it all, with eyes that see everything, and said ‘What reason brings you here?...Phaethon replied ‘Universal light of the great world, Phoebus, father, if you let me use that name…give me proof father, so they will believe I am your true offspring, and take away this uncertainty from my mind!’ He spoke, and his father removed the crown of glittering rays from his head and ordered him to come nearer. Embracing him, he said ‘It is not to be denied you are worthy to be mine, and Clymene has told you the truth of your birth. So that you can banish doubt, ask for any favour, so that I can grant it to you. May the Stygian lake, that my eyes have never seen, by which the gods swear, witness my promise.’ Hardly had he settled back properly in his seat when the boy asked for his father’s chariot and the right to control his wing-footed horses for a day. His father regretted his oath. Three times, and then a fourth, shaking his bright head, he said ‘Your words show mine were rash; if only it were right to retract my promise! I confess my boy I would only refuse you this one thing. It is right to dissuade you. What you want is unsafe. Phaethon you ask too great a favour, and one that is unfitting for your strength and boyish years. Your fate is mortal: it is not mortal what you ask. Unknowingly you aspire to more than the gods can share…no one except myself has the power to occupy the chariot of fire. Even the lord of mighty Olympus, who hurls terrifying lightning-bolts from his right hand, cannot drive this team, and who is greater than Jupiter?... You will not easily rule those proud horses, breathing out through mouth and nostrils the fires burning in their chests. They scarcely tolerate my control when their fierce spirits are hot, and their necks resist the reins. Beware my boy, that I am not the source of a gift fatal to you, while something can still be done to set right your request!’… Finally, look around you, at the riches the world holds, and ask for anything from all of the good things in earth, sea, and sky. I can refuse you nothing. Only this one thing I take exception to, which would truly be a punishment and not an honour…Whatever you ask will be given, I have sworn it by the Stygian streams, but make a wiser choice!’ The warning ended, but Phaethon still rejected his words, and pressed his purpose, blazing with desire to drive the chariot.’
15 GODFRIED MAES Antwerp 1649-1700 Antwerp Phaeton in the Chariot of the Sun God Pen and brown ink and brown and gray wash, with framing lines in brown ink. 177 x 232 mm. (7 x 9 1/8 in.) PROVENANCE: As No.14. LITERATURE: J. van Tatenhove, ‘Tekeningen door Jacob de Wit voor de Ovidius van Picart’, Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 1985: Achttiende-Eeuwse Kunst in de Nederlanden, 1987, p.233, note 40; ‘Drawings in London, 5-11th July 2003’, The Burlington Magazine, June 2003, unpaginated, illustrated; Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 2009, p.97 and p.158, no.134, illustrated p.132. EXHIBITED: Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.134. The second drawing from the series depicts Phaeton in the chariot of the Sun. The horses, feeling the chariot lighter than usual, go out of control, and the frightened youth drops the reins. As Ovid writes, ‘the team of four run wild and leave the beaten track, no longer running in their pre-ordained course. He was terrified, unable to handle the reins entrusted to him, not knowing where the track was, nor, if he had known, how to control the team… When the unlucky Phaethon looked down from the heights of the sky at the earth far, far below he grew pale and his knees quaked with sudden fear, and his eyes were robbed of shadow by the excess light. Now he would rather he had never touched his father’s horses, and regrets knowing his true parentage and possessing what he asked for…robbed of his wits by chilling horror, he dropped the reins. When the horses feel the reins lying across their backs, after he has thrown them down, they veer off course and run unchecked through unknown regions of the air. Wherever their momentum takes them there they run, lawlessly, striking against the fixed stars in deep space and hurrying the chariot along remote tracks. Now they climb to the heights of heaven, now rush headlong down its precipitous slope, sweeping a course nearer to the earth.’
16 GODFRIED MAES Antwerp 1649-1700 Antwerp The Fall of Phaeton Pen and brown ink and brown and gray wash, with framing lines in brown ink. 180 x 236 mm. (7 1/8 x 9 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: As No.14. LITERATURE: J. van Tatenhove, ‘Tekeningen door Jacob de Wit voor de Ovidius van Picart’, Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 1985: Achttiende-Eeuwse Kunst in de Nederlanden, 1987, p.233, note 40; Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 2009, p.97 and p.158, no.135, illustrated p.133. EXHIBITED: Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.135. The fiery chariot of the Sun plunges to Earth, drying up the seas and rivers, burning the mountains, scorching the ground, and turning much of Africa into a desert: ‘Then, truly, Phaethon sees the whole earth on fire. He cannot bear the violent heat, and he breathes the air as if from a deep furnace. He feels his chariot glowing white. He can no longer stand the ash and sparks flung out, and is enveloped in dense, hot smoke. He does not know where he is, or where he is going, swept along by the will of the winged horses.’ As her surface burns, Earth, in her agony, cries out to Jupiter, who is forced to intervene: ‘the all-powerful father of the gods climbs to the highest summit of heaven, from where he spreads his clouds over the wide earth, from where he moves the thunder and hurls his quivering lightning bolts, calling on the gods, especially on him who had handed over the sun chariot, to witness that, unless he himself helps, the whole world will be overtaken by a ruinous fate…He thundered, and balancing a lightning bolt in his right hand threw it from eye-level at the charioteer, removing him, at the same moment, from the chariot and from life, extinguishing fire with fierce fire. Thrown into confusion the horses, lurching in different directions, wrench their necks from the yoke and throw off the broken harness. Here the reins lie, there the axle torn from the pole, there the spokes of shattered wheels, and the fragments of the wrecked chariot are flung far and wide. But Phaethon, flames ravaging his glowing hair, is hurled headlong, leaving a long trail in the air, as sometimes a star does in the clear sky, appearing to fall although it does not fall. Far from his own country, in a distant part of the world, the river god Eridanus takes him from the air, and bathes his smoke-blackened face. There the Italian nymphs consign his body, still smoking from that triple-forked flame, to the earth, and they also carve a verse in the rock: HERE PHAETHON LIES WHO THE SUN’S JOURNEY MADE, DARED ALL THOUGH HE BY WEAKNESS WAS BETRAYED.’
17 GODFRIED MAES Antwerp 1649-1700 Antwerp The Sisters of Phaeton Transformed into Poplars Pen and brown ink and brown and gray wash, with framing lines in brown ink. 178 x 235 mm. (7 x 9 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: As No.14. LITERATURE: J. van Tatenhove, ‘Tekeningen door Jacob de Wit voor de Ovidius van Picart’, Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 1985: Achttiende-Eeuwse Kunst in de Nederlanden, 1987, p.225 and p.233, note 40; The Burlington Magazine, March 2003, unpaginated [advertisement]; Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 2009, p.97 and p.158, no.136, illustrated p.133; Victoria Sancho Lobis, Rubens, Rembrandt and Drawing in the Golden Age, exhibition catalogue, Chicago, 2019-2020, p.283, note 6. EXHIBITED: Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.136. This drawing, the last in the series, depicts Phaeton’s seven sisters, the Heliads, mourning the death of their brother, and being transformed into poplar trees: ‘Clymene, having uttered whatever can be uttered at such misfortune, grieving and frantic and tearing her breast, wandered over the whole earth first looking for her son’s limbs, and then failing that his bones. She found his bones already buried however, beside the riverbank in a foreign country. Falling to the ground she bathed with tears the name she could read on the cold stone and warmed it against her naked breast. The Heliads, her daughters and the Sun’s, cry no less, and offer their empty tribute of tears to the dead, and, beating their breasts with their hands, they call for their brother night and day, and lie down on his tomb, though he cannot hear their pitiful sighs. Four times the moon had joined her crescent horns to form her bright disc. They by habit, since use creates habit, devoted themselves to mourning. Then Phaethüsa, the eldest sister, when she tried to throw herself to the ground, complained that her ankles had stiffened, and when radiant Lampetia tried to come near her she was suddenly rooted to the spot. A third sister attempting to tear at her hair pulled out leaves. One cried out in pain that her legs were sheathed in wood, another that her arms had become long branches. While they wondered at this, bark closed round their thighs and by degrees over their waists, breasts, shoulders, and hands, and all that was left free were their mouths calling for their mother. What can their mother do but go here and there as the impulse takes her, pressing her lips to theirs where she can? It is no good. She tries to pull the bark from their bodies and break off new branches with her hands, but drops of blood are left behind like wounds. ‘Stop, mother, please’ cries out whichever one she hurts, ‘Please stop: It is my body in the tree you are tearing. Now, farewell.’ and the bark closed over her with her last words. Their tears still flow, and hardened by the sun, fall as amber from the virgin branches, to be taken by the bright river and sent onwards to adorn Roman brides.’ Perhaps intended as book illustrations or designs for prints, these highly refined drawings by Maes were, however, never reproduced or published in his lifetime. In 1717 the artist’s widow sold all the drawings to the artist Jacob de Wit, who later used some of them as models for his illustrations, engraved under the supervision of Bernard Picart, for a 1732 translation of The Metamorphoses into Dutch, French and English editions. (One of the Maes drawings that de Wit copied and adapted was the present sheet, which appears in reverse in the engraved illustration in the book.) The eighty-three original drawings by Maes remained together until 1762, when they were dispersed at auction in Amsterdam.
18 FRANCESCO MONTI Bologna 1683-1768 Brescia Study of a Male Nude Holding a Pole Black chalk and charcoal, with stumping. Inscribed G. B. Piazzetta in pencil on the verso. 420 x 293 mm. (16 1/2 x 11 1/2 in.) PROVENANCE: Richard von Kühlmann, Ohlstadt1; Herbert List, Munich (Lugt 4063), his drystamp at the lower right2; Acquired in 1972 with the rest of List’s collection of drawings by Ursula and Adolf Ratjen, Vaduz, Liechtenstein, for Wolfgang Ratjen, Munich; The Stiftung Ratjen, Vaduz, Liechtenstein; Flavia Ormond, London, in 1996; Private collection. LITERATURE: Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, and elsewhere, Zeichnungen alter Meister aus Deutschem Privatbesitz, exhibition catalogue, 1965-1966, p.15, no.37, illustrated fig.111 (as Giovanni Battista Piazzetta); Mary Cazort Taylor, ‘Some Drawings by Francesco Monti and the Soft Chalk Style’, Master Drawings, Summer 1973, p.162; Marzia Faietti and Alessandro Zacchi, ed., Figure: Disegni dal Cinquecento all’ Ottocento nella Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, 1998, p.274, under no.92, illustrated (entry by Nancy Ward Neilson); Clifford S. Ackley, ‘Master drawings from the collection of Horace Wood Brock’, The Magazine Antiques, February 2009, p.56, fig.8; Horace Wood Brock, ‘The Truth about Beauty’, in Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 2009, p.13; Clifford S. Ackley, ‘The Intuitive Eye: Drawings and Paintings from the Collection of Horace Wood Brock’, in Brock, Levy and Ackley, ibid., p.90; Elena Rossoni, ‘Studi di nudi virili di Francesco Monti alla Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna’, Aperto: Bolletino del Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe della Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, No.3, June 2016, p.36, fig.15. EXHIBITED: Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie Hamburg, Kunsthalle and Bremen, Kunsthalle, Zeichnungen alter Meister aus Deutschem Privatbesitz, 1965-1966, no.37 (as Piazzetta); New York, Flavia Ormond Fine Arts at Adelson Galleries, Italian Old Master Drawings 1500-1850, 1996, no.13; Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Classic Taste: Drawings and Decorative Arts from the Collection of Horace Brock, 2000; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.2. Francesco Monti studied in Modena with Sigismondo Caula before returning in 1693 to his native Bologna, where he completed his training in the studio of Giovan Gioseffo Dal Sole. The Venetian qualities inherited from Caula remained evident in his work throughout his long and successful career. Among his important early works is the large Pentecost, dated 1713, painted for the church of San Prospero in Reggio Emilia. Monti’s reputation flourished in the 1720s, when he received a number of significant commissions for history paintings and was elected to a term as principe of the Accademia Clementina in Bologna. As Dwight Miller has written, ‘Monti evolved a distinctive personal idiom, characterized by graceful figures reminiscent of the style of Parmigianino but perhaps more directly inspired by the more extravagant late Mannerist idiom of such painters as Bartholomeus Spranger and Josef Heintz I of the court of Rudolf II at Prague...Monti’s art contributed to a neo-Mannerist strain in 18th century Emilian painting; he was perhaps its most sophisticated exponent.’3 Together with artists such as Donato Creti, Sebastiano and Marco Ricci, Giambattista Pittoni, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta and others, Monti contributed to a series of large allegorical paintings of imaginary tombs commemorating prominent British noblemen, commissioned by the Irish entrepeneur Owen McSwiny in the late 1720s and 1730s from the foremost Venetian and Bolognese painters of the day. Monti also executed several paintings for churches in Bologna and the surrounding region, among them a Death of Saint Peter Martyr for San Domenico in Modena, completed in 1732. Four years later he moved to Brescia to work on the decorations, now lost, of the Palazzo Martinengo. The success of this
project led to further commissions, and Monti eventually established a flourishing practice in Brescia. The later years of his career were spent working mainly in Lombardy – in Cremona and Bergamo, as well as Brescia – on a number of large-scale fresco commissions. Among his most significant late works is the extensive decoration of the Brescian church of Santa Maria della Pace. Monti was a prolific and gifted draughtsman, producing figure studies in black chalk, of which the present sheet is a particularly fine example, as well as compositional drawings in red chalk. As has been noted of the artist, ‘Monti’s drawing style is highly individualistic: it is based on the firm Bolognese academic tradition, but the treatment of the chalk medium, which he preferred, is handled with a particular deftness...His lightness of touch, combined with the “Neo-Mannerist” predilection for attenuated figures, produce a combination of elegance and spontaneity rare in the Bolognese tradition.’4 The present sheet may be closely compared with a group of seven academic drawings by Monti, all of similar dimensions and technique, in the collection of the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna5. Characteristic of these drawings are the sophisticated, if somewhat artificial, poses and a faintly sketched landscape background (which in the case of the present sheet seems to be of an architectural nature), as well as the use of various props such as helmets, turbans, knives or staffs. Furthermore, the same model also appears to have posed for several of the drawings of this group. Apart from the seven drawings in Bologna, a handful of comparable male academies in black chalk by Monti are known, including a study of a Draped Male Nude, Wearing a Helmet and Holding a Dagger, formerly in the Horvitz collection6, and a Standing Male Nude in a Hat Holding a Staff, which appeared at auction in 19997. It has been suggested that these drawings, which are all of a similar size, may have once formed part of a large sketchbook. This distinctive group of drawings of male nudes may be dated to Monti’s Bolognese period, when he was closely associated with the Accademia Clementina in the city, and before his departure for Brescia in 1736. As Mimi Cazort has written, ‘Characteristic of the style which Monti used for these drawings, here defined in terms of the usage of the medium and called the “soft chalk style”, are the smooth blending of the chalk from dark into light areas, with secondary lighting at the edges of the darkest shadow areas and little or no visible hatching; the irregularly accented but complete chalk contour around each figure; and, a particular idiosyncrasy of Monti’s, the use of vertically aligned, streaky modeling with precise attention to details of musculature.’8 The handling of black chalk in drawings such as this suggest that Monti must have seen and studied the male nude academies of his Venetian contemporary Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682-1754). Indeed many of these drawings, including the present sheet, were at one time attributed to the latter artist. As Cazort has pointed out, ‘It is safe to assume that Monti was well acquainted with Piazzetta’s drawings not only because of the Venetian artist’s prestige but because of their mutual involvement during the 1720’s in the last of the Bolognese academies, the Accademia Clementina: Piazzetta was made an honorary member of the Accademia in 1725 and Monti was elected its Principe for the years 1726-27. Since a chief requisite for the honors of the Academy was facility in draughtsmanship, academic drawings in particular, it is likely that Monti knew Piazzetta’s drawings in this mode and emulated them...Piazzetta’s attitude toward the figure and his handling of the chalk was basically a Bolognese rather than a Venetian one which can be traced in a straight line back to the Carracci and forward to the Gandolfi. It may have been precisely this “Bolognese” quality which Monti found so congenial because of his own training in the same tradition.’9
19 FRANÇOIS BOUCHER Paris 1703-1770 Paris Study of a Male Nude Holding a Hammer Red chalk on light brown paper. 191 x 184 mm. (7 1/ x 7 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Private collection, Paris, in 1991; Gisèle Weinberger, Paris; Thomas Le Claire, Hamburg, in 1994; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 2 July 1996, lot 242 (bt. Berger); Bernadette and William M. B. Berger, Denver, Colorado; The Berger Collection Educational Trust, until 2017. LITERATURE: Possibly Alexandre Ananoff and Daniel Wildenstein, L’opera completa di François Boucher, Milan, 1980, p.111, under no.313; The Burlington Magazine, January 1994, [advertisement]; New York, Sotheby’s, The Line of Beauty: Drawings from the Collection of Howard and Saretta Barnet, 31 January 2018, p.36, under lot 7. EXHIBITED: New York, Thomas Le Claire Kunsthandel at W. M. Brady & Co., Master Drawings 15001900, 1994, no.29. François Boucher was a pupil of the painter François Lemoyne and the engraver Jean-François Cars. After winning the Prix de Rome in 1723, he was unable to take up the scholarship in Italy due to a lack of space at the Académie de France in Rome, and was obliged to remain in Paris. His first significant project was producing numerous engravings after drawings by Antoine Watteau for Jean de Jullienne’s Figures de differents caractères. The payment he received for this work allowed the artist to travel to Rome at his own expense; he arrived in Italy in 1728, lodging at the Académie de France and returned to Paris around 1731. The favourite painter of Louis XV’s mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour, Boucher painted decorations for Versailles, Fontainebleau and Marly, as well as several private homes in Paris. He also painted numerous easel pictures – pastoral landscapes, religious and mythological subjects, genre scenes, chinoiseries and portraits – and designed tapestry cartoons for the Gobelins tapestry manufactory, where he succeeded Jean-Baptiste Oudry as surinspector. In 1765 he was also named premier peintre du roi, or First Painter to the King. As a modern writer has noted, ‘Boucher is the artist par excellence of the French Rococo, in which a perceptive wit, a sense of elegance and a conscious feeling for style were combined with a fluent imagination; this was art designed for a sophisticated audience, for an urban and country society.’1 A gifted draughtsman, Boucher claimed to have produced ten thousand drawings over a career of some fifty years. He was, in fact, perhaps the most prolific French draughtsman of the eighteenth century. As has been noted of Boucher, ‘Every medium served him: pen, pencil, watercolor, chalk, especially his favorite trois crayons, bistre wash, india ink, grisaille, and often a combination of several of these. No subject was too lofty or too humble to engage his attention. Whether he drew from life or from his fertile imagination…Boucher’s masterly touch is always present, always unmistakeable.’2 The artist’s drawn oeuvre includes pastoral scenes, religious, historical and mythological subjects, nudes, book illustrations, chinoiseries, landscapes, genre scenes, studies of children and heads, as well as designs for tapestries, porcelain and fountains. Pierre Rosenberg has succinctly noted that ‘Boucher’s love of drawing never waned with time and success. Admittedly, drawing was kept in its proper place, as a vital link between the conception or the idea of a work or composition, and its realization, its metamorphosis into a painting…To quote Mariette, Boucher “was a born painter”, but he placed great emphasis on drawing throughout his entire career.’3 Although most of his drawings were preparatory studies for his paintings, Boucher also produced finished drawings as
independent works, often adapting and elaborating a head or figure from one of his paintings. While his preference was for black, red, and (particularly in his later years) brown chalk, he also made highly finished drawings in pastel and, at times, drew on coloured paper. His drawings were greatly admired by his contemporaries, and were reproduced by engravers such as Gilles Demarteau, Gabriel Huquier or Louis-Marin Bonnet. Indeed, Boucher’s popularity as a draughtsman owes much to the fact that many of his drawings were reproduced and widely distributed as engravings. The present sheet would appear to be a study, in reverse, for a figure of a blacksmith in the left background of Boucher’s oval painting of Venus at the Forge of Vulcan (fig.1) in the Louvre4, dated 1747 and exhibited at the Salon of that year. The painting is noted in a mémoire by Boucher as having been commissioned, for the sum of 800 livres, by Charles François Paul Le Normant de Tournehem, Directeur général des bâtiments du roi, for the King’s bedchamber at the Château de Marly. It has been suggested, however, that the Venus at the Forge of Vulcan and a pendant painting of Venus Presenting Aeneas to the Gods (or The Apotheosis of Aeneas), now in the Musée-Promenade de Marly-le-Roi in Louveciennes5, may have initially been commissioned in 1746 for the redecorated apartments of the soon to be married Dauphin at Versailles, before the intended destination of the works was changed to Marly. The painting of Venus at the Forge of Vulcan is described in the mémoire as ‘4 pieds de long sur 3 et demi de haute représente Vénus qui prie Vulcain de forger des arms pour Enée; ce tableau est compose de huit figures’6, and in the 1747 Salon livret as ‘Un Tableau ovale, representant les Forges de Vulcain. Ce tableau est destine pour la Chambre à coucher du Roy à Marly’7. Boucher received the final payment for both works in February 1748. Not long thereafter the composition was adapted and enlarged by the artist in a design for a tapestry to be woven at the Beauvais tapestry works8. Boucher presumably drew the present sheet before he had determined the definitive composition of the painting. Although the figure is reversed in the final painting, and the artist may therefore have used a counterproof of this drawing to reorient the figure, the position of the hands in the drawing is also close to that of the right-hand forger in the same painting. The present sheet may also have been used for a similar figure in the Beauvais tapestry noted above.
1
20 FRANÇOIS BOUCHER Paris 1703-1770 Paris Study of a Male Nude Holding a Hammer Above his Head Red chalk, with touches of white heightening, with framing lines in brown ink, on buff paper, backed. 310 x 189 mm. (12 1/4 x 7 3/8 in.) PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 29 June 1987, lot 3 (bt. Hazlitt); Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London, in 1988; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 8 January 1991, lot 170; Librairie Michel Descours, Lyon, in 1996; Saretta Barnet, New York. LITERATURE: Possibly Alexandre Ananoff and Daniel Wildenstein, L’opera completa di François Boucher, Milan, 1980, p.111, under no.313; New York, Thomas Le Claire Kunsthandel at W. M. Brady & Co., Catalogue IX: Master Drawings 1500-1900, exhibition catalogue, 1994, under no.29; London, Christie’s, Old Master Drawings, including 17th Century Italian Drawings from the Ferretti Di Castelferreto Collection, 2 July 1996, p.270, under lot 242. EXHIBITED: London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, European Drawings: Recent Acquisitions, 1988, no.63. As Margaret Morgan Grasselli has noted, ‘Probably because of his marked preference for women as models and subjects, Boucher made far fewer studies of male nudes. Not surprisingly, these are handled in a manner that reflects an entirely different attitude towards the models and underlines their very real physical dissimilarities from women. Instead of the long, smooth, sensuously curving contours that emphasize soft, seductive female forms, Boucher…uses sharper, more forceful strokes and handles the surfaces in a way that brings out the hard, muscular conformation of the male body. He also gives his male figures more physically powerful attitudes, sometimes making them almost burst from the page, completely unlike the graceful, often languorous and perfectly contained poses of his nymphs and goddesses.’1 The majority of Boucher’s extant drawings of male nudes are academic studies of posed life models in red (or occasionally black) chalk, which he produced for students to copy, in his role as a professor at the Académie Royale from 1735 onwards. Several of these drawn académies were later engraved and published, most famously in the Livre d’Académies dessinés d’Après le naturel par François Boucher Peintre du Roy, published between c.1750 and 1754. A number of drawings of male nudes by Boucher, however, were not done as teaching exercises but as preparatory studies for paintings, and both the present sheet and the previous drawing are fine examples of this. As Alastair Laing has noted of these two drawings, ‘Each of the figures is a genuine study for a painting, rather than a derivative from a painting, done for collectors.’2 Both drawings may be related to an important painting by the artist; the Venus at the Forge of Vulcan (fig.1), dated 1747, in the Louvre3. A monochrome oil sketch for the composition is also in the Louvre4, while a drawing for a different forger in the painting, in black chalk, is in the Musée Sainte-Croix in Poitiers5. A study for the Cupid with arrows and a dove may have been made after the figure in the painting, as a drawing for a collector, rather than as a preparatory study for it6. No other preparatory drawings related to the painting of Venus at the Forge of Vulcan are known7. 1 (detail of No.19 fig.1)
The standing figure in the present sheet was later reused in a more ambitious composition of the subject of Venus at the Forge of Vulcan, designed by Boucher for a tapestry woven at Beauvais between 1754 and 17568, for which a grisaille sketch (fig.2) is in the Louvre9. As Laing has noted, the tapestry also includes a figure of a forger holding a hammer, similar to that in the previous drawing (No.19), and in the same direction10. Boucher was particularly fond of the subject of Venus at the Forge of Vulcan, and treated it several times in his career, in paintings, drawings and tapestry cartoons. Taken from Virgil’s epic Aeneid, the theme of the goddess visiting Vulcan’s forge on Mount Etna to ask her estranged husband to provide arms for her illegitimate mortal son Aeneas, to which he agrees only after her seduction of him, had great appeal for the artist, and undoubtedly for his patrons as well. As Edith Standen has noted of the theme, ‘One can only speculate why this particular mythological subject was so popular with Boucher’s patrons, including Louis XV. Perhaps the reason was that it provided such a piquant contrast between the soft whiteness of Venus, with her nymphs, cupids, and doves, and the masculinity of Vulcan and his fierce helpers at their noisy and dirty labors. Boucher, in fact, has been quoted as recommending the subject to a pupil whose noble patron had asked for a painting. He said it was “une tâche fort attrayante à remplir: le dessin d’une belle figure de femme environnée d’Amours, la silhouette d’un homme musculeux accompagnée de quelques cyclopes à l’arrière-plan.”’11 To judge by his distinctively rugged appearance, the model for both of these drawings seems to be Jean-François Deschamps, a popular model at the Académie whom Boucher favoured for drawings and paintings of the male nude from around 1740 onwards. Boucher’s contemporary, the writer Claude-Henri Watelet, in his posthumously published Dictionnaire des beaux-arts, noted that ‘sometimes Deschamps was the ever-youthful Mercury, sometimes the terrible Mars, sometimes Neptune, Pluto, Jupiter…There was nothing about him, including his head, that could not sometimes be recognised, and one was astonished to see his somewhat Bacchic face become that of a hero or a God.’12 Among stylistically comparable red chalk drawings of male nudes by Boucher, also posed by Deschamps, are two studies in a Swiss private collection13. As Françoise Joulie has noted of such drawings as these by Boucher, intended not as academies but as studies for paintings, ‘They are perhaps some of the maître’s finest drawings, because his knowledge and mastery of anatomical drawing were internalized to give precedence to studies of posture in a composition.’14
2
21 HUBERT ROBERT Paris 1733-1808 Paris An Architectural Capriccio of the Roman Forum, with Figures by the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Foreground and the Arch of Titus Beyond Red chalk, with framing lines in brown ink, on paper laid down onto another sheet. 363 x 287 mm. (14 1/4 x 11 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Tajan], 12 April 1999, lot 150; Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 25 March 2015, lot 131. LITERATURE: Sarah Catala et al, Les Hubert Robert de Besançon, exhibition catalogue, Besançon, 2013-2014, p.97, under no.59. Succinctly described by the director of the French Academy in Rome, Charles-Joseph Natoire, as a young man ‘who has a penchant for painting architecture’ (‘qui a du goût pour peindre l’architecture’), Hubert Robert spent a total of eleven years in Italy, between 1754 and 1765. There he fell under the particular influence of Giovanni Paolo Panini, the leading Italian painter of architectural views and capricci, who taught perspective at the Académie de France. In Rome Robert befriended Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and with him made sketching tours of the countryside around Rome. Both artists were also engaged by the Abbé de Saint-Non to provide landscape illustrations for his projected Voyage pittoresque, ou description historique des royaumes de Naples, et de Sicile, eventually published between 1781 and 1786. In 1766, the year after his return to Paris, Robert was admitted into the Académie Royale as a ‘peintre des ruines’, rather unusually being both reçu and agrée in the same year. He made his debut at the Salon in 1767, exhibiting picturesque landscapes and capricci, and soon had developed such a reputation for paintings of real and imagined Roman views, often incorporating ancient ruins, that he was given the sobriquet ‘Robert des Ruines’. He continued to exhibit at the Salons until 1798. A versatile artist, Robert often repeated and developed favourite views or compositions in different formats, including chalk drawings, finished watercolours, small cabinet pictures and large-scale wall paintings. Despite being imprisoned during the Revolution, he remained a significant figure in the artistic scene in Paris until the end of the century. Hubert Robert was a prolific and gifted draughtsman. As Margaret Morgan Grasselli has recently written of the artist, ‘Over the course of his long career, he turned out thousands of works on paper, ranging from the slightest chalk sketches to fully completed sanguines, from swift pen and ink jottings to highly resolved watercolors. These works show Robert at his most versatile, spontaneous, and experimental, and constitute a significant part of his entire oeuvre, complementing and augmenting what he achieved in his paintings… Drawing was, in fact, the soul of Robert’s art, and he remained a dedicated draftsman until the end of his life.’1 The 18th century collector and connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette noted of Robert’s drawings that they were very popular and highly sought-after (‘chacun lui en demande’), and the artist often produced chalk drawings and watercolours as independent works of art for sale. The present sheet may likely be dated to c.1765-1770, during Robert’s last months in Italy or the early years of his return to France. A counterproof of this drawing is in the collection of the Bibliothèque Municipale in Besançon2. Robert often made counterproofs of his chalk drawings; this was an essential task, since by making a counterproof, any excess chalk dust, which otherwise might easily smear, would be removed from the original drawing. Some thirty years after he drew the present sheet, Robert returned to the counterproof of this drawing now in Besançon, from which he took the three columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux for his capriccio painting of Roman Ruins with the Colosseum, signed and dated 1798 and today in the Louvre3.
22 BALTHASAR ANTON DUNKER Saal 1746-1807 Bern Landscape with a Peasant Family by a Path Pen and black ink and watercolour, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in two shades of brown ink and yellow wash. Laid down on an old mount. Signed and dated Dessiné par B: A: Dunker 1775 in brown ink near the lower right corner. 284 x 219 mm. (11 1/8 x 8 5/8 in.) [image] 290 x 223 mm. (11 3/8 x 8 3/4 in.) [sheet] 299 x 233 mm. (11 3/4 x 9 1/8 in.) [including mount] The German painter, watercolourist and etcher Balthasar Anton Dunker (sometimes spelled Duncker) took drawing lessons from the landscape painter Jacob Phillipp Hackert in the early 1760s. In 1765 he settled in Paris, where he studied with Joseph-Marie Vien and Noël Hallé, and was also much influenced by Johann Georg Wille, the German printmaker resident in Paris, in whose circle he met such artists as Sigmund Freudenberger and Adrian Zingg. Dunker began his career as a reproductive etcher, receiving commissions from the print publisher Gabriel Huquier, and his contributions to the Receuil d’estampes gravées d’après les tableaux du cabinet de Monseigneur le duc de Choiseul, a compendium of etchings after paintings in the collection of the Duc de Choiseul, published in 1771, may be regarded as his first significant works. From 1773 onwards Dunker lived and worked in Bern, producing views of Swiss landscapes, as well as genre pictures, portraits and historical subjects. Nevertheless, Dunker is perhaps better-known today as a printmaker than as a painter or draughtsman. His etchings and engravings are characterized by imaginative compositions and a notable level of detail. He also produced vignettes and book illustrations for such works as Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris, published in 1787, and penned a number of satirical texts, often illustrated by himself and published anonymously between 1782 and 1785. An outspoken opponent of the French Revolution, Dunker published several anti-revolutionary essays between 1798 and 1800, and also drew some political caricatures. The artist died in relative poverty in Bern in 1807. Dunker’s virtuoso landscape drawings range from Rococo to Romantic in mood. He first began making independent landscape drawings while in Paris, alongside his work as an engraver, and was probably inspired by the sketching expeditions organized by Johann Georg Wille. It was not until he settled in Switzerland, however, that Dunker began to produce landscape watercolours consistently, often going on sketching trips with the Swiss artists Sigmund Freudenberger and Johann Ludwig Aberli. He worked mainly in watercolour but also in gouache, black and brown ink, and pencil, and his drawings of this Swiss period can be divided into two main types; topographically accurate views of the countryside around Bern and imaginary or ‘ideal’ landscapes, often enlivened with ruins and castles. The present sheet is dated 1775, not long after the artist began living and working in Bern. Finished, fully signed and dated watercolours such this were undoubtedly intended as autonomous works of art, to be sold to collectors. Indeed, many of Dunker’s finished watercolours of this period were sent to Wille in Paris to be offered for sale there, which may be why the artist elected to inscribe this work in French. Among stylistically comparable watercolours by Dunker is a Painter Seated Before a Waterfall, signed and dated 1779, in the collection of the Kunstmuseum in Bern1.
23 JEAN-ÉTIENNE LIOTARD Geneva 1702-1789 Geneva Portrait of a Seated Woman, in Profile to the Right Black and red chalk, heightened with white chalk, on white laid paper. The reverse of the figure partially silhouetted with blue and black chalk on the verso. 228 x 173 mm. (9 x 6 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Camille Groult, Paris (according to an inscription on the old backing board); By descent to his son, Jean Groult, Paris; Probably thence by descent to his son, Pierre Bordeaux-Groult, Paris. EXHIBITED: Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Exposition universelle de 1900. Exposition rétrospective de la ville de Paris, 1900 (according to a label on the old backing board)1. Born in the-then independent republic of Geneva and trained in the art of miniature painting on enamel, Jean-Étienne Liotard completed his artistic education in Paris, arriving there in 1723 and working as an independent artist by 1726. He soon rose to prominence as a portrait painter, and in fact became known almost exclusively for his masterful portraits in pastel. His successful career took him throughout Europe, and he worked in France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Romania, Austria, Germany, Holland and England. It was in particular his voyage to the Near East, made in 1739 in the company of his English patrons John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich and William Ponsonby, later 2nd Earl of Bessborough, which was to have a lasting influence on Liotard. The artist lived and worked in Constantinople for four years, receiving commissions mainly from Westerners living in the city, many of whom were portrayed in Turkish dress. In 1742 Liotard spent ten months in Moldavia before establishing himself in Vienna at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa. Liotard had returned to Europe with a large number of portrait and genre drawings of Western and Turkish subjects, as well as clothing and accessories. Indeed, the artist grew a long beard and dressed in Turkish clothing, styling himself ‘le peintre Turc’, for several years afterward. After a peripatetic career working in several European cities – Venice, Naples, Frankfurt, Lyon, Paris (where he spent eight years and is said to have earned around 30,000 livres annually), London, Amsterdam and The Hague – and obtaining numerous significant portrait commissions, Liotard settled in Geneva in 1757. The second half of his career, amounting to some thirty years, was spent in his native city. A wealthy and successful artist, he received numerous portrait commissions from prominent citizens of Geneva and visitors to the city. He also produced portraits of friends, family members and colleagues, as well as a number of still life compositions and self-portraits. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Liotard had no pupils and seems also not to have had a workshop or assistants. In 1781 he published a treatise on painting, and in addition dictated an autobiographical memoir to his eldest son, Jean-Etienne Liotard the Younger. The artist died in Geneva in 1789, at the age of 87. During a life and career that lasted for almost the entire length of the 18th century, Liotard produced a total of over five hundred works; mainly pastels, which number around three hundred, but also some thirty paintings and around 150 chalk drawings, as well as miniatures, enamels and a handful of prints. The finest collection of Liotard’s work is today held by the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva, while smaller but nevertheless choice groups of works are in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Louvre in Paris. It has been suggested that this intimate portrait drawing depicts an as-yet unidentified woman from Geneva. The drawing can be dated to the period after 1757, when Liotard and his new wife settled in the Swiss city. On a stylistic basis, the drawing may perhaps be placed more precisely in the late 1770s, by comparison with such works of this date as a profile portrait drawing of the artist’s daughter Marie-Thérèse Liotard of c.1779, today in the collection of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva2.
The present sheet is drawn in a combination of coloured chalks on a very thin, almost translucent sheet of white paper. The artist then traced the outlines from the recto onto the verso with slender lines of red and black chalk, before adding larger areas of tone in pale blue and black chalk. The thinness of the paper allows the areas of colouring on the verso to show through onto the recto, thereby creating a greater sense of depth and modelling in the features of the sitter. This precise and refined silhouetting of the figure on the verso of the sheet, creating a ‘negative’ image of the portrait image on the recto, is entirely characteristic of Liotard’s working practice during his time in Geneva in the late 1750s and 1760s. As Christian Rümelin has noted of the artist, ‘beginning in 1758, he repeatedly resorted to a method he had already used during his stay in Rome, treating the reverse of relatively thin paper in a technique known from miniature painting. Adding colors to the back of portions of a composition heightens the intensity of those on the front, owing to the slight transparency of the paper. He did not employ this technique systematically, but only in autonomous drawings.’3 Many of the artist’s later drawings adopted this novel technique of adding relief to a portrait by reinforcing the image on the verso, such as a profile portrait of Charles-Benjamin de Langes de Monmirail, Baron de Lubières, in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles4. As Alastair Laing has pointed out, ‘Liotard was a true draughtsman…[with a] relentless proclivity for experiment. One of the most fascinating instances of this is the device that he frequently used to obtain greater translucency and variety of colour in his drawings, without muddying their linear clarity, by washing a repeat image composed simply of taches of colour onto their versos.’5 According to an inscription on the former backing board, this drawing was once in the possession of the industrialist Camille Groult (1837-1908), whose impressive collection of 18th century French and English paintings, drawings, pastels and tapestries was kept in his hôtel particulier on the avenue Malakoff in Paris. The attribution of the present sheet to Jean-Étienne Liotard has been confirmed by both Marcel Roethlisberger and Renée Loche.
verso
24 DUTCH SCHOOL Late 18th Century A Trompe-l’Oeil of a Collage of Engraved Portraits of Dutch and Flemish Painters Pen and brown ink and grey wash, on two joined sheets of paper. The outlines of the composition silhouetted and the whole laid down onto a backing sheet. Each portrait numbered in brown ink. Said to be indistinctly inscribed verzameling van …g…af / … Be. mdd… (sc?)hulde on the verso, now laid down. 632 x 565 mm. (24 7/8 x 22 1/4 in.) at greatest dimensions. PROVENANCE: Jacques and Galila Hollander, Ohain, Belgium; Thence by descent until 2013; Their sale (‘Le cabinet de curiosités de Jacques et Galila Hollander’), Paris, Christie’s, 16 October 2013, lot 433 (as French School, 18th Century); Haboldt & Co., Paris and New York; Private collection. This large trompe-l’oeil drawing depicts more than 170 portraits of Dutch and Flemish painters active between the 15th and the 18th centuries. While the small engraved portraits, each numbered in brown ink, appear to have been distributed at random, pride of place is given to a portrait of Peter Paul Rubens, numbered 1 and placed at the centre of the sheet, within a crowned cartouche. The image is taken from the engraved portrait of Rubens1 in Arnold Houbraken’s biographical compendium De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen (The Great Theatre of Dutch Painters), published in three volumes between 1718 and 1721. The portrait of Rubens in Houbraken’s book is accompanied on the same page by portraits of the artists Hendrik van Balen and Roelandt Savery (fig.1), which also appear in the present sheet, as Nos. 9 and 10 respectively. While many of the images in this drawing are taken from Houbraken’s De Groote Schouburgh, others are derived from the artist portraits reproduced in Jean-Baptiste Descamps’ Vie des peintres flamands, allemands et hollandois, published between 1753 and 1764. Among the artists whose engraved portraits are depicted in the present sheet are Abraham Bloemaert, Gerard ter Borch, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Adam Elsheimer, Allaert van Everdingen, Govert Flinck, Hendrick Goltzius, Frans Hals, Hans Holbein, Jacob Jordaens, Philips Koninck, Johannes Lingelbach, Maria Sibylla Merian, Adriaen van Ostade, Rembrandt, Cornelis and Herman Saftleven, Frans Snyders, Lucas van Uden, Anthony Van Dyck and Jan Baptist Weenix. Trompe-l’oeil still life drawings of this type were popular in Holland in the 18th century, but were often unsigned. Indeed, some of the draughtsmen responsible for such imaginative compositions may have been amateur artists. For example, a similar large-scale trompe-l’oeil drawing of a mass of printed pages, signed and dated ‘N. de Wit 1740’, is in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm2. The artist of the Stockholm drawing has been tentatively identified as one Nicolaas de Wit, born in Amsterdam in 1710, who is not documented as a professional artist.
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25 JEAN-BAPTISTE GREUZE Tournus 1725-1805 Paris Studies of Three Hands Red chalk, with framing lines in brown ink, laid down on a 19th century mount. Inscribed Greuze in pencil at the lower left, and further inscribed Greuze (jean baptiste) in brown ink on the mount. 315 x 492 mm. (12 3/8 x 19 3/8 in.) PROVENANCE: Jean Masson, Amiens and Paris (Lugt 1494a); His sale (‘Aquarelles et Dessins de l’Ecole Française du XVIIIe siècle, Composant la Collection de Mr J. Masson’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Lair Dubreuil], 6 December 1923, lot 57 (‘Feuille de trois études de mains. Sanguine. Haut., 31 cent. 5; larg., 49 cent. 2’); Private collection, France. LITERATURE: Possibly J. Martin and Ch. Masson, ‘Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint et dessiné de Jean-Baptiste Greuze’, in Camille Mauclair, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Paris, n.d. [1905?], possibly no.1423 (‘Mains. Sanguine. – Étude de bras et de mains de femme. Vente Walferdin, en 1860.’). After a period of study in Lyon, Jean-Baptiste Greuze arrived in Paris around 1750 and entered the studio of Charles-Joseph Natoire. He was admitted into the Académie Royale as an associate member in 1755, in the category of peintre de genre particulier, but did not gain full membership as an Academician until 1769. His paintings of moralizing genre subjects, exhibited at the annual Salons, earned him the praise of the influential critic Denis Diderot. He was also a fine portraitist, exhibiting a number of portraits at the Salon throughout the 1760s to considerable acclaim. While Greuze enjoyed the patronage of such prominent collectors as Jean de Jullienne, Lalive de Jully, the Duc de Choiseul and the Empress Catherine II of Russia, his difficult temperament often alienated other clients. Even the artist’s great champion Diderot, writing to the sculptor Falconet in 1767, described Greuze as ‘an excellent artist, but a thoroughly unruly person. One must take his drawings and his pictures, and leave the man at that.’1 In 1769, angered by the rejection of his reception piece, a history painting, by the Académie, who instead admitted him only as a genre painter, Greuze refrained from exhibiting at the Salons until 1800. His reputation suffered after the Revolution, and he died in relative obscurity at the age of eighty, in his studio at the Louvre. A gifted and versatile draughtsman, Greuze was equally adept in chalk, pastel and ink, and was praised by Diderot, who noted of him that ‘this man draws like an angel…He is enthusiastic about his art: he makes endless studies; he spares neither care nor expenses in order to have the models that suit him.’2 A particular interest of Greuze was the study of physiognomy and facial expression, made manifest through large-scale drawings of têtes d’expression. These drawings, usually in red chalk, allowed him to refine the facial types and expressions that were such an important part of his paintings, but they were also produced as independent works of art, to be sold to collectors. Indeed, Greuze enjoyed a healthy market for his drawings, which found their way into important 18th century collections in France, Germany and Russia, while several of his fellow artists – Joseph-Marie Vien, Claude Hoin, AignanThomas Desfriches and Johann Georg Wille among them – owned drawings by him. The inventory of Greuze’s property taken during his divorce proceedings mentions eighty-one studies of hands and feet by the artist, kept in his studio. As Irina Novosselskaya has noted, ‘Drawings constituted a special place in Greuze’s work. Without exaggeration it can be said that no other eighteenth-century French artist made so many careful studies for his paintings…Greuze’s sketches, often done in different tones of red chalk, are almost always done on large sheets (40 to 50 centimetres high), and they almost always depict figures, heads, and hands in large scale. Strong, bold strokes produce forms and portray movement... The artist was constantly searching for the correct placement or movement of hands.’3 Furthermore, as the Greuze scholar Edgar Munhall has pointed out, ‘The attention that Greuze devoted to hands in general… and the skill with which he drew them suggests the importance he attached to them as expressive elements secondary only to faces and gestures in conveying the meaning of his dramatic scenes.’4
All three studies of hands on this large sheet are preparatory for Greuze’s large painting The Hermit, or The Distributor of Rosaries (Le donneur de chapelets) of c.1780 (fig.1), sold at auction in 2013 and today in a private collection5. The scene is set in a hermit’s grotto dominated by a crucifix6 where ‘a stern old Franciscan friar encircles the left hand of a reverent young woman in white with the first from a chest full of red rosaries. Brightly lit and standing in the center of the composition, she is the culminating cross in a living rosary of girls linked by limbs enacting extravagant expressions of emotion and affection. To enrich the contrast of male and female, youth and age, Greuze has added an epicene assistant holding the chest for the hoary-headed monk. That novice is as pretty as the young women from whom his pure and modest gaze is wholly averted.’7 The large painting was probably commissioned from Greuze by its first recorded owner, Louis Gabriel, Marquis de Véri, who owned several other important paintings by the artist. As Pierre Rosenberg has noted of The Hermit, ‘Beyond the genre aspect, there is…a juxtaposition of contrasts – the happiness of innocent childhood and the simple joys of adolescence with the harsh wisdom of old age – which transcends the simple anecdote.’8 A reproductive print after the painting, engraved by Henri Marais, was published in Paris in 17889. The right arm and hand at the upper right of the present sheet is a study for the figure of a young girl in the centre of the composition of the painting, while the two other studies of hands were used for the kneeling girl in a red dress in the foreground. A closely comparable drawing by Greuze of four arms and hands, today in the Musée Bonnat-Helleu in Bayonne10, contains studies for the left arm of the central figure and the hands of the two girls next to her. Other preparatory studies by Greuze for The Hermit, or The Distributor of Rosaries include a large red chalk drawing for the figure of the hermit in the Louvre11 and a study for the feet of the kneeling acolyte at the lower right, in the Musée Bonnat-Helleu in Bayonne12. A large but somewhat sketchy red chalk study for the two little girls in white behind the central figure was, like the present sheet, once in the collection of Jean Masson13, while a study in red chalk for the head of the girl holding a chicken, at the left of centre of the composition, appeared at auction in Paris in 199914. The present sheet bears the collector’s mark of Jean Masson (1856-1933), who owned a considerable number of drawings by Greuze. Although Masson gave much of his extensive collection of ornamental drawings and prints to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, his superb collection of 18th century French master drawings was dispersed at several auctions in Paris between 1923 and 1927.
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26 GIOCONDO ALBERTOLLI Bedano 1742-1839 Milan Design for a Decorative Wall Panel Watercolour over an underdrawing in pencil. 1015 x 468 mm. (40 x 18 3/8 in.) PROVENANCE: Pandora Old Masters, New York, in 1998; Private collection. LITERATURE: Adriano Cera, ed., Disegni, acquarelli, tempere di artisti italiani dal 1770 ca. al 1830 ca., Bologna, 2002, Vol.I, unpaginated, Albertolli no.4. EXHIBITED: New York, Pandora Old Masters, An Exhibition of Italian Old Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 1998, no.19. Active as an architect and decorator in Parma, Florence and Milan, Giocondo Albertolli was born near Lugano in Switzerland. He received his training in Parma, where he studied with Giuseppe Peroni and was also much influenced by the work of Ennemond-Alexandre Petitot, the court architect to the Duke of Parma. Only a very few works remain from the seventeen years that Albertolli spent in Parma, notably the stucco decoration of the Palazzo Grillo, executed between 1769 and 1771. By 1770 Albertolli was working in Florence, engaged on the stucco decoration of several rooms in the Medici villa at Poggio Imperiale. Together with his brother Grato, he also worked at the Palazzo Pitti and on the Sala di Niobe of the Uffizi. Albertolli settled in Milan in 1775, where he worked for the rest of his career. He provided stucco designs and designed furniture and fixtures for the Palazzo Reale and the royal villa at Monza, as well as for a number of private palaces and villas. Appointed professor of design at the school of architectural ornament of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in 1776, he remained in the post for over thirty years, until 1812. Firmly established as one of the leading Neoclassical designers and architects in Lombardy, Albertolli published four volumes of engravings after his decorative designs, which served to spread his influence well beyond Milan. His last significant commission was for the design and decoration of the villa of Duke Francesco Melzi d’Eril at Bellagio on Lake Como, constructed between 1808 and 1815. In some autobiographical notes written in 1830, near the end of his career, Albertolli stated that, during his time in Milan, he had ‘the opportunity to make designs for works in stucco, painting, marble, bronze and for everything that concerns the decoration of princely habitations. The example of the court was followed by many of the leading signori of Milan, whence many of them renewed their palaces, decorating them with the new good taste. This also gave me the occasion to make many designs.’1 The combination of paired deer and hares in this very large watercolour by Albertolli, which is almost certainly to be dated to the artist’s Lombard period, would suggest that it may have been intended for a decoration in a hunting lodge. The drawing is stylistically and thematically similar to the first plate2 in Albertolli’s Ornamenti diversi inventati e disegnati da Giacondo Albertolli professore di ornate nella Reale Accademia di Belle Arti in Milano; a collection of engravings after the artist’s stucco designs, published in 1782. As the decorative arts scholar Alvar Gonzalez-Palacios has observed, ‘That Albertolli worked with meticulous care on every single detail will be clear to anyone who has examined [his] drawing and prints… Coming half-way between Piranesi and Percier and Fontaine, Giocondo Albertolli was not inferior to the best ornamenters of neo-classicism…He knew how to create new models, which although they re-echo forms beloved by the ancients, were neither slavish archeological exercises nor, as happened to other Italian ornamenters of the period…did he let himself be carried away excessively by the sixteenth-century classicism, though he too loved and understood it.’3
27 ANTOINE-JEAN GROS, BARON GROS Paris 1771-1835 Meudon Sheet of Studies of Horses and Mounted Soldiers, the Head of a Helmeted Warrior and other Figures Pen and brown ink and red chalk. Made up at the top right corner and along much of the right edge. 186 x 189 mm. (7 3/8 x 7 1/2 in.) PROVENANCE: Probably the Gros atelier sale, Paris, Rue des Fosses-Saint-German-des-Prés [Dubois & Paillet], 23 November – 1 December 1835, probably part of lot 122 bis (‘Environ cinquante lots de croquis, études et fragments de figures et compositions, par M. le baron Gros; divisés ainsi, ils seront vendus à chaque vacation et annoncés sous ce numéro.’); Charles Martyne, Paris (Lugt 1800); Private collection, Paris. The son of a portrait and miniature painter, Antoine-Jean Gros entered the studio of Jacques-Louis David at the age of fourteen, studying alongside Anne-Louis Girodet and François Gerard. He enrolled in the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1787 and won second place in the Prix de Rome competition in 1792. The following year, a few days after the death of Louis XVI on the guillotine, Gros decided to leave Paris for Italy. He was to spend the next eight years in Italy, working mainly as a portraitist in Florence, Genoa and Milan, and this period was to have a profound influence on his mature style. It was while he was in Genoa that he was introduced to Joséphine Bonaparte and accompanied her to Milan to be presented to Napoleon, resulting in a majestic portrait of Napoleon at Arcole, exhibited at the Salon of 1801. The huge popularity of the engraving made after the painting served to establish the artist’s reputation in Italy and France. Through the influence of Napoleon, Gros was appointed a member of the committee entrusted with selecting important works of art in Italy to be sent to France. Although he made his debut at the Paris Salon in 1798, Gros did not return to France until October 1800. Soon afterwards, he was commissioned to paint three portraits of Napoleon as First Consul, and he continued to be one of the foremost painters of the Napoleonic era. Among his major works of this period was Napoleon Visiting the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa, exhibited to much acclaim at the Salon of 1804, and Napoleon on the Battlefield at Eylau, completed in 1808. In 1811 Gros received a commission to decorate the cupola of the church of Sainte Geneviève (the Panthéon) in Paris, completed only in 1824. After the fall of Napoleon in 1815 and David’s subsequent exile to Brussels, Gros took over his master’s Parisian studio and pupils at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, although he also admired and influenced the work of such younger artists as Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault. As one modern scholar has noted, ‘At heart Gros was a romantic, and for modern painting and French painting in particular, the forerunner of that expressive mode, an inspiration to Géricault and Delacroix, as well as to a large group of other artists, even if none was his pupil. Géricault and Delacroix were the actual foundation of romantic expression in nineteenth-century French painting; but Gros played a considerable part in its advent and himself uninfluenced produced it from the inherent impulsion of his own feeling.’1 Gros gained important commissions during the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X and in 1824, at the height of his public success, was ennobled as a Baron by Charles X. But at around the same time his work began to fall out of fashion, and he soon found himself at odds with the generation of younger artists centred around the dominant figure of Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres. Long prone to fits of depression, and distraught over the poor reception at the Salon of his latest painting, a Hercules and Diomedes, he committed suicide in June 1835, throwing himself into the river Seine at Meudon. Several months later the contents of his studio were dispersed at auction. Held at his studio in Paris, the sale included 122 lots of framed and unframed drawings, including one lot of twenty-four sketchbooks
and another containing some fifty sketches and studies for compositions by the artist. Many of these drawings, including the sketchbook pages, have since been widely dispersed. The most significant extant collection of drawings by Gros, numbering four sketchbooks from his seminal Italian period and seventeen individual drawings, is today in the Louvre. Of Gros as a draughtsman, it has been noted that ‘When the sketches, drawings as well as studies in oil, are considered there is never any question of Gros’ role as a romantic, all possessing a vigorous spirit, beauty of line and continued freshness and originality in…pencil drawings of simple figures, as well as widely active groups of men and horses, fighting, charging, or in mortal combat.’2 The nervous, vibrant penwork of the present sheet is wholly characteristic of the artist’s mature drawings, which were much admired by the succeeding generation of Romantic painters. As Arlette Sérullaz has noted of Gros, ‘his pen drawings retain a violence which was no longer indebted to classicism: as soon as the artist became the eulogist of the Napoleonic epic, his stroke became swifter, more spirited, his ardent sensibility was expressed in broken, zigzag, spasmodic lines…gifted with an impulsive temperament, Gros showed the way to the fiery, ardent drawing of Delacroix.’3 The present sheet of studies remains unconnected with any surviving work by Baron Gros, and as such is difficult to date with any accuracy. It may conceivably be an early work by the artist, at a time when he was one of the leading members of David’s studio, and perhaps before his trip to Italy. To judge from the antique armour worn by many of the figures in this drawing, the artist was here working out ideas for a classical composition of the type made famous by his master, yet the vigorousness of the pen technique, and in particular the attitudes of the horses, are far removed from David’s restrained manner and reveal something of Gros’s innate Romantic sensibility. The study of a soldier wearing an antique helmet, drawn in red chalk, finds some parallels with a similar figure in Gros’s large canvas of Eleazar Choosing Death over Eating Forbidden Meats, painted for the Prix de Rome competition of 1792 and today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Saint-Lô4. Gros produced numerous sketches and studies of horses, in various attitudes; in a stable accompanied by a groom or alone at rest, elsewhere ridden by soldiers or jockeys, or galloping free. The artist’s pupil and biographer Jean-Baptiste Delestre praised Gros for ‘His surprising ability to capture the appearance of horses. He especially enjoyed reproducing their elegant forms and proud and gracious movements. The sketchbooks from the happy years of his adolescence have retained precious notes. Several of these ink drawings showing cavalcades or beautiful teams of horses, which he followed racing, from Paris to the Bois de Boulogne, without stopping, so appealing was this spectacle to his eyes.’5 Among comparable sheets of studies by the artist is a drawing of horses and figures that was part of a large and important group of drawings by Gros assembled by Delestre and dispersed at auction in Paris in 20176. The use of red chalk is quite rare in the drawings of Gros, and is generally only found in his early drawings. Three pages of a sketchbook in the Louvre, dating from the artist’s period in Italy between 1793 and 1800, include a few studies in red chalk among the more typical pen and ink or pencil sketches7. Another example of the artist’s use of red chalk is found in a drawing also datable to his Italian period; a study of seated woman in a landscape formerly the Delestre collection8. The present sheet bears the collector’s mark of Charles Martyne (1876-1936). Martyne (or Martine), the librarian at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris between 1905 and 1934, assembled a large and eclectic group of paintings, drawings, books and autograph letters, all kept in a crowded apartment on the rue Bonaparte. Much of his collection of drawings was sold in Paris in May 1939, although a part of it was inherited by his nephew, the magistrate Jean-Louis Debauve (1926-2016).
28 MARTIN DROLLING Oberhergheim 1752-1817 Paris The Artist’s Son Michel-Martin Reading, with Two Studies of His Left Hand Red chalk and pencil on laid paper. 227 x 160 mm. (9 x 6 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Part of an album of drawings belonging to the artist’s descendants; Art market, Belgium, in 1997; Galerie Arnoldi-Livie, Munich, in 1999; Bernd Schultz, Berlin. Born in Alsace, Martin Drolling was a specialist in portraiture and genre painting, and as a youth studied the example of Dutch 17th century painters. (As one scholar has noted of the artist, ‘His neat and careful style is directly inherited from the Dutch genre scenes, as are his portraits.’1) Drolling exhibited at the Salons from 1793 onwards, and several of his interiors and genre pictures were reproduced as prints. He was occasionally employed by the portrait painter Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun to paint objects in her portraits, and through her met Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Drolling’s genre scenes are often likened to those of his contemporary Louis-Léopold Boilly, and indeed the two artists ‘are the best examples of that intimate, bourgeois art which appeared quite early in total contrast to the historical and neo-classical school of David and his pupils.’2 Between 1802 and 1813 he worked as a designer and decorator at the Sèvres porcelain factory, yet he remained impoverished for much of his life. Datable to c.1800, the present sheet is a portrait of the artist’s son and pupil, Michel-Martin Drolling (1786-1851), who was also to become a painter. The younger Drolling completed his training in the studio of Jacques-Louis David, and won the Prix de Rome in 1810 with a painting of The Wrath of Achilles. Much of his early career was taken up with portraiture and with small-scale pictures, and he exhibited regularly at the Salons between 1817 and 1850. Admitted into the Académie in 1833, Michel-Martin Drolling received several important decorative public commissions, including paintings for Notre Dame de Lorette and the Conciergerie in Paris and the cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux. In 1850, near the end of his career, he completed a series of paintings of the life of Saint Paul for the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Martin Drolling produced several painted and drawn portraits of his son, and as a child Michel-Martin also posed for a number of his father’s genre paintings. He is, for example, depicted in a painting of a young boy holding a violin and leaning out of a window, signed and dated 1800, in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art3. He also seems to have been the model for the sleeping boy in Drolling’s painting Le Petit Dormeur, signed and dated 1795, which appeared at auction in London in 19954. A large portrait drawing by Martin Drolling of his wife Louise-Élisabeth Belot and their son Michel-Martin, drawn in black chalk on vellum and slightly earlier in date than the present sheet, is in the Musée Magnin in Dijon5. A later self-portrait (fig.1) by the sitter of the present sheet, Michel-Martin Drolling, dated 1804 when he was eighteen years old, was recently on the art market in New York and is today in a private collection.
1
29 LUIGI SABATELLI Florence 1772-1850 Milan Satan in Hell, from Milton’s Paradise Lost Pen and brown ink, over traces of an underdrawing in pencil, with traces of framing lines in brown ink. Signed(?) L. Sabatelli in brown ink at the lower left. Inscribed Ei repente inalzo fuor dello Stagno / lib. I. a. c. JJ. in brown ink on the verso. Further inscribed SATANA PRECIPITATO DA DIO NELL’ INFERNO / Ei repente innalzo fuor dello Stagno, in brown ink on a part of the former mount. 342 x 437 mm. (13 1/2 x 17 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 28 January 1999, lot 86; Private collection. LITERATURE: Possibly Luigi Sabatelli, Cenni biografici sul cav. Prof. Luigi Sabatelli scritti da lui medesimo e raccolti dal figlio Gaetano, pittore, Milan, 1900, p.35, ‘Disegni a penna’ no.28 (‘La morte che si oppone a Satana alla porta dell’inferno (Milton).’). In his posthumously published autobiography, the Florentine painter, draughtsman and printmaker Luigi Sabatelli recalled that it was during his youthful period in Rome in the 1790s that he became well known for his finished pen and ink drawings. The sale of these scenes from Greek, Roman and Florentine history, as well as episodes from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton and the Old Testament, earned him some one hundred zecchini over four years1. His highly finished pen drawings, and the engravings derived from them, were greatly admired by his contemporaries, and many of these drawings were sold to collectors. This large drawing is a splendid example of Sabatelli’s vigorous pen draughtsmanship. The scene depicted in this drawing, and the text on the verso that accompanies it, is found in Book I of the 17th century English writer John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Satan and his followers have been defeated by God in Heaven and cast into Hell, where they lie, entwined by chains, in a lake of fire. The devils are freed from their chains by God, and Satan rises up out of the fiery lake, spreads his wings and flies to dry land. He summons Beelzebub, his comrade and lieutenant, and the rest of the fallen angels to join him on the shores of the lake of fire: ‘Thus Satan talking to his nearest mate / With head up-lift above the wave, and eyes / That sparkling blazed, his other parts besides / Prone on the flood, extended long and large / Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge / As whom the fables name of monstrous size…So stretched out huge in length the Archfiend lay / Chained on the burning lake, nor ever thence / Had risen or heaved his head, but that the will / And high permission of all-ruling Heaven / Left him at large to his own dark designs…Forthwith upright he rears from off the pool / His mighty stature; on each hand the flames / Driven backward slope their pointing spires, and rolled / In billows, leave in the midst a horrid vale. / Then with expanded wings he steers his flight / Aloft, incumbent on the dusky air / That felt unusual weight, till on dry Land / He lights, if it were land that ever burned / With solid, as the lake with liquid fire…Such resting found the sole / Of unblest feet. Him followed his next mate, / Both glorying to have escaped the Stygian flood / As gods, and by their own recovered strength, / Not by the sufferance of supernal Power.’2 As evidenced by the inscription on the verso of the sheet, the artist has followed the text from the first complete Italian translation of Milton’s poem by Paolo Antonio Rolli, published as Il Paradiso perduto, poema inglese di Giovanni Milton. Rolli began working on the translation in 1719 and published the first six books in London ten years later. The full translation was published in 1735 and reprinted several times throughout the 18th century. Sabatelli’s treatment of the subject reveals something of the influence, during the 1790s and early 1800s, of the contemporary English interest in the ‘Sublime’, which he would have encountered in Rome in the work of such artists as Benjamin West and John Flaxman, as well as Johann Heinrich Fuseli, who had laboured throughout the decade of the 1790s on a series of forty-seven paintings of scenes from Milton’s life and works, eventually exhibited as a whole in 1799.
30 CHRISTOPH HEINRICH KNIEP Hildesheim 1755-1825 Naples Study of the Base of a Tree and Undergrowth Pencil, with framing lines in pencil, on buff paper, laid down on an original 19th century mount. Signed C. H. Kniep in brown ink at the lower left of the mount, and inscribed and dated Napoli 1816 in brown ink at the lower right of the mount. 200 x 296 mm. (7 7/8 x 11 5/8 in.) The German landscape draughtsman Christoph Heinrich Kniep began his career as a portrait painter in Germany, working in Hannover, Kassel, Lübeck and Berlin, before travelling to Italy in 1782. He settled first in Rome, drawing Italian landscapes and making copies of classical works of art, and from 1785 onwards lived in Naples. In Italy Kniep was active among the circle of artists around Jacob Philipp Hackert and Johann Heinrich Tischbein, both of whom were a considerable influence on his style. It was through Tischbein that he met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Naples, and Kniep accompanied the writer on his voyage through Southern Italy and Sicily, between 1786 and 1788. Unlike many other German artists, however, Kniep continued to live and work in Naples even after the city fell under French rule in 1806. He made numerous highly accurate drawings of the excavations at Paestum and Pompeii, and obtained his livelihood from the sale of his work to local clients and foreign visitors to Rome and Naples. He also taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples, and published several albums of engravings after his landscape drawings. In his Notes on Modern Painting at Naples, published in 1855, the English writer Lord Napier opined that, ‘Under the intrusive government of the French, the names of Kniep, Voogd, Rebel, Denis, and Huber, were in the greatest repute, and demonstrate how completely the delineation of landscape and pastoral life had been appropriated by alien pencils.’1 Despite his long career in Italy and his role as a member of the artistic community in 18th century Rome, Kniep enjoyed only a modest reputation in his own lifetime. As has been noted of the artist, ‘Neither self-obsessed or perhaps talented enough to do more than eke out a living from the commissions of wealthy visitors to Rome, he somehow failed to make his mark, rather like Jacob Asmus Carstens, John Robert Cozens and other foreign draughtsmen who made their way to Italy in this period. His response to the artistic demands and political changes of the time was to escape into idyll and a fastidious adherence to traditional values and techniques.’2 Although Kniep’s drawings of ideal classical landscapes have been largely forgotten since his death, the recent publication of a monograph on the artist and a museum exhibition of his work have done much to bring his oeuvre back to light3. Large groups of landscape drawings by Kniep are today in the collections of the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum in Hannover, the Roemer- und PelizaeusMuseum in Hildesheim and the Goethe-Nationalmuseum in Weimar, while other examples are in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Goethe-Museum in Düsseldorf, the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt, the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Museo Nazionale di San Martino in Naples, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Albertina in Vienna, and elsewhere. This highly finished sheet, which is on its original mount, signed and dated 1816, is likely to have been sold to a collector as an independent work of art. The drawing differs from much of Kniep’s drawn oeuvre, however, in its microcosmic view of nature, and in its subject can be related to some of the plates of Kniep’s Disegni originali, a series of prints after his drawings, published in Naples in 1818. It has been suggested that the view depicted here may be in the vicinity of the town of Cava de’ Tirreni, near Salerno in Campania.
31 PELAGIO PALAGI Bologna 1775-1860 Turin The Education of Bacchus Black chalk over traces of an underdrawing in red chalk, heightened with touches of gold. Laid down on a 19th century mount, with framing lines in black ink. Numbered No. / 68 and 83 on a label at the upper right of the old mount. 172 x 229 mm. (6 3/4 x 9 in.) [image] PROVENANCE: Nicolaas Teeuwisse, Berlin. At the age of twelve Filippo Pelagio Palagi was taken into the home of the important Bolognese collector Count Carlo Aldovrandi, where he was able to study the extensive collection of prints in the count’s library, and also attended life drawing classes at the Accademia Clementina. By 1795 Palagi was collaborating with Antonio Basoli on the pictorial decoration of the house of the Trebbi family in Bologna. He was to work alongside Basoli, as well as Felice Giani, on other decorative projects for private homes in Bologna between 1801 and 1805, and at the same time received sculptural commissions for a number of sepulchral tomb monuments in the Certosa of Bologna. In 1806 Palagi undertook a study trip to Rome, financed by his patron Aldovrandi. He remained in Rome until 1815, studying at the Accademia di San Luca and meeting such artists as Vincenzo Camuccini (who was to have a profound influence on his style), Francesco Hayez, Tommaso Minardi and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. During his time in Rome Palagi worked on the renovation and decoration of the Palazzo Venezia in 1811 and the Palazzo del Quirinale in 1812, and also painted a fresco in a room in the Palazzo Torlonia. It was also while he was in Rome that he began to assemble what would eventually become a superb collection of Greek, Egyptian, Etruscan and Roman sculpture, objects and coins. Between 1815 and 1832 Palagi lived and worked in Milan, where he founded a private art school and established a particular reputation as a portrait and history painter, working predominantly in a Neoclassical style. In 1832 he was summoned to the court of the Savoy dynasty in Turin by Carlo Alberto, King of Sardinia, for whom he was to work for the remainder of his career. Within a few years Palagi had been appointed court painter for all of the royal residences, working at the castle and park of Racconigi, the Castello di Pollenzo and, most significantly, at the Palazzo Reale in Turin, where he painted a magnificent ceiling painting of The Dance of the Hours for the ballroom. He also worked at the Teatro Regio in Turin and the Villa Traversi at Desio. It was during this period that Palagi reached the height of his success and fame, leading Stendhal to famously describe him as ‘le célèbre Palagi, peintre de Bologne’. His achievements as an architect, interior decorator, painter, sculptor, scenographer and furniture designer were considerable, and had a profound influence on later generations of artists and decorators. At Palagi’s death he left his extensive collection of antiquities, library and archive to his native city of Bologna, and as such the largest collection of his drawings and designs, numbering over three thousand sheets, is today in the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archginassio there. As has been noted, Pelagio Palagi ‘demonstrated extraordinary facility as an expressive draftsman’1, and the present sheet is a splendid example of his refined Neoclassical technique. Among stylistically comparable chalk drawings by the artist are a Hylas and the Nymphs in a private collection2, which is a study for a painting of c.1810-1811 in a private collection in Florence3, and a Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John, also in a private collection4. A signed drawing of The Birth of Cupid that appeared at auction in Italy in 19965 is likewise very similar to the present sheet. Comparisons may also be made with a lithograph of a Sleeping Cupid6 by Palagi, while a similar subject is found in a large etching of The Education of Cupid by Mauro Gandolfi7, which reproduces a much smaller circular painting by Palagi of 1820-1821.
32 ANTONIO BASOLI Castelguelfo 1774-1848 Bologna The Interior of an Egyptian Temple Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Inscribed Fatto all’improvviso dal Prof.e Ant.o Basoli / avendo prima fatto fare delle macchie sulla / carta ed essendo gli stato dato l’argomento / La sera dei 14 Marzo 1824 / in casa della Sig.ra Caterina / Lipparini la quale fece ella / stessa le macchie sud.e in brown ink on the verso. 388 x 495 mm. (15 1/4 x 19 1/2 in.) PROVENANCE: Pandora Old Masters, New York, in 2000; Private collection. LITERATURE: Adriano Cera, ed., Disegni, acquarelli, tempere di artisti italiani dal 1770 ca. al 1830 ca., Bologna, 2002, Vol.I, unpaginated, Basoli no.24. EXHIBITED: New York, Pandora Old Masters, Old Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2000, no.21. Much of what we know of the life and work of Antonio Giuseppe Basoli is derived from an autobiographical manuscript, written in 1821 and today in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna. A painter, decorator and scenographer, Basoli is best known for his stage designs and drawings of architectural interiors; indeed, he described himself as a ‘pittore di decorazioni da teatro, da camera e quadri di tal genere’. He received his early training, between 1786 and 1794, at the Accademia Clementina in Bologna, where he was particularly influenced by the work of the Gandolfis and the Bibiena family. Basoli was active in and around Bologna for his entire career, during the early part of which he worked as a figure painter on a number of decorative projects in collaboration with the theatrical designer Pelagio Palagi. Basoli decorated the Teatro Comunale in 1809 and worked at various palaces in Bologna, including the Palazzo Rosselli del Turco, Palazzo Sanguinetti and Palazzo Hercolani, as well as several villas in the surrounding province. He served as a professor of ornamental design (‘direttore di disegni e ornamenti’) at the Accademia di Belle Arti from 1804 to 1826, and succeeded Antonio Sanquirico as the principal designer at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. His numerous designs for the stage, including many intended for performances at La Scala, were engraved in two publications; the Raccolta di prospettive serie, rustiche e di paesaggio, published in 1810, and the Collezione di varie scene teatrali, which appeared in 1821. Basoli also produced a number of designs for furniture, lamps and other household objects. Towards the end of the 18th century, Basoli began to develop an interest in Egyptian forms and motifs, in keeping with the fascination with such themes evident among many European artists around the turn of the century, and especially following Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. (Indeed, in 1797 Basoli had proposed an Egyptian decorative scheme for a room in the home of a lawyer named Monti in Bologna.) Among several drawings of Egyptian subjects by Basoli is a stage design with an Egyptian palace and obelisk, part of a large group of such drawings by the artist in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice1, as well as An Interior in the Egyptian Manner in the Philadelphia Museum of Art2. That Basoli continued to occasionally depict Egyptian themes in his drawings well into his later career can be seen in a Grand Egyptian Scene, dated 1840, which was formerly in the Edmond Fatio collection in Geneva3. As the inscription on the verso of the present sheet notes, this large drawing was made by Basoli as a means of amusing his friends, on the 14th of March 1824, in the home of a certain Caterina Lipparini4. Before he started drawing in front of his audience, the sheet of paper had been stained by two large ink splotches. The artist then proceeded to create this dramatic imaginary view of the interior of an Egyptian temple, cleverly incorporating the ink blots into his design.
33 JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES Montauban 1780-1867 Paris Portrait of Marie-Anne-Adélaïde Balze, Mme. Joseph Balze Pencil. Signed, dated and dedicated Ingres / à son ami / monsieur / Balze. / 1828. in pencil at the lower left. 270 x 216 mm. (10 5/8 x 8 1/2 in.) PROVENANCE: Given by Ingres to the husband of the sitter, Joseph Balze, Paris; By descent to his son, Paul Balze, Paris; By inheritance to his brother, Raymond Balze, Paris; By descent to his daughter, Anne-Marie Balze, Mme. Alfred-Pierre-Emile Hennet de Goutel-Balze; By descent to her daughter, Marguerite Hennet de Goutel, Mme. Jean Lacroix de Cariès de Senilhes; Otto Wertheimer, Paris, by 1956; Acquired from him by Robert Lehman, New York; P. & D. Colnaghi, London; Galerie Kornfeld, Bern; Anonymous sale, Bern, Kornfeld & Klipstein, 9-10 June 1976, lot 437; The Lefevre Gallery, London, in 1977; Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva; Their sale, London, Sotheby’s, 9 July 2014, lot 144; Bernd Schultz, Berlin. LITERATURE: Charles Blanc, Ingres: Sa vie et ses ouvrages, Paris, 1870, p.235; Henri Delaborde, Ingres: Sa vie, ses travaux, sa doctrine, Paris, 1870, p.290, no.254; Georges Duplessis, Les portraits dessinés par J.-A.-D. Ingres, Paris, 1896, no.2, pl.2; Paul Leroi, ‘Vingt dessins de M. Ingres’, L’Art, Paris, 1894-1900, p.818; Henry Lapauze, Les portraits dessinés de J.-A.-D. Ingres, Paris, 1903, p.44, no.3, pl.3; Henry Lapauze, Ingres: Sa vie & son oeuvre, Paris, 1911, illustrated p.267; Louis Flandrin, ‘Deux disciples d’Ingres: Paul et Raymond Balze’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, August 1911, p.141; AmauryDuval, ‘M. Ingres’, La Renaissance de l’art français et des industries de luxe, May 1921, illustrated p.242; Hans Naef, Die Bildniszeichnungen von J.-A.-D. Ingres, Bern, 1977-1980, Vol.II, pp.583-585, fig.2, Vol.V, pp.116-117, no.311; Lyon, Musée Historique des Tissus, Dessins du XVIe au XIXe siècle de la collection du Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Lyon, exhibition catalogue, 1984-1984, p.103, under no.120; Agnes Mongan, David to Corot: French Drawings in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge and London, 1996, p.218, under no.233; Philip Rylands, ed., The Timeless Eye: Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1999, illustrated p.407; Aileen Ribeiro, Ingres in Fashion: Representations of Dress and Appearance in Ingres’s Images of Women, New Haven and London, 1999, pp.75-76, pl.54. EXHIBITED: Paris, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Tableaux, Études peintes, dessins et croquis de J.-A.-D. Ingres, 1867, no.321; Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1889: Exposition centennale de l’art français (1789 à 1889), 1889, no.330; Paris, Grand Palais, Exposition Internationale Universelle de 1900: Exposition centennale de l’art français, 1800 à 1889, 1900, no.1093; Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, Exposition Ingres, 1911, no.135; Paris, Chambre Syndicale de la Curiosité et des BeauxArts, Exposition Ingres, 1921, no.101; Paris, Galerie André Weil, Exposition Ingres: Maître du dessin français, 1949, no.59; Cincinnati, Cincinnati Art Museum, The Lehman Collection, 1959, no.274; London, The Lefevre Gallery, Important XIX and XX Century Works on Paper, 1977, no.21; New York, Jan Krugier Gallery, The Presence of Ingres: Important Works by Ingres, Chassériau, Degas, Picasso, Matisse and Balthus, 1988, no.27. Drawn from life, the portrait drawings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres may be counted among his finest and best-known works. The artist had a remarkable ability of vividly capturing, with a few strokes of a sharpened graphite pencil applied to smooth white or cream paper, the character and personality of a sitter1. Around 460 portrait drawings by him are known today, most of which date from before 1824, when he left Italy and returned to France. Relatively few portrait drawings can be dated to the artist’s later Parisian years, of which the present sheet is a particularly fine example.
In the same year of 1828, Ingres also made a portrait drawing of Mme. Jean-Baptiste Hinard, née Marianne-Françoise-Stanislas Balze, the sister of Joseph Balze and sister-in-law of the present sitter, which is today in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam3. It was in Rome that Joseph Balze first met Ingres, from whom he commissioned some works around 1814. This charming portrait of Mme. Balze was drawn in Paris in 1828, after the Balze family had returned to France. As Hans Naef has described the present sheet, ‘If one can recognize men by their wives, the portrait of Mme. Balze reflects the most beautiful light on her husband. The feminine charm of her posture and her features are evidently due not only to a favourable appearance, but also to the grace of her disposition.’2 Two years after this drawing was made, the sitter’s young sons Paul and Raymond entered the studio of Ingres as pupils and assistants3. In the same year of 1828, Ingres also made a portrait drawing of Mme. Jean-Baptiste Hinard, née Marianne-Françoise-Stanislas Balze (fig.1), the sister of Joseph Balze and sister-in-law of the present sitter4. The portrait drawings of Mme. Balze and Mme. Hinard are very similar in attitude and execution and almost identical in size, and appear to have been executed as pendants. As one scholar, writing in 1911, noted of these two drawings, ‘[Ingres] made two lovely portraits in pencil for his friend, which are preserved like two treasures in the Balze family.’5 Yet although Ingres produced drawn portraits of the wife and sister of Joseph Balze, to whom he dedicated them, he never seems to have made one of Balze himself. Another comparable drawing of the same date is a portrait said to be of a Mme. Brazier (fig.2), today in the Musée des Tissus et des Arts Décoratifs in Lyon6. Referring to both the Lyon drawing and the present sheet, the costume historian Aileen Ribeiro has noted that ‘it was probably natural that Ingres preferred to depict relatively simple styles of dress which could act as a foil to the face and headwear of his portrait drawings. Two portraits dated 1828, one believed to be of Madame Brazier and the other of Madame Joseph Balze, show sitters in modest day dresses. Madame Balze’s dress is a check fabric, fitting fairly tightly to the figure…Women of the most fashionable sort arranged their hair in sausage-like curls with a large bun on top of the head, known as an Apollo knot…Indoors, around the house, women wore caps of linen or cotton trimmed with lace and ribbons…The wonderful cream-puff confections that both Madame Brazier and Madame Balze wear on top of their prominent curls, serve to give the impression of heads rather too large for their accompanying bodies; this may reflect either Ingres’s concentration on the face and its immediate surroundings, or the particular attention devoted to hairstyles and headwear in the fashion plates of the period.’7 An autograph, traced version of the present sheet, drawn on papier calque, is in the Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts8.
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34 GEORGE RICHMOND, R.A. Brompton 1809-1896 London Self-Portrait in Profile Pen and brown ink, with touches of pink wash, over traces of an underdrawing in pencil, on a page from a sketchbook. A sketch of the legs of a standing figure drawn in pencil on the verso. 130 x 196 mm. (5 1/8 x 7 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: By descent in the family of the artist, until 2001; Christopher Powney, London; Thence by descent to a private collection. LITERATURE: Susan Sloman, Missing Pages. George Richmond R.A. 1809-1896: Drawings, Watercolours, Letters, Journals & Notebooks, exhibition catalogue, London, 2001, unpaginated, no.17, illustrated pl.XIII. EXHIBITED: London, Agnew’s and W/S Fine Art, Missing Pages. George Richmond R.A. 1809-1896: Drawings, Watercolours, Letters, Journals & Notebooks, exhibition catalogue, 2001, no.17. A disciple of Willam Blake and a close friend of Samuel Palmer, George Richmond formed – with Palmer, Edward Calvert and other followers of Blake – a small group who called themselves ‘The Ancients’. The only member of ‘The Ancients’ who received a conventional academic training, Richmond entered the Royal Academy Schools in December 1824, at the age of just fourteen, and there studied under Johann Heinrich (Henry) Fuseli. It was while he was at the Academy Schools that he first showed himself to be an accomplished and gifted draughtsman. Between 1824 and 1828 Richmond often joined Blake, Palmer, John Varley and others at John Linnell’s Hampstead home to draw from nature, as he also did with Palmer at Shoreham in Kent for several weeks in 1827. After his marriage in 1831, Richmond began working primarily as a portrait painter, quickly achieving a considerable measure of success. Although much influenced by Michelangelo and Italian art of the Renaissance, it was not until 1838 that Richmond was able to visit Italy, when he travelled with Palmer to Rome. In the 1840s he became friendly with John Ruskin, of whom he produced two portraits, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1843 and 1857; the second of these was later engraved. Richmond was elected to the Royal Academy in 1866, and his stature in the London art world was such that he was twice offered the directorship of the National Gallery, which he twice declined. It is as a portraitist that Richmond is best known today, and which accounts for the bulk of his extant oeuvre as a painter. As his biographer Raymond Lister has noted, ‘Richmond was in fact at his greatest as a portrait painter. Despite yearnings to express himself in other ways, despite his early promise as a visionary painter, it is in portraiture that his true stature is to be seen.’1 Like much of Richmond’s oeuvre of drawings and watercolours, this striking self-portrait study, which may be dated to the 1830s, remained in the possesion of his descendants, and largely unknown to scholars, until recently. As Susan Sloman has noted of the present sheet, ‘Richmond was an enthusiastic and regular observer of his own features, painting several oil self-portraits in a distinctly Reynolds-inspired style…There are strong similarities between this drawing and other likenesses of the artist. He wore his hair this length throughout his life, deliberately covering his large ears, and his long nose and deep-set eyes are clearly defined in other drawn and painted self-portraits. A profile relief portrait of the artist made for his memorial in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral by his son William Blake Richmond2 shares all the features seen here.’3 Among other early self portraits by George Richmond is an oval miniature of c.1831 in the National Portrait Gallery in London4. Further self portraits by the artist are today in the collections of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Uffizi in Florence, the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.
35 JOHN FREDERICK LEWIS, RA London 1804-1876 Walton-on-Thames Sheikh el Belled, Kom Ombos, Upper Egypt Watercolour and gouache, over traces of an underdrawing in pencil. Signed, inscribed and dated J. F. Lewis Kom Ombos. 1850. / l. d. [?] in pencil at the lower right. 331 x 452 mm. (13 x 17 3/4 in.) [image] 367 x 526 mm. (14 1/2 x 20 3/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: The posthumous Lewis studio sale (‘Catalogue of the Remaining Works of That Distinguished Artist, John F. Lewis, R.A., Deceased’), London, Christie’s, 4-7 May 1877, lot 135 (‘Sheikh El Belled, Kom Ombos, 1850’, bt. Vokins for £27.6); J. & W. Vokins, London; Thomas Agnew & Sons, Manchester and London; Purchased from them by Arthur Greenlow Lupton, Leeds; Thence by descent. EXHIBITED: Probably London, Royal Academy, 1870, no.580 (as A Scheik el Belled, Upper Egypt). After some early success as a painter, mostly of animal subjects (an interest he shared with his childhood friend and neighbour Edwin Landseer), John Frederick Lewis seems to have largely given up painting around 1830 in favour of drawings and finished watercolours. These works were exhibited at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours (to which he had been elected as an associate in 1827, at the age of just twenty-one), the Royal Academy, the British Institution and elsewhere. He made his first trip abroad in 1827, visiting Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Between 1832 and 1834 Lewis lived and worked in Spain, producing numerous drawings, watercolours and lithographs of local sights, figures, costumes and buildings. Spanish subjects dominated his exhibited output of finished watercolours for most of the succeeding years, as well as two volumes of lithographs published in 1835 and 1836, earning him the nickname ‘Spanish Lewis’. In 1837 Lewis left London to travel to Italy, where he spent two years, and from there went on to Greece, Albania and Turkey before eventually settling in Egypt at the end of 1841. Lewis resided in Cairo for ten years, living as an Oriental gentleman in an elegant Ottoman house in the Azbakiyyah quarter of the city, dressing in the Turkish manner and enjoying what one visitor, the writer William Makepeace Thackeray, described as a ‘dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life.’ He produced a large number of watercolours and drawings during his decade in Egypt before his return to England in 1851. For the remainder of his career he painted Orientalist subjects inspired by his years in the East, and based largely on the drawings made in Cairo. These depictions of mosques, bazaars, Eastern interiors, desert encampments and imaginary harem scenes proved immensely popular with collectors. (As one modern scholar has noted, ‘Without doubt Lewis’s depictions of Oriental and, in particular, harem life were given greater veracity in the eyes of his European audience because of his well-publicised adoption of an elite Ottoman lifestyle.’1) In 1855 Lewis was elected President of the Society of Painters in WaterColours, although the previous year he had also begun to exhibit paintings at the Royal Academy. His growing interest in oil painting, at the expense of watercolours, led him in February 1858 to resign from the Old Water-Colour Society, and for the remainder of his career Lewis’s exhibited works were mainly paintings. Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1859 and an Academician in 1864, Lewis showed regularly at the Academy until his death in 1876. Lewis’s paintings and watercolours of exotic Eastern subjects, executed in a meticulous and detailed manner, remained popular with collectors and connoisseurs throughout the later stages of his career. As his fellow artist and traveller Edward Lear noted, in a letter to Lewis’s wife written the year before the painter’s death, ‘There have never been, and there never will be any works depicting Oriental life – more truly beautiful and excellent – perhaps I might say – so beautiful and excellent. For, besides the
exquisite and conscientious workmanship, the subjects painted by J. F. Lewis were perfect as representations of real scenes and people.’2 During his decade in Cairo, Lewis only seems to have made one trip to Upper Egypt, in 1849-1850 at the end of his stay in Egypt, when he was accompanied by his wife Marian. The couple visited Thebes and Edfu, and travelled as far south as Philae, where they met Florence Nightingale, before returning north to Cairo via Kom Ombo, where they arrived in February 1850. About a hundred miles south of Luxor, the town of Kom Ombo (also Kom Umbu or Ombos) on the eastern bank of the Nile was famous for its double temple, built during the Ptolomeic dynasty in the 2nd century BC and dedicated to both the crocodile god Sobek and Horus, the falcon god. Lewis made several drawings of the temple and the inhabitants of Kom Ombo, of which the present sheet is an especially fine example. A printed inscription on the former mount, probably transcribed from a now-lost label, identifies the subject of this watercolour as the ‘Sheikh el Belled’ (shaykh al-balad, or the headman of a village). The sheikh is shown alongside his white horse, both apparently resting after a long journey. As has been noted of Lewis, ‘Time and again, his sketches from his Nile trip reveal that his interest lay in the rural life of Upper Egypt rather than with the ancient monuments that most tourists travelled there to see.’ Also drawn at this time was a stylistically comparable watercolour of An Arab with Two Oxen Ploughing at Kom Ombos (fig.1) which, like the present sheet, was in the 1877 studio sale, and recently reappeared at auction in London3. This large sheet is one of two watercolours with identical titles included in the sale of the contents of Lewis’s studio in May 1877, the year after the artist’s death. It was purchased at the sale by the London-based framers, gilders and fine art dealers William and John Henry Vokins, who specialized in watercolours, and seems to have been sold on by them to the art dealers Agnew’s. The present sheet was acquired from Agnew’s by the Yorkshire councilman, industrialist and university chancellor Arthur Greenlow Lupton (1848-1930). One of the two known watercolours of this title was sent by Lewis to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1870; an indication of the esteem in which he held the composition. The other version of this subject seems to have remained unsold in the posthumous 1877 Lewis studio sale, and remained with the artist’s widow until May 1897, when it was sold at auction4.
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36 MAXIMILIAN HAUSCHILD Dresden 1810-1895 Naples The Artist and his Family on the Terrace of the Villa Tagliaferro in Ischia Graphite on coated paper, with scratched highlights, with framing lines in pencil and laid down on a 19th century mount. Signed M. Hauschild in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed and dated Andenken an die Villa Tagliaferro auf Ischia. 1853. in pencil on the mount. A blindstamp of the paper manufacturer at the lower right. Further inscribed “Restaurierung von J. Wackwitz” / 1976 in pencil and stamped twice with a business address stamp for Jürgen Wackwitz, on the reverse of the mount. 239 x 324 mm. (9 3/8 x 12 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Dresden, Schmidt Kunstauktionen, 6 June 2015, lot 133; Bernd Schultz, Berlin. In 1826 Maximilian Albert Hauschild was enrolled in the architecture school of the Akademie in Dresden, to which he was eventually to return as a teaching assistant between 1838 and 1852. By 1833 he was in Rome, where he developed a particular interest in Italian architecture of the Middle Ages, notably the churches of the Early Christian, Gothic and Romanesque eras. He returned to Rome in 1841 and 1846, and in 1850 published Wanderung durch Plätze, Kirchen, Kreuzgänge etc. etc. Italiens und Siciliens, illustrated with twelve plates after his drawings. From 1852 onwards Hauschild lived between Dresden and Italy, eventually settling in Naples for good. He painted works in oil, gouache and watercolour, producing accurate and highly detailed views of the interiors of churches and monasteries throughout Italy (notably in Florence, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Venice and Viterbo) and Germany (Bamberg, Erfurt, Meissen, Regensburg and elsewhere), all depicted with a particular sensitivity for light effects. Paintings by Hauschild are today in museums in Bamberg, Dresden, Erfurt and Karlsruhe, as well as in Naples, Oslo and St. Gallen. Drawings by Hauschild are quite rare. A pencil drawing of the interior of the Cathedral at Naumberg an der Saale is in the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento1 and an oil on paper study of A View Through a Window, with Vine Leaves is in the Fondation Custodia in Paris2. A drawing of the Duomo at Viterbo was at one time in the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden but was lost in the bombing of the city in 1945, while a handful of watercolours and drawings have appeared on the art market in Germany in recent years3. Dated 1853, this charming drawing depicts the artist at work, surrounded by his family, on the terrace of the Villa Tagliaferro in the town of Casamicciola Terme, on the north shore of the island of Ischia. Hauschild portrays himself seated at an easel, accompanied by women, children and pets, on the shaded terrace of the villa, overlooking the sea and the Italian mainland, with Vesuvius in the distance. The Villa Tagliaferro no longer exists, and is likely to have been destroyed in the earthquake of 28 July 1883, when much of Casamicciola was left in ruins4. The French writer and politician Alphonse de Lamartine stayed at the Villa Tagliaferro and there wrote his novel Graziella, which was first published in serial form in 1849 in his book Les Confidences. As he wrote, ‘The island of Ischia, which separates the Gulf of Gaeta from the bay of Naples, and which is itself only separated from the isle of Procida by a narrow channel, is merely one singular perpendicular mountain whose white brow plunges its jagged teeth into the sky. Its steep sides, furrowed by glens, ravines, and beds of torrents, are covered from top to bottom with the dark-green foliage of chestnut-trees. Those of its plateaux which are nearest the sea and inclined towards the waves, are crowned with thatched cottages, rustic villas, and villages half hid beneath luxuriant vines…There is not one of those houses suspended to the slopes of the mountain, hid at the bottom of its ravines, shooting up like pyramids on the top of its plateaux, leaning against its wood of chestnut-trees, shadowed by its cluster of pines, surrounded by its white arcades, and festooned with its hanging vines, which has not been the ideal dwelling, in dreams, of a poet or lover.’5
37 CHARLES NICHOLLS WOOLNOTH, RSW London 1815-1906 Glasgow Highland Mountain Landscape at Coire Gabhail, Glencoe Watercolour and gouache. Signed C. Woolnoth in brown ink at the lower right. 495 x 768 mm. (19 1/2 x 30 1/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Private collection, France. Born in London, Charles Woolnoth moved to Scotland at an early age, living in Glasgow and training at the Royal Scottish Academy Schools in Edinburgh. He painted mainly large-scale views of the Highlands of Scotland in oils and watercolour, and exhibited his work in London between 1838 and 1875. A founder member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours, where he exhibited from 1879 onwards, Woolnoth also showed at the Royal Scottish Academy between 1850 and 1887, and at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts between 1861 and 1905. As one modern scholar has noted of the artist, ‘he painted intricately detailed landscapes in watercolour, using the medium almost as oil… his large, well-worked views of the Highlands have an undeniable grandeur.’1 Watercolours by Woolnoth are today in the collections of the Kirkcaldy Galleries in Fife, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as well as in several private collections. This very large watercolour is a view of Coire Gabhail, also known as the Lost or Hidden Valley at Glencoe (or Glen Coe) in the Scottish Highlands. The Gaelic name Coire Gabhail means ‘Corrie of the Bounty’ or ‘The Hollow of Capture’, derived from the Scottish word ‘corrie’; a steep-sided hollow at the head of a valley, formed by glaciation. The name of the glen derives from the fact that the high valley was used by members of the notoriously lawless Clan MacDonald of Glencoe to hide their cattle, which were often stolen from others. Woolnoth exhibited views of Glencoe at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1852, 1857 and 1864, as well as two watercolours at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in 1865. Writing in 1856, the Scottish author and poet George Gilfillan described Glencoe: ‘I consider it the most awfully magnificent scene…my eyes have ever rested on. It is a scene which, strange to say, has seldom been sung, and never adequately, by poet…we hurried up the banks of the river, to reach the Pass. The name of the stream is Cona – truly the most musical and romantic name that was ever borne by river. In its two simple sounds, the Italian and the Gaelic tongues seem to meet and embrace each other. What famous river...can compare in beauty of sound, aye, or in grandeur of scenery, with the Cona?...Further on, the valley widened, and the path rapidly ascended, till we came to a somewhat elevated point, whence the whole broad prospect of the Glen burst upon us. The valley is not a narrow and confined one, as some tourists, who seem to have passed through it blind, assert; it is, as Talfourd more truly says, “a huge valley, between mountains of rock, receding from each other till a field of air of several miles’ breadth lies between their summits.” But these summits, who can describe? Conceive two streets of a city, which had been ruined by an earthquake, or blasted by a storm of fire, suddenly enlarged and exalted into mountains, three or four thousand feet high; or conceive two ranger of mountain-waves, when the sea was at its wildest, arrested and stiffened into eternal granite, and you have some conception of Glencoe; and of the spirit of terrible sport in which Nature seems to have worked while making it. It is a divine ruin. But what sublimity mingles with the desolation! Here hills are piled on hills…Here, sharp and dizzy ridges rise; and there, black ravines yawn. Here, two mountains seem to have been torn from each other by one rude grasp; there, several seem to have been melted by fire into one mural precipice; and yonder, behind the jagged foreground of the ruined Glen, stand up some proud peaks, which look as if they had escaped the wave of wrath, which had blasted, twisted, shattered, and torn all around…We said that this scene has never been sung; and the reason of this seems to be, it has never yet been seen by the eye of a poet fully capable of singing it.’2 Among comparable large-scale exhibition watercolours by Woolnoth are The Pass of Glen Lyon3 and a View in Carradale, Kintyre4.
38 MOSÈ BIANCHI Monza 1840-1904 Monza Recto: Studies of Women Verso: Two Studies of a Woman Holding a Laurel Wreath Pen and brown ink, with touches of watercolour, over an underdrawing in black chalk, on laid paper. The verso in black chalk, and pen and brown ink. Numbered 61.18 in pencil on the recto, and 23 in pencil on the verso. Inscribed with a signature of a Bernasconi heir, dated 1977, in blue ink on the verso. 535 x 386 mm. (21 1/8 x 15 1/4 in.) Watermark: A star-shaped object above the letters EGA. PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist by Juan and Felix Bernasconi, Milan; By descent to Maria Elvira Celia Mendez(?) de Bernasconi (her signature in blue ink on the verso), by 1977; Sale (‘The Bernasconi Collection of Italian Pictures and Drawings of the 19th Century’), London, Christie’s, 27 March 1987, lot unidentified; Borghi & Co., New York, in 1987; Private collection, New York; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1995; Private collection, London. EXHIBITED: New York, Borghi & Co., Mosè Bianchi, 1987, no.45; New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1995, no.49. A native of Monza, Mosè Bianchi received his artistic training at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. Even in his earliest works, which were academic history subjects and altarpieces, the lightness of touch and fluidity of handling for which he would become known is readily evident. In 1866 he went to Venice, where he was strongly affected by the work of Giambattista Tiepolo. The following year he was in Paris, where he met the art dealer Adolphe Goupil, who did much to spread the artist’s reputation beyond Italy. In 1877 Bianchi completed his first significant decorative project; the fresco decoration of the Villa Giovanelli at Lonigo, near Vicenza. The artist continued to develop his distinctive, painterly style in his views of Venice of the 1880s and of Milan in the following decade. Bianchi’s oeuvre also includes many scenes of rural life, notably around Gignese on Lake Maggiore, and several superb portraits. In 1913, a few years after the artist’s death, an appreciation of Bianchi’s life and work in an English magazine noted that he ‘must be reckoned as one of the most important of modern Italian artists, though one of the least well known outside his own country…Bianchi’s pictures are rich in beauties, and posterity will surely recognise in the painter’s versatility and in the excellent work of his brush the power and splendour which the artist’s own modesty would not let him see.’1
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Both sides of this large drawing are related to the decoration of the Villa Giovanelli in Lonigo, where Bianchi was commissioned in 1877 to paint a series of frescoes for the ground floor rooms. A family of bankers and merchants, the Giovanelli were well known as collectors and connoisseurs, and their employment of Bianchi served to enhance the artist’s reputation, and led to further fresco commissions. Much of the effect of these ceiling frescoes, painted with a mastery of foreshortening and perspective in three rooms of the villa, has today been lost as a result of poor restoration and conservation. Bianchi produced several preparatory studies for the Villa Giovanelli frescoes, in the form of oil sketches, drawings, watercolours and even plaster models, and it is only through the surviving studies for the frescoes that a sense of their Tiepolesque freschezza can be appreciated. The main figure on the recto of this drawing would appear to be a first idea for the figure of Flora in the fresco of the same subject in the sala della musica of the Villa Giovanelli2. The pose of the figure is, however, somewhat closer to a preparatory oil sketch (fig.1) for the fresco, in an Italian private collection3, than to the final work. Another oil sketch for the full composition (fig.2) was once in the Bernasconi collection and is today in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan4, while an oil sketch for the figure of Flora alone, also from the Bernasconi collection, appeared on the art market in London in 19945. The verso of the present sheet contains two studies for an allegorical female figure holding a laurel wreath in Bianchi’s fresco of Glory and History in the sala degli arazzi of the Villa Giovanelli6, for which a large preparatory painting (fig.3) is in the Museo Godi Valmarana in Lugo Vicentino7. A chalk study for the entire figure, from the Bernasconi collection, was on the art market in New York in 19878. This large double-sided sheet was once part of a large group of paintings and drawings by Mosè Bianchi purchased from the artist by the brothers Juan (d.1920) and Felix Bernasconi (d.1914), prominent Milanese industrialists who formed an impressive collection of works by contemporary Italian painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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39 PAUL ALBERT STECK Troyes 1866-1924 Paris Portrait of the Artist Félicien Rops in his Studio Pen and brush, with brown and black ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in pencil, heightened with white. Framing lines in brown ink. Signed and dated paul steck. 91. in pencil at the upper right. Further inscribed by the artist Felicien Rops and cordial souvenir / Paul Steck 92 in pencil on the former backing sheet. 315 x 250 mm. (12 3/8 x 9 7/8 in.) [image] 338 x 276 mm. (13 1/4 x 10 7/8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Probably given by the artist to Félicien Rops, Paris, in 1892; Private collection. LITERATURE: La Vie populaire, Paris, 17 September 1891, illustrated on the cover; La Plume: littéraire, artistique et sociale, 15 June 1896, illustrated p.426. Paul Steck studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under the Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. A painter of landscapes, portraits and scenes from literature and allegory, often with a Symbolist tone, Steck began exhibiting at the Salons in 1890, earning an honourable mention in 1895. The following year he won a third-class medal at the Salon and also became member of the Société des Artistes Français. Among his best-known works is a remarkable painting of Ophelia Drowning of 1895, today in the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris. Steck took part in the fifth Salon de la Rose + Croix in 1896, and four years later won a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900. Steck produced a small number of portrait drawings and prints of fellow artists in the 1890s1. The present sheet is a portrait of the Belgian painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator Félicien Rops (1833-1898) in his studio. Dated 1891 and apparently presented to the sitter the following year, this drawing was used for the cover (fig.1) of the illustrated weekly magazine La Vie populaire published on the 17th of September 1891. The same image was used again a few years later to illustrate a special issue – devoted to Rops – of the literary and artistic review La Plume, which appeared on 15 June 1896. A drawing by the artist Paul Mathey of Félicien Rops examining a newly printed sheet in his workshop (fig.2) is in a private collection in London2. Drawn in 1888, a few years before Steck’s portrait, the Mathey drawing was a study for a painting which was reproduced alongside the present sheet in the 15 June 1896 issue of La Plume.
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40 EMILE CLAUS Vive-Saint-Eloi 1849-1924 Astene Grainstacks in the Snow Pastel on buff paper. Signed E. Claus in pencil at the lower left. 181 x 239 mm. (7 1/8 x 9 3/8 in.) [sheet] Born the twelfth of thirteen children into a family of modest means, the painter Emile Claus was raised on the banks of the Lys (Leie) river in Belgium. In 1869, at the age of twenty, he entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. A gifted colourist, Claus developed a particular fondness for the landscapes of Western Flanders and especially the woods and meadows along the Lys, which he painted with an eye to capturing light effects. He also painted a number of splendid peasant portraits and genre subjects, particularly in the early part of his career. In 1883 he settled in a cottage (named ‘Zonneschijn’, or ‘Sunshine’) in the town of Astene, on the banks of the Lys, where he lived until his death. Within a few years he began to enjoy some commercial success, with one of his paintings acquired by the museum in Antwerp and another by the Belgian royal family. From 1885 onwards Claus worked in a pointillist technique, developing a style that came to be characterized as ‘luminism’; a form of Belgian late Impressionism, with a particular emphasis on light effects, whose other significant adherent was Théo Van Rysselberghe. For much of his career, Claus remained devoted to the Leieland region that he recorded so faithfully in his work. Nevertheless, he travelled to Holland, Italy, Spain and Morocco, and also spent much time in Paris, where he befriended Claude Monet and Henri Le Sidaner. In the 1880s his paintings were included in exhibitions in Amsterdam, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Edinburgh, Liverpool, London, New Orleans and, in particular, Paris. By the turn of the century Claus was established as one of Belgium’s best-known landscape painters, dedicated to the practice of painting in the open air. In 1899 his work was praised by one writer: ‘Every one of his canvases, especially those of his later years, has been a successful endeavour to reach the highest perfection in rendering the lovely varied hues of the sky, of summer radiance on land and river. And besides this purely technical, material merit, all his pictures excel in subtle accuracy, in perfect truthfulness of most minute execution…He finds the beautiful, not only in the subject, in its perfect dimensions, but in the colouring of things, in the lovely blending of light and shade, which he applies as but few others can.’1 In 1904 Claus was one of the founders of the artistic society Vie et Lumière, and four years later the Belgian writer and journalist Camille Lemonnier, a close friend of the artist, published one of the first monographs on his work. As an anonymous review of the book noted of Claus, ‘His art is so various, embracing as it does every field that is open to the modern realist, and at the same time so alive to the picturesque in man and nature, so well balanced in its means of expression that it is always certain of finding admirers.’2 During the First World War Claus fled to London, where he lived from 1914 to 1919, painting a number of striking views of the river Thames and its bridges which are indebted to the example of Monet. His London paintings were exhibited in Brussels in 1921, although by then his art had fallen somewhat out of fashion. A large group of works by Emile Claus is today in the Museum of Deinze and the Leie Region (Mudel), while others are in museums in Antwerp, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Douai, Ghent, Ixelles, Liège, Paris, Rome, Venice and elsewhere. This exquisite small pastel landscape may be approximately dated to the early 1890s, and reveals the influence on Claus of the work of Claude Monet, whom he met in Paris at around this time. (Monet’s own well-known series of twenty-five paintings of similar stacks of wheat were painted between the summer of 1890 and the spring of 1891. Fifteen of these canvases were exhibited at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in May 1891, and Claus may well have visited the exhibition, which earned considerable critical acclaim and was a huge commercial success.) Grainstacks or stacks of wheat appear in a number of Claus’s paintings of this period, such as The Gleaners of 1894 in the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent3 and Landscape with Grainstacks in a private collection4.
41 FRANCESCO PAOLO MICHETTI Tocco di Casauria 1851-1929 Francavilla al Mare The Head of a Youth Charcoal, black chalk and pastel, on light brown paper. Signed FP Michetti in black chalk at the lower right. 463 x 354 mm. (18 1/4 x 13 7/8 in.) PROVENANCE: Galleria Fogliato, Turin; Anonymous sale, Milan, Sotheby’s, 18 June 2008, lot 6. A pupil of Domenico Morelli at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples, Francesco Paolo Michetti enjoyed his earliest success in Paris, where he participated in the Salons of 1872 and 1875. However, it was not until 1877, when his large canvas of The Procession of the Corpus Domini at Chieti was exhibited in Naples to popular acclaim, that he secured his reputation in his own country. Michetti developed a distinctive style of painting, with a use of bold colours married to a brilliant and fluent technique. A common thread in his work was his interest in rural themes, and particularly the beliefs and traditions of his native Abruzzo region, seen in such paintings of the 1880s as The Vow, now in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. In 1885 he purchased an old convent in the town of Francavilla al Mare that he transformed into a large home and studio, known as the Conventino, which became the centre of a small group of writers, artists, sculptors and musicians who shared a love of the people, traditions and culture of the surrounding Abruzzo region. A prominent member of this group was the poet and playwright Gabriele d’Annunzio, who often stayed at the Conventino and published an essay on Michetti in 1896. Michetti exhibited frequently throughout Italy, often showing large groups of studies in pastel and tempera. At the third Biennale in Venice, held in 1899, he was honoured with a retrospective exhibition of some two hundred works covering the whole of his career. His last major paintings, large canvases entitled The Cripples and The Snakes which continued his interest in local customs, were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, and are today in the Museo Michetti in Francavilla al Mare. After 1900 Michetti largely abandoned painting in favour of photography, becoming one of the first artistic practitioners of the new medium in Italy. In fact, by the early 1880s he had already begun to base his paintings and drawings on his own photographs, preferring these to using posed models in his studio. During the last thirty years of his life, Michetti continued to experiment with photography, while also producing a series of almost monochromatic landscape drawings and sketches in oil, gouache and pastel.
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A gifted draughtsman, Michetti was a lifelong exponent of the pastel medium, which he was able to exploit for its strong colour and luminous effects. He was introduced to pastel by the painter Eduardo Dalbono, and from about 1877 onwards worked, as a draughtsman, almost exclusively in pastel, chalk, tempera or mixed media. His pastel drawings are characterized by an abiding interest in the chromatic possibilities of the medium, which he applied with remarkable confidence and virtuosity. Michetti’s use of pastel was also to be a distinct influence on a number of younger artists in Naples, notably Giuseppe Casciaro. As one writer has aptly noted, ‘The Abruzzi landscape truly spoke to Michetti’s heart with its many voices; he heard them all and absorbed them all. The sea and the mountains, the local festivals so full of colour, of movement, of joy, the mystic processions, the pageantry of superstition and faith in the naves of the solemn age-old cathedrals and of the silent basilicas, the peaceful labour in the fields, the olive-clad hills, the people with their keen sensitiveness and their primitive tenacious passions, deeply impressed his feelings; in black-and-white or in colour, in innumerable marvellous drawings and in paintings of unforgettable beauty and imperishable interest he expressed the fascination, the poetry, the sweetness and the ruggedness, the character and the variety of those scenes. He was indeed a sublime interpreter of the Abruzzi and of their people, whose faces and souls he portrayed in fundamental and everlasting lines.’1 This striking pastel study may be related to one of the seated onlookers in Michetti’s very large painting of The Daughter of Jorio of 1895 (fig.1), in the Palazzo della Provincia in Pescara2, of which a somewhat smaller variant is in a private collection3. The subject of Michetti’s painting was inspired by a scene he and his friend Gabriele d’Annunzio witnessed in the artist’s home town of Tocco di Casauria one summer day, when a young woman, dressed in red, was chased through the town square by a number of drunken farm labourers. Several years after Michetti painted his work, the subject was adapted by d’Annunzio into the play La figlia di Iorio, written in 1903 and first performed the following year. The play, which takes place in the Abruzzi and contains dialogue in the Abruzzese dialect as well as local proverbs and rhymes, tells the story of a love between an outcast girl, accused of being a witch, and the shepherd Aligi, who is betrothed to a woman he does not love. The present sheet would appear to be an unused or initial study for the head of the second man from the left4 in the painting of The Daughter of Jorio, for whom the model may have been the artist and musician Paolo De Cecco, another member of Michetti’s circle at the Conventino. A related grisaille study of what appears to be the same model as in the present sheet (fig.2), more definitively related to the seated figure in the painting of The Daughter of Jorio, is in a private collection5. A pen and ink study for the grisaille is in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples6. A similar youth in an identical cap also appears in Michetti’s design for the cover of the book Abruzzo forte e gentile: Impressioni d’occhio e di cuore by Primo Levi, published in 18837.
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42 ROSA BONHEUR Bordeaux 1822-1899 Thomery The Call of the Stag Pastel on brown paper, laid down on board. Signed Rosa Bonheur in brown chalk at the lower left. 490 x 638 mm. (19 1/4 x 25 1/8 in.) PROVENANCE: Arthur Tooth and Sons Ltd., London; Acquired from them in April 1932 by Adolf Streuli, Zurich1; Thence by descent until 2018. One of the foremost animalier painters of the 19th century, Marie-Rosalie (always known as Rosa) Bonheur was the eldest child of the minor painter Raymond Bonheur, from 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, 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 Paris. 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, who 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, Bonheur 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 of the Légion d’Honneur; the first female artist to be admitted into the order. After an absence of more than a decade she again exhibited her work in Paris at the Salon of the Exposition Universelle in 1867. One of the most famous and honoured artists of the day, Rosa Bonheur continued to work with much success, enjoying a lucrative market for her animal paintings in France, England and America, until her death at the Château de By in 1899. The four-day auction of the contents of Bonheur’s studio, held in Paris in June 1900, included a total of 1,835 works by the artist, including eight hundred paintings, two hundred watercolours, almost 750 drawings and pastels, and sixteen sketchbooks. Rosa Bonheur spent much of her career making careful studies of animals at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and other zoos, as well as at slaughterhouses and horse fairs. She also occasionally performed dissections at the Ecole nationale vétrinaire d’Alfort in Paris. The artist kept several animals – including a stag named Jacques – in her menagerie at the Château de By, and made numerous studies of them, as well as from animals which had recently been shot. This large pastel is datable to the decade of the 1890s, when Bonheur turned more towards the medium of pastel in order to create intense, luminous effects in her landscapes. The setting is the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, which was once home to numerous stags, roes and roebucks, as well as wild boar, rabbits and pheasants. A very similar landscape setting at Fontainebleau is seen in a large lithograph by Bonheur, signed and dated 1865, depicting a stag and several deer in identical terrain2.
As an early account of the artist noted, ‘Another change in the Fontainebleau forest also caused deep regret in the heart of Rosa Bonheur. I refer to the drying up of the ponds, which seems to be in course all over the region. She thought this waning symbolised the gradual decline of her own life. This disappearance of the water in the neighbourhood of the Gorge aux Loups removed still another attraction from that spot. In those earlier days, the Mare aux Fées, now scarcely more than a marshy hollow, contained shallow but limpid water, while its banks and the plateau roundabout were covered by a short, thick turf, in the midst of which rose up those healthy isolated oaks. At night the moon would light up the whole scene most beautifully, and then it was that Rosa Bonheur, hidden behind a tree or shrub, would lie for hours together, watching the stags who would come there from miles around in order to quench their thirst, and who, in the autumn, when in heat, would lock antlers and fight sturdily on the banks. Many were the studies of combating stags that Rosa Bonheur bore away in her mind from the Mare aux Fées, and transferred to canvas early next morning in her studio.’3 Among thematically and stylistically comparable works by Rosa Bonheur is a very large pastel on canvas of A Stag and Three Doe in a Misty Mountainous Landscape, signed and dated 1897, which appeared at auction in 19854, and The King of the Forest, also dated 1897 (fig.1), which was sold at auction in 20075. Two similarly sizeable pastels of A Stag in the Mist and Stag and Deer, Morning Effect were both exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 18976; the latter work reappeared at auction in New York in 20017. Annie-Paule Quinsac has confirmed the attribution of this pastel to Rosa Bonheur.
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43 THÉO VAN RYSSELBERGHE Ghent 1862-1926 Saint-Clair Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter, Élisabeth Van Rysselberghe Pastel. Signed with the artist’s monogram and dated 7 août 96 VR in blue chalk at the upper right. 563 x 380 mm. (22 1/8 x 15 in.) PROVENANCE: The artist’s wife, Maria Van Rysselberghe, Brussels; By descent to the sitter, Élisabeth Van Rysselberghe, Brussels; Thence by descent to her illegitimate daughter, Catherine Elisabeth Van Rysselberghe (Gide), Switzerland; Private collection, Paris; Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 1 December 2006, lot 7; Private collection. LITERATURE: Emile Verhaeren, ‘Théo van Rysselberghe’, Ver Sacrum: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung Bildender Kuenstler Oesterreichs, November 1899, illustrated p.10; Camille Mauclair, ‘Théo van Rysselberghe’, L’art décoratif, February 1903, illustrated in colour as frontispiece, facing p.41; Christian M. Nebehay, Gustav Klimt: Dokumentation, Vienna, 1969, p.184, fig.273; Ronald Feltkamp, Théo Van Rysselberghe 1862-1926: Catalogue raisonné, Brussels, 2003, p.310, no.1896-007; Catherine Gide et al, Théo Van Rysselberghe Intime, exhibition catalogue, Le Lavandou, 2005, p.103, no.30 (with incorrect dimensions), illustrated in colour p.49; Le chemin des peintres: Saint-Clair-Le Lavandou, Le Lavandou, 2006, p.9 [untraced]; Brussels, Centre for Fine Arts and The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Théo Van Rysselberghe, exhibition catalogue, 2006, p.257, illustrated in colour p.220; Valérie Duponchelle, ‘Sous le pinceau de Théo Van Rysselberghe’, Le Figaro, 1 December 2006, p.29. EXHIBITED: Vienna, Wiener Secession, Austellung der Vereinigten bildenden Künstler Österreichs, 1899, probably no.50; Brussels, Galerie Georges Giroux, Théo Van Rysselberghe: exposition d’ensemble, 1927, no.1 (‘Élisabeth’); Ghent, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rétrospective Théo van Rysselberghe, 1962, no.206; Luxembourg, Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art, Théo van Rysselberghe 1862-1926, 1962, no.75; Le Lavandou, Espace Culturel du Lavandou, Théo Van Rysselberghe intime, 2005, no.30; Brussels, Centre for Fine Arts, and The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Théo Van Rysselberghe, 2006, unnumbered. A gifted painter and draughtsman, Théo Van Rysselberghe studied at the Academy in his native Ghent and first exhibited his work in 1880 before completing his artistic training in Brussels, at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, where he studied with Jean-François Portaels. He was a member of the Belgian artist’s society L’Essor and in 1883 was among the founder members of the more avant-garde group Les XX, who rejected academism and rebelled against the artistic standards of their time. It was through this artistic circle that Van Rysselberghe met such influential artists as James Ensor, Fernand Khnopff and James McNeill Whistler. A pivotal moment in Van Rysselberghe’s development as an artist came in 1886, at the eighth Impressionist exhibition in Paris, where he encountered Georges Seurat’s monumental pointillist canvas A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, painted between 1884 and 1886. This led Van Rysselberghe to experiment with the pointillist technique, and from 1886 onwards he was working in a Neo-Impressionist manner, becoming one of the leading exponents of pointillism in Belgium. In 1897 Van Rysselberghe left Brussels for Paris, where he worked on the anarchist journal Le Temps nouveaux. He continued working in a pointillist style until around 1907. Among his most significant later commissions was for an enormous painting to decorate a stair landing in the Hôtel Solvay on the Avenue Louise in Brussels, commissioned by the architect Victor Horta and completed and installed in 1902. A frequent visitor to the South of France, Van Rysselberghe settled permanently at Saint-Clair, near Le Lavandou, in 1911. Van Rysselberghe was a superb portraitist, and much of his early reputation was based on his portraiture, which also accounted for a large portion of the works that he exhibited. While in the 1880s he produced mainly portraits of family and friends, by the following decade he was receiving numerous lucrative commissions for portraits, which earned the artist a tidy income. Over a period of
around fifteen years, between 1889 and 1904, Van Rysselberghe produced some thirty or so splendid portraits in the pointillist style, and he may be claimed as one of the leading portraitists of the NeoImpressionist movement. Unlike many other Neo-Impressionist artists, however, his portraits were not cool or inflexible in appearance. As the Belgian writer and journalist Camille Lemonnier, writing in 1906, noted of the artist, ‘Practically alone, Van Rysselberghe, at least, knew how to retain the free play of life in his figures, which in the works of his contemporaries are often stiff and rigid. With him, they have action, gesture, attitude; they undulate with rhythm and suppleness.’1 This splendid pastel is a portrait of the artist’s only child, Élisabeth Van Rysselberghe (1890-1980), who is depicted here at the age of five. The artist made several portraits of Élisabeth, whose godfather was the Belgian writer and art critic Emile Verhaeren, from her childhood to young adulthood. (This pastel portrait was, in fact, first illustrated in an article by Verhaeren devoted to Van Rysselberghe, published in the November 1899 issue of Ver Sacrum, the official periodical of the Vienna Secession.) A similar painted portrait of Élisabeth at about the same age and with the same bow in her short blonde hair (fig.1), is in a private collection2. Sylvia Beach, the American-born bookseller and publisher who owned the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company, once described Élisabeth as ‘a handsome, rather boyish girl’3, and she always seems to have kept her hair fairly short. In 1911 the young Élisabeth Van Rysselberghe had a brief but intense affair with the English poet Rupert Brooke, with whom she maintained a correspondence until his death from septicaemia in 1915, which left her devastated. A few years after this portrait was drawn, when Élisabeth was nine years old, her parents met the writer André Gide, who was to become close to both Théo and his wife Maria. Gide and Théo exchanged countless letters over many years, while the artist’s wife Maria kept a journal-cum-diary of Gide’s life, unbeknownst to him, for over thirty years. Their daughter Élisabeth was to have an affair with Gide, who was twenty-one years her senior, and had a daughter by him in 1923. As her mother Maria Van Rysselberghe noted of Élisabeth, ‘She was as if subjugated by Gide, attracted by a force to which, no doubt, she gave no name and which would later flourish.’ Élisabeth raised their child on her own, causing something of a scandal at the time, since she also refused to divulge the identity of the girl’s father, even to close relatives. Although Gide was devoted to both Élisabeth and his daughter, he too kept his paternity a secret from almost everyone he knew. Élisabeth eventually married the writer Pierre Herbart, Gide’s secretary, in 1931. The present sheet remained in the sitter’s family for over a century, until 2006. After Elisabeth’s death in 1980 it passed to her illegitimate daughter with André Gide, Catherine Elisabeth Van Rysselberghe (1923-2013), who had only discovered the identity of her true father when she was thirteen years old.
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44 GIOVANNI BOLDINI Ferrara 1842-1931 Paris A Man Playing a Piano in the Artist’s Studio Pencil. Signed Boldini in black chalk at the lower centre. 363 x 268 mm. (14 1/4 x 10 1/2 in.) PROVENANCE: Jean-Gabriel Domergue, Paris1; Thence by descent to a private collection; Eric Turquin, Paris, in 2007; Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2008; Private collection, London. EXHIBITED: New York, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd. at Adam Williams Fine Art Ltd., An Exhibition of Master Drawings and Paintings, 2008, no.46. Giovanni Boldini painted and drew numerous views of the interior of his two studios in Paris; the first on the Place Pigalle, where he worked soon after his arrival in Paris in 1872, and the second on the Boulevard Berthier, to which he moved in July 1886, after it had been vacated by John Singer Sargent. As Sarah Lees has written, ‘In the mid-1880s Boldini began a distinctive and very personal artistic exploration…He increasingly turned his attention to the interiors of his house and studio in a series of works that reveal a compelling universe of formal subjects and an unparalleled approach to communicating emotions and ideas…[Boldini] began using the spaces of his studio as a stage upon which to portray visits from friends, artists, and critics, or musical evenings that he attended or organized.’2 This fine drawing depicts a man playing a piano in Boldini’s studio on the Boulevard Berthier. Although the identity of the sitter remains a mystery, the same man appears in a small oil painting of The Pianist in the Studio (fig.1) of around 1910, today in a private collection3. The painting depicts a corner of Boldini’s studio, with the unknown man seated at the artist’s piano in front of the painter’s full-length pastel portrait of Emiliana Concha de Ossa, propped against the wall in the background4. What may be the same pianist also appears in a large pastel drawing in the Museo Boldini in Ferrara5, and again at the left edge of an easel picture of The Singer of c.1884 (fig.2), in the Fondazione Carife collection at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Ferrara6.
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45 GEORGES CLAIRIN Paris 1843-1919 Belle-Îsle-en-Mer Claudea Flegans: An Allegory of the Sea Pastel, watercolour and gouache on board. Signed and dedicated à Madlle de Villers / hommage respecteux / de son ami / G. Clairin in pencil at the lower left. 519 x 247 mm. (20 3/8 x 9 3/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to a Mademoiselle de Villers (according to the dedication at the lower left), possibly Suzanne Jacobina Bernheim de Villers, Paris; Galerie Tanagra, Paris, in 1974; Galerie Mona, Paris, in 1986; Private collection, Paris; Galerie Coligny, Paris, in 1993; Private collection, Paris. LITERATURE: ‘Selection: A selection from some of the fine works of art and antiques on the international market’, The Connoisseur, April 1975, p.306, fig.1; Delphine Montalant and Ian Millman, ed., Le Symbolisme et la femme, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Toulon, Pau and Marcq-en-Barœul, 1986, p.61, no.8 (entry by Françoise Hugont). EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Tanagra, Les Perfectionnistes 1843-1917: Peintres du réel et de l’imaginaire, 1974-1975, no.1; Paris, Mairie du 9e arrondissement (Délégation à l’action artistique de la Ville de Paris), and elsewhere, Le Symbolisme et la femme, 1986, no.8; Tokyo, Isetan Museum of Art, and elsewhere, Terres d’inspiration des peintres de Pont-Aven, Nabis et Symbolistes, 1987, no.126; Paris, Galerie Coligny, Rêveries, Symbolisme et Croix-Rose, 1993 [number unknown]. Georges-Jules-Victor Clairin entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1861, and there studied under Isidore Pils and François-Edouard Picot. He first exhibited his work at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1866, and continued to do so, with much success, throughout his career, winning a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle in 1889. In 1868 Clairin accompanied the painter Henri Regnault on a trip through Spain and Morocco, where he was particularly taken with Moorish architecture and costumes. In Morocco he met the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny, and together the two artists visited Tetuan, while Clairin also travelled in Italy with the Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gerôme. Apart from the easel pictures and illustrations for which he was highly regarded, Clairin received a number of public commissions, notably the ceiling painting for the foyer of the Opéra in Paris, painted in 1874. This was the first of several decorations that Clairin would produce for hôtels particuliers, châteaux, theatres and other public buildings over the course of his career, including paintings for the Bourse de Commerce, the Sorbonne and the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. Known to his friends by the nickname ‘Jojotte’, Clairin was a popular member of artistic society in Belle Epoque Paris, and was associated with an elegant crowd of writers, actors, artists, musicians and socialites. He was best known for his numerous paintings of the actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was a close friend and often hosted the artist at her country home. Bernhardt regarded Clairin as her preferred painter, and he painted her numerous times, both in several of her stage roles as well as in more informal surroundings; two of the finest of his portraits of the actress are today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tourcoing and the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris. Also a noted painter of Orientalist subjects, Clairin travelled to Egypt with the composer Camille Saint-Saëns in 1895, although he was taken ill and was unable to cross the Sinai desert as he had wished. He exhibited his work at the Salon des Artistes Français, the Salon des Peintres Orientalistes Français and the Societé Coloniale des Artistes Français, as well as at the Salon des Artistes Algériens et Orientalistes in Algiers. The artist was made a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1897, four years before a major exhibition of his work was held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. A large number of paintings, watercolours and drawings by Clairin were dispersed in two sales of the contents of his studio in Paris in 1920, the year after his death.
Apart from his better-known historical and Orientalist scenes and landscapes, Clairin also produced a small body of work in a more Symbolist vein, often devoted to an exotic theme as represented by an enigmatic female figure. As has been noted of the artist, ‘sometimes going beyond the deserts and the ocean, further than anything reality offered his gaze, he scaled the infinite, he threw himself into a pure dream and he anchored on the canvas adorable visions of women which satisfied his thirst for colour; these are figures of enchantresses, living flowers, possessing an original capriciousness, in a languid pose, an unexpected event where the painter found the perfect opportunity for an innovative effort of decoration.’1 Often associated with a marine motif in Clairin’s personal mythology, women were a constant source of inspiration for the painter, while the theme of the sea, and in particular the wave, was a popular subject among Symbolist artists of the 19th century in France. Traditionally entitled ‘Claudea Flegans’, this large and striking drawing, executed in a combination of watercolour, pastel and gouache, appears to represent an allegorical depiction of the seaweed which ensured the safety of sailors and seamen, and is also symbolic of the rich bounty of the sea. A similar subject appears in Clairin’s well-known painting La Grande Vague (The Great Wave), painted in 1898 and exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français that year and at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 (fig.1). A finished preparatory drawing in watercolour and gouache for La Grande Vague was in a private collection in Paris in 19862, while another study for the painting recently appeared at auction in France3; both are similar in spirit to the present sheet. Also akin to the drawing here exhibited is a remarkable watercolour and gouache study of a nymph with a coral-like headdress, dated 1899 and dedicated by Clairin to the glass and jewellery designer René Lalique (fig.2), which was sold at auction in London in 20084, and a related drawing in black and white chalk that appeared at auction in Paris in 20175. Like many of Georges Clairin’s finished watercolours, this large sheet was almost certainly drawn as an independent work of art. Indeed, many of the artist’s most elaborate drawings and watercolours bear dedications to his friends and were presented to them as gifts, and the present sheet is no exception. The recipient of this drawing may have been Suzanne Bernheim de Villers (1883-1961), who in November 1901 married the art dealer Gaston Bernheim de Villers.
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46 GUSTAV KLIMT Vienna 1862-1918 Vienna Study of a Seated Old Woman with her Hand to her Head Pencil on buff wove paper. Signed and dedicated FRAU / MARIA NEBEHAY / freundlichst / zugeeignet / GUSTAV KLIMT in pencil at the lower left. Numbered 30 P in pencil at the lower left. 551 x 348 mm. (21 5/8 x 13 5/8 in.) PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist by Gustav and Maria Nebehay, Vienna, in 1917; By descent to their son, Christian M. Nebehay, Vienna; Thence by descent to a private collection, France, by 1984. LITERATURE: Fritz Novotny and Johannes Dobai, Gustav Klimt, with a Catalogue Raisonné of His Paintings, New York, 1968, p.347, under no.162; Alice Strobl, Gustav Klimt: Die Zeichnungen. Vol.II: 1904-1912, Salzburg, 1982, p.210, no.1864; Christian M. Nebehay, Gustav Klimt: From Drawing to Painting, London, 1994, p.230, note 5; Marc Restellini, ed., De Fra Angelico à Bonnard: Chefs-d’oeuvre de la Collection Rau, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2000-2001, p.212, under no.85; Tobias G. Natter, ed., Gustav Klimt: The Complete Paintings, Cologne, 2012, p.612, under no.184. EXHIBITED: Vienna, Christian M. Nebehay, 40 Auserwählte Handzeichnungen von Gustav Klimt, March 1960, no.30 (not for sale); Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Gustav Klimt / Egon Schiele. Zum Gedächtnis ihres Todes vor 50 Jahren: Zeichnungen und Aquarelle, 1968, no.83. Gustav Klimt was one of the foremost draughtsmen of the early 20th century. Over four thousand drawings by him survive today, though many more have been lost; the artist is known to have often thrown away many drawings, while some fifty sketchbooks were destroyed in a fire in 1945. The vast majority of Klimt’s drawings are drawn in black chalk or pencil, and sometimes in coloured pencils. The artist regarded his drawings purely as working studies, and thus never sold them, although he would occasionally give some away. When a sheet left his studio in this way he would invariably sign and often dedicate it, but otherwise Klimt rarely signed his drawings. In her catalogue raisonné of Klimt’s drawings, Alice Strobl identified the present sheet as a preparatory study for the artist’s painting Old Woman (Alte Frau) of 1909 (fig.1), today in a private collection1. This dark and somewhat sombre painting was first exhibited at the Internationale Kunstschau in Vienna in 1909, and again at the ninth Venice Biennale the following year, in a room devoted to works by Klimt. Old Woman (Alte Frau) is part of a small group of paintings with black backgrounds that Klimt produced between 1907 and 1910, in which the features of the subject appear dramatically from their shadowy surroundings. The work is unusual in that the artist rarely chose elderly people as the subject for his paintings, with the exception of a handful of portraits. As has been noted of the painting, ‘As a figure on its own, she stands for old age itself and is to be understood allegorically. Her bowed head and closed eyes convey the calm and self-absorption of the figure. Her face, marked by the years, suggests a quiet fatalistic melancholy…The isolation of the figure and its dissociation from life mark the despairing loneliness of old age.’2 In its almost Expressionistic mood and effect, Old Woman (Alte Frau) can be related to a handful of other works by Klimt of the same period such as Mother and Children (The Family) of 1909-1910 in the Belvedere in Vienna3. While the painting Old Woman (Alte Frau) displays a measured pathos, it lacks the sheer intensity of expression and gesture found in the present sheet – which is the only generally accepted study for the picture – in which the woman’s face is hidden by a bony hand and her body seemingly bent over in pain. Alice Strobl has noted that at the same time that Klimt made this drawing he was also working on the initial studies for his monumental painting Death and Life, today in the Leopold Museum in Vienna4, which appears to have been begun around 1908 but was not finished until two or three years later.
This large sheet was drawn not long after the young Egon Schiele first came into contact with Klimt. The two artists met in 1907, when Schiele was seventeen and Klimt was almost thirty years older and the acknowledged leader of the Vienna Secession group. Klimt took an interest in the young Schiele, encouraging him in his work and buying his drawings or exchanging them for his own, as well as finding him models and introducing him to potential collectors. While the strong stylistic influence of Klimt’s draughtsmanship is readily evident in Schiele’s earliest drawings of between 1907 and 1909, the present sheet offers a tantalizing glimpse of the younger artist’s impact on the older one; in the posture of the figure and, in particular, the expressive emphasis on the hands and fingers of the subject. The present sheet was one of around thirty drawings by Klimt acquired from the artist in 1917 by the Viennese art dealer Gustav Nebehay (1881-1935). Nebehay kept three of the drawings – including the present sheet – for his own collection, and in a letter of 12 October 1917, the day after a visit by Klimt to the dealer’s home, asked the artist to dedicate these three drawings5 to himself and his wife Maria: ‘Dear Professor! Herewith you will find the drawings returned. On the sheets that I and my wife have chosen for ourselves, I ask you to write [to] ‘Herrn Gustav’ or ‘Frau Maria N.’ so that the drawings can be withdrawn from the trade…I hope that yesterday evening was good for you and remain, with kind regards, yours, Gustav Nebehay.’6 Three months after this letter was written, Klimt suffered a severe stroke, and died on 6 February. The present sheet may therefore have been among the last drawings to be signed and dedicated by the artist. Gustav Nebehay, who kept this drawing throughout his life, assisted in the settlement of Klimt’s estate (as he also did for Schiele, who died eight months after Klimt) and came to establish his career dealing in works by both artists. This drawing was later inherited by Gustav and Maria Nebehay’s son, Christian Nebehay (1909-2003), who was likewise an art dealer and included the present sheet – albeit not for sale – in an exhibition of Klimt drawings at his Vienna gallery in 1960. Although Christian Nebehay also lent this drawing to an important exhibition of drawings by Klimt and Schiele at the Albertina in Vienna in 1968, it has not been exhibited since.
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47 ODILON REDON Bordeaux 1840-1916 Paris La cape rose Watercolour. Signed ODILON REDON in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed Odilon Redon / “La cape rose” and numbered 20753 in pencil on the verso. Inscribed Odile Redon / la cape rose in brown ink on a label pasted onto the backing board. Stamped P in black ink on the old backing board. 247 x 173 mm. (9 3/4 x 6 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, and by descent to his widow, Camille Redon; Acquired from her in 1916 by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris; Acquired from them in December 1917 by J. Laroche, Paris; Sam Salz, New York; His wife, Marina Salz, New York; Private collection; Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 9 May 2000, lot 312; Private collection, California. LITERATURE: Alec Wildenstein, Odilon Redon: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint et dessiné. Vol.I: Portraits et figures, Paris, 1992, p.181, no.456. EXHIBITED: Paris, Bernheim-Jeune & Cie., Paysages d’après nature (peinture à l’huile), aquarelles et dessins par Odilon Redon (1840-1916), 1917, no.55 ter (as ‘Figure nue, palmes, roue’); New York, The Museum of Modern Art and Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Bresdin, 1961-1962, no.66. For the first thirty years of his career Odilon Redon worked almost exclusively in black, producing his ‘noirs’ in charcoal and chalk; drawings he described as ‘mes ombres’, or ‘my shadows’, dominated by strange and unsettling images of fantastic creatures, disembodied heads and masks, solitary eyes, menacing spiders and other dreamlike forms. Towards the end of the 19th century, however, he began to develop a new emphasis on colour, chiefly using the medium of pastel but also watercolour, oil paint and distemper. Indeed, after about 1900 Redon seems to have almost completely abandoned working in black and white. Like his noirs, his pastels of floral still lives and portraits were popular with a few collectors, and several were included in exhibitions in Paris and abroad. Nevertheless, his work remained unpopular with the public at large, and it was left to a few enlightened collectors to support the artist in his later years. Redon’s use of watercolour is characteristic of the last decade or so of his career, ‘when he turned from working primarily in black to enthusiastically embrace color. Indeed, the watercolors seem to have had a somewhat more private role in his oeuvre than his work in other media. Although he discussed his noirs, or fusains (charcoal drawings), his prints, pastels, and paintings in his correspondence – and in his posthumously published writings on art – watercolor is never discussed. The mature watercolors, however, treat themes that concerned the artist throughout his career, and some...are complete and accomplished works of art.’1 Redon’s watercolours reflect a more reserved side of his experiments with colour, and seem to have been done for his own pleasure. His late watercolours were never exhibited in his lifetime, and seem to have been retained by the artist until his death, after which a number of examples were sold by his widow to a few collectors. Redon’s work as a watercolourist was first seen by the public only in posthumous exhibitions, notably at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in 1917, in which the present sheet was included, and the Galerie Barbazanges in 1920. Throughout his career Redon produced paintings, pastels and drawings of heads in profile, often idealized, sometimes grotesque, and always somewhat mysterious. Datable to the early years of the 20th century, this small, vibrant watercolour – which was last exhibited in 1961 – depicts a figure enclosed by a sort of colourful aura or nimbus, a motif found in several of Redon’s compositions of the first and second decades of the 20th century. Like much of the artist’s work, the subject of the present sheet remains characteristically enigmatic, though it may be loosely grouped with around fifty paintings, pastels and drawings which are dominated by the theme of figures with their eyes closed.
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48 GLYN PHILPOT, RA London 1884-1937 London The Head of a Black Man (‘Billy’) Charcoal, heightened with white chalk, on brown paper. 275 x 261 mm. (10 7/8 x 10 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to Jessica and Dorothy Leeson; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 23 June 1994, lot 127; The artist’s niece, Gabrielle Cross; The Fine Art Society, London, in 1997. EXHIBITED: London, The Fine Art Society, Glyn Philpot RA: Paintings, drawings and sculptures from the Estate of Gabrielle Cross, 1997-1998, no.30. Born in Clapham, Glyn Warren Philpot studied at the Lambeth School of Art in London and, later, at the Académie Julian in Paris. Among his earliest paintings were portraits of his family and friends, since he could not afford professional models, and in 1904 he first showed a picture at the Royal Academy. He also began organizing small exhibitions, at borrowed studios and galleries, in order to bring his work to a wider audience. In 1906 he exhibited at the Society of Portrait Painters, and also began working from the first of a series of studios in Chelsea. Four years later he had his first significant one-man exhibition in a London art gallery, which was a modest critical and commercial success. Aptly described, by one friend who met the artist at around this time, as ‘a young man of brilliant powers who nevertheless was a traditionalist from the start and not a revolutionary’1, Philpot counted among his early accomplishments a portrait of a Spanish bullfighter, painted in 1909, that received much critical praise, and a painting of The Marble Worker of 1911, which won the Gold Medal at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh two years later. A member of the International Society in 1912, he exhibited there for the next twelve years. Philpot developed a successful career as a society portrait painter, earning a considerable income from between ten and twelve commissions each year. He also produced a small number of sculptures in bronze. Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1915, he became the youngest Royal Academician on his full election to the institution in 1923, and the same year was the subject of a large retrospective exhibition at the Grosvenor Galleries. Much admired for his refined draughtsmanship, confident technique and sense of colour, Philpot made regular trips to Italy to study the Old Masters, and sent paintings to the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy. In 1927 he painted a mural for St. Stephen’s Hall in Westminster, and in 1930 was honoured with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale. In 1931 Philpot decided to move to Paris, which was to prove a turning point in his career. It was in the early 1930s that Philpot’s style changed dramatically, under the influence of Picasso and Matisse, and the art that he encountered in Paris. Bored by portraiture, he began to experiment with new techniques and subjects in paintings which he first showed at the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1932. His newer work found much less acceptance with critics and collectors, however, and many were quite scathing in their assessment of it. (A headline in The Scotsman in 1932 declared ‘Glyn Philpot “Goes Picasso”’.) Philpot lost several of his former clients, who were unhappy with his new, more ‘modern’ style of painting, and his income suffered greatly, forcing him to sell his country house in West Sussex. During the 1930s exhibitions of his recent paintings and sculptures were held at the Leicester and Redfern Galleries in London, while he continued to travel abroad; to North Africa, Spain and France. He also began producing still life compositions and watercolours, which were easier to sell; the watercolours were exhibited at the Syrie Maugham Gallery in 1935.
Philpot’s early death in December 1937, at the age of fifty-three, resulted in a memorial exhibition at the Tate Gallery the following summer. The subsequent turmoil of the Second World War, however, meant that his work was somewhat forgotten in later years. As one critic noted, writing on the occasion of an exhibition of the artist’s paintings at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1976, ‘Philpot’s unerring skill both in drawing and handling of paint, the wide-ranging originality of his subject pictures, and the careful yet sensitive characterisation of his portraits all compare favourably with the half dozen or so early twentieth-century British artists who have become household names. How is it, then, that with these qualities, one of the most sought-after society portrait painters of his time…can have slipped so quickly from the public mind?’2 Philpot’s superb draughtsmanship is readily evident in his work as a painter, and the present sheet is one of the earliest examples of an interest in the black male form that was to be a recurring motif in his oeuvre throughout his career. As his biographer has pointed out, ‘Black models…were not common in the work of artists of Glyn’s own time and earlier…What makes Glyn unique was that black men became a major theme in his paintings done in London and Paris, and the inspiration of some of his best work.’3 This charcoal drawing may be dated to c.1912-1913, and depicts one of the artist’s first black models, identified only as ‘Billy’ in a drawing exhibited at the Modern Society of Portrait Painters in 19134, where it was shown alongside a small bust-length painting of the same sitter (fig.1), now in a private collection5. Both the drawing and the painting of ‘Billy’ – the first in a long series of depictions of black men by Philpot – were purchased at the exhibition by the politician and art collector Sir Philip Sassoon, who later commissioned a portrait from the artist. (A powerful charcoal figure drawing of a standing male nude of c.1913, today in a private collection6, may also depict the same model.) ‘Billy’, the sitter of this drawing, reappears in Philpot’s large painting The Watcher on the Roof (fig.2) of 1913, which was acquired, the same year that it was painted, by the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa7. The present sheet may, in fact, have been intended as a preparatory study for the Ottawa painting. Writing in 1921, the art critic Sir Claude Phillips noted of Glyn Philpot that ‘He has the gift, uncommon in these days, of bringing out all that is latent in the negro type of pathetic appeal. Rubens and Van Dyck, Rembrandt and his followers amongst the seventeenth century Dutch painters had this gift, but among moderns Mr. Glyn Philpot stands alone in the seriousness, the pathos, with which he has approached and solved an attractive problem.’8
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49 JAN TOOROP Poerworedjo 1858-1928 The Hague Portrait of the Rev. Dr. Jan Heldring Charcoal and pencil. Signed JthToorop in pencil at the upper right. Inscribed Jan Heldring, with other illegible inscriptions and dimensions in pencil in the right margin. The drystamp of the stationers Boekhandel A. J. Nuss, Amsterdam (not in Lugt) stamped at the lower right. 455 x 360 mm. (17 7/8 x 14 1/8 in.) [image] 485 x 406 mm. (19 1/8 x 16 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: By descent to the sitter’s grandson, Ranulph Bye, Holicong, Pennsylvania1; Private collection, New Jersey. LITERATURE: Peter van der Coelen, ‘Een leven lang ‘smoelletjes maken’: Jan Toorop en de praktijk van het portretteren’, in Peter van der Coelen and Karin van Lieverloo, Jan Toorop Portrettist, exhibition catalogue, Nijmegen, 2003, p.29. Born and raised in Java in the Dutch East Indies, Jan (Johannes) Theodoor Toorop settled in Holland in 1872, at the age of fourteen. He studied in Delft, Amsterdam and Brussels, and in 1884 became a member of the Belgian artistic and literary group Les XX and exhibited with the group for several years thereafter. His early career saw the artist working in a variety of styles, sometimes concurrently, ranging from Realism to Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism. Toorop had his first exhibition in 1885, and after his marriage to an Englishwoman the following year divided his time between England, Brussels and The Hague, as well as the artist’s colony at Katwijk aan Zee in Holland. In the early 1890s Toorop began to work in a Symbolist vein, producing large, complex and highly finished drawings which are among his most famous works. By the turn of the century Toorop was established among the leading avant-garde artists in Holland, with his work influential in the development of the International Art Nouveau style. In 1905 Toorop converted to Roman Catholicism, which would have a profound impact on his work for the remainder of his career. He began to produce a large number of often overtly religious compositions, many of which were reproduced as prints or in facsimile and displayed in private homes throughout the Low Countries. By 1920 he was in poor health and largely confined to a wheelchair, with his left leg paralyzed. Nevertheless, he continued to produce numerous drawings and prints. Toorop was an extremely accomplished draughtsman, both in his use of a range of materials and in the effects he was able to achieve with them. Toorop produced a large number of drawn and painted portraits of family, friends and fellow artists, as well as many portraits – usually in the form of highly finished drawings – of some of the leading Dutch writers, poets, politicians, lawyers, musicians, composers and intellectuals of his day. Indeed, Toorop may justifiably be claimed as one of the finest Dutch portraitists of the early 20th century. Beginning in the early years of the century, at around the time of his conversion to Catholicism, he produced a number of striking portraits of priests and clergymen. (He was particularly active in this regard during the years between 1910 and 1913, when he made several arresting portraits of Jesuits at the Canisius College in Nijmegen.) Toorop’s avowed Catholicism did not, however, prevent him from making portraits of Protestant clergymen, of which the present sheet is a particularly fine example. This large pencil portrait of Dr. Jan Lodewijk Heldring (1852-1923), a pastor and member of the Dutch Reformed Church in Amsterdam2, is typical of Toorop’s portraiture in its precise and direct treatment of the head of the sitter. In many of his large-scale portrait drawings, the artist preferred to depict his subjects full face and head-on, seemingly in direct confrontation with the viewer.
50 EDOUARD VUILLARD Cuiseaux 1868-1940 La Baule Jos Hessel in the Drawing Room at the Château des Clayes Pencil, with touches of pastel, on a page from a sketchbook. 168 x 110 mm. (6 5/8 x 4 3/8 in.) PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, with the atelier stamp (Lugt 909c) at the lower right; Private collection, Paris. Most of Edouard Vuillard’s drawings are small in scale and intimate in nature. As one scholar has noted, ‘He observed and recorded assiduously, not just, one senses, with a view to accumulating studies that would be of possible use at a later date, but also as a function of the role he played in the society in which he moved, and an essential expression of the pleasure he took in his day-to-day surroundings.’1 Datable to the 1930s, the present sheet is drawn on a page from a sketchbook, and is typical of Vuillard’s drawings made in preparation for a portrait or interior scene. This drawing is, in fact, a preparatory sketch for a larger, more finished pastel drawing of the same composition (No.51 in this catalogue), which depicts the artist’s friend and dealer Jos (Joseph) Hessel at the Château des Clayes, his country estate near Versailles. A director of the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune before opening his own gallery in 1913, Jos Hessel (18591942) was by the 1920s one of the most important art dealers in Paris. He was Vuillard’s principal agent and dealer for the latter part of the artist’s career, while Lucy Hessel was to be the painter’s muse, model and, most likely, lover for almost forty years. As one scholar has described him, ‘Jos Hessel was one of the first art dealers of a kind that is familiar today: he sought out gifted contemporaries, found patrons and commissions for them, and looked after their interests in general…As an impresario, Hessel was energetic and resourceful and made himself indispensable. Shortly after 1900 Vuillard and the Hessels became inseparable, spending almost every evening together in the Hessels’ Paris apartment. During the summer Vuillard traveled or went to Brittany and Normandy with them, and in later years he became a semipermanent guest at their country houses on the outskirts of Paris.’2 The Hessels acquired the Château des Clayes in 1926, and Vuillard was to become a frequent visitor to the house, where he had his own room and a studio. Indeed, the château, conveniently close to Paris and with its large park designed by André Le Nôtre, became the artist’s rural retreat for the last decade of his life. As Kimberly Jones has noted, ‘The time he spent away from Paris in the countryside was essential to Vuillard’s productivity; it offered him repose, but also a change of scenery that helped expand his own perceptions of the world around him.’3 Sadly, the Château des Clayes no longer exists; it was burned down by the retreating German troops in 1944 and all that remains are two side towers. In later years Jacques Salomon, the artist’s nephew by marriage, recalled of Vuillard at the Château des Clayes that ‘he was constantly drawing his friends, and those who found his eye upon them knew they must hold the pose in which he had caught them...I can still picture Vuillard at a social gathering. He would suddenly look intently at a group...with a direct stare. Then his face would grow grave, and without taking his eyes off his subjects he would whip his notebook out of his pocket...and, without hesitation, start to draw. He worked with great speed, scarcely glancing at his paper, entirely preoccupied by the sight before him.’4
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51 EDOUARD VUILLARD Cuiseaux 1868-1940 La Baule Jos Hessel in the Drawing Room at the Château des Clayes Pastel on pink paper, laid down on board. Signed E Vuillard in brown ink at the lower right. 305 x 224 mm. (12 x 8 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist by Jos and Lucy Hessel, Paris and the Château des Clayes, near Versailles; By descent to their daughter, Lucie (Lulu) Grandjean-Hessel (Mme. Jacques Arpels), Paris1; Thence by descent until 2018. LITERATURE: Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Vuillard: The Inexhaustible Glance. Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, Milan, 2003, Vol.III, p.1575, no.XII-247 (where dated c.1930-1938). From around 1900 onwards Vuillard used mainly pastel for his drawings, and soon came to master the subtlety and vibrancy of this challenging medium. As the critic and art historian Claude Roger-Marx wrote, in one of the first monographs on the artist, ‘Vuillard often found expression by means of pastels’2, and indeed he made more extensive use of the medium than perhaps any French artist since Degas in the previous generation. Pastel was to become an essential part of Vuillard’s working process until the end of his career, used for landscape and figure studies, compositional drawings and still-life subjects, as well as in preparatory studies for portraits. The interior depicted in this pastel is the large drawing room or billiard room (fig.1) of the Château des Clayes, an early 19th century château near Versailles belonging to Vuillard’s close friends Jos and Lucy Hessel. The large canvas seen here hanging above the fireplace behind the seated figure of Jos Hessel is a painting of The Sleeping Diana of c.1924 by Ker-Xavier Roussel, Vuillard’s brother-in-law and fellow Nabis. The painting, which can be seen in photographs of the interior of Les Clayes in 19303, was destroyed with the rest of the château in a fire in 1944. A small-scale oil sketch (fig.2), for the painting is today in the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia4. Also seen in the present sheet, on top of the mantlepiece, is a small bust by the sculptor Aristide Maillol. The bust, which would appear to be a portrait of Lucy Hessel, is today in a French private collection5. Vuillard’s domestic interior scenes, which usually include members of his family and close friends, ‘are not intended as portraits, nor are they genre paintings in the true sense of the term. Rather, they are evocations of the private world of the artist’s personal experience...[and] provide a tantalizing view into a cloistered and rarefied world…’6 A stylistically comparable pastel by Vuillard depicting the top of the mantlepiece and the Maillol bust, with the Roussel painting behind, was on the art market in c.20047.
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52 PABLO PICASSO Málaga 1881-1973 Mougins Maternité (Mother and Child) Pencil. Dated and numbered by the artist 5.1.51 / IV in pencil at the upper right. Numbered 1088 / 24 in pencil on the verso. 269 x 210 mm. (10 5/8 x 8 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist (No.5323); By inheritance to the artist’s granddaughter, Marina Picasso, Cannes, Geneva and New York. Although motherhood and childhood are subjects that Picasso revisited throughout his career, the theme most notably presents itself in his oeuvre when the artist became a father himself. As his dealer and great champion Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler noted, ‘if one wanted to establish some sort of statistics of Picasso’s later subjects, it is quite certain that children would figure importantly. There is no esthetic reason for this. He has painted, drawn, etched, sculptured many children because he adores children, especially young ones…Even more so did he cherish and sketch his own children: Paulo, Maya, Claude, Paloma… The children painted or drawn by Picasso are of all ages. One can see them at every moment of their young lives. There are babies in the cradle, in their mother’s arms, children playing, Paulo riding a donkey, Maya with a little boat, Claude and Paloma with a little toy train.’1 Many of Picasso’s earliest works on the theme of children date from the 1920s, following the birth of his eldest son Paulo in 1921. More paintings and drawings of children were produced in the late 1930s, with the birth of his daughter Maya (b.1935), and again in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with numerous depictions of Claude (b.1947) and Paloma (b.1949), his children with Françoise Gilot. Interestingly, although the three grandchildren born in Picasso’s lifetime – Pablo, known as ‘Pablito’ (b.1949), Marina (b.1950) and Bernard (b.1959), who were the children of his son Paulo – were close in age to his own children, there are very few portraits of them. The only drawings the artist made of one of his grandchildren were six sketches of his youngest grandson Bernard Ruiz Picasso as a newborn baby2; all drawn on 9 November 1959 as a gift for the child and his mother, Christine Pauplin. In her memoirs, the artist’s grandaughter Marina Picasso recalls that she and her brother Pablito were never the subject of one of Picasso’s works. As she writes, ‘There isn’t a single hint of our existence in his work, not one drawing or painting. When we went to La Californie [Picasso’s home and studio in Cannes, where he lived between 1955 and 1961], we would search for ourselves desperately on the walls, secretly flipping through the catalogues and art books, trying to find our features in a faun, a bacchanal, or the kaleidoscope of a still life. We came across studies and paintings of Maya, Picasso’s daughter with Marie-Thérèse Walter; sketches and portraits of Claude and Paloma, his children with Françoise Gilot; of fisherman, his tailor, people we didn’t know, dogs, cats, birds, lobsters, guitars, coffee pots, fruit bowls, jugs, leeks…but not a single sketch of us, his direct heirs.’3 Drawn on January 5th, 1951, the present sheet is numbered IV and is one of a small group of drawings by Picasso of a mother and a female child, all drawn with a sharp pencil on the same day and on successive pages of a sketchbook4. This drawing was followed, in the sequence of sketches made that day, by two closely related studies, numbered V and VI, which share the same provenance as the present sheet. While the present sheet depicts the mother holding her infant in her lap, the two subsequent images drawn later the same day show her bringing the child to its cradle (fig.1)5, kissing her, and laying her down (fig.2)6.
It may be argued that, despite their intimacy and charm, these three drawings – which were unknown to Christian Zervos when he published his monumental catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s work – lack the sense of evident affection found in Picasso’s more finished portrait drawings of his daughter Paloma, and of the artist and his family, which date from just ten days later7. At the time these drawings were made, Picasso was supremely happy in his life with Françoise Gilot, and often drew his own children. Claude and Paloma were, however, by this time much older than the baby girl shown in the present sheet. As such, and despite Marina Picasso’s later protestations to the contrary, it may be tentatively suggested that this drawing, and the two related pencil studies executed the same day, may have been drawn on a visit by Picasso to his new granddaughter, the infant Marina, who would have been less than two months old at the time. The present sheet was until recently in the collection of Marina Ruiz Picasso, the only daughter of Picasso’s eldest son Paulo. Though her relationships with both her father and grandfather were extremely troubled, she was the only legitimate grandchild of the artist alive at the time of his death in 19738, and therefore received the largest inheritance, second only to that of Picasso’s second wife Jacqueline. Marina Picasso has also been the most vocal of the Picasso descendants in regards to her relationship, or lack thereof, with the artist; her memoir Picasso: My Grandfather details his neglect of her and her immediate family throughout his life. Nevertheless, as Picasso’s biographer, the late John Richardson, has noted, Marina Picasso ‘differs from the artist’s other five heirs in that she has made a point of exhibiting as much as possible of her magnificent collection in a succession of traveling exhibitions… As Marina says, “despite the resentment I felt for my grandfather, I owe this to his memory”. And, for students of modern art in cities which have never seen a Picasso retrospective, these exhibitions have been a revelation.’9 The present sheet from Marina Picasso’s collection, however, appears not to have previously been exhibited. A photo-certificate from Claude Picasso, dated 15 May 2017, accompanies the present sheet.
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53 DOMENICO GNOLI Rome 1933-1970 New York Roman Dreamer Pen and black and brown ink and black wash, over traces of a pencil underdrawing. Signed and dated D. Gnoli / 59 in black ink near the upper right corner. 686 x 615 mm. (27 x 24 1/2 in.) PROVENANCE: Arthur Jeffress Gallery, London, in 1960; Agota Anna Balkanyi, Lady Nicholas Sekers, London; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 7 December 1977, lot 278; Drue Heinz, London and New York. LITERATURE: ‘Mr. Dominic Gnoli’, The Times, 15 March 1960, p.6; Annie de Garrou Gnoli, ‘Catalogo ragionato’, in Vittorio Sgarbi, L’opera grafica di Domenico Gnoli, Milan, 1985, p.167, illustrated p.108, fig.82 (where dated 1959-1960); Mario Quesada, ‘Gnoli disegnatore: fonti e temi’, in Bruno Mantura, Domenico Gnoli 1933-1970, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 1987, illustrated p.19. EXHIBITED: London, Arthur Jeffress Gallery, Second London Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Dominic Gnoli, 1960, No.11 (illustrated on the cover of the catalogue). A precocious artist, Domenico Gnoli took private lessons in drawing and etching from the painter and printmaker Carlo Alberto Petrucci in Rome. He exhibited for the first time, aged just seventeen, at the Galleria La Cassapanca in Rome in 1950, and the following year his work was included in the exhibition Art Graphique Italien Contemporain at the Galerie Giroux in Brussels. After briefly studying theatre design at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, Gnoli began working as a scenographer, producing designs for stage sets and costumes for a production of The Merchant of Venice at the Schauspielhaus in Zurich in 1953, while the following year he worked on designs for a staging of As You Like It at the Old Vic Theatre in London that opened in 1955. Despite the makings of a successful career as a scenographer, however, in 1956 Gnoli decided to give up theatrical work – claiming that ‘it was distracting [him] from the essential’ – in order to concentrate on drawing and painting. He had lived between London, Paris and Rome before eventually settling in New York in 1956, where his friends included Leonard Bernstein, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jerome Robbins and Diana Vreeland. Solo exhibitions of Gnoli’s drawings and prints were held in New York in 1956, London and Rome in 1957, Rome in 1958, New York in 1959, and London in 1960. He also worked as a book illustrator, writing and illustrating Orestes or the Art of Smiling, published in London in 1960, and two years later provided illustrations for the American writer Norman Juster’s Alberic the Wise and Other Journeys. He also received commissions for illustrations for magazines as diverse as Fortune, Life, Sports Illustrated, Holiday, Show, Horizon and several others, and in 1968 was awarded a gold medal by the Society of Illustrators in New York. Gnoli is perhaps best-known today, however, for his paintings executed from 1964 onwards; large canvases in which the artist almost obsessively concentrates his attention on isolated details of clothing, hair and objects. Gnoli continued to have exhibitions of his work in Italy, France, Germany, England and America, where in 1969 his first solo exhibition of paintings was held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. The year before, while that exhibition was being planned, Gnoli wrote to a friend in New York: ‘I would hate you to think that I am just losing interest with all this, fooling myself with the idea that Janis will make a great painter out of me, and therefore I needn’t worry about drawings anymore. This would be mad, first because even if the show with him will do well it will only be a temporary success since the art scene is moving so fast that what is great today is shit tomorrow, second, I am, regardless of big money and glamour, a born
illustrator, and will not renegade myself.’1 Gnoli died of cancer in New York in April 1970, just over two weeks before his 37th birthday. The fantastic imagery, boundless wit and sheer technical virtuosity of Gnoli’s work continues to appeal to critics and collectors long after his untimely death. As the Italian writer and curator Francesco Bonami has recently written, ‘Gnoli journeys across the cosmos and visits imaginary societies. He invented his own planet and traveled there like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. As an artist, Gnoli was truly an aristocrat, ruling his imagination like a kingdom. He observed his planet from both ends of the telescope: From one end he was able to see a faraway world, with many little characters on many different stages; from the other end, as if looking into a microscope, he was able to get very close, like a flea.’2 Works by Domenico Gnoli are today in the collections of, among others, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Städel in Frankfurt, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Drawn in 1959, the present sheet may be associated with a group of pen and ink drawings by Gnoli; a series of views of the markets and restaurants of the city of Rome, mostly seen from high above, dating from between 1958 and 19603. As the artist noted of four other large-scale drawings from the same series, ‘Here are four of my ‘Roman’ drawings – I say Roman, not of Rome or about Rome, because, just like me, they are Roman by nature, not by vocation. Four Roman drawings then, done with care, with pedantic precision – a sort of inventory of the elements of the Rome in which I grew, possibly more a Rome I remember than a Rome I know. An inventory of umbrellas, chairs, crates, the tables of the sidewalk cafes, fish and vegetables stocked in the shady intimacy of small markets, the solemn and dark laundries – everything, in short, that moves on the cobblestones of the narrow, unpredictable streets of the old Rome. And the smells, the noise, and then at last the night…the empty wine shops – the ‘osterie’ as we call them – with the odds-and-ends remaining from some informal gathering, some ready to close with the chairs on the tables so the floor can be swept, only one table still set with the chairs around it, for the tired waiters’ dinners…and then the noise ceases, but the voices go on – the exclamative, mocking wise voices of the Romans. The wise voices of a wise city, these are – of skeptical, calm citizens removed from all urgency, removed quite often from these drawings too, so that the settings of their tranquil lives may speak for themselves...’4 As a review in The Times of the inaugural exhibition in London of Gnoli’s drawings, held at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in 1957, noted, ‘Mr. Gnoli’s drawings are complex, fantasticated, and full of busy goingson of a mildly satirical absurdity...The success of imaginative excursions of this sort depends largely on the ability of the never-never land that has been created to sustain a measure of internal plausibility by which even the most extravagant oddities become, in context, the correct and acceptable thing. The world of Mr. Gnoli’s drawings may seem a largely synthetic and artificial one, but it does establish a sense of its own private logic by its exorbitant amount of quite rational detail.’5 Three years later, a brief mention in The Times of Gnoli’s second London exhibition at the same gallery – in which the present sheet was included, serving as the cover of the catalogue – singled out this large drawing in particular: ‘Mr. Dominic Gnoli’s last London exhibition was of fantasticated drawings in which the fantasy lay as much in the subject-matter as in the highly elaborate pen technique. The drawings and paintings in his exhibition now at the Jeffress Gallery, 28, Davies Street, are seemingly concerned with more ordinary – even with “realist” – subjects, such as washer-women, piles of baskets, crates or folded linen, deserted beaches, and buildings. But a sense of fantasy and light humour still pervades them, in none more pleasantly than in the “Roman Dreamer”, stretched at ease on the tiled roof of his curious house.’6
54 HORST JANSSEN Hamburg 1929-1995 Hamburg Self-Portrait Pencil, with touches of brown chalk. Inscribed 5.40, and signed and dated 16 11 71 Janssen in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed 96 / Fest in pencil on the verso. 261 x 382 mm. (10 1/4 x 15 in.) PROVENANCE: Joachim Fest, Kronberg; Anonymous sale, Berlin, Villa Grisebach, 31 May 2012, lot 48; Bernd Schultz, Berlin. The German draughtsman, illustrator and printmaker Horst Janssen was raised in the city of Oldenburg by his mother and grandparents, and never knew his father. He studied between 1946 and 1951 at the Landeskunstschule in Hamburg, where his teacher was the painter and engraver Alfred Mahlau. (He was later offered a professorship at the Hamburg academy, but turned down the opportunity.) In 1948 he published a children’s book and in the early 1950s began developing his skills as a printer and lithographer. Hugely prolific, Janssen produced a large number of drawings, etchings, lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings characterized by dreamlike and often erotic imagery, creating a distinctive body of work – landscapes, still life subjects, portraits and self-portraits, often incorporating literary references and texts – that was quite unusual within the context of postwar European art. In the early part of his career he rarely exhibited his work outside Hamburg, and if he sold a print or drawing it was usually for a relatively modest amount – between 50 and 100 Marks for a print and between 200 and 850 Marks for a drawing – to a small coterie of collectors whom he knew. As he said at around this time, ‘I want to know who has my pictures. Out of vanity. Besides, I love them.’ Janssen’s first retrospective exhibition of almost 180 drawings and prints was held in 1965 at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover, leading the director of that institution, Wieland Schmied, to describe the artist as ‘the greatest draughtsman apart from Picasso. But Picasso is a different generation.’1 The exhibition later travelled to several cities in Germany and also to Basel, and led to Janssen’s work becoming much more widely known outside Hamburg. His output never slackened, and his intensely personal vision continued to find new avenues of expression. He also often created drawings and prints inspired by foreign works of art, and in 1972 published an appreciation of the printed landscapes of the 19th century Japanese artist Hokusai. During his lifetime, Janssen won several important prizes and awards – including the first prize for graphic art at the Venice Biennale of 1968 – and his drawings and prints were widely exhibited throughout Europe, as well as in America, Russia and Japan. Significant exhibitions of his work were held in Mannheim in 1976, at the Documenta VI in Kassel the following year, at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1980 and the Albertina in Vienna in 1982. Janssen died in Hamburg in 1995, at the age of sixty-five. Five years later the Horst Janssen Museum in the artist’s hometown of Oldenburg, dedicated to the artist’s work, was inaugurated. Horst Janssen obsessively drew self-portraits throughout his career, often showing his distorted full face from unusual angles and often in extreme close-up. As has recently been noted, ‘Like Rembrandt, whom Janssen portrayed in watercolour and etching multiple times and whose self-portraits he intertwined in his own…, Janssen obviously examines himself in the mirror. He comes so close to it that the magnification is accompanied by a hyperreal exaggeration and distortion. The surface structure of the skin, its wrinkles and blemishes are precisely defined, nearly ugly, relentlessly real and, at the same time, completely unreal… Whereas viewers of a Janssen self-portrait are at first inclined to return the gaze of the artist, they soon notice that the images are not at all intended in this way. The close-up perspective seems perversely intimate – you are that close only to yourself.’2 Drawn on the 16th of November 1971, the present sheet can be related to a similar self-portrait drawing of about the same date (fig.1), in a private collection in London, which is the artist’s design for the poster for an exhibition of his prints at the Galerie Kornfeld in Zurich in November 1971. Another
stylistically comparable self-portrait drawing, dated 10 March 1972 and also depicting the artist’s thenlover Gesche Tietjens, is in a different private collection3. As Janssen himself wrote, in the introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of his work in 1970, ‘Well – I was born, I played, I was filled with wisdom and now I sit here and draw; drawings for the market, drawings for presents, self portrait-drawings and drawings of every kind…I achieve the greatest effect however in the drawings of the third category – the self portraits. Partly because this discipline is hardly cultivated at all these days, partly because a comedian-like gift puts me in the position of being able to make my face appear quite convincingly, according to requirements, sometimes gay and young, sometimes melancholic, sometimes wild, and at other times bloated to the point of being destroyed, yet directly stimulating. My drawing ability in portraying the actual mirror image in a very exact manner, but with the very unusual yet important understatement, thus created the impression of that honesty so much desired by the public.’4 The artist further described the process of making a self-portrait drawing: ‘So I sit down in the morning under the lamp when it is still dark and look across at myself for a moment: the right side of my face in reflection is shadowed. A light-hearted mischievousness does not make me see the most intense darkness a little to the right of the right extremity of the reflection of my face, where the most intense darkness actually is, but in the middle of the same to the right next to the nose, and the top and bottom lips running into the nick of the chin. The left eye strikes me as being quiet, soft and large because its gaze is not fixed on any one object. From this moment on I have to be careful not to destroy this completely ‘Nazarene’ expression, by not looking at my reflection too penetratingly or by not making it grin by remembering a joke. This can only happen as a form of recovery after the fixing of a momentary image. Once this has happened, the two of us can allow ourselves a coffee, a cigarette and a short chat to recover, which affords us considerable pleasure since we have the same needs and pleasures in everything. In the ensuing period the already determined concept is filled in quasi-automatically. From time to time I glance across at him seeking correction or merely confirmation and he glances back to me, showing a sympathetic understanding for my intentions. Thus this tender portrait comes to an end by itself, in this corresponding hour of the morning. I also put a crude signature underneath just of figures indicating the time – like a concluding farewell as an emphatic ending to a successful and clarifying discussion. And then a few seconds afterwards, when I am alone, I laugh out loud: Duped. And the day can begin.’5 The present sheet once belonged to the artist’s close friend, the German historian, editor and critic Joachim Fest (1926-2006), who knew Janssen for over twenty-five years and assembled a large collection of his graphic work. Fest published two books on the artist; the first, Horst Janssen: Selbstbildnis von fremder Hand, appeared in 2001 and was followed five years later by Die schreckliche Lust des Auges: Erinnerungen an Horst Janssen, a memoir of their long friendship.
1
55 ERIC FISCHL Born 1948 Untitled (Standing Nude) Watercolour on thick paper. Signed and dated fischl 2000 in pencil at the lower right. 680 x 3309 mm. (26 3/4 x 13 in.) PROVENANCE: A gift from the artist to the previous owner. Raised on Long Island, Eric Fischl is one of the finest American painters to emerge in the 1980s, graduating from the California Institute of the Arts in 1972. Fischl’s first solo exhibition was held while teaching in Nova Scotia in 1975, and after he moved to New York in 1978 a show at the Edward Thorpe Gallery in 1980 launched his career there. The following year, his controversial presentation of the sizeable painting Bad Boy led to a degree of international renown. In the catalogue of an exhibition at the Waddington Gallery in London in 1989, the artist’s impact on the art world was noted: ‘When Fischl first entered prominence and notoriety as an artist – the initial shock of his subject matter, its patently sexual material, apart – the most astonishing feature was his willingness to conceive of the power of painting to tell stories, to be a form of fiction.’1 Fischl’s work is represented in numerous American, Canadian and European museums, and he has had solo exhibitions in galleries and museums across the globe. Although Fischl is best known for his provocative and large-scale paintings, he is a prolific and talented artist across several media, including photography and printmaking as well as sculpture, and has also worked on projects from artist’s books to stage designs. Characteristic of all of his work, in whatever medium, is an abiding interest in the human figure. However, as the artist has stated, ‘I make a distinction between “pose” and “posture”. I am not interested in poses. That is an abstraction. It is a concern of formalists. I am interested in posture. Posture is the shape the body takes with the accumulation of experience. Posture reveals in very explicit and precise terms the relationship an individual has with their soul. Posture is the externalization of the internal conflict we all experience.’2 A gifted draughtsman and printmaker, Fischl notes, ‘I have over the course of my career used all kinds of different materials such as charcoal, crayons, watercolor, oil, the graphic techniques of etching, lithography and monotypes. Each one has its restrictions and its demands and I like using them for precisely those reasons. I have had better luck with some materials and less with others. For the artist, the properties specific to a material will unlock the creative flow or they will block it. It is essential that an artist finds the materials which will unlock and expand his imagination and express his feelings. I prefer to draw with a brush and my fingers rather than with a pencil or charcoal. I prefer to use color rather than black and white. Using color is like drawing with light. I prefer illumination over rendering…The difference between drawing and painting for me has been that suspension of certain kinds of criteria I have for painting that I don’t have for drawing. In so doing, my drawings tend to explore and express the more fluid erotic sensual aspects of life. I think of them as more gestural, as in body-language, and body-language includes bones and muscles as well.’3 Fischl is particularly fond of the medium of watercolour, which he has used primarily as studies for his prints and paintings. The present sheet, dated 2000, displays a coloured background that is found more often in his watercolours of the late 1990s than in more recent works. As the artist has maintained, ‘Certainly with the watercolors where there are only one or two colors, there is a nice play between the material and its demands and the figure and its demands. I like the tension that exists there. I like the tension between the very thin, very liquid, very transparent watercolor and the dense, muscular, physical body. Drawing is an act of reduction and liberation. With watercolor I am reducing the body to the most minimal language one can use to describe it and at the same time capturing something essential so that the spirit transcends the limitations of the body.’4
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
No.5 Bloemaert
No.11 Van Dijck
Fig.1 Abraham Bloemaert Seated Woman, Turned towards the Left Pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white on paper. Stockholm, Nationalmuseum Inv. NHM Anck 51 Photo: Cecilia Heisser, Nationalmuseum (CC BY-SA).
Fig.1 Abraham van Dijck Old Man Seated in an Armchair Pen and brown ink and brown wash. Draiflessen Collection (Liberna), Mettingen Inv. nr. D 173 © Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen Photo: Henning Rogge, Hamburg).
No.6 Cosci Fig.1 Giovanni Balducci, Il Cosci The Visitation of the Virgin to Saint Elizabeth Pen and brown ink, brush and pale brown wash, over black and red chalk. Squared lightly in black chalk. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Inv. 1979.61 Fig.2 Giovanni Balducci, Il Cosci The Marriage of the Virgin Pen and brown ink, grey and brown wash. New York, Morgan Library and Museum Inv. 1993.258 No.10 Visscher Fig.1 Cornelis Visscher Self-portrait Black chalk, touched with grey wash, on vellum. London, British Museum Inv. 1895,0915.1343 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Fig.2 Cornelis Visscher Self-portrait with a Hat Black chalk, with grey wash, on vellum. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Inv. RP-T-1900-A-4482.
No.20 Boucher Fig.1 François Boucher The Forge of Vulcan Oil on canvas. Paris, Musée du Louvre Inv. MI1025 © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Franck Raux. No.25 Greuze Fig.1 Jean-Baptiste Greuze The Hermit, or The Distributor of Rosaries Oil on canvas. Property of a Private collection Image courtesy of Sotheby’s. No.28 Drolling Fig.1 Michel-Martin Drolling Self-Portrait Oil on unlined canvas. Private collection No.51 Vuillard Fig.2 Ker-Xavier Roussel The Sleeping Diana Oil on canvas. Atlanta, High Museum of Art Inv. 67.19 Purchase in memory of Ruth McMillan with funds from the 1960, 1961, and 1972 Flower Festivals of the Garden Club of Georgia.
NOTES TO THE CATALOGUE
No.1 Roman School, 16th Century 1. Stephen V. Grancsay, ‘Lucio Piccinino: Master Armorer of the Renaissance’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, April 1964, p.259. 2. Ibid., p.264. No.2 Bartolomeo Cesi 1. A number of Florentine drawings with the same later provenance as the present sheet are inscribed in the distinctive handwriting of the 17th century Florentine engineer, draughtsman and collector Giuseppe Santini, who was active between c.1661 and 1717. 2. The inscription Mattia Roselli on the former mount is identical to those found on a number of drawings, mainly by Tuscan artists, from albums at one time in the collection of Comte Eugène d’Oultremont (1845-1916) in Belgium, and in all likelihood originally compiled in Florence in the 17th or 18th century. 3. Quoted in translation in Suzanne Folds McCullagh and Laura M. Giles, Italian Drawings before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Collection, Chicago, 1997, p.87, under no.110 (entry by Laura Giles). 4. See note 2 above. A number of drawings with similar mounts and inscriptions, and with the same provenance, are in the Louvre. These include, for example, a group of drawings by the 18th century Tuscan artist Giovanni Battista Tempesti, acquired by the Louvre from the d’Oultremont family in 1985; see 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.390-392, nos.572-574. 5. Nancy Ward Neilson, ‘Bologna, not Rome’, Master Drawings, Autumn 1973, p.270. 6. Inv. Hz. 7417; Gernsheim no.142694; Zacchi in Fortunati and Musumeci, op.cit., p.135, p.153, note 21, illustrated p.130, fig.1 (where dated c.1582). 7. Inv. 781; Vera Fortunati Pietrantonio, ‘Bartolomeo Cesi’, in Vera Fortunati Pietrantonio, ed., Pittura bolognese del ‘500, Bologna, 1986, Vol.II, illustrated p.821; Graziani, Abbate and di Giampaolo, op.cit., p.32, pl.VIII. 8. Michele Danieli, ‘Il primo decennio di attività di Bartolomeo Cesi’, Paragone, May 2010, p.19, pl.24. 9. Inv. 2963; Graziani, Abbate and di Giampaolo, op.cit., p.106, fig.12; Catherine Legrand, Le dessin à Bologne 1580-1620: La réforme des trois Carracci, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1994, pp.36-37, no.21; Catherine Loisel, Musée du Louvre: Département des arts graphiques. Inventaire général des dessins italiens X: Dessins bolonais du XVIIe siècle, Tome II, Paris and Milan, 2013, p.285, no.412. 10. Inv. 0504 and 1146; James Byam Shaw, Drawings by Old Masters at Christ Church, Oxford, Oxford, 1976, Vol.I, p.253, nos.960-961, Vol.II, pls.550-551; Graziani, Abbate and di Giampaolo, op.cit., pp.151-152, figs.79-80. No.3 Paolo Farinati 1. The German art historian Kurt Bauch (1897-1975) developed a particular specialization in the work of Rembrandt. 2. ‘si fa molto stima de suoi disegni, che vengono raccolti dagli studiosi...I disegni da lui fatti furono per così due infiniti in carte tinte tocchi d’acquarelli e lumi di biacca, che sarebbe impossibile il raccontarne le inventioni, e molti ancora se ne veggono in istampa, de’ quali n’è stato raccolto gran numero da’dilettati, e trasportati in varie parti, essedo il Farinato in questo particolare molto piaciuto a una certa fierezza, e maestria da lui posseduta.’; Carlo Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte, Venice, 1648; ed. Detlev Freiherr von Hadeln, Berlin, 1924, Vol.II, p.132. 3. Quoted in translation in Eveline Baseggio Omiccioli, ‘Paolo Farinati’s Design for the Banner of the Confraternity of the Artillerymen in Verona’, Master Drawings, Autumn 2012, p.65. 4. Inv. 862; Lionello Puppi, ed., Paolo Farinati: Giornale (1573-1606), Florence, 1968, fig.7; Terence Mullaly, ‘Paolo Farinati’, in Licisco Magagnato, ed., Cinquant’anni di Pittura Veronese 1580-1630, exhibition catalogue, Verona, 1974, p.93, no.63, fig.182. No.4 Daniel Lindtmayer 1. Lot 1051 in the 1835 Veith sale contained 258 drawings for stained-glass, and is described in the sale catalogue as ‘Eine Sammlung von 258 Bl. Wappen vielfältig mit reichen hist. u. sinnbildl. Umgebungen u. Scenen des lebens von Künstlern d. 16. Jahrh. als Joh. Rud. Fuesli, H. u. W. Kübler, L. Ringler, H. C. Lang, D. Lindmeier, Chr. Maurer, T. Stimmer u. andern. Mit der Feder in Tusche, mehrere in Farben ausgeführt u. jedes Blatt auf starke weisse Pappe aufgebracht. Meist. roy. fol.’. 2. Virginia Chieffo Raguin, ‘Daniel Lindtmayer II’, in Jane Turner, ed., The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, Vol.19, p.414.
No.5 Abraham Bloemaert 1. According to a note in the van Regteren Altena collection files. 2. Karel van Mander, Het schilder-boeck, 1604; quoted in translation in Hessel Miedema, ed., Karel van Mander: The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the First Edition of the Schilder-boeck (1603-1604), Doornspijk, 1994, pp.450-451. 3. Inv. NMH Anck 51; Jaap Bolten, Abraham Bloemaert: The Drawings, Leiden, 2007, Vol.I, p.299, no.894, Vol.II, p.350, fig.894; Bolten, op.cit., 2017, p.89, fig.279; Börje Magnusson, Dutch Drawings in Swedish Public Collections, Stockholm, 2018, unpaginated, no.36. The drawing, in pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, on prepared paper, measures 140 x 144 mm. No.6 Giovanni Balducci, called Il Cosci 1. Inv. 1979.61; Jacob Bean and Lawrence Turcic, 15th and 16th Century Italian Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1982, p.29, no.16.; Mario di Giampaolo, ‘Balducci o Corenzio? Un’ ipotesi’, in Monika Cämmerer, ed., Kunst des Cinquecento in der Toskana, Munich, 1992, fig.16. The sheet measures 332 x 259 mm. 2. Inv. 1993.258; New York, Finch College Museum of Art, In the Shadow of Vesuvius: Neapolitan Drawings from the Collection of János Scholz, exhibition catalogue, 1969, no.30. The drawing is visible at https://www.themorgan.org/drawings/item/144545 . [accessed 13 December 2019]. 3. Inv. 1993.168. The drawing is visible at https://www.themorgan.org/drawings/item/140862. [accessed 13 December 2019]. No.7 Marcantonio Bassetti 1. Anthony Blunt and Edward Croft-Murray, Venetian Drawings of the XVII & XVIII Centuries in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1957, pp.25-26, nos.1-21, pls.3 and 5-8. 2. Ibid., p.25. No.8 Marcantonio Bassetti 1. ‘disegni...toccar soleva di biacca e nero à oglio sopra la carta’... ‘Di questa maniera molti ancora se ne veggono di sua invenzione che far soleva per lo più nel tempo del verno, divisandoli intorno ad un suo Gabinetto, de’quali ancora soleva far vendita a coloro che si dilettavano di far studio, e in particolare à gli oltramontani che transitavano per Verona’; Carlo Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte, Venice, 1648; ed. Detlev Freiherr von Hadeln, Berlin, 1924, Vol.II, p.241. 2. In a letter dated 6 May 1616; Transcribed in Giovanni Bottari and Stefano Ticozzi, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed architettura scritte da più celebri personnaggi, Milan, 1822, Vol.II, p.383. 3. Inv. 6847; Anthony Blunt and Edward Croft-Murray, Venetian Drawings of the XVII & XVIII Centuries in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1957, p.26, no.14 (not illustrated); Anna Ottani Cavina, ‘Marcantonio Bassetti’, in Licisco Magagnato, ed., Cinquant’anni di Pittura Veronese 1580-1630, exhibition catalogue, Verona, 1974, p.160, no.146, fig.176. The drawing measures 187 x 590 mm., and is visible at https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/19/collection/906847/the-triumph-of-caeser [accessed 28 November 2019]. 4. Inv. 4831; Blunt and Croft-Murray, ibid., p.26, no.20 (not illustrated). The drawing, which measures 148 x 385 mm., is visible at https://www. rct.uk/collection/search#/6/collection/904831/a-battle [accessed 28 November 2019]. 5. An Englishman long resident in Venice, Joseph Smith (c.1674-1770) served as British consul in the city between 1744 and 1760. Smith was a major patron of Canaletto, Sebastiano and Marco Ricci and other artists, and his remarkable collection of drawings was purchased from him in 1762 by George III, and is now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. No.9 Sigismondo Coccapani 1. Miles Chappell, ‘Theories of Relativity for Some Florentine Drawings’, Artibus et Historiae, No.61, 2010, p.53. 2. Several drawings by Sigismondo Coccapani in the Uffizi have mounts with identical inscriptions, as do two drawings by the artist in private collections; a Diana and Actaeon in the collection of David and Julie Tobey in New York (Wolk-Simon and Bambach, op.cit., pp.144-145, no.42; Acanfora, op.cit., p.205, no.D120, illustrated p.232, pl.128) and a Martyrdom of Saint Stephen in another private collection. 3. Chappell, op.cit., 1990, pp.185 and 190. 4. Elisa Acanfora, ‘Sigismondo Coccapani disegnatore e trattatista’, Paragone, November 1989, p.102, pls.1 and 48b; Acanfora, op.cit., 2017, p.62, fig.104 and pp.148-149, no.18. 5. Chappell, op.cit., 2004, p.20, fig.1; Acanfora, op.cit., 2017, p.211, no.D138, illustrated p.6, fig.1 and p.225, pl.49.
6. Inv. 32; Acanfora, op.cit., p.207, no.D126, illustrated p.229, pl.90. 7. Miles Chappell, ‘On the Identification of a Collector’s Mark’, Master Drawings, Spring 1983, pp.36-58. No.10 Cornelis Visscher 1. William W. Robinson, Bruegel to Rembrandt: Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, exhibition catalogue, London, Paris and Cambridge, 2002-2003, p.198, under no.86. 2. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library and Paris, Institut Néerlandais, Rembrandt and his Century: Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century from the Collection of Frits Lugt, Institut Néerlandais, Paris, exhibition catalogue, 1977-1978, p.178, under no.121. 3. Inv. 1895,0915.1343. An image of the drawing is visible at https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_ details.aspx?objectId=709883&partId=1&people=104055&peoA=104055-2-9&page=1 [accessed 1 December 2019]. 4. Hollstein 162; Christiaan Schuckman and D. De Hoop Scheffer, ed., Hollstein’s Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts ca.14501700, Vol.XL, Roosendaal, 1992, p.177, no.162; Victoria Sancho Lobis, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and the Portrait Print, exhibition catalogue, Chicago, 2016, p.65, fig.29. 5. Hollstein 163; Schuckman and De Hoop Scheffer, ed., ibid., p.178, no.163. 6. Inv. RP-T-1902-A-4624 and RP-T-1900-A-4482. Images of both drawings are visible online at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/237841 and https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/237843, respectively [accessed 1 December 2019]. 7. Inv. 1847,0326.18. The drawing is visible at https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?obje ctId=709891&page=3&partId=1&peoA=101898-3-4&people=101898 [accessed 1 December 2019]. 8. Inv. K 2010-1; London, Emanuel von Baeyer, Portraits: Mid-Seventeenth to Early Twentieth Century, exhibition catalogue, 2008, pp.4-5, no.1. 9. Hollstein 122. An impression of the engraving is in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna (illustrated at https://picryl.com/media/ umbach-jonas-8a8b48 [accessed 6 December 2019]). No.11 Attributed to Abraham Van Dijck 1. The date has sometimes been read as 1655. 2. Inv. I, 194; Werner Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, Vol. 3, New York, 1980, pp.1248-1249, no.571; Jane Shoaf Turner, Dutch Drawings in The Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, New York, 2006, Vol.I, p.63, no.71, Vol.II, fig.71, illustrated in colour pl.10. The dimensions of the drawing are 150 x 137 mm. 3. Werner Sumowksi, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, Landau/Pfalz, 1983, Vol.I, p.671, no.367, illustrated p.688 (where dated 1655-1660). 4. Turner, op.cit., Vol.I, p.63, under no.71. Of the two other drawings fully accepted by Sumowksi as by Abraham Van Dijck, one is a study of a young woman in Bremen (see note 6 below) that is similarly comparable to the present sheet, while the other - a signed study of a beggar woman standing in a landscape - is in the St. Annen-Museum in Lübeck (Inv. AB 194; Sumowski, op.cit., 1980, pp.1252-1253, no.573). The latter drawing, however, is much less Rembrandtesque than the Morgan and Bremen drawings, and unlike them is also less stylistically comparable to the present sheet, and must date from later in Van Dijck’s career. 5. Inv. D 173; Sumowski, op.cit., 1980, pp.1288-1289, no.590xx; Jaap van der Veen, ‘Rembrandt’s Late Pupils’, in David de Witt, Leonore van Sloten and Jaap van der Veen, Rembrandt’s Late Pupils: Studying Under a Genius, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, Museum het Rembrandthuis, 2015, p.34, fig.1.13. The dimensions of the drawing, which is probably a study for a blind Tobit, are 178 x 132 mm. 6. Inv. 27; Sumowski, op.cit., 1980, pp.1250-1251, no.572; de Witt, van Sloten and van der Veen, op.cit., p.35, fig.1.14. The drawing, which measures 208 x 183 mm., is signed with the artist’s monogram AVD and indistinctly dated Novemb. 16 [cut off] / 4. 7. Rudolf sale (‘Fine Dutch, Flemish and German Drawings from the Collection of the Late Mr. C. R. Rudolf, Part 1’) Amsterdam, Sotheby Mak van Waay, 18 April 1977, lot 112 (as School of Rembrandt); Sumowski, op.cit., 1980, pp.1302-1303, no.597XX. The sheet measures 121 x 100 mm. 8. Inv. SK-A-3300; Sumowksi, op.cit., 1983, Vol.I, p.671, no.370, illustrated p.691 (where dated 1655-1660); David de Witt, ‘Studying under a Genius’, in de Witt, van Sloten and van der Veen, op.cit., p.98, fig.3.37. No.12 Jacob van der Ulft 1. The German editor and publisher Curt Otto (c.1880-1929) began collecting Old Master drawings around 1908, with a particular focus on Dutch and Flemish drawings of the 17th century. His collection of drawings was dispersed at auction in Leipzig in 1929, the year after his death. 2. Michiel C. Plomp, The Dutch Drawings in the Teyler Museum. Vol.II: Artists Born Between 1575 and 1630, Haarlem/Ghent/Doornspijk, 1997, p.399, under no.464.
3. Inv. 23236; Frits Lugt, Musée du Louvre. Inventaire général des dessins des écoles du nord: École hollandaise, Vol.II, Paris, 1931, p.38, no.769, pl.LII. The unsigned drawing measures 258 x 421 mm., and is illustrated at http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr/detail/oeuvres/10/108125-Antoineet-Cleopatre-max [accessed 13 November 2019]. 4. Inv. Q71; Plomp, op.cit., p.399, no.464. The drawing is also visible at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/228651 [accessed 2 December 2019]. 5. Inv. 4338; Walther Bernt, Die Niederländischen Zeichner des 17. Jahrhunderts, Munich, 1958, Vol.II, unpaginated, no.580. The drawing measures 159 x 195 mm. 6. Inv. 1985.16; Jane Shoaf Turner, Dutch Drawings in The Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, New York, 2006, Vol.I, p.190, no.289, Vol.II, pl.289. The measurements of the unsigned sheet are 225 x 314 mm. 7. Inv. 31925; Emmanuel Starcky, Musée du Louvre. Cabinet des dessins. Inventaire général des dessins des écoles du nord: Écoles allemande, des Anciens Pays-Bas, flamande, hollandaise et suisse XVe-XVIIIe siècles, Paris, 1988, p.212, no.305. The drawing measures 190 x 200 mm., and is illustrated at http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr/detail/oeuvres/12/39689-Eglise-situee-a-cote-dune-mosquee-max [accessed 13 November 2019]. No.13 Attributed to Erasmus Quellinus the Younger 1. Inv. 1976.45. The drawing is visible at https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/296170?position=1 [accessed 1 December 2019]. 2. Anonymous sale, Amsterdam, Sotheby’s, 5 November 2002, lot 24 (as Attributed to Quellinus); Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 30 January 2019, lot 83 (as Attributed to Quellinus). 3. Inv. 40794; Christina Corsiglia, ed., Rubens and his Age: Treasures from the Hermitage Museum, Russia, exhibition catalogue, Toronto, 2001, p.164, no.110 (entry by Alexey Larionov). The drawing, which measures 500 x 635 mm., is a design for a temporary façade for a building on the processional route of Don Juan of Austria, the new governor of the Spanish Netherlands, on his ceremonial entry into Antwerp on 6 May 1657. 4. Marie-Louise Hairs, Dans le sillage de Rubens: Les peintres d’histoire anversois au XVIIe siècle, Liège, 1977, p.105, fig.24; Jean-Pierre de Bruyn, Vlaamse Schilders uit de Tijd van de Grote Meesters. Erasmus II Quellinus (1607-1678): De Schilderijen met Catalogue Raisonné, Freren, 1988, pp.255-256, no.218, fig.218; Jean-Pierre de Bruyn and Sandrine Vézilier-Dussart, ed., Erasmus Quellinus: In de voetsporen van Rubens, exhibition catalogue, Cassel, 2014, pp.106-107, no.22. The dimensions of the panel are 41.7 x 28.3 cm. The painting later served as a design for the frontispiece, engraved by Richard Collin, of Engelbert Flacchio’s Genealogie de la très-illustré, très-ancienne et autrefois souveraine maison de La Tour, où quantité d’autres familles trouveront leur extraction et parentage, devoted to the history of the Thurn und Taxis family and published in 1709 (de Bruyn, ibid., p.255, fig.218/1). In the context of military trophies like that depicted on the present sheet, it is also interesting to note that Quellinus assisted Rubens in making painted copies after some of Andrea Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar paintings, now at Hampton Court, in which similar motifs appear. No.14 Godfried Maes 1. Drawings by Maes, including others from the Metamorphoses series, are today in the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the WallrafRichartz-Museum in Cologne, the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the University Library in Leiden, the British Museum in London, the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre and the Fondation Custodia in Paris, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Eesti Kunstimuuseum in Tallinn, the Albertina in Vienna, and elsewhere. No.18 Francesco Monti 1. The first known owner of this drawing was the German diplomat and industrialist Richard von Kühlmann (1873-1948), who served as foreign minister towards the end of the First World War. 2. The German photographer and collector Herbert List (1903-1975) began collecting in the 1950s and eventually owned some eight hundred Italian drawings. 3. Dwight C. Miller, ‘Monti, Francesco’, in Jane Turner, ed., The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, Vol.22, pp.26-27. 4. Mimi Cazort and Catherine Johnston, Bolognese Drawings in North American Collections 1500-1800, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa, 1982, p.134. 5. Inv. 3780-3784, 4160 and 4161. Four of these are illustrated in Mary Cazort Taylor, ‘Some Drawings by Francesco Monti and the Soft Chalk Style’, Master Drawings, Summer 1973, pls.28-31. Two are illustrated in Faietti and Zacchi, ed., op.cit., pp.272-275, nos.90-91, the first of these is illustrated in colour on p.223. 6. London, P. & D. Colnaghi, Old Master Drawings, 1984, no.33; Linda Wolk-Simon, Italian Old Master Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz, exhibition catalogue, Gainesville and elsewhere, 1991-1993, pp.106-109, no.26. 7. Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 27 January 1999, lot 32 (unsold). 8. Cazort Taylor, op.cit., pp.161-162. 9. Cazort Taylor, op.cit., p.162.
No.19 François Boucher 1.
Denys Sutton, ‘Frivolity and Reason’, in London, Royal Academy of Arts, France in the eighteenth century, exhibition catalogue, 1968, p.24.
2. Regina Shoolman Slatkin, ‘Alexandre Ananoff: L’Oeuvre dessiné de Boucher, Catalogue raisonné, Vol.I.’ [book review], Master Drawings, Spring 1967, p.54. 3. Pierre Rosenberg, ‘Boucher and Eighteenth-Century French Drawing’, in Alastair Laing, The Drawings of François Boucher, exhibition catalogue, New York and Fort Worth, 2003-2004, p.16. 4. Alexandre Ananoff and Daniel Wildenstein, François Boucher, Lausanne and Paris, 1976, Vol.I, pp.410-413, no.302, fig.872; Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1980, p.111, no.313; James Fack, ‘The Apotheosis of Aeneas: a lost Royal Boucher rediscovered’, The Burlington Magazine, December 1977, p.828, fig.23; Guillaume Faroult, ‘“Toutes les écoles, en exemplaires extrêmement artistes”: Louis La Caze et la connaissance de la peinture ancienne en France (1830-1870)’, in Guillaume Faroult and Sophie Eloy, ed., La Collection La Caze: Chefs d’oeuvre des peintures des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Pau and London, 2007-2008, p.58, fig.25. 5. Fack, ibid., p.828, fig.24. 6. Fack, op.cit., p.830. 7. Pierrette Jean-Richard, François Boucher: gravures et dessins provenant du Cabinet des Dessins et de la Collection Edmond de Rothschild au Musée du Louvre, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1971, p.16. 8. Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1976, Vol.II, pp.52-54, no.351/11, fig.1031; Edith A. Standen, ‘The Amours des Dieux: A Series of Beauvais Tapestries After Boucher’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 1984-1985, p.80, fig.14. No.20 François Boucher 1. Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Eighteenth-Century Drawings from the Collection of Mrs. Gertrude Laughlin Chanler, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 1982, p.18, under no.2. 2. E-mail correspondence, 28 November 2019. 3. Alexandre Ananoff and Daniel Wildenstein, François Boucher, Lausanne and Paris, 1976, Vol.I, pp.410-413, no.302, fig.872; Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1980, p.111, no.313; James Fack, ‘The Apotheosis of Aeneas: a lost Royal Boucher rediscovered’, The Burlington Magazine, December 1977, p.828, fig.23; Guillaume Faroult, ‘“Toutes les écoles, en exemplaires extrêmement artistes”: Louis La Caze et la connaissance de la peinture ancienne en France (1830-1870)’, in Guillaume Faroult and Sophie Eloy, ed., La Collection La Caze: Chefs d’oeuvre des peintures des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Pau and London, 2007-2008, p.58, fig.25. 4.
Inv. 26214; Françoise Joulie and Jean-François Méjanès, François Boucher: hier et aujourd’hui, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2003-2004, p.125, no.57. The dimensions of the oil sketch are 238 x 330 mm.
5. Inv. 255; Poitiers, Musée de Poitiers, Catalogue des peintures, dessins, aquarelles, gravures – sculptures, 1930, p.42, no.255 (‘Croquis d’homme (Vulcain?). Crayon.’), illustrated pl.6, fig.255; Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1976, Vol.I, p.412, no.302/2, fig.873. A copy or version of the Poitiers drawing is in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm (Inv. UUB French drawings 4; Per Bjurström, Drawings in Swedish Public Collections 4. French Drawings: Eighteenth Century, Stockholm, 1982, unpaginated, no.858A). 6. Alexandre Ananoff, L’oeuvre dessiné de François Boucher (1703-1770), Paris, 1966, Vol.I, p.212, no.818, fig.132; Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1976, Vol.I, p.412, no.302/1, fig.874. As Laing has noted, ‘The drawing of Cupid was almost certainly done après coup, for a collector.’; E-mail correspondence, 28 November 2019. 7. As Alastair Laing has pointed out, ‘One curious thing is why there should only be drawings for these two background figures and one for the Cupid in the Marly picture…Were they intended as guidance for studio hands who would actually paint the figures in the picture? Or is it that there were drawings for the main figures in [the painting] too, but that those were more highly prized, and so framed and hung, which ultimately led to their deterioration, to the point of their being discarded?’; E-mail correspondence, 28 November 2019. 8. Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1976, Vol.II, pp.52-54, no.351/11, fig.1031; Edith A. Standen, ‘The Amours des Dieux: A Series of Beauvais Tapestries After Boucher’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 1984-1985, p.80, fig.14. 9. Inv. MI 1025; Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1976, Vol.II, pp.53-54, no.351, fig.1032; Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1980, pp.115-116, no.367; Standen, ibid., p.81, fig.16. 10. Laing adds, however, that ‘The parallel with that figure [in the tapestry] is not exact either, however, and, since the figure is the same way round as the one in the drawing, Boucher would have to have made an offset of the latter before following it in the cartoon for the tapestry.’; E-mail correspondence, 28 November 2019. 11. Standen, op.cit., p.82. The pupil of Boucher in question was the German painter Johann Christian Mannlich, and the anecdote is found in his memoirs. 12. Claude-Henri Watelet and Pierre-Charles Levesque, Dictionnaire des beaux-arts, 1788-1791, Vol.I; quoted in translation in Françoise Joulie, François Boucher: Fragments of a World Picture, exhibition catalogue, Holte, 2013, p.78, under no.23. 13. Joulie, ibid., pp.72-75, nos.20-21. 14. Joulie, op.cit., 2013, p.74, under no.21.
No.21 Hubert Robert 1. Margaret Morgan Grasselli, ‘Robert, Master Draftsman’, in Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Yuriko Jackall, Hubert Robert, exhibition catalogue, Paris and Washington, D.C., 2016, pp.13 and 20. 2. Inv. vol.453, no.179; Catala et al, op.cit., p.87, no.59. The drawing measures 362 x 283 mm. 3. Inv. RF 1983-81; Pierre Rosenberg, Musée du Louvre. Catalogue de la donation Othon Kaufmann et François Schlageter au Département des peintures, Paris, 1984, pp.60-61, no.14; Strasbourg, Ancienne Douane, Itineraire d’une passion: Hommage a deux collectionneurs strasbourgeois Othon Kaufmann et François Schlageter, exhibition catalogue, 1997, p.62, no.35. No.22 Balthasar Anton Dunker 1. Inv. A 5601; Raoul Nicolas, Balthasar-Antoine Dunker, Geneva, 1924, illustrated facing p.60; Henriette Mentha Aluffi, ed., Balthasar Anton Dunker 1746-1807, exhibition catalogue, Bern, 1990-1991, p.127, no.29, illustrated p.62, pl.12. No.23 Jean-Étienne Liotard 1. The present sheet, however, cannot be identified in the catalogue of the Exposition rétrospective de la Ville de Paris of 1900. 2. Inv. 1934-31; Anne de Herdt, Dessins de Liotard, exhibition catalogue, Geneva and Paris, 1992, pp.264-265, no.144; Claire Stoullig et al, JeanÉtienne Liotard 1702-1789 dans les collections des Musées d’art et d’histoire de Genève, exhibition catalogue, Geneva, 2003, illustrated p.44; Claire Stoullig et al, Jean-Étienne Liotard 1702-1789: Masterpieces from the Musées d’Art et d’Histoire of Geneva and Swiss Private Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2006, illustrated p.42; Marcel Roethlisberger and Renée Loche, Liotard: Catalogue, sources et correspondence, Doornspijk, 2008, Vol.I, p.679, no.585, Vol.II, figs.793 (recto) and 794 (verso). 3. Christian Rümelin, ‘The Drawings of Jean-Étienne Liotard’, in Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, “The most beautiful pastel ever seen.”: The Chocolate Girl by Jean-Étienne Liotard, exhibition catalogue, 2018-2019, p.83. 4.
Inv. 2004.75; de Herdt, ibid., pp.194-195, no.106; Roethlisberger and Loche, ibid., Vol.I, p.678, no.582, Vol.II, figs.789 (recto) and 790 (verso) (as Jean-Michel Liotard?).
5. Alastair Laing, ‘Geneva and Paris: Liotard’ [exhibition review], The Burlington Magazine, November 1992, p.749. No.24 Dutch School, 18th Century 1. Arnold Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen, s’Gravenhage, 1718, [1753 ed.], Vol.I, facing p.63. 2. Inv. GKM 1072; Börje Magnusson, Dutch Drawings in Swedish Public Collections, Stockholm, 2018, unpaginated, no.525. The sheet, drawn in pen and black ink and gouache on vellum, measures 625 x 450 mm., and is dedicated to Lieve Gielvink, the wealthy mayor of Amsterdam at the time. No.25 Jean-Baptiste Greuze 1. Quoted in translation in Edgar Munhall, Jean-Baptiste Greuze 1752-1805, exhibition catalogue, Hartford, San Francisco and Dijon, 1976-1977, p.23, note 25. 2. Quoted in translation in Edgar Munhall, Greuze the Draftsman, exhibition catalogue, New York and Los Angeles, 2002, p.14. 3.
Irina Novosselskaya, ‘The Collection of Drawings by Jean-Baptiste Greuze in St Petersburg’, in Munhall, ibid., 2002, p.34.
4. Munhall, op.cit., 2002, p.94, under no.24. 5. Anita Brookner, Greuze: The rise and fall of an eighteenth-century phenomenon, London, 1972, pl.64; Paris, Grand Palais, Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, French Painting 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution, exhibition catalogue, 19741975, pp.461-462, no.83, illustrated p.58 (entry by Pierre Rosenberg); James Thompson, Jean-Baptiste Greuze [The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin], New York, Winter 1989-1990, p.37, fig.32; New York, Wildenstein, The Arts of France from François Ier to Napoléon Ier: A Centennial Celebration of Wildenstein’s Presence in New York, exhibition catalogue, 2005-2006, pp.287-289, no.121; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 31 January 2013, lot 96 (sold for $1,082,500). The painting measures 113 x 147.5 cm. 6.
It may be noted in passing that outdoor scenes are rare in Greuze’s work.
7. Thompson, op.cit., p.36. 8. Paris, Detroit and New York, op.cit., p.462, under no.83.
9.
New York, Wildenstein, op.cit., p.187, fig.121a. The engraving bears a dedication to the Marquis de Véri’s brother, the Abbé Joseph Alphonse de Véri, who may have first suggested the subject of the painting to Greuze.
10. Inv. RF 51004; Pierre Rosenberg, ed., La donation Jacques Petithory au musée Bonnat, Bayonne: objets d’art, sculptures, peintures, dessins, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1997-1998, pp.208-209, no.210 (entry by Jean-François Méjanès). The drawing, in red chalk, measures 330 x 492 mm. 11. Inv. 26994; Jean Guiffrey and Pierre Marcel, Inventaire général des dessins du Musée du Louvre et du Musée de Versailles: Ecole Française, Vol.VI, Paris, 1911, pp.58-59, no.4564; New York, Wildenstein, op.cit., p.288, fig.121b; 585 x 442. On the verso of the drawing is a drapery study for the same figure. 12. Inv. RF 51003; Rosenberg, ed., op.cit., pp.208-209, no.209. The dimensions of the drawing, which is in red chalk, are 310 x 455 mm. 13. Jean Masson sale (‘Aquarelles et Dessins de l’Ecole Française du XVIIIe siècle, Composant la Collection de Mr J. Masson’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Lair Dubreuil], 7-8 May 1923, lot 90 (bt. Decours for 1,750 francs); Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Rostand], 26 November 1969, lot 13. The drawing measured 520 x 340 mm. 14. Anonymous sale, Hôtel Drouot [Couturier & de Nicolay], 31 March 1999, lot 11 (unsold). No.26 Giocondo Albertolli 1. Tarcisio Casari, Giocondo Albertolli cronaca di una vita al servizio dell’arte, Bedano, 1991, p.25; Quoted in translation in Enrico Colle, Giocondo Albertolli: I repertori d’ornato / The repertoires of decoration, Milan, 2002, p.51. 2. Ibid., illustrated p.59. 3. Alvar Gonzalez-Palacios, ‘Disegni di Giocondo Albertolli’, Arte Illustrata, May-June 1971, p.80. No.27 Antoine-Jean Gros 1. Henry Sayles Francis, ‘Preface: Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835)’, in New York, Jacques Seligmann & Co., and elsewhere, Baron Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835): Painter of Battles, The First Romantic Painter, exhibition catalogue, 1955-1956, pp.7-8. 2. Ibid., p.9. 3. Arlette Sérullaz, ‘“I cannot tell you how delighted I was by M. David’s letter […]. Fortunate is the man who can receive and appreciate the advice of a man such as him!”’, in Arlette Sérullaz, Gérard, Girodet, Gros: David’s Studio, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2005, p.11. 4. David O’Brien, After the Revolution. Antoine-Jean Gros: Painting and Propaganda under Napoleon, University Park, 2006, p.22, fig.9; Laura Angelucci, Musée du Louvre. Département des arts graphiques. Inventaire général des dessins: École française. Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835), Paris, 2019, p.12, fig.3. 5. ‘Son aptitude étonnante à saisir l’allure des chevaux. Il aimait à reproduire leurs forms élégantes et leurs mouvements fiers et gracieux. Les livres de croquis des jours heureux de son adolescence ont conserve des notes précieuses. Plusieurs de ces dessins à l’encre représentant des cavalcades ou de beaux attelages, qu’il suivait à la course, de Paris au bois de Boulogne, et sans s’arrêter, tant ce spectacle mouvant avait d’attait à ses yeux.’; JeanBaptiste Delestre, Gros et ses ouvrages, ou mémoires historiques sur la vie et les travaux de ce célèbre artiste, Paris, n.d. [1845], pp.12 and 15. 6. Gaston Delestre, Antoine-Jean Gros 1771-1835, Paris, 1951, unpaginated, fig.14; Sale, Paris, Artcurial, Collection Gaston Delestre: Deux siècles de passion familiale, 22 March 2017, lot 19. 7. Inv. RF 54925,127, RF 54925,128 and RF 54925,129; Angelucci, op.cit., pp.197-199, nos.355-357. 8. Sale, Paris, Artcurial, op.cit., lot 6. No.28 Martin Drolling 1. Jacques Vilain, ‘Martin Drolling’, in Paris, Grand Palais, Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, French Painting 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution, exhibition catalogue, 1974-1975, p.398. 2. Ibid., p.398. 3. Inv. M.81.38; Scott Schaefer and Peter Fusco, European Painting and Sculpture in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue, Los Angeles, 1987, illustrated p.38; Peter Hecht, De Hollandse fijnschilders, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, 1989, p.50, under no.6, fig.6c. 4. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 7 July 1995, lot 69. 5. Inv. 1938 DF 302; Olivier Bonfait, ‘La presence absente. Variations sur la figure et le portrait’, in Rémi Cariel, ed., Étrange visage: Portraits et figures de la collection Magnin, exhibition catalogue, Dijon, 2012, pp.45-47, no.24 (where dated 1796-1799). The drawing measures 422 x 358 mm.
No.29 Luigi Sabatelli 1. ‘Soggetti greci, romani, ebraici, danteschi, fiorentini, omerici, ecc., ecc., in somma senza numero. Io calcolo che nella mia dimora in Roma, che fu di oltre quattro anni, avrò guadagnato circa cento zecchini.’; Sabatelli, Cenni biografici, op.cit., p.26. 2. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 192-241. No.30 Christoph Heinrich Kniep 1. Lord (Francis) Napier, Notes on Modern Painting at Naples, London, 1855, p.68. 2. C. Stumpf, ‘Der Zeichner Christoph Heinrich Kniep (1755-1825) – Landschaftsauffassung und Antikenrezeption. By Georg Streibl’ [book review], The Burlington Magazine, July 1999, p.366. 3. Hildesheim, Roemer-Museum, Christoph Heinrich Kniep, Zeichner an Goethes Seite: zwischen Klassizismus, Realismus und Romantik, 1992; Georg Striehl, Der Zeichner Christoph Heinrich Kniep (1755-1825) – Landschaftsauffassung und Antikenrezeption, Hildesheim, 1998. No.31 Pelagio Palagi 1. Roberta J. M. Olson, ‘Introduction: In the Dawn of Italy’, in Roberta J. M. Olson, Ottocento: Romanticism and Revolution in 19th-Century Italian Painting, exhibition catalogue, Baltimore and elsewhere, 1992-1993, p.20. 2. Adriano Cera, ed., Disegni, acquarelli, tempere di artisti italiani dal 1770 ca. al 1830 ca., Bologna, 2002, Vol.II, unpaginated, Palagi no.29. 3. Claudio Poppi, ed., Pelagio Palagi pittore: Dipinti dalla raccolte del Comune di Bologna, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, 1996, p.35, fig.12. 4. Cera, op.cit., unpaginated, Palagi no.41. 5. Anonymous sale, Milan, Finarte, 18 December 1996, lot 143 (sold for 4,660 lire). 6. Valeria Roncuzzi Roversi Monaco, ‘Pelagio Palagi e l’incisione’, in Poppi, ed., op.cit, illustrated p.99. 7. Roversi Monaco, op.cit., illustrated p.100; Fausto Gozzi, Ubaldo, Gaetano e Mauro Gandolfi: le incisioni, exhibition catalogue, San Matteo della Decima, 2002, unpaginated, no.38; Francesca Lui, ‘Mauro Gandolfi incisore e Pelagio Palagi tra Milano e Bologna’, in Marco Riccòmini, ed., Scritti per Eugenio: 27 testi per Eugenio Riccòmini, Milan, 2017, p.208, fig.7. No.32 Antonio Basoli 1. Inv. 34049; Maria Ida Biggi, ‘Disegni di scenografia nelle collezioni Donghi e Certani’, Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte, 2003, p.513, fig.13. 2. Inv. 1984-56-636; see Cazort and Johnson 1982; Ann Percy and Mimi Cazort, Italian Master Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2004, unpaginated, no.61 (where dated c.1795-1800). 3. Geneva, Nicolas Rauch S.A,, Collection Edmond Fatio, 3-4 June 1959, lot 3. The drawing is signed and dated 1840, and is inscribed ‘Il gran Memmonio di Egitta’. 4. Caterina Lipparini may have been a relation of the Bolognese painter Lodovico Lipparini (1800-1856), who painted a portrait of Basoli in c.1824, the same year this drawing was made. No.33 Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres 1. For his drawn portraits, Ingres used specially prepared tablets comprised of several sheets of paper wrapped around a cardboard centre, over which was stretched a sheet of fine white English paper. The smooth paper on which he drew was therefore cushioned by the layers beneath, and, made taut by being stretched over the cardboard tablet, provided a resilient surface for his finely-executed pencil work. 2. ‘Wenn man die Männer an ihren Frauen erkennen kann, so wirft das Porträt von Mme Balze das schönste Licht auf ihren Gatten. Der weibliche Reiz ihrer Haltung und ihrer Züge gehört offensichtlich nicht allein einem vorteilhaften Äußeren, sondern auch der Anmut des Gemütes an.’; Naef, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.583-584. 3. Paul and Raymond Balze grew to be very close to Ingres, who treated them almost like sons, often addressing them as ‘cher enfants’, even when they were grown men. 4. Inv. FII 35 (PK); Naef, op.cit., Vol.V, pp.118-119, no.312. The dimensions of the drawing are 180 x 237 mm. 5. ‘[Ingres] exécute pour son ami deux délicieux portraits à la mine de plomb qui sont conservés comme deux trésors dans la famille Balze.’; Flandrin, op.cit., p.141.
6. Inv. 1825; Lyon, Musée Historique des Tissus, op.cit., pp.102-103, no.120; Naef, op.cit., Vol.V, pp.122-123, no.314; Ribeiro, op.cit., p.75, pl.53. 7. Ribeiro, op.cit., pp.75-76. 8. Inv. 1969.17; Mongan, op.cit., pp.218-219, no.233. Signed Ingres and dated 1828, the drawing is on tracing paper and measures 280 x 212 mm. As Agnes Mongan has noted, ‘it was not unusual for Ingres to make a tracing of a portrait of a close friend’ (Mongan, op.cit., p.218, under no.233). The Harvard drawing seems to have been given by Mme. Balze in 1842 to her friend Mme. de Madrazo, the mother of another of Ingres’s pupils, the painter Federico de Madrazo. No.34 George Richmond 1.
Raymond Lister, George Richmond: A Critical Biography, London, 1981, p.144.
2.
In the National Portrait Gallery in London (Inv. NPG 5870); Sloman, op.cit., unpaginated, pl.XIII, fig.vi.
3.
Sloman, op.cit., unpaginated, under no.17.
4.
Inv. NPG 6586; Lister, op.cit., p.120, fig.63, pl.XXXIII; Richard Holmes et al, Romantics & Revolutionaries: Regency Portraits from the National Portrait Gallery London, exhibition catalogue, 2002, illustrated p.77; Simon Schama, The Face of Britain: The Nation through its Portraits, London, 2015, illustrated p.392.
No.35 John Frederick Lewis 1. Christine Riding, ‘Travellers and Sitters: The Orientalist Portrait’, in Nicholas Tromans, ed., The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, exhibition catalogue, New Haven, London and Istanbul, 2008-2009, p.56. 2. Quoted in Michael Lewis, John Frederick Lewis, R.A. 1805-1876, Leigh-on-Sea, 1978, p.33. 3. The posthumous Lewis studio sale, London, Christie’s, 4-7 May 1877, lot 169; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 5 July 2017, lot 202 (sold for £27,500). 4. The posthumous Lewis studio sale, London, Christie’s, 4-7 May 1877, lot 132 (unsold); Sale (‘Fifty Remaining Works of that Distinguished Artist, John Frederick Lewis, R.A. (Sold by the Direction of the Widow)…’), London, Christie’s, 3 May 1897, lot 39 (‘SHEIK EL BELLED, and horse’), bt. W. Rome for £26.5.0); Lewis, op.cit., p.84, no.421, where the dimensions are given as 355 x 508 mm. No.36 Maximilian Hauschild 1. Inv. 1871.532; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Central European Drawings in the Collection of the Crocker Art Museum, Turnhout, 2004, pp.208209. The drawing is dated August 23rd, 1836. 2. London and New York, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Master Drawings, 2014, no.24a. 3. These include a watercolour of a Street Scene in Munich, dated 1831, which appeared at auction in 2003 (Königstein im Taunus, Reiss & Sohn, 4 June 2003, lot 243), while two watercolour views of the interior of the churches of San Sisto in Viterbo and San Miniato in Florence, the latter dated 1849, were sold at auction in 2010 (Heidelberg, Winterberg Kunst, 8 May 2010, lots 393 and 394, respectively). A pencil drawing of the village of Lacco Ameno in Ischia, from the collection of Graf von Bredow in Potsdam, was sold in 2011 (Heidelberg, Winterberg Kunst, 5 November 2011, lot 340). Other pencil drawings by Hauschild to have recently appeared on the art market include detailed views of the facades and interiors of churches in Amalfi, Assisi, Palermo and Verona. 4. Pasquale Polito, Lamartine a Napoli e nelle isole del golfo, Naples, 1975; extract reprinted in La Rassegna d’Ischia, October 2006, p.43. 5. Alphonse de Lamartine, Les Confidences, Paris, 1849; trans. Les Confidences, Confidential Disclosures, New York, 1857, pp.117-118. No.37 Charles Nicholls Woolnoth 1. Julian Halsby, Scottish Watercolours 1740-1940, London, 1986, p.107. 2. George Gilfillan, The History of a Man, London, 1856, pp.277-280. 3. Anonymous sale, Perth, Sotheby’s at Scone Palace, 13 April 1981, lot 45. The dimensions of the watercolour are 460 x 660 mm. 4. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s Belgravia, 27 April 1982, lot 99. The sheet measures 510 x 840 mm.
No.38 Mosè Bianchi 1. Alfredo Melani, ‘Studio-Talk: Milan’, The Studio, September 1913, pp.317 and 320. 2. Francesca d’Arcais et al., Gli affreschi nelle ville venete dal Seicento all’ Ottocento, Venice, 1978, Vol.I, pp.179-180, no.88, Vol.II, fig.1457; Simonetta Coppi, ‘Gli affreschi di Mosè Bianchi (1877-1889): Documenti per la storia dell’ eclettismo’, in Monza, Villa Reale and la Rinascente, Mosè Bianchi e il suo tempo 1840-1904, exhibition catalogue, 1987, op.cit., illustrated p.39. 3. Monza, ibid., p.315, no.69, illustrated p.121, no.69; Paolo Biscottini, Mosè Bianchi: Catalogo ragionato, Milan, 1996, p.216, no.221. 4. Inv. 1108; Monza, op.cit., pp.314-315, no.68, illustrated p.120, no.68; Biscottini, ibid., p.215, no.220, illustrated in colour p.57; Alessandro Rovetta et al, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Tomo quarto – Dipinti dell’ Ottocento e del Novecento – Le miniature, Milan, 2008, pp.82-83, no.1058. An oil sketch bozzetto of the Flora composition, but in reverse, is in a private collection (Biscottini, ibid., p.217, no.224.) 5. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 16 November 1994, lot 93 (sold for £32,200); Biscottini, op.cit., p.216, no.222. A similar but less finished study of the same figure of Flora was formerly in the collection of Giovanni Pin in Milan (Biscottini, op.cit., p.216, no.223, as location unknown.) 6. Coppi in Monza, op.cit., illustrated p.38. 7. Monza, op.cit., pp.313-314, no.65, illustrated p.117, no.65; Biscottini, op.cit., p.209, no.210. 8. New York, Borghi and Co., op.cit., no.44. No.39 Paul Steck 1. A drawing of the painter Henri Gervex seated at an easel in his studio, executed in charcoal and black chalk and dated the same year as the present sheet, was sold at auction in Paris in 2016 (Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 1 April 2016, lot 118). Steck also engraved a portrait of the artist Georges Antoine Rochegrosse, standing with a palette and brushes in his hand. 2. The dimensions of the drawing are 325 x 228 mm. The same private collection also owns a related oil sketch by Mathey, which measures 65 x 50 cm. Both works are studies for Mathey’s finished portrait painting of Rops, which is today in the Château de Versailles.
No.40 Emile Claus 1. Pol de Mont, ‘Emile Claus, The Painter of the Leieland’, The Artist: An Illustrated Monthly Record of Arts, Crafts and Industries, September 1899, pp.170 and 174. 2. ‘Émile Claus. Par Camille Lemonnier.’ [book review], The Burlington Magazine, December 1908, p.175. 3. Inv. 1950-AH; Johan De Smet, Emile Claus 1849-1924, exhibition catalogue, Ostend, 1997, p.126, pl.56. 4. Ibid., p.137, pl.66. No.41 Francesco Paolo Michetti 1. Raffaello Biordi, ‘Francesco Paolo Michetti: The most vigorous and successful Italian painter of the XIX Century’, East and West, April 1951, p.38. 2. Fabio Benzi et al, Francesco Paolo Michetti: Catalogo generale, Cinisello Balsamo, 2018, p.259, no.548, illustrated in colour pp.100-101, pl.56; The dimensions of the painting are 280 x 550 cm. 3. Rome, Palazzo Venezia and Francavilla al Mare, Museo Michetti and Palazzo San Domenico, Francesco Paolo Michetti: Dipinti, pastelli, disegni, exhibition catalogue, 1999, p.201, no.46, illustrated in colour pp.94-95, fig.46. The painting measures 110 x 200 cm. 4. It is presumably this youthful figure in Michetti’s painting who is identifiable as the lovestruck shepherd Aligi in Gabriele d’Annunzio’s later play. 5. Benzi et al, op.cit, p.260, no.553, illustrated in colour p.102, pl.57 (where dated c.1893-1895). 6. Inv. 380; Benzi et al, op.cit, p.260, no.554 (where dated c.1893-1895). 7. Anna Maria Damigella, ‘Michetti dal verismo degli idilli bucolici al naturalismo poetico (1870-1881)’, in Rome and Francavilla al Mare, op.cit., illustrated p.34; Benzi et al, op.cit., p.206, no.306. No.42 Rosa Bonheur 1. This large pastel once belonged to the Swiss lawyer and politician Adolf Streuli (1868-1953). 2. Vernon, Musée de Vernon, Rosa Bonheur: l’éloge du monde animal, exhibition catalogue, 2015, illustrated p.15. The dimensions of the print are 462 x 1025 mm.
3. Theodore Stanton, ed., Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur, London, 1910, pp.301-302. 4. Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 30 October 1985, lot 360. The pastel measures 1500 x 1930 mm. 5. Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 18 April 2007, lot 125 (sold for $492,000). The pastel measures 1553 x 898 mm. 6. Anna Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur: Sa vie, son oeuvre, Paris, 1908, illustrated p.89 and p.403, respectively. 7. Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 2 November 2001, lot 222 (sold for $110,000). The dimensions of the pastel are 1505 x 1924 mm. No.43 Théo Van Rysselberghe 1. Camille Lemonnier, ‘Les Vingt’, L’Art moderne, 27 May 1906, p.165; quoted in translation in Patricia vander Elst-Alexandre, ‘Théo Van Rysselberghe’s Work: A Survey’, in Brussels, Centre for Fine Arts and The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, op.cit., p.64. 2. Brussels, Centre for Fine Arts and The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, op.cit., p.257, illustrated p.221 (where dated to 1897-1898). 3. Richard McDougall, ed., The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier, London, 1976, p.457. No.44 Giovanni Boldini 1. The French artist Jean-Gabriel Domergue (1889-1962) was a friend of Boldini and seems to have owned several works by the elder artist. In 1955 Domergue was appointed a curator at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, where he organized a series of important monographic exhibitions. He had planned one devoted to Boldini, but this project was still unrealized at the time of Domergue’s death in 1962. The following year, however, an important exhibition of Boldini’s work was held at the Musée Jacquemart-André, in honour of Domergue. 2. Sarah Lees, Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris, exhibition catalogue, Ferrara and Williamstown, 2009-2010, p.180. 3. 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.513-515, no.990. The painting measures 35 x 27 cm. 4. Boldini’s splendid full-length pastel portrait of the young Chilean woman Emiliana Concha de Ossa was painted in 1888, when the sitter was eighteen years sold, and won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris the following year. The artist kept the painting for himself, and it remained in his studio throughout his life. The pastel was presented by Boldini’s widow to the Italian State in 1933, and is today in the collection of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan (Inv. 7434; Dini and Dini, ibid., p.270, no.489, illustrated in colour Vol.I, pl.LXVI; Francesca Dini, Fernando Mazzocca and Carlo Sisi, eds., Boldini, exhibition catalogue, Padua, 2005, pp.230-231, no.91; Lees, op.cit., p.56, fig.22). 5. Inv. 1459; Andrea Buzzoni and Marcello Toffanello, Museo Giovanni Boldini: Catalogo generale completamente illustrato, Ferrara, 1997, pp.168169, illustrated in colour p.75, pl.II; Dini and Dini, op.cit., p.515, no.991. 6. Bianca Doria, Giovanni Boldini: Catalogo generale dagli Archivi Boldini, Milan, 2000, Vol.I, no.177, Vol.II, pl.177 (where dated 1884); Dini and Dini, op.cit., Vol.III, pp.218-219, no.389, illustrated in colour Vol.I, pl.LIII; Lees, op.cit., no.53, pl.53; Sarah Lees, ed., Nineteenth-Century European Paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, New Haven and London, 2012, Vol.I, pp.62-63, under no.27, fig.27.1 (where dated c.1884). The dimensions of the painting are 61 x 46 cm. No.45 Georges Clairin 1. ‘Enfin, parfois, dépassant les deserts et l’océan, plus loin que tout ce que la réalité offrait à ses regards, il a escalade l’infini, il s’est jeté en plein rêve, et il a fixé sur la toile d’adorables visions de femmes qui répondaient à sa soif de couleur; ce sont des figures enchanteresses, fleurs vivantes, d’un caprice original, d’une attitude alanguie, d’un imprévu où le peintre trouvait l’occasion favourable pour un effort inédit de decoration.’; Sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, Tableaux par Georges Clairin, 20 April 1901, p.7. 2. Montalant and Millman, ed., op.cit., p.61, no.9, illustrated in colour p.10. 3. Anonymous sale, Boulogne-Billancourt, Jonquet, 28 March 2019, lot number unknown. The drawing measures 390 x 315 mm. 4. Paris, Musée du Luxembourg, René Lalique: Bijoux d’exception 1890-1912, exhibition catalogue, 2005, no.130; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 12 November 2008, lot 200 (sold for £13,750). The drawing measures 310 x 220 mm., and is dedicated ‘a mon ami Lalique’. 5. Anonymous sale, Paris, Artcurial, 26 September 2017, lot 492. The drawing, which measures 375 x 260 mm., bears a dedication to a M. Baillehache. No.46 Gustav Klimt 1. Novotny and Dobai, op.cit., pp.347-348, no.162; Sale (‘The Property of the Art Foundation of Doctor Gustav Rau’), London, Christie’s, 7 February 2007, lot 270; Alfred Weidinger, ed., Gustav Klimt, Munich, London and New York, 2007, pp.290-291, no.195; Natter, ed., op.cit., pp.611612, no.184. The dimensions of the painting are 97.4 x 48.8 cm. 2. Weidinger, ed., ibid., p.290, under no.195.
3. Inv. 10501; Novotny and Dobai, op.cit., p.348, no.163, illustrated in colour pl.73; Weidinger, ed., op.cit., p.292, no.199; Natter, ed., op.cit., p.613, no.188, illustrated p.254. 4. Inv. 630; Novotny and Dobai, op.cit., pp.357-358, no.183; Weidinger, ed., op.cit., pp.294-295, no.206; Natter, ed., op.cit., pp.616-617, no.193, illustrated pp.239-239. 5. Another drawing from this group of three, dating from c.1904 and similarly dedicated by the artist to Maria Nebehay, depicts a reclining pregnant nude, and passed by descent to the Nebehay’s daughter Steffy (Strobl, op.cit., 1982, pp.76-77, no.1405; Christian M. Nebehay, Die Goldenen Sessel Meines Vaters: Gustav Nebehay (1881-1935) Antiquar und Kunsthändler in Leipzig, Wien und Berlin, Vienna, 1983, p.111, fig.84). The third drawing, a study of a female nude seen from behind of c.1913, was dedicated by Klimt to Gustav Nebehay (Alice Strobl, Gustav Klimt: Die Zeichnungen. Vol.III: 1912-1918, Salzburg, 1984, pp.30-31, no.2219). 6. ‘Sehr geehrter Herr Professor! Anbei die Blätter zurück. Auf den Blättern, die ich und meine Frau uns ausgesucht haben, bitte ich Sie daraufzuschreiben Herrn Gustav resp. Frau Maria N., damit die Blätter dem Handel entzogen sind…Ich hoffe, daß der gestrige Abend Ihnen recht gut bekommen ist und bleib(e), / mit herzlichen Grüßen / Ihr / Gustav Nebehay.’; Christian M. Nebehay, Gustav Klimt: Dokumentation, Vienna, 1969, p.389. The last line of the letter refers to the visit made by Klimt to the Nebehay’s home in Vienna on 11th October 1917. The art dealer was delayed by traffic and arrived late to find Klimt with Maria and the Nebehay children. The artist told Gustav Nebehay that he had had a delightful hour playing with the children, especially young Christian, who would have been seven years old at the time. No.47 Odilon Redon 1. Ann H. Sievers, Linda Muehlig and Nancy Rich, Master Drawings from the Smith College Museum of Art, New York, p.207, under no.52. No.48 Glyn Philpot 1. J. G. P. Delaney, ‘Gerald Heard’s memoir of Glyn Philpot c.1945’, The British Art Journal, Summer 2003, p.87. 2. Robin Gibson, ‘Glyn Philpot, R.A. at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford’ [exhibition review], The Burlington Magazine, November 1976, p.791. 3. J. G. P. Delaney, Glyn Philpot: His life and art, Aldershot, 1999, p.96. 4. London, Royal Institute Galleries, The Modern Society of Portrait Painters’ Seventh Exhibition, 1913, p.37, no.104 (‘Billy’), not illustrated. 5. Ibid., p.8, no.44 (‘Head of a Negro’), illustrated p.21; A. C. Sewter, Glyn Philpot 1884-1937, London, 1951, pl.21; Robin Gibson, Glyn Philpot 1884-1937: Edwardian Aesthete to Thirties Modernist, exhibition catalogue, London, National Portrait Gallery, 1984-1985, p.51, no.17; Delaney, op.cit., 1999, illustrated in colour pl.C4. 6. Gibson, ibid., p.97, no.79 (as in the collection of Mrs. George Woolmer). 7. Inv. 684; The Canadian Magazine, May 1914, illustrated p.83; Gibson, op.cit., p.51, under no.17, fig.35. The painting, which measures 142.7 x 123.3 cm., is also known as The Morning Prayer or The Prayer on the Roof. 8. The Daily Telegraph, 15 November 1921; quoted in Delaney, op.cit., 1999, p.97. No.49 Jan Toorop 1. This large drawing has remained in the sitter’s family until recently, having passed by descent to Heldring’s grandson, Ranulph Bye (1916-2003), an American artist and writer. A typewritten label pasted onto the old backing paper is inscribed ‘Portrait of my grandfather / Revd. Dr. Jan Lodewijk Heldring / of Amsterdam. Charcoal drawing / by Jan Toorop. / Ranulph Bye / Refitted and matted January 1982’. 2. A photograph of Jan Heldring as a younger man is contained in an album of photographs of members of the Heldring family and other Dutch families, in the iconographic collection of the RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague. The photograph of Heldring is visible online at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/173399 [accessed 27 November 2019]. No.50 Edouard Vuillard 1. Belinda Thomson, ‘Vuillard as a Draughtsman’, in London, Wolseley Fine Arts, Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940): Pastels and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 2003, p.7. 2. Stuart Preston, Edouard Vuillard, London, 1985, p.39. 3. Kimberly Jones, ‘Vuillard and the “Villégiature”’, in Guy Cogeval, Édouard Vuillard, exhibition catalogue, Washington and elsewhere, 2003-2004, p.441. 4. Jacques Salomon, Auprès de Vuillard, Paris, 1953; quoted in translation in John Russell, ed., Vuillard, Greenwich, 1971, pp.127-128. No.51 Edouard Vuillard 1. The present sheet, which belonged to Jos and Lucy Hessel, was inherited by their adopted daughter Lulu Grandjean-Hessel, later Mme. Jacques Arpels (1921-2004), who appears in many of Vuillard’s paintings, drawings and photographs after 1930.
2. Claude Roger-Marx, Vuillard: His Life and Work, New York, 1946, p.185. 3. Romain Coolus, ‘Le Château des Clayes’, La Renaissance, July 1930, p.185; Salomon and Cogeval, op.cit., Vol.III, p.1574, under no.XI-244. 4. Inv. 67.19. 5. Hessel sale (‘Hommage à la Famille Hessel: Mécènes at Modèles’), Paris, Christie’s, 23 March 2018, pp.32-33, lot 2A. The bust is today in a private collection in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. 6. Kimberly Jones in Guy Cogeval, Édouard Vuillard, exhibition catalogue, Washington and elsewhere, 2003-2004, p.131. 7. Salomon and Cogeval, op.cit., Vol.III, p.1576, no.XII-249 (where dated c.1930-1938); London, Neffe-Degandt Fine Art and New York, Jill Newhouse, Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940): Paintings, Pastels, Watercolours and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, n.d. (2004?), pp.78-79, no.39. No.52 Pablo Picasso 1. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, ‘Introduction’, in Helen Kay, Picasso’s World of Children, London, 1965, pp.8-9. 2. These are illustrated in Kay, ibid., pp.217 and 219-224. 3. Marina Picasso, Picasso: My Grandfather, London, 2001, pp.28-29. 4. In raking light, the present sheet reveals the indentations of the pencil sketch (presumably No.III in the sequence) that was drawn on the previous page of the sketchbook, in which the arms of a woman may be discerned. 5. Formerly Marina Picasso collection (Inv.05324); Her sale (‘Picasso Man & Beast: Works from the Collection of Marina Picasso’), New York, Sotheby’s, 18 May 2017, part of lot 108 (sold for $324,500); Santa Fe and Dallas, Gerald Peters Gallery, Picasso on Paper: Selected Works from the Marina Picasso Collection, exhibition catalogue, 1998, fig.44. The drawing, in pencil on paper, measures 270 x 210 mm. and is dated 5.1.51 and numbered V. 6. Formerly Marina Picasso collection (Inv.05325); Her sale (‘Picasso Man & Beast: Works from the Collection of Marina Picasso’), New York, Sotheby’s, 18 May 2017, part of lot 108 (sold for $324,500); Santa Fe and Dallas, ibid., fig.45 (incorrectly dated 1954). The drawing, which measures 270 x 210 mm., is executed in pencil on paper and is dated 5.1.51 and numbered VI. 7. The Picasso Project. Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 1885-1973. The Fifties I: 19501955, San Francisco, 2000, p.36, nos. 50-003(a) and 51-003(b), respectively. The former is also illustrated in New York, Jan Krugier Gallery, Picasso. “Petits formats”: Works from the Marina Picasso Collection, exhibition catalogue, 1989, no.49. 8. Bernard Ruiz Picasso, the artist’s third grandchild, was illegitimate at the time of his birth. No.53 Domenico Gnoli 1. Letter of 29 December 1968 from Gnoli to his agent Ted Riley; quoted in Walter Guadagnini, ed., Domenico Gnoli, exhibition catalogue, Modena, 2001, p.9. 2. Francesco Bonami, ‘Fleas on Mars’, in New York, Luxembourg & Dayan, Domenico Gnoli: Paintings 1964-1969, exhibition catalogue, 2012, p.12. 3. de Garrou Gnoli in Sgarbi, op.cit., illustrated pp.58-65. 4. ‘Four Drawings: Domenico Gnoli’, The Paris Review, Autumn-Winter 1959-1960. 5. ‘Fantasy in Art. Mr. Dominic Gnoli’s Exhibition’, The Times, 31 January 1957, p.3. 6. ‘Mr. Dominic Gnoli’, The Times, op.cit., p.6. No.54 Horst Janssen 1. ‘…der größte Zeichner außer Picasso. Aber Picasso ist eine andere Generation.’. This was an assessment with which Janssen seem to have agreed, stating that ‘At the moment there is no one better than me…It’s not my fault, it’s my talent.’ (‘Es gibt im Augenblick keinen Besseren als mich…Ich kann nichts dafür, ich habe nur Talent.’); ‘Janssen: Zwei Zentner Talent’, Der Spiegel, 22 December 1965. 2. Stephanie Buck and Jürgen Müller, ed., Rembrandt’s Mark, exhibition catalogue, Dresden, 2019, p.122 (entry by Mailena Mallach). 3. Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Horst Janssen: The Portrait. A Selection from 1945 to 1994, exhibition catalogue, 1998-1999, no.57; Claudia Breitkopf-Weinmann et al, Egon Schiele – Horst Janssen: Selbstinszenierung, Eros und Tod, exhibition catalogue, Vienna and Oldenburg, 2004-2005, p.107, no.8. The dimensions of the drawing are 370 x 520 mm. 4. Horst Janssen, ‘Hamburg 17.2.70’, in London, Marlborough Fine Art, Horst Janssen: Drawings, exhibition catalogue, November 1970, unpaginated. 5. Ibid., unpaginted.
No.55 Eric Fischl 1. Frederic Tuten, ‘Eric Fischl: Form Reformed’, in London, Waddington Galleries, Eric Fischl, exhibition catalogue, 1989, p.5. 2. Quoted in London, Thomas Gibson Fine Art Ltd., Eric Fischl, exhibition catalogue, 2007, p.62, under no.26. 3. Quoted in ibid., p.42, under no.16 and p.16, under no.5. 4. Quoted in London, Thomas Gibson, op.cit., p.58, under no.24.
London, Arthur Jeffress Gallery, Second London Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Dominic Gnoli, 1960.
INDEX OF ARTISTS ALBERTOLLI, Giocondo; No.26 BALDUCCI, Giovanni called Il Cosci; No.6 BASOLI, Antonio; No.32 BASSETTI, Marcantonio; Nos.7-8 BIANCHI, Mosè; No.38 BLOEMAERT, Abraham; No.5 BOLDINI, Giovanni; No.44 BONHEUR, Rosa; No.42 BOUCHER, François; Nos.19-20 CESI, Bartolomeo; No.2 CLAIRIN, Georges; No.45 CLAUS, Emile; No.40 COCCAPANI, Sigismondo; No.9 COSCI, Giovanni Balducci called il; No.6 DIJCK, Abraham van [attr.]; No.11 DROLLING, Martin; No.28 DUNKER, Balthasar Anton; No.22 DUTCH SCHOOL, 18th Century; No.24 FARINATI, Paolo; No.3 FISCHL, Eric; No.55 GNOLI, Domenico; No.53 GREUZE, Jean-Baptiste; No.25 GROS, Antoine-Jean, called Baron Gros; No.27 HAUSCHILD, Maximilian; No.36 INGRES, Jean-Auguste-Dominique; No.33 JANSSEN, Horst; No.54 KLIMT, Gustav; No.46 KNIEP, Christoph Heinrich; No.30
LEWIS, John Frederick; No.35 LINDTMAYER the Younger, Daniel; No.4 LIOTARD, Jean-Étienne; No.23 MAES, Godfried; Nos.14-17 MICHETTI, Francesco Paolo; No.41 MONTI, Francesco; No.18 PALAGI, Pelagio; No.31 PHILPOT, Glyn; No.48 PICASSO, Pablo; No.52 QUELLINUS the Younger, Erasmus [attr.]; No.13 REDON, Odilon; No.47 RICHMOND, George; No.34 ROBERT, Hubert; No.21 ROMAN SCHOOL, 16th Century; No.1 RYSSELBERGHE, Théo van; No.43 SABATELLI, Luigi; No.29 STECK, Paul Albert; No.39 TOOROP, Jan; No.49 ULFT, Jacob van der; No.12 VAN DER ULFT, Jacob; No.12 VAN DIJCK, Abraham [attr.]; No.11 VAN RYSSELBERGHE, Théo; No.43 VISSCHER, Cornelis; No.10 VUILLARD, Edouard; Nos.50-51 WOOLNOTH, Charles Nicholls; No.37
Godfried Maes (1649-1700) The Fall of Phaeton No.16