SOFA

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

Front cover: Giuseppe Casciaro Cliffs at Capri, with a Fishing Boat No.44

Firmin Baes (1874-1943) The End of the Day (Fin de journĂŠe) No. 60

A SENSE OF PLACE LANDSCAPES OF THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am, as always, very grateful to my wife Laura for her advice, support and patience while I was working on this catalogue through the months of two lockdowns in London, and beyond. I am also greatly indebted to the splendid gallery team of Megan Corcoran Locke and Alesa Boyle for their invaluable assistance in every aspect of preparing this catalogue. At Healey’s printers, Ric Horlock, Jenny Willings and Terry Adams have been wonderful colleagues. Andrew Smith has photographed almost all of the drawings, and, working closely 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 this catalogue and the drawings included herein: Ming Aguilar, Deborah Bates, Jessica Bauer, Edward Boyle, Mathias Chivot, Glynn Clarkson, Philippe David, Hamish Dewar, Edouard Dumont, Cheryl and Gino Franchi, Luci Gosling, Diek Groenewald, Lotte Hendrickx, Sam and Charles Howell, Nathan Kernan, Catherine Lampert, Thomas Le Claire, Suz Massen, Elizabeth McKeown, Anne Messmann, Guy Peppiatt, Theodore Reff, Jane Roberts, Max Rutherston, Betsy Thomas, Jane Turner, Jack Wakefield and Joanna Watson.

Stephen Ongpin

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

Unless otherwise noted, paper is white or whitish.

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

A SENSE OF PLACE LANDSCAPES OF THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES Drawings, Watercolours and Oil Sketches from c.1820 to c.1960

PRESENTED BY

STEPHEN ONGPIN

2021

1 ALPHONSE-NICOLAS-MICHEL MANDEVARE Paris(?) c.1770-c.1850 Paris A Pollarded Tree Black chalk on wove paper. Signed with the artist’s initials M-M in black chalk at the lower right.

593 x 445 mm. (23 3/8 x 17 1/2 in.)

The life and career of the landscape artist Alphonse Mandevare remains largely undocumented. While the year of his birth is unknown, he seems to have spent most of his career in Paris. He first exhibited at the Salon in 1793, where he showed two gouache landscapes, both now in the Musée des BeauxArts in Nantes. Although sometimes recorded as having died in 1829, he appears to have continued to exhibit regularly at the Salons until around 1848, almost always showing landscape drawings in black chalk or gouache; indeed, his contemporary reputation seems to have rested primarily on his work as a draughtsman. A number of Mandevare’s studies of trees were engraved by the firm of Lambert frères, and he himself produced two landscape lithographs in 1822.

In 1804 Mandevare published a treatise entitled Principes raisonnés du paysage a l’usage des écoles des départemens de l’Empire français, dessinés d’après nature1, dedicated to Comte Antoine-François de Fourcroy, directeur general de l’instruction publique. Intended as a guide to landscape painting for the amateur artist, the book consisted of twelve cahiers, in both folio and quarto formats, each made up of four plates engraved by Galine after Mandevare’s drawings and accompanied by an explanatory text.

The purpose of the treatise was to establish a progressive series of exercises by which young artists could develop the tools necessary to create picturesque landscapes. These began with individual studies d’après nature of prominent elements within a landscape - leaves, branches, trees, rock formations and so forth - which could then be integrated into a panoramic view. A selection of drawings by Mandevare, apparently related to the Principes raisonnés du paysage, appeared in the 1808 sale of the printmaker Laurent Guyot in Paris.

Mandevare has only recently been rediscovered as a draughtsman, with the appearance of several groups of chalk drawings originating from the collection of the artist’s descendants. Many of these large sheets bear dates between 1820 and 1825, and most are now in private collections2. A group of ten large black chalk drawings by the artist have been acquired by the British Museum, and other landscape drawings have lately entered the collections of the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Fondation Custodia in Paris and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.. A sketchbook with thirteen pencil studies of gnarled trees by Mandevare is in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York3, while other drawings by the artist are in the museums at Grenoble, Lille, Schwerin and Soissons.

Although two similar pollarded willow trees appear in the ninth cahier4 of Mandevare’s Principes raisonnés du paysage, the present sheet, drawn in a rich black chalk, is an independent work of art and is likely to date to the 1820s. (That the artist executed such autonomous drawings of trees can be seen from his Salon entries; a drawing of an Etude d’arbre, for example, is listed in the livret of the Salon of 1804.) An equally large and dramatic study of a pollarded tree by Mandevare, formerly in the collection of Charles Ryskamp, was sold at auction in New York in 20115. Another comparable drawing of a tree, similarly signed and of identical dimensions to the present sheet, appeared at auction in London in 20116.

2 ACHILLE-ETNA MICHALLON Paris 1796-1822 Paris A Procession of Monks in the Countryside near Naples Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over a pencil underdrawing. Signed and dated Michallon / 1822 in brown ink at the lower right. Further inscribed Michallon 1822 in pencil on the mount.

192 x 272 mm. (7 5/8 x 10 3/4 in.) [sight] PROVENANCE: Probably the posthumous vente Michallon, Paris, Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Germain [Masson de Saint-Maurice], 26-28 December 1822; Louis Deglatigny, Rouen; By descent to his greatgrandson, Jean-Claude Delauney, Caen.

The son of the sculptor Claude Michallon, Achille-Etna Michallon was orphaned at an early age. A precocious and gifted artist, he received his training with Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Jean-Victor Bertin, Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunuoy and Jacques-Louis David. (He also seems to have closely studied Alphonse Mandevare’s Principes raisonnés du paysage, a practical guide to landscape drawing published in 1804.) Michallon first exhibited at the Salon in 1812, at the age of fifteen, and received a second-class medal. Among his earliest works were a series of landscape illustrations for accounts of exotic voyages, notably Le voyage d’Ali Bey en Abbassi en Afrique et en Asie pendant les années 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806 et 1807, published in Paris in 1814. Three years later, in 1817, Michallon won the inaugural Prix de Rome in the newly established category of historical landscape painting, created for him the previous year by the Count de Vaublanc, Minister of the Interior.

Michallon was a pensionnaire in Rome between 1818 and 1821, and the landscape paintings he sent to the Salons from Italy were well received by critics, many of whom regarded him as the most promising young landscape painter of his generation. During his return trip to France in 1821 Michallon made drawings of picturesque towns in Italy and Switzerland, and soon after his arrival in Paris opened a teaching studio. Among his pupils was the young Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, who was of the same age, and who studied with him for a brief period until Michallon’s early death from pneumonia in September 1822, a month shy of his twenty-sixth birthday. A sale of the contents of the painter’s studio, held a few weeks after his death, included some four hundred paintings and oil sketches, as well as around seven hundred drawings and nineteen sketchbooks. In 1994 an exhibition devoted to Michallon was mounted at the Louvre, which today houses the largest extant collection of the artist’s drawings.

As has been noted of the artist, ‘Michallon drew a small number of imaginary landscapes in the historical, idealized vein, but the majority of his output was devoted to studies after the motif, made from direct observation. These sheets include some drafted in a clean, simple, and illustrative style; others are more richly evoked, exploring the range of effects generated by chalk or ink.’1 Drawn in the year of the artist’s early death, after he had left Italy and returned to France, this atmospheric landscape should be seen as a souvenir of Italy, rather than a strictly topographical view. A stylistically comparable pen and wash drawing - a depiction of The Tomb of Virgil in Naples, also signed and dated 1822 - is in the Louvre2.

The present sheet is likely to have been among the contents of the artist’s studio dispersed in the posthumous vente Michallon of December 1822. The drawing later entered the collection of the Rouen merchant and archaeologist Louis Deglatigny (1854-1936), who assembled an extensive collection of paintings and drawings, as well as books and prints, much of which was sold in five auctions in Paris in 1937. The present sheet, however, remained with the collector’s descendants until 2019.

3 JOSEPH MICHAEL GANDY ARA London 1771-1843 Plympton Near Southwick, Shoreham, West Sussex Watercolour, with scratching out, over an underdrawing in pencil. Colour beginnings in watercolour and a compass diagram in grey ink on the verso. Inscribed 31 Aug 22 in pencil at the upper left and 8 o/c / S in pencil at the upper right. Further inscribed near Southwick / Shoreham / 31 Aug 22 8 o/c SE in brown ink on the verso.

109 x 184 mm. (4 1/4 x 7 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist by Richard Westmacott and placed into an album; The album given to his daughter, Maria Poole, née Westmacott; Thence by descent until sold, London, Christie’s, 20 November 2003, lot 7; Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York; Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva.

LITERATURE: Suzanne Folds McCullagh, ed., Dreams & Echoes: Drawings and Sculpture in the David and Celia Hilliard Collection, exhibition catalogue, Chicago, 2013-2014, p.79, under no.28.

EXHIBITED: New York, Richard L. Feigen & Co., Joseph Gandy: Visionary Views of England, 2004, no.37.

An architect by profession, Joseph Gandy was trained in the office of James Wyatt from 1786, before enrolling in the Royal Academy Schools in 1789. Following a period of three years spent in Rome, between 1794 and 1797, he returned to London, where in 1798 he was employed as a draughtsman by the architect Sir John Soane. Although long regarded by scholars as merely an employee of Soane, translating the latter’s architectural designs into full-scale watercolours, it is now known that Gandy often produced drawings after his own inventions1. He maintained a modest architectural practice of his own, and exhibited a remarkable series of large-scale architectural history watercolours and capriccios - grandiose subjects inspired by Ancient Greece and Rome - at the Royal Academy between 1789 and 1833. Gandy was admitted as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1803, largely on the strengths of his undoubted skills as an architectural draughtsman and despite the fact that at that time he had not received any commissions as a practicing architect, but was never elected an Academician.

The present sheet was one of several landscape sketches by Gandy from the 1820s which were acquired from him by his friend, the Neoclassical sculptor Sir Richard Westmacott. Westmacott had studied in Rome with Gandy, and sometimes purchased works from his often impecunious friend.

He later assembled these watercolours into two albums, one of which is today in the Sir John Soane Museum in London2, while the other, including this watercolour, was eventually broken up and the contents dispersed in 20043. This second album contained ninety-seven watercolours of landscapes and studies from nature, variously inscribed and dated between the 15th of July 1820 and the 5th of July 1826, and included views in London and its outskirts, Surrey, Sussex and Kent, together with a number of studies of skies, clouds, sunsets, storms and nocturnal views4. The watercolours appear to have come from one or more sketchbooks used by Gandy, and many were inscribed by the artist with the location, date and the time of day or night that the views were made, as well as the compass direction of the view chosen. Indeed, Gandy’s topographical drawings and watercolours often served as a form of diary and travelogue, a practice he had begun during his period of study in Italy, when he went on sketching expeditions in the Campagna.

According to the artist’s annotations on the present sheet, this poetic watercolour - a view of the English Channel between Southwick and Shoreham in West Sussex, on the south coast of England was drawn at eight o’clock on the 31st of August, 1822. Another watercolour by Joseph Gandy from the same album, today in a private collection in Chicago, depicts a view of Shoreham drawn on the same day, just an hour earlier than the present sheet5.

4 JOSEPH-FRÉDÉRIC DEBACQ Paris 1800-1892 Paris The Nave of the Cathedral at Monreale, Looking Towards the Apse Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in pencil. Inscribed Cathedrale de Monreale près de Palerme in pencil on the verso. Further inscribed Cathedrale de Monreale près Palerme. in pencil at the bottom of the album page onto which this drawing was pasted. Stamped with the mark FD in a double circle (not in Lugt), possibly the Debacq atelier stamp, at the lower right.

238 x 283 mm. (9 3/8 x 11 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: From an album of landscape drawings by Joseph-Frédéric Debacq and the Duc de Luynes, made during a voyage to southern Italy in 1828.

An architect and painter, Joseph-Frédéric Debacq entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1818, studying with the architect Lucien-Tirté van Clemputte. Appointed architect to the city of Paris, Debacq found an important patron and supporter in Honoré Théodoric d’Albert de Luynes, the future 8th Duc de Luynes (1802-1867), a wealthy student of archaeology and an amateur artist. De Luynes was fascinated by antiquity, and in 1828 he and Debacq travelled together from southern France, across the Alps and through the Italian peninsula, to study the Greek ruins and cities of Southern Italy; the area known by the ancient Romans as Magna Graecia. In 1833 De Luynes would publish an important study, illustrated

by Debacq, of the ancient Greek city of Metapontum in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Working with the architect Charles Garnier, Debacq later designed the funerary chapel of the Château de Dampierre for the Duc de Luynes, and also built his hôtel particulier on the rue de l’Université in Paris.

This and the following drawing were once part of an album of pen and wash drawings - by both Debacq and the Duc de Luynes - of landscape views and architectural sites, made during their voyage together through Italy in 1828. The two men began their journey in Savoy in the south of France, and travelled across the Alps and through Piacenza, Rimini, Fano and Narni to Rome. They continued their trip, via Terracina, to Naples, Pompeii and Paestum, thence to Metaponte and Taranto, and onwards to Gerace in Calabria. On the island of Sicily Debacq and de Luynes visited Taormina, Syracuse, Agrigento, Selinunte, Segesta, Palermo and Monreale.

One of the finest surviving examples of Norman architecture, the Cathedral, or Duomo, of Monreale in Sicily was founded by King William II of Sicily and built between 1174 and 1267 AD. Much of the vast interior, with a wide central nave flanked by two smaller aisles, is decorated with some 6,400 square metres of golden mosaics depicting scenes from the Old and New Testament. This drawing presents a view of the nave looking west towards the triple apse, which is dominated by the monumental mosaic of Christ Pantocrator over the altar.

As the British traveller and writer Henry Gally Knight notes, ‘nothing can less resemble the interior of Norman churches in the north than the interior of Monreale. Here are no massive buttresses, no round arches, no triforium. Single pillars, taken from Roman buildings, support pointed arches on each side of the nave. Some of the capitals are antique, but the greater part are of the time, and of the same pattern, exhibiting foliage, volutes in the shape of cornucopias, with figures intermixed. These capitals are of the most delicate and elaborate workmanship, and can only have been produced by a Greek chisel…But the glory of Monreale consists in the Mosaics which cover its walls: the walls of the nave, of the aisles, the transepts, the apses - every part of this spacious cathedral. In the centre apse appears the leading feature of the interior - a colossal half length of the Redeemer, environed by the vision of the Apocalypse and the Apostles...All of these Mosaics are on a gold ground, and the whole affords the most gorgeous display of Byzantine decoration now in existence.’1

5 JOSEPH-FRÉDÉRIC DEBACQ Paris 1800-1892 Paris The Nave of the Cathedral at Monreale, Looking East, with a Traveller in the Foreground Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in pencil. Inscribed Cathedrale de Monreale près de Palerme in pencil on the verso. Further inscribed Cathedrale de Monreale près Palerme. in pencil at the bottom of the album page onto which this drawing was pasted. Stamped with the mark FD in a double circle (not in Lugt), possibly the Debacq atelier stamp, at the lower left.

197 x 315 mm. (7 7/8 x 12 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: From an album of landscape drawings by Joseph-Frédéric Debacq and the Duc de Luynes, made during a voyage to southern Italy in 1828.

The Duomo at Monreale, as the 19th century English traveller and illustrator William Henry Bartlett noted, ‘though different in style, might vie in extent and splendour with any of the cathedrals erected by the Norman Kings in England or in France. The most celebrated artists, Greek, Italian and Saracenic, were employed in its construction and adornment, and it remains the most splendid monument of that singular and often gorgeous, though some may think incongruous, combination of styles…When the immense bronze doors are suddenly thrown open, the effect of the interior covered with gold and mosaic, and sunk in a rich half-shadow, is indescribably gorgeous. The nave, ample and spacious, resembles a basilica, rather than the vaulted edifice of the north. The design is exceedingly simple; a range of massive pillars of different coloured marbles, taken from ancient Roman buildings, and surmounted by capitals, some of them antique, and others rich in device and execution, evidently carved by Greek workmen. The arches above are slightly pointed; a range of slender lights above them casts a subdued light into the edifice, which is surmounted by a rich flat roof, gorgeously carved and decorated…[The] mosaics, with which the greater part of the interior is covered, confer upon it a distinctive character. They are wrought upon a gold ground…and exhibit a series of scripture incidents. Predominating the whole is a colossal head of the Saviour in the centre apse, which produces, as it was intended to do, an awful and striking effect. But this is not all; the marble panelling of the side aisles, the ornamental devices, and the decorations of the roofing, are all strikingly Saracenic, while Norman peculiarities of detail are curiously intermingled with the rest. Combining as it does so many styles nowhere else seen in juxtaposition, and wrought into one grand whole by the master-mind of the architect, the cathedral of Monreale is undoubtedly the most curious, as well as magnificent monument of the period which gave it birth.’1 The present sheet depicts the nave of the Duomo, looking east towards the entrance façade. In both this and the previous drawing the artist has endeavoured to be as accurate as possible, to the extent of depicting a small temporary wooden scaffold or balustrade at the clerestory level, above one of the arches on the south aisle.

Drawings by Debacq are rare. A handful of architectural studies, dating from his student days, are in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, while a watercolour by the artist is in the Musée Calvet in Avignon.

6 JOHN FREDERICK LEWIS RA London 1804-1876 Walton-on-Thames The Patio de los Arrayanes at the Alhambra, Granada Pencil and brown wash, heightened with white gouache. Inscribed by the artist The house in Front a blaze / of White. The reflection / perfect. Darken this / for objects reflected in pencil at the upper right.

Further inscribed Patio de los / Arrayanes in pencil at the lower left and Alhambra. Oct.26 in pencil at the lower right.

282 x 212 mm. (11 1/8 x 8 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Charles Baring Wall MP, London and Norman Court, West Tytherley, Hampshire; By inheritance to his cousin, Thomas Baring MP, London and Norman Court, West Tytherley1; Thence by descent.

Early in his career, John Frederick Lewis established his reputation as a gifted draughtsman with drawings and finished watercolours that were exhibited at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, the Royal Academy and the British Institution. Perhaps inspired by the example of his friend, the artist David Wilkie, he travelled to Spain in 1832, remaining there for two years and producing numerous drawings of local sights, costumes, buildings and landscapes. Spanish themes dominated Lewis’s output of finished watercolours for the next few years; indeed, between 1834 and 1839, every one of his exhibited works was of a Spanish subject. Together with two volumes of lithographs - Sketches and Drawings of the Alhambra, published in 1835, and Lewis’s Sketches of Spain and Spanish Character, which appeared the following year - these works earned the artist the nickname ‘Spanish Lewis’.

In the autumn of 1832, after a period of time in Madrid, Lewis settled in Granada in Andalusia. There he stayed with his patron and friend Richard Ford at the Casa Sanchez, an old house on the grounds of the Alhambra. Lewis was captivated by the Alhambra, the hilltop fortress and palace of the Nasrid dynasty that had ruled Granada for two hundred years, until the end of the 15th century. He made a number of drawings of the Moorish architecture of the palace, situated on a rock high above the city.

Lewis’s Alhambra drawings have long been recognized as among the finest works of his Spanish period.

As the artist’s grand-nephew noted, ‘Lewis’s sketches of the Alhambra…are important as being his first sustained attempt at architectural drawing. Furthermore, in the Alhambra he was close to the fascinating relics of an Islamic culture for the first time. Lewis was captivated by it all: the elegance of this palace made for indolent enjoyment; the traceries of its peristyles; the latticed jalousies through which some dark-eyed princess might observe unseen; the cool halls and the tinkle of water everywhere.’2 The present sheet, drawn on the 26th of October 1832, depicts the interior courtyard of the Alhambra known as the Patio de los Arrayanes, or Courtyard of the Myrtles, so named for the myrtle bushes that border the central pond, which is fed by fountains at either end. Almost certainly made on the spot, this is very much a working drawing, and includes the artist’s colour notes in pencil. A more finished watercolour of the same view, but from a slightly different vantage point, is in a private American collection3.

Another drawing of the Patio de los Arrayanes, seen from the opposite end of the pond, is in the Bolton Museum4, while a watercolour sketch of the courtyard is in the collection of Eton College5. Other drawings by Lewis of the Alhambra are today in the collections of the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, as well as the Ackland Art Museum at Chapel Hill, North Carolina and the Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife in Granada.

7 GUSTAV FRIEDRICH HETSCH Stuttgart 1788-1864 Copenhagen An Imaginary Reconstruction of the Roman Forum Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over a pencil underdrawing. Laid down on a 19th century mount washed brown, with framing lines in brown ink. Signed with a monogram and dated GH / 1833 in brown ink at the lower left.

485 x 327 mm. (19 1/8 x 13 1/4 in.) [sheet] 597 x 442 mm. (23 1/2 x 17 3/8 in.) [including mount] The son of the German classical painter Philipp Friedrich von Hetsch, Gustav Hetsch was active as an architect, designer and draughtsman. Born in Stuttgart, he studied in Tübingen and Paris, where he was a pupil of Charles Percier and worked on the Parisian church of Sainte-Geneviève, now the Panthéon.

In 1812 he returned to Stuttgart but soon afterwards travelled to Italy, where he met the Danish architect Peder Malling, who encouraged him to move to Copenhagen in 1815. Hetsch was to spend the remainder of his long career in Denmark. He contributed to the interior decoration of the rebuilt Christiansborg Palace, and in later years designed the Great Synagogue of Copenhagen, completed in 1833, and the church (later Cathedral) of Saint Ansgar, built between 1840 and 1842. Much of Hetsch’s work was in the field of decorative art, however, and between 1828 and 1857 he served as artistic director of the Royal Porcelain Factory. He also designed metalwork and furniture, and taught at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Kunstakademie) in Copenhagen, where he eventually rose to the position of Professor of Architecture.

This large sheet can be likened to an ink and wash drawing of the imaginary perspectival interior of a classical building (fig.1), signed and dated 1820, in the collection of the Kunstakademiets Bibliotek in Copenhagen1. Intended as a design for a pantheon or temple devoted to famous men, the drawing was the artist’s reception piece for admission into the Kunstakademie in Copenhagen, to which he was accepted in June 1820. A number of similar large-scale drawings of architectural fantasies by Hetsch, bearing dates between 1822 and 1840 (fig.2), are also in the Kunstakademiets Bibliotek2. Another stylistically comparable drawing by the artist, depicting the interior of the Roman church of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, is in the Art Institute of Chicago3.

1.

2.

8 FERDINAND-VICTOR-EUGÈNE DELACROIX Charenton-Saint-Maurice 1798-1863 Paris Landscape near Eaux-Bonnes in the Pyrenees Watercolour over an underdrawing in pencil on paper, backed.

171 x 295 mm. (6 3/4 x 11 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s studio, Paris (Lugt 838a); The Delacroix atelier sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 17-29 February 1864, probably part of lot 594 (‘Études de muletiers et de paysannes. Vues de montagnes.

Aquarelles et dessins. 27 feuilles.’, bt. Richy); Probably A. Richy, Paris; Private collection, France; Galerie Schmit, Paris, in 2000; Acquired from them by Eugene V. Thaw, New York; Thence by descent.

One of the finest draughtsmen of the 19th century in France, Eugène Delacroix was adept in a variety of techniques - notably pen, pencil, watercolour, charcoal and pastel - and produced a large and diverse number of drawings of all types. As has been noted, ‘For their number, variety and importance he attached to them, drawings are an essential, if not fundamental part of Delacroix’s oeuvre…they represent the most faithful testimonies of the man and the artist with his foibles but his greatness as well.’1 However, Delacroix’s output as a draughtsman remained almost completely unknown and unseen by scholars, collectors and connoisseurs until the posthumous auction of the contents of his studio held in February 1864, six months after the artist’s death, which amounted to some six thousand drawings in 430 lots. The sale included not only preparatory compositional sketches and figure studies for Delacroix’s paintings and public commissions, but a myriad variety of drawings of studies of wild animals, landscapes, copies after the work of earlier masters, costume studies, scenes from literature, still life subjects and the occasional portrait, as well as finished pastels. The contemporary critic Théophile Silvestre wrote, ‘What truly astonished everyone at this public auction of Delacroix’s watercolors, drawings, and jottings was the master’s untiring abundance, the variety of his motifs, and the dedication with which he rendered the subjects that struck him in all of their forms…This collection of watercolors and drawings is a veritable encyclopedia of impressions…’2 The largest single collection of drawings by Delacroix, numbering almost three thousand individual sheets and several sketchbooks, is today in the Louvre.

Delacroix produced relatively few landscape drawings, apparently because he regarded landscape as a background for his paintings and not necessarily as a subject in itself. (He never exhibited a landscape painting at the Salon.) Although his use of watercolour for landscape sketches was inspired by his visit to England in 1826 and his friendship with the artist Richard Parkes Bonington, it was not until the 1840s that he regularly made landscape studies in the medium. During this time he produced watercolour landscapes of the scenery around his country home at Champrosay, near Fontainebleau, and also near the home of his friend George Sand at Nohant in central France. These works, however, were never exhibited but were kept in the artist’s studio until his death. Delacroix’s revived interest in landscape from the 1840s onwards can be seen as, to some extent, the result of a series of travels he made to the mountains, the seaside and the country for the sake of his health, as well as an increasing desire for solitude and a respite from the demands made on him by his work in Paris.

In the summer of 1845, on the advice of his doctor, Delacroix spent about a month - between 22 July and 15 August - in the small spa town of Eaux-Bonnes, at the foot of the Pyrenees. (The artist was exhausted from working concurrently on the decorative schemes for the Palais Bourbon and the Palais du Luxembourg, on which he had been engaged for the previous five or six years, and had been sent to the thermal spa to rest and recover his strength.) During his time in Eaux-Bonnes he took long walks in the mountainous countryside surrounding the fashionable spa town, making countless drawings and sketches of the scenery; the banks of the Valentin river and the villages of the Ossau Valley, the canyon at Gourzy and the mountain peak known as the Pic de Ger. As Delacroix wrote from Eaux-Bonnes to

his friend Frédéric Villot, in a letter of 24 July 1845, just after his arrival in the town: ‘The landscape is beautiful. It is the mountains in all their majesty. There are truly delightful sites at every step, at every bend in the trail: if you have the legs of a goat to climb the rises then you will have the complete enjoyment of the countryside.’3 In another letter, to his cousin Léon Riesener, he writes, ‘The natural landscape is very beautiful here. There are mountains wherever you turn, and the visual effect is magnificent. What surprised me the most, even more than their beauty, is the indifference with which everyone looks at them, including the artists, such as [Camille] Roqueplan and [Paul] Huet, both of whom I found here.’4 However, while he was struck with the majesty of the mountains around Eaux-Bonnes, Delacroix seems to have regarded them as challenging to paint. As he wrote on August 5th to a friend, ‘The beauty of this scenery of the Pyrenees is not something that one can hope to render with painting in a happy way. Regardless of the impossibility of working continuously here, it is all too gigantic and one does not know where to start in the midst of these masses and this multitude of details’5, while on the same day he also wrote to Villot that ‘the gigantic and all of that confounds me. There is never paper big enough to give an idea of these masses and the details are so numerous that no amount of patience can triumph over them.’6 (He also complained about the weather at Eaux-Bonnes, writing in another letter, ‘Here it seems to be by design; this place is a sort of funnel where all the clouds congregate. It rains almost all the time and the fact is that if the waters are good for curing stubborn colds, there is no better place for catching one.’7) Previously unpublished, this free and fresh study of a view near Eaux-Bonnes may be compared to a handful of other, equally atmospheric watercolours by Delacroix, notably five studies of the mountains of the Pyrenees in the Louvre8. Also similar to the present sheet is a watercolour of a mountain landscape at Eaux-Bonnes in the British Museum9 and another in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven10. Other watercolours by Delacroix of landscapes in the Pyrenees are today in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. In addition to a number of independent drawings and watercolours, a sketchbook used by the artist between July and August 1845 survives from this period in the Pyrenees, and was recently acquired by the Louvre. The Louvre sketchbook includes several watercolour landscapes that are closely comparable to the present sheet11.

Delacroix’s landscape watercolours, with their fluidity of wash and delicacy of touch, reveal that the artist could more than hold his own in this challenging medium. He tended to use very diluted watercolours to achieve the effects he wanted, and, rather than applying gouache or white heightening, preferred to leave the whitish reserve of the paper to serve as highlights. As he noted in his journal in 1847, ‘The particular charm of watercolour, against which all oil painting invariably appears red and pissing, lies in the constant transparency of the paper; the proof is that it loses this quality when a little gouache is applied.

It [ie. this transparency] is lost entirely in a gouache.’12 Such spirited watercolours as the present sheet are, in the words of one scholar, ‘a painter’s sketches, free from the manual and intellectual habits of the watercolor specialist and the illustrator.’13

9 JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET Gruchy 1814-1875 Barbizon A Reclining Nymph in a Wooded Landscape Black conté crayon.

203 x 262 mm. (8 x 10 3/8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, with the studio stamp (Lugt 1460; Herbert 1875A) at the lower left1; Private collection, Europe.

In Paris in the 1840s Jean-François Millet encountered a group of landscape painters, including Théodore Rousseau, Constant Troyon and Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, who together established the Barbizon school. Although his early career was dominated by portraits, by the 1850s he had begun to paint pastoral subjects, establishing his public reputation with three seminal paintings; The Sower (1850), The Gleaners (1857) and The Angelus (1859). By the 1860s Millet was enjoying a successful career, receiving numerous commissions for paintings and pastels. He was honoured with an exhibition of his work at the Exposition Universelle in 1867, but within a few years had begun to suffer from poor health. Four months after the artist’s death in January 1875, the contents of his studio were dispersed at auction.

Millet was a skilled draughtsman, with an oeuvre ranging from quick sketches and more elaborate figure studies to landscape studies in pen and watercolour, as well as highly finished pastel drawings that were sold as autonomous works of art, often for considerable sums of money. Indeed, for much of his career Millet earned his living from his drawings, rather than his paintings. As the scholar Robert Herbert has noted, ‘Millet’s penchant for drawing was catered to by the nature of his market. In the early years at Barbizon he sold few paintings at all, and at such derisory prices that the sale of three or four drawings could produce the same income…As the decade progressed…Millet acquired more opportunities for selling oils.

Drawings still held priority, however, for they were his instinctive way of creating. Almost all his paintings were chosen from among drawings that had already been completed.’2 After his arrival in Paris in 1846, Millet produced a series of paintings and drawings in which female nudes were prominent. He painted around twenty-five small-scale canvases of female nudes in bucolic landscapes, typified by such works as A Woman Reclining in a Landscape of c.1846-1847, in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston3. These paintings, sometimes mildly erotic in nature, seem to have been done with a view to having more immediate commercial appeal than the larger works he was painting for the Salons. At the same time Millet made around fifty drawings, including the present sheet, that can be related to this same trend, although they remain a very small part of his oeuvre as a draughtsman as a whole. By the end of the decade, he had turned his attention to peasant subjects, and depictions of female nudes largely disappeared from his oeuvre for the remainder of his career.

The present sheet may thus be grouped with a relatively small number of early chalk drawings of female nudes, executed in the second half of the 1840s. Among stylistically comparable drawings of single nudes of this date are several examples in the Louvre, including a study of a bather4, as well as a Reclining Nude in a private collection5. The bucolic setting of this drawing, and the presence of a figure playing music in the background, give the composition the air of a scene from mythology or classical literature, although Millet allows no references to a specific theme.

Only a handful of complete figural compositions of this type are known from Millet’s drawn oeuvre of the late 1840s. A signed black chalk drawing of Lot and his Daughters, in which a similar reclining female nude is found, was on the art market in New York in 19996, while an oval drawing of The Lovers is in the Art Institute of Chicago7.

10 CARL LUDVIG MESSMANN Copenhagen 1826-1893 Gothenburg Nocturne: Trees at the Edge of a Lake Pencil, with stumping, heightened with charcoal and white chalk. Inscribed L. Messmann. del in brown ink on the old mount.

101 x 142 mm. (4 x 5 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Benjamin Wolff, Engelholm, Denmark (Lugt 420)1, with his drystamp at the lower right centre of the old mount; Thence by descent in the Wolff Sneedorf family.

Relatively little is known of the Danish landscape draughtsman, painter and lithographer Carl Ludvig Ferdinand Messmann. In 1840, at the age of fourteen, he enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (the Kunstakadamiet) in Copenhagen, where he remained until January 1845. He also trained at the lithography workshop Em. Bærentzen & Co. in Copenhagen. Students at the Kunstakadamiet were encouraged to paint out of doors, and among Messmann’s favoured subjects were the countryside in and around the Danish capital. He often worked in the Frederiksberg Gardens and the forest of Charlottenlund, on the shores of the Øresund north of Copenhagen, as well as elsewhere in North Zealand, producing drawings, nature studies and lithographs imbued with a romantic sensibility and an appreciation of nature. Messmann also worked in the Danish towns of Aalborg, Kolding, Ribe and Tønder in the late 1840s. In 1848 he volunteered for service in the First Schleswig War between Denmark and Germany, serving in Jutland and Funen, but the following year was allowed to be discharged since his wife had just had their first child. In 1849 he and his family moved to Frederiksberg, on the outskirts of Copenhagen. A painting of Hesselager Manor, on the island of Funen in southeastern Denmark, was one of the first of his works to be exhibited in public, at the Kunstakadamiet in the Charlottenborg Palace in 1850. The artist was to exhibit a total of twenty works at Charlottenborg during the decade of the 1850s, seven of which were purchased by King Frederik VII of Denmark between 1854 and 1859.

By 1852 Messmann had settled in Roskilde, the ancient capital of Denmark, west of Copenhagen, where he made several drawings and paintings of the 13th century Roskilde Cathedral. The second half of the 1850s were to be a particularly productive period for the artist, as he continued to exhibit landscape paintings and pencil drawings. Apart from Frederik VII, other Danish collectors of Messmann’s work included the businessman Johan Hansen and the publisher Jacob Hegel, as well as such fellow artists as Carl Emil Baagøe, Ludvig Abelin Schou and Johan Christian Dahl.

Messmann often worked in Sweden, and in 1857 moved there permanently, living briefly in Malmö before settling in Gothenburg in September 1859. The artist was to live and work in Sweden for the remaining thirty-four years of his career, making occasional trips back to Denmark. He became as well known for his views of Gothenburg as he had been for his earlier depictions of Copenhagen, and illustrated a series of views of Gothenburg and its surroundings as lithographs for Viktor Rydberg’s Göteborg med dess omgifningar, which was published in twelve volumes between 1859 and 1862. He also worked as a teacher of drawing and perspective. Messmann continued to exhibit both paintings and drawings, characterized by a precision of handling and an attention to detail, until his death in Gothenburg in 1893, at the age of sixty-seven.

Ludvig Messmann remains an obscure figure today, and is rarely mentioned in accounts of 19th century painting in Denmark or Sweden. Drawings and paintings by the artist can be found in the collections of the Museum of Copenhagen, the Roskilde Museum and the Øregård Museum in Denmark, as well as the Goteborgs Stadtmuseum in Gothenburg, the Malmö Konstmuseum in Malmö, the Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Some lithographs by Messmann are in the British Museum.

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11 BERNHARD FIEDLER Berlin 1816-1904 Trieste A View of Verona from the Banks of the River Adige, with the Ponte Scaligero Pencil and red chalk on grey washed paper, with scratching-out. Signed, dated and inscribed B. Fiedler.

1850 / Verona n.d. Natur gez. in pencil at the lower left. Inlaid on an old mount.

232 x 322 mm. (9 1/8 x 12 5/8 in.)

Active as a painter, decorator and draughtsman, Bernhard Fiedler studied at the Kunstakademie in Berlin with the landscape painters Johann Gerst and Wilhelm Krause. The recipient of an Austrian travel grant in 1843, he journeyed extensively in Northern Italy and along the Dalmatian coast, recording his travels with paintings, drawings and watercolours. Fiedler was admitted to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, and spent a considerable amount of time in Trieste, producing topographical drawings of the castles of the Friuli region for King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia and serving as drawing master to the Archduchess Charlotte. In 1853 he accompanied an Austrian delegation to Constantinople, where he presented a painting to the Sultan, and the following year was in Greece and Italy.

Later trips took the artist to Turkey, Egypt, Palestine and the Near East, and these travels resulted in a number of charming paintings of Orientalist views and genre subjects; works for which he is best known today. Fiedler visited Egypt at least four times - in 1853, 1855, 1864-1865 and 1882 - and painted numerous views of Cairo, Giza and such sites along the Nile as Luxor, Thebes and Aswan. (He also contributed illustrations for the German Egyptologist Georg Ebers’s book Aegypten in Wort und Bild, published in 1879.) Among the artist’s important commissions was the decoration of the castle of Miramare, on the Gulf of Trieste, built for the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian between 1856 and 1860. Paintings by Fiedler are today in museums in Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Vienna and Trieste, while a large alpine landscape, dated 1845, is in the Royal Collection at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

Executed in 1850, this fine drawing depicts a view of the city of Verona from the southern bank of the Adige river, near the Basilica of San Lorenzo, on what is today the Riva San Lorenzo. Fiedler is here looking west, towards the 14th century fortified bridge known as the Ponte Scaligero (or Ponte di Castel Vecchio), constructed by Cangrande II della Scala, Lord of Verona, between 1354 and 1356.

(The bridge was destroyed by retreating German troops in April 1945 but was rebuilt, with original materials salvaged from the riverbed, between 1949 and 1951.) Visible at the southern end of the bridge in this drawing is the Castelvecchio castle, built by the ruling Scaligeri family between 1354 and 1376.

As the Scottish mathematician and traveller William Archibald Cadell, writing in 1820, described Verona, ‘The river Adige, which rises in the Tyrol, and has its course to the east of the Lake di Garda, runs through and nearly surrounds the principal part of the town by its winding course. The Ponte del Castel Vecchio, a bridge of three arches built over this river in 1354, in the reign of Can Grande II, is remarkable for the extent of one of its arches, which is 157 English feet in span. This bridge communicates with the castle; it is narrow, and was part of the old fortifications, and is not used for the passage of the public road.’1 As another 19th century writer noted, ‘The main arch of the bridge is said to be 160 ft. wide, and instead of being in the centre, it is on the side next to the castle, and from it the other arches slope away to the north bank, in a strange down-hill kind of way.’2 A third contemporary author adds that ‘The Veronese were always proud of their old bridge, whose largest arch, not in the centre, but on one side, they boast is larger than that of the Rialto.’3

12 VIGGO FAUERHOLDT Copenhagen 1832-1883 Düsseldorf Randkløve Skår, near Gudhjem on the East Coast of Bornholm Oil on paper. Inscribed and dated W. Fauerholt del 1857. in black ink on the mount.

238 x 175 mm. (9 3/8 x 6 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Benjamin Wolff, Engelholm, Denmark (Lugt 420), with his drystamp on the mount; Thence by descent in the Wolff Sneedorf family1.

The marine painter Viggo Fauerholdt studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen between 1846 and 1852, and exhibited there between 1854 and 1867, showing a total of forty-two works. He travelled widely throughout Denmark, painting in and around Copenhagen and also at Helsingør, Sønderbog, Rudkøbing, Svendborg and on the island of Fanø. Many of his exhibited works from 1856 onwards were views of the Danish island of Bornholm, situated in the Baltic Sea well to the east of the rest of Denmark. Inspired by the contemporary Germanic tradition of picturesque landscape painting, Fauerholdt was one of the first Danish artists to paint the dramatic, rugged coastline of Bornholm, and must have lived on the island for several years2. In 1862 one of his views of Bornholm was acquired by King Frederik VII of Denmark. Three years later Fauerholdt left Denmark and settled in Düsseldorf, where he lived for the remainder of his career, painting coastal and shipping scenes and seascapes in Germany and Holland.

Dated 1857, this small oil sketch is a view of the coastal rock formation of Randkløve Skår on the east coast of the Baltic island of Bornholm. Located southeast of the town and fishing port of Gudhjem, which Fauerholdt painted often, Randkløve Skår is a natural cleft or ravine in the rock cliff face. As the author of a 19th century American guidebook noted, ‘The scenery and geological nature of Bornholm differ so essentially from the other parts of Denmark – wild coasts, and picturesque rocks but a few hundred feet above sea-level…A walk should be taken to a wild spot on the coast – Randklöveskaaret, east of Österlarsker...’3 The precise location of this coastal view can be determined as a little north of the small fishing village of Ypnasted. Today the coastline at Randkløve Skår is much less barren than it appears in this oil sketch, since sheep are no longer grazed on the cliffs and the landscape is now heavily overgrown with vegetation.

The present sheet is a study for the left edge of one of Fauerholdt’s best-known early works; a much larger and more panoramic view of Randkløve Skår and the east coast of Bornholm (fig.1), also dated 1857, in the collection of the Bornholms Konstmuseum4. The painting, which was probably exhibited in 1858 at the Kunstakadamiet in the Charlottenborg Palace in Copenhagen, was acquired by the museum on Bornholm in 1985.

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13 RODOLPHE BRESDIN La Fresne 1822-1885 Sèvres Landscape with Fishermen Pen and black ink on papier calque, laid down. Signed and dated 1858 Rodolphe Bresdin in black ink at the lower right.

107 x 172 mm. (4 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.)

One of the most remarkable and visionary graphic artists of the 19th century in France, Rodolphe Bresdin seems to have been entirely self-taught. An eccentric, somewhat bohemian figure, he served as the inspiration for the impoverished artist-hero of Jules Champfleury’s novel Chien-caillou, published in 1845; indeed, for most of his career Bresdin was also known by the nickname ‘Chien-Caillou’. He worked mainly in Toulouse and Bordeaux where, despite living in abject poverty, he was considerably industrious, producing prints of figures in fantastical landscapes, peasant interiors and Biblical subjects, all depicted with an abundance of detail. In Bordeaux he taught the young Odilon Redon, on whom he was to be a powerful influence. Although he occasionally exhibited at the Salons between 1848 and 1879, and was greatly admired by such writers as Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Théodore de Banville and Robert de Montesquieu, Bresdin failed to achieve much recognition or financial success.

In 1880, destitute and in poor health, the artist abandoned his family and the following year moved into a garret in Sèvres, where he was found dead one day in January 1885. His work remained almost completely unknown to the public at large until a retrospective exhibition, including fifty prints and a dozen drawings, was held at the Salon d’Automne in 1908.

Bresdin’s entire oeuvre consists of drawings, etchings and lithographs. His disciple Redon noted that all three techniques were mastered by the artist; ‘Three processes serve in turn to express M. Bresdin’s unique inspiration: pen drawing on stone, etching, and pen and ink drawing – forming a completely new genre which he alone practices and of which he is, so to speak, the creator.’1 While his graphic work is well-known today, his activity as a draughtsman has been less studied, despite being equally important to an understanding of his art. Like his prints, Bresdin’s drawings were never on a very large scale, yet were almost always intricately drawn and minutely detailed. Many of his drawings were finished works in pen and ink, created as autonomous works of art for sale. (As a recent monograph on the artist has noted, ‘The pen and ink drawings would, particularly in the early days when he had no access to equipment, have been a main source of income and were always the cornerstone of his work. He used black, India ink on Bristol paper, administered with fine metal pens…Many of the drawings have certainly been lost, even some Salon exhibits. They were sold for a pittance and would therefore not have been regarded as items of value.’2) From a career spanning some fifty years, only slightly more than four hundred drawings by Bresdin survive today, alongside a graphic oeuvre of around 160 prints. Only rarely do his drawings appear on the market, and they remain scarce outside important groups in several public collections, notably the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague and the Art Institute of Chicago.

The present sheet is drawn with a very fine pen in black ink on tracing paper. The majority of the artist’s drawings are, in fact, on such transparent tracing paper (papier calque in French), with the translucency of the paper helping to transfer or reverse designs and motifs to a print medium3. This small landscape is dated 1858, when the artist was living in Toulouse and producing some of the most imaginative works of his career. Depictions of fishermen occur occasionally among Bresdin’s drawings and etchings; a comparable small drawing of anglers appeared at auction in Paris in 20144. (The artist himself is known to have fished on the banks of the Garonne river, which runs through the city of Toulouse.)

Among other stylistically comparable pen and ink drawings is a Landscape with Smugglers, likewise dated 1858, in the Art Institute of Chicago5.

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14 SAMUEL PALMER Newington 1805-1881 Redhill In Vintage Time Watercolour, heightened with gouache and gum arabic, over an underdrawing in pencil. Signed and dated S. PALMER 1861 at the lower left.

196 x 429 mm. (7 3/4 x 16 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Walker’s Galleries, London, in 1952; Acquired from them by a private collector; Thence by descent until 2010.

LITERATURE: ‘Society of Painters in Water Colours [Second and Concluding Notice]’, The Illustrated London News, 8 June 1861, p.540; Alfred Herbert Palmer, Samuel Palmer: A Memoir, London, 1882, p.87; Alfred Herbert Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher, London, 1892, [1972 ed.], p.411, no.107; Raymond Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, New York, 1988, p.188, no.5821; London, The Fine Art Society, The Fine Art Society 1876-2016: A Celebration, 2016, p.58, no.25.

EXHIBITED: London, Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1861, no.216; London, Walker’s Galleries, 48th Annual Exhibition of Early English Water-Colours, 1952, no.86 (as ‘The End of Day’); London, The Fine Art Society, The Fine Art Society 1876-2016: A Celebration, 2016, no.25.

Samuel Palmer’s only artistic training came in the drawing lessons he took as a youth, and it is due largely to a number of early encounters with other artists that his style developed. In 1822 he met John Linnell and, through him, was introduced to William Blake two years later. Both artists were to be formative influences on the young Palmer, with Blake, in particular, becoming a mentor and an enduring inspiration. Palmer’s devotion to landscape is evident from the earliest years of his career, and by the second half of the 1820s he had begun to produce richly worked scenes of the countryside around Dulwich in London, treated as a kind of mysterious, fruitful and dreamlike garden. This ‘visionary’ approach to the pastoral English landscape found its fullest expression when Palmer was living in the village of Shoreham in Kent, where he settled in 1826. The highly finished paintings and drawings of the Shoreham period, in the late 1820s and early 1830s, are regarded as the peak of Palmer’s early career. Painted and drawn in a rich combination of media, and characterized by an intensity of imagery and sentiment, his Shoreham works went against much of what was conventional in the landscape art of the day. At Shoreham, Palmer was associated with a small group of like-minded artists, including George Richmond and Edward Calvert, who called themselves ‘The Ancients’, but none were quite so committed to this radical vision of landscape as he was.

This resolutely single-minded and somewhat uncommercial approach could not last, however, and Palmer’s style began to change in the mid 1830s. He moved back to London and began travelling further afield, to Devon, Somerset and North Wales, in search of landscapes to paint. Following his marriage to Linnell’s daughter Hannah in 1837, and a two-year honeymoon in Italy, Palmer’s work became distinguished by a brightness and clarity inspired by the light of the Mediterranean. The finished Italianate landscapes that he produced over the next three decades, executed in a rich technique of watercolour, gouache and gum arabic, are among his most attractive and appealing works. In 1843 Palmer was elected an Associate of the Old Water-Colour Society, becoming a full member in 1854, and although he exhibited there annually, he found few patrons and had to work as a drawing-master to supplement his income. In 1865 he received his most important commission, for a series of very large watercolours illustrating Milton’s poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, from the solicitor Leonard Rowe Valpy. Palmer worked on these impressive watercolours over the next sixteen years until his death.

Palmer’s skill as a draughtsman never faltered and was much admired into his old age; indeed ‘by the end of his life he was as effective – if less widely acknowledged – a master of bravura watercolour as any of his exhibiting contemporaries.’2

This watercolour, depicting a peasant family returning home at sunset with a cart laden with grapes, was one of seven works sent by Palmer to the annual exhibition of the Royal Society of Painters in WaterColours in 1861. It may have been intended as a pair with a watercolour of the same size, entitled In the Chequered Shade (fig.1), which was also exhibited at the OWCS that year and shared the same subsequent provenance as the present sheet; it is now in the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, Delaware3. As a recent Palmer biographer has pointed out, ‘At the Old Watercolour Society exhibition his works had been dismally hung. The committee excused itself by saying that his pictures were so powerful that nothing could stand against them; but the outcome was that only three of the seven works submitted had been sold. The painter was in low spirits.’4 One review of the 1861 OWCS exhibition singled out the present sheet, noting that ‘one of the most original and remarkable landscapists in the room is Mr. Samuel Palmer, who, besides throwing an air of poetry over the scenes he represents, peoples them with figures perfectly well drawn, and with a classic style about them which reminds one of an earlier and more learned school of landscape-art. Like the generality of the artists of our day, he is too much devoted to one peculiar aspect of atmosphere – glowing sunsets, which, however, he manages so as to produce a considerable amount of variety. “After the Storm” (183), “In Vintage Time” (216) and “Sunset in the Mountains” (226) are all examples eminently deserving the high character we have specified.’5 The romantic Italianate landscape and strong colours of In Vintage Time are typical of the artist’s mature work. As William Vaughan has written of this period, ‘Palmer had always been inclined to experiment with painting methods. With the abandonment of oil, he seems to have considered new ways of extending the power and range of watercolour...In his desire to strengthen effects Palmer developed practices already explored at Shoreham to augment watercolour with other media. He regularly added body colour and chalk to give his paints density. He even used glue to rival the viscosity of oil...By these methods he was able to retain a remarkable amount of purity of tone and delicacy of detail. His concern to use the best possible materials, the most reliable of pigments, was probably necessary in order for these effects to work. All in all, Palmer’s later watercolours are remarkable for their complexity.’6 The format of this watercolour is the so-called ‘little long’, measuring about 190 x 405 mm., which was Palmer’s preferred size for the drawings of his middle and later years. The horizontal format of these works allowed the artist to focus on the landscape, and the extensive pencil underdrawing and the highly finished stippled effect are also typical of Palmer’s mature draughtsmanship. The present sheet may be closely related to other watercolours of the early 1860s such as A Poet, which was exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society in 1862 and was sold at auction in 20067. Watercolours such as In Vintage Time readily evoke not only the artist’s experiences of Italy, but also often combine elements and motifs that are reminiscent of his travels in Shoreham, Devon and Wales. As has been noted of Palmer, ‘his watercolours count amongst the finest of Victorian landscapes and are to be valued as well as part of the cultural life of that age.’8

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15 JEAN-BAPTISTE-CAMILLE COROT Paris 1796-1875 Ville d’Avray Italianate Landscape Pen and brown ink. Laid down.

197 x 160 mm. (7 3/4 x 6 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The vente Corot, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Boussaton, Baubigny], 26 May 1875 onwards, with the vente stamp (Lugt 460a) at the lower left; Comte Armand Doria, Château d’Orrouy, Orrouy, Oise1; By descent to his grandson, Comte Arnauld Doria, Paris (with his collection label and number 848 on the old backing board); Thence by descent.

EXHIBITED: Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, L’Italia vista dai pittori Francesi del XVIII e XIX secolo, 1961, no.100 (‘Monumento con cupola’, lent by Arnauld Doria); Turin, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, L’Italia vista dai pittori francesi, 1961, no.93 (lent by Arnauld Doria).

Camille Corot received his training in the classical landscape tradition from the artists Achille-Etna Michallon and Jean-Victor Bertin. Towards the end of 1825, at the age of twenty-nine, he left Paris for Italy. He remained in Italy for three years, and during this period produced around 220 drawings and 150 landscape paintings and oil sketches. He was to return to Italy twice more, in 1834 and 1843.

None of Corot’s Italian paintings or drawings seem to have left his studio before his death, and only one landscape painting from this period was exhibited at the Salon.

Although Corot’s drawings received relatively little critical attention in his lifetime, the artist laid great store by them, and claimed that he drew every evening. As Peter Galassi has noted, ‘The range and versatility of Corot’s drawings is a sign of their function. For Corot the drawing was never an end in itself; it was part of a continuous process of experiment and revision. This was true even when a series of drawings did not lead to the implied climax of an oil study.’2 Around a thousand drawings by Corot are known today, ranging from rapid working sketches to large landscape studies. A significant number of drawings by the artist were preserved by the Corot scholars Alfred Robaut and Etienne Moreau-Nélaton and are today in the Louvre.

This spirited pen and ink sketch is unlikely to be a topographically accurate view, and instead appears to have been inspired by landscapes the artist would have seen in Italy. While the cupola in the distance is reminiscent of St. Peter’s in Rome, it also recalls Bernini’s church of Santa Maria Assunta in the town of Ariccia, in the Alban Hills southeast of Rome. Corot had visited Ariccia in 1826 and again in 1843, and the dome of the church seems to have remained part of his visual repertoire of Italianate motifs for the rest of his life. As Michael Pantazzi has noted, ‘It would be difficult to claim that Corot’s last voyage to Italy had an effect on his style, though in the subjects of his paintings he returned to memories of Lake Nemi and, obsessively, to a view he drew of the dome of the church at Ariccia, perched above a cliff. The Italianate views invented later were almost always based on sketches of other sites visited in earlier times.’3 The present sheet can also be related to a small group of atmospheric, freely-executed drawings of Italianate landscapes by Corot, datable to the period between the early 1850s and the early 1870s, in which a similar domed building is prominent in the far distance. Closely comparable in stylistic terms are two pen and ink landscape sketches in the Louvre; one drawn on the reverse of an invitation to a memorial service in 1852 for Corot’s mother4, and the other part of a small sketchbook5. Also similar in composition and effect is a charcoal drawing in the same sketchbook6, and another pencil sketch in the Louvre7, as well as a charcoal drawing of The Great Birch: Souvenir of Ariccia of c.1871-1872 in the Princeton University Art Museum8.

actual size

16 PAUL HUET Paris 1803-1869 Paris The Rock Arch Known as the ‘Song of the Sea’ at Nanjizal Cove, Cornwall Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil. Inscribed Grotte du chant de la mer Land’s end. in brown ink at the lower right.

260 x 362 mm. (10 1/4 x 14 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: In the artist’s studio at the time of his death, with the Huet atelier stamp (Lugt 1268) at the lower right; By descent in the family of the artist.

In 1820, while studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paul Huet befriended the young painters Eugène Delacroix and Richard Parkes Bonington, who introduced him to the English manner of watercolour technique. Also influential were the landscape paintings of John Constable, which were a revelation to the young artist when they were first exhibited at the Salon of 1824. Following his own Salon debut in 1827, Huet accompanied Bonington on a sketching tour of the Normandy coast. This was to be the first of his extensive travels throughout France, and he returned often to the regions of Normandy, the Auvergne and Provence, as well as forests of Compiègne and Fontainebleau, closer to Paris. At the Salon of 1831 his work was praised by one critic, who noted that ‘M. Paul Huet is today placed at the head of the new school of landscapists.’ Another admirer was Victor Hugo, who noted of Huet that ‘he understood nature as it should be understood, imprinted with reality and penetrated with the ideal.’ Much of the artist’s work remained with his family long after his death in 1869, with only a portion of this studio inventory dispersed at auction in Paris in 1878.

Huet made numerous drawings and sketches en plein-air in pencil, pastel and watercolour, all imbued with a remarkable feeling for light and colour. The present sheet may be dated to the summer of 1862, when the artist made his first and only visit to England. He produced a number of sketches on his travels which, apart from London and Windsor, included visits to Tunbridge Wells, Salisbury and Stonehenge. He also visited Devon and Cornwall in southwestern England, a region he particularly admired, and which reminded him of his beloved Normandy. As the artist wrote to his wife, in a letter of July 1862, ‘We are in the true Cornwall, a picturesque land, the ancient Brittany that is for England what French Brittany is to Normandy...Charming details, an incredible freshness, a general expression of the whole of England and many similarities with Normandy and the entrance to Brittany, this is what you will find.’1 During his visit to this area Huet was based in the Cornish town of Liskeard, from which he undertook a number of sketching trips. His travels took him as far west as Land’s End, where he made watercolour views of some of the distinctive sights of the surrounding area, such as the balancing Logan Rock at Treen and this view of a tall, narrow rock arch known as the ‘Song of the Sea’ (or ‘Zawn Pyg’), part of a sea cliff on an isolated beach at Nanjizal Cove, two kilometres from Land’s End. The artist must have visited the beach - which remains inaccessible by road today - by walking along the coastal path from Land’s End in the north.

A closely related watercolour of the same view, seen from slightly further down the beach, was exhibited in London in 19692. Among other watercolours by Huet from this trip to Devon and Cornwall is a view of The Waterfall at Lydford, today in a New York private collection3. Other Cornish views - one depicting the coastline at Land’s End and the other the Logan Rock - are illustrated in a monograph on the artist published in 19624.

17 VICTOR HUGO Besançon 1802-1885 Paris Seascape with Ships in Fog Pen, brush and brown ink and brown wash, with touches of white gouache. Inscribed N° 78 Massin in brown ink on the verso. Inscribed Dessin original de Victor Hugo. Ancienne Collection Paul Meurice (Succession Ozenne-Meurice) in black chalk on the verso.

56 x 247 mm. (2 1/4 x 9 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Paul Meurice, Paris; By descent to his adopted daughter, Mme. Marie Ozenne Meurice; Henri Guillemin, Paris and Neuchâtel; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Piasa], 13 June 2001, lot 150 (bt. Krugier); Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva.

LITERATURE: Jean Massin, ed., Victor Hugo: oeuvres complètes, Paris, 1967, Vol.I, no.876; Raphael Rosenberg and Max Hollein, ed., Turner Hugo Moreau: Entdeckung der Abstraktion, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt, 2007-2008, no.100, illustrated p.174; Florian Rodari, ed., Victor Hugo: Dessins visionnaires, exhibition catalogue, Lausanne, 2008, no.26, illustrated p.41 (where dated c.1856); Felix Krämer, ed., Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt, 2012-2013, no.62, illustrated p.121; Gerhard Kehlenbeck, Victor Hugo: Visions of a Poet-Draughtsman, Hamburg, 2015, unpaginated, no.4.

EXHIBITED: Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, Turner Hugo Moreau: Entdeckung der Abstraktion, 2007-2008, no.100; Lausanne, Fondation de l’Hermitage, Victor Hugo: Dessins visionnaires, 2008, no.26; Frankfurt, Städel Museum, Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst, 2012-2013, no.62; Paris, Musée d’Orsay, L’ange du bizarre: Le romantisme noir de Goya à Max Ernst, 2013, no.45; Graz, Bruseum / Neue Galerie Graz, Nach der Dämmerung: Victor Hugo und Günter Brus / After Dusk: Victor Hugo and Günter Brus, 2017-2018.

The outstanding literary figure in 19th century France, Victor Hugo was also an accomplished and prolific draughtsman, producing nearly three thousand drawings. Although he began to draw seriously around 1825, relatively little of this early work survives and it was not until some twenty years later that he was to develop his distinctive personal graphic idiom. Hugo seems to have been most productive as a draughtsman during periods when he was writing less, for example in 1850. Conversely, there are very few drawings from the years 1852 and 1853, when he was engaged on a spell of intense literary activity. His drawings achieved a height of expression during the years of his political exile from France, between 1852 and 1870, when he lived on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey1.

Although Hugo often gave drawings as presents to friends and colleagues, and allowed several sheets to be reproduced as engravings, the act of drawing remained a largely private occupation. (As he wrote in 1863 to his close friend Paul Meurice - the first owner of the present sheet - ‘these scribbles are for private use and to indulge very close friends.’) For much of his life Hugo’s drawings were known, outside of his family, only to a handful of writers and connoisseurs. The poet Charles Baudelaire, writing in 1859, praised ‘the magnificent imagination that flows from the drawings of Victor Hugo like the mystery of the heavens. I speak of his drawings in Indian ink, because it is too obvious that in poetry our poet is the king of landscape.’2 In the last ten years of his life Hugo drew much less, however, a decline mirrored in his literary output. The first public exhibition of his drawings was held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1888, three years after his death, when over 150 sheets were shown.

As a draughtsman, Hugo relied primarily on brown or black ink, with washes applied with a fluidity and transparency that allowed for remarkable tonal and atmospheric effects. His idiosyncratic working

methods have been described by his son Charles: ‘Once paper, pen and ink-well have been brought to the table, Victor Hugo sits down and without making a preliminary sketch, without any apparent preconception, sets about drawing with an extraordinarily sure hand not the landscape as a whole but any old detail. He will begin his forest with the branch of a tree, his town with a gable, his gable with a weather vane, and, little by little, the entire composition will emerge from the blank paper with the precision and clarity of a photographic negative subjected to the chemical preparation that brings out the picture. That done, the draftsman will ask for a cup and will finish off his landscape with a light shower of black coffee. The result is an unexpected and powerful drawing that is often strange, always personal, and recalls the etchings of Rembrandt and Piranesi.’3 Another vivid description of Hugo’s working methods was provided by his grandson Georges Hugo: ‘I sometimes saw him drawing: they were only quick little sketches, landscapes, caricatures, profiles drawn at a single stroke, which he made on any little scrap of paper. He scattered the ink haphazardly, crushing the goose quill which grated and spattered trails of ink. Then he sort of kneaded the black blot which became a castle, a forest, a deep lake or a stormy sky; he delicately wet the barb of his pen with his lips and with it burst a cloud from which rain fell down onto the wet paper; or he used it to indicate precisely the mists blurring the horizon.’4 Hugo also experimented with different techniques and media, including inkblots (taches), folded paper, stencilled cut-outs, gold leaf and impressions taken from various objects, including leaves and lace.

The present sheet was drawn during Hugo’s fifteen-year period of exile in Guernsey, when he came to be fascinated by the majestic vistas of sea and sky that he saw around him. His home on the island, Hauteville House, was surmounted by a glass-walled observatory, from where the author could gaze out at the surrounding seas. As he wrote in 1859, in a letter to a friend, ‘I need these periods of rest sometimes in my solitude, in face of the ocean, amid this sombre scenery which has a supreme attraction for me and which draws me toward the dazzling apparitions of the infinite.’ The rugged coastline and rock formations of Guernsey provided Hugo with a variety of dramatic motifs for his drawings. He would spend a considerable amount of time wandering over the island, at all times of the day and night, and took a large number of photographs of the scenery.

Hugo’s favourite subject was always the sea. As Pierre Georgel has noted of the drawings made during his stay in the Channel Islands, ‘his visual world became enriched almost to the point of obsession with the spectacle of the sea. But this grandiose, monotonous horizon never changed. As a result, the graphic work moved further and further away from the real in an attempt to catch the kaleidoscope of sea, rock and cloud, or to reflect the ebb and flow of an imaginary world in which shapes could form and dissolve in an instant.’5 Even after his return to Paris in 1870, Hugo continued to visit Guernsey, and to produce drawings inspired by its bold and dramatic landscape.

The first owner of this drawing was the playwright and novelist Paul Meurice (1818-1905), a lifelong friend of Hugo. During the period of the writer’s exile, Meurice looked after his financial and literary interests, and upon the writer’s death was named one of the executors of his estate. Meurice owned a large group of some of the most significant drawings by Hugo, and was responsible for organizing the first exhibition of them, in Paris in 1888. In 1902, he established the Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris, which, together with the Bibliothèque Nationale, today holds the largest collection of drawings

by Victor Hugo.

18 HILAIRE-GERMAIN-EDGAR DEGAS Paris 1834-1917 Paris Coastal Landscape at Sunset, with a View of Cabourg (Paysage, soleil couchant) Pastel on light brown paper, mounted on board. Signed and dated degas / 69 in pencil at the lower left.

Stamped with the Degas vente stamp (Lugt 658) in red ink at the lower left. Numbered M 4142 and 5532 in blue chalk on the backing board.

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

PROVENANCE: The Atelier Degas, Paris; The fourth Vente Degas, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 2-4 July 1919, lot 51b (‘Paysage, soleil couchant.’), sold with another pastel for 3,300 francs (bt. Comiot)1; Charles Comiot, Paris; Gustave Loiseau, Paris; By descent to Paul and Madeleine Loiseau; Acquired from them by a private collector in 1974; Private collection, Canada, until 2008.

LITERATURE: Paul-André Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre, Paris, 1946, Vol.II, pp.112-113, no.220 (‘Paysage, soleil couchant. Étude au pastel.’); Franco Russoli and Fiorella Minervino, L’opera completa di Degas, Milan, 1970, p.100, no.300; Richard Kendall, Degas Landscapes, New Haven and London, 1993, p.282, note 35; Alexander Eiling, ed., Degas: Klassik und Experiment, exhibition catalogue, Karlsruhe, 2014-2015, pp.232-233, no.104 (entry by Dorit Schäfer).

EXHIBITED: Leeds, Harewood House, In Cloud Country: Abstracting from Nature from John Constable to Rachel Whiteread, 2013; Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Degas: Klassik und Experiment, 20142015, no.104.

This evocative landscape is part of a series of more than forty pastel studies of landscapes and seascapes, almost certainly done en plein air, drawn by Edgar Degas on the Normandy coast in the summer and autumn of 18692. Degas spent the summer of 1869 based at the village of Beuzeval, not far from the seaside resort of Cabourg, and made pastel landscapes along the stretch of coastline between Villers, Houlgate and Dives-sur-Mer to the southwest. In these evocative works, Degas may have been inspired by the seascapes of his friend James McNeill Whistler, as well as the pastel landscapes of Eugène Delacroix, whose work he avidly collected.

Paul-André Lemoisne, the author of the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s oeuvre, has noted of these Normandy scenes that ‘As he looks at them, Degas’s keen eye also registers the appearance of the countryside, the pale sea-green shore fringed with foam, the curve of a bank of golden sand, the outline of hills, a velvety meadow, the color of the sky. Later, back in the studio, the artist delights in recreating some of these places from memory, attempting to reproduce the colors and outlines with his sticks of pastel.’3 More recently, Christopher Lloyd has written of these pastel landscapes that ‘Degas concentrates on different times of day, changing atmospheric effects and varied meteorological conditions – sunlight, dampness, light breezes and sudden gusts of wind. The handling of the pastel is amazingly adroit – smoothly applied with delicate nuances in some areas and roughly treated in others. Above all, there is an eloquent sense of space and an aching feeling of emptiness.’4 Although until recently regarded by many scholars as having been done in Degas’s Paris studio, Richard Kendall has argued that a number of these 1869 pastels are topographically accurate and depict actual sites on the Normandy coast, and that most, if not all, of these works must have been done on the spot. Furthermore, Kendall has convincingly suggested that this particular pastel depicts a view taken from just southwest of Houlgate in Normandy, looking across to the fashionable resort of Cabourg in the distance5. A note in one of Degas’s notebooks of this period underlines the artist’s close observation of his surroundings: ‘sunset, cold and dull orange-pink, whitish green, neutral, sea like a sardine’s back and clearer than the sky…Line of the seashore brown, the first pools of water reflecting the orange, the second reflecting the upper sky; in front, coffee-coloured sand, rather sombre.’6

The forty or so Normandy landscapes of 1869 represent Degas’s first consistent use of pastel, which by the 1880s was to become his preferred medium. He found pastel to be an ideal means of capturing transient effects of light and atmosphere in a landscape, something he had not always been able to achieve before. As Kendall writes, ‘In the late 1850s, Degas had struggled with pencil, ink and watercolour to translate his perceptions into two-dimensional imagery, adding vividly written summaries of changing light and weather conditions. Now, he could use the medium of pastel, combining the effects of colour, line and tone in a single process that almost kept pace with his perceptions. With pastel, he could scatter powdery hues across the paper to indicate coffee-coloured sand or silvery-green sea…With pastel, too, he could respond to the finest nuances of the atmosphere, working rapidly as wind and weather began to change.’7 The present sheet is one of only a handful of drawings from the series of pastel landscapes of 1869 to be signed and dated by the artist. Degas has here applied the pastel lightly over the warm tones of the pale brown paper, which he left to show through in places, adding to the atmospheric qualities of the scene. As Kendall has written of these 1869 pastels, ‘it is notable that almost all the seascapes and beach scenes are depicted under cloudy, overcast skies. None of them, however, is generalized, and each proposes a subtle variation on the theme of sea-mist, sun-lit haze or impending rain. Seen in this way, the pastels are as much a part of Degas’ documentary project as his land-based motifs, and even at their most vaporous must be seen as particularized accounts of local circumstances, rather than the efflorescences of a citydweller’s mind.’8 Pure landscapes are rare in Degas’s oeuvre as a draughtsman, however, and seem to have been a feature of his work only for brief periods in the late 1860s, when these Normandy pastels were drawn, and the early 1890s, when he produced a group of pastels over monotype bases.

At the fourth vente Degas of July 1919, at which all of the 1869 pastel landscapes were sold, each one fetched very high prices that were often several times the estimates. As the expert Joseph Durand-Ruel noted in a letter written the day after the auction, ‘We had the greatest success with the small pastels of landscapes, which we had appraised at around 1,000 francs each because of the current overpricing of Degas’s works and which, to our great surprise, sold for between 3,000 and 20,000 francs. These prices are sheer folly.’9 This Coastal Landscape at Sunset, with a View of Cabourg was one of several works acquired at the posthumous ventes Degas by the Parisian amateur Charles Comiot, who came to own at least six pastel landscapes from this series. In an article on the Comiot collection published in 1927, the art critic François Fosca devoted considerable attention to this group. As he wrote of the landscape pastels in the collection, ‘They are numerous, because M. Comiot was able to recognize that in this field Degas was no less a master than in the representation of the human body…most were executed by the seashore, and show us flat, deserted beaches, dunes with grasses grey and sparse. From such bare sites, so much lacking in plastic elements, Degas brings forth wonders: isn’t that the mark of a great artist?’10 Fosca added that ‘These pastels are quite a bit closer to those of Whistler. Just as the painter of the Nocturnes, Degas withdrew from nature as soon as the sun appeared at its brightest. An ochre-tinted beach and the stifling blue of the sky when the mist covers the sun; Degas, like Whistler, asked for nothing else.’11 The present sheet, aptly described by the Degas scholar Theodore Reff as a ‘wonderfully atmospheric, moody landscape’12, later entered the collection of the French painter Gustave Loiseau (1865-1935), and remained in the collection of his heirs until the 1970s.

This group of small pastel landscapes from the summer and autumn of 1869, characterized by a sense of emptiness and an absence of human figures, were never exhibited in Degas’s lifetime and were kept in his studio until his death. The fact that a handful of these pastel landscapes, including the present sheet, are both signed and dated would suggest that the artist may well have regarded them - despite their relatively small proportions and austere compositions - as finished, independent works.

As Richard Kendall has noted, ‘Never exhibited as a group and still generally unknown, these pastels can be counted among the seminal achievements of [Degas’] pre-Impressionist years.’13

­­­­­­­­­­­­­19 FÉLIX ZIEM Beaune 1821-1911 Paris Boats and a Gondola in the Bacino di San Marco, Venice Watercolour, with touches of gouache and white heightening, on Whatman paper. Signed Ziem in brown ink at the lower left.

126 x 215 mm. (5 x 8 1/2 in.)

Watermark: J. WH[ATMAN] / TURK[EY MILL].

Félix François Georges Ziem studied at the Ecole d’Architecture et des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, where he won a prize for landscape drawing, before settling in Marseille in 1839. Early in his career, his skill as a watercolourist gained him the patronage of Ferdinand Philippe, Duc de Orléans. He soon achieved a fair degree of success as a painter, and began to travel - first around the South of France, where he was particularly taken by the landscape around the Provençal port town of Martigues - and then further afield. Indeed, Ziem was one of the most well-travelled artists of his day. He made the first of many trips to Italy in 1842, spending time in Rome and Venice before returning to France via Germany and Austria. He met and befriended Prince Grigori Gagarin, and with him travelled around Russia between 1843 and 1844, visiting Odessa, Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg. He made his debut at the Salon in 1849, and continued to exhibit there regularly until 1868.

The artist made countless trips throughout Europe, including a stay in England in 1852, and between 1856 and 1859 visited the Near East, working in Turkey, Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia. Ziem always remained particularly fond of Venice, which he visited some twenty times, and it is as a painter of Venetian views that he is best known today. From around 1861 he settled in Martigues, though he continued to spend time in Nice, Paris and Venice. He enjoyed great success throughout the rest of his career, selling his paintings for huge sums, and was among the wealthiest French artists of the 19th century. His patrons included the Comte de Morny, Princesse Mathilde, Baron de Rothschild and the Duke of Devonshire, and many of his paintings also found their way into important American collections, notably that of William T. Walters in Baltimore. A large group of paintings, watercolours and drawings by Ziem, presented by the artist in 1905, is today in the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris, while another substantial collection of his work is in the Musée Ziem in Martigues.

Ziem was a prolific and gifted draughtsman and watercolourist, and from early in his career he enjoyed an enthusiastic market for his watercolours among French collectors. Writing in the preface to a catalogue of a sale of thirty-four of Ziem’s watercolours in 1868, the critic Théophile Gautier compared him favourably to such English masters of the medium as J. M. W. Turner and Richard Parkes Bonington, further noting that one could experience the pleasures of visiting Venice, Marseille, the Mediterranean, Barbizon, Holland or Egypt by simply studying a portfolio of the artist’s watercolours.

Following his first visit to Venice in 1842, Ziem returned there many times over the next five decades, sometimes annually, and came to be closely associated with the city. Indeed, he became known as the ‘painter of Venice’, a city that he seems to have regarded as a second home. The present sheet, which may perhaps be dated to the first half of the 1870s, depicts the Bacino di San Marco seen from the entrance to the lagoon, with the Campanile and the Doge’s Palace in the centre distance, and the church of Santa Maria della Salute with the entrance to the Grand Canal at the left of the composition.

20 FERDINAND HEILBUTH Hamburg 1826-1889 Paris An Elegant Woman Seated by a River Watercolour and gouache on blue paper, laid down. Signed FHeilbuth in black ink at the lower left.

256 x 420 mm. (10 1/8 x 16 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly the posthumous vente Heilbuth, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 19-21 May 1890.

The son of a German rabbi, Ferdinand Heilbuth abandoned rabbinical studies to take up a career as an artist. He studied in Antwerp, Munich, Düsseldorf and Rome before settling in Paris, where he entered the studio of Paul Delaroche, remaining there after it was taken over by Charles Gleyre. Heilbuth made his debut at the Paris Salon in 1853, and his early work consisted of genre pictures and historical paintings, the latter often depicting episodes from the lives of earlier artists. These works, exhibited at the Salons to popular acclaim, included such paintings as The Son of Titian and Rubens Introducing Brouwer to his Wife. He later abandoned such subjects, however, in favour of paintings inspired by a long stay in Rome, and in particular the inner workings and day-to-day life of the Vatican, for which he became very well known. At the Salon of 1865, a painting of Absolution of Venial Sin in the Church of St. Peter in Rome was purchased by the Empress Eugénie for 10,000 francs.

Obliged to leave Paris during the Franco-Prussian war, Heilbuth worked in England between 1870 and 1872, where he enjoyed some success. Like his friend James Tissot, with whom he was often compared, he painted scenes of such leisurely plein-air pursuits as croquet, lawn tennis and boating on the Thames. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Grosvenor Gallery, and among his patrons was Sir Richard Wallace, who purchased four of his paintings which are today in the Wallace Collection in London. Heilbuth returned to Paris in 1874 and became a naturalized French citizen four years later.

He was a friend of Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet and Edouard Manet, while his work was also admired

by Vincent Van Gogh. The year after Heilbuth’s death, a sale of the contents of the artist’s studio included nearly 150 paintings and oil sketches, as well as 69 watercolours and 84 drawings.

It was during his stay in England that Heilbuth developed a fondness for watercolour. His work in the medium was praised in a contemporary critical appraisal of the artist: ‘He had executed paintings in watercolor among the first of those who were not solely and specially aquarellists; his first painting in this kind is of the year 1864...In this material he found a scale of fresh and velvety colors which oil-painting does not yield, and fell in love with the method. Thenceforth he strewed abroad, by handfuls, a thousand little subjects, the delightful accidents borrowed from Paris life, from the adventures of the villeggiatura in the environs, that inexhaustible source of pleasurable scenes.’1 Heilbuth was a founding member of the Société des Aquarellistes Français in 1879. As an English review of the inaugural exhibition of the Société noted, ‘At the head of the acquarellistes of France we naturally place DETAILLE, LOUIS LELOIR, HEILBUTH, and VIBERT…A landscape painter and a great artist is FERDINAND HEILBUTH. Although a German by birth, he is a naturalised French subject, and very cordially do his adopted countrymen acknowledge the splendor of his talent…There is realism in HEILBUTH’s delineation of his personages, which contrasts, and to a certain degree jars, with the exquisite poetry of his rendering of Nature.’2 This drawing has been requested for the exhibition Renoir: Rococo Revival. Impressionism and the French Art of the Eighteenth Century at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, from 2 March to 19 June 2022.

21 ARTHUR MELVILLE RWS ARSA RSW Loanhead-of-Guthrie 1855-1904 Whitley A Street Market by a Church, probably in Granville, Normandy Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil. Signed A. Melville in grey ink at the lower left.

314 x 277 mm. (12 3/8 x 10 7/8 in.)

Among the finest British watercolourists of the 19th century, Arthur Melville was of humble Scottish origins. The son of a coachman, he was apprenticed to a grocer but, from the age of thirteen, took evening art classes and drawing lessons in Edinburgh. His painting A Scotch Lassie was shown at the annual exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1875, and within a few months he was studying at the RSA Schools and sharing a studio in Edinburgh. In 1878 Melville had a painting exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, and later the same year moved to Paris to study at the Académie Julian.

He remained in France for much of the next two years, painting at Cancale in Brittany and Granville, Honfleur and Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, before eventually settling in the town of Grez-surLoing, seventy kilometres south of Paris, where there was a thriving artistic community. After a brief period back in Edinburgh, the young Melville embarked on a journey to Egypt, where he spent the latter half of 1881 and the first few weeks of 1882, before continuing on to Jeddah, Aden, Karachi, Baghdad, Mosul and Constantinople, returning to England in August 1882 via Vienna, Strasbourg and Paris. This trip resulted in a number of fine watercolours of Oriental subjects, which were exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in London in 1883.

The years 1884 and 1885 found Melville working as a portrait painter, and travelling throughout Scotland and to Orkney. Elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1886 and to the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1888, Melville moved to London the following year, although he continued to make frequent trips back to Scotland. In 1890, 1891 and 1893 he travelled around southern Spain and Morocco, working in Ronda, Córdoba, Granada, Seville, Toledo, Madrid and Tangier, while also spending time in northern Spain in 1892 and Venice in 1894; these trips all resulted in some splendid watercolours. Melville died at the age of just forty-nine, from typhoid contracted while on a final trip to Spain. Shortly after his death, retrospective exhibitions of his work were held in London, Glasgow, Newcastle and Nottingham. In a review of one of these exhibitions, the critic Frank Rutter opined that ‘Melville was unquestionably the most brilliantly audacious watercolour painter of his time.’

Although Melville produced a number of oil paintings, mainly from the late 1890s onwards, these were only rarely exhibited in his lifetime, and it is the medium of watercolour which accounts for the bulk of the artist’s output. Indeed, it is as a brilliant and gifted watercolourist that Melville is best known today.

As his biographer Agnes Mackay aptly noted, ‘He could lay on colour with the freshness of a shower of rain.

His control of touch was masterly...He drenched his tones with brilliant colour, making them sing together to create astonishingly fresh harmonies. Colour became alive under his hand.’1 Melville was particularly admired for his ability to capture bright sunlight, while his compositions were often radical and inventive. As Mackay writes, ‘Another gift was that of composing a picture, of grasping the pictorial aspects of a scene. Where others saw only confused movement and formless glitter, Melville imposed rhythm and shape...we find over and over again in his water-colours that everything is turned to effect, but that only the essentials are used. For he was content, especially in his later work, to depend on some striking arrangement of colour, on the play of light and shadow, leaving much of the paper merely tinted in a harmony of toned white. Thus apparently with the simplest means, bright splashes of colour and wide spaces of light, he realised his effects.’2 In his seminal and posthumously published Water-colour Painting in Britain, the artist, curator and scholar Martin Hardie gives a detailed account of Melville’s watercolour technique, as described to him

by the artist Theodore Roussel, a friend of Melville’s who later married his widow: ‘Melville’s method was pure water-colour, but water-colour applied on a specially prepared paper. This paper was soaked in dilute Chinese White, till it was literally saturated and impregnated with white. He worked often into a wet surface, sponging out superfluous detail, running in those warm browns and rich blues and reds which he knew so well how to blend and simplify. His colour was often dropped onto the paper in rich, full spots or blobs rather than applied with any definite brush-marks. The colour floats into little pools, with the white of the ground softening each touch. He was the most exact of craftsmen; his work is not haphazard and accidental, as might be rashly thought. Those blots in his drawings, which seem meaningless, disorderly and chaotic, are actually organised with the utmost care to lead the way to the foreseen result.’3 Datable to the late 1870s, this vibrant watercolour is a rare example of Arthur Melville’s early work, much of which is now lost. The present sheet may have been drawn in Granville, a coastal town in Normandy a few kilometres north of Mont Saint-Michel, which Melville visited in June 1878. The church depicted here is probably Notre-Dame du Cap Lihou in Granville, and this watercolour provides an apt example of a particular characteristic that the scholar Kenneth McConkey noted in Melville’s work: ‘he could...place the cutting edges of architecture with acuity, and his observation of crowds, the moving masses of humanity, was unmatched.’4 Writing a few years before Melville visited the town, an English traveller described the area around the church of Notre-Dame du Cap Lihou in Granville: ‘The upper town, surrounded by its fortified walls, and crowned by its church and lighthouse, stands on a lofty promontory of rock, with the sea stretching out behind it...when we had climbed up the steep ladders leading to the walls of the upper town, we found endless pictures among the bright and varied scenes of the market...the view of the Bay of Granville is charming; and the church, on the verge of the lofty promontory, although gloomy-looking – being built of dark granite – has a solemn impressive interior: but the smells and dirt of the place are overpowering, even in the open air and in the fresh sea breezes.’5 Melville produced only a handful of watercolours in Granville, and the present sheet may be tentatively identified with one of two unlocated works by the artist; a Market Day at Granville, exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh in 18796, or A French Market Place (Granville), included in the posthumous Melville exhibition at the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours in London in 19067.

Among the few other extant watercolours of Granville by Melville is a Street Market, Granville, dated 1878, in the Glasgow Museums collection8, and a street scene recently on the art market in Scotland9.

It was during his early years in France that, as the artist Romilly Fedden noted, ‘Melville’s work in watercolour began to reveal special qualities. He had discovered his medium. These were no tinted drawings dependent on a scaffolding of pencil work, but painting – painting so strong and virile that it could hold its own with any other medium – even with oil. The Frenchmen were astounded.’10 Fedden adds that ‘Melville may be called the great technician of water-colour...[His] job was water-colour, and he knew it so well, its ways, its difficulties, its capabilities, its limitations – he understood his medium and he mastered it. He was daring, unconventional. He tried things which no one else had tried, he followed no one, belonged to no accepted school, and in that, in his individuality, he stands apart.’11

22 JOHN BRETT ARA Reigate 1831-1902 London Logan Bay, Cornwall Oil on unlined canvas. Dated and inscribed Logan Aug. 31/80 at the upper left.

25.3 x 48.2 cm. (10 x 19 in.)

PROVENANCE: Bought from the artist for £70 by Sir Thomas Devitt, Bt., London; His posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 16 May 1924, part of lot 51 (sold for 20 gns. to Leggatt Bros., probably for Howson Devitt); Howson Foulger Devitt, London; Thence by descent until 2015.

LITERATURE: Charles Brett, ‘Catalogue of Works’, in Christiana Payne and Charles Brett, John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter, New Haven and London, 2010, p.223, no.899.

EXHIBITED: London, St. Jude’s School House, Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibition, April 1882, no.9; London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Spring Exhibition, 1902, no.201; Penzance, Penlee House Gallery and Museum, John Brett: A Pre-Raphaelite in Cornwall, 2006, no.41 [ex-catalogue].

John Brett enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools in 1854, at the relatively late age of twenty-two.

A devout reader of the writings of John Ruskin, he was attracted by the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and met Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. In 1856, while travelling in the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland, he met the landscape painter John William Inchbold, whose work proved to be a significant inspiration. Soon afterwards Brett completed his first major painting, The Glacier of Rosenlaui, dated August 1856 and shown at the Royal Academy the following year. In 1858 he exhibited a second major canvas, The Stonebreaker, at the Royal Academy. This was followed a year later by what is arguably Brett’s masterpiece as a Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter; a remarkable view of The Val d’Aosta that was praised by Ruskin and eventually bought by him.

From 1865 onwards, Brett painted mainly maritime scenes and coastal views in England, Scotland and Wales. He was particularly fond of the rugged coastlines of Devon and Cornwall, as well as the Channel Islands. After his marriage in 1870, Brett spent most of his summers making sketching tours, including three years in the 1880s when he and his family spent weeks onboard a yacht, sailing the coastline of Britain. In 1881 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, although he never rose to the position of Academician. The last decade or so of Brett’s career was a constant struggle, as his work fell out of favour and fashion, although his sea paintings continued to be exhibited throughout Britain and even occasionally at the Paris Salon. While he often lectured on art and published several articles, he painted little after 1897, and died in relative obscurity at the age of seventy. Nevertheless, speaking shortly after his death, the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Edward Poynter, could praise Brett as ‘one of the most original of our landscape artists’. Also within a few weeks of the artist’s passing, a small group of his paintings - including the present work - was included in an exhibition of views of Cornwall at the newly-established Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.

In the introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of his landscape oil sketches at the Fine Art Society in 1886, Brett described his working method in some detail. When planning a painting of a particular view, he would make small oil sketches on the spot, completing each one in two or three hours without any subsequent retouching. Some of these oil sketches would later be worked up in his London studio, over the winter months, into full-scale exhibition canvases, often of considerable size.

Brett first visited Cornwall during his honeymoon in September 1870, and he returned again in 1872, 1873, and 1876. He continued to make regular painting expeditions to Cornwall, with his last visit in 1899, and views of the rugged granite cliffs of the Cornish coast became a favourite motif. As the artist’s great-grandson has noted, Brett ‘left over 200 known views of the coastline from Fowey in the east to Bude

in the north, painted over thirty years, in which he recorded with Ruskinian precision and Pre-Raphaelite intensity of colour its varied beauties, revelling in the diverse moods of sea and sky, and the majesty and grandeur of the cliffs.’1 This painting was made during Brett’s stay in Cornwall in the summer of 1880, when he was based at Porthgwarra and Sennen, near Land’s End. By this time the artist was working exclusively on canvas, having given up painting on prepared millboards in 1878. Like all of his oil sketches, the present work is unsigned - the artist only signed his finished exhibition pictures - but is inscribed with the date and location depicted. Logan Bay is here shown looking eastwards towards the headland known as Treryn Dinas, which incorporates the naturally balancing Logan Rock. As Christiana Payne has commented, ‘Brett was not attracted by the rural picturesque; it was the natural elements, the rocks, the sea and sky, which drew him to the coast.’2 This view of Logan Bay is painted so thinly in oils that it has the appearance of watercolour. According to Payne, while in Cornwall ‘Brett was making sketches both in oil and in watercolour, as if uncertain which medium was the more appropriate. Watercolour was suited to the fluid movements of the sea, the transparent sky and the reflections from wet sand, but oil was more successful in conveying the textures of the rocks, which were becoming an increasing preoccupation.’3 The painting retains its original period frame, of a particular type used by Brett for most of his works between 1875 and 1895. With its distinctive style of moulding incorporating a zigzag pattern infilled with triangular palmettes, the frame was known as a ‘Dolman’ frame, and was manufactured specifically for Brett by the leading firm of framemakers Dolman & Co. of London4.

Logan Bay, Cornwall was bought from Brett by Sir Thomas Lane Devitt, Bt. (1839-1923), a shipping magnate who was a friend and major patron of the artist. Devitt’s collection included several works by Brett, including the painting Echoes of a Far-Off Storm, which he presented to the Guildhall Art Gallery in London in 1918. In 1882 Devitt lent Logan Bay, together with four other views of Cornwall by Brett, to the second Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibition, established the previous year by the vicar of the church of St. Jude’s in Whitechapel, Canon Samuel Augustus Barnett.5 In the catalogue of the exhibition, in which each picture was described in terms intended for the layman, it was noted of this painting that ‘The water has made itself into a mirror for the rocks and sky.’6 Twenty years later, and a few weeks after Brett’s death, Devitt lent the same group of Cornwall paintings, including the present work, to the Spring Exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Although included in the posthumous auction of Devitt’s collection in 1924, Logan Bay appears to have been purchased at the sale, through Leggatt, by Devitt’s son Howson Foulger Devitt (1869-1949), and has since remained with his descendants until recently.

23 EUGÈNE BOUDIN Honfleur 1824-1898 Deauville Sky Study Oil on brown paper. Stamped with the atelier stamp E.B. (Lugt 828) in blue ink at the lower left.

Indistinctly inscribed in pencil at the lower left and in the centre of the sheet.

124 x 161 mm. (4 7/8 x 6 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist; Probably the Boudin atelier sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 20-21 March 1899.

The son of a sailor, Louis-Eugène Boudin established a small stationery and framing shop in the port city of Le Havre. Encouraged by some of the artists living or working in the area, whose work he occasionally exhibited in his shop, he took up painting himself in 1847, and by the early 1850s had established a modest career as a landscape painter. He painted marine scenes that attracted much favourable comment when he began exhibiting regularly at the Salon from 1859 onwards. Boudin travelled extensively around France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and made yearly visits to favourite sites in Normandy and Brittany, in particular the fashionable seaside resorts of Deauville and Trouville.

Much of Boudin’s work was small in scale, and was shown both in Paris and in provincial exhibitions around the country. He found a ready market for his paintings and, from 1881 onwards, enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who sold his works in France and America.

His oil paintings and lively watercolours, with their interest in capturing effects of light and colour, were an important early influence on Claude Monet, who was his pupil. Some six thousand drawings, watercolours and oil sketches by Boudin - most of the contents of his studio at his death - are today in the Louvre, while other significant groups of drawings and watercolours were given by the artist or his descendants to the museums of Honfleur and Le Havre.

An unassuming man, Boudin was never particularly concerned with his public stature or reputation, content with his modest successes as a petit maître. As he once described himself to a critic, ‘I am a loner, a daydreamer who has been content to remain in his part of the world and look at the sky.’1 Indeed, the artist was particularly drawn to the sky, and he produced numerous studies of clouds and skies. As he wrote in one of his notebooks, ‘To swim in the open sky. To achieve a cloud’s tenderness. To suspend those background masses, far off in the grey mist, and break up the azure…What delight and what torment!...Did they do better in the past? Did the Dutchmen achieve that poetry of clouds I seek? That tenderness of the sky which even extends to admiration, to worship: it’s no exaggeration.’2 The artist Camille Corot is said to have referred to Boudin as ‘the king of skies’, while the novelist Alexandre Dumas, also an admirer, wrote to the artist, ‘Vous m’avez promis aussi un grand ciel…’. The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, writing in 1859, noted that he had recently seen a large number of studies - ‘improvised facing sea and sky’ - in the artist’s studio. He noted that ‘M. Boudin, who might pride himself on his devotion to his art, shows his curious collection with great modesty. He knows full well that it must all become a painting, by means of the poetic impression recalled at will: and he does not pretend to pass off his notes for paintings…These studies, so swiftly and accurately sketched, after what, in terms of force and colour, are the most inconstant, the most fleeting of things, after waves and clouds…all these clouds with their fantastic, luminous shapes…’3 A group of comparable sky and cloud studies by Boudin, drawn in oil on paper, are in the collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne André Malraux in Le Havre4, while other examples, mainly in pastel, are in the Musée Eugène Boudin in Honfleur5.

actual size

24 JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER Lowell, Massachusetts 1834-1903 London Hastings Watercolour. Numbered 9432 in pencil on the verso.

136 x 225 mm. (5 3/8 x 8 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Charles William Dowdeswell (Dowdeswell and Dowdeswells Gallery), London, with the gallery stamp (Lugt 690) on the verso; Obach and Co., London, in 1908; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 21 July 1911, part of lot 80 (‘J. M. Whistler. Hastings; and Fishing-Boats, Hastings – a pair. 5 in. by 8 1/2 in.’); P. & D. Colnaghi and Obach, London, by 1912; George Edward Healing, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, until 1953; Sir Hugh Eyre Campbell Beaver KBE, London and Luxford House, Crowborough, Sussex, until 1967; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 19 July 1968, lot 31; Schweitzer Gallery, New York; Acquired from them in 1968 by a private collection, USA; Ira Spanierman, New York, in 1970; Private collection.

LITERATURE: A. E. Gallatin, Whistler’s Pastels and Other Modern Profiles, New York, 1911, unpaginated, illustrated (as ‘Hastings: No.II. From the hitherto unpublished water-colour drawing in the possession of Messrs. P. and D. Colnaghi and Obach.’); Margaret F. MacDonald, ‘James McNeill Whistler: 1934-1984 Anniversary Portrait. Notes, Harmonies, Nocturnes’, in New York, M. Knoedler & Company, Notes, Harmonies & Nocturnes: Small Works by James McNeill Whistler, exhibition catalogue, 1984, p.18; Margaret F. MacDonald, James McNeil Whistler. Drawings, Pastels and Watercolors: A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 1995, pp.312-313, no.830.

EXHIBITED: New York, M. Knoedler & Company, Inc., Notes, Harmonies & Nocturnes: Small Works

by James McNeill Whistler, 1984, no.78.

James McNeill Whistler had only rarely worked in watercolour before 1880, when he returned to London from Venice. From then onwards, however, he painted numerous small and highly atmospheric landscape watercolours - usually measuring approximately five by eight inches or six by twelve inches - of views along the Thames, the Kent coast, Cornwall, the Channel Islands and Holland. As one early writer has noted, ‘Whistler’s water-colours are as perfect in their way as the pastels. The artist has never strained his medium, has never tried to get the same results as if using pigment. Very often his drawings in water-colour are not much more than notes, with the result that they are always surprisingly spontaneous and fresh in appearance, and that his delicate and transparent washes of captivating colour are always a delight.’1 Some two hundred watercolours by Whistler survive today, of which around 150 can be dated to the decade of the 1880s, alongside numerous small oils, pastels and prints. The artist preferred not to exhibit these intimate works at the Royal Academy, where they would have been overwhelmed by the surrounding paintings. Instead, he showed them at independent galleries, where he took personal charge of the hanging, wall colours, decoration and lighting, as well as the design of the invitations and even the uniforms worn by the gallery attendants. The works were hung with a large amount of space between them, unlike the traditional crowded picture hang of the Victorian exhibition hall. Whistler also designed the gilt frames for his watercolours, which he chose to frame without mounts, according them the status of oil paintings. As he wrote in 1873, ‘my frames I have designed as carefully as my pictures – and thus they form as important a part as any of the rest of the work.’2 The artist first showed his watercolours in public at an exhibition of small-scale works, entitled “Notes” – “Harmonies” – “Nocturnes”, at the Dowdeswell Gallery in London in 1884. The exhibition included

thirty-eight oil paintings, three pastels and twenty-six watercolours. Two years later a second “Notes” – “Harmonies” – “Nocturnes” show at the same Bond Street gallery was dominated by watercolours, which numbered forty-eight in total, alongside twelve paintings, eight pastels and seven drawings. A third exhibition, with the same title, was held at the Wunderlich gallery in New York in 1889. As a reviewer of the 1886 exhibition noted, ‘Mr. Whistler would confer a real boon on artists if, in his next lecture, especially addressed to them, he would reveal how he obtains the marvellous transparency of colour which he can throw at times into his sea and air. Is it the result of happy accident, or of profound study?’3 Presented in its Whistler-designed frame, this small, fresh watercolour depicts the cliffs above the coastal town of Hastings, in East Sussex. In the summer of 1875, Whistler’s brother William had persuaded their elderly mother to leave the artist’s home and studio in Chelsea, where she had been living, and move to the Sussex coast for the sake of her health. Aged seventy and prone to bouts of severe bronchitis aggravated by London’s pollution, Anna McNeill Whistler ‘took a suite of rooms at 43 St. Mary’s Terrace, high on a hill above the seaside town of Hastings, on England’s southern coast. By September, she was strong enough to stroll along the hillside…At night, she could see the lights of the town from the bow window of her sitting room, although she most enjoyed watching, as her artist son would have done, the “moonlight shining on the sea beyond”.’4 This watercolour view of Hastings may be dated to the end of 1880 or the early part of 1881. As the Whistler scholar Margaret MacDonald has described the present sheet, ‘The assurance of the watercolour technique suggests that this drawing dates from after Whistler’s return from Venice in November 1880. The colours are lovely: the slopes are a warm sage-green with the distant town light red with bluish-grey slate roofs. Some buildings were touched with white. The sea is darker, tinged with brown.’5 Anna Whistler died suddenly in January 1881, and Whistler and his brother William were unable to get to Hastings in time to see her before she passed away. ‘[William’s] medical practice forced him to return to London almost immediately, so Nellie [William’s wife and the artist’s sister-in-law] came to help with preparations for the funeral. Whistler tried to divert himself by painting small (nine by five inches) watercolors of the town, the cliffs, the beach, the fishing boats. He walked with Nellie along the windswept cliffs. Decades later, she recalled him being worn down by grief and “remorse”, but if he wept, she did not see it.’6 Two related watercolours of Hastings, of similar dimensions and date, are today part of the Lunder Collection of works by Whistler in the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine. These are a view of Fishing Boats at Hastings7, which was sold together with the present sheet at auction in London in 1911, and a vertical composition of Hastings from the Cliffs8, which was also included in the 1911 sale. Margaret MacDonald has noted of the present sheet and Hastings from the Cliffs that ‘Both…are remarkable for their spontaneity and sense of space, and are painted on the same paper, probably wove, which has a neat diamond grain.’9 As another scholar writes of the related watercolour of Hastings from the Cliffs, in terms equally applicable to the present sheet, ‘[it] recalls the vaporous surfaces of the oil Nocturnes and anticipates the freer, more fluid handling of the exhibition watercolors…that were shortly to come. It is notable for its decorative composition, intense color, and palpable weather – the result of layered, dripping, and spreading washes and shimmering highlights from exposed areas of white paper.’10 And, as MacDonald adds of Whistler’s work of the early 1880s, ‘The accomplished elegance of his… watercolours – of Hastings…show his increasing sophistication.’11 Perhaps because of their association with his mother’s death, Whistler did not select any of the Hastings watercolours for the three “Notes” – “Harmonies” – “Nocturnes” exhibitions that he organized between 1884 and 1889. They remained in his studio, and were only offered for sale after the artist’s death in 1903. The three known watercolour views of Hastings share much of the same later provenance, and all were in the collections of the solicitor George Healing (1871-1953) and the industrialist Sir Hugh E. C. Beaver (1890-1967).

25 CLAUDE-EMILE SCHUFFENECKER Fresne-Saint-Mamès 1851-1934 Paris Coastal Cliffs, Normandy Pastel on light brown paper. Stamped with the Schuffenecker atelier monogram1 (not in Lugt) at the lower left.

300 x 457 mm. (11 7/8 x 18 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist and by descent to his daughter, Jeanne Schuffenecker, Paris; Possibly Jacques Fouquet, Galerie Les Deux Iles, Paris; Private collection.

Born in Franche-Comté, Émile Schuffenecker met Paul Gauguin when both worked at the same stock brokerage firm. The two remained lifelong friends, and an extensive correspondence between them survives. In 1884 Schuffenecker was one of the founders of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, and he was also invited to take part in the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886. He began to achieve some commercial success around 1888, after Theo Van Gogh showed his work, with that of Gauguin, at the Galerie Boussod & Valadon in Paris. The following year Schuffenecker organized an exhibition of paintings by the ‘Groupe Impressionniste et Synthésiste’, including works by himself, Gauguin, Emile Bernard and others. The only solo exhibition of his work to be held in his lifetime took place in 1896 in Paris, and included seventeen paintings, twenty-one pastels and three drawings.

Although by no means wealthy, Schuffenecker purchased works by several of his contemporaries, and in time came to own a large number of works by Gauguin, as well paintings by Paul Cézanne and Vincent Van Gogh and drawings by Odilon Redon and Charles Filiger. Schuffenecker remains little known today, and only a handful of exhibitions have been devoted to him. Indeed, he was relatively obscure even in his lifetime, once describing himself as a man who, ‘placed in the margin, made himself at home there, without bitterness, without desire.’

This large sheet is a fine example of Schuffenecker’s mastery of pastel, which he used with considerable skill throughout his mature career. It may be dated to the 1880s or early 1890s, when the artist produced several pastels of coastal views in Brittany and Normandy, particularly near Yport and Étretat, which are among his finest works in this demanding medium. As the scholar Jill Grossvogel has pointed out ‘The lightness of pastel, its own evanescence, was especially appropriate to Schuffenecker’s landscapes and seascapes – its transparent qualities and the ease with which it could be manipulated were ideally suited to capturing movement, setting down images whose essence was literally fleeting, changing, inconstant in appearance at any given moment.’2 Furthermore, as another scholar has stated, ‘In his pastels from Normandy, the world appears as ephemerally fleeting reflections of an intensity that is matched only by the later works of Claude Monet. But Schuffenecker’s light is significantly cooler than Monet’s. Everything is enveloped in an atmospherically scintillating haze created by mixing white into the pigments.’3 Views of coastal cliffs were among Schuffenecker’s favourite subjects, and pastel drawings of cliffs at Étretat and elsewhere are in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brest, the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen and Tate Modern in London, as well as in several private collections, while an oil painting of Étretat, dated 1888, is in the Indianapolis Museum of Art4. The present sheet is particularly close in composition to a slightly smaller pastel in a private collection5. As one writer noted of Schuffenecker, a decade after his death, ‘Pure impressionist, he thought and he showed that the aiguille at Etretat, for example, taking advantage of the infinite play of light and the changing aspects with which that light adorned the rock formation, could summon up a world of sensations capable of providing the painter, throughout his entire life, work and delight.’6

26 FRANZ SKARBINA Berlin 1849-1910 Berlin Seascape in Stormy Weather Watercolour and white gouache. Inscribed A.287 in blue chalk on the verso, and with mountmaker’s instructions inscribed in pencil on the verso.

190 x 269 mm. (7 1/2 x 10 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s estate, with the Nachlass Skarbina estate stamp (Lugt 2289) at the lower right.

A painter of landscapes, genre scenes and city views, Franz Skarbina studied at Akademie der bildenden Künste in Berlin between 1865 and 1869, before setting up his first studio in Berlin. In 1871 he travelled around Germany and Austria, and later journeyed to Holland, Belgium and France. In 1878 he had his first public success with a large, sensational and somewhat macabre painting of a recent suicide, rope still around his neck, returning to life and waking up among the corpses in the Berlin morgue. Around 1881 Skarbina was appointed a professor of anatomical drawing at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in Berlin, although he eventually resigned in 1893 due to conflicts with the conservative director of the school, Anton von Werner. Skarbina enjoyed an extended stay in Paris in 1882, and the following year exhibited for the first time at the Salon. He also spent a year in Paris in 1885-1886, and his paintings of Parisian streets are particularly fine examples of the interest in urban life that would carry through into his paintings of Berlin in later years. In 1891 his painting Promenade in Karlsbad won a gold medal at the Internationalen Kunstaustellung exhibition in Berlin.

Skarbina joined the nascent Berlin Secession movement in 1899, and exhibited with the group between 1899 and 1901. As a German critic and art historian, writing in an English magazine in 1901, noted of him, ‘This artist is surprisingly versatile. There is no phase of modern painting which he has not tried with success...he [has] become one of the finest painters of light Germany can boast of. Changing from subject to subject, full of variety in technique, he has remained true to himself in that one point – hence his great success...Whatever he has learned in Paris he turned to account afterwards in his native town, in his numerous pictures of Berlin street-life and Berlin interiors.’1 A memorial exhibition of Skarbina’s work - numbering over 220 paintings, gouaches, pastels, watercolors and prints - was held at the Königliche Akademie der Künste in Berlin a few months after his death in 1910.

The influence of Skarbina’s older contemporary Adolph Menzel is evident in much of his work. Like Menzel, Skarbina was particularly interested in depictions of city life in Berlin and fashionable resorts, characterized by a keen observation of figure types and settings, although he also painted a small number of pure landscapes. A gifted draughtsman, Skarbina prepared his paintings with individual figure studies in chalk and charcoal, which are again in the manner of Menzel. A superb watercolourist, he may be said to have been arguably the finest master of the medium in the Berlin of his day.

Skarbina was a city dweller for most of his career, and his best pictures reflect an abiding interest in urban life. However, during the summers he would sometimes travel to a seaside resort, often on the North Sea. This atmospheric watercolour was probably done on one of these visits. Similar seascapes are found in the background of some of the artist’s genre scenes of elegant figures on the seashore, such as a watercolour of 1882, depicting a man removing a jellyfish from the path of a woman walking on the beach2. A watercolour and gouache view by Skarbina of a beach in Capri, dated 1883, is today in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.3

27 MAX SELIGER Bublitz 1865-1920 Leipzig Landscape on the Palatine Hill in Rome Watercolour, over traces of a pencil underdrawing, on paper laid down on a thin board. Signed, dated and inscribed Rom. M. Seliger 1889. November. Auf dem Palatine. in red ink at the top of the sheet.

Further inscribed MS 14 in red chalk on the verso.

262 x 428 mm. (10 3/8 x 16 7/8 in.)

Born in Bublitz in Pomerania (now Bobolice in Poland), Max Seliger was active as a painter, decorator, mosaicist and lithographer. He remains little known outside of Berlin and Leipzig, where he worked for most of his life, and there appear to have been no monographs or exhibitions dedicated to the artist.

Early in his career, in 1893, Seliger received the commission for what is probably his best-known work; the decoration of the façade of the German pavilion, the Deutsches Haus, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Another significant public commission he earned was for a series of mural paintings to decorate the former Royal Gymnasium, or school, in the town of Wurzen in Saxony.

Seliger also established a particular reputation as a designer of mosaic decorations. These include a series of mosaics painted for the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin in 1903-1904, while on a more intimate scale is his mosaic on the tomb of his young nephew Fritz Dernburg in the Berlin cemetery of Grunewald, which was completed in 1895.

A member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund, Seliger also worked as an illustrator and graphic artist, providing a design for the title page of the December 1898 issue of the Kunstgewerbeblatt, depicting Dürer’s Self-Portrait Adored by the Personification of Art. His most significant and influential role, however, seems to have been as a teacher. Between 1901 and his death in 1920 Seliger served as the director of the Königliche Akademie für graphische Kunst and Buchgewerbe (the Royal Academy of Graphic Arts and Printing) in Leipzig, where painting and drawing were taught alongside bookbinding, lettering, typography and printing techniques. In 1920 his book Kunstbetrachtung und Naturgenuss (Viewing Art and Enjoying Nature) was published.

As part of his teaching, Seliger was interested in the relationship between an artist’s handwriting and the way in which he drew, and to this end asked numerous artists of his day to provide him with examples of both their writing and drawing on a single sheet of paper. He eventually amassed a collection of 236 examples, which was posthumously published in 1924 as Handschrift und Zeichnung von Künstlern alter und neuer Zeit (Writings and Drawings by Artists of Old and New Times), and is today in the Altona Museum in Hamburg1.

Among the relatively few works by Max Seliger in public collections are ten drawings for the mosaics of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, in the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin, and a group of landscapes, urban views and portraits acquired by the Stadtgeschichtliche Museum in Leipzig from the local collector Armin Hüchelheim. Individual drawings by the artist are in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.

Seliger travelled extensively throughout Germany and Italy. Dated November 1889, this watercolour view of a spot on the Palatine Hill in Rome is a fine example of his interest in working en plein air.

Another Italian landscape watercolour by Seliger - a view of Florence, dated 1898 - appeared at auction in Switzerland in 19932.

28 PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR Limoges 1841-1919 Cagnes-sur-Mer Mediterranean Landscape Watercolour and gouache on buff paper. Signed with the artist’s initial R. in pencil at the lower left.

145 x 273 mm. (5 3/4 x 10 3/4 in.) [image] 159 x 306 mm. (6 1/4 x 12 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Andipa Gallery, London; Stanley Michael Meyler, Evanston, Illinois.

Despite Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s undoubted fame as one of the foremost artists of the 19th century, his drawings and watercolours have remained relatively little studied to this day. Nevertheless, as the Renoir scholar François Daulte noted, ‘It is in his sketches and studies, rather than his large paintings, that he reveals all his originality and freshness of vision.’1 Although best known for his figure paintings, Renoir painted and drew landscape subjects throughout his career. As he once told the art dealer René Gimpel, near the end of his life, ‘I can’t paint nature, I know, but the hand-to-hand struggle with her stimulates me. A painter can’t be great if he doesn’t understand landscape. At one point the term ‘landscapist’ was one of scorn, especially in the eighteenth century. And yet, that century which I adore produced great landscape artists. I am of the eighteenth century. I humbly consider not only that my art descends from Watteau, Fragonard, Hubert Robert, but even that I am one of them.’2 The present sheet is a fine and fresh example of the artist’s watercolour technique as a landscapist, characterized by a freedom of handling and an assured use of colour. Landscape drawings such as this display ‘Renoir’s ability to suggest form simply by modulating his brushstrokes and colors…[and share] the autumnal greens, yellows, and russets of Renoir’s palette as well as the handling of foliage and careful pictorial organization.’3 The artist here uses the white of the paper to capture the effect of bright sunlight, on which he applies delicate washes of green, red, yellow and blue to create both the forms and reflections of the trees and foliage.

As has been noted of Renoir’s landscapes, ‘he skilfully realised the Impressionist notion of finding an adequate expression for the fleeting moment outdoors, defining the landscape in paintings and watercolours as an atmospheric colour appearance. Swift, open brushstrokes and vibrating colours create an urgent atmosphere of shimmering reflections of sunlight on the vegetation, water, and air. Particularly in his later works, Renoir returned to his Impressionist beginnings, creating pictures directly linked to certain seasons and times of day or specific places…He was inspired by the intensity of light in the Mediterranean and the lush vegetation in the South of France, where he spent the winter months from the late 1880s because of a severe case of rheumatism, before finally settling for good in Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1907. His late landscape compositions, for which the watercolour technique seemed ideally suited, are characterised by free and easy brushstrokes and a vivid as well as powerful use of colour.’4 Renoir’s watercolour landscapes of this type are generally dated between 1885 and 1900, and show the influence of his close friend Paul Cézanne, whom he sometimes worked alongside. It has been suggested that some of the artist’s late watercolours may have once been part of an album or sketchbook of landscapes, inspired by the example of Cézanne, used by Renoir in the middle and late 1880s. As Richard Brettell has pointed out, ‘Although the two painters are now considered virtual opposites, Auguste Renoir was probably Paul Cézanne’s closest friend during the thirty years before Cézanne died in 1906…

And it was surely no accident that he turned to a medium that was more often Cézanne’s choice than his own…Renoir used [watercolour] to embrace Cézanne.’5

29 WILLIAM STOTT OF OLDHAM Oldham 1857-1900 Belfast Open Sea Pastel on board. Signed and dated WILLIAM STOTT OF OLDHAM in pencil at the lower right. Dedicated To John Swan in pencil at the lower centre.

245 x 327 mm. (9 5/8 x 12 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to John Macallan Swan, London1; Thence by family descent, until 2016; Anonymous sale, London, Bonham’s Knightsbridge, 28 June 2016, lot 95.

William Stott studied at the Oldham School of Art and often sketched in the surrounding countryside and on the coasts of Lancashire and Cumbria. His early works were mainly small-scale watercolours notable for their freshness, and in 1878 he moved to Paris to complete his artistic education. By this time, as the scholar Roger Brown has noted, the young Englishman ‘was already a proficient artist of landscapes, which displayed a sensitivity to tone, atmosphere and colour that was to stay with him throughout his short artistic life.’2 Stott showed a few watercolours at the Paris Salons between 1878 and 1880, and lived for a time in the town of Grez-sur-Loing, which hosted a thriving community of foreign artists. At the Salon of 1881 he exhibited two large paintings indebted to the example of the Realist artist Jules Bastien-Lepage, which brought him to public notice. The following year he sent two more canvases to the Salon, one of which won a third-class medal.

In 1882 Stott returned to England and settled in the small harbour village of Ravenglass, in the Lake District in Cumbria, where he lived for the remainder of his career. He was elected to the Society of British Artists in 1885, at the invitation of James McNeill Whistler, and before long came to be regarded as one of Whistler’s foremost disciples; this influence is particularly noticeable in the younger artist’s portraits of the 1880s. By 1887, however, he had begun moving away from Whistlerian subjects in favour of themes associated with the Aesthetic Movement and influenced by the example of the Symbolist artists in France. That year he exhibited a large painting of The Birth of Venus, for which Whistler’s mistress had posed nude, which received scathing critical reviews. The result was a lasting rift with Whistler, which tainted Stott’s reputation in England for the remainder of his career. Nevertheless, his standing in artistic circles on the Continent remained high, in particular in France, Belgium and Germany. Yet what he seems to have wanted most, namely acceptance into the Royal Academy and recognition by the artistic establishment in London, was never forthcoming. Stott died suddenly, at the age of forty-two, on board a ship sailing from Southampton to Belfast, and was largely forgotten within a few years of his death.

From 1883 onwards Stott began working in pastel, ‘almost exclusively for plein-air landscape work and in preliminary sketches for exhibition pictures – and he proved to be a superb pastellist.’3 He was influenced in particular by the pastel landscapes of Edgar Degas, whom he may have met around this time, and Whistler. While Stott sometimes used his pastel sketches as studies for the background of his paintings, he also regarded them as fully-fledged works of art and often exhibited them. The present sheet is one of a number of pastel seascapes executed in the 1880s and 1890s. As Roger Brown has noted, ‘At Ravenglass…Stott worked on a series of seascapes and coastal views in pastel, which follow Whistler’s simplicity and economy of expression almost to abstraction. Stott was to produce many such landscapes in the remaining years of his life, almost exclusively on the Cumberland coast. These figureless, subjectless scenes…are a celebration of Stott’s belief in the beauty and symbolism of nature unsullied by the human presence or the limitations of narrative…these small landscapes and seascapes seem to display a form of pantheism, where emotional and spiritual values are expressed through the moods of nature. Like Whistler, Stott was pushing further the boundaries of the apparently limited subject.’4 Among comparable works is a pastel seascape today in the Gallery Oldham5.

30 HENRI EDMOND CROSS Douai 1856-1910 Saint-Clair View of Le Lavandou Watercolour over a pencil underdrawing. Stamped with the studio stamp H.E.C. (Lugt 1305a) in red ink at the lower left. Inscribed 26 Nov – 4h in blue chalk on the verso. Inscribed Le Lavandou (cyprés) and numbered 720 in pencil on the verso.

173 x 248 mm. (6 3/4 x 9 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, Saint-Clair; Possibly the Cross atelier sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Baudoin], 28 October 19211; Anonymous sale, Paris, Galerie Charpentier, 10(?) June 1955 (according to an inscription on the old backing board); Georges Renand, Paris2; By descent to Jeannine and Edouard Chapet, Paris; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: To be included in the forthcoming Cross catalogue raisonné being prepared by Patrick Offenstadt.

Born to an English mother and a French father, Henri Edmond Delacroix studied first in Lille and later in Paris. Early in his career he changed his surname to Cross, an Anglicized version of croix, to avoid comparisons with the famous 19th century Romantic painter and confusion with a contemporary artist named Henri Eugène Delacroix. Little is known of his work before 1884, when he first exhibited with the Société des Artistes Indépendants. Cross did not adopt the Neo-Impressionist techniques of his colleagues Georges Seurat and Paul Signac until the early 1890s, after Seurat’s death. One of his first paintings in the pointillist technique was a portrait of his wife, exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1891. At around the same time he left Paris for the south of France, eventually settling in the village of Saint-Clair, near Le Lavandou and not far from Saint-Tropez. The Mediterranean landscape of the Côte d’Azur was to become Cross’s preferred subject matter for the remainder of his career, although he also painted idyllic scenes of bathers and mythological figures. As Cross’s friend Signac, who assembled a large personal collection of his paintings and watercolours, wrote of him in 1894, ‘One…feels in him the joy of painting, the love for delicate harmonies, something undefinably hesitant and mysterious and unexpected.’3 From 1892 onwards Cross participated in all the exhibitions devoted to the Neo-Impressionist movement, and in 1894 he had his first private gallery show in Paris; a joint exhibition with his fellow pointillist Hippolyte Petitjean. His style became less rigid as his career progressed, however, with his paintings gradually adopting a greater freedom of brushwork than the more rigidly pointillist scenes of his close friend Signac. He also developed a brighter palette, the colours of his paintings reflecting his fascination with the light of the South. As the painter Maurice Denis, a friend of the artist, noted in 1907, ‘Cross has resolved to represent the sun, not by bleaching his colours, but by exalting them, and by the boldness of his colour contrasts...The sun is not for him a phenomenon which makes everything white, but is a source of harmony which hots up nature’s colours, authorizes the most heightened colour-scale, and provides the subject for all sorts of colour fantasies.’4 Towards the end of his career, Cross had largely stopped painting out of doors, preferring to make small watercolours from nature which were then developed into finished paintings in the studio.

He was, however, never very productive as a painter, due to a combination of failing eyesight and severe arthritis, and from 1900 onwards painted relatively few works. His first one-man exhibition, numbering thirty paintings and the same number of watercolours, was held at the Galerie Druet in Paris in 1905, and was a great success. This was followed two years later by a retrospective exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, organized by the art critic and dealer Félix Fénéon, which included

thirty-eight paintings and fifty-one watercolours. Cross’s late work influenced such Fauve artists as Henri Matisse (who became a good friend and owned at least one painting by Cross), Charles Camoin, André Derain, Louis Valtat and Henri Manguin, all of whom visited his studio in the Midi in the 1890s and early 1900s. As the scholar Robert L. Herbert has written of Cross, ‘By the time of his death, his work stood as a hymn to color and sunlight, and helped form the vision of the Mediterranean coast which is commonplace today.’5 Watercolours occupied Cross throughout his life, and particularly in the later stages of his career, after he had settled in the South of France. In March 1900 he wrote to his fellow painter Charles Angrand that he was concentrating his activities on producing watercolours, adding that ‘It’s fun. The absolute necessity to be quick, bold, even insolent, has brought a kind of beneficial feverishness into my work after the months spent languishing on my paintings...’6 Cross would make these drawings from nature, having already begun with an idea of what colour combinations and forms he would need, and having developed these basic ideas in the studio. As the artist wrote to one friend, ‘I compose in the studio, coming as close as possible to my interior vision; then, the harmony being established, partly on paper and canvas, and partly in my head, I set about making my sensations objective – sensations corresponding to the initial vision – in front of nature. These documentary sketches, during the definitive execution of the painting, more often than not are behind me or in a filing box.’7 From 1895 onwards Cross sold some of his watercolours through Siegfried Bing’s gallery Maison de l’Art Nouveau in Paris, where Signac saw and admired them, and also showed them at the Salon des Indépendants in 1903. Their importance to Cross is seen in the fact that, in the two solo exhibitions of his work, in 1905 and 1907, the artist chose to show numerous watercolours alongside his finished paintings. His watercolours are, however, only rarely signed and are almost never dated, making establishing a chronology of his work in the medium difficult.

As the Cross scholar Patrick Offenstadt has written, ‘Cross produced drawings and watercolours throughout his life, but it seems that it was not until around 1888, advised by Pissarro and guided by Signac, that it became a daily practice. True, he used watercolour initially as a preparatory springboard for his oil paintings, but some of them are so accomplished, harmonious and poetic that one can only consider them as fullyfledged works of art in their own right, and sometimes even as masterpieces. Then came watercolour for watercolour’s sake. It was around 1903-05 that he freed himself of all constraints...Signac used ink and pencil to structure his compositions and explore his subjects, while Cross worked directly with the brush. His technical mastery and sure hand allowed him to be bold, while his chronic arthritis drew him to the medium because it forced him to work ‘light’. Watercolour was therefore the result – and great beneficiary of both his physical suffering and his genius.’8 As Heinz Widauer adds, ‘painting with watercolours greatly facilitated his work. It ensured that his hands would lose none of their practice and enabled him to capture rapidly and effortlessly a maximum of colour sensations when working outdoors.’9 The small fishing port of Le Lavandou lay below the hilltop town of Bormes and some two kilometres from the inland village of Saint-Clair, where Cross lived for much of the last two decades of his life. On one of his first visits to the area he wrote to Paul Signac, ‘It’s so beautiful! I owe you a debt of gratitude for guiding me to this corner of Provence. After the two or three conversations we had on the subject, two names have always stayed in my mind: Bormes – Lavandou.’10 In another letter, written to Charles Angrand ten years later, after he had settled at Saint-Clair, Cross enthused, ‘The light which bathes all things in its radiance is enticing, dazzling, overwhelming…Our beaches here are deserted. Elegance can be found only in the pines that rise out of the sand and in the delightful half-moon of the shoreline.

But what never-ending beauty!’11 Cross made numerous paintings, watercolours and drawings of this Provençal coastal region, which he loved: ‘Always the same light, the same atmosphere, the same flora.

The silhouettes of the headlands, and the mountains – the continuation of the Maures – are the only thing that ever changes. But the view is always magical.’12 The artist is buried in the cemetery at Le Lavandou.

31 CHARLES GUILLOUX Paris 1866-1946 Lormes Autumn Landscape with a Figure on a Path Black chalk, pastel and watercolour, with traces of a framing line in pencil. Signed and dated C. Guilloux 93 in brown ink at the lower left.

145 x 125 mm. (5 3/4 x 4 7/8 in.)

Self-taught as an artist and relatively unknown today, Charles-Victor Guilloux worked briefly at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris before devoting himself to his chosen profession. He first exhibited his landscape paintings at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1892, where all eight of his works were sold, and one review of the exhibition noted that ‘M. Charles Guilloux possesses a personal vision, a refined understanding of nature, from which much can be expected.’1 He was soon associated with the Symbolist movement, taking part in several of the exhibitions of Peintres Impressionistes et Symbolistes at the Galerie Le Barc de Boutteville, alongside Paul Gauguin and the Nabis artists. (A reviewer of one of the Le Barc de Boutteville exhibitions in 1892 praised Guilloux’s contribution as ‘A magnificent series of landscapes sent in by an unknown who is a master’.) Solo exhibitions of his work were held at Le Barc de Boutteville in 1896 and 1898.

Guilloux mainly painted views of Paris and its surroundings, as well as the landscapes along the banks of the Seine - near the villages of Herblay and Frette-sur-Seine, close to his home - and also in Brittany. He often depicted landscapes at twilight with misty, atmospheric effects. Although Guilloux made studies sur le motif, he preferred to work on his visionary landscapes in his studio, leading the noted art critic Roger Marx to describe him as ‘an artist who is more concerned with poetry than exact reality.’ Like the Nabis painters, his work also evokes an interest in Japonisme and Synthetism. In later years Guilloux exhibited at both the Salon de la Société nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Salon des Indépendants, while a group of eight Parisian views was included in the fourth exhibition of the Société des Peintres du Paris Moderne at the Grand Palais in 1907 and a one-man exhibition was held at the Galerie Hessèle in Paris in 1912. Guilloux also produced a number of colour lithographs, one of which, entitled The Deluge, was commissioned in 1893 by the publisher André Marty for the seminal print portfolio L’Estampe originale and is probably his best-known work today.

Paintings by Charles Guilloux are today in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, as well as in the museums of Beauvais, Meudon, Montpellier, Moulins and Vic-sur-Seille. Among the few drawings by the artist in a public collection outside of France is a Breton landscape in watercolour and pastel, dated 1896, in the Cleveland Museum of Art2.

Guilloux’s works on paper are characterized by the same atmospheric effects and somewhat elegiac quality of his paintings. His drawings display a confident handling of pencil, watercolour and pastel, sometimes using all three at once, as in the present sheet. Dated 1893, at the beginning of the artist’s independent career, this fine autumn landscape evinces an air of mystery and melancholy that is a recurring feature of Guilloux’s distinctive oeuvre.

actual size

32 HIPPOLYTE PETITJEAN Mâcon 1854-1929 Paris Mountainous Landscape Watercolour on paper, laid down on board. Signed hipp Petitjean in violet ink at the lower left.

388 x 587 mm. (15 1/4 x 23 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: E. J. van Wisselingh & Co., Amsterdam (No. A8481); Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 22 April 1971, lot 37; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 2 April 1974, lot 29; Anonymous sale, Los Angeles, Sotheby Parke-Bernet, 6 June 1978, lot 618; Bel Fine Art, New York; Private collection.

LITERATURE: To be included in the forthcoming Petitjean catalogue raisonné, currently in preparation

by Stephane Kempa.

Hippolyte Petitjean left school at thirteen and began his training as a draughtsman in his native Mâcon while working as an apprentice housepainter. In 1872 he won a grant to study in Paris, where he continued his training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in the studio of the academic painter Alexandre Cabanel. In 1886 he joined the group of artists known collectively as the Neo-Impressionists, led by Paul Signac and Georges Seurat. (The term ‘Neo-Impressionism’ had been coined by the art critic Félix Fénéon in a review of the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, in which divisionist paintings by Seurat, Signac and Camille Pissarro were hung together in one room.) Petitjean enjoyed a close friendship with Seurat, whose influence is particularly noticeable in the younger artist’s dark conté crayon drawings of this period. In his mature work, he continued to remain true to the pointillist techniques of Seurat, although his compositions were also influenced by the work of the Symbolist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Petitjean exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants in Paris from 1891 onwards, and the following year took part in a number of small gallery exhibitions devoted to the Neo-Impressionist artists. He also contributed to exhibitions in Belgium (where he showed with the avant-garde group of artists Les XX in 1893 and its successor Le Libre Esthétique in 1898), Sweden and Germany.

Unlike many of his colleagues, Petitjean struggled financially for most of his career, and lived in relative poverty, only earning a modest salary as an art teacher. It was not until the sale of some of his paintings at a group exhibition of Neo-Impressionist artists at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1899 that he achieved a small measure of financial stability, but later years still found sales few and far between. In a notebook in which the artist carefully recorded his output between 1886 and his death, numerous paintings, drawings and watercolours are listed as having been being gifted or sold to creditors in exchange for services, or to pay bills, while in several years no sales are recorded at all. After 1917 Petitjean’s output slowed considerably, although his work continued to be exhibited with the Neo-Impressionists.

Indeed, Petitjean maintained an adherence to Neo-Impressionist principles throughout his career, even after the decline in the movement’s critical fortunes following Seurat’s death in 1891. Not long after this, some members of the group, notably Camille Pissarro and his son Lucien, started to become disillusioned with the rigid demands of the pointillist technique. Yet despite Pissarro’s comments in a letter to Lucien written in January 1894 (‘I will give you the details of what passed between Petitjean and Signac; this is only the beginning of disagreeable discussions among the Neos, for Petitjean completely agrees with our view that there is no future in a method as constricted as that of the dot exclusively!’1), Petitjean seems never to have abandoned pointillism as a method of artistic expression. In his survey of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, published in 1920, the scholar and critic Gustave Coquiot noted that ‘In the phalanx of neo-impressionists, M. Petitjean ranks very high. He is best known for his Bathers, of pure classical style, and for his vividly coloured landscapes.’2 The artist continued to exhibit his work

regularly at the Salon des Indépendants until the very end of his career. In May 1929, shortly before his death, an exhibition of twenty-eight of his works was mounted at a Parisian gallery, from which one painting was purchased by the State for the Musée du Luxembourg.

Although he lived to the age of seventy-five, Petitjean was never very prolific as a painter, with an oeuvre of around 350 paintings, although these were sometimes rather large in scale. His subject matter included landscapes, urban scenes, mythological subjects and, occasionally, portraits. These works were often preceded by several preparatory studies, usually made en plein-air, though the paintings themselves were almost always executed in his large Parisian studio, built with the proceeds from the sale of two paintings by his friend Seurat.

Arguably Petitjean’s most distinctive and original contribution as a Neo-Impressionist artist are his vibrant pointillist watercolours, of which the present sheet is a fine example. Approximately two hundred watercolours by the artist are known, many of which were made as independent works of art to be sold to collectors. As one modern scholar has noted, ‘As with most of [Petitjean’s] works, his watercolors are not dated, nor are their locations identified. In executing them, he employed the divided color technique very freely, applying dabs of color in a loose network that allows the white of the paper to show through... in his pure landscapes the artist takes a more individual approach, subtly modulating the different areas of color to suggest gradual spatial recession or the light effects of a setting sun.’3 From around 1912 onwards, Petitjean’s watercolours are characterized by more widely spaced dots of pure colour, in which the surface of the paper shows through.

In a letter dated 1 September 1893, Petitjean wrote to Camille Pissarro: ‘I worked more than usual, but nothing important, pochades, sketches, watercolours, a genre in which I am not very skilled but which I find very good for taking quick colour notes and which interests me a lot. In front of nature, it seems to me that instinctively I feel more and more the need to grasp the side of decorative simplicity but still a lot of indecision. I am also required by the diversity of tones and here is the difficulty: variety in unity. This is what I find is good in watercolour which, by its manner, forces you to a synthetic interpretation...’4 The range and variety of Hippolyte Petitjean’s watercolours were only rediscovered several years after his death, at a centenary exhibition of his work at the Galerie de l’Institut in Paris in 1955. As one modern scholar has noted of these Neo-Impressionist watercolours, ‘All executed in pointillist style, they reveal a very individual side of his talent which fully justifies the collectors’ interest in them.’5 In 20152016 a major Petitjean retrospective was mounted at the Musées des Mâcon, which today holds a substantial collection of the artist’s work, amounting to some 117 paintings and drawings.

Almost certainly intended as a finished work of art for sale, this very large sheet is a fine example of Petitjean’s mature pointillist technique as a watercolourist. Among stylistically comparable and sizeable watercolours by the artist is a view of A Broad Valley at Sunset in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.6 and The Seine at Mantes-la-Jolie in the Indianapolis Museum of Art7, as well as A Boat on a Pond in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection at the Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza in Madrid8. Another closely comparable pointillist watercolour of sailboats in a bay by Petitjean, of similar dimensions to the present sheet and signed in the same way, is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa9.

33 CHARLES LACOSTE Floirac 1870-1959 Paris The Bay of Arcachon Oil on paper. Inscribed and dated Arcachon – Septembre 1895 scratched into the paint with the tip of the brush at the lower right. Further inscribed and dated Arcachon – Septembre 1895 in pencil on the verso.

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

Born in the Gironde, Charles Lacoste studied in Bordeaux, where at the age of fourteen he befriended the poet Francis Jammes and the future collector Gabriel Frizeau. Jammes was to be a lifelong friend and champion of the artist, while Frizeau became Lacoste’s first significant supporter and patron, in the early years of his career1. Lacoste, whose mother was of English descent, made three trips to London; in 1894, 1896 and 1897. There he stayed in Chelsea with his friend, the writer Hubert Montague Crackanthorpe, and through him became associated with a literary and intellectual circle. He was also inspired by the work of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner which he studied on repeated visits to the National Gallery, and which influenced his own particular interest in exploring atmospheric effects in his landscapes. From 1894 onwards Lacoste’s works were characterized by a certain stillness, and he often painted landscapes at sunrise or sunset, at night or by moonlight, with snow, mist or fog. This is particularly true of the landscapes he painted in London, which capture something of Whistler’s Thames nocturnes of twenty years earlier.

The first exhibition in which Lacoste took part was the Salon des Cent of 1898, organized by the magazine La Plume, to which the artist had the previous year contributed an article entitled ‘La Simplicité dans la peinture’, in which he noted: ‘Les oeuvres que, toutes nous propose la nature, comme elle, doivent être simples...’ Lacoste settled in Paris in 1899, and soon came under the wing of the philanthropist and patron Arthur Fontaine, who hosted one of the leading intellectual salons in the city. It was there that Lacoste met and became associated with such figures as the writers André Gide, Paul Claudel and Paul Valéry, the composers Claude Debussy and Darius Milhaud, and the artists Eugène Carrière, Maurice Denis, Odilon Redon and Edouard Vuillard. It was Gide who, in 1904, introduced Lacoste to the gallerist Alphonse Eugène Druet, who decided to promote and exhibit his work, which he did yearly until 1938. Among his other supporters in Paris was the Princesse Faucigny-Lucinge de Cystria, who came to own several works by Lacoste. Between 1900 and 1914, Lacoste showed at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne, as well as with the exhibitions organized by La Libre Esthetique in Brussels in 1907 and the Toison d’Or (Golden Fleece) in Moscow the following year.

He had several one-man exhibitions at galleries in Paris, notably at the Galerie Druet and the Galerie Eugène Blot, and at the Galerie Barbazanges in 1921 and the Galerie Raphaël Gerard in 1937.

Although above all a landscape painter, Lacoste also painted around thirty portraits, mostly before 1900, and a handful of still life subjects, as well as producing tapestry cartoons for the Gobelins factory and illustrations for books by Jammes and Gide. In 1928 he was commissioned to decorate a staircase in the Palais du Luxembourg, and two years later painted a mural for the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle in Toulouse. In 1937 a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Salon d’Automne. A number of works by Lacoste are in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, while others are in the collections of several provincial museums in France, as well as in Algiers, Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

Dated September 1895, this atmospheric oil sketch is an early work by the artist, done several years before he settled in Paris. Lacoste and his family would often spend summers in Arcachon, a seaside town in the Gironde in southwestern France, and by 1891 he was painting views of the bay and its boats2. Several other paintings of Arcachon dating from 1895, mostly of fairly small dimensions, are today in private collections3.

34 WALTER RICHARD SICKERT RA Munich 1860-1942 Bath The Church of Santa Maria Maddalena, Venice Oil, pen and black ink on paper, laid down on board. Signed Sickert in ink at the lower left.

244 x 148 mm. (9 5/8 x 5 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably Judge William Evans, Bayswater, London and Ilmington Manor, Warwickshire; His wife, Mrs. Frances Louise Evans; Given by her to Dr. Lloyd Williams; Given by him to a private collector; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 13 June 1986, lot 202; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 3 March 1989, lot 311 (sold for £5,500); Piccadilly Gallery, London; Max Rutherston, London, in 1990; Purchased from him by the Misses A. and O. Heywood; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, New Haven and London, 2006, p.275, under no.181, no.1.

EXHIBITED: Possibly London, The Goupil Gallery, The Judge Evans Collection, May-June 1918, no.137 (‘Venice’); London, Max Rutherston, The Influence of the Slade, 1890-1920, October-November 1990, no.85.

Walter Sickert once described Venice as ‘the loveliest city in the world’. He made several visits there, first briefly in 1894, and again in 1895-1896, 1900, 1901 and 1903-1904, staying for several months each time. He produced a large number of drawings, oil sketches and finished paintings of Venetian subjects and, as Robert Upstone has written, ‘For nearly a decade Venice formed the dominant subject in his art and the city inspired him to discover new modes of expression. Through hard work and experimentation in Venice, Sickert became the painter who was to be recognized as the most significant figure in early Modern British art. In short, Venice was the crucible in which Sickert’s mature work was formed.’1 The Sickert scholar Wendy Baron has noted that, ‘Like many artists before him, Sickert was bewitched by the unique landscape of Venice. He chronicled both its great sites and its quiet backwaters.’2 During his first proper campaign of painting in Venice, in 1895 and 1896, the artist wandered throughout the city, making numerous drawings and painting oil sketches. As he wrote at the time to his friend, the painter Phillip Wilson Steer, ‘Venice is really first-rate for work…and I am getting some things done. It is mostly sunny and warmish and on cold days I do interiors in St. Mark’s.’3 While in general Sickert did not paint en plein air, Upstone points out that ‘a number of small oil on panel pochades survive from his first Venetian painting trip that indicate he took up established impressionist practice and worked directly before the subject.’4 These works were usually quite small in scale, and the present sketch may perhaps be counted among them.

Probably datable to Sickert’s first lengthy stay in Venice, in 1895-1896, this oil sketch depicts the small domed Neoclassical church of Santa Maria della Maddalena (usually referred to by Venetians simply as ‘La Maddalena’), with the Fondamenta delle Colonnette at the left. Sickert drew this sketch while standing on the small Ponte Correr, which crosses the Rio della Maddalena (fig.1) just behind and to the southeast of the church. Built around 1760 by the Venetian architect Tommaso Temanza on the site of an earlier, 13th century church, Santa Maria Maddalena has a circular plan inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. Set back in a small campo in a relatively isolated part of the Cannaregio district of Venice, it is one of the few completed buildings by Temanza, who was primarily an architectural historian and biographer. The church of the Maddalena is his most famous work, and the architect, who died in 1789, is buried there. The church has a very beautiful interior, but is usually closed.

The present sheet may be related to two other oil sketches of the same view by Sickert, both painted on panel. An oil sketch that appeared at auction in 1983 (fig.2) is much more superficial in appearance, and has been dated by Baron to c.19035. The present work is, however, closer in style and handling to another small panel, of similar dimensions, which was last documented in the collection of Viscount Radcliffe in 19606. Lillian Browse’s succinct description of the latter painting may equally be applied to the present work: ‘This small panel is large in conception, dark and sonorous in colour, and rich and ‘juicy’ in handling.’7 Two drawings related to this composition are also recorded in Wendy Baron’s catalogue of Sickert’s works. One of these, drawn in charcoal with touches of pastel and titled ‘The Sea is in her Broad, her narrow Streets’, appeared at auction in 19688, while a pen and ink drawing of the same church was formerly in the collection of Vera Russell and was sold at auction in 19719.

The first recorded owner of this small oil sketch was Mrs. Frances Evans, who, with her husband Judge William Evans (1847-1918), was among Sickert’s most loyal patrons and collectors between 1907 and 1914. Judge and Mrs. Evans would commission paintings from the artist based on drawings that he showed them in his studio. As Lillian Browse has written, ‘Sickert, being a complete professional, saw nothing wrong in repeating a subject, sometimes several times over, according to his client’s commissions.

Both Lady Jowitt and Mrs. Francis Evans, old friends of his, bear witness to this fact…Mrs. Evans says that when she and her husband, Judge Evans, went to Sickert’s studio he would show them a pile of small sketches and drawings and ask them to take their pick. He would then paint an oil from whatever they chose, usually for £25.’10 The Evanses bought or commissioned at least four paintings of Venetian views

by Sickert, and also owned several paintings of Dieppe, as well as a handful of figure compositions.

Judge and Mrs. Evans formed their collection over a period of some twenty years. In an obituary, the Burlington Magazine noted of Judge Evans that ‘He was a very genial and discriminating patron of contemporary art, and was, with Mrs. Evans who shared his taste, a constant visitor at all exhibitions, galleries, and sales where works of contemporary painting or drawing were exhibited. He and Mrs. Evans collected a large number of works which show contemporary art in England at its best.’11 An exhibition of works from the Evans collection was held at the Goupil Gallery in London in May 1918, and included, apart from several works by Sickert, paintings and drawings by Charles Conder, Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, William Orpen, Phillip Wilson Steer, William Strang, Henry Tonks and many others. As a review of the exhibition stated, ‘The interesting collection of pictures which was formed by the late Judge Evans…consists principally of works by living British artists, and might serve in some ways as a model to patrons of modern art.’12

1.

2.

35 EMILIE MEDIZ-PELIKAN Vöcklabruck 1861-1908 Dresden Landscape with a Thunderstorm Pencil, charcoal and pastel on blue-green paper. Signed, dated and inscribed 96 Duino Surnal(?) 96 / E. Pelikan in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed Juli-(?) [cut off] in pencil at the right centre edge, and numbered 7 in pencil at the lower left. Titled and dated “gewitter” 1896 and numbered 165 in pencil on the verso.

289 x 579 mm. (11 3/8 x 22 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of Karl Mediz and Emilie Mediz-Pelikan, Dresden; By descent to their daughter, Gertrude Honzatko-Mediz, Zurich; Probably Kurt Kalb, Vienna; Richard Nagy, London; Matthew Rutenberg, New York.

Born in Upper Austria, Emilie Pelikan studied in Vienna with the landscape painter Albert Zimmerman, whom she accompanied to Munich in 1885, and her early landscapes are very much in the traditional style of her teacher. After Zimmerman’s death in 1888 she went to live in the artists’ colony in Dachau - where she first met the younger Viennese painter Karl Mediz - and also spent some time in Paris, studying the work of the Impressionist painters. By 1890, the year of her first gallery exhibition, Pelikan was working in the coastal town of Knokke in Belgium, where she again encountered Mediz. The two artists were married in Vienna in 1891 and spent a brief period in Krems an der Donau, where their daughter Gertrude was born. Finding little success in Austria, they settled in Dresden in 1894.

Emilie Mediz-Pelikan worked closely alongside her husband, with whom she made regular sketching trips to the Tyrol and South Tyrol, Northern Italy and the Adriatic coast. In one of the only contemporary accounts of their work to be published in English, the British-Austrian art historian Amelia Sarah Levetus, who must have known the couple, wrote that ‘These two artists are man and wife; they have wandered in many places together, over the highest mountains and across glaciers, on the banks of deep rivers and on their pilgrimages have painted scenery and portraits and everything else between. They have endured the greatest hardships together and have worked together; they have chosen the same subjects for their canvases, yet their individualities remain, and in similar subjcets also there is a great variety of treatment...

Frau Mediz-Pelikan also has immense energy, combined with poetry of expression more delicate than that of her husband; she loves to paint lavenders and silver greys, to bring out the very depths of that which she is depicting.’1 Both Emilie Mediz-Pelikan and Karl Mediz were invited to participate in the inaugural Vienna Secession exhibition of 1898, at which they each showed three paintings. Emilie’s reputation as a gifted landscape painter and watercolourist was soon established, with her work much praised by critics and colleagues.

While her youthful paintings had been in an Impressionistic manner, her mature landscapes reflect a particularly distinctive Symbolist quality. As one recent scholar has noted, ‘Emilie Mediz-Pelikan focused on the overwhelming power of nature, which she captured in the detailed and intensely colored brushwork of her mountain and Mediterranean landscapes, producing pictures that seem to flicker and oscillate.’2 She was likewise a gifted portraitist, usually in the form of pencil or chalk drawings, and also illustrated Ricarda Huth’s novel Aus der Triumphgasse: Lebenskizzen, which was published in 1902.

In 1901 Mediz-Pelikan’s work was included in the Internationale Kunstausstellung in Dresden, and two years later a joint exhibition of works by Karl Mediz and Emilie Mediz-Pelikan, including twenty-four paintings and sixteen drawings by the latter, was held at the Hagenbund, the Austrian artist’s association in Vienna. At the February 1903 Hagenbund exhibition her painting of Blossoming Chestnut Trees was acquired by the state for the newly-established Moderne Galerie at the Lower Belvedere in Vienna, which opened to the public three months later. (Mediz-Pelikan was also eventually made an honorary member of the Hagenbund, which did not formally accept women until 1924.) In 1904 an exhibition of Emilie’s graphic work took place at a gallery in Dresden, and in 1905 and 1906 her paintings were shown at the Künstlerhaus in Berlin.

As Amelia Levetus, writing in 1905, noted of Emilie Mediz-Pelikan and Karl Mediz, ‘In personal appearance these two are as different as their works; in nature they are one; he considers her the greater artst and she him…Both Herr and Frau Mediz look for new ground and out-of-the-way corners for work. They are both so fond of rich colouring that they seek those parts of the earth where Nature is most profuse in her gifts. They have both endured the blaze of the sun on the highest points of the Dolomites and other ranges of the South Tyrolean mountains, often spending days on their heights, at different periods of the year, with no one near, and sleeping under the blue canopy of heaven. In their open-air existence they have learned the true shades of the rays of the sun as they fall upon earth; and so they know full well all the tones from orange to violet, and from violet to orange...Both husband and wife are fond of their combinations of colours, greens, reds and greys...Of the two, Frau Mediz has the wider field. She has more tones and nuances, more delicacy and more variety…She is influenced by him, and also has nocturnes in blue and silver, such as Whistler might have painted…These two, both husband and wife, have a great future before them.’3 Sadly, however, this was not to be. Emilie Mediz-Pelikan died suddenly of a heart attack in 1908, at the age of forty-seven. Her husband was devastated by the loss, and became something of a recluse, creating mainly graphic works and only a few paintings. His career never recovered before his death thirty-eight years later, in 1945. Although the estate of both Emilie Mediz-Pelikan and Karl Mediz was administered by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, the couple’s daughter Gertrude refused to allow any exhibitions of their work to take place. The estates passed into the ownership of the East German state, and both artists fell into obscurity. Mediz-Pelikan’s paintings and drawings were eventually returned to Austria, and much of the estate was acquired by the Viennese art dealer Kurt Kalb. Although a small exhibition of her work was held in Linz in 1986, it has only been in the past two decades that Mediz-Pelikan’s oeuvre has been truly rediscovered and her posthumous reputation as a gifted landscape artist and draughtsman secured. In 2019 Emilie Mediz-Pelikan was among the artists included in the revelatory exhibition City of Women: Female Artists in Vienna 1900-1938 at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, which today owns four paintings by the artist.

The present sheet was drawn near the ancient fishing village of Duino, on the coast of the northern Adriatic Sea, northwest of Trieste in the Italian province of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Emilie Mediz-Pelikan first visited the town, at the time a fashionable seaside resort on the Austrian Riviera, in 1891, the year of her wedding to Karl Mediz. She returned there in 1896, when this drawing was made, and again 1898 and 1905. She painted and drew several views of the beach and shore near the picturesque village, below the cliffs dominated by Duino Castle overooking the Gulf of Trieste. After the end of the First World War and the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Duino became part of the Kingdom of Italy.

A stylistically comparable chalk drawing by Emilie Mediz-Pelikan - a seascape dated 1905 and also on blue-green paper4 - is among a group of seventeen sheets by the artist today in the collection of the Albertina in Vienna5. Another group of some fifteen drawings by Mediz-Pelikan is in the KupferstichKabinett in Dresden6, while six drawings by her are in the Jack Daulton Collection in California7.

36 SIR EDWARD JOHN POYNTER PRA Paris 1836-1919 London Sailboats on an Italian Lake Watercolour on board. Signed with initials and dated 18 EJP 96 in brown ink at the lower right.

268 x 367 mm. (10 1/2 x 14 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s Belgravia, 29 June 1976, lot 296.

One of the leading artistic figures of Victorian England, Edward Poynter made his reputation as a painter of historical subjects, in which precise archeological detail, interesting narrative themes and a polished technique were combined with great effect. His first public success came with the painting Israel in Egypt, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1867, and his reputation continued to rise throughout his career. Among his public commissions were the decoration of the interior of the Palace of Westminster and the Royal Albert Hall. Poynter also made designs for stained glass, mosaic and ceramics. Apart from being the first Slade Professor of Art at University College in London, he was appointed Director of the National Gallery in 1894 (the last artist to hold the position) and, from 1896, served concurrently as President of the Royal Academy.

Though Poynter is not generally thought of as a watercolourist, and relatively few works in the medium by him are known, it should not be forgotten that his earliest artistic training was with the topographical watercolourist Thomas Shotter Boys. Poynter worked in watercolour throughout his career, mostly for landscapes and informal portraits. In 1865 he was one of the founding artist-exhibitors at the Dudley Gallery in London, conceived as a venue for the exclusive presentation of watercolours, and was elected to the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colour in 1883. As an early account of his watercolours noted of Poynter, his ‘love of nature and profound knowledge of plant life enable him to see and feel a keener enjoyment in landscape art than the generality of artists, and his pictures are evidently the expression of his own sincere joy in the beauty of nature...a sound knowledge of draughtsmanship and a sense of refined and beautiful colour enable him to carry out his ideas very rapidly...Sir Edward is particularly happy in catching the true atmospheric tones, and a certain serenity of outlook and restrained colour ensure the sense of repose which is characteristic of his landscapes.’1 Poynter’s landscape watercolours tend to be records of places he visited - views in Italy, Scotland and elsewhere - and are among his most personal works, done for his own pleasure and seldom exhibited. In contrast to the more diffused forms of the work of many of his contemporaries, his technique remained precise and controlled, with a restrained colour scheme. As one contemporary critic wrote, ‘It is not too much to claim that, as Sir Edward Poynter’s more ambitious work is of [a] classic order, something of the same quality has overflowed into these small but choice water-colours which are his recreation (as he himself says), from the more severe duties of his positions as chief craftsman, instructor and governor of certain national institutions. His work is not aggressive at all; it does not even attempt sober tours de force; it is merely strong, and simple, and reposeful, and, as a rule, English. But somehow it has a way of making one want to see it again, and to pore over it – just as have his crayon studies...These watercolours are less known, but in their way they have that same reticent beauty which have those well-known figure drawings...There is a peculiar mental quality in them which is at once charming and dignified, despite its suspicion of severity.’2 Dated 1896, this finished watercolour is likely to depict a view in Northern Italy. As a modern scholar has noted of Poynter, ‘The watercolours he produced in the late 1890s, especially in the area around Lago d’Orta, are minutely detailed and at the same time full of atmospheric effects.’3

37 WILLIAM FRASER GARDEN Gillingham 1856-1921 Huntingdon River Landscape near St. Ives, Huntingdonshire Watercolour. Signed and dated W. F. GARDEN: ‘97. in brown ink at the bottom centre. Inscribed Near S. Ives, Hunts. - 30/- in pencil on the verso.

195 x 285 mm. (7 5/8 x 11 1/4 in.)

Watermark: [WHAT]MAN 1896 PROVENANCE: The Broderick family, Lytham St. Annes, Lancashire.

Born into a family of Scottish origins, Garden William Fraser changed his name to William Fraser Garden so as to distinguish himself from his six brothers, all but one of whom were also active as landscape artists. Arguably the best of the so-called ‘Fraser Brotherhood’, Garden abandoned his career as a clerk in the late 1870s in order to devote himself to landscape painting, and came to exhibit his watercolours at the Royal Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours and the Society of British Artists. The subjects of his watercolours were, by and large, views of the fen villages along the river Ouse in his native county of Huntingdonshire, such as Holywell, Hemingford Grey, St. Ives and Houghton; all characterized by a remarkable attention to detail and crisp, cool lighting. Throughout the 1880s Garden was represented by the Dowdeswell Gallery in London, who sold a number of his works.

After 1890, however, he seems to have given up exhibiting in London, and relied on a small number of local collectors in Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire. He was, however, never a very prolific artist, and only produced a handful of watercolours each year. As Charles Lane has noted of Garden, ‘His apparent lack of ambition and the consequently few watercolours which he painted each year, even when at his busiest, resulted naturally enough in his failing to come to the notice of all but a local audience.’1 Although he was the most successful of the Fraser brothers, Garden was very poor for most of his life, and was declared bankrupt in 1899. He lived in the village of Hemingford Abbots and, after his wife and children left him, in a room at the Ferry Boat Inn at Holywell, where in his old age he is said to have paid his bills with drawings instead of bank notes. Something of a recluse, he continued to paint until the end of his life, although his eyesight began to fail in 1918. Long unknown to scholars and collectors, William Fraser Garden’s body of work has only fairly recently been rediscovered, and his reputation as one of the finest Victorian landscape watercolourists is now firmly established.

Dated 1897, this watercolour depicts a view near the small town of St. Ives, on the left bank of the river Ouse, with, in the far distance, the steeple of St. Margaret’s Church at Hemingford Abbots. Garden often painted views of St. Ives and its environs, and his watercolours of views along the Ouse - which was prone to flooding the surrounding meadows after any heavy rainfall - are masterpieces of clarity and detail. As Christopher Newall has written, ‘Garden’s watercolors are a manifestation of the latecentury revival of interest in the representation of landscape subjects in minute and painstaking detail. He chose picturesque but unremarkable subjects in his immediate locality – decrepit mill buildings and riverside inns along the banks of the Great Ouse, as well as pure landscapes…His works of the late 1880s and early 1890s are extraordinary in their pellucid clarity of light and their exact delineation of architectural and landscape detail.’2 A pendant to the present watercolour - a river landscape near St. Ives of the same date, provenance and dimensions - has recently been acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.3

38 CHARLES CARYL COLEMAN Buffalo 1840-1928 Capri A View of Vesuvius from Capri Pastel on buff-coloured board. Signed with the artist’s monogram and dated Sept.-20th / 1901 in blue chalk at the lower left.

184 x 305 mm. (7 1/4 x 12 in.) [image] 251 x 344 mm. (9 7/8 x 13 1/2 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Rome, Christie’s, 8 June 2006, lot 12; Private collection, London.

Born in New York State, Charles Caryl Coleman travelled to Europe in 1856 as a teenager. He spent three years studying in Paris, followed by two years in Florence, where he met his compatriot and longtime friend Elihu Vedder. In 1862 he returned to America and served in the Union army during the Civil War. Wounded in battle in 1863 and honourably discharged, he was back in Europe by 1866, settling in Rome. He was to spend the remainder of his career in Italy, living and working mainly in Rome, but with several visits to Venice, and also making regular trips back to America. Among his important patrons was the notable Scottish art collector and philanthropist Louisa Baring, Lady Ashburton. In 1880 Coleman bought a villa on the island of Capri, where he settled permanently in 1885. As one scholar has noted, ‘He soon became one of the island’s most memorable residents, joining a community of expatriates from many countries that had been established in the 1820s. “Uncle Charlie”, as Coleman was known, transformed a portion of a convent guest-house into a virtual palace for art, crowding his Villa Narcissus with Roman, Moorish, Persian, and Renaissance antiquities and hundreds of his own landscapes. In this exotic setting he entertained students from the American School of Archaeology in Rome and acted as the leader of the circle of painters active on Capri.’1 Coleman enjoyed a fine view of Vesuvius from the Villa Narcissus, his home and studio on Capri, about nine miles away from the volcano, which had been in a state of almost constant activity for over two hundred and fifty years, since a major eruption in 1631. A large group of pastel drawings by the artist, collectively entitled ‘Songs of Vesuvius’, was exhibited at the Noe Art Galleries in New York in December 19062. Several of these depicted the great eruption of the volcano earlier that year, which lasted several months and culminated in April. A review of the exhibition commented, ‘Charles Caryl Coleman, an expatriated American who has his studio in Capri, was fortunate in knowing Vesuvius so well from being so long its neighbour that when the eruption began last April he was exactly the right one to record all its impressive and majestic phases. He shows at Noé’s thirty-four “Songs of Vesuvius”, done in pastel and as exquisite as Japanese water-colors. In most of them the element of tragedy is not felt, only the decorative beauty of the colors and masses of fire and lava and smoke. Mr. Coleman is in no way a romanticist, and his calm presentation of that awful catastrophe is almost a denial of its terrors.’3 Another review of a later exhibition of Coleman’s work, held at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1916, noted, ‘The group of pastels, drawings and tempera which Mr. Coleman aptly designates as “Songs of Vesuvius”…are in the truest sense lyrics of art, delicate fleeting notes of exquisite color in which the majesty of an awful natural phenomenon is interpreted with great seriousness, yet made to serve as a basis for a sensuous effect, extraordinarily light, subtle and tender. The Vesuvian pieces alone make a beautiful exhibition and by their unusual quality of color and composition attract alike both art lovers and students.’4 This atmospheric pastel view of Vesuvius by Coleman is dated the 20th of September 1901. A stylistically comparable pastel of the volcano, executed during the eruption of April 1906, is today in the Brooklyn Museum5, while also in the same collection is a much larger pastel of Vesuvius, dated December 19136.

39 PAUL CÉZANNE Aix-en-Provence 1839-1906 Aix-en-Provence Landscape with the Montagne Saint-Victoire Watercolour and pencil on white wove paper. Inscribed haut / arbres devant la montagne in pencil on the verso. Numbered 164 / 16975 in blue chalk on the verso.

325 x 499 mm. (12 3/4 x 19 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist; By inheritance to Paul Cézanne fils, Aix-en-Provence and Paris; Probably part of a group of watercolours acquired from him in March 1907 by the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune et Cie., Paris; Lent by them to Newman Emerson Montross (Montross Gallery), New York, in 1915-1916; Acquired from them in 1916 by Lillie P. Bliss, New York; Bequeathed by her in 1931 to the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Their sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, 11 May 1944, lot 65; Lola and Siegfried Kramarsky, New York; By descent to Dr. Sonja Binkhorst-Kramarsky, New York, by 1959; Thence by descent to a private collection, New York.

LITERATURE: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., ed., The Lillie P. Bliss Collection, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1934, p.35, no.17, pl.17; Lionello Venturi, Cézanne: Son art - son oeuvre, Paris, 1936, Vol.I, p.266, no.1018, Vol.II, pl.301, fig.1018 (where dated 1900-1906); Alfred H. Barr, Jr., ed., Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1942, p.30 no.101; Theodore Reff, ‘Cézanne’s Watercolors and Modern Taste’, in Theodore Reff, ed., Cézanne Watercolors, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1963, p.16; Theodore Reff, ed., Cézanne Watercolors, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1963, pp.5051, no.52, illustrated pl.LI; Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art 1929-1967, New York, 1977, p.651; John Rewald, Paul Cézanne. The Watercolours: A Catalogue Raisonné, London and New York, 1983, p.209, no.499, illustrated fig.499 (where dated c.1900); George S. Keyes, ‘Reconsideration of Late Variants of Cézanne’s “Theme of Mont Sainte-Victoire”’, Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 2003, p.36, fig.6; Walter Feilchenfeldt, Jayne Warman and David Nash, The Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings of Paul Cézanne: An Online Catalogue Raisonné, [www. cezannecatalogue.com], no.FWN 1444 (where dated c.1900).

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS: Rome, Palazzo dell’Esposizione, Prima esposizione internazionale d’arte della ‘Secessione’, 1913, no.677; Rome, Palazzo dell’Esposizione, Seconda esposizione internationale d’arte della ‘Secessione’, 1914, no.24; New York, Montross Gallery, Cézanne Exhibition, 1916, no.12; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Representative Modern Masters, 1920, no.55; New York, The Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere, Memorial Exhibition: The Collection of the Late Miss Lizzie P. Bliss, 1931-1932, no.20; Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cézanne: Paintings, Watercolors & Drawings, 1952, no.114; Aix-en-Provence, Pavillon de Vendôme, Exposition pour commémorer le cinquantenaire de la mort de Cézanne, 1956, no.79; New York, Wildenstein, Cézanne, 1959, no.82; New York, M. Knoedler and Company, Cézanne Watercolors, 1963, no.52; Pasadena, Pasadena Art Museum, Cézanne Watercolors, 1967, no.30.

‘Paul Cézanne’s watercolors offer the viewer kaleidoscopic arrays of translucent color touches – blue, green, yellow, pink, violet – that appear to shimmer on the luminous paper like so many reflections on the surface of a pond. As one continues to look, graphite pencil lines, like reeds swaying in the watery depths, beckon from what appears to be a subtending, deeper level of the image. These drawn lines, ranging from graphic hatching to sinuous contours, applied with the sharpened point of a pencil, contrast strikingly with the soft, watery touches of color put down by the soggy bristles of a watercolor brush.’1 One of the finest watercolourists of the 19th century, Paul Cézanne used the medium throughout his career, but with particular emphasis from the 1880s onwards. Over six hundred watercolours by the artist are known, ranging from quick studies in his sketchbooks to highly finished works. Few of

Cézanne’s watercolours can be related to his oil paintings, and most were not intended as preparatory studies for painted compositions but instead served primarily as a means of recording his impressions.

As the scholar Christopher Lloyd has pointed out, ‘Cézanne seems to have favoured watercolour...as a viable alternative to painting, allowing for a more thorough and prolonged analysis of motifs. In fact, by the early 1880s Cézanne only very rarely used watercolour as part of the preparatory process and had instead begun to regard it as a medium in which he could capture the effects of nature more definitively than perhaps in his paintings.’2 Yet the artist himself seems not to have thought too much of his watercolours, as there are accounts of them strewn carelessly on the floor of his studio and, indeed, sometimes in the fields beyond. In the last part of Cézanne’s career, from around 1895 until his death in 1906, watercolour came to occupy more of his time, and the resulting landscapes, still-life subjects and portraits of this period are characterized by a noticeably more vibrant tonality.

Although a few of Cézanne’s watercolours were acquired during his lifetime by enlightened collectors such as Auguste Pellerin, Victor Chocquet and Comte Isaac de Camondo, many of the artist’s larger, independent watercolours of landscape and still life compositions were only discovered among the contents of his studio after he had died. Nearly two hundred watercolours - including the present sheet - were acquired from the artist’s son by the Parisian dealers Ambroise Vollard and Gaston and Josse Bernheim-Jeune in March 1907, a few months after Cézanne’s death. Vollard had, in fact, mounted the first exhibition of the artist’s watercolours in his Paris gallery two years earlier, in 1905. As one critic noted of the Vollard exhibition, ‘The watercolors of Cézanne are revealed to us at a time propitious for the artist’s glory and our pleasure. Works that are precious, gracious. The master amuses himself. But his diversions are wondrous marvels and beautifully instructive. They make play with bold blues, pure whites, clear yellows – still lifes, flowers, landscapes, and they sometimes give the illusion of painted porcelain, of delicate iridescent opals. Others, with only a few touches of color, are admirable drawings with that novel primitive character discerned everywhere by eyes that are, one might say, forever newborn.’3 In 1907, the year after Cézanne’s death, a large exhibition of seventy-nine watercolours by the artist was mounted, to considerable acclaim, at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris, and later at the Galerie Paul Cassirer in Berlin. A day after having seen the exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke described the watercolours in a letter to the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker: ‘the watercolors are very beautiful. Just as confident as the paintings, and as light as the paintings are heavy.

Landscapes, very light pencil outlines and here and there, as if just for emphasis and confirmation, there is an accidental scattering of color [ein Zufall von Farbe], a row of spots, wonderfully arranged and with a security of touch: as if mirroring a melody...’4 Within a few years of his death, Cézanne’s watercolours had become something of a cult among his admirers and collectors, with such artists as Edgar Degas and Auguste Renoir owning prized examples.

A characteristic of the watercolours produced by Cézanne is the striking balance the artist was able to achieve between the pencil drawing itself, the delicate touches of translucent watercolour laid over this, and the areas of the paper left in reserve, untouched by pencil or paintbrush. As one writer has described Cézanne’s watercolours, ‘the white of the paper plays an essential role, complementary to that of color passages, contributing to the definition of light, color and form values. It does not simply stand for natural light illuminating solid form...These blank paper areas are shapes, planes and intervals; they are also color among colors...Summarily stated, every part of a watercolor by Cézanne – a blue line, a pure orange wash, a white interval – is a functional element, not existing separately, but interdependent with all other elements in its space and form-defining role.’5 Like he did with his oil paintings, Cézanne applied watercolour to his drawings very thinly, achieving a transparency that allowed for no corrections or retouching, and underlining his sheer confidence in his handling of the medium.

The art historian Meyer Schapiro has noted that ‘The watercolors are often a reconnaissance of the subject, the steps toward a fuller knowledge before the final engagement on the canvas. Cézanne did not simply draw what he already knew and recognized, he drew and painted in watercolor in order to isolate and absorb for the first time the discovered qualities of the object that, translated into his painter’s medium, were right for the projected picture. What is fascinating in the watercolors as studies is the freshness

of these first notations of the attracting features of a scene. They permit us to dwell in the intimacy of Cézanne’s sensing of a pictorial aptness in things; we experience in these studies, which were not designed with finality and yet are consummate works of art, his attentiveness, his fine hesitations and scruples, his delicacy of touch, his anxious trial of sensations – the traits of an honestly receptive mind.’6 East of Aix-en-Provence and dominating the surrounding plain, the mountain known as the Mont Sainte-Victoire rises to over 3,000 feet. Cézanne painted more than thirty oil paintings and some fortyfive watercolours of the mountain, from different vantage points, and it was a motif that he returned to often throughout his later life. As Lionello Venturi has written, ‘Mount Ste. Victoire, which is so isolated and imposing when seen from around Aix, was perhaps the thing in nature which most fascinated Cézanne from boyhood. Whenever he climbed it, he regained his contact with nature – a nature of wide horizons.’7 The bare, rocky peak of the mountain was to be an endless source of fascination for the artist.

Most of Cézanne’s paintings of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire can be divided into two distinct periods of his career; between 1882 and 1890, and again between 1901 and his death in 1906. The present watercolour is part of the last, and perhaps the most important, series of studies that Cézanne painted of this inspirational view. As the artist himself is said to have noted to his close friend Joachim Gasquet, ‘Look at Sainte-Victoire there. How it soars, how imperiously it thirsts for the sun! And how melancholy in the evening when all its weight sinks back…For a long time I was quite unable to paint Sainte-Victoire; I had no idea how to go about it because, like others who just look at it, I imagined the shadow to be concave, whereas in fact it’s convex, it disperses outward from the centre. Instead of accumulating, it evaporates, becomes fluid, bluish, participating in the movements of the surrounding air.’8 This large watercolour may be related to an oil painting by Cézanne of Mont Sainte-Victoire of c.19041906, of vertical format (fig.1), today in the Detroit Institute of Arts9. It is also close in composition to another painting by Cézanne of c.1904, Mont Sainte-Victoire above the Route du Tholonet in the Cleveland Museum of Art10, which is of a square format. In his critical catalogue raisonné of Cézanne’s watercolours, John Rewald has noted that this watercolour Landscape with the Montagne Saint-Victoire differs in mood from the related painting in Detroit: ‘What contributes to this different mood is that for the painting Cézanne had adopted a vertical format, whereas in this watercolor the more “congenial” horizontal composition allows the motif to breathe more freely. The motif seems to have been painted from the vicinity of the terrace of Château Noir11. Pale washes, predominantly blue and green, are applied over a very light pencil sketch. The outlines of the mountain, however, have been redrawn several times with the pencil and then delicately retraced with a thin blue brush line.’12

1.

As has also been noted of the present sheet, ‘This representation of the Sainte-Victoire is unusual among Cézanne’s numerous paintings of the subject by virtue of the thin, disappearing line with which the mountain is drawn. Ordinarily the painter’s bold brushstrokes force the mountain to loom heavy in the background.

But in this example, two trees with wide areas of color dominate the view; there is no middle ground filled with the details of houses and trees. A floating, moving atmosphere is created by the fluidity of the medium and by the large blank areas on the paper. An oil painting of the same subject, done about 1897, gives an almost identical view but with an entirely different mood, devoid of the air, transparency, and movement of our drawing.’13 The Cézanne scholar John Rewald has pointed out that ‘The brushwork of the late watercolors is bold and large, superbly fluent and self-assured…Sometimes there are hasty and vague pencil indications that establish basic shapes and guide the brush through intricate panoramas of fields and trees, buildings and curved roads, rocks and branches, not to mention the crags of Mont Saint-Victoire. But frequently the preparatory sketch is completely dispensed with and the brush attacks the paper directly, spreading its multicolored touches with a breathtaking – one might say meditated and controlled – spontaneity, accumulating transparent veils from which forms disengage themselves and assert their identity by contrast with the whiteness of the support…In a strange dialectic, the profile of Saint-Victoire, seen from Les Lauves, is honed to its essentials while the radiant washes that surround it leave all details vague.’14 More recently, another scholar has observed that, ‘in these watercolors of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, the bright, exposed paper captures something of the blinding intensity of the light of the south of France.’15 This Landscape with the Montagne Saint-Victoire was one of several watercolours by Cézanne that were exhibited at the first ‘Secessione’ exhibition in Rome in 1913, when the artist’s work as a watercolourist was still little-known. It was purchased three years later by Lillie P. Bliss (1864-1931), one of the earliest American collectors of Cézanne’s paintings and watercolours. Bliss purchased her first work

by Cézanne in 1913, and continued to acquire works by the artist almost to the end of her life. The present sheet was one of eight watercolours bought by Bliss at the Cézanne exhibition held at the Montross Gallery in New York in 1916, which had been selected and curated by Félix Fénéon of the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. In 1931 Bliss bequeathed much of her collection to the nascent Museum of Modern Art in New York, which she had helped to found. While her bequest of 150 works became the nucleus of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, she had stipulated in her will that any of the works (with the exception of two paintings by Cézanne and one by Honoré Daumier) could be sold or exchanged for other works of art to help strengthen the young museum’s collection.

The present sheet was deaccessioned by the museum in 1944, and was acquired by the banker and prominent art collector Siegfried Kramarsky (1893-1961), who owned important works by Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Vincent Van Gogh and many others. Landscape with the Montagne Saint-Victoire remained in the possession of Kramarsky and his descendants for the next seventy-five years, and was last exhibited in 1967.

An early biographer has noted that, ‘In their transparency, Cézanne’s watercolors call to mind the sumptuous stained-glass windows that once decorated the aisles of dark cathedrals and gave so much richness to the naves they illuminated with a flamboyant glow. These watercolors give off light, it seems, as if the sun had penetrated them.’16 Furthermore, as Meyer Schapiro has perceptively written, ‘It is one of the charms and also a mystery of the arts commonly grouped under the name of painting that a few pencil lines with some added washes of color, hardly filling the surface and made as a preliminary study for what is to be a fully-covered canvas, can possess an intrinsic completeness…We do not have to interest ourselves in the workshop procedure of Cézanne to enjoy these offshoots of his process. Our admiration is independent of curiosity about method and technique, so compelling is the harmony of these incidental stages of his work, a harmony which is not to be confused with the values of an unfinished canvas. These modest notes achieve wholeness through the same operations of choice and perfected habit that determine the order of the most complex composition. Unlike the unfinished picture they say what they were meant to say – if only to the painter himself – and although a watercolor could have said more, they seem to us a perfect achievement as they are.’17

40 MAXIME MAUFRA Nantes 1861-1918 Poncé-sur-Loire Coastal Landscape in Brittany Gouache, watercolour, black chalk and pencil, on buff paper. Signed and dated Maufra. 1903. in pencil at the lower right. Faintly inscribed with mounting and framing instructions in pencil on the verso.

220 x 284 mm. (8 5/8 x 11 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 28 November 2007, lot 90; Private collection, Paris.

A native of Brittany, Maxime Maufra was not formally trained as an artist and at first worked in commerce, painting only in his spare time. Although he submitted two paintings to the Salon of 1886, which were singled out for praise in a review by Octave Mirbeau, he did not take up painting as fulltime profession until 1890. In that year he made his first visit to Pont-Aven, where he met Paul Gauguin and Paul Sérusier. Two years later he settled in Montmartre in Paris, with a studio at the Bateau-Lavoir.

He continued to spend a considerable amount of time in Brittany throughout the early 1890s, meeting several of the other painters working at Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu. Like Gauguin, Sérusier and Charles Filiger, Maufra contributed to the decoration of the inn of Marie Henry at Le Pouldu. Unlike many of these artists, however, he preferred to depict quiet, almost Symbolist landscapes devoid of figures. In an exhibition of his work at the Le Barc de Boutteville gallery in 1894, Maufra divided his landscapes into three different types, which he titled ‘Les effets’, ‘Les phénomenes’ and ‘Synthèses de la Bretagne’.

Though the exhibition was well received by some critics, it did not result in many sales.

In 1896 Maufra’s fortunes rose when he was given his first exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel, who soon had the artist under contract. His friendship with Gauguin remained a close one until the latter’s departure for Tahiti, and the elder artist continued to encourage him in his work. (On a visit to his studio, Gauguin is said to have told Maufra, “I know you defend my art, and I am grateful. Our ways are totally different; yours is good, and you must go with it.”) Maufra spent his summers working in Brittany, a practice he maintained throughout his career, although he soon found Pont-Aven too crowded with artists and chose instead to live and work in more isolated communities, among fishermen and peasants.

As Caroline Boyle-Turner has noted, ‘throughout his life, he retained his love of Breton subjects, exploring them again and again.’1 Maufra worked along the entire southern coast of Brittany, from his home town of Nantes to the Pointe de Raz. He was particularly fond of the landscape around Quiberon, and bought a house there in 1903. Like several artists of the Pont-Aven circle, Maufra was also active as a printmaker, working in etching and lithography. He died in 1918, at the age of fifty-seven.

In his monograph on the artist, published in 1926, Arsène Alexandre aptly described Maxime Maufra as ‘a poet of the sea’. Always working en plein-air and intent on depicting the stormy seas of the Breton coast, he often painted during the most violent weather, sometimes with his easel supported against the wind by the artist’s long-suffering wife. As Maufra once wrote of his approach to painting landscapes and marine subjects: ‘I work relentlessly, I try to express the strong sensations, the strange aspects of nature, the cosmic effects, in a gale, under moonlight, the tempests, shipwrecks, tormented landscapes, floods, waterfalls; in other words, everything which can be rendered not in a fleeting impression of an effect but on the contrary in condensing all that this effect carries in itself, this with a preoccupation of the picture and its subject.’2

41 CARL JOHAN FORSBERG Stockholm 1867-1938 Sønderho Pax Watercolour and gouache, heightened with white and gum Arabic, laid down on board. Signed and dated CJFORSBERG . MCMV in green ink at the lower right.

524 x 724 mm. (20 5/8 in. x 28 1/2 in.) at greatest dimensions.

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Sweden; Benjamin Peronnet Fine Art, Paris.

LITERATURE: Carl Johan Forsberg, Opera, Stockholm, 1913, pp.51-60, illustrated; August Hahr, ‘C. J. Forsbergs akvareller. Utställningen i Konstnärshuset, Konst och konstnärer, 1914, p.14; Ulrich Thieme, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler, Vol.XII, Leipzig, 1916, p.218 (‘Der Tod (in einer Alpenlandschaft sitzend)’); Næstved, Rønnebæksholm, Forestillinger om Skønhed / Perceptions of Beauty: Carl Johan Forsberg & Eva Louise Buus, exhibition catalogue, 2016, p.119; EXHIBITED: Stockholm, Konstnärshuset, Carl Johan Forsberg, 1913; Paris, Benjamin Peronnet Fine Art, Dessins suédois autour de 1900, 2019, no.5.

The Swedish landscape watercolourist Carl Johan Forsberg was born into a wealthy family and studied architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm between 1889 and 1893. He continued his training at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, where he also took courses in etching. He first exhibited his highly stylized landscapes in watercolour and gouache in 1904 at the Konstnärshuset, the gallery of the Swedish Artist’s Association in Stockholm, although without much critical or commercial success. Of independent means, however, Forsberg did not need to make a living from his work, and he began to travel through southern Europe, Greece and Morocco, and, between 1910 and 1913, around Denmark and Norway. In 1913 he once again exhibited several works at the Konstnärshuset in Stockholm, including some earlier Symbolist landscapes, such as the present sheet, alongside more recent landscapes.

A review of the 1913 exhibition commented on this watercolour in particular, noting that ‘C. J. Forsberg was originally an architect…[he] is just as much a landscape artist. That he has a high degree of architecturally active imagination, that he mainly feels like an architect before the landscape, however, quite clearly shows in his landscape images. Lines and structure become essential, no matter how brightly coloured many pictures appear. And almost everywhere in his production is the decorative and stylized, which is the objective. He seeks the astonishing impression and has achieved great effects of this kind in both mountain and sea views. It is quite natural that a watercolourist of Forsberg’s temperament should have sought out the Swiss Alps and the mountains of Norway, that he should play with snow formations and blocks of ice, and dream of the majesty and dominion of the eternal ice, which, for all living things, must set an unrelenting frontier…such as in the colourful composition Pax…What the artist is aiming for in general, we are probably already clear about. That which crystallizes in lines and shapes, what can be captured in ornamental and architectural forms, apparently attracts him the most.’1 In 1913 Forsberg published the book Opera, illustrated with reproductions of his work, which seems to have served as something of an artistic manifesto. The following year he and his family settled in the small village of Sønderho on the Danish island of Fanø, where the artist lived and worked until his death. These were intensely productive years for Forsberg, although he seems to have not wanted to part with much of his work, for which he asked exceptionally high prices. He continued to exhibit his watercolours occasionally in Sweden and Denmark, usually to middling reviews. An exhibition at the Valand Academy in Gothenburg in 1920, however, elicited a review entitled ‘A Poet with Watercolours’, which remarked that ‘Any artist who wants and dares to be himself merits our interest and respect. How much greater is not our confidence in the seriousness and devotion of an artist who listens only to the music

of his own soul, creating on the basis of his own inner imperatives without concerning himself with matters such as the art professor’s most recent hobby or the random vagaries of the art market.’2 The work of Carl Johan Forsberg remained almost completely unknown for most of the 20th century.

Apart from his own book Opera, there were no monographs or articles published on the artist, and only a handful of contemporary reviews of his exhibitions are known. It was not until the 1980s, when his work was included the groundbreaking exhibition Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting 1880-1910, shown at three American museums between 1982 and 1983, that he first came to wider notice. More recently, the contemporary Danish artist Eva Louise Buus (b.1979) has taken inspiration from Forsberg’s oeuvre to create paintings and prints which have twice been exhibited alongside the original watercolours in Denmark; at the Fanø Kunstmuseum in 2015 and the Rønnebæksholm in Næstved in 2016. A large group of watercolours by Forsberg is today in the collection of the Fanø Kunstmuseum, while others are in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.

Painted in 1905, this large landscape in watercolour and gouache was entitled Pax by the artist, and was included in his 1913 exhibition at the Konstnärshuset in Stockholm. As the artist noted, Pax was inspired by a sketch made on a journey to the Swiss Alps in 1903, and in particular to the upper Rhône valley. At the headwaters of the great river, Forsberg was struck by the majestic form of the Rhône Glacier. As he later wrote, ‘It was the first time I found myself in front of a glacier, alone in the infinite silence and solitude of the snow mountain, surrounded by the overwhelming majesty of nature; my soul was filled with reverence for the divine powers of nature, and it was under these poignant impressions that I composed the sketch for PAX...in front of my eye spread the rim of the white glacier, from which the river gets its first nourishment, meandering slowly down into the valley, and at my foot the dark, black-blue surface of the ‘Totensee’. It gave me the first idea for my work...a composition that would become the ‘Capo lavoro’ of my life.’3 Forsberg associated the grandeur and isolation of this alpine landscape with the fragility of life, and this sense was heightened by an accident that befell the artist and his wife which almost cost them their lives. They were descending by horse-drawn carriage from Lake Totensee via the Grimsel Pass when they were caught in a severe thunderstorm. The river flooded and burst its banks and a bridge collapsed just before the carriage crossed it, almost causing it to fall into the raging torrent. Forsberg and his companions had to cross the broken bridge, in darkness, on hastily placed wooden planks, before they were able to continue their journey and finally reach shelter in the town of Mieringen. The artist was understandably shaken by this experience, and never forgot it. He came to associate the Rhône with the Styx, the mythological river dividing the worlds of the living and the dead in Greek mythology, and saw the name of Lake Totensee (literally ‘the lake of the dead’) as another portent of the accident.

Haunted by the trauma of this close brush with death, Forsberg was determined to translate his onthe-spot sketch into a finished work. As the artist recalls in Opera, ‘The sketch for Pax was in my drawing portfolio for several years, waiting to be completed. Every time I saw it again, my mind was seized by anxiety and melancholy, and my hand trembled, as if I had touched a sacred leaf. More and more I became convinced that it would become one of the greatest works of my life as an artist.’4 The finished watercolour was eventually painted in Stockholm in the early months of 1905, where the artist had organized an exhibition the previous year, and depicts the Rhône Glacier in the centre distance, with Lake Totensee in the valley below. Barely noticeable, seated on a small island at the left, is the tiny figure of Death with his scythe.

Forsberg regarded Pax as his most important work, describing it as a ‘capo d’opera’ in his book Opera, published in 1913, in which the image of the watercolour was accompanied by a lengthy poem.

Recognizing its importance in his oeuvre, and regarding it as the culmination of his artistic career thus far, he offered Pax to the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm in 1905 but it was declined. As the artist later wrote, ‘it has saddened me for many years that in my own homeland I have been so poorly received by the very men who ought to have used their influential position to benefit young, modern art instead of being driven by ignorance or egotism to seek, if possible, to kill and trample on the delicate blossoms sprouting in the often barren fields of art.’5

42 HANS LIETZMANN Berlin 1872-1955 Torbole Rocks on the Shore of Lake Garda, near Torbole Watercolour and gouache on thick paper. Signed and dated H. Lietzmann / 06 in brown ink at the lower left. Illegibly inscribed on the verso.

317 x 554 mm. (12 1/4 x 21 3/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Munich, Neumeister Kunstauktionen, 5 June 2014, lot 50.

Born in Berlin, the painter and draughtsman Hans Lietzmann was orphaned by the age of eight, and was raised by a Lutheran pastor. Although he studied at the Akademie in Berlin between 1889 and 1894, he was largely an autodidact. One of his first paintings, The Disciples at Emmaus, was exhibited in Berlin in 1894, and two years later other paintings of Biblical subjects earned him an honourable mention in the annual Rome competition. An early visit in 1884 to the northern part of Lake Garda, then still a part of Austria, encouraged him several years later to settle in the area, and in 1899 he built a house in the village of Torbole sul Garda, on the north shore of the lake. (After the Treaty of Vienna of 1866, Torbole served as a border station between the Kingdom of Italy and the Habsburg territories.) There Lietzmann established a studio and a private art school specializing in nude and landscape painting, which came to be frequented by numerous German artists. He became one of the best-known artists of the region, and lived and worked in Torbole for most of the rest of his life, painting many views of the town and the shores of the lake over the next fifty years.

After serving as a military draughtsman in France during the First World War, Lietzmann returned to Torbole to find that his home had been destroyed in the fighting and his property, like that of other German aliens, confiscated by the new Fascist regime in Italy. Nevertheless, he remained in the town, working as a painter of religious works and as a portraitist, producing likenesses of many of the inhabitants of Torbole. He also restored an altarpiece by the 18th century Venetian painter Giambettino Cignaroli, in the local church of Sant’Andrea, that had been damaged during the war. Among his important commissions was one for sixty tempera paintings of New Testament subjects, painted between 1924 and 1928 for the Preussische Hauptbibelgesellschaft of Berlin and now in the collection of the Märkishes Museum there. In 1928 he published a guidebook to Torbole, which was followed by an autobiography issued in 1937. Lietzmann remained in Torbole during the Second World War, living almost in poverty and largely forgotten, and was buried there after his death. In recent years interest in his work has been revived, stimulated by an exhibition in Torbole on the thirtieth anniversary of his death in 1985, and culminating in the publication of a monograph devoted to his work in 2006.

Hans Lietzmann was best known for his landscape paintings and gouaches of the Alpine scenery and rocky shorelines of the Lake Garda region. He generally worked en plein air, and his paintings are characterized by confident brushwork and a refined handling of light and shade, allied to a particular feeling for colour. The present sheet was drawn in 1906, a few years after the artist had settled in Torbole, during a period when he was at his happiest and most productive. Among comparable works

by Lietzmann is a gouache view of The ‘Marocche’ Rocks near Torbole, signed and dated 1910, which was sold at auction in Germany in 20151.

43 AUGUSTE LEPÈRE Paris 1849-1918 Domme A Grove of White Poplar Trees Charcoal, watercolour and gouache on board. Signed and dated A. Lepère 08 in pencil at the lower left.

Inscribed Peupliers de Hollande sous bois in pencil on the reverse of the backing board.

454 x 320 mm. (17 7/8 x 12 5/8 in.)

A painter, draughtsman and printmaker, Louis-Auguste Lepère began his career as an illustrator and engraver for such publications as the Magasin Pittoresque, La Revue illustrée and L’Illustration, while also contributing illustrations to the magazines Graphic and Black and White in London and Harper’s in America. In the early part of his career he produced wood engravings characterized by a fine and delicate line, and around 1889 took up the woodcut, of which he became an undisputed master.

In 1894 Lepère entered into an exclusive arrangement with the print dealer and publisher Edmond Sagot, who from then onwards received his entire output for sale. Lepère exhibited at the Salon des peintres-graveurs Français between 1890 and 1913, as well as at the Salon des Artistes Français and its successor, the Société nationale des Beaux-Arts, from 1870 to 1914. In 1905 a catalogue of his etchings and woodcuts was published by Alphonse Lotz-Brissonneau, a patron and close friend of the artist who had assembled an almost complete collection of Lepère’s graphic work.

Lepère’s renown as a printmaker, however, tended to overshadow his considerable gifts as a painter, to the artist’s apparent chagrin. As one contemporary critic recalled, ‘To the world, and especially the foreign world, the name of Lepère is chiefly familiar from his engravings and notably his woodcuts. The artist himself, however, considered these merely as auxiliary to his oils. “I am, above all, a painter”, he would say remindfully if a suggestion were made to attribute pre-eminence to his plates and blocks. For originally he had taken up engraving as a breadwinning makeshift, and it was much against his wish that the popularity they won robbed him of the time he would for choice have spent at the easel.’1 In 1908 Lepère was given the honour of a lifetime exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints in one room of the Salon nationale des Beaux-Arts, while another retrospective was mounted at the Musée de Luxembourg in 1917, the year before the artist’s death.

In his day, Auguste Lepère was much admired for his technical skill as both a draughtsman and a printmaker. As one critic noted in 1897, ‘Lepère is an incomparable draughtsman, surmounting all sorts of difficulties with an ease which many just envy him; an engraver, too, of the first rank, handling with equal facility the knife or the burin, equally at home in relief engraving or in etching; also a lithographer of remarkable flexibility and breadth of touch. He excels, in fact, in every branch of his art. Everything he touches bears the impress of a truly personal originality, alike in his method of looking at things and in the way he reproduces them. With a deep knowledge of all the secrets of the draughtsman’s art, he has one great merit, among many others – namely, in never being cramped in the expression of his ideas, in always succeeding in developing them to their fullest extent.’2 Like his paintings, Lepère’s drawings are characterized by a freshness of execution and an abiding love of nature. A late work by the artist, this large study in watercolour and gouache was drawn in 1908, probably in the Vendée in western France. Poplars appear occasionally in Lepère’s late graphic oeuvre, notably in two well-known etchings; Rideau de peupliers (Vendée) of 1911 and La ferme aux peupliers de Hollande of 1914. Two paintings, Avenue de Peupliers, fin de Novembre (Vendée) and Les Grands Peupliers, temps gris, fin Novembre (Vendée) were exhibited in Paris in 19143. As another contemporary critic, writing not long after the artist’s death, noted of Lepère, ‘He loved the beautiful masses of trees, the beauty of their structure and the shadows which they shed and disperse and with which they are wrapped. He interpreted their charm in the sketches he brought back from the forest of Fontainebleau…’4

44 GIUSEPPE CASCIARO Ortelle 1863-1941 Naples Cliffs at Capri, with a Fishing Boat Pastel on paper, laid down on board. Signed and dated 11 Ag 08 GCasciaro in pencil at the lower right.

Inscribed H 39 - Le mare(?) a Capri in pencil on the backing board.

355 x 414 mm. (14 x 16 1/4 in.)

Born in the province of Lecce, the painter and pastellist Giuseppe Casciaro enjoyed a successful career of some sixty years. He was a pupil of Filippo Palizzi, Gioacchino Toma, Stanislao Lista and Domenico Morelli at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples, where he won numerous prizes. Although he also painted in oils, Casciaro developed a particular proficiency for landscape drawings in pastel. He may have first been inspired to take up the medium in 1885, when a series of pastel drawings by the artist Francesco Paolo Michetti was shown in Naples. Two years later, in 1887, Casciaro exhibited a series of eleven pastel landscapes of his own, and he remained devoted to the medium throughout his life.

He settled on the hillside quarter of Naples known as the Vomero, for some time sharing a studio with the painter Attilio Pratella, and his preferred subject matter were views in and around Naples, together with the nearby islands of Capri and Ischia.

Between 1892 and 1896 Casciaro travelled regularly to Paris, where he had a one-man exhibition and received commissions from the dealer Adolphe Goupil. He exhibited frequently in Naples and at the Biennale in Venice, and won a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. Casciaro was appointed a professor at the Accademia in Naples in 1902, and by 1906 was also engaged as a tutor in pastel drawing to the Queen of Italy, Elena di Savoia. Among his important supporters was the dealer and collector Ferruccio Stefani, who assiduously promoted his work in both Italy and South America. Casciaro’s work was also exhibited throughout Europe; in Munich, Barcelona, Madrid, London, Prague, Vienna, Athens and St. Petersburg, as well as in San Francisco, Tokyo and, through the influence of Stefani, Buenos Aires and Santiago. Paintings and pastels by Casciaro are today in the collections of the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte and the Museo del Novecento in Naples, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.

Casciaro was one of the finest practitioners of the pastel landscape in Italy in the late 19th century, and his pastels were admired by collectors and connoisseurs. The author of an early monograph on the artist noted that his pastels displayed ‘an extraordinarily perceptive refinement and a solidity of touch’1, and likened his accomplishments in the medium to that of such predecessors and contemporaries as Michetti, Giuseppe de Nittis, Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet. The Neapolitan poet Salvatore Di Giacomo, a close friend of the artist, chose to describe the pastel landscapes of Casciaro in lyrical terms: ‘A pastel by Casciaro resembles both Bach and Mozart; it is sometimes both tragic and profound, a moving Beethoven-like passage. This elegance is delightful: this spirit, this taste are rare: this pleasant and assured strength, it does not oppress you but it pulls you: and the voice of this lovely artist has all the accents: it has the ardour and the sigh, the impetus and the tenderness, a cry and a murmur.’2 Giuseppe Casciaro often worked on the island of Capri over the course of his long career. This large and vibrant landscape, dated the 11th of August 1908, is a particularly fine and fresh example of his mastery of the pastel medium, and is likely to have been intended as an exhibition piece.

45 SIR MUIRHEAD BONE Glasgow 1876-1953 Oxford The Bronze Sculpture of Saint Michael and the Dragon on the Façade of the Cathedral of Orvieto, Looking Down on the Piazza del Duomo Pencil on two sheets of joined paper. Signed, dated and inscribed Muirhead Bone / Orvieto 1912 in pencil at the lower right.

505 x 288 mm. (19 7/8 x 11 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: An unidentified triangular collector’s mark with the initials RSM (not in Lugt) stamped in brown ink on the verso.

EXHIBITED: Possibly Berlin, Austellunghaus am Kurfürstendamm, Fünfundzwanigste Ausstellung der Berliner Secession: Zeichnende Künste, November-December 1912, no.83 (‘Orvieto’).

Born in a suburb of Glasgow, Muirhead Bone was initially trained as an architect, but abandoned this career in favour of working as a draughtsman and printmaker. His first etchings date from 1898, and, as the collector and scholar Campbell Dodgson has noted, ‘Like several etchers who have distinguished themselves in after life by a style of marked originality, he found out the technique for himself, or at least without a definite course of study under any teacher or in any school of engraving.’1 In the winter of 1901 Bone settled in London, where a few months later an exhibition of his prints was held at the Carfax Gallery. Beginning in 1904 his prints were published by Obach and Co., and the same year he became a founding member and honorary secretary of the Society of Twelve, an exhibition society devoted to original prints and drawings. Among his most significant works of the first decade of the 20th century were the drypoints of The Demolition of St. James’s Hall (1906-1907) and The Great Gantry, Charing Cross Station (1906), and a large pencil drawing of The British Museum Reading Room (1907). Each of these compositions are characterized by a novel viewpoint of a well-known building and an attention to detail, and were prefaced by numerous studies and drawings. As his grandson has noted, ‘his method of working seems to have been to record as much as he could in a detailed, on-the-spot drawing and to work this up over several months to a finished print or drawing, which would be the centrepiece of his submission to the next exhibition of the Society of Twelve.’2 During the First World War Bone was appointed Britain’s first official War Artist, and from 1916 onwards spent much of the next two years on the Western Front. He produced numerous drawings and watercolours of the military campaigns and their effect on the surrounding countryside, intended for both journalistic and propagandic purposes. Many of his drawings were published as The Western Front: Drawings by Muirhead Bone, which appeared in monthly instalments throughout 1916 and 1917.

Over the next thirty-five years Bone enjoyed considerable commercial and critical success. He was much honoured, and served as a trustee of the Imperial War Museum, the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, although he declined to be considered for membership in the Royal Academy. He travelled widely within Britain and throughout Europe, making drawings and etchings of the places he visited. After the market for fine prints declined in the 1930s, Bone turned more towards marketing and exhibiting his drawings, usually at Colnaghi’s, and took on illustration commissions for newspapers and magazines.

Bone’s drawings were as much admired as his etchings, and his larger and more ambitious drawings were often sold for between £20 and £50 apiece. Several of his pencil studies were reproduced in such publications as the Architectural Review, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Art Journal, the Illustrated London News and the German Die Graphischen Künste. As Dodgson noted, ‘he is much more at home with pencil and charcoal, ink and water-colour wash and pastel, than with the pigments and utensils of the

landscape painter in oils. He is a “black and white” artist first and foremost, and one of the most gifted, varied and accomplished draughtsmen that have ever been known. Gifted with a fresh and eager interest in the forms of things, singly and in relation to others, that enables him to discover beauty of surface or shape or proportion in objects that the less curious eye ignores as dull and ugly…gifted, above all with a most astonishing eyesight, keen, searching and tireless, and with equally unfailing sureness of hand.’3 From the autumn of 1910 to the summer of 1912, Muirhead Bone and his family travelled throughout central and northern Italy. The artist made several drawings and etchings of the cliff town of Orvieto in Umbria, five of which were used to illustrate an article written by his wife Gertrude and published in the magazine Country Life in February 19144. Drawn in 1912, this unusual view of the façade of the great cathedral at Orvieto is dominated by the 14th century bronze sculpture of The Archangel Saint Michael and the Dragon (fig.1) by Matteo di Ugolino da Bologna, cast in 1356, which adorned the top of the gable above the right-hand (south) door of the Duomo. Now replaced by a copy, the sculpture of Saint Michael and the Dragon is today in the collection of the Museo del Opera del Duomo in Orvieto5. To make this large drawing, Bone stood at the level of the open arcade running above the three gabled doors and below the rose window, leaning out to draw the sculpture and the piazza below.

In the words of Campbell Dodgson, ‘at Orvieto, on its great cliffs, with its golden wine and the mellow, almost equally golden, stone of the west front of its great cathedral – there, and in many a mountain stronghold of Central Italy, further from railways and less renowned, [Bone] made a memorable series of drawings, now scattered among many collections.’6 During his time in Italy Bone produced thirty-two copper plates and several fine drawings, some of which were sent to London and Glasgow to be sold by his dealers. (A number of his drawings of Italy were also exhibited in London in 1914, to very positive reviews.) Other drawings of the cathedral of Orvieto by Bone are today in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Dodgson has further noted of Bone that ‘Muirhead was brought up to be an architect, and he owes to that apprenticeship the thorough knowledge of construction, the extraordinary eye for significant detail, and the sureness of hand whether in finished or in summary drawing, which no etcher could acquire who should approach architecture merely from the outside. For him, however, drawing soon came to be of paramount interest, and he relinquished all thought of practicing architecture as a profession.’7 Writing shortly after the artist’s death in 1953, Sir Kenneth Clark praised Bone’s ‘almost miraculous skill…British artists, whatever their merits, are not usually remarkable for technical skill and Bone must be the only one who can be compared with the great Italians, Piranesi or Bibiena.’8

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46 LORENZO CECCHI Limite sull’Arno 1864-1940 Ghivizzano Coreglia An Arcade in the Interior of the Colosseum in Rome Watercolour over a pencil underdrawing, with framing lines in pencil. Signed and dated LCecchi 6.

912 in red ink at the lower left. Inscribed Colosseo in blue ink and numbered 123 in brown ink on the verso. Further inscribed Regalato da me / ai Sigg. Magnozzi / Mario e Dino(?) / 23-9-955 / Julia Lefori(?)

Scarpellini in pencil on the verso.

614 x 370 mm. (24 1/8 x 14 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Julia Lefori(?) Scarpellini; Given by her to Mario and Dino(?) Magnozzi on 23 September 1955 (according to the inscription on the verso).

An architect, painter, sculptor and teacher, Lorenzo Cecchi spent his youth in the port town of Livorno, on the western coast of Tuscany. He taught at the Scuola di Arti e Mestieri, the local school of arts and crafts, for several years, and influenced a later generation of Tuscan painters. Among Cecchi’s most significant commissions as an architect is the neo-Gothic Marassi family chapel in the Cimitero delle Porte Sante in Florence; executed in the 1880s, it was one of the largest and most grandiose structures in the cemetery, but is now largely derelict. In 1908 he settled in Rome, where he worked for the next thirty years as a professor of drawing. Cecchi remains a relatively obscure figure today, even within Italy. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held in Montecatini Terme in 1972, and another show of paintings and watercolours by Cecchi was mounted at a gallery in Livorno in 2006.

Throughout his career, Lorenzo Cecchi was particularly admired for his finished watercolours of views, sites and monuments in the provinces of Tuscany, Sardinia, Umbria and Lazio, as well as Pompeii and the ancient temples of Magna Graecia and Sicily; all imbued with a remarkable technical virtuosity and a particular interest in architectural forms. As his biographer Gino Mazzanti, a former student, described him, he was ‘a multi-faceted and productive artist, especially in the field of architecture of which he was a profound connoisseur.’ Cecchi was perhaps best known for his vibrant watercolours of the buildings and ruins of Imperial Rome, executed during his long stay in the Eternal City.

The ancient Roman amphitheatre of the Colosseum, situated to the east of the Roman Forum, is the largest structure of its kind to have ever been built. Construction of the Colosseum was begun under the Emperor Vespasian in 72 AD and was completed in 80 AD by his eldest son, the Emperor Titus, with some later modifications made during the reign of his younger brother Domitian. Also known as the Flavian Amphitheatre, the Colosseum could hold up to 80,000 spectators, and was used for public spectacles and gladiatorial contests. In the 14th century the structure was severely damaged by an earthquake, causing much of the south side to collapse. Significant parts of both the interior and exterior of the amphitheatre were later used as quarries, and were stripped of marble and stone for the construction of buildings elsewhere in the city.

47 LORENZO CECCHI Limite sull’Arno 1864-1940 Ghivizzano A Passage in the Colosseum in Rome Watercolour over a pencil underdrawing, with framing lines in pencil. Signed and dated LCecchi 7 / 91[cut off] in black ink at the lower right. Numbered 134 in brown ink on the verso. Inscribed Regalato al / Sig. Mariolino Magnozzi / nel suo giorno di compleanno / 23. 9. 55. / Julia Lefori(?) Scarpellini in pencil on the verso.

615 x 373 mm. (24 1/4 x 14 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Julia Lefori(?) Scarpellini; Given by her to Mariolino Magnozzi as a birthday present on 23 September 1955 (according to the inscription on the verso).

As a late 19th century guide to the ruins of Rome noted of the Colosseum, ‘Although two-thirds of the original building have disappeared under the shameful treatment to which the barbarous nobles of the middle ages subjected it, enough still remains to show the arrangement of the entrances, passages, and seats of this wonderful construction. The plan of the whole may be best described as consisting of three principal massive concentric elliptical arcades. The intervals between each of these are filled in with other arched work containing corridors and staircases, and between the innermost of these three arcades and the wall which surrounded the arena was a triple system of substruction supporting the lower parts of the rows of seats in the amphitheatre. The stone used throughout is travertine, with the exception of some interior work of brick and concrete, and some pumice-stone in the arches…The second and third of the principal concentric walls contain arches corresponding to those in the outer wall. Corridors run between these concentric walls, and on the first and second floors of the outer ring, and the first floor of the inner ring, these circles afford a completely unobstructed passage all around. The other corridors are blocked up in parts by various staircases, leading to the upper rows of seats.’1 Another watercolour of the interior of the Colosseum (fig.1) by Lorenzo Cecchi, signed and dated 1907, was sold at auction in Italy in 20082.

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48 HENRI LE SIDANER Port Louis (Mauritius) 1862-1939 Versailles The White Garden at Gerberoy (Le jardin blanc) Pencil and coloured pencil on buff paper. Signed and dedicated a M Viaud / amicalement / LE SIDANER in black ink at the lower left.

250 x 356 mm. (9 7/8 x 14 in.)

PROVENANCE: Presented by the artist to Gabriel (Jean) Viaud-Bruant, Poitiers; Galerie Paule Cailac, Paris; Galleries Maurice Sternberg, Chicago; Worthington Gallery, Chicago, in 1979; Elaine and Perry Snyderman, Highland Park, Illinois.

LITERATURE: Jean Viaud-Bruant, Jardins d’artistes: Les Peintres-Jardiniers, Poitiers, 1916 [5th ed.], illustrated on the cover and also between pp.38 and 39; Yann Farinaux-Le Sidaner, Le Sidaner: L’oeuvre peint et gravé, Paris, 1989, p.337, no.1025.

EXHIBITED: Possibly Paris, Musée Galliera, Rétrospective Henri Le Sidaner, April 1948; Chicago, Galleries Maurice Sternberg, 19th and 20th Century Masters, 1976.

Although Henri Le Sidaner spent some time in the studio of Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des BeauxArts in Paris, he eventually gave up this academic training and in 1882 moved to the coastal town of Étaples, in northern France. He lived and worked there for the next twelve years in isolation, painting views of the surrounding countryside and genre scenes of peasant life. Le Sidaner first exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris in 1887, and continued to exhibit there yearly until 1893, when he began showing at the rival Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Around 1901 he settled in the small medieval village of Gerberoy, on the border of Normandy and Picardy, where he built a studio and garden and worked until the end of his life. His house at Gerberoy became the dominant subject of his mature work, providing him with inspiration for nearly forty years. As the artist’s close friend and biographer Camille Mauclair, writing in 1928, noted, ‘he had the good fortune to find an atmosphere and surroundings that suited his nature and his ideas. He was destined to paint much of France, but Gerberoy was and remains his asylum pacis and family home.’1 Apart from his travels throughout France, Le Sidaner also painted in Bruges, Venice, London and around Lake Maggiore in Italy. In 1910 he was given a retrospective exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit, while in 1914 a room was devoted to his work at the Venice Biennale. In 1930 he was admitted into the Académie des Beaux-Arts, a triumph for a painter who had worked outside official circles for most of his career.

Le Sidaner delighted in capturing transient effects of light, and would paint scenes in bright sunshine, twilight, moonlight or even artificial light. As one American critic, writing in 1906, noted, ‘His art expression lies somewhere between that of Corot and that of Claude Monet. It is elusive and delightful and stamps him as one of the most original, one of the most exquisite of France’s younger painters…

What Sidaner does not know about light and the method of reflecting it on a canvas seems scarcely worth knowing…the time he most loves…is the hour of dusk, the time that follows the sinking of the sun, when the world has lost its days but is not yet possessed of the fullness of night – the alluring hour of twilight with its vaporous mists and its eerie shadows.’2 While the artist often made sketches and drawings sur le motif, his paintings themselves were generally painted from memory rather than direct observation. He was able to achieve remarkable effects of solitude and serenity in his pictures, and chose his compositions carefully to heighten the poetic mood. As the painter Paul Signac noted of Le Sidaner, ‘his entire work is influenced by a taste for tender, soft and silent atmospheres. Gradually, he even went so far as to eliminate from his paintings all human figures, as if he feared that the slightest human form might disturb their ruffled silence.’3

Drawn in 1912, the present sheet depicts one of the artist’s favourite subjects; his house at Gerberoy, which he once described as his ‘haven of peace’. Le Sidaner had first visited the village of Gerberoy in 1900, at the suggestion of Auguste Rodin, and a year later purchased a house there, creating a large garden that provided him with a myriad of subjects and motifs for his paintings. Le Sidaner often depicted the gardens and the façade of the house, studying the tonal effects and play of light at various times of day and in different seasons. As Camille Mauclair wrote, ‘The house is relatively constant, despite the changes in appearance which the seasons may bring. However, the thoughts and sensibilities of the man who inhabits and loves this place are constantly renewed – and this is why the subject is never monotonous.

The pictures Le Sidaner paints in Gerberoy are, more than any others, expressions of his moods. And the way he presents these moods, varying them indefinitely, is the pictorial result of his talent for arrangement, for fitting the scene to the frame – this is a talent he possesses to the highest degree.’4 Like most of the artist’s paintings, the views of the house at Gerberoy are almost always devoid of figures.

This drawing is a finished preparatory study for Le Sidaner’s large painting Le jardin blanc au crépuscule (fig.1) of 1912, which was acquired, the year after it was painted, by the Musées Royaux des BeauxArts de Belgique in Brussels5. The painting depicts the so-called white garden, decorated with white flowers, created by the artist soon after he acquired the property at Gerberoy: ‘At the top of the four steps facing the house…Le Sidaner designed a white garden in which a small, rectangular lawn, lined with gravel paths, was surrounded by weeping rose tries and carnations. The enclosed, fragrant terrace was especially beguiling at twilight…The glory of the white garden was to be fleeting; the rose trees were decimated in the harsh winter of 1917 and replaced by hardier species with longer blooming periods.’6 Also preparatory for the Brussels painting is a slightly larger oil sketch of the same composition7.

The present sheet was given by Le Sidaner to Gabriel Viaud, called Jean Viaud-Bruant (1865-1948), a noted French horticulturalist, flower breeder and garden designer from Poitiers who was also a collector of modern art. This drawing was used as the cover of the fifth edition of Viaud-Bruant’s book Les Peintres-Jardiniers, in which the author writes of the subject: ‘The profound artist Le Sidaner created a White Garden, solely composed of white flowers, in his Thebaid of Gerberoy (Oise); there he produced paintings of great merit in the evening, at dusk and in the moonlight. This philosopher is the type of the painter-poet...His thought is condensed in a brushstroke, in the placement of a hue; he paints like a visionary, a rare quality. The wall of his house are walls behind which something happens, and what an intense feeling of intimacy, what an extraordinary caress of soft light is spread everywhere! Le Sidaner seduces us like a poet, because he has likewise the gift of fleeting images, the same richness, the same colourful inventiveness, the same luminous quivering, the same intuition, to which he adds the glow and the phosphorescence of the world.’8

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49 EDMUND STEPPES Burghausen 1873-1968 Deggendorf Moonlit Landscape with Cliffs Pen and black ink and brown and grey wash, with white and grey gouache. The composition silhouetted at the top edge and mounted onto a thick board, and the whole sheet bordered with framing lines in black ink. Signed and dated Ed. Steppes / 1913. in brown ink at the lower left.

181 x 196 mm. (7 1/8 x 7 3/4 in.) [image] 206 x 241 mm. (8 1/8 x 9 1/2 in.) [sheet] The landscape painter Edmund Steppes studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich between 1892 and 1894 before completing his artistic training on his own, making sketching trips to the Swabian Alps and Switzerland. By the turn of the century he had begun to enjoy some success, selling his work to private collectors and enjoying the support of a number of influential figures in the German art world. His work began to be exhibited widely, and was first acquired by a German museum in 1902. Steppes made an intensive study of German and Netherlandish art of the late Gothic period, and was drawn to the works of Albrecht Altdorfer and Matthias Grünewald, whose Isenheim altarpiece in Colmar he found particularly inspirational. He was especially attracted to the often bizarre and fantastical landscapes in the backgrounds of these paintings, elements of which would find their way into his own work. Steppes was devoted to drawing, producing numerous small-scale studies with detailed observations of nature. These drawings and watercolours - of flowers, plants and leaves, as well as gnarled trees and strange rock formations - account for some of his most distinctive work. A member of the National Socialist party since 1932, Steppes exhibited several works at the propagandic Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung exhibitions of the 1930s and 1940s in Munich1.

In the years before and after the First World War, Steppes spent much time on sketching expeditions in the Bavarian countryside around Munich, the Swabian Alps and the Allgäu region. Although his paintings were worked on in the studio, they were always based on studies made on the spot which, while remaining true to nature, often reveal an element of mystical symbolism and fantasy. As one contemporary English critic noted, ‘There is something very seductive in the landscapes of Edmund Steppes...Above all, there is depth of thought and earnestness in Steppes’ composition, a keen sentiment for the decorative, and a feeling for style, expressed with an intimacy and knowledge born of understanding and love. Nature has breathed her secret to him, has revealed to him things beyond the general ken of mankind, and, moreover, has taught him how to reveal her glories to others in the loveliest and most touching of tones.’2 And, as the artist himself once wrote, ‘We are painters out of love for nature, out of a joy in it and in a never-quenched longing to recognize it, to possess it.’3 Steppes assiduously kept his landscape drawings in boxes, although much of this material was lost when his studio was destroyed by a bomb during the Second World War. The present sheet is a fine and characteristic example of Steppes’s atmospheric landscape studies. As an early writer noted of these paintings and drawings, ‘An inborn flow of feeling tinged with a shade of melancholy pervades this work…Steppes is the painter of silence. He loves the quiet valley and the lonely mountain tops…Bright sunlight is not to his taste, he prefers the subdued light of dawn, evening, and moonlight. Evidences are present in his art that he is not averse to modern modes of expression, but he loves to persevere in his own style.’4 In 1913, the same year as this drawing, another critic described the artist’s landscape sketches as ‘strange works of an unworldly poetic nature reminiscent of Augustin Hirschvogel or the Master E.S., more dreamed than actually seen, these sheets are quite suitable for silent observers in peaceful hours.’5

50 ANDRÉ LHOTE Bordeaux 1885-1962 Paris View of Collioure, Pyrenees Watercolour and pencil, with grey ink and grey wash. Signed and dated A. LHOTE – 13 – in brown ink at the lower left.

325 x 502 mm. (12 3/4 x 19 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Paris.

LITERATURE: To be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the work of André Lhote, by Dominique Bermann Martin and the late Jean-François Aittouarès1.

Apprenticed to an ornamental sculptor, André Lhote studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, training as a sculptor while painting in his spare time. In 1905 he decided to devote himself entirely to painting, while at the same time supporting himself by working as an art teacher. The following year he was introduced to Gabriel Frizeau, one of the few collectors of modern art in Bordeaux, who went on to assemble a fine collection of his work. After being rejected several times by the Salon des Amis des Arts de Bordeaux, Lhote was accepted at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1907, and the next year showed at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants, where he was to exhibit often. His early paintings, executed in a Fauvist stye, show the influence of Paul Gauguin, and in 1910 he had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Druet in Paris. Lhote was greatly inspired by the paintings of Paul Cézanne that were shown at the Salon d’Automne in 1910, and Cézanne’s influence was to resonate in much of his later work. At the Salon d’Automne of 1911, his painting of The Port of Bordeaux was hung alongside works by Albert Gleizes, Fernand Leger, Jean Metzinger and Jacques Villon. By the following year Lhote had become associated with a group of artists working in a synthetic Cubist style, known as the Section d’Or, which included Gleizes, Leger, Metzinger and Villon, as well as Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier and Juan Gris.

Due to his poor health, Lhote served in the army for only a brief period during the First World War, and spent much of the war years in Paris and Arcachon. Active as a writer and critic, he published numerous books of essays on art history, and served as the art critic for the Nouvelle Revue Française between 1917 and 1940. He established his own art school, the Académie André Lhote, in Montparnasse in 1922, and also lectured on art extensively in France and abroad throughout the 1950s; in Belgium, England, Hungary and Italy, as well as Algeria, Brazil and Egypt. Indeed, as a result of his popularity as a lecturer and writer, Lhote’s work became very well known and influential outside France, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. While views of the ports of Bordeaux and Marseille were among his favourite subjects as a painter, his later work of the 1940s and beyond found him in a more lyrical mood, with an emphasis on serene landscapes. In 1956 Lhote won the Grand Prix National des Arts, and two years later a major retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.

Drawn in 1913, this large cubistic watercolour depicts the small Mediterranean port town of Collioure in southern France, close to the border with Spain. In the early part of the 20th century, Collioure was a popular destination for artists such as Georges Braque, André Derain, Othon Friesz, Henri Martin, Paul Signac and, perhaps most notably, Henri Matisse. Lhote must have visited Collioure more than once, since he produced a handful of paintings of this picturesque Catalan fishing village, each one different in composition, over several years. A small painting of Collioure is in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier2, while a different view of the port, dated 1917, was with the Marlborough Gallery in London in 1958 and was included in the Lhote retrospective exhibition in Paris that year3. Another painting of Collioure

by Lhote, datable to around 1920, appeared at auction in London in 19904.

51 ALBERT GOODWIN RWS Maidstone 1845-1932 Bexhill Sunset at Woolacombe Bay, North Devon Watercolour and gouache, over an underdrawing in pencil. Signed and dated 1915. / ALBERT GOODWIN in brown ink at the lower right. Inscribed Woolacombe Bay N. Devon. in brown ink at the lower left.

355 x 523 mm. (14 x 20 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Hewson & Forster, Sheffield; Anonymous sale, Sheffield, Sheffield Auction Gallery, 8 May 2015, lot 672; Maas Gallery, London.

Albert Goodwin was apprenticed to a draper after leaving school, but soon turned his attention to painting, probably inspired by his friendship with the artist Arthur Hughes. In 1860, at the age of fifteen, Goodwin had a work accepted at the Royal Academy, and at around the same time was introduced

by Hughes to the painter Ford Madox Brown, who became his teacher. Goodwin remained close to Brown for several years, with the latter noting of the young artist, in a letter of 1864, that ‘there can be no doubt of his becoming before long one of the greatest landscape painters of the age.’ The influence of the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with which Brown was closely associated, was to have a profound effect on Goodwin’s manner of landscape painting. Another significant influence was the prominent art critic, writer and artist John Ruskin, whom he met around 1869. In 1872 Ruskin invited Goodwin to accompany him on a three-month tour of Switzerland and Italy, a voyage that was to be of lasting significance for the young painter. A highly prolific artist, Goodwin travelled extensively throughout Britain and Europe, as well as further afield; visiting Egypt, India, the West Indies, North America and New Zealand. In 1876 he became an associate member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours, where he exhibited for over fifty years, and also showed at the Royal Academy between 1860 and 1920.

Although he often worked in oils, Goodwin is best known as a watercolourist. He was encouraged in this by Ruskin, who recognized that the watercolour technique allowed the artist to achieve the ephemeral effects and rich tonalities which he came to favour. For the last thirty years of his career, Goodwin’s watercolours displayed a poetic sense of atmosphere and colour that reflect the inspiration of the late watercolours of J. M. W. Turner. As he noted in his diary in 1911, ‘I sometimes wonder if the spirit of old Turner makes use of my personality. I often find (or think I find) myself doing the very things that he seemed to do.’ Like Turner, Goodwin often experimented with his watercolour technique, sometimes combining the medium with gouache, pen and ink, chalk, pastel or gum arabic, and occasionally using coloured papers. He also often worked on the surface of the paper itself; as can be seen in a diary entry of March 1912: ‘The two sunsets…I found…far too heavy both in colour and tone – hammered at them with the blade of a safety-razor, a knife, sandpaper, sponge, rag and a fitch brush! So many are the expedients that the despairing watercolour painter in the last has to resort to.’

In 1877 Goodwin settled in the seaside town of Ilfracombe in North Devon, where he lived for more than thirty years. Even after he he moved to Bexhill in Surrey in 1906, he continued to return to Devon and Cornwall to paint. He was especially attracted to views of the Atlantic coastline, particularly at dawn or sunset, writing in 1880 that, ‘Little is known of the charm of North Devon in winter, where the sun rises all the morning and sets all afternoon.’1 Furthermore, as he wrote in a diary entry from October 1909: ‘I have been thinking how much joy I have had since I was little in the colour of the evening and morning sky and what a delight thousands have in the same thing.’ Located a few miles to the west of Ilfracombe, the coastal resort of Woolacombe is dominated by a long sandy beach extending over three miles2.

In the course of his visit to Woolacombe in the summer of 1915, when this watercolour was drawn, Goodwin seems to have ignored a sign posted on the beach stating that photography or sketching was strictly prohibited, despite also being warned by a coastguard patrol to the same effect.

52 PAUL-ALBERT BESNARD Paris 1849-1934 Paris A View of Rooftops in Rome at Sunset, with the Monument to King Victor Emanuel II of Savoy Watercolour.

230 x 145 mm. (9 x 5 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, Paris; Galerie Paul Prouté, Paris, with the gallery’s Besnard sale stamp (Lugt 5552) on the verso; Matthew Rutenberg, New York.

EXHIBITED: Possibly Paris, Galerie Paul Prouté S.A., Dessins originaux anciens, Dessins originaux modernes - XIXe et XXe siècles, Spring 1978, no.281 (‘Vision. A la Villa Medicis, composition de ciel et d’ombre. Aquarelle. 145 x 230.’, priced at 600 francs).

Albert Besnard entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1866, studying with Alexandre Cabanel, before making his debut at the Salon of 1868. Six years later he won the Prix de Rome with a painting of the Death of Timophanes, Tyrant of Corinth. His five years at the Villa Medici in Rome were followed by three years in London, where he obtained several important portrait commissions. By the middle of the 1880s Besnard was one of the most highly regarded and fashionable society portrait painters in Paris.

He developed a particularly evocative manner of depicting his sitters that relied on luminous, vibrant colours, dramatic (and at times artificial) lighting, and bold brushwork. These elements also found their way into the artist’s other main activity; his work as a mural painter. Besnard painted large decorative schemes for several public buildings in Paris, including the Sorbonne, the Ecole de Pharmacie and the Pavillion des Arts Décoratifs at the Exposition Universelle of 1900, as well as ceiling decorations for the Salon des Sciences of the Hôtel de Ville, the Comédie Française and the Petit Palais. He also created mural decorations for L’Art Nouveau Bing, the shop of the dealer and collector Siegfried Bing on the rue de Provence in Paris, and the villa of Baron Joseph Vitta at Evian. In addition, Besnard produced designs for stained glass and worked as a printmaker.

Although Besnard was strongly influenced by the works and techniques of the Impressionists, he never exhibited with them, leading Edgar Degas to complain that ‘Besnard is flying with our wings’. He did, however, exhibit regularly at the Salons, and also at the Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1890 onwards. In 1910-1911 he travelled extensively around India, and the paintings from this trip were shown to critical acclaim at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1912. The following year Besnard was appointed director of the French Academy in Rome, where he remained until 1921, and in 1925 he published Sous le ciel de Rome, a memoir of his time in the city. From 1923 until his death in 1934, Besnard was the director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris; as such, his influence on a later generation of artists was considerable.

Albert Besnard is much less well known as a watercolourist than as a painter and muralist. The present sheet may be dated to the period of Besnard’s second stay in Rome, between 1913 and 1921, when he served as the director of the Académie de France at the Villa Medici. This view over the rooftops of Rome appears to be from the Villa Medici itself, looking due south. Prominent in the left background is the national monument dedicated to the first Italian King, Vittorio Emanuele II, which was constructed between 1885 and 1935.

actual size

53 EDOUARD VUILLARD Cuiseaux 1868-1940 La Baule The Square Berlioz on the Place Vintimille, Paris Pencil and pastel, on a page from a small sketchbook. Stamped with the Vuillard atelier stamp (Lugt 909c) at the lower right.

133 x 102 mm. (5 1/4 x 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s studio, Paris; Thence by descent in the family of the artist.

Edouard Vuillard lived in Paris for most of his life, in a series of small apartments which he shared with his mother until her death in 1928. As Guy Cogeval has written, ‘Like most artists born in the provinces, Vuillard was a confirmed lover of Paris...His discovery of new realities, the broadening of his wide culture, his ever-alert intellectual curiosity – all were bound up with his growing love of strolling through the city...His continual walks through Paris, his almost metronomically obsessive observation of the slightest detail that “shimmered” in his mind, opened up many perspectives.’1 In the summer of 1908 Vuillard and his mother settled into a fifth-floor apartment on the rue de Calais, close to the Place Vintimille (today the Place Adolphe-Max), in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. From his window, Vuillard began producing paintings, pastels and drawings of views of this picturesque small square, and the oval public garden, known as the Square Berlioz, at its centre. As one scholar has noted, ‘Vuillard’s name has become almost synonymous with the Place Vintimille…He obviously delighted in the view from his windows overlooking the leafy enclosure dominated by the statue of Hector Berlioz, who had lived nearby, and across to the shabby dignity of the yellowish houses also confronting the little public garden with its strollers sunning themselves.’2 In 1926 the artist and his mother moved to an apartment on the square itself, at 6 Place Vintimille, from where he continued to study the little park and its everyday population of local inhabitants.

This page from a small sketchbook is a preparatory study for a square-format painting of the Place Vintimille (fig.1), of modest dimensions, which is currently on the art market3. Both the drawing and the painting can be dated fairly precisely to the period between late October and the middle of November 1919, as each work depicts, at the bottom of the composition, several colourful election posters attached to the railings of the park, in advance of the legislative elections held on the 16th of November 1919. Indeed, the painting is mentioned in Vuillard’s journal on the 30th of October and the 2nd of November 1919. A similar view appears in a photograph of the Square Berlioz and the Place Vintimille from Vuillard’s apartment, taken by the artist in c.1910-19124. The little square remains largely unchanged today.

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54 PABLO PICASSO Málaga 1881-1973 Mougins Landscape at Juan-les-Pins Pencil on buff paper. Dated 13-7-20 in pencil at the upper right. Numbered 1056 / 36 in pencil on the verso.

270 x 422 mm. (10 5/8 x 16 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist; By inheritance to the artist’s granddaughter, Marina Picasso, Cannes, Geneva and New York.

LITERATURE: Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso. Vol.30: Supplément aux années 1920-1922, Paris, 1975, pl.36, no.86; The Picasso Project. Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 1885-1973. Neoclassicism I – 1920-1921, San Francisco, 1995, p.97, no.20-311.

EXHIBITED: Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, Picasso the Draughtsman: 103 Works from the Marina Picasso Collection, 1993, no.50.

From around 1914, Pablo Picasso began to experiment with a Neoclassical style that was radically different from the explorations in Cubism he had been engaged in for the previous seven years. Over the next decade, while continuing to work in a Cubist vein, Picasso concurrently explored a more classical mode of expression, particularly in his drawings. To begin with, this new Neoclassical manner - in which the influence of Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres is noticeable - was largely reserved for portraiture, but it also came to include figure subjects and landscapes, as is the case with the present sheet. By the 1920s this classical style became particularly associated with a series of summer visits made by the artist to the French Riviera.

Like they had the previous year, Picasso and his newly-pregnant wife Olga spent the summer of 1920 in the South of France. As the artist’s biographer Sir John Richardson has written: ‘By June 29, they had found a villa on a hillside above the yet to be developed resort of Juan-les-Pins next to Antibes. The Villa des Sables on the chemin des Sables, which no longer exists, was a modest house with a good view of the Mediterranean and a small garden…Picasso chose the place because it was quiet and out of the way…and it offered adequate studio space. This summer would prove very productive.’1 Picasso and Olga remained at Juan-les-Pins until September, and during this period the artist was especially prolific as a draughtsman, making numerous drawings and some small paintings. His subjects were mostly depictions of Olga, drawings of bathers on the beach, and vistas of the landscape below the hilltop Villa des Sables, which enjoyed superb views of the coast and bays on either side of the Cap d’Antibes.

Richardson further notes of the artist at Juan-les-Pins: ‘When he installed himself in a new place, Picasso usually did drawings of the area to get his bearings and map out a kind of cosmology for himself. A turning in the road, a stretch of railway track, a view of the sea, telegraph poles: such are the subjects of his sketchbook notations. He also did colourful oil sketches of local villas in which he has fun with their distinctive towers and balustrades.’2 As another scholar has pointed out, ‘In his sketchbooks or on loose sheets, the artist offers us quite literal descriptions of the seascape of Juan-les-Pins and a number of particular aspects of the villa at which he was staying. These works seem to be almost domesticated. Picasso had no compunction in describing his real surroundings, even though he was aware that the true reality of things might be revealed to him at the most unexpected moment.’3

Drawn on the 13th of July 1920, shortly after Picasso and Olga had settled into the Villa des Sables, this drawing may be associated with a handful of pencil landscapes of Juan-les-Pins made between July and September 1920. These views of rooftops, trees and neighbouring villas, drawn from a window at the Villa des Sables, include a sheet in the Musée Picasso in Paris4 and several others in private collections5.

A number of landscape drawings of rooftops at Juan-les-Pins are also found in a small sketchbook used

by Picasso in the summer of 1920, which contains two pencil sketches (fig.1) closely related to the left half of the composition of the present sheet6. A small oil sketch on canvas depicting the same view of a house among gardens and foliage (fig.2), dated the 28th of July 19207, may also be associated with this drawing. Likewise executed during this fertile summer was a small, decorative painting of houses at Juan-les-Pins, today in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris8.

In later visits to the Côte d’Azur in the 1920s and 1930s, Picasso stayed in other rented villas in Juanles-Pins and Antibes. Indeed, apart from the period of the Second World War, when he remained in Paris, he was to return to the Riviera almost every summer until the end of his life; not only to Antibes and Juan-les-Pins but also Saint-Raphaël, Vallauris, Cannes and finally Mougins, where he lived from 1961 until his death in 1973. The Cap d’Antibes was ultimately the home of the first museum dedicated to the painter in his lifetime; in 1966 the Château Grimaldi in Antibes, where Picasso had a studio for several months at the end of 1946, was renamed the Musée Picasso, and today contains over two hundred works by the artist.

This drawing was until recently in the collection of the artist’s granddaughter Marina Ruiz Picasso (b.1951), the only daughter of Picasso’s eldest son Paulo. Though her relationships with both her father and grandfather were troubled, Marina was the only legitimate grandchild of the artist alive at the time of his death in 1973, and therefore received the second-largest inheritance, after that of Picasso’s second wife Jacqueline. As 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…for students of modern art in cities which have never seen a Picasso retrospective, these exhibitions have been a revelation.’9

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55 ERNEST STEPHEN LUMSDEN RSA PRE London 1883-1948 Edinburgh Northern Twilight Oil on canvas, laid down on board.

23.6 x 32.7 cm. (9 1/4 x 12 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Fine Art Society, London, in May 1984; Giorgio Ajmone-Marsan and Umberta Nasi, London.

A gifted printmaker and painter, Ernest Lumsden was largely self-taught as an etcher, learning the craft from the technical guide written by the 19th century French printmaker Maxime Lalanne, which first appeared in an English edition in 1880. He soon became adept in the medium and established a considerable reputation as a printmaker. His earliest work as an etcher dates to 1902, when the young artist was living in Paris and studying at the Académie Julian. In 1906 six of his etchings were exhibited at the Society of Painters and Gravers and the following year two more were shown at the Salon in Paris.

By 1908 he had settled in Edinburgh, where he took up a position at the Edinburgh College of Art, but his wanderlust led him the following year to British Columbia in Canada. From there he travelled on to Japan and Korea, and thence to Beijing and on to Burma.

It was in India, however, that Lumsden found scenes and subjects that truly captivated him, and he produced a number of etched views of the cities of Benares, Jaipur and Udaipur. He was to make several trips to India, visiting Jodhpur, Kashmir and Ladak and often returning to Benares. He also spent some time travelling throughout Spain. In 1914 Lumsden was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, and in 1924 he published The Art of Etching, which remains a standard work on the subject. As well as landscapes, Lumsden also etched a number of portraits of friends and fellow artists, among them Frank Brangwyn, Augustus John, Edmund Blampied and James McBey. His wife, Mabel Royds, was also an accomplished painter and printmaker.

The 1920s found Lumsden in Edinburgh earning a comfortable living, selling his prints through Colnaghi’s in London. An exhibition of his work at Taylor and Brown’s Galleries in Edinburgh in March 1920 included not only the etchings for which he was becoming very well known, but also a number of drawings and oil paintings. With the decline in the market for etchings in the later 1920s and 1930s, however, Lumsden began working more as a painter. He was elected an associate member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1923, becoming a full member ten years later. Lumsden moved into Sir Henry Raeburn’s old studio in Edinburgh’s Queen Street in 1927, working primarily as a portrait painter, and became curator of the Royal Scottish Academy library in 1935. In November 1935 he showed a number of paintings, including seascapes and other Berwickshire views, as part of group exhibition at the New Gallery in Edinburgh. Crippled by arthritis in his later years, Lumsden produced relatively little in the 1940s before his death in 1948, at the age of sixty-four.

Works by Ernest Lumsden are today in the collections of the Tate, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Burnaby Art Gallery in Canada, and elsewhere.

Lumsden remains far better known as a printmaker than a painter, however, and his paintings only occasionally appear on the market today.

56 HERMANN WÖHLER Hanover 1897-1961 Hanover The Flood (Sintflut) Pen and black ink, within a border drawn in pen and black ink, on thick, textured paper. Signed with the artist’s monogram HW in black ink at the lower centre. Titled Sintflut in black ink at the upper right. Numbered (dated?) IV 5 in pencil on the verso. Numbered and inscribed 286 IV 5 Sintflut 2.5 in pencil on the old mount. Further inscribed IV 5 / Bölke, Abb. S.53 / HERMANN WOHLER (1897 – HANNOVER – 1961) SINTFLUT. FEDERZEICHNUNG 1925/29 in pencil on the old mount.

402 x 316 mm. (15 7/8 x 12 1/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist; Private collection, Germany.

Only recently rediscovered as one of the most fascinating graphic artists in Germany in the first half of the 20th century, Hermann Wöhler studied in Hanover, Dresden and Berlin. He was a pupil of the Symbolist artist and illustrator Hugo Hoeppener, known as Fidus, whose work combined mysticism, eroticism and allegory. A deeply intellectual man, Wöhler was well-versed in history, art history, philosophy and classical literature, as well as in Oriental and Eastern religions, Gnosticism and the Kabbalah. Like Fidus, he took his subjects from mythology and literature, creating striking works characterized by imaginative compositions and often bizarre imagery. At the beginning of his career Wöhler worked primarily in black and white, making elaborate large-scale drawings in pen and black ink. In 1918 he produced a portfolio of seven sizeable ink compositions, plus a title page, entitled Zwielicht: Sieben Sinnbilder / Erste Geschichte des Erwachenden Schicksals vor dem Licht (‘Twilight: Seven Symbols / The First History of the Awakening Fate of Light’). He continued to create several such series of large ink drawings, executed with an astonishingly meticulous technique, throughout the 1920s.

Later in his career, Wöhler turned towards fairytale themes, producing a large number of tempera paintings of such subjects, for the most part executed in the 1940s. These works, painted in bold colours, took themes from the well-known stories of Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and Ludwig Bechstein, but shunned the usual manner of depicting these subjects. The artist instead created his own fantastical environments in which the fairytale stories took place; dark green forests and jungles, underwater worlds or urban canyons of buildings. Produced during and after the Second World War, Wöhler’s fairytale paintings can be seen as a reaction to, and an escape from, the horrors of war.

In 1923 Wöhler was appointed a drawing teacher at the Staatliche Kunsthochschule in Berlin, and from 1934 until his death in 1961 taught at the Pädagogischen Kunsthochschule in Hanover. His long career as an art teacher seems to have precluded him from selling or exhibiting his own work, and his oeuvre was almost completely unknown to the public at large during his lifetime. It was not until 1987, more than a quarter of a century after his death, that the first exhibition of Wöhler’s work was mounted, at the Historisches Museum in Hanover. Within a few years, a handful of works by the artist began to appear on the market. In 2015 and 2016, an exhibition of sixty of Wöhler’s tempera paintings was held at the Deutsches Märchen- und Wesersagenmuseum (the German Fairytale Museum) in Bad Oeynhausen, commemorating the recent acquisition by the museum of over two hundred works from the artist’s heirs.

This large sheet is a splendid example of Hermann Wöhler’s visionary pen drawings of the 1920s. A large group of stylistically comparable drawings of this period by the artist is today in the Jack Daulton Collection in California1, while two similar highly finished drawings have recently been acquired by the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York2.

57 SIR GEORGE CLAUSEN RA RWS London 1852-1944 Newbury Rain Clouds Watercolour. Signed G. CLAUSEN in black ink at the lower right. Inscribed (by the artist?) The Ash Tree in Spring / by G. Clausen RA in pencil on the old backing board. Further inscribed Arnold Fellows / Collection No 246 in pencil on the old backing board. Also inscribed Sir George Clausen / R.A. R.W.S. / 1852-1945 / Rain Clouds / A.F. No 246 in brown ink on another old backing board.

263 x 351 mm. (10 3/8 x 13 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Arnold Fellows, Chigwell and Barnes1; Possibly bequeathed, with the rest of the Fellows collection, to Queen Mary’s Grammar School, Walsall; The Property of a Charitable Trust, until 2019.

From the age of sixteen George Clausen worked as a draughtsman in a firm of decorators in London before winning a scholarship to the South Kensington Schools. A significant influence on the young artist was Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose work he first saw at the Grosvenor Gallery in London, inspiring him to take up bucolic themes. In 1881 Clausen left London to settle in Childwick Green in Hertfordshire, later moving to Cookham Dene in Berkshire in 1885. Six years later, he settled with his family in the village of Widdington, near Saffron Walden in Essex. Working directly from nature, he painted scenes of rural life and the landscape of the farmlands of Essex. As has been noted of Clausen, ‘His preoccupation was with light; the dazzle of sun on cornfields and haystacks and mowers at midday, the stilled radiance of blossom in orchards, the woods and empty fields at evening, and the subtle atmospheric effects in shadowy barn and stable.’2 In 1886 Clausen exhibited at the New English Art Club, and by 1891 was showing at the Royal Academy.

In the 1890s the influence of Bastien-Lepage was tempered by that of Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, artists whom Clausen greatly admired. He had his first one-man exhibition in 1902, at the Goupil Gallery in London, where he showed thirty-one drawings and pastels and twenty paintings. Appointed a Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy Schools, he was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society in 1898 and became a Royal Academician in 1908. In 1926 he earned a commission for a large mural for St. Stephen’s Hall in the House of Commons, and on its unveiling the following year received a knighthood. A retrospective exhibition of his work at the National Gallery, proposed just a few months before the artist’s death at the age of ninety-two, sadly never took place.

A gifted and prolific draughtsman, Clausen was a master of different media. As a watercolourist, he produced both landscape studies and smaller variants of his oil paintings. He showed regularly at the Royal Watercolour Society, and in 1921 exhibited forty-one watercolours at the Grosvenor Gallery in London. Indeed, in the latter part of his career the medium came to dominate his output. As one recent scholar has aptly noted of such later works as the present sheet, however, ‘the watercolours that Clausen increasingly painted are not identifiable landscapes but dream-like renderings of an atmospheric rural utopia.’3 Writing in 1930, Clausen noted that ‘I try to work as simply and directly as possible in water-colour…I try (though, of course, I can seldom do it) to put the colour on in one wash, without re-touching, for I think there is nothing so beautiful as a clean tint in water-colour that is exactly right. And even if it does not exactly run into the right place (for water-colour is a tricky medium) the quality of the colour has something of the spontaneity and effortless rightness that one finds in Nature itself – a quality that is always lost by labouring and stippling a drawing...It seems to me that water-colour painting depends more on simplicity of method than oil-painting, and this means, of course, that you must know pretty well what you want to do before you begin.’4

58 JOSEF (JOSEPH) ŠÍMA Jaromĕř 1891-1971 Paris The Sea Watercolour and gouache. Signed and dated SIMA 1934 in brown ink at the lower right.

45 x 310 mm. (1 3/4 x 12 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Hélène Drude (Galerie Le Point Cardinal), Paris1.

A significant figure in 20th century European art, Josef Šíma studied at the Academy of Arts in Prague and became a member of the avant-garde artist’s group Devĕtsil, founded in 1920. The following year he moved to Paris, where he soon became closely associated with Surrealist circles in art and literature, and exhibited his work in the Surrealist section of the Salon des Surindépendants. In 1926 he took French citizenship, and at around the same time met Max Ernst and André Breton. Choosing not to be associated with Breton’s Surrealist group, Šíma, together with the poets and writers Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and René Daumal, formed the parallel group Le Grand Jeu, whose members met at his studio2. After the Second World War, Šíma expressed a renewed interest in landscape, and also produced a number of book illustrations. His work was shown widely in France and abroad, culminating in a major exhibition at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1968.

As the critic and art historian Meyer Schapiro wrote of him, ‘Sima is one of those painters, uncommon in our culture, who see the mysteriously grand, the cosmic. He discovers it not in the multiplicity or fullness of things, but in a few elements of narrow span, often a single chord. They shape a sparse silent world congenial to a mood of revery and invite a solitary communion with the distant and high. His reticent image calls one away from the habitual in our surroundings to a vast unlocalized space, without footholds or landmarks, beyond the reach of our hands. However strange this space may be, it is no domain of the fanciful and incongruous, but a transmuted reflection of nature. From an older more realistic art Sima has inherited an aesthetic of the airy and luminous and disengaged it from the ties with earthly objects and weather...I do not know of another painter who has maintained with such purity and steadfastness this contemplative attitude which is more familiar through the poets than the painters.’3 In the spring of 1933, Šíma returned to the seaside resort town of Hendaye, in the Basque country on the southwestern tip of France. He had first visited Hendaye in 1921, and on this return visit was inspired to produce a series of works entitled Sea, ten of which he exhibited a few weeks later, at the artistic organization Umĕlecká beseda in Prague in May 1933. Until then, he had painted landscapes and figure subjects in a more or less non-representational manner, but now he began to paint the ocean, albeit still in an abstract vein. Most of Šíma’s marine compositions of this period are, like the present sheet, made up of two horizontal passages; one blue for the sky and the other green for the sea, from which emerge patterns of foaming waves, appearing as cylindrical rollers. In other works, sky and sea merge to form a continuous blue surface, divided only by the darker line of the horizon. In composition and effect, this small watercolour may be related to three earlier seascapes by Šíma, each painted at Hendaye in 1933, in the National Gallery of Prague4, and in particular to the largest (fig.1) of these paintings5.

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59 MAURICE LANGASKENS Ghent 1884-1946 Schaerbeek An Elderly Man Studying a Map (Le Géographe) Pencil and black ink and watercolour on panel. Signed and inscribed Maurice Langaskens. / étude. in black ink at the lower left.

300 x 345 mm. (11 7/8 x 13 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Brussels, Hôtel de Ventes Horta, 20 January 2014, lot 242; Day and Faber, London; Agnew’s, London.

A Belgian painter and printmaker, Maurice (Maurits) Langaskens enrolled in the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1901, and was trained as a decorative painter by the leading Belgian muralist and sculptor Constant Montald. From early on Langaskens was recognized as a fine draughtsman, and won several prizes at the Académie. After living and studying for a few months in France in 1906, mainly in Dijon, the young Langaskens settled in Schaerbeek, outside Brussels. He began his independent career in 1907, when he exhibited three decorative paintings at the Salon in Brussels for the first time and also had an exhibition of his work shown at the Salle Boute in the city. The following year he contributed six paintings to the 16th annual exhibition of the Belgian artist’s association ‘Pour l’Art’ in Brussels, where he was to exhibit frequently over the course of his later career, until 1941. (Langaskens also designed the poster for the 17th ‘Pour l’Art’ exhibition in 1909.) Also in 1908, one of his paintings was selected for an exhibition of modern Belgian art in Berlin.

Much of Langaskens’s early work was in a vibrant and visually arresting Art Nouveau or Symbolist style.

This bold and colourful manner also translated well into large-scale mural commissions, and he soon became one of the leading painter-decorators of the early 20th century in Belgium. His decoration of the town hall of the city of Zoutleeuw in 1912 earned the artist considerable fame and the praise of his teacher and mentor Montald: ‘He was one of the best students in the class; today he is the most outstanding artist among the decorators of our time.’1 The same year the first of several exhibitions of Langasken’s work was mounted at the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in Brussels.

The outbreak of the First World War, however, brutally interrupted the rise of the artist’s successful career. Drafted into the Belgian army at the beginning of August 1914, Langaskens was captured by the Germans after less than a fortnight. He spent the next three and half years as a prisoner of war, at internment camps at Sennelager, Münsterlager and Göttingen. He produced numerous, mostly smallscale paintings and watercolours of portraits and depictions of many of his fellow prisoners, as well as scenes of daily camp life, that are today regarded as among his finest and most personal works. It was also during this period that he painted two of his best-known pictures, the large canvas In Memoriam of 1916, depicting the burial of a Belgian soldier by his comrades, and the monumental triptych Repose en Paix, begun in 1915 and completed in 1918. After his liberation and return to Belgium, Langaskens exhibited over eighty of the paintings and drawings that he had produced as a prisoner of war at the Galerie Sneyers in Brussels in 1918.

After the Armistice, Langaskens - suffering from aphasia and nervous disorders brought about by his long confinement - painted mainly easel pictures of winter landscapes, rustic genre scenes and floral subjects, and also produced a number of designs for tapestries, book illustrations and stained-glass windows. Within a few years, however, his health had recovered and he returned to undertaking large-scale decorative mural commissions. In 1920 Langaskens was one of the founders, alongside Constant Montald, Jean Delville, Emile Fabry and Albert Ciamberlani, of the Société de l’art Monumental, dedicated to the monumental decoration of public buildings and their integration into

architecture. Among his first public commissions after the war was a large mural decoration for a school in Schaarbeek, completed in 1922. A monograph devoted to Langaskens was published the following year, and important exhibitions of his paintings, drawings and prints were held in galleries in Brussels in 1924, 1925, 1930 and 1936.

Between 1934 and 1935 Langaskens, along with other members of the Société de l’art Monumental, contributed to the extensive decoration of the municipal theatre at Leuven. He continued to exhibit throughout the 1940s, particularly at the yearly ‘Pour l’Art’ exhibitions. There he showed more and more of his superb graphic work, which had begun to take up much of his time. In 1943 Langaskens also provided illustrations for an edition of Maxence Van der Meersch’s novel L’empreinte du Dieu. After the artist’s death in 1946, the contents of his studio were sold at auction in Brussels and subsequently dispersed. Memorial exhibitions of his work were held in Brussels in 1949 and in Schaarbeek in 1956, while more recently a retrospective exhibition was mounted at the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres in 2003.

By far the largest and most comprehensive collection of works on paper by Maurice Langaskens numbering over five hundred drawings, watercolours and prints, mainly dating from his time as a prisoner of war but also including works from throughout his career - is today in the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres. Other drawings by the artist are in the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and Military History in Brussels, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, the Commune de Schaerbeek, and in several private collections.

Although Langaskens rarely dated his work, the present sketch on panel can be dated to around 1930.

Drawn with pen and black ink and watercolour on a plywood panel, it is a study for a colour aquatint

by Langaskens entitled Le Géographe2. In both the drawing and the related print (fig.1), the man appears to be examining a map of the city of Brussels. The artist created a number of drawn and etched variants of this subject, with an elderly man intensely studying a map, an atlas or a globe. An analogous subject is also found in a small panel of an entomologist scrutinizing an insect (fig.2) - of similar dimensions, medium and technique to the present panel - which appeared at auction in Paris in 20083.

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60 FIRMIN BAES Sint-Joost-ten-Node 1874-1943 Brussels The End of the Day (Fin de journée) Pastel on board. Signed Firmin Baes in pencil at the lower right. Further signed and entitled Fin de journée / Firmin Baes in black chalk and blue chalk on the reverse of the board. Numbered 457 in blue chalk on the reverse of the board.

435 x 559 mm. (17 1/8 x 22 in.)

EXHIBITED: Possibly Brussels, Galeries de l’Art Belge, Exposition Firmin Baes, n.d. (1900), no.40 (‘Fin de jour’).

Active as a portraitist and a painter of still life subjects, nudes, landscapes and interiors, Firmin Baes was the son of the decorative painter Henri Baes. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels between 1888 and 1894, under the Symbolist painter Léon Frédéric, and the elder artist’s influence is evident in many of his early paintings. In 1900 his painting The Archers won a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, which brought the artist to wider notice. (An English periodical noted that ‘M. Firmin Baes is a very young painter, admirably gifted, who neglects no labour to realise his very personal ideal...his skill borders on mastery.’1) Baes exhibited annually at galleries in Belgium, and occasionally in Europe and in America. Although at first he showed oil paintings and large charcoal drawings, as his career progressed he began to work mainly in pastel, producing highly finished portraits, still life subjects and nudes.

Baes achieved much success as a portrait painter and pastellist. In 1910 he built a large house and studio in Brussels which he filled with his collection of paintings and objets d’art, and where he would receive visitors. He worked to a strict schedule, with mornings spent on portrait sittings and paintings from posed nude models, while the afternoons were devoted to the painting of still life subjects, interiors and landscapes. A member of the Belgian artist’s association ‘Pour l’Art’ from 1898 onwards, Baes exhibited with the group almost every year for the rest of his career, and was also admitted to the Société Royale des Beaux-Arts in 1919. Baes’s account book lists a total of 1,340 paintings sold to collectors, of which 212 were portraits and 264 were still life subjects, together with 152 nudes and 227 landscapes. The artist also produced a number of posters and decorative wall panels, as well as numerous drawings and smaller pastels, which were often given to friends.

A superb draughtsman, Baes was adept at charcoal, chalk and pastel. From around 1900 onwards he worked almost exclusively in pastel, employing a confident, virtuoso technique. His exhibition pastels were often drawn on canvas, and he seems to have developed a particular (and secret) technique of fixing the friable medium to the canvas support. The resulting works, usually executed on a fairly large scale, are characterized by luminous colour and a refined handling of pastel. At the time of an exhibition of Baes’s work in a Brussels gallery in 1932, one critic praised ‘a series of new works by this pastellist who, by subtly squeezing with his thumb chalk in selected tones on the paper or the canvas, achieves a delicacy, softness or an intensity which is not often attained with such great effect with oil painting, and only rarely with the same successful use of the medium.’2 This very large landscape is a fine example of Baes’s meticulous pastel technique. As Jean Marchal wrote of the artist, ‘The pastels of Firmin Baes reach the highest heights of virtuosity. Finesse, grace, elegance, even refinement, these are the goals that in still life and landscape as well as in genre subjects, the artist’s dazzling talent undoubtedly achieves.’3 Pure pastel landscapes such as the present sheet, however, are fairly rare in the artist’s oeuvre4.

61 PAUL KLEE Münchenbuchsee 1879-1940 Muralto Landscape in the Lower Alps (Voralpine Landschaft) Oil on paper. A study of a horse or donkey(?) drawn in ink on the verso, backed. Faintly signed Klee in brown ink at the lower left.

180 x 280 mm. (7 1/8 x 11 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Galerie Simon), Paris, until 1938; Karl Nierendorf, Cologne, Berlin and New York, from 1938; Israel Ber Neumann, Berlin and New York; Dr. and Mrs. Eric Ponder, Mineola, New York; Acquired from him in 1962 by Galerie Berggruen & Cie, Paris; Acquired from them in 1962 by James Wise, Geneva, New York and Nice; Anonymous sale, Geneva, Galerie Motte, 1 November 1963, lot 119; Anonymous sale, Geneva, Galerie Motte, 5 December 1964, lot 74; Brook Street Gallery, London; Acquired from them in 1966 by a Mr. Yerburgh (according to a label on the backing board); Private collection; Private collection, England, since 2003.

LITERATURE: Paul Klee, Oeuvre-Katalog, MS., 1937, no.11; Bern, Paul Klee Foundation, Paul Klee.

Catalogue Raisonné, Vol.7 1934-1938, 2003, p.219, no.6947 (1937.11), as location unknown; Bern, Zentrum Paul Klee, Jahresbericht 2018, 2019, p.12.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Simon, Paul Klee: oeuvres récentes, 1938, no.38; New York, Nierendorf Galleries, Exhibition Paul Klee, November 1938, no.58 (as Alpine Foothills); Geneva, Galerie du Perron, Paul Klee: Exposition, 1965, no.26; London, Brook Street Gallery, Klee, 1966, no.31 (as Alpine Foothills).

‘For Klee, making an art of landscape was not…an exclusive category…He did not seek to challenge nature but to learn from its methods, he did not approach the external landscape as matter for interpretation but as a matrix of experience – landscape meant a certain scale, certain modes of color, an atmosphere, a tracing of memories, a sense of community, a metaphor for even wider spaces.’1 Born in Switzerland, by 1906 Paul Klee had settled in Munich, where he became a member of the Neue Künstlervereinigung (New Artist’s Association) and the Blauer Reiter (Blue Rider) group. He had his first one-man exhibitions at Herwarth Walden’s Berlin gallery Der Sturm in 1916 and 1917, which established his reputation. Shortly after leaving military service in 1919, Klee signed an exclusive sales contract with the Munich dealer Hans Goltz, who the following year mounted the first substantial exhibition of Klee’s work in his Galerie Neue Kunst in Munich. Appointed to a teaching post at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920, Klee continued to work there after the move of the school to Dessau in 1925. In 1931 he resigned from the Bauhaus to take up a position as professor of painting at the Düsseldorf Akademie, a post he only held for two years before being banned from teaching - as a ‘degenerate artist’ - by the Nazis. By the end of 1933 he had returned to his native Switzerland, and in 1935 began showing signs of progressive systemic scleroderma, the disease that would eventually kill him five years later. In 1937 seventeen of his works were included in the Nazi Entartente Kunst (‘Degenerate Art’) exhibition in Munich, while over a hundred of his works in German museums were confiscated by the Nazis and sold abroad. Klee died in June 1940, at the age of sixty-one.

In the autumn of 1935 Klee began suffering from the debilitating skin disease scleroderma; an autoimmune disorder that left him unable to paint or draw for long periods of time. Although in the course of the following year he made a number of visits to mountain clinics for treatment that helped to alleviate his condition, he was only able to produce a total of twenty-five works during the whole of 1936. By February of 1937, however, Klee’s health had improved to the extent that he was able to work prolifically again, with the result that 1937 and 1938 were among the most productive of the final

years of his career; in 1937 he created 264 works, and the following year the number rose to 489. As one scholar has noted of these late paintings and drawings, ‘Klee seems to have derived a paradoxical vitality from the conscious, profound process of coming to terms with disease and the approach of death, a vitality that significantly transformed his art.’2 Characterized by a vigour and inventiveness, Klee’s works of the late 1930s often display his experimentation with various techniques and combinations of oil, chalk and watercolour.

Previously known only from a black-and-white photograph, this vibrant oil sketch on paper of 1937 depicts an Alpine landscape with pine trees, and recalls the time that the artist spent in spas and health clinics in the Swiss mountains during the previous months. Although drawn the same year that Klee was being publicly disparaged in Nazi propaganda, with his work shown at the Entartente Kunst exhibition and his paintings removed from museum collections, the present sheet displays no trace of any reference to this tumultuous period near the end of the artist’s life. Klee’s characteristic serpentine line, dividing the composition and directing the viewer’s eye to the cluster of pine trees at the top, and the use of complimentary pastel colours, serve to highlight the artist’s ever-present imagination and his undying sense of optimism.

The ink drawing of what seems to be a horse or donkey with a disproportionally large head, visible beneath the backing on the verso of this alpine landscape, has remained unpublished until now. It may be likened to a charcoal drawing (fig.1) entitled by the artist Esel, aus der Hand fressend (‘Donkey, Eating out of the Hand’), of the same date and apparently drawn shortly before the present sheet, in the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern3.

The present sheet was among several works by Paul Klee sold in New York by the expatriate German art dealers J. B. Neumann and Karl Nierendorf, who from 1938 onwards actively promoted the artist’s work in America. This Landscape in the Lower Alps (Voralpine Landschaft) was purchased by Dr. Eric Ponder, a distinguished American haematologist who assembled a small but choice collection of works

by Klee.

verso

1.

62 TRISTRAM HILLIER RA Peking 1905-1983 Bristol Recto: Fishing Boats on a Beach Verso: Landscape with Farm Buildings by a Stream Pencil. The verso in pencil, with the composition squared for transfer in red chalk. Inscribed by the artist Numbers on lower boat in pencil at the lower left, and San Francisco (Numbers below) / AX AR/7 D ISABEL Y DIEGO in pencil at the lower right. The verso extensively inscribed by the artist, in the margins, with various notes on composition, lighting and colour notes in pencil and blue ink.

289 x 457 mm. (11 3/8 x 18 in.) [sheet] Although he was born in China, where his father managed the Peking branch of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, Tristram Hillier was raised and educated in England. He trained at the Slade School of Art in London, where he received a thorough grounding in the principles of draughtsmanship that was to serve him well throughout his career. As the Hillier scholar Jenny Pery has noted of the artist, he ‘continued throughout his life to draw in the way he was taught at the Slade, achieving a remarkable delicacy of touch and understanding of form. With its emphasis on descriptive accuracy, Slade drawing was invaluable in providing information for use in painting, and the importance of drawing as the vital infrastructure of Hillier’s art cannot be overestimated. All his work is based in linear composition rather than colour orchestration or expressionist manipulation of paint.’1 Hillier continued his studies at the Atelier Colarossi in Paris, and also spent some time in the teaching studio of André Lhote in Montparnasse. In Paris he met and befriended such artists as Georges Braque, André Masson and Max Ernst, as well as the writer and poet André Breton, and was drawn into the milieu of the Surrealists. Hillier was to live in France for much of the next decade or so, working in Paris and in studios in Gascony and Provence.

He had his first one-man exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in London in 1931, at the age of twenty-six, and a second exhibition followed at the same gallery two years later. It was also in 1933 that he was invited to join Paul Nash’s Unit One group of Modernist painters, sculptors and architects, and the next year he took part in the group’s only exhibition, at the Mayor Gallery in London.

Associating himself with the English Surrealists, Hillier was active mainly as a landscape and still life painter, and also painted the occasional religious subject, all in a very precise manner and with a high degree of finish. The lasting influence of Edward Wadsworth, a fellow member of Unit One, was to be of particular significance, notably in the younger artist’s adoption of the medium of tempera for some of his work of the late 1930s. Hillier lived in the South of France, often painting alongside Wadsworth, until the outbreak of the Second World War, when he returned to England and settled in Somerset.

There he painted agricultural and rural subjects with the same exactitude as his landscapes and still life compositions. Wadsworth introduced Hillier to the London dealers Arthur Tooth & Sons, who took on the artist and mounted several exhibitions of his work, with considerable success. For much of his career, Hillier’s paintings attracted a strong following of loyal collectors, and most of his gallery exhibitions were sold out. He exhibited widely in England and elsewhere, and sent works to the Royal Academy from 1937 onwards. Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1957, he became a full Academician ten years later. He always retained the Catholic faith of his childhood and upbringing, and his religious convictions and deep spirituality is often vividly expressed in his later work.

The landscape paintings and drawings for which Tristram Hillier is best known are characterized by a contemplative mood that is a particular hallmark of his work. Jenny Pery, the author of a recent monograph on the artist, has noted that, ‘Icily elegant, eerily still, Tristram Hillier’s work presents a dreamlike, post-apocalyptic world in which human beings, rarely seen on stage, seem to be refugees from disaster. Seashores with abandoned or rotting boats, foreign townscapes threaded by shadowed empty streets and overlooked by forlorn or forbidding churches, tree-lined country lanes where it is forever winter… these are the haunting images that furnished Hillier’s art throughout half a century of consistent production.’2

Hillier’s finished paintings were preceded by detailed preparatory pencil studies, executed with a confidence and exactitude characteristic of all of his drawings. The recto of this large, double-sided sheet depicts a coastal view in Spain or Portugal. Hillier first visited the region the 1930s and returned almost yearly, usually in the summer, from the late 1940s through to the 1970s. In his autobiography, published in 1954, the artist wrote of Spain that it was ‘a country which I came subsequently to love above all countries and where, since the last war, I have worked for several months each year. The translucent light of the south is comparable to that of Greece…with the addition of a dramatic quality, both noble and cruel, with which the landscape as well as the people are invested. The Iberian peninsula is neither wholly European nor Asiatic in character, a land set apart from all others, but one pre-eminently to inspire a painter.’3 On his summer visits to Spain and Portugal, Hillier would make intensely observed drawings and preparatory studies of the landscape and architecture, which he would later use as the basis for paintings completed in his studio in England. He was particularly attracted to the subject of fishing boats drawn up on deserted beaches. As Frances Spading has noted, ‘Boats in particular gave free play to Hillier’s sculptural feeling for form…the brightly coloured hull, with their strong, simple shapes, set up complex rhythms and satisfying interrelationships.’4 The verso of the present sheet - extensively inscribed by the artist with detailed notes on colour, lighting and composition, and lightly squared in red chalk - is a study for an English rural landscape, probably in Somerset, where the artist painted in the autumn and winter months. As Pery has written, ‘Although he grew to dislike the English countryside, he appreciated the quietude as well as many of the motifs it offered him – bare trees, muddy paths, frozen ponds.’5 As she further notes, ‘When he settled in Somerset after World War II, the steady habit of work that he adopted continued virtually until his death.

During the winter months, the immaculate pencil drawings with which he returned from his annual summer wanderings would be worked up into paintings...The paintings became a synthesis of his experiences and feelings, emotion recollected in tranquility. In the cloistered environment of his studio he could relive his life through painting.’6 Many of Hillier’s Somerset views were made in the countryside around his home in the village of East Pennard, between Shepton Mallet, Castle Cary and Glastonbury in the southeast corner of the county.

Writing shortly after the artist’s death, Nicholas Usherwood noted of Hillier’s paintings that, ‘Of Somerset or Spain, of boats on a beach or of buildings in a landscape, painted in 1936 or 1976, they all depend ultimately on the quality of still life and the disciplined concentration on a single theme: their secret life and impassive mystery…Tristram Hillier’s life may now sadly have come to an end but those boats still, expectantly, wait.’7 More recently, in a review of a major exhibition of Hillier’s work held in 2019-2020, another critic has pointed out: ‘Look at his images of upturned boats, deserted seashores and industrial detritus, of wintry Somerset farms or the abandoned white villages of Spain. They are possessed by an aura of eerie quietude. Hillier can take any subject – a ship’s anchor, a tree bare of leaves, an electricity pylon, a broken-down barn – and impregnate it with a sense of otherworldly mystery. The mundane becomes enigmatic in his symbolic world.’8

recto

verso

63 PAUL CADMUS New York 1904-1999 Weston, Connecticut Vermont Waterfall No.1 Coloured chalks on blue-green paper. Signed Cadmus in white chalk at the lower right. Inscribed VERMONT WATERFALL / # 1 / CADMUS / 12 1/2 x 8 3/4 in pencil on the old backing board.

328 x 234 mm. (12 7/8 x 8 3/4 in.)

Watermark: P M FABRIANO. PROVENANCE: Palm Beach Galleries, Palm Beach; Samuel P. Reed, New York; His posthumous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 28 April 2007, lot 218; Private collection, Los Angeles.

Over a career that lasted some seven decades, Paul Cadmus was active as a gifted painter, draughtsman, illustrator and printmaker. At the age of fifteen, he enrolled at the National Academy of Design in New York, where he remained for six years before transferring to the Art Students League of New York.

Cadmus began his career working as a commercial illustrator for an advertising agency, and it was while at the Art Students League that he met his friend and longtime lover, the painter Jared French. The two men travelled together in Europe in the early 1930s, living for some time in Majorca, before returning to America in 1933. Cadmus began painting a series of large, crowded genre and street scenes of downtown New York life, often characterized by more than a hint of satire. He also started working for the New Deal government agency known as the Works Progress Administration, painting murals for public buildings; works in which he was much influenced by the social realist painters Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller. These included a series of four paintings entitled Aspects of Suburban Life, commissioned in 1936 as designs for murals to decorate the United States Post Office in Port Washington, New York, but never actually installed, and a large mural of Pocahontas Saving the Life of John Smith, painted in 1938 for the Parcel Post Building in Richmond, Virginia.

Although Jared French married Margaret Hoening in 1937, he and Cadmus continued to be close, and the two artists shared a studio for many years. It was French who encouraged Cadmus to move away from commercial illustration towards fine art. Fascinated by Italian Renaissance painting, he began painting solely in egg tempera in the 1940s. Cadmus was elected to the National Academy of Design as an associate in 1979, becoming a full Academician the following year. In 1990 a pair of joint exhibitions incorporating the work of Cadmus and two of his closest friends, Jared French and George Tooker, were mounted at the Midtown Payson Gallery and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Cadmus died in 1999, five days short of his ninety-fifth birthday.

A highly accomplished draughtsman, Cadmus was esteemed by critics, collectors and connoisseurs.

Since he worked very slowly as a painter, averaging only two paintings a year, many more drawings than paintings by the artist have survived. He produced only a handful of pure landscape drawings, however, and just one oil painting; a view of Majorca painted in 1932 and today in the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. The present sheet is typical of Cadmus’s drawing practice in its use of toned paper, which is a characteristic of many of his figure studies. In the 1940s, when his friend and sometime lover Jared French and his wife bought a summer house in the town of Hartland in Vermont, Cadmus was given his own house on the same property, and this drawing is likely to date from around this time. In later years, after the Frenches had settled in Rome, the Vermont house was taken back from Cadmus and given to Jared’s Italian lover.

64 DAVID BOMBERG Birmingham 1890-1957 London Middle Temple Charcoal on light brown paper. Inscribed Authenticated by Lilian Bomberg. / London Series. / Possibly [crossed out] SOUTH Middle Temple. / by David Bomberg / LB in blue ink on the verso.

475 x 622 mm. (18 3/4 x 24 1/2 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Marlborough Fine Art, London, in c.1967; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 May 1983, lot 142; Redfern Gallery, London; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 8 March 1995, lot 121 (bt. Bowie); David Bowie, London and New York.

LITERATURE: London, Piano Nobile, Bomberg/Marr: Spirits in the Mass, exhibition catalogue, London, 2017, pp.32-33, no.11 (entry by Sean Ketteringham).

EXHIBITED: London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., David Bomberg 1890-1957: Drawings and watercolours, n.d. (1967?), no.29; London, Piano Nobile, Bomberg/Marr: Spirits in the Mass, London, 2017, no.11.

The son of a Polish immigrant, David Bomberg was apprenticed to a lithographer as a youth, but was determined to establish himself as an artist. He took evening classes with Walter Sickert at the Westminster School and also studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. In 1911 he was admitted into the Slade School of Art, aided - as were his fellow pupils Isaac Rosenberg and Mark Gertler - by a loan from the Jewish Education Aid Society. At the Slade he studied alongside Paul Nash, Christopher Wynne Nevinson, William Roberts, Stanley Spencer and Edward Wadsworth, and as a gifted draughtsman benefitted from the school’s emphasis on drawing technique. Like many of his fellow students, Bomberg was fascinated by the works of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso exhibited at Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Gallery in 1910 and 1912, as well as such artistic movements as Cubism and Futurism. In the summer of 1913 he was expelled from the Slade for his radicalism, and undertook a trip to Paris that resulted in encounters with Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and André Derain. In 1914 the young Bomberg was given a one-man exhibition at the Chenil Galleries in Chelsea, which generated much critical comment. He was also invited by Wyndham Lewis to exhibit with the Vorticist Group at the Doré Gallery in London. After a period of military service in the First World War, he produced a major painting of Sappers at Work for the Canadian War Memorials Fund in 1919.

In the 1920s Bomberg began to travel to Spain and Palestine, and these trips resulted in a number of superb landscape paintings and drawings. A period spent living in Spain in the 1930s, in the rugged mountains of the remote and somewhat isolated province of Asturias, was immensely fruitful, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War forced him to return to London at the end of 1935. During the Second World War, a commission from the War Artists Advisory Committee led Bomberg to a bomb store in a disused mine near Burton-on-Trent, where he made numerous drawings and oil sketches in 1942. Between 1945 and 1953 he worked as an art teacher at the Borough Polytechnic, where among his students were Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. He was a much admired teacher, and several of his pupils formed the Borough Group, with Bomberg as its figurehead and leader.

Despite his early successes before the First World War, Bomberg struggled for recognition as an artist throughout his later career, and lacked a dealer who could champion and promote his work. Indeed, the only significant exhibition devoted to Bomberg to be held after the First World War was a relatively modest show of thirty-seven works at the Heffer Gallery in Cambridge in 1954. In the same year he returned to Spain, hoping to set up an art school in the mountaintop city of Ronda in Andalusia.

Although this never came to pass, many of Bomberg’s students visited him in Ronda and painted there.

It was not until just after his death, when the Arts Council organized a retrospective exhibition of his work, that Bomberg achieved a measure of recognition. Only in the 1980s, with the publication of an important monograph on the artist and a major exhibition at the Tate Gallery, was his reputation firmly established. Bomberg is today regarded, both as an artist and a teacher, as a highly significant figure in 20th century British art.

Executed in 1947, this impressive charcoal drawing is one of several large-scale drawings Bomberg made of buildings in London during and after the Second World War. In these powerful works, as the scholar Richard Cork has noted, ‘He reduced his draughtsmanship to its most skeletal in order to convey the gutted, sooty wreckage of a metropolis battered almost beyond recognition by Nazi bombing-raids.

Charcoal was the ideal medium for the purpose.’1 The artist had begun making these charcoal drawings around 1944, when he served as a firewatcher in Kensington. As Bomberg’s biographer William Lipke has written, ‘While standing watch on long dark nights, he became more and more intrigued with the monumental buildings that had withstood many centuries. Deciding at last to begin that series of sketches that would record London’s historic monuments blackly silhouetted against the sky, he turned to his favourite drawing medium, charcoal. With its rich, velvety texture the artist drew out the firmness of the architecural forms, yet rubbed in the pervading darkness like a thin haze covering the inky night...This experience left an indelible stamp on his mind, and later he would return to examine the architectural heritage of London more closely after peace was restored.’2 Bomberg had envisaged publishing a book of these cityscape drawings. However, as Cork notes, ‘Like so many of Bomberg’s projects, the scheme never reached fruition: his style was too stark to attract publishers interested in topographical surveys of the city. But the drawings themselves remain, testifying to the compassion with which he surveyed the battered remains of a city whose skeletal structure lends itself well to Bomberg’s defining line.’3 Bomberg’s charcoal drawings of this type led to his appointment to teach a weekly drawing class at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. The artist had shown some of his drawings to the eminent architect Sir Charles Reilly, who in a letter of December 1944 recommended him to the Bartlett as a teacher: ‘I have been looking at Mr David Bomberg’s drawings of great masses of buildings, and feel he has something valuable to convey to the young architectural student. He has extraordinary powers of giving a sense of mass and it is on its mass and volume a modern building so much relies. He could help therefore the young architect...If I had charge of a school still I should like Mr Bomberg to take a sketching class for me, feeling he would help the student to get at the meaning of the mass composition of the building rather than of their detail, and that is what is wanted.’4 The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple is one of the four Inns of Court in the City of London, along with the adjoining Inner Temple, Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn. The Middle Temple is the western part of the ‘Temple’; the building that served as the English headquarters of the Knights Templar until the order was dissolved in 1312. This sizeable drawing depicts the bomb-damaged main church at Middle Temple. As the present sheet has recently been described, ‘The architectural mass almost entirely fills the sheet, recalling Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s eighteenth-century etchings depicting imagined subterranean spaces. Incomplete walls and empty windows, undarkened by Bomberg’s furious shading, eliminate the solidity that defined [a drawing of the same site] three years earlier. Now the walls of Middle Temple appear wavering and skeletal, more akin to scaffolding than centuries old stone. Bomberg invites contemplation of the monumental and deeply historic made fragile to deliver an unexpected poignancy only heightened by the brusque handling.’5 Bomberg also made a number of charcoal drawings of the late 12th century Round Church at Middle and Inner Temple - a building based on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which the artist would have known from his travels in Palestine in the 1920s - that are closely comparable to the present sheet, and of similar dimensions6.

This large drawing is one of around a dozen works by Bomberg acquired by the singer, musician and actor David Bowie (1947-2016) for his personal collection. As Bowie once stated, ‘I’ve always been a huge David Bomberg fan. I love that particular school. There’s something very parochial English about it.

But I don’t care.’7

65 JOHN MINTON Great Shelford 1917-1957 London The Wheel (Derelict Farm Machine) Pen and black ink and watercolour, with touches of white heightening, on paper laid down on board.

Signed and dated John Minton 1948 in brown ink at the upper left. Inscribed by the artist John Minton / THE WHEEL / Watercolour 1948 in brown ink on a label pasted onto the verso.

280 x 381 mm. (11 x 15 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Lefevre Gallery, London, in 1949; Purchased from them on 18 May 1950, for £21, by a Mrs. Edwards, Gayton, Northamptonshire.

EXHIBITED: London, The Lefevre Gallery, New Paintings and Water Colours by John Minton, February 1949, no.41 (as The Wheel).

Although he had a relatively brief career before his death at the age of thirty-nine, John Minton was enormously prolific and achieved a great deal of success in his lifetime. Between 1945 and 1956 he had eight one-man shows, mainly at the Lefevre Gallery in London, and also took part in a number of group shows and the Summer exhibitions at the Royal Academy. Alongside his extensive output as a painter and draughtsman, Minton produced numerous illustrations for books, book jackets, magazines and advertisements, and also designed posters, wallpaper and stage sets. Of independent means, he was able to support the work of several of his fellow artists, such as Lucian Freud, from whom he commissioned a portrait in 1952. Minton devoted much of his later career to teaching, in particular at the Royal College of Art in London. As his biographer Frances Spalding has noted, ‘Minton’s virtuoso performances with pencil or pen and ink commended him as a teacher’1, and he was a popular and inspirational figure among his students. Despite the fact that he enjoyed considerable early success, by the 1950s Minton’s work was becoming overshadowed by that of other artists in his circle, notably Freud and Francis Bacon. As a friend of his later recalled, ‘He saw himself as overtaken by fashions in art – abstract expressionism among others – for which he had no liking. While others of his contemporaries – Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan – held their ground and came through, Minton saw himself as obsolete, as eccentric and old-fashioned as Edward Lear. He could not come to terms with new developments and he lost faith in his own talent…He was, I suppose, one of those kingfisher-like specimens whose bright plumage briefly glinted then was gone.’2 Suffering from intense melancholy and alcoholism, Minton died, by his own hand, in January 1957.

Many of Minton’s drawings and watercolours of the late 1940s depict farms and record farming practices that were soon to be mechanized. This large sheet can be associated with a handful of watercolours

by Minton of pieces of farm machinery that were no longer in use, all dating from 1948 and of similar dimensions. A comparable watercolour of Derelict Farm Machinery (fig.1), signed and dated 1948, is in the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in California3, while a comparable watercolour of a Farm Machine was on the London art market in 20064.

1.

66 LUCIAN FREUD OM CH Berlin 1922-2011 London Boat, Connemara Pen and black ink and tempera, with touches of white heightening, on thin Whatman paper.

445 x 562 mm. (17 1/2 x 22 1/8 in.)

Watermark: J. WHATMAN / HAND MADE / 1923.

PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist by William G. Howell, Cambridge and London, probably in the early 1950s; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Phoebe Hoban, Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open, Boston and New York, 2014, pp.4142; James Finch, ‘Circa 1950; Lucian Freud at the Hanover Gallery’, in Christina Kennedy and Nathan O’Donnell, ed., Life Above Everything: Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats, exhibition catalogue, 2019, pp.101-103, illustrated p.99; Aidan Dunne, ‘Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats: A couple of outsiders side by side’, The Irish Times, 3 July 2019; Tom Walker, ‘An unlikely couple? Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats, reviewed’, Apollo-Magazine.com, 6 August 2019.

EXHIBITED: Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Life Above Everything: Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats, 2019-2020.

One of Lucian Freud’s finest drawings, this unusually large sheet is a major addition to his oeuvre.

Purchased from the artist not long after it was made, the drawing then remained in the same private collection for over sixty years. With its audacious composition and masterly combination of pen and ink and tempera, this impressive sheet is a magnificent testament to Freud’s skill as a draughtsman.

The early years of Freud’s career were primarily devoted to drawing, and the practice was a vital part of the artist’s development throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, when he created an important series of self-contained works in charcoal, ink, watercolour, coloured crayons, pencil and chalk. As the artist himself recalled, many years later, ‘I would have thought I did 200 drawings to every painting in those early days. I very much prided myself on my drawing. My work was in a sense very linear.’1 From the middle of the 1940s onwards, Freud’s drawings began to display a greater confidence in his powers of observation and expression, and his draughtsmanship reached new heights of refinement. As the artist’s biographer William Feaver has noted, ‘By the mid-1940’s, Freud’s drawings had an extraordinary allure. In charcoal, conté and chalk on Ingres paper he caught every texture from bamboo to corduroy...’2 The drawings - whether in pen, pencil or crayon - also began to display techniques associated with printmaking, like hatching, stippling and dotting, and it is perhaps not surprising that it was around this time that the artist began to experiment with etching.

By the middle of the 1950s, however, Freud had begun to move away from drawing altogether, fearing that the predominantly linear, graphic quality of his paintings was impeding his brushwork. (As he stated, ‘people thought and said and wrote that I was a very good draughtsman but my paintings were linear and defined by my drawing. [They said] you could tell what a good draughtsman I was from my painting…I thought if that’s at all true I must stop.’3) After the middle of the decade Freud produced drawings relatively infrequently, and certainly without the sustained productivity of the 1940s and early 1950s. In many respects, etching took the place of drawing as his preferred graphic medium.

The present sheet had previously been thought to date from a period of three weeks that Freud spent in Ireland in August 1948, not long after his marriage to Kitty Garman and the birth of their daughter

Annie. Together with his then lover, the young English painter Anne Dunn (b.1929), Freud stayed at the Zetland Arms hotel overlooking Cashel Bay in Connemara, in County Galway on the west coast of Ireland. This large drawing, however, in fact dates from a second visit that Freud made to Connemara a few years later, in 1951. Anne Dunn recalls that Boat, Connemara was executed in the late summer of that year, when she and her husband Michael Wishart, together with Freud and Kitty, returned to Connemara, where the two couples stayed for a week in a pair of rented cottages in Cashel Bay4.

Observed with Freud’s keen, analytical eye for a composition, the present sheet depicts a small steamboat drawn up on the shore near the Zetland Arms, on an inlet in Cashel Bay. Behind the boat, which was used to ferry travellers across the bay, is a low stone pier, built around 1860 and still there today, with Cashel Hill behind5. In the left background can be seen a Connemara pony - a breed originating in County Galway, where the harsh landscape resulted in a hardy, tough breed of horse which would have been used to haul loads of seaweed and kelp from the bay, while a small rowboat is visible in the right background.

This large and imposing drawing is a tour de force of penwork, with the stones of the pier, the water, and the boat and its ropes drawn with a precise technique of hatched and cross-hatched pen lines.

The lower hull of the boat - the only part of the drawing with any colour - is drawn in an ochre tone using tempera, to represent the copper hull sheathing of the boat. Compositionally, Freud has daringly chosen to leave both the foreground and the sky blank, with the upper and lower part of the paper untouched, allowing the subject of the drawing to be concentrated in the precise centre of the sheet.

In its use of a fine calligraphic pen line applied with a combination of stippling, dotting, hatching and crosshatching, the present sheet may be likened to drawings of the late 1940s or early 1950s, such as equally large Man at Night (Self-Portrait) of 1947-19486, or smaller pen drawings such as one of the artist’s young neighbour Charlie Lumley as Narcissus of 1948-1949, now in the Tate7, or a drawing of Hercules of 19498. The same precise technique is also found in a number of pencil and crayon drawings intended as illustrations for William Samson’s book The Equilibriad, published in 19489.

Soon after it was drawn, this drawing was acquired directly from the artist by the architect and collector William Gough (‘Bill’) Howell (1922-1974). Having served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, in the course of which he was awarded the DFC in 1943, Bill Howell returned to civilian life and became a student of architecture at Cambridge. There he founded the Cambridge Contemporary Art Trust, a picture-loan scheme open to any student or resident of Cambridge. Howell built an impressive collection for the Trust, buying works of art directly from artist’s studios, as well as gaining the patronage of such prominent figures as Henry Moore, Sir Kenneth Clark and Herbert Read. In 1948 Howell organized the first exhibition of the Cambridge Contemporary Art Trust, which included works by Freud, John Craxton and other artists.

The present sheet was, however, not part of the Trust’s collection, and was instead acquired from Freud by Howell for his own collection, possibly around 1954, when the artist and his second wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, moved into a flat in Soho that had been previously occupied by Howell.

Never exhibited or published, and completely unknown to scholars, Boat, Connemara remained in the possession of Howell’s descendants until 2012.

67 ALAN REYNOLDS Newmarket 1926-2014 Hurstpierpoint The Hillock at Dusk Watercolour and gouache. Signed and dated Reynolds / 55 in brown ink at the lower left. Titled “The Hillock at Dusk.” in brown ink on the verso.

517 x 302 mm. (20 3/8 x 11 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Ernest Brown & Phillips Ltd. (The Leicester Galleries), London, in 1956; Acquired from them by Shirley Thicman; Thence by descent to a private collection.

EXHIBITED: London, The Leicester Galleries, Artists of Fame and Promise II, 1956, no.38.

Born in Suffolk, Alan Munro Reynolds left school at the age of fourteen. He received little formal artistic training until leaving the Army in 1947, when he enrolled at the Woolwich Polytechnic School of Art. His work was included, as a non-member, in the London Group exhibitions of 1950 and 1951 and, while he was still enrolled at art school, in three exhibitions at the Redfern Gallery in London. He won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, where among his fellow students were Frank Auerbach, Bridget Riley, Peter Blake and Leon Kossoff. Although Reynolds received the Painting Medal in his first year, he did not remain at the RCA for long. In 1952 he exhibited twenty-four small paintings in his first one-man show at the Redfern Gallery, followed a year later by a second show there and, in 1954, a solo exhibition at the Durlacher Gallery in New York. Reynolds achieved almost instant success as a landscape painter, with the sale of nearly all of the paintings, drawings and watercolours he exhibited at the Redfern Gallery; indeed, by the time he was thirty his paintings had been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of South Australia, and the Tate, among other institutions. In later years Reynolds taught drawing at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and painting at the Saint Martin’s School of Art, both in London. After 1958 he largely abandoned drawing from nature, and began moving away from landscape painting in favour of a new interest in abstraction. A decade or so later, around 1967, Reynolds gave up painting entirely, and began working on constructed white reliefs. These abstract works made up the bulk of his output, along with woodcuts and tonal drawings, for the remaining forty years of his career.

Reynolds’s landscapes of the 1950s evince a love of nature, and are characterized by a strong emphasis on horizontal and vertical elements and subdued colours. As one scholar has recently noted, ‘Reynolds painted views of his native East Anglia and of Kent, the broad horizontal wheat fields and hop gardens respectively marked off with vertical wheat heads and poles. His style was descriptive but the compositions were often invented and elements arranged to reflect Reynolds’s sense of underlying abstract harmony.

Figures rarely appear. The colour is largely muted and especially so in the many watercolours that are executed solely in washes of brown or black. These highly stylized compositions in watercolour use to advantage the medium’s transparency by layering bands of tone over recognizable topographic and botanic motifs. Technically ambitious and reflectively pastoral, Reynolds’s paintings articulated abstract forms without neglecting realistic motifs.’1 This large watercolour was drawn in 1955, the same year that the art critic Robert Melville wrote of Reynolds’s landscapes that, ‘If we are regaining confidence in the future of the most rewarding tradition in English art, it is thanks to the immense promise of his work and the evidence of his already remarkable development.’2 As Melville further noted, in the catalogue introduction for Reynolds’s fourth one-man show, entitled The Four Seasons, at the Redfern Gallery in June 1956, ‘Alan Reynolds is the only painter I know who has succeeded in conveying to us his sense of a scale stretched far beyond the limits of sight through the medium of visionary landscapes which remain in close correspondence with the appearance of the natural scene.’3

68 FRANK AUERBACH Born 1931 Recto: Study after J. M. W. Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander Verso: A Building Site Pencil, with stumping, with touches of oil paint. The verso in pencil. The verso squared for transfer in pencil and numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4 on all four sides. Inscribed dark in pencil on the verso.

254 x 365 mm. (10 x 14 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Marlborough Gallery, London, in 1988; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Barnaby Wright, ‘Creative Destruction: Frank Auerbach and the Rebuilding of London’, in Barnaby Wright, ed., Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62, exhibition catalogue, London, 2009-2010, pp.29-31, fig.13 (where dated c.1952); Catherine Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London, 2015, p.56, illustrated p.57 (where dated c.1953).

EXHIBITED: London, Marlborough Fine Art, Works on Paper by Contemporary Artists, 1988, no.7.

Throughout much of his career, beginning in the late 1940s, Frank Auerbach has made drawings after Old Master paintings in the collection of the National Gallery in London. He entered the Saint Martin’s School of Art in 1948, and its close proximity to the National Gallery meant that he was able to make daily or weekly visits to the museum to draw after the Old Masters; a practice he maintained until the late 1980s. As Robert Hughes has written, ‘Auerbach’s attachment to the National Gallery in London is deep and almost fanatical; throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s he and his friend [Leon] Kossoff kept up what struck other artists and students as the quaint habit of going to Trafalgar Square at least once a week to make drawings from certain paintings there.’1 Among the paintings Auerbach has copied in the National Gallery are works by Caravaggio, Claude, Constable, Degas, Gainsborough, Goya, Hals, Poussin, Rembrandt, Rubens, Seurat, Tiepolo, Titian, Turner and Veronese.

Referring to his frequent trips to the National Gallery, Auerbach has said that ‘it reminds me of what is required. All the great painters: there’s a unity like a great wind blowing everything together, you get a glimpse of that.’2 In another interview, he noted, ‘My most complimentary and my most typical reaction to a good painting is to want to rush home and do some more work. When the bus services were better I used to go to the National Gallery more frequently, just go and come back. And I find that towards the end of a painting I actually go and draw from pictures more to remind myself of what quality is and what’s actually demanded of paintings. Without these touchstones we’d be floundering.’3 And, in another conversation, he added, ‘I have hardly ever drawn from a modern picture – I know how it’s made. When it is one by an old master, I know they are marvellous, but I can’t see what is the secret that makes them so.’4 Drawn in the early 1950s, the present sheet is one of relatively few surviving youthful drawings by Auerbach. The recto of the sheet contains a very free and spirited copy after J. M. W. Turner’s large painting of The Parting of Hero and Leander (fig.1), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1837 and today in the National Gallery5. Of all the paintings in the National Gallery, the landscape paintings of the 18th and early 19th century British School - notably the works of Turner, Constable and Gainsborough - seem to have had the most profound effect on Auerbach. As he has said, ‘I think I have a sort of penchant for the whole of English painting. It is as though it isn’t held up by a scaffolding of theory or of philosophy...that it was arrived at empirically, as though there is a sort of fresh wind blowing through a room of English painting, that is nowhere else in the National Gallery. I find myself at home here.’6 The verso of the sheet, which is squared for transfer, depicts a building site in London; a theme that occupied the artist for much of the 1950s. Auerbach was fascinated by the intense programme

recto

of building and reconstruction being undertaken in post-war London in the late 1940s and 1950s, following the devastation caused by the Blitz. As he recalled in 2007, ‘It was almost fortuitous that just after the war, when I did these things, London was a ruin, and so I painted bomb sites and building sites and so on, which looked absolutely marvellous: grand mountain landscapes all over London.’7 Auerbach painted an important series of building site pictures between 1952 and 1962, and, in keeping with his practice for much of his later career, often turned to the study of paintings in the National Gallery to help him work through his ideas and resolve problems in his own compositions. As he has said, ‘I’m not copying a picture, I’m trying to gain some sort of inspiration from the fact that somebody’s succeeded in grasping something that seems relevant, where I have at that point failed to grasp it in my own picture.’8 Indeed, both sides of this drawing can be related to the artist’s interest in painting building sites in London. As Catherine Lampert has noted of the present sheet, ‘Auerbach’s Study after Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander (c.1953), which is a drawing based on a work in the National Gallery, puts emphasis on the grand buildings of Abydos, with spectators lined up on the dock, and the storm over the Hellespont in which Leander drowned. A gridded building-site sketch on the verso curiously transports the eye into deep space; the ideal architecture and the lightning bolt in Turner’s painting is here a diagonal stroke that we read as a huge beam being cantilevered into position.’9 Another scholar has recently commented at length on the relationship between the recto and verso of this large drawing: ‘Auerbach’s exploration of London’s building sites was entwined at a more profound level with his experience of Old Master and Romantic painters in the National Gallery. In a surviving sketchbook page from this period we find a sketch of a building site on the verso of a study after Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander, which makes the connection explicit. Undoubtedly there would have been many other comparable studies from different paintings and building sites in sketchbooks that he has destroyed.

Turner’s painting conjoined the motifs and painterly effects that contemporary viewers, when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art in 1837, would have associated with an expression of the sublime.

Dramatic storms breaking over a turbulent sea are set amidst a treacherous-looking mountain landscape.

A fantastical city (based upon the study of classical ruins) is stacked precariously upon the rocks, stretching up into the hazy mists of the sky. This all speaks of the sublime, ineffable experience of overwhelming terror and excitement that gripped the later eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century imagination. The energy of Auerbach’s study suggests that it also gripped him. It is clear that he understood the painting to be a battle between the structuring geometric forms of the architecture and the wild destructive forces of the storm-possessed elements...For Auerbach, the building sites were a contemporary equivalent of a sublime landscape – one that could inspire the fear, excitement and strangeness of an uncharted mountain terrain.’10

1.

recto

verso

69 FIKRET MUALLA Constantinople 1903-1967 Reillanne Barges on the Seine Gouache on paper. Signed Fikret / Moualla in pencil at the lower right.

332 x 545 mm. (13 1/8 x 21 1/2 in.) [image] 347 x 557 mm. (13 3/4 x 22 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Private collection, Normandy; Edouard Dumont, Paris; Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, London, in 2008; Private collection, London.

EXHIBITED: New York and London, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Master Drawings, 2008, no.59.

Born into a well-to-do family in Ottoman Constantinople, Fikret Mualla Saygi was educated at a French school in Galatasaray and left Turkey in 1919, at the age of seventeen, to study engineering in Switzerland and Germany. Living in Berlin, he began to show signs of the alcoholism and extreme paranoia that was to plague him throughout his life, and for which he frequently received hospital treatment. It was in Berlin that Mualla was encouraged to take up painting, although he was almost completely self-taught, and he soon abandoned his engineering career. In 1926, on his return to Constantinople (soon to be officially renamed Istanbul), he settled in the Beyoğlu district of the city. He worked as a theatrical scene painter and art teacher, and also illustrated a book by the eminent Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and contributed drawings to the literary journal Yeni Adam.

Despite living a dissolute life in poverty and having no studio of his own - he kept many of his sketchbooks, pencils and brushes in the several pockets of a voluminous overcoat that he constantly wore - Mualla was included as one of five Turkish painters in a Russian book dedicated to the art of different countries, published in 1934, the same year that a small exhibition of his work was held. Mualla had several stays in the Bakirköy Psychiatric Hospital in Istanbul, where he was allowed to continue to paint. He once attempted to interest the director of the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts in his work, but when he tried to gift a painting for the academy’s modern art collection, it was summarily rejected, and in anger and frustration Mualla threw all the works he had brought with him into the waters of the nearby Bosphorus. Nevertheless, he won a significant commission to paint thirty picturesque views of Istanbul for the Turkish pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, and with the payment for this work decided to leave Turkey for France.

At the end of 1938 or the very beginning of 1939, Mualla moved to Paris, where he continued to live in abject poverty and was soon mired in debt. He had little time for the artists who congregated on the Place du Tertre in Montmartre, which he described as being full of ‘fake painters selling fake works to fake collectors for fake money’, but spent a brief period of time studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and in the studio schools of the artists Othon Friesz and André Lhote. Mualla’s first paintings were sold to waiters and bartenders, usually in exchange for food or drink; a practice that was to continue throughout his career. A difficult and belligerent character, Mualla was institutionalized at several times, largely due to his alcoholism. He often got into fights, and was frequently in trouble with the police.

As the Turkish painter and poet Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu later recalled of Fikret Mualla in Paris, ‘Imagine an artist responsible for nothing but painting pictures whenever the impulse takes him. An artist who is prepared to go hungry and thirsty three days a week; who picks up cigarette butts from the street as if gathering berries in the countryside. An artist who, the moment he manages to sell a few pictures with the help of friends and acquaintances, gets drunk on the hardest liquor, eats the most expensive food, and rages

at those around him, flinging the most outrageous insults.’1 One day, at the Parisian artist’s café La Palette, Mualla met Picasso who, impressed with his talent, offered to help him find lodging on the condition that he give up drinking, which he refused to do. Nonetheless, Picasso bought a painting from him and also gave him a drawing of his own, although Mualla subsequently gave the drawing to a bartender in exchange for a week of free drinks.

The personal troubles of the artist were not, however, reflected in his work, which is characterized by vibrant colours and happy figures. Working mainly in watercolour and gouache, and signing his name ‘Moualla’, he produced numerous scenes of Parisian jazz clubs, restaurants, bars and cafes, as well as circus scenes and views along the quais of the Seine. In the early 1950s Parisian gallery owners began to take an interest in Mualla’s work, and he had his first one-man exhibition in November 1954, followed by a second the year after; both were very successful. Further exhibitions followed at the Marcel Bernheim gallery in 1957 and 1958, as well as at the galleries of Katia Granoff and Dina Vierny. Among Mualla’s patrons was the industrialist Louis Lhermine, who supported him financially and came to own several hundred gouaches by the artist, although the relationship soured when Mualla attempted to sell the same painting to both Lhermine and a Turkish businessman. Another important and loyal patron was Mme. Fernande Anglès, with whom the artist sometimes stayed in the South of France. Although now moderately successful, he continued to drink to excess and was prone to fits of paranoia and depression.

His health continued to decline, and in 1962 he suffered a stroke which resulted in his left side being paralyzed with hemiplegia. Mualla left Paris to recuperate in the South of France, eventually settling in the Provençal hilltop village of Reillanne in the Alpes-Maritimes, where he lived for the remaining five years of his life. As he wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘In my opinion, every artist should suffer hardship, anguish and hunger. Only after that should they enjoy life…That is my fate. My life has passed in a struggle against poverty. Now in this quiet village, I submit to living peacefully by myself waiting for the final period of my life as ordained by God. Apart from this, I have no problems! No pretensions. We have seen every kind of circumstance the world has to offer, we have tasted very few of the pleasures of life. Today what is left but for my tongue to recall the past and my brush to paint?’2 Fikret Mualla died in Reillanne in 1967, having never returned to Paris. In 1974, more than thirty years after he had left Turkey, his body was taken to Istanbul to be buried with honour. A retrospective exhibition of his work was mounted in Ankara in 1976, while a more comprehensive show was held at the newly opened Istanbul Modern museum in 2005.

This large gouache drawing is a splendid example of Mualla’s vibrant, painterly style. The subject of barges on the Seine and the Marne rivers was a particular favourite of the artist, and appears in several gouaches, most of which are today in private collections3.

70 GLUCK (HANNAH GLUCKSTEIN) London 1895-1978 Steyning Landscape with a Church Tower Black ink and black wash on blue paper.

126 x 126 mm. (5 x 5 in.)

PROVENANCE: A gift to the artist to Arnold Hunt1; Thence by descent.

Born into a wealthy Jewish family in London, Hannah Gluckstein rebelled against her conservative upbringing as a teenager, dressing in men’s clothes and rejecting her given name, eventually insisting on being referred to simply as ‘Gluck’. She attended the St. John’s Wood Art School and spent her early years in the artist’s colony of Lamorna in southwest Cornwall. Over the course of her career Gluck painted landscapes, theatrical scenes, exquisite floral still lives and, in particular, a series of stylish portraits. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Dorien Leigh Galleries in 1924, and all sixty works in the show were sold. A second exhibition of forty-four works was mounted at the Fine Art Society in 1926, and again met with much critical and commercial success. Around the same time Gluck moved into a large house and studio in Hampstead and lived there with her lover, the society florist Constance Spry, whose work inspired her to begin painting the large flower compositions for which she became well known. For her next exhibition in 1932, she transformed the galleries of the Fine Art Society into a ‘Gluck room’, decorated with wall panels and pilasters in a muted colour scheme to create a harmonious setting for her work. She also had her paintings framed in a white, three-stepped frame of her own patented design, which came to be known as the Gluck frame. The exhibition of twentynine paintings, including eleven of flowers, was again a triumph, and was followed by another equally successful show of thirty-three pictures in 1937.

In between these two exhibitions Gluck met the one great love of her life, the socialite and philanthropist Nesta Obermer, with whom she was to have an intense relationship until 1944, and who remained a lifelong friend. After the 1937 exhibition, Gluck spent most of her time travelling with Nesta and produced very little work before the outbreak of the Second World War, which destroyed the world of high society that she had flourished in. Her London home was requisitioned by the Auxiliary Fire Service and she moved to a small house in East Sussex. She began suffering from what seems to have been panic attacks, which prevented her from being very productive. In 1944 Gluck moved to the Chantry House in the West Sussex town of Steyning, the home of the sisters and journalists Nora and Edith Shackleton Heald. The latter was to become the artist’s longtime partner, and Gluck lived with her at the Chantry House for the rest of her life. She painted little, and instead focussed her attention, for more than a decade, on a personal campaign to improve the quality of artist’s materials and establish a recognized British standard for them. She did not exhibit in public again for over thirty-five years, until a retrospective exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1973. Gluck died in 1978, at the age of eighty-two.

It was in her early years as an artist in Lamorna in Cornwall that Gluck first developed an abiding love of landscape. Her landscape compositions were almost always characterized by a large expanse of sky above a very low horizon. In some unpublished ‘Notes on Landscape Painting’, written in 1940, she recalled of the work she produced in Cornwall: ‘My landscapes were the first that truthfully showed the immediate impression one gets there – that of very little land and great expanses of sky...The sky is a bowl, not a flat backcloth and its colour and light reflect in every blade of grass, every twig…the colour of the sky permeates the landscape under that sky…Wind and weather change continuously, a landscape is chameleon to the light.’2 Gluck loved Cornwall and kept a studio there throughout her life, first at Lamorna until 1947, and from 1953 onwards in the nearby village of St. Buryan. The present sheet is closely related to a small Cornish landscape painting of 1964, in which an identical church tower probably the late 15th century parish church of St. Buryan - appears on the horizon3.

actual size

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

No.5 Debacq Cathedral of Monreale, Sicily Postcard, 1937 Photo © Mary Evans / Grenville Collins Postcard Collection No.39 Cézanne Fig.1 Paul Cézanne Mont Sainte-Victoire Oil on canvas.

Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts Bequest of Robert H. Tannahill Inv. 70.161 Photo © Bridgeman Images No.48 Le Sidaner Fig.1 Henri Le Sidaner Le jardin blanc au crepuscule Oil on canvas.

Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium Inv. 4068 Photo © RMFAB, Brussels No.65 Minton Fig.1 John Minton Derelict Farm Machinery Pen and black ink and watercolour.

In the collection of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California No.68 Auerbach Fig.1 Joseph Mallord William Turner The Parting of Hero and Leander Oil on canvas.

London, The National Gallery Turner Bequest, 1856 Inv. NG521 Photo © The National Gallery, London

NOTES TO THE CATALOGUE

No.1 Alphonse-Nicolas-Michel Mandevare 1. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, BN Est., DC 50/fol.

2. Thirty-two large landscape drawings by Mandevare appeared at auction at Phillips in London in 1991 and 1992. Two drawings by the artist are illustrated in Chiara Stefani, ‘Dessiner le paysage entre XVIIIe et XIXe siècles’, Revue de l’Art, 2004, No.1, p.62, figs.3 and 4.

3. Inv. 194.29.9.1 – 194.29.9.13; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 5 July 1994, lot 105 (unsold). The drawings in the Vassar album, which are somewhat smaller in scale than the present sheet, are visible at http://emuseum.vassar.edu/view/objects/aslist/search@/0/titledesc?t:state:flow=93e82fb5-9973-4983-a549-b7498f64666a

[accessed 9 April 2020].

4. Images of the two plates, from a copy of the Principes raisonnes du paysage in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, are illustrated at https://gallica. bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5562983v/f98.image.r=mandevare [accessed 10 April 2020] and https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5562983v/f100. image.r=mandevare [accessed 10 April 2020]. The images are described in the book: ‘La saule indigen, différent fort peu de l’exotique, qui saura faire l’un, fera sans peine l’autre, la forme des branches et la direction des feuilles sont les seules choses à observer.’

5. William M. Griswold et al, The World Observed: Five Centuries of Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2001, p.69, no.60 (entry by Cara Denison); Matthew Hargraves, Varieties of Romantic Experience: British, Danish, Dutch, French and German Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp, exhibition catalogue, New Haven, 2010, p.104, no.84 (where dated 1829); Ryskamp sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 25 January 2011, part of lot 189. The drawing measures 462 x 612 mm.

6. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 7 July 2011, lot 119.

No.2 Achille-Etna Michallon 1. Esther Bell et al, The Age of Elegance: The Joan Taub Ades Collection, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2011, pp.72-73, no.29 (entry by Jennifer Tonkovich).

2. Inv. RF 13 786; Vincent Pomarède et al, Achille-Etna Michallon, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1994, p.121, no.36, illustrated in colour p.71.

No.3 Joseph Michael Gandy 1. That Gandy was certainly held in high regard by Soane is shown in the comments made by the architect in a lecture presented at the Royal Academy in 1813: ‘A superior manner of Drawing is absolutely necessary, indeed it is impossible not to admire the beauties and almost magical effects in the architectural drawings of a Clérisseau, a Gandy, or a Turner.’

2. Inv. Vol 163. Images of the watercolours in the album are visible at http://collections.soane.org/THES84383 [accessed 22 November 2020].

3. A selection of pages from the two Westmacott albums is illustrated in Brian Lukacher, Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England, London, 2006, pp.81-83, figs.85-92, p.124, fig.138 and p.183, fig.189. Others are illustrated in New York, Richard L. Feigen & Co., op.cit., no.37.

4. Among the landscapes depicted were views of Dorking, Box Hill, ‘near Southend’, ‘near Leatherhead’, ‘Leith Hill from Cobham Park’, Epsom, Brighton, ‘between Brighton and Shoreham’, ‘from Holingbury Hill’, Hove, ‘near Shoreham’, ‘Southwick near Shoreham’, Devil’s Dyke, Ramsgate, Rottingdean, ‘near Lord Cavendish’s’, Eastbourne, ‘Chalk pit, near Eastbourne’, Beachy Head, ‘near Peckham Rye’, ‘London from Hill above Peckham Rye’, Purfleet, Kensington Garden, ‘near Newhaven’, ‘near Norwood’, Yeovil, Devonshire Hill and Hampstead.

5. McCullagh, ed., op.cit., pp.78-79, no.28. The watercolour is inscribed ‘31 Aug. 22 7 o/c E. S.’ No.4 Joseph-Frédéric Debacq 1. Henry Gally Knight, The Normans in Sicily, London, 1838, pp.288-290.

No.5 Joseph-Frédéric Debacq 1. William Henry Bartlett, Pictures from Sicily, London, 1853, pp.176-179.

No.6 John Frederick Lewis 1. The first known owner of this drawing was Charles Baring Wall (1795-1853), who served as Member of Parliament for, at various times, the constituencies of Guildford, Wareham, Weymouth and Salisbury. At his death in 1853 he bequeathed his entire estate to his cousin, the banker Thomas Baring (1799-1873), who was briefly the Conservative MP for Great Yarmouth and later served as MP for Huntingdonshire for nearly thirty years.

2. Michael Lewis, John Frederick Lewis, R.A. 1805-1876, Leigh-on-Sea, 1978, p.17.

3. New York and London, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Master Drawings, 2014, no.20. The drawing, on blue-grey paper, measures 270 x 373 mm., and was the final study for a lithograph reproduced in colour in Lewis’s Sketches and Drawings of the Alhambra of 1835.

4. Inv. 1963.P.16; Lewis, op.cit., p.65, no.140 (not illustrated). An image of the drawing, which is signed and dated 24 June 1833, is visible at https:// www.boltonlams.co.uk/boltonlams/homepage/20/details?entry_id=12520 [accessed 24 November 2020].

5. The watercolour is visible at https://www.watercolourworld.org/painting/patio-de-los-arrayanes-alhambra-tww001163 [accessed 24 November 2020].

No.7 Gustav Friedrich Hetsch 1. Inv. A 13308; Copenhagen, Kunstindustrimuseet, Arkitekten G. F. Hetsch 1788-1864, exhibition catalogue, 1988, p.30, no.29, illustrated p.7.

2. Inv. A 13302, A 3565, 15633, A 12672, A 9384a and A9384b; Ibid., pp.28-29, nos.19-24, one (no.20; Inv. A 3565, signed and dated 1831) illustrated p.8.

3. Inv. 2012.68. The drawing is visible at https://www.artic.edu/artworks/213428/a-view-in-san-lorenzo-fuori-le-mura-rome [accessed 11 April 2020], where dated c.1820.

No.8 Eugène Delacroix 1. Arlette Sérullaz, “Delacroix’s drawing is to that of Ingres as fire is to ice”, in Arlette Sérullaz, Drawing Gallery: Delacroix, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2004, p.12.

2. Théophile Silvestre, Eugène Delacroix: documents nouveaux, Paris, 1864, pp.31-32; quoted in translation in Matthew Simms, Cézanne’s Watercolors: Between Drawing and Painting, New Haven and London, 2008, p.19.

3. ‘Le pays est magnifique. C’est la montagne dans toute sa majesté. Il y a vraiment à chaque pas, à chaque détour de sentier des sites ravissants: ayez avec cela les pieds d’une chèvre pour escalader les montées et vous avez la jouissance complète du pays.’; André Joubin, Correspondance generale d’Eugène Delacroix, Paris, 1935-1938, Vol.II, pp.223-224.

4. Joubin, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.221-222; quoted in translation in Arlette Sérullaz, ‘Chronology’, in Arlette Sérullaz et al, Delacroix: The Late Work, exhibition catalogue, Paris and Philadelphia, 1998-1999, p.18.

5. ‘La beauté de cette nature des Pyrénées n’est pas de celles qu’on peut espérer de render avec la peinture d’une manière heureuse. Indépendamment de l’impossibilité d’un travail suivi, tout cela est trop gigantesque et on ne sait par où commencer au milieu de ces masses et de cette multitude de détails.’; Joubin, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.227-228.

6. ‘…le gigantesque et tout cela me déconcerte. Il n’y a jamais de papier assez grand pour donner l’idée de ces masses et les détails sont si nombreaux qu’il n’est pas de patience qui puisse en triompher.’; Joubin, op.cit., Vol.II, p.229.

7. A. Sérullaz, op.cit., 2004, p.87, under no.39.

8. Inv. RF 9449-9451, RF 9758 and RF 9795; Claudine Ganeval and Pierre C. Lamicq, Eugène Delacroix aux Pyrénées: Dessins et aquarelles, Lourdes, 1975, pls.II, IV, VII-IX; Maurice Sérullaz, Musée du Louvre: Inventaire géneral des dessins, école Française: Dessins d’Eugène Delacroix, Paris, 1984, Vol.I, pp.432-433, nos.1186-1190. The first of these is illustrated in colour in A. Sérullaz, op.cit., 2004, p.87, no.39, pl.39.

9. Inv. 1970, 1212.47; Ganeval and Lamicq, ibid., pl.I; Salé, op.cit., Vol.II, p.23, fig.12. The sheet measures 152 x 284 mm.

10. Inv. 2014.37.1. This watercolour, which once belonged to Edgar Degas and measures 188 x 317 mm., is visible at https://artgallery.yale.edu/ collections/objects/190266 [accessed 7 May 2020].

11. Marie-Pierre Salé, Eugène Delacroix: Carnet <<des Pyrenees>>, Paris, 2016, Vol.I (fac-simile), illustrated folio 8 recto (dated 25 July 1845), folios 8 verso and 9 recto (dated 26 July 1845) and folios 14 verso and 15 recto; Vol.II (étude), pp.19 and 61 and detail illustrated p.6.

12. ‘Le charme particulier de l’aquarelle, auprès de laquelle toute peinture à l’huile paraît toujours rousse et pisseuse, tient à cette transparence continuelle du papier; la preuve, c’est quelle perd de cette qualité quand on la gouache quelque peu. Elle la perd entièrement dans une gouache.’; In a journal entry dated 7 October 1847; Eugène Delacroix [ed. Michèle Hannoosh], Journal, Paris, 2009, p.399.

13. Alain de Leiris, ‘From Delacroix to Cezanne’, in Alain de Leiris and Carol Hynning Smith, From Delacroix to Cezanne: French Watercolor Landscapes of the Nineteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, College Park and elsewhere, 1977-1978, p.44.

No.9 Jean-François Millet 1. The J.F.M. stamp at the bottom of the sheet is the studio stamp (or cachet d’atelier) that was applied to the unsigned drawings in Millet’s studio at the time of his death in 1875. Most of these drawings were dispersed in the Millet atelier sale held in Paris in May 1875, or at the sale of the collection of the artist’s widow in April 1894.

2. Robert L. Herbert, Jean-François Millet, exhibition catalogue, London, 1976, p.111.

3. Inv. 17.1481; Alexandra R. Murphy, Jean-François Millet, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 1984, pp.10-11, no.6.

4. Inv. RF 11361. The drawing, on blue-grey paper, is visible at http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr/detail/oeuvres/1/23598-Baigneuse-nue-les-piedsdans-leau-max [accessed 23 April 2020].

5. Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, Paris, 1921, Vol.I, illustrated between pp.56 and 57, fig.33; Lucien Lepoittevin, JeanFrançois Millet, Vol.II: L’ambiguité de l’image, essai, Paris, 1973, p.62, fig.47; Herbert, op.cit., p.53, no.18.

6. New York, W. M. Brady & Co., Old Master Drawings, 1999, no.34.

7. Inv. 1927.4434; Herbert, op.cit., pp.53-55, no.19; Alexandra R. Murphy et al, Jean-François Millet: Drawn into the Light, exhibition catalogue, Williamstown and elsewhere, 1999, p.39, no.5.

No.10 Carl Ludvig Messmann 1. The mount of this drawing bears the drystamp of the 19th century Danish collector Benjamin Wolff (1790-1866), who owned a number of drawings by Messmann.

No.11 Bernhard Fiedler 1. W. A. Cadell, A Journey in Carniola, Italy, and France, in the Years 1817, 1818, Edinburgh, 1820, pp.117-118.

2. Augustus J. C. Hare, Cities of Northern and Central Italy, London, 1876, Vol.I, p.280.

3. John Cam Hobhouse, Lord Broughton, Italy: Remarks Made in Several Visits from the Year 1816 to 1854, London, 1859, Vol.I, p.76.

No.12 Viggo Fauerholdt 1. The collection of drawings assembled by the 19th century Danish collector Benjamin Wolff (1790-1866) remained with his descendants for nearly 180 years.

2. Another painting of the coast of Bornholm by Fauerholdt is in the collection of the Deutsches Schifffahrtsmuseum (the German Maritime Museum) in Bremerhaven.

3. William Pembroke Fetridge, Harper’s Hand-Book for Travellers in Europe and the East, New York, 1883, Vol.III, pp.1346-1347.

4. Henrik Vensild, ‘Viggo Fauerholdt – en maler på Bornholm i forrige århundrede’, Jul paa Bornholm, 1985, illustrated p.34. An image of the painting, which measures 56 x 92 cm., is also visible at https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/randcleven-at-gudhjem-on-the-eastcoast-ofbornholm/XQHvaKoSYItqgg [accessed 18 November 2020].

No.13 Rodolphe Bresdin 1. Odilon Redon, A soi-même, Paris, 1922 [1961 ed.], p.165, translated in ‘Odilon Redon – Writings on Bresdin’, in New York, Museum of Modern Art and Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Bresdin, exhibition catalogue, 1961-1962, p.160.

2. Trevor Dance, Rodolphe Brèsdin: An Incorrigible Bohemian, London, 2016, p.244.

3. Bresdin also made extensive use of papier calque to copy illustrations from books or magazines, a practice he adopted as early as the late 1840s or early 1850s, and which provided him with a rich and varied source of motifs to use in his own work.

4. Anonymous sale, Paris, Artcurial, 26 March 2014, lot 89. The dimensions of the sheet are 80 x 130 mm.

5. Inv. 1949.75; Dirk van Gelder and John Sillevis, Rodolphe Bresdin 1822-1885, exhibition catalogue, The Hague, 1978-1979, p.166, no.150; Dance, op.cit., illustrated p.250. The sheet measures 133 x 222 mm.

No.14 Samuel Palmer 1. Raymond Lister, who listed the present work as ‘unlocated since 1861’, had suggested, incorrectly, that the drawing exhibited in 1861 with the title In Vintage Time may have been identical with a watercolour Harvesting the Vineyard of 1859, now in the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery in Bedford (Inv. P117; Lister, op.cit., p.187, no.573; Evelyn Joll, Cecil Higgins Art Gallery; Watercolours and Drawings, Bedford, 2002, p.196, no.P.117).

2. Ibid., p.887.

3. Inv. 2019-2; Lister, op.cit., p.189, no.586; New York and London, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Master Drawings, 2016, no.29. Signed and dated 1861, the watercolour measures 202 x 432 mm.

4. Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer, London, 2011, p.254.

5. Society of Painters in Water Colours [Second and Concluding Notice]’, op.cit., p.540.

6.

William Vaughan, Samuel Palmer: Shadows on the Wall, New Haven and London, 2015, pp.270-271.

7. Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman’), London, Sotheby’s, 7 June 2006, lot 414 (sold for £45,600).

8. Vaughan, op.cit., p.2.

No.15 Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot 1. The French aristocrat Comte Armand Doria (1824-1896) owned almost eighty paintings and numerous drawings by Corot, including twentytwo works purchased at the 1875 sale. As one scholar has noted of Doria, ‘His taste was quite specific, with a preference for the artist’s most direct impressions; yet he saw Corot’s oeuvre very much as a whole and admired both his early and late work.’; Michael Pantazzi, ‘Corot and His Collectors’, in Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi and Vincent Pomarède, Corot, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Ottawa and New York, 1996-1997, p.402.

2. Peter Galassi, Corot in Italy: Open Air Painting and the Classical-Landscape Tradition, New Haven and London, 1991, p.179.

3. Michael Pantazzi, ‘The Greatest Landscape Painter of Our Time’, in Tinterow, Pantazzi and Pomarède, op.cit., p.147.

4. Inv. RF 8915; Alfred Robaut, L’oeuvre de Corot: Catalogue raisonné et illustré, Paris, 1905, Vol.I, illustrated p.125 (where dated 1852); Dorit Schäfer, ‘“Ich hate es nie eilig mit den Details…”. Corots späte Zeichnungen’, in Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Camille Corot: Natur und Traum, exhibition catalogue, 2012-2013, p.249, fig.1, where incorrectly dated c.1843.

5. Inv. 8728, 29. The drawing is visible online at http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr/detail/oeuvres/56/119627-Croquis-max [accessed 1 December 2020].

6. Inv. 8728, 12; Robaut, op.cit., Vol,I, illustrated p.143 (where dated c.1855). The drawing is also visible at http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr/detail/ oeuvres/12/119582-Croquis-max [accessed 1 December 2020].

7. Inv. RF 8810; Nathalie Michel-Szelechowska, ‘Ein Skizzenbuch Corots als Indikator für sein schöpferisches Denken und seine kulturelle Prägung’, in Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, op.cit., p.285 (where dated c.1870).

8. Inv. x1941-97; Robaut, op.cit., Vol.IV, no.2998; Princeton, Art Museum, 19th and 20th Century French Drawings from the Art Museum, Princeton University: An Introduction, exhibition catalogue, 1972, pp.42-43, unnumbered. The drawing can also be related to a small group of etchings

by Corot known as Memories of Italy, in which a building in the distance is viewed through a repoussoir element of trees in the foreground (Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, op.cit., pp.323-324, nos.167 and 169).

No.16 Paul Huet 1. ‘Nous sommes dans le véritable Cornwall, pays vraiment pittoresque, l’ancienne Bretagne qui est à l’Angleterre ce que la Bretagne française est à la Normandie…Des détails charmants, une fraîcheur inouïe, expression générale de toute l’Angleterre et beaucoup de rapports avec la Normandie et l’entrée de la Bretagne, voilà ce que vous trouverez.’; René Paul Huet, Paul Huet, d’après ses notes, sa correspondance, ses contemporains, Paris, 1911, p.317.

2. London, Heim Gallery, Paintings by Paul Huet (1803-1869) and Some Contemporary French Sculpture, 1969, p.23, no.92, illustrated pl.92. The watercolour, which measures 230 x 360 mm., is inscribed by the artist ‘La grotte du chant de mer’.

3. New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 2001, no.46. The drawing is a promised gift to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. 4. Pierre Miquel, Paul Huet. De l’aube romantique à l‘aube impressioniste, Sceaux, 1962, illustrated pp.205 and 207.

No.17 Victor Hugo 1. Hugo and his family lived first in Jersey from 1852 to 1855, and then in Guernsey, where they settled in October 1855 and remained until their return to France in 1870.

2. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Lettre à M. le Directeur de la Revue Française sur le Salon de 1859’, Revue Française, 1859, p.524; quoted in translation in Kevin Salatino, ‘Ego Hugo’, Master Drawings, Winter 2019, p.534.

3. Quoted in translation in Marie-Laure Prévost, ‘The Techniques of a Poet-Draftsman’, in Florian Rodari et al, Shadows of a Hand: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1998, p.31.

4. Quoted in translation in Florian Rodari, ‘Victor Hugo, a Precursor a posteriori’, in ibid., p.25.

5. Pierre Georgel, Drawings by Victor Hugo, exhibition catalogue, London, 1974, unpaginated, between nos. 22 and 25.

No.18 Edgar Degas 1. At the fourth and final Degas studio sale, held in July 1919, the present sheet was framed and sold together with a study of houses at the foot of a hill, also in pastel (Lemoisne, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.114-115, no.231). The pair sold for 3,300 francs, and both pastel landscapes shared the same subsequent provenance until 2008.

2. Lemoisne, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.112-121, nos.217-253. An excellent survey of the pastel landscapes of this period is found in Kendall, op.cit., pp.85107.

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

4. Christopher Lloyd, Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels, London, 2014, p.83.

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

6. Notebook 23, pp.58-59; Théodore Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar Degas, Oxford, 1976, Vol.I, p.118; quoted in translation in Ann Dumas, ‘Degas, The Secret Landscapist’, in Ann Dumas et al, Edgar Degas: The Last Landscapes, exhibition catalogue, Columbus and Copenhagen, 2006-2007, p.16.

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

8. Kendall, op.cit., p.99.

9. Letter from Joseph Durand-Ruel to the Galerie Durand-Ruel, New York, dated 5 July 1919; quoted in translation in Caroline Durand-Ruel Godfroy, ‘Behind the Scenes: Durand-Ruel and the Degas Sales’, in Ann Dumas et al, The Private Collection of Edgar Degas, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1997, p.268.

10. ‘Ils sont nombreux, car M. Comiot a su reconnaître que dans ce domaine, Degas n’était pas moins un maître que dans la representation du corps humain…la plupart furent exécutés au bord de la mer, et nous montrent des grèves plates et désertes, des dunes à l’herbe rare et grise. Des sites aussi nus, aussi vides d’éléments plastiques, Degas tire des merveilles: n’est-ce pas là la marquee du grand artiste?’; François Fosca, ‘La Collection Comiot’, L’amour de l’Art, April 1927, pp.113-114.

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

12. E-mail correspondence, July 2011.

13. Kendall, op.cit., p.86. Other pastel landscapes from this series are today in the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy and the Albertina in Vienna, as well as in several private collections.

No.20 Ferdinand Heilbuth 1. Charles Yriarte, ‘Ferdinand Heilbuth’, in Society of French Aquarellists, Paris, n.d., p.205 (translation of the same author’s text in Société d’Aquarellistes Français: ouvrage d’art, Paris, 1883).

2. ‘The French Water-Colour Society’, The Architect, 26 April 1879, p.243.

No.21 Arthur Melville 1. Agnes Ethel Mackay, Arthur Melville, Scottish Impressionist (1855-1904), Leigh-on-Sea, 1951, p.117.

2. Ibid., pp.117-118.

3. Martin Hardie, Water-colour Painting in Britain. Vol.III: The Victorian Period, London, 1968, p.201.

4. Kenneth McConkey, ‘Eccentric, Impudent, Pretentious and Wild: the Art of Arthur Melville’, in Kenneth McConkey and Charlotte Topsfield, Arthur Melville: Adventures in Colour, exhibition catalogue, Edinburgh, 2015, p.11.

5. Katharine S. Macquoid, Through Normandy, London, 1874, p.469.

6. Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, 1879, no.1043 (as Market Day at Granville, with no dimensions given).

7. London, Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours, The Exhibition of the Collected Works of Arthur Melville, R.W.S., A.R.S.A., January-February 1906, no.151 (A French Market Place (Granville), as signed ‘A. Melville, Market, Granville’, with no dimensions given). Lent to the exhibition

by Robert Strathern, an early patron of Arthur Melville who was an Edinburgh solicitor and a collector of contemporary Scottish art, the watercolour may possibly be identified with that now in Glasgow (see note 8 below).

8. Inv. 35.528; McConkey and Topsfield, op.cit., p.33, no.2. The watercolour measures 279 x 459 mm.

9. London, Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours, op.cit., no.127 (lent by Walter F. Goodwin); Anonymous sale, Edinburgh, Bonham’s, 24 August 2007, lot 1352. The watercolour is signed & dated 1878, and measures 270 x 440 mm.

10. Romilly Fedden, ‘Arthur Melville R.W.S. (1885-1904)’, in A. J. Finberg, ed., The Old Water-Colour Society’s Club 1923-1924, First Annual Volume, London, 1924, p.40.

11. Ibid., pp.45-46.

No.22 John Brett 1. Charles Brett, ‘John Brett in Cornwall’, in Charles Brett, Michael Hickox and Christiana Payne, John Brett: A Pre-Raphaelite in Cornwall, exhibition catalogue, Penzance, 2006, p.55.

2. Payne and Brett, op.cit., p.134.

3. Payne and Brett, op.cit., p.115.

4. Dolman & Co. of London also provided frames for the National Gallery and for artists such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Hubert van Herkomer. For more on Brett’s use of Dolman frames, see Ann Sumner, ‘A Note on the Framing of John Brett’s Welsh Seascapes’, in Cardiff, National Museum of Wales, John Brett: a Pre-Raphaelite on the Shores of Wales, exhibition catalogue, 2001, pp.116-117, and Lynn Roberts, ‘John Brett’s Picture Frames’, in Payne and Brett, op.cit., pp.187-188.

5. In promoting these free annual exhibitions of contemporary art, Canon Barnett hoped to ‘educate people so that they might realise the extent and meaning of the past, the beauty of nature, and the substance of hope.’ The immense success of these exhibitions, which drew thousands of visitors, led Barnett to advocate for the establishment of a permanent exhibition space in the East End of London, and led to the founding of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1901.

6. London, St. Jude’s School House, Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibition, 1882, p.2, under no.9.

No.23 Eugène Boudin 1. Paul Leroi, ‘Salon de 1887’, L’Art, 1887; quoted in translation in Vivien Hamilton, Boudin at Trouville, exhibition catalogue, Glasgow and London, 1992-1993, p.9.

2. From a notebook entry dated 3 December 1856; quoted in translation in Anne-Marie Bergeret-Gourbin, Eugène Boudin: Paintings and drawings.

Catalogue raisonné, Musée Eugène Boudin, Honfleur, Paris, 1996, p.80.

3. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Salon de 1859’, La Revue française, June-July 1859; Quoted in translation in Bergeret-Gourbin, ibid., Paris, p.76.

4. Inv. 2004.3.2, 2004.3.4 to 2004.3.15, 2004.3.17 and 2004.3.18.

5. Bergeret-Gourbin, op.cit., pp.77-86, nos.24-30. Two of these are also illustrated in Laurent Manœuvre, Eugène Boudin: dessins, Paris, 2001, pp.22-23, figs.1-2.

No.24 James McNeill Whistler 1. Gallatin, op.cit., pp.8-9.

2. In a letter of 18 January 1873 to the American art dealer George Lucas; quoted in Emily Jacobson and Blythe McCarthy, ‘Knowledge of a Lifetime’, in Lee Glazer et al, Whistler in Watercolor: Lovely Little Games, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 2019, p.136.

3. ‘The Whistler Exhibition’, The Illustrated London News, 15 May 1886, p.512.

4. Daniel E. Sutherland, Whistler: A Life for Art’s Sake, New Haven and London, 2014, p.133. The house in Hastings still stands today, adorned by a blue plaque.

5. MacDonald, op.cit., 1995, p.312, under no.830.

6. Sutherland, op.cit., p.180.

7. Inv. 2013.501; MacDonald, op.cit., 1995, p.313, no.832; Sale (‘The Estate of E. Wayne Tyler Jr., Washington, D.C.’), New York, Sotheby’s, 30 November 2006, lot 70 (sold for $60,000); Justin McCann, ed., Whistler and the World: The Lunder Collection of James McNeill Whistler at the Colby College Museum of Art, exhibition catalogue, Waterville (ME), 2015-2016, illustrated p.141; Glazer et al, op.cit., p.21, fig.9. The watercolour measures 139 x 222 mm.

8. Inv. 2013.294P; New York, M. Knoedler & Co., op.cit., p.60, no.76; MacDonald, op.cit., 1995, p.312, no.831; McCann, ed., op.cit., illustrated p.139; Glazer et al, op.cit., p.21, fig.8. The sheet measures 222 x 142 mm.

9. MacDonald, op.cit., 1995, p.312, under no.831.

10. Lee Glazer, ‘A New Beginning’, in Glazer et al, op.cit., pp.20-22.

11. MacDonald, op.cit., 1984, p.18.

No.25 Claude Émile Schuffenecker 1. Schuffenecker’s studio stamp, which he designed in 1890, represents a stylized lotus flower, flanked with tendrils made up of the artist’s initials E and S. 2. Jill Grossvogel, ‘Margin & Image’, in Jill Grossvogel, Claude-Emile Schuffenecker, exhibition catalogue, Binghamton and New York, 1980-1981, p.19.

3. Jan Würtz Frandsen, Drawn Toward the Avant-Garde: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century French Drawings from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, exhibition catalogue, 2002, p.130, under no.38.

4. Inv. 79.289; Pont-Aven, Musée de Pont-Aven and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Musée Départemental Maurice Denis ‘Le Prieuré’, Emile Schuffenecker 1851-1934, exhibition catalogue, 1996-1997, p.49, no.23.

5. Ibid., p.72, no.49.

6. Maximilien Gauthier in Paris, Galerie Berri-Raspail, Un Méconnu: Emile Schuffenecker, exhibition catalogue, 1944; quoted in translation in Grossvogel, op.cit., p.75.

No.26 Franz Skarbina 1. Franz Servaes, ‘Modern Berlin Painters’, The Artist: An Illustrated Monthly Record of Arts, Crafts and Industries, August 1901, p.142.

2. Margrit Bröhan, Franz Skarbina, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 1995, illustrated p.42, under no.6.

3. Inv. 2016.159.1; London, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Drawing Inspiration: Sketches and Sketchbook Pages of the 19th and 20th Centuries, exhibition catalogue, 2016, no.21.

No.27 Max Seliger 1. Christian L. Küster, ‘Die Autographensammlung zu Max Seligers “Handschrift und Zeichnung von Künstlern alter und neuer Zeit”’, Altonaer Museum in Hamburg: Jahrbuch 1971, pp.57-70.

2. Anonymous sale, Luzern, Galerie Fischer, 14 May 1993, lot 2701.

No.28 Pierre-Auguste Renoir 1. François Daulte, Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Water-colours, pastels and drawings in colour, London, 1959, p.8.

2. As recorded by René Gimpel on a visit to Renoir’s studio on April 23rd, 1918; René Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer, London, 1966, pp.20-21.

3. Stephanie Wiles, in Cara D. Denison et al, The Thaw Collection: Master Drawings and New Acquisitions, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1994, p.121, under no.88.

4. Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Christine Ekelhart, ed., Impressionism: Pastels, Watercolours, Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Vienna, 2012, pp.227228.

5. Richard R. Brettell et al, The Robert Lehman Collection, Vol.IX: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century European Drawings, New York, 2002, p.184, under no.91.

No.29 William Stott of Oldham 1. This pastel was presented by the artist to the English animalier painter and sculptor John Macallan Swan RA (1847-1910), with whom Stott is known to have corresponded.

2. Roger Brown, William Stott of Oldham 1857-1900: “A Comet rushing to the Sun”, exhibition catalogue, Oldham, 2003-2004, p.11.

3. Ibid., p.30.

4. Brown, op.cit., p.31.

5. Inv. 33.38; Brown, op.cit., p.85, no.37 (as North Breeze, and dated c.1885).

No.30 Henri Edmond Cross 1. The 1921 auction of works from Cross’s studio included ninety-three lots of watercolours and drawings by the artist, with some lots containing as many as twenty sheets.

2. This watercolour belonged to the esteemed French collector Georges Renand (1879-1968). Beginning in the 1920s, Renand assembled an important collection of 19th and 20th century paintings and drawings, as well as some fine Old Master paintings, sculpture and antiquities.

Although most of the Renand collection was dispersed, after the death of his wife, at three auctions in Paris in 1987 and 1988, the present sheet was among those works inherited by his daughter Jeannine Renand-Chapet (1918-2017), herself a notable collector.

3. Paul Signac, journal entry dated 14 December 1894; John Rewald, ed., ‘Extraits du journal inédit de Paul Signac / Excerpts from the Unpublished Diary of Paul Signac, I: 1894-95’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, July-September 1949, pp.111 and 172.

4. Maurice Denis, Théories (1890-1910): Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, Paris, 1912; quoted in translation in London, Royal Academy of Arts, Post-Impressionism: Cross-Currents in European Painting, exhibition catalogue, 1979-1980, p.61, under no.57.

5. Robert L. Herbert, Neo-Impressionism, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1968, p.40.

6. Quoted in translation in Patrick Offenstadt, ‘Cross aquarelliste / Cross the watercolourist’, in Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Cross et la néoimpressionnisme: De Seurat à Matisse / Cross and Neo-Impressionism: From Seurat to Matisse, exhibition catalogue, 2011-2012, p.192.

7. Lucie Cousturier, ‘H.-E. Cross’, L’Art Décoratif, March 1913; quoted in translation in Herbert, op.cit., p.48, under no.18.

8. Offenstadt, op.cit., pp.190-191.

9. Heinz Widauer, ed., Seurat Signac Van Gogh: Ways of Pointillism, exhibition catalogue, Vienna, 2016-2017, p.106.

10. Letter of 4 November 1891; quoted in translation in Raphaël Dupouy, ‘“The Most Beautiful Region in the World”: Henri-Edmond Cross and Le Lavandou’, in Frédéric Frank et al, ed., Color and Light: The Neo-Impressionist Henri-Edmond Cross, exhibition catalogue, Giverny and Potsdam, 2018-2019, p.229.

11. Letter of 18 August 1901; quoted in translation in Dupouy, ibid., p.234.

12. Letter of 12 August 1902; quoted in translation in Dupouy, op.cit., p.234.

No.31 Charles Guilloux 1. ‘M. Charles Guilloux posséde une vision personnelle, une entente raffiné de la nature, dont il est permis d’attendre beaucoup.’; ‘Société des Artistes indépendants’, Revue encyclopédique, 1892, p.1102.

2. Inv. 2004.92. An image of the work is visible online at https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2004.92 [accessed 25 November 2020].

No.32 Hippolyte Petitjean 1. John Rewald, ed., Camille Pissarro: Letters to his Son Lucien, New York, 1943, (1995 ed.), p.228.

2. Gustave Cocquiot, Les Indépendants 1884-1920, Paris, 1920; quoted in translation in Jean Sutter, ed., The Neo-Impressionists, London, 1970, p.146.

3. Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, ‘Neo-Impressionist Drawings’, in Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Andrew Robison, ed., Color, Line, Light: French Drawings, Watercolors, and Pastels from Delacroix to Signac, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 2012-2013, p.132.

4. ‘j’ai plus travaillé que d’habitude, mais rien d’important, des pochades, des croquis, des aquarelles, genre dans lequel je suis peu habile mais que je trouve très apte à prendre de rapides notes de couleurs et qui m’intéresse beaucoup. Devant la nature, il me semble qu’instinctivement j’éprouve de plus en plus le besoin d’en saisir le côté de simplicité decorative mais toujours beaucoup d’indécision. Je suis requis aussi par le diversité des tons et voilà la difficulté: la variété dans l’unité. Voilà ce que je trouve de bon dans l’aquarelle qui, par sa facture, vous force à interpretation synthétique…’; Quoted in Mâcon, Musées de Mâcon, Hippolyte Petitjean 1854-1929, exhibition catalogue, 2015-2016, p.25.

5. Sutter, ed., op.cit., p.145.

6. Inv. 2015.206.2; Grasselli and Robison, op.cit., p.142, no.84 (where dated c.1897). The sheet measures 320 x 500 mm.

7. Inv. 79.282; Sutter, ed., op.cit., illustrated p.121; Mâcon, op.cit., illustrated p.21.

8. Inv. CTB.1999.13; Mâcon, op.cit., illustrated p.42.

9. Inv. 9288; A. E. Popham and K. M. Fenwick, European Drawings (and two Asian drawings) in the Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1965, p.190, no.279.

No.33 Charles Lacoste 1. Apart from several works by Lacoste, Frizeau also came to own Gauguin’s famous frieze-like painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as well as works by André Derain, André Lhote, Odilon Redon, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and many other artists.

2. A painting of boats at Arcachon, dated 25 July 1891, is in a private collection; Paris, Mairie de XVIe arrondisement, and elsewhere, Charles Lacoste 1870-1959: 60 ans de peinture entre symbolisme et naturalisme, exhibition catalogue, 1985, p.90, no.4, illustrated p.48.

3. Ibid., p.97, no.16, illustrated p.52 (dated February 1895) and pp.98-99, nos.19-20, illustrated pp.51 and 53 (both dated September 1895); Frédéric Chappey, ‘Charles Lacoste entre symbolisme et naturalisme’, L’Oeil, November 1985, p.46, fig.4; New York and London, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Master Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 2017, no.42.

No.34 Walter Sickert 1. Robert Upstone, Sickert in Venice, exhibition catalogue, London, 2009, p.9.

2. Baron, op.cit., p.31.

3. In a letter written in the autumn of 1895; Robert Emmons, The Life and Opinions of Walter Richard Sickert, London, 1941, p.107.

4. Upstone, op.cit., p.57.

5. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 May 1983, lot 94 (as Santa Maria Formosa); Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 9 June 2006, lot 60 (as A Quiet Canal, Venice); Baron, op.cit., p.275, no.181 (where dated c.1903). The painting measures 19 x 14.5 cm.

6. Lillian Browse, Sickert, London, 1960, p.69, no.32, pl.32 (incorrectly titled Santa Maria Formosa), where dated c.1901; Baron, op.cit., p.275, under no.181, no.2 (not illustrated). The painting measures 24.8 x 14.3 cm.

7. Browse, ibid., p.69, no.32.

8. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 19 July 1968, lot 35, not illustrated; Baron, op.cit., p.275, under no.181, no.3 (not illustrated). The drawing measures 292 x 222 mm.

9. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 4 June 1971, lot 7 (as Santa Maria Formosa, Venice), not illustrated; Baron, op.cit., p.275, under no.181, no.4 (not illustrated). Drawn in pen and ink over pencil on brown paper, squared for transfer, and signed Sickert and inscribed Maddalena – Venice, the drawing measures 305 x 222 mm.

10. Browse, op.cit., pp.19-20.

11. ‘Obituary’, The Burlington Magazine, March 1918, p.120.

12. R[andolph] S[chwabe], ‘Judge William Evans’s Collection of Contemporary Pictures’, The Burlington Magazine, May 1918, p.205.

No.35 Emilie Mediz-Pelikan 1. Amelia Sarah Levetus, ‘Two Austrian Painters: Karl Mediz and Emilie Mediz-Pelikan,’ The Studio, March 1905, p.95.

2. Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber, ‘Education, Associations, and Networks’, in Stella Rolig and Sabine Fellner, ed., Stadt der Frauen / City of Women: Künstlerinnen in Wien 1900-1938 / Female Artists in Vienna 1900-1938, exhibition catalogue, Vienna, 2019, p.53.

3. Levetus, op.cit., pp.95-98.

4. Inv. 39139 (as by both Emilie Mediz-Pelikan and Karl Mediz). The drawing, which measures 251 x 635 mm., is signed by Mediz-Pelikan and dated ‘10 Juni 1905’. It is visible at https://sammlungenonline.albertina.at/#/query/cb4a3855-5eec-43ac-8713-06818250772c [accessed 29 November 2020].

5. The Albertina’s collection of drawings by Mediz-Pelikan can be viewed at https://sammlungenonline.albertina.at/#/query/44f004c0-a2df-48c8aa16-9d56c0a5f8b3 [accessed 29 November 2020].

6. All of the drawings by Mediz-Pelikan in Dresden are visible at https://skd-online-collection.skd.museum/Home/Index?page=1&pId=12593796 [accessed 29 November 2020].

7. The drawings are visible online at http://www.frauen-kunst.com/emiliemedizpelikan.html [accessed 29 November 2020].

No.36 Sir Edward John Poynter 1. Isabel G. McAllister, ‘Some Water-Colour Paintings by Sir Edward Poynter, P.R.A.’, The Studio, December 1917, p.90 and 94.

2. Lewis Lusk, ‘Sir E. J. Poynter as a Water-Colourist’, The Art Journal, June 1903, p.190.

3. Kim Sloan, ed., Places of the Mind: British watercolour landscapes 1850-1950, exhibition catalogue, London, 2017, p.57.

No.37 William Fraser Garden 1. Charles Lane, The Fraser Family, London, 2010, p.75.

2. Scott Wilcox and Christopher Newall, Victorian Landscape Watercolours, exhibition catalogue, New Haven and elsewhere, 1992-1993, p.172, under no.108.

3. Inv. 2017.12.2; London, Guy Peppiatt Fine Art and Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, One Hundred Drawings and Watercolours, exhibition catalogue, 2016-2017, p.91, no.79. The watercolour is signed and dated W. F. GARDEN: / ‘97. and faintly inscribed Near S. Ives, Hunts. The dimensions of the sheet are 195 x 285 mm.

No.38 Charles Caryl Coleman 1. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Lure of Italy: American Artists and The Italian Experience 1760-1914, exhibition catalogue, Boston and elsewhere, 1992-1993, p.376, under no.100.

2. New York, Galleries of Theodore C. Noe, Villa Narcissus, Capri: An Exhibition of Pictures by Charles Caryl Coleman, n.d. (1906).

3. ‘Art Notes of the Month’, The Independent, 27 December 1906, p.1551.

4. ‘Exhibition of Works by Charles Caryl Coleman at the Albright Art Gallery’, Academy Notes, April 1916, p.57.

5. Inv. 20.656; Karen A. Sherry, Fine Lines: American Drawings from the Brooklyn Museum, exhibition catalogue, 2013, pp.192-193, no.93. Signed, like the present sheet, with the artist’s CCC monogram, the pastel measures 268 x 214 mm. and is inscribed ‘10 A.M. / April 14 -1906’.

6. Inv. 20.657. The drawing, which measures 614 x 456 mm., is signed with the artist’s monogram and is inscribed --CAPRI -- / 11- 25 AM / Dec. 21. 1913.

No.39 Paul Cézanne 1. Matthew Simms, Cézanne’s Watercolors: Between Drawing and Painting, New Haven and London, 2008, p.1.

2. Christopher Lloyd, Paul Cézanne: Drawings and Watercolours, London, 2015, p.64.

3. Charles Morice, ‘Aquarelles de Cézanne’, Mercure de France, 1 July 1905; quoted in translation in Françoise Cachin, ‘A Century of Cézanne Criticism I: From 1865 to 1906’, in Françoise Cachin et al, Cézanne, exhibition catalogue, Paris, London and Philadelphia, 1995-1996, p.41.

4. Letter of 28 June 1907 to Paula Modersohn-Becker; Quoted in translation in Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, London, 1988, pp.52-53, note 1. Rilke had gone to see the exhibition at Modersohn-Becker’s suggestion.

5. Alain de Leiris, ‘From Delacroix to Cezanne’, in Alain de Leiris and Carol Hynning Smith, From Delacroix to Cezanne: French Watercolor Landscapes of the Nineteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, College Park, and elsewhere, 1977-1978, pp.51-52.

6. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Cézanne as a Watercolorist’, in Reff, ed., op.cit., p.12.

7. Lionello Venturi, Paul Cézanne Water Colours, London, 1943, p.29.

8. Joachim Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet’s Cezanne: A Memoir with Conversations, London, 1991, p.153.

9. Inv. 70.161; Venturi, op.cit., 1936, Vol.I, p.229, no.764, Vol.II, pl.252, fig.764 (where dated 1897, but later changed to 1895-1900 in Venturi’s unpublished revised notes); John Rewald, Walter Feilchenfeld and Jayne Warman, The Paintings of Paul Cézanne, London and New York, 1996, Vol.I, p.550, no.938, Vol.II, p.328, fig.938 (where dated 1904-1906); Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, Degas to Matisse: Impressionist and Modern Masterworks from the Detroit Institute of Arts, exhibition catalogue, 2000-2001, illustrated in colour p.31; Keyes, op.cit., p.32, fig.1; Feilchenfeldt, Warman and Nash, op.cit., no.FWN 363 (where dated c.1904-1906).

10. Inv. 1958.21; Venturi, op.cit., 1936, Vol.I, no.666, Vol.II, fig.666 (where dated 1894-1900); Rewald, Feilchenfeld and Warman, ibid., Vol.I, p.530, no.900, Vol.II, p.529, fig.900 (where dated c.1904); Keyes, op.cit., p.36, fig.6; Feilchenfeldt, Warman and Nash, op.cit., no.FWN 363 (where dated c.1904-1906).

11. Built in the second half of the 19th century, the Château Noir was a ruined neo-Gothic castle situated a few kilometres east of Aix, on the road to Le Tholonet, a village at the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire. For about fifteen years, from the late 1880s, the artist rented a small room at the Château Noir that he used to store painting materials, while the house – which had an unobstructed view of Mont Sainte-Victoire - served a base from which to explore the surrounding area.

12. Rewald, op.cit., 1983, p.209, under no.499.

13. Reff, ed., op.cit., p.51, under no.52.

14. Rewald, op.cit., 1983, p.37.

15. Simms, op.cit., p.165.

16. Georges Rivière, Le maître Paul Cézanne, Paris, 1923, p.120; quoted in translation in Simms, op.cit., p.82.

17. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Cézanne as a Watercolorist’, in Reff, ed., op.cit., p.11.

No.40 Maxime Maufra 1. Caroline Boyle-Turner, Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven: Prints and Paintings, exhibition catalogue, London and Edinburgh, 1989-1990, p.162.

2. Quoted in translation in London, Gimpel Fils, Maxime Maufra (1861-1918): A Marine & Landscape Painter, exhibition catalogue, 1951, unpaginated.

No.41 Carl Johan Forsberg 1. Hahr, op.cit., pp.14-18.

2. H. W. L, ‘En lyriker i akvarel’, Göteborgs Morgenpost, 1920, undated; quoted in translation in Birgitte Agersnap, ‘Utopi of Forgængelighed / Utopias and Intransigence’, in Næstved, Rønnebæksholm, op.cit., p.74.

3. Forsberg, op.cit., p.56.

4. Forsberg, op.cit., p.59.

5. Forsberg, op.cit., p.60.

No.42 Hans Lietzmann 1. Anonymous sale, Munich, Neumeister Kunstauktionen, 23 September 2015, lot 168. The dimensions of the gouache are 355 x 563 mm.

No.43 Auguste Lepère 1. Muriel Ciolkowska, ‘Auguste Lepère’, American Art News, 1 March 1919, p.4.

2. Gabriel Mourey, ‘A French Wood-Engraver: Auguste Lepère’, The Studio, December 1897, p.143.

3. Paris, Galerie Ed. Sagot, Catalogue des trente-quatre peintures et quatorze eaux-fortes de A. Lepère, exhibition catalogue, 1914, unpaginated, nos.1 and 10, respectively (not illustrated).

4. René d’Avril, ‘The Wood-Engravings of Auguste Lepère’, Art & Life, November 1919, p.268.

No.44 Giuseppe Casciaro 1. ‘una straordinaria finezza percettiva e ad una solidita di tocco’; Alfredo Schettini, Giuseppe Casciaro, Naples, 1952, p.22.

2. ‘Un pastello di Casciaro ha del Bach e del Mozart; e talvolta è tragico e profondo, anche, come una commossa voce beethoveniana. Questa eleganza è deliziosa: questo spirito, questo gusto son rari: questa forza piacevole e sicura, non vi opprime ma vi trascina: e la voce di questo adorabile artista ha tutti gli accenti: ha la foga ed il sospiro, l’impeto e la tenerezza, un grido e un sussurro.’

No.45 Muirhead Bone 1. Campbell Dodgson, Etchings & Dry Points by Muirhead Bone, Vol.I: 1898-1907, London, 1909, p.16.

2. Sylvester Bone, Muirhead Bone: Artist and Patron, London, 2009, p.69.

3. Campbell Dodgson, ‘The Art of Muirhead Bone’, Country Life, 30 December 1916, p.773.

4. In her article, Gertrude Bone noted that ‘the great Duomo of Orvieto is almost always empty, save for tourists and intoning priests. Built on the tide of one of those waves of inspiration which visited Italy, it would seem as though with the ebbing of that wave the people’s interest in their treasure slackened and they returned to the half-pagan beliefs which sustained their ancestors.’; Gertrude Bone, ‘Orvieto. - I’, Country Life, 21 February 1914, p.269.

5. Gerardo De Canio, ‘Il ciclo scultoreo nel duomo di Orvieto. Innovazione nella conservazione’, in Piero Cimbolli Spagnesi, ed., Studi sull’architettura del Duomo di Orvieto, Rome, 2020, p.109, fig.6.

6. Dodgson, op.cit., 1916, p.774.

7. Dodgson, op.cit., 1909, p.15.

8. ‘Sir Muirhead Bone’, The Times, 29 October 1953, p.10.

No.47 Lorenzo Cecchi 1. Robert Burn, Old Rome; A Handbook to the Ruins of the City and the Campagna, London and Cambridge, 1880, pp.61-63 and 65.

2. Anonymous sale, Trento, Casa d’Aste von Morenberg, 29 November 2008, lot 109. The dimensions of the watercolour are 620 x 370 mm.

No.48 Henri Le Sidaner 1. Camille Mauclair, Henri Le Sidaner, Paris, 1928 [English ed., Newmarket, 2019], p.11.

2. D. C. P., ‘Henri Le Sidaner’, The Collector and Art Critic, November 1906, pp.7-8.

3. Quoted in translation in Farinaux-Le Sidaner, op.cit., p.31.

4. Mauclair, op.cit., p.104.

5. Inv. 4068; Farinaux-Le Sidaner, op.cit., p.131, no.295; Josette Galiègue et al, Henri Le Sidaner en son jardin de Gerberoy 1901-1939, exhibition catalogue, Beauvais and Douai, 2001-2002, illustrated p.100.

6. Heather Lemonedes, ‘Gardens of Reverie and Imagination’, in Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art and London, Royal Academy of Arts, Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, exhibition catalogue, 2015-2016, pp.172-173.

7. Farinaux-Le Sidaner, op.cit., p.337, no.1024; Galiègue et al, op.cit., illustrated p.100. The oil on panel, in a private collection, measures 38 x 58 cm.

8. ‘Le profond artiste Le Sidaner a créé un Jardin blanc, uniquement composé de fleurs blanches, dans sa Thébaïde de Gerberoy (Oise); il en a fait des tableaux d’un haut mérite le soir, au crépuscule et au clair de lune. Ce philosophe est le type du peintre-poète…Sa pensée se condense dans un coup de pinceau, dans la pose d’un ton; il peint en visionnaire, qualité rare. Ses murs de maison sont des murs derrière lesquels il se passe quelque chose, et quel sentiment intense d’intimité, quelle extraordinaire caresse de la lumière douce partout épandue! Le Sidaner nous séduit comme un poète, parce ệ qu’il a pareillement le don des images fugitives, la même richesse, la même ingéniosité colorée, le même frémissement lumineux, la meme intuition, à laquelle il ajoute la lueur et comme la phosphorescence du monde.’; Viaud-Bruant, op.cit., p.39.

No.49 Edmund Steppes 1. In 1943 Steppes was awarded the Goethe Medal for Art and Science, and in 1944 his name was included on the so-called ‘GottbegnadetenListe’ of artists, writers, actors, composers and musicians considered crucial to German culture and therefore exempt from military mobilization during the latter stages of the war. When the war ended, Steppes stood trial for his membership of the Nazi party, but was judged to have joined the party for idealistic and financial reasons and not through political motivation, and thus only received a fine.

2. A. S. L., ‘Studio-Talk’, The Studio, October 1910, pp.76-77.

3. ‘Aus Liebe zur Natur, aus Freude an ihr und in nie gestillter Sehnsucht, sie zu erkennen, zu besitzen, sind wir Maler.’; Steppes in the catalogue of an exhibition in Weimar in 1908, quoted in Andreas Zoller, Der Landschaftsmaler Edmund Steppes (1873-1968) und Seine Vision einer “Deutschen Malerei”, unpublished Ph.D thesis, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig, 1999, p.107.

4. ‘Studio-Talk’, The International Studio, September 1914, pp.243-244.

5. ‘Eigenartige Arbeiten einer weltfremden Poetennatur an Augustin Hirschvogel oder den Meister E.S. erinnernd, mehr geträumt als wirklich gesehen, sind diese Blätter so recht für stille Betrachter in friedlichen Stunden geeignet.’; Der Cicerone, 1913, p.107, quoted in Zoller, op.cit., p.140.

No.50 André Lhote 1. This watercolour is recorded in the archives of the late Jean-François Aittouarès, and its authenticity has also been confirmed by Dominique Bermann Martin, who will include it as no.109 in her and M. Aittouarès’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the work of André Lhote.

2. Valence, Musée de Valence, André Lhote: Rétrospective, exhibition catalogue, 2003, illustrated pl.90.

3. Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, A. Lhote, exhibition catalogue, 1958, no.30 (not illustrated).

4. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 21 February 1990, lot 187.

No.51 Albert Goodwin 1. The artist describing one of his watercolours at an exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1890; quoted in Peter Wise, A Visionary in the West: Albert Goodwin in Devon and Cornwall, Barnstaple, 2015, pp.25-26.

2. During the Second World War Woolacombe Sands served as a training ground for American troops practicing amphibious landings in preparation for the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

No.53 Edouard Vuillard 1. Guy Cogeval, ‘Backward Glances’, in Guy Cogeval, Édouard Vuillard, exhibition catalogue, Washington and elsewhere, 2003-2004, pp.4-8.

2. Stuart Preston, Edouard Vuillard, London, 1985, p.112.

3. Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Vuillard: The Inexhaustible Glance. Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, Milan, 2003, Vol.III, p.1238, no.X-127 (where dated 1919). The painting, which measures 53 x 53 cm., was with Galerie Thomas Salis in Salzburg in 2018.

4. London, The Lefevre Gallery, Vuillard et son Kodak, exhibition catalogue, 1964, illustrated p.25; Gloria Groom, Edouard Vuillard, PainterDecorator: Patrons and Projects, 1892-1912, New Haven and London, 1993, p.174, fig.279.

No.54 Pablo Picasso 1. John Richardson, A Life of Picasso. Vol.III: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, London, 2007, p.160.

2. Ibid., p.162. Four small oil sketches of houses and rooftops at Juan-les-Pins are illustrated in Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso: From the Ballets to Drama (1917-1926), Cologne, 1999, pp.221-222, nos.803-806.

3. Palau i Fabre, ibid., p.215.

4. Inv. MP 929; Michèle Richet, The Musée Picasso, Paris. Catalogue of the Collections, Vol.II: Drawings, Watercolours, Gouaches, Pastels, London, 1988, p.254, no.806; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.118, no. 20.380. The drawing is dated August 1920.

5. Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso. Vol.4: Oeuvres de 1920 à 1922, Paris, 1951, pl.42, no.130 (dated 11 July 1920) and pl.70, no.203 (dated August 1920); Zervos, op.cit., 1975, pl.36, no.85 (dated 12 July 1920) and pl.38, no.90; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.95, no.20-306, p.97, nos.20-310 and 20-312, and p.118, no.20-379; Jean-Louis Andral et al, M. Pablo’s Holidays: Picasso in Antibes Juan-les-Pins, exhibition catalogue, Antibes, 2018-2019, no.8, illustrated p.23 (dated 15 July 1920).

6. Zervos, ibid., 1951, pl.46, no.142 and pl.47, no.150 (dated 28 September 1920); Arnold Glimcher and Marc Glimcher, ed., Je suis le cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso, exhibition catalogue, London, 1986, one illustrated p.320, under No.71; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.114, no. 20.366 and p.135, no.20-435.

7. Palau i Fabre, op.cit., p.221, no.803; Andral et al, op.cit., no.12, illustrated p.24. The oil sketch, which measures 15 x 24.5 cm. and is dated on the reverse, is in the collection of the artist’s heirs.

8. Inv. MP 68; Zervos, op.cit., 1951, pl.35, no.107; Marie-Laure Besnard-Bernadac et al, Musée Picasso. Catalogue of the Collections, Vol.I: Paintings, Papiers collés, Picture reliefs, Sculptures, Ceramics, London, 1986, p.55, no.63; Palau i Fabre, op.cit., p.214, no.777; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.109, no.20-349; Andral et al, op.cit., no.6, illustrated p.13.

9. John Richardson, ‘In Memory of Pablito’, in Santa Fe and Dallas, Gerald Peters Gallery, Picasso on Paper: Selected Works from the Marina Picasso Collection, exhibition catalogue, 1998, unpaginated.

No.56 Hermann Wöhler 1. These are illustrated at http://www.symbolismus.com/home.html.

2. Inv. 2018.4.1 and 2018.4.2. Images of these drawings are visible at http://emuseum.vassar.edu/view/objects/asitem/search@/1/titledesc?t:state:flow=0ea7dd4e-ae89-46e9-8c1e-4d70d0d78f28 and http://emuseum.vassar.edu/view/objects/asitem/search@/0/titledesc?t:state:flow=0ea7dd4e-ae89-46e9-8c1e-4d70d0d78f28 [accessed 22 November 2020].

No.57 George Clausen 1. This watercolour belonged to Arnold Fellows, who studied at Queen Mary’s Grammar School in Walsall between 1911 and 1917, and later taught at the school as an Assistant Master between 1921 and 1924. He spent the rest of his career as a teacher and Master at the Chigwell School in Essex. Fellows assembled a fine collection of British paintings, watercolours and drawings which he bequeathed to Queen Mary’s Grammar School.

2. J. Wood Palmer, in London, Arts Council, A Time of Harvest: Pastels and Drawings by Sir George Clausen, R.A., exhibition catalogue, 1949, unpaginated.

3. Anna Greutzner Robins, ‘‘South Country’ and other imagined places’, in Kim Sloan, ed., Places of the Mind: British watercolour landscapes 18501950, exhibition catalogue, London, 2017, p.102.

4. J. Littlejohns, British Water-Colour Painting & Painters of To-day, London, 1931, pp.30-31.

No.58 Josef Šíma 1. The scholar and art dealer Hélène Drude, director of the Galerie Le Point Cardinal in Paris, owned a number of works by Josef Šíma, including a sketchbook from 1921.

2. Šíma also became the artistic director of the short-lived literary review of the same name, Le Grand Jeu. Although he remained apart from André Breton’s Surrealist group, Šíma took part in the Surrealist exhibition at the Kunsthaus in Zürich in 1929, and also accompanied Breton and Paul Eluard on their trip to Prague in 1935, when he designed the cover for the Czech edition of Breton’s iconic Surrealist novel Nadja.

3. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Sima’, in Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Joseph Sima, exhibition catalogue, 1968, p.9.

4. Frantisek Smejkal, Sima, Paris, 1992, p.202, fig.203 and p.204, fig.205; Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, op.cit., p.56, figs.43-44.

5. Smejkal, ibid., p.202, fig.203. The painting measures 65 x 90 cm.

No.59 Maurice Langaskens 1. ‘Il fut des meilleurs élèves de la classe; il est aujourd’hui l’artiste le plus remarquable parmi des décorateurs de notre époque.’; quoted in Jan Dewilde and Annick Vandenbilcke, ‘Maurice Langaskens – peintre-décorateur. Kroniek van een kunstenaarsleven’, in Jan Dewilde et al, Maurice Langaskens 1884-1946, exhibition catalogue, Ypres, 2003-2004, p.16.

2. An impression of the print, which measures 390 x 290 mm., is in the collection of the Commune de Schaerbeek (Inv. 569). Another impression of the etching appeared at auction in Belgium in 2016 (Anonymous sale, Brussels, Brussels Art Auctions, 25 October 2016, part of lot 298).

3. Anonymous sale (‘Tableaux et Sculptures Belges XIXème et XX ème s.’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [EVE], 21 October 2008, lot 199. The panel measures 310 x 350 mm.

No.60 Firmin Baes 1. The Artist: An Illustrated Monthly Record of Arts, Crafts and Industries, Vol.27, 1900; quoted in Georgette Naegels-Delfosse, Firmin Baes, Brussels, 1987, p.208.

2. ‘La galerie du Studio présente une série d’oeuvres nouvelles de ce pastelliste qui, en écrasant d’un pouce subtil sur le papier ou sur la toile des craies aux tons choisis, arrive à des finesses, à des douceurs ou à des intensités auxquelles la peinture à l’huile n’atteint pas toujours avec le même bonheur et rarement avec la même réussite de matières.’; Richard Dupierreux, Le Soir, 8 February 1932; quoted in Naegels-Delfosse, ibid., p.214.

3. ‘Les pastels de Firmin Baes atteignent les plus hauts sommets de la virtuosité. La finesse, la grâce, l’elégance, le raffinement même, voilà les buts qu’aussi bien dans la nature morte et dans le paysage que dans le genre, l’éblouissant talent de l’artiste atteint sûrement.’; quoted in NaegelsDelfosse, op.cit., p.211.

4. A large group of similar landscape paintings by Baes, albeit executed in oil on canvas rather than pastel, were presented by the artist’s granddaughter to the Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1985.

No.61 Paul Klee 1. David Burnett, ‘Paul Klee: The Romantic Landscape’, Art Journal, Summer 1977, p.323.

2. Matthias Bärmann, ‘“As if it concerned myself”: Emigration, Illness and Creative Process in Paul Klee’s Last Years’, in Matthias Bärmann et al, Basel, Paul Klee: Tod und Feuer: Die Erfüllung im Spätwerk / Death and Fire: Fulfillment in the Late Work, exhibition catalogue, Basel and Hannover, 20032004, p.13.

3. Inv. Z 1231; Ernest Raboff, Paul Klee: Art for Children, New York, 1968, unpaginated, illustrated; Bern, Paul Klee Foundation, op.cit., p.217, no.6943 (1937.7). The drawing, which measures 278 x 178 mm., is numbered by the artist 1937.7, and must therefore just predate the present sheet, which is numbered 1937.11 in Klee’s manuscript Oeuvre-Katalog.

No.62 Tristram Hillier 1. Jenny Pery, Painter Pilgrim: The Art and Life of Tristram Hillier, London, 2008, p.34.

2. Ibid., p.10.

3. Tristram Hillier, Leda and the Goose: An Autobiography, London, 1954, p.139.

4. Frances Spalding, ‘London: Tristram Hillier at the Royal Academy’, The Burlington Magazine, August 1983, p.509.

5. Pery, op.cit., p.125.

6. Pery, op.cit., pp.12-14.

7. Nicholas Usherwood, ‘Introduction’, in Bradford, Cartwright Hall, and elsewhere, A Timeless Journey: Tristram Hillier R.A. 1905-1983, 19831984, p.15.

8. Rachel Campbell-Johnson, ‘The dreams of a rural surrealist’, The Times, 3 January 2020, p.9.

No.64 David Bomberg 1. Richard Cork, ‘Bomberg’s Odyssey’, in Richard Cork, David Bomberg, exhibition catalogue, London, 1988, p.38.

2. William Lipke, David Bomberg, London, 1967, p.86.

3. Cork, op.cit., 1988, p.115.

4. Quoted in Richard Cork, David Bomberg, London, 1987, pp.258-259.

5. London, Piano Nobile, op.cit., p.32, under no.11.

6. These include a drawing of The Round Church at Middle Temple which appeared at auction in 1983 (Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 May 1983, lot 144) and another with Fischer Fine Art Art in London in 1988 (Cork, op.cit., 1987, pl.331; Cork, op.cit., 1988, p.164, no.160; London, Fischer Fine Art Ltd., Bomberg: An Exhibition of Major Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1988, illustrated p.44), as well as a third large sheet which was on the art market in 2017 (London, Piano Nobile, op.cit., pp.30-31, no.10).

7. Michael Kimmelman, ‘Talking Art with: David Bowie. A Musician’s Parallel Passion’, The New York Times, 14 June 1998, p.35.

No.65 John Minton 1. Frances Spalding, John Minton: Dance till the Stars Come Down, Aldershot, 1991 [2005 ed.], p.93.

2. Alan Ross, in London, Michael Parkin Gallery, John Minton and Friends, exhibition leaflet, 1997, unpaginated.

3. Inv. 2015.2; New York and London, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Master Drawings, 2015, no.52. The watercolour measures 280 x 381 mm.

4. London, The Maas Gallery, British Pictures, exhibition catalogue, 2006, p.19, no.19. Another example is recorded in the Oliver Brown collection in 1958, while a further watercolour of a Derelict Farm Machine was, like all of these drawings, at one time with the Lefevre Gallery in London.

No.66 Lucian Freud 1. Quoted in Sebastian Smee, Lucian Freud: Drawings 1940, exhibition catalogue, New York, Matthew Marks Gallery, 2003, p.16.

2. William Feaver, ed., Lucian Freud Drawings, exhibition catalogue, London, Blain/Southern and New York, Acquavella Galleries, 2012, p.13.

3. Sebastian Smee, ‘Introduction’, in Lucian Freud, Sebastian Smee and Richard Calvocoressi, Lucian Freud on paper, London, 2008, p.5.

4. I am grateful to Catherine Lampert for this information. Anne Dunn further recalls that Freud only had pastels with him during their stay in Connemara in 1948, and therefore the present sheet, which is drawn in pen, ink and tempera, cannot date from that earlier trip.

5. The spot on which the artist stood to make the drawing was just below and about a hundred metres west of the Zetland Arms, with his back to the hotel. Just to his right, unseen in the drawing, is the R342 road, which follows the shore of Cashel Bay. 6. Penny and Johnson, op.cit., pl.27; Freud, Smee and Calvocoressi, op.cit., no.85; Feaver, op.cit., no.54. The drawing measures 546 x 425 mm.

7. Inv. T11793; Freud, Smee and Calvocoressi, op.cit., no.96 (where dated 1949); Feaver, op.cit., pl.61 (where dated 1948).

8. Freud, Smee and Calvocoressi, op.cit., no.97.

9. Nicholas Penny, ‘The Early Works 1938-1954’, in Penny and Johnson, op.cit., pp.12-13; Richard Calvocoressi, ‘The Graphics of Lucian Freud’, in Freud, Smee and Calvocoressi, op.cit., illustrated pp.26-27; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 10 February 2010, lot 68.

No.67 Alan Reynolds 1. Alexander Adams, ‘Obituary: Alan Reynolds (1926-2014)’, The British Art Journal, Winter 2014-2015, p.132.

2. Robert Melville, ‘Alan Reynolds’, Apollo, October 1955, p.100.

3. Robert Melville, in London, Redfern Gallery, The Four Seasons, 1956; quoted in J. P. Hodin, Alan Reynolds, London, 1962, unpaginated.

No.68 Frank Auerbach 1. Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p.7.

2. Pilar Ordovas, ed., Raw Truth: Auerbach – Rembrandt, exhibition catalogue, London and Amsterdam, 2013-2014, p.30.

3. Catherine Lampert, ‘A Conversation with Frank Auerbach, 1978’, in London, Hayward Gallery, Frank Auerbach, exhibition catalogue, 1978; reprinted in Catherine Lampert, ed., Frank Auerbach, exhibition catalogue, London and Bonn, 2015-2016, p.155.

4. Lampert, op.cit., 2015, p.62.

5. Inv. NG 521; Andrew Wilton, J. M. W. Turner: His Art and Life, New York, 1979, p.283, no.P370, illustrated p.203, fig.219; Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London, 1984, Vol.I, pp.221-222, no.370, Vol.II, illustrated in colour pl.374; Judy Egerton, National Gallery Catalogues. The British School, London, 1998, pp.296-305, no.NG 521.

6. Colin Wiggins, Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working after the Masters, exhibition catalogue, London, 1995, p.16.

7. ‘Frank Auerbach in conversation with William Feaver’, in William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York, 2009, p.229.

8. Wiggins, op.cit., p.10.

9. Lampert, op.cit., 2015, p.56.

10. Wright, op.cit., pp.29-30.

No.69 Fikret Mualla 1. Ali Akay, Fikret Mualla Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Istanbul, 2005, p.54.

2. Ibid., p.290.

3. One example is illustrated in Türkkaya Ataöv, ‘Fikret Moualla’, Tendenzen, April-June 1983, p.64, and another in Akay, op.cit., p.231. Several others have appeared at auction in recent years: London, Christie’s South Kensington, 29 November 1993, lot 200; Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 1 April 1999, lot 25; Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 19 December 2002, lot 143; Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 18 December 2006, lot 33 and Paris, Artcurial, 22 February 2008, lot 240.

No.70 Gluck 1. Arnold Hunt owned at least one other work by Gluck, a small, undated Cornish Landscape, painted on panel and measuring 12.3 x 18.1 cm.

2. Quoted in Diana Souhami, Gluck 1895-1978: Her Biography, London, 1988, pp.41-42.

3. London, The Fine Art Society, Gluck, exhibition catalogue, 1973, no.52 (as St. Buryan); London, The Fine Art Society, Gluck, exhibition catalogue, 2017, no.19 (as Nevermore). Signed and dated Gluck 1964, the painting, executed in oil on board, measures 11.8 x 23.4 cm. (4 5/8 x 9 1/4 in.) and is in a private collection.

The artist Giuseppe Casciaro working en plein-air in 1928

INDEX OF ARTISTS

AUERBACH, Frank; No.68 BAES, Firmin; No.60 BESNARD, Paul-Albert; No.52 BOMBERG, David; No.64 BONE, Muirhead; No.45 BOUDIN, Eugène; No.23 BRESDIN, Rodolphe; No.13 BRETT, John; No.22 CADMUS, Paul; No.63 CASCIARO, Giuseppe; No.44 CECCHI, Lorenzo; Nos.46-47 CÉZANNE, Paul; No.39 CLAUSEN, George; No.57 COLEMAN, Charles Caryl; No.38 COROT, Jean-Baptiste-Camille; No.15 CROSS, Henri Edmond; No.30 DEBACQ, Joseph-Frédéric; Nos.4-5 DEGAS, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar; No.18 DELACROIX, Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène; No.8 FAUERHOLDT, Viggo; No.12 FIEDLER, Bernhard; No.11 FORSBERG, Carl Johan; No.41 FRASER GARDEN, William; No.37 FREUD, Lucian; No.66 GANDY, Joseph Michael; No.3 GLUCK (Hannah Gluckstein); No.70 GOODWIN, Albert; No.51 GUILLOUX, Charles; No.31 HEILBUTH, Ferdinand; No.20 HETSCH, Gustav Friedrich; No.7 HILLIER, Tristram; No.62 HUET, Paul; No.16 HUGO, Victor; No.17 KLEE, Paul; No.61

LACOSTE, Charles; No.33 LANGASKENS, Maurice; No.59 LE SIDANER, Henri; No.48 LEPÈRE, Auguste; No.43 LEWIS, John Frederick; No.6 LHOTE, André; No.50 LIETZMANN, Hans; No.42 LUMSDEN, Ernest Stephen; No.55 MANDEVARE, Alphonse-Nicolas-Michel; No.1 MAUFRA, Maxime; No.40 MEDIZ-PELIKAN, Emilie; No.35 MELVILLE, Arthur; No.21 MESSMANN, Carl Ludvig; No.10 MICHALLON, Achille-Etna; No.2 MILLET, Jean-François; No.9 MINTON, John; No.65 MUALLA, Fikret; No.69 PALMER, Samuel; No.14 PETITJEAN, Hippolyte; No.32 PICASSO, Pablo; No.54 POYNTER, Edward John; No.36 RENOIR, Pierre-Auguste; No.28 REYNOLDS, Alan; No.67 SCHUFFENECKER, Claude-Emile; No.25 SELIGER, Max; No.27 SICKERT, Walter Richard; No.34 SIMA, Josef (Joseph); No.58 SKARBINA, Franz; No.26 STEPPES, Edmund; No.49 STOTT OF OLDHAM, William; No.29 VUILLARD, Edouard; No.53 WHISTLER, James Abbott McNeill; No.24 WÖHLER, Hermann; No.56 ZIEM, Félix; No.19

Albert Goodwin RWS (1845-1932) Sunset at Woolacombe Bay, North Devon No. 51

Back cover: Carl Johan Forsberg Pax No.41

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