Master Drawings 2022

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

Front cover: Jean-Pierre Laurens (1875-1932) Portrait of a Zouave Prisoner, Looking to the Left No.36

Georges de Feure (1868-1943) Dutch Landscape with Woodcutters No.33

MASTER DRAWINGS 2022

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am extremely grateful to my wife Laura for her advice, support and patience during the period that I was working on this catalogue while at the same time moving into our new gallery premises in London.

I am also greatly indebted to my wonderful gallery team of Alesa Boyle, Eilidh McClafferty and Megan Corcoran Locke for their invaluable assistance in every aspect of preparing this catalogue and exhibition.

Sarah Ricks, Alastair Frazer and Jenny Willings at Healeys printers have been, as ever, amazing to work with. Andrew Smith has photographed almost all of the drawings, and has also been tireless in the fundamental task of colour-proofing the images for the catalogue against the original artworks. 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: Stijn Alsteens, Deborah Bates, Jorge Coll, Michele Danieli, Pauline David, David Ekserdjian, Will Elliott, Larry Feinberg, Cheryl and Gino Franchi, Meg Grasselli, Mina Gregori, Nicholas Hall, Mireille Mosler, James Mundy, Jonathan den Otter, Elizabeth Pilliod, Furio Rinaldi and Kees van Tilburg.

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

Unless otherwise noted, paper is white or whitish.

Please note that drawings are sold mounted but not framed.

High-resolution digital images of the drawings are available on request.

All enquiries should be addressed to Stephen Ongpin at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art Ltd. 82 Park Street London W1K 6NH Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 or [+44] (0)7710 328-627 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com Between 16 January and 2 February 2022 only: Tel. [+1] (917) 587-1183 Tel. [+1] (212) 249-4987

Stephen Ongpin

MASTER DRAWINGS 2022 presented by

Stephen Ongpin

1 TOMMASO (MASO) FINIGUERRA Florence 1426-1464 Florence Recto: A Man Carrying a Large Bunch of Grapes (The Return from Canaan?)

Verso: A Galloping Horse Pen and brown ink and brown wash.

182 x 122 mm. (7 1/8 x 4 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Among the contents of the studio of Maso Finiguerra, Florence, and by descent in his family until at least 1507; Probably in the Medici collections by the end of the 16th century; Part of an album of forty-six drawings attributed to Pollauiolo acquired by Ignazio Enrico Hugford, Florence; The album acquired with the rest of Hugford’s collection in 1779 by the Uffizi, Florence; The album stolen from the Uffizi in July 1793; Probably Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni, Florence, and by descent; The album broken up and partly dispersed in the late 18th or early 19th century; The present sheet part of an album of eighteen drawings by Finiguerra and his studio in the Pelli Bencivenni Fabbroni collection, Florence, by 1946; The album purchased in 1946 by Leo Planiscig, Florence; De Sanctis collection; Sale, Geneva, W. S. Kundig, 22 November 1947, lot 9 (as Alesso Baldovinetti); Libreria Ulrico Hoepli, Milan; The present sheet acquired from them in 1947 by Martin Bodmer, Zurich and Cologny; The Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny; Their sale, New York, Christie’s, 23 January 2002, lot 143 (as Attributed to Maso Finiguerra); Robert Landolt, Chur; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Bernhard Degenhart and Annegrit Schmitt, Corpus der Italienischen Zeichnungen 13001450: Sud- und Mittelitalien, Berlin, 1968, Vol.II, p.612, figs.951-952, p.617, p.621, note 62; Lorenza Melli, Maso Finiguerra: I disegni, Florence, 1995, pp.95-96, nos.131-132, pp.194-195, figs.147-148; Francesco Grisolia, ‘Per Maso Finiguerra: Sulle trace di un “libretto in quarto di disegni”’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 2018, pp.301-303, note 34, figs.20-21; Rhoda Eitel-Porter and John Marciari, Italian Renaissance Drawings at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, 2019, p.118, note 1, under no.18 (entry by John Marciari).

The present sheet may be included among a distinctive group of figure drawings by the Florentine draughtsman, goldsmith and engraver Maso Finiguerra, which have generally been dated between the 1450s and the artist’s death in 1464. The son and grandson of goldsmiths, Finiguerra trained with his father until around 1457, and as an independent artist gained a number of important commissions and enjoyed the patronage of such Florentine collectors as Giovanni Rucellai. He was best known as a maker of nielli; a kind of engraving on small silver plates or objects, where the incised lines were filled with a black mixture of sulphur, silver and lead, creating an image that contrasted with the polished silver surround, and which could also be recorded as printed impressions. During his lifetime, the artist was praised in Antonio Filarete’s Trattato dell’architettura, written between 1457 and 1464, as one of the finest goldsmiths in Italy, while also excelling in the niello technique. Finiguerra is likewise mentioned

by Giorgio Vasari, writing a century later. Vasari, who owned a number of drawings by the artist as part of his famous libro de’ disegni, notes that Finiguerra ‘had an extraordinary fame, and deservedly, since there had never been seen any master of engraving and of niello who could make so great a number of figures as he could, whether in a small or in a large space…This man drew very well and in abundance, and in our book are many of his drawings of figures, both draped and nude, and scenes done in water-colour.’1 Finiguerra is also known to have provided designs for wooden intarsia panels, notably for the sacristy of the Duomo in Florence. Although he died in his late thirties, his influence is evident in the work of several later Florentine draughtsmen and engravers.

As Hugo Chapman has pointed out, ‘It is Finiguerra’s skill as a designer of figures and small-scale figurative compositions that is reflected in his drawings, all of which are executed in pen and ink, often with wash. In [his drawings], the clear definition and crispness of the pen outlines over a black chalk underdrawing, with sparing use of wash…to indicate shading, correspond closely to the linear quality and limited tonal range of nielli…Drawings such as these served as a repository of figural ideas that could be used by Finiguerra to

recto (actual size)

speed up the compositional process...In addition to the model-book function of such studies, the practice of drawing from life, which included making studies from nude models, was clearly important to Finiguerra in honing his artistic skills, both in the wielding of the engraving burin and to widen the repertoire of poses and gestures at his command.’2 At the time of Finiguerra’s death in 1464, his studio inventory included fourteen books or albums of drawings bound in parchment, as well as several loose sheets. These books of drawings – primarily studies of posed models, usually young workshop assistants, or garzoni – were valued greatly by the artist’s descendants, and were retained first by his brother and fellow goldsmith Francesco (who, in the artist’s will drawn up in 1464, was expressly forbidden from selling any of them) and later by Maso’s son Pierantonio. Finiguerra had intended that these drawings should be kept together, for the benefit of whichever of his descendants might carry on his workshop. A large group of these figure drawings, amounting to almost a hundred sheets, is today in the Uffizi in Florence, while an album of twentythree drawings is in the Louvre in Paris and others are in museums in Europe and America.

Although a large number of drawings in this so-called ‘Finiguerra group’, including the present sheet, can be attributed to Maso Finiguerra himself, others have been given to artists in his circle. As has been noted of these studies, ‘[there is] among all the drawings a generic relationship which suggests that if they were not done by Maso himself they were at least done in his shop or under his influence.’3 Some of the drawings have previously borne attributions to the Florentine painter, sculptor and engraver Antonio del Pollaiuolo (c.1432-1498). The two artists almost certainly knew each other and may have collaborated; indeed, Maso is thought to have used Pollaiuolo’s designs for some of his silver work. As John Marciari has noted, however, ‘Most of these drawings presumably come from the fourteen books of drawings that were still held by Finiguerra’s heirs at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and it was probably on this basis that Vasari was able to attribute the drawings to the artist. Yet by the nineteenth century, most of the drawings had been given instead to Antonio Pollaiuolo and his circle…Degenhart and Schmitt returned the group to Finiguerra and his workshop, and more recent scholars, including Lorenza Melli, have argued that many of the drawings are by Finiguerra himself.’4 The present sheet has a long and fascinating provenance. It has recently been noted that this drawing was part of an album of forty-six drawings by Finiguerra and his school that were formerly in the Medici collections, possibly since the time of Christina of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany (1565-1637).

The album was acquired, sometime between the 1730s and 1770s, by the Anglo-Florentine painter, critic and art agent Ignazio Enrico Hugford (1703-1778). The year after Hugford’s death, over 3,100 drawings from his collection, including the album containing the present sheet, were purchased for the Uffizi collections. In July 1793, however, this album – its contents then attributed to Pollaiuolo – was recorded as having been stolen from the Uffizi. It then seems to have been in the possession of Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni (1729-1808), who served as Director of the Uffizi between 1775 and 1793.

At some point in the late 18th or early 19th century the album was broken up and divided into two separate volumes. One of these, bearing the coat of arms of Christina of Lorraine on the cover and containing around twenty-three drawings, was acquired by the French painter and collector Léon Bonnat (1833-1922) and is now in the Louvre. The other album, containing eighteen or nineteen drawings, including this double-sided sheet, remained in the possession of the Pelli (Bencivenni) Fabbroni family in Florence, and are recorded in photographs taken in 19465. The same year, this album was acquired from the Pelli Fabbroni family by the Austrian museum curator and art historian Leo Planiscig (1887-1952), a specialist in Italian Renaissance sculpture who lived in Florence from 1938 until his death. After passing through the De Sanctis collection, the album was sold at auction in Geneva in 1947 and acquired by the Libreria Ulrico Hoepli in Milan, by whom the drawings were removed from the album and dispersed. Seven drawings by Finiguerra sharing the same provenance as the present sheet until 1947 are now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York6, while two others are in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.7 and the Courtauld Gallery in London8. Another figure study, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, also shared the same provenance as this drawing until 20029.

verso (actual size)

2 JACOPO CARUCCI, called PONTORMO Pontorme 1494-1557 Florence A Standing Male Nude, Holding onto a Ring and Looking Upwards Pen and brown ink, over faint traces of an underdrawing in black chalk. Another study of the same figure, in pen and brown ink over a black chalk underdrawing, on the verso. Inscribed Michel-ange in pencil on the verso. Made up at the lower right and upper left corners.

403 x 245 mm. (15 7/8 x 9 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Etienne Claude Desperet, called Auguste Desperet, Paris (Lugt 721); His posthumous sale, Paris, Clément, 7-10 June 1865, probably lot 16 (as Baccio Bandinelli, ‘Etude d’un homme nu debout, avec une seconde étude au verso d’après le même modèle; à la plume’), sold together with another drawing for 57 francs; Jean-Pierre-Victor Maziès, Paris and Auch (Lugt 1919); Probably his sale, Paris, S. Mayer, 18 May 1887 (possibly as attributed to Michelangelo); P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1993; John Gaines, Lexington, Kentucky; His (anonymous) sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 January 2000, lot 52 (as Naldini); Private collection.

LITERATURE: Philippe Costamagna, Pontormo, Milan, 1994, p.13, note 24; Elizabeth Pilliod in New York, Nicholas Hall Ltd., Grey Matters, online exhibition catalogue, 2021, no.12 (as Pontormo)1.

EXHIBITED: New York, Paris and London, P. & D. Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1993, no.4 (as Naldini); New York, Nicholas Hall Ltd., Grey Matters, 2021, no.12 (as Pontormo).

Named Pontormo after his birthplace, Jacopo Carucci arrived in Florence around 1507. His early training with Leonardo da Vinci was followed by brief periods in the studios of Mariotto Albertinelli and Piero di Cosimo, although of more lasting importance was a longer period of apprenticeship with Andrea del Sarto. Pontormo was already working as an independent artist by 1515, when he was engaged on the decorations celebrating the entry of the Medici Pope Leo X into Florence. His first major work was an altarpiece of the Madonna and Child with Saints, commissioned in 1518 for the Pucci chapel in San Michele Visdomini in Florence, and with this painting he established a new, more expressive and idiosyncratic pictorial language, with strongly lit, agitated figures. Between 1520 and 1521 Pontormo worked alongside Andrea del Sarto and Francesco di Cristofano, known as Franciabigio, at the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano, where he painted a lunette fresco of Vertumnus and Pomona on the end wall of the main salone. In 1522, escaping an outbreak of the plague, Pontormo retired to the Certosa del Galluzzo, outside Florence, where he painted a cycle of scenes from the Passion in the monastery cloister. Completed in 1524, these frescoes provide further evidence of the painter’s eccentric vision, with his distinctive figures placed within a compressed pictorial space. Soon after returning to Florence, Pontormo painted what is arguably the masterpiece of his early maturity; the Entombment altarpiece of around 1526-1528 in the church of Santa Felicità. Following the death of Del Sarto in 1530, Pontormo became the leading painter in Florence. His later years were spent working for the Medici, decorating their villas at Careggi and Castello and producing a number of portraits and tapestry cartoons. In the final decade of his career Pontormo was mainly engaged on the extensive decoration of the choir of the Medici church of San Lorenzo, on which he worked alone and in secret. The work was completed after his death by his devoted pupil and assistant Agnolo Bronzino, but the frescoes were destroyed in the 18th century.

Pontormo was a supremely gifted draughtsman. Most of his drawings are studies of single figures, often nude, and many appear to be preparatory studies for paintings, although this is by no means always the case. While he was a fairly prolific draughtsman – Vasari mentions ‘molti disegni, cartoni, e modelli di terra bellissimi’ left in his studio after his death – his drawings remain scarce outside the Uffizi in Florence, which houses the vast majority of his extant drawn oeuvre. Indeed, relatively few drawings by this seminal Mannerist artist are today to be found in public collections outside Italy.

recto

The authorship of this large and impressive double-sided drawing, previously attributed to both Michelangelo and Baccio Bandinelli, has been a matter of some scholarly debate. The figure type and physiognomy of the figure are very close to Pontormo, yet almost all of his drawings are in chalk, and only a very small number of studies in pen and ink by him are known. The present sheet, however, would certainly appear to be by the same hand as a closely related pen and ink study of a male nude model in a similar pose (fig.1), which is on the recto of a double-sided drawing given to Pontormo in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin2. First published by Fritz Goldschmidt in 1915 as by Pontormo, the Berlin drawing was subsequently attributed to the same artist by Hermann Voss in 1920 and Bernard Berenson in 1938. In his groundbreaking book The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Berenson noted of the male nude on one side of the Berlin sheet that ‘The recto is not easy to recognize as P[ontormo], the hatching being so painfully Michelangelesque. And yet the swing of the contours seems to speak for him besides the fact that the other side is certainly by him.’3 Indeed, the black chalk study on the verso of the Berlin drawing4 is unquestionably a preparatory study by Pontormo for one of the putti in his lunette fresco of Vertumnus and Pomona in the Medici villa of Poggio a Caiano, near Florence, painted by the artist in 1520-1521. In this respect, it is significant that the small pen sketch at the lower left corner of the recto of the present sheet is in turn closely related to three chalk studies by Pontormo in the Uffizi5, each of which depicts a youth shielding his eyes (fig.2), which are preparatory for the fresco at Poggio a Caiano. This seated figure does not, however, appear as such in the final lunette fresco.

Although the Berlin drawing was long attributed to Pontormo – and despite the fact that the chalk study on its verso is unquestionably by him – the male nude on the recto of that sheet was reattributed in the 1960s to Pontormo’s pupil Giovanni Battista Naldini (1535-1591), first by Janet Cox-Rearick in 1964 and again by Paola Barocchi in an article on Naldini’s drawings published the following year6. In her catalogue raisonné of Pontormo’s drawings, Cox-Rearick noted that ‘A small number of drawings in pen and bistre occur at irregular intervals before 1530 in Pontormo’s oeuvre, but their appearance is quite incidental and the potential of this medium was never developed.’7 Since she believed that Pontormo rarely drew in pen and ink alone, Cox-Rearick preferred to attribute the recto of the Berlin drawing to his disciple Naldini. She went on to write of the recto of the Berlin sheet that, ‘Although it is the reverse of an authentic study, it is difficult to accept this ill-proportioned figure and crudely hatched technique as Pontormo’s. In Pontormo’s few pen studies pen was used for accents, or to define the structure of a figure under a wash, but never as an instrument for modeling form…this drawing is probably by Naldini.’8

1

verso

Naldini was a pupil and assistant of Pontormo from 1549 until the master’s death in 1557, and as a draughtsman was steeped in the style of his teacher. According to the biographer Filippo Baldinucci, he inherited Pontormo’s drawings after his death, and he seems to have copied some of them. However, the autograph drawings by Naldini that appear to be after studies by his master ‘exhibit striking differences from Pontormo’s graphic style’, as Elizabeth Pilliod has recently pointed out9. Furthermore, as Edmund Pillsbury has noted, ‘Another group of drawings that has suffered from Dr. Cox Rearick’s streamlining of the oeuvre [of Pontormo] are the drawings done in pen. Some of these…are rightly given to the artist’s associate in his later years, Giambattista Naldini. However, others assigned to this same follower…seems to be perfectly acceptable as originals by the master…Naldini’s and Pontormo’s pen styles are not easily confused.’10 The traditional view that Pontormo rarely use pen and ink as a drawing technique led both Cox-Rearick and Barocchi to attribute any Pontormesque studies in that medium to Naldini. Along with the recto of the Berlin drawing, therefore, they identified a small group of pen and ink drawings, all in the Uffizi and traditionally attributed to Pontormo, as works by Naldini11. However, more recently – in Uffizi inventory catalogues published in 1986 and 1991 by Annamaria Petrioli Tofani – this group of pen and ink studies in the Uffizi have been given back to Pontormo; an opinion seconded in the case of at least one of them – a compositional study of God Commanding Noah to Build the Ark – by both Edmund Pillsbury and Carlo Falciani12. Similarly, Pilliod has preferred to attribute the pen drawings in the Uffizi, as well as both the present sheet and the drawing in Berlin, to Pontormo himself12, noting of the Uffizi drawings that ‘These sheets demonstrate that Pontormo sometimes used ink both in inventing and going over his sketched ideas in black chalk and it is perhaps no more than an accident of fate that so few such drawings remain.’14 While Philippe Costamagna rejected the attribution of the Uffizi pen drawings to Pontormo, he chose to reserve judgment on both the present sheet and its counterpart in Berlin, noting that ‘There is a current inclination to identify the hand of the master [ie. Pontormo] in the drawing exhibited at Colnaghi in 1993 and, consequently, in the Berlin drawing…for our part, however, we dare not comment on such a delicate case.’15 Elizabeth Pilliod has recently published the present sheet as an autograph work by Pontormo. As she points out, ‘There is a group of figure studies [in the Uffizi] drawn in ink with strong similarities to the present sheet that have been returned to Pontormo16…These vivacious studies of flying putti exhibit a combination of chiaroscuro modeling with patches of dense hatching that is identical to the treatment of the modeling on the torso of the figure in the present drawing…The fact that the figure on the verso was not traced through or transferred from another sheet suggests that the artist has tried out one solution and then done it a second time, developing it to a higher degree of finish on the recto. Close examination reveals that

recto (detail)

2

the relationship of the man’s chin to his shoulder as well as the direction of his gaze is different on recto and verso, additional evidence for the sheet as an exploratory exercise rather than simply copying.’17 The small sketch of a seated figure at the lower left corner of the recto of this sheet, noted above, is a highly characteristic feature of Pontormo’s drawings, but is not found in those of Naldini. As Pilliod writes, ‘The miniscule doodle in the lower left of the present sheet provides valuable evidence both for the attribution of the sheet to Pontormo and the dating and purpose of the drawing. The little figure drawn with spontaneous dashes and jots of ink is a hallmark of Pontormo’s process. He frequently drew such tiny figures on the periphery of sheets containing large-scale figures. In every case these little sketches are versions of the main figure adjacent to them or are for the same project or commission…In the present drawing, the figure raises his proper right hand to shield his eyes. He sits with his left knee pulled up to his chest and apparently crossed over his right thigh while his right leg presumably dangled over the ledge on which this figure sits in the fresco [at Poggio a Caiano]. In devising this figure, which in the fresco is an old man seated at the far left, Pontormo played with the position of his legs and the idea of having him cover his eyes. In a series of extant sketches apparently drawn from a young male studio model in various poses18, we see the following variations: both legs drawn up and crossed, the right hand over his eyes (fig.3), his proper right leg drawn up with his left leg bent and resting flat on the ledge, and the inversion of this last. However, in no variation found in these drawings or the fresco does one leg dangle below the seated figure. That motif is instead found in the final fresco in three figures in the register above the subject of this little drawing. Thus the sketch in the corner of the present drawing reveals how Pontormo toyed with combining various motifs in multiple ways. The tiny sketch is, as so many of his others…attest, a remnant of Pontormo’s process, the product of his ever-investigating mind as he searched for the final form.’19 The spontaneity of the draughtsmanship evident in this drawing would suggest that it was made from a posed model. As Costamagna has noted, however, ‘Pontormo’s regular habit of drawing from life so profoundly affected the nature of his draftsmanship that it is often difficult to differentiate his studies from life from those after earlier models or simply from those that sprang from his imagination.’20 The Michelangelesque pose of the figure in this drawing may have been inspired by such muscular nudes by the Renaissance master as those in his lost fresco of The Battle of Cascina in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, painted in 1504-1505 but destroyed a few years later. A more direct influence may have been the pose of David, bending down to pick up the head of Goliath, in a small engraving of David and Goliath by Marcantonio Raimondi, which has been dated to c.1515-151621.

As for the purpose of this double-sided drawing, Elizabeth Pilliod has made the interesting suggestion that it may be related to another fresco, also commissioned from Pontormo but never begun, intended for the wall opposite his Vertumnus and Pomona in the salone of Poggio a Caiano. (The precise subject of this proposed second fresco remains unclear, however.) As Pilliod writes, ‘[this] large study for the man looking upwards is similar not only in medium and style but also in pose to the figure on Berlin Kupferstichkabinett 465r (fig.1)22. It should be recalled that on the verso of that drawing is a sketch for one of the putti who is holding up a large festoon that is suspended below the oculus on the end wall Pontormo painted at Poggio a Caiano. While one can only hint at the possibility that the men [in the present sheet], who gesture or look upwards, are for the same project, we suspect that they were. In fact, the frescoes that Pontormo was to paint on the opposite wall of the great hall at Poggio a Caiano included a confusing mélange of subjects, one of which was said to be “nudes playing soccer.” Always assumed to be a subject determined later, during the rule of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici, it would in fact be more likely that the subjects of both ends of the hall were already determined when Pope Leo X awarded the commission to Pontormo. Although Pontormo only finished one wall he undoubtedly mused in drawing about the subject of the companion wall. The present sheet may preserve his thoughts for both ends of the great hall.’23 The present sheet bears the collector’s marks of two 19th century French artist-collectors. The engraver, lithographer and draughtsman Étienne (known as Auguste) Desperet (1804-1865) made a modest living from his work as a printmaker, but was nevertheless able to assemble a choice collection of some seven hundred drawings, mainly by French and Italian artists, which was dispersed at auction after his death. This drawing then entered the collection of the painter Jean-Pierre-Victor Maziès (18361895), who exhibited occasionally at the Salons between 1861 and 1889, showing mainly portraits24.

3 GIORGIO GANDINI DEL GRANO Parma(?) c.1489-1538 Parma Sheet of Studies of the Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist Red chalk, pen and brown ink, with touches of brown wash and white heightening. Inscribed (by the artist) la salute la / qual d[omi?]ni in brown ink at the upper right, -liva(?) in brown ink at the left centre edge, and Pada(?) in brown ink at the lower right. Illegibly numbered (201?) or inscribed in brown ink at the lower left.

169 x 140 mm. (6 5/8 x 5 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Sir Peter Lely, London (Lugt 2092); Probably his posthumous sales, London, Richard Tompson, 16 April 1688 onwards or London, Parry Walton, 15 November 1694 onwards; Possibly Richard Houlditch, London; His son, Richard Houlditch Jr., London (Lugt 2214), with his collector’s mark and associated number 4 in brown ink at the lower right; Probably his sale, London, Langford, 12-14 February 1760; Sir Joshua Reynolds, London (Lugt 2364); By descent to his niece, Mary Palmer, later Marchioness of Thomond; Probably the posthumous Reynolds sales, London, A. C. de Poggi, 26 May 1794 onwards, or London, H. Philips, 5-26 March 1798; Possibly London, Christie’s, 17 May 1821, part of lot 43 (as Correggio); Tobias Christ, Basel; Dr. Hans Schneider, Basel and The Hague; Anonymous sale, Bern, Gutekunst & Klipstein, 6 November 1952, lot 45 (as Parmigianino, bt. Landolt for 590 Swiss francs); Dr. Robert Landolt, Chur; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Charles Rogers, A Collection of Prints in Imitation of Drawings, to Which are Annexed Lives of Their Authors with Explanatory and Critical Notes, London, 1778, Vol.II, pp.13-14 (as Correggio); Rudolph Weigel, Die Werke der Maler in ihren Handzeichnungen, Leipzig, 1865, p.164, no.1891 (as Correggio); Julius Meyer, Correggio, Leipzig, 1871, p.507, no.726 (as Correggio); A. E. Popham, Correggio’s Drawings, London, 1957, p.176, no.A19 (as Bernardino Gatti); David Ekserdjian, ‘Correggio tradotto. By Massimo Mussini’ [book review], The Burlington Magazine, October 1996, p.693, under no.574, fig.74 (as Gandini del Grano); Mario di Giampaolo and Andrea Muzzi, Il Parmigianino e il fascino di Parma, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 2003, pp.128-130, under nos.69-70, fig.90 (detail); Andrea Muzzi, ‘Aggiunte a Giorgio Gandini del Grano disegnatore’, in Alessandra Talignani et al, Parmigianino e la scuola di Parma: Atti del convegno, Casalmaggiore e Viadana 5 Aprile 2003, Viadana, 2004, pp.3032, fig.5, p.36, note 12; Lucia Fornari Schianchi, ed., Correggio, exhibition catalogue, Parma, 20082009, p.453, under no.V.7 (entry by Angelo Loda); Francesca Frucco, ‘Per Gandini disegnatore’, in Vittoria Romani, ed., Studi sul disegno padano del Rinascimento, Verona, 2010, p.150, pp.173-174, no.12, fig.15, also p.173, under no.11 and p.174, under no.13; Michael Matile, ed., Zwiegespräch mit Zeichnungen: Werke des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts aus der Sammlung Robert Landolt, exhibition catalogue, Zurich, 2013-2014, pp.49-51, no.16, also illustrated on the frontispiece (entry by Mary Vaccaro); Mary Vaccaro, ‘After Correggio: Drawings by Giorgio Gandini del Grano for Parma Cathedral’, Master Drawings, Spring 2015, pp.64-65, fig.6, pp.78-79, note 35; Arlene Blankers and John McEwen, ‘My favourite painting: Studies of the Virgin and Child with the Infant Baptist by Giorgio Gandini del Grano’, Country Life, 7 April 2021, p.70.

EXHIBITED: Zurich, Graphische Sammlung ETH, Zwiegespräch mit Zeichnungen: Werke des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts aus der Sammlung Robert Landolt, 2013-2014, no.16.

ENGRAVED: By William Wynne Ryland for Charles Rogers, A Collection of Prints in Imitation of Drawings, 1778, no.45 (as Correggio).

Very little is known of the Parmesan artist Giorgio Gandini del Grano, including the precise year of his birth, and he is first mentioned in documents in 1528, a decade before his early death. The artist is not discussed by Giorgio Vasari or any other 16th century writers on art, and almost no dated works by him survive. Gandini is thought to have been a pupil and assistant of Antonio Allegri, called Correggio (c.1489/94-1534), who was certainly a profound influence on his style. Indeed, as one modern scholar

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has noted, ‘Of all Correggio’s followers, Giorgio Gandini del Grano may have been the closest and the one who, among his nearest contemporaries, seems to have understood him best.’1 Gandini seems to have enjoyed a considerable reputation in his native Parma, as evidenced by the fact that in June 1535 he was commissioned to complete the mural decoration of the choir and apse of the city’s cathedral, part of a large project initially given to Correggio in 1522. While Correggio had completed the painting of the interior of the cupola, he did not finish any of the remaining decoration in the church. The year after the master’s death, Gandini was granted the commission to complete the work, for which he was to be paid 350 gold scudi. However, Gandini likewise died before being able to begin work in the cathedral, although he produced several preparatory drawings and full-scale cartoons for the project.

(The decoration was eventually completed by Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli around 1544.) Among the most significant of Gandini’s few surviving paintings is an altarpiece of The Holy Family with Saints Michael and Bernard, commissioned for the high altar of the church of San Michele in Parma and now in the Galleria Nazionale there. Among a handful of other extant works by the artist are easel pictures in the Galleria Nazionale in Parma and the Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki.

The corpus of extant drawings generally accepted as by Giorgio Gandini del Grano numbers around forty-five sheets, many of which, like his paintings, display the strong influence of Correggio, his presumed master. As Diane DeGrazia has written, Gandini’s drawings show that he was ‘an artist of considerable talent and originality whose vocabulary was based on Correggio but whose compositional sense was that of a classic mannerist, somewhat like Bedoli...Gandini’s drawings [are] linear in quality, circular in composition, and softened by a red chalk sfumato based on a direct knowledge of Correggio. Gandini must have been a careful craftsman and, much like Correggio, experimented with various positions of his models, searching with numerous lines and pentimenti for the perfect placement, continually changing as he drew.’2 Drawings by Gandini are today in the collections of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum in Budapest, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Uffizi in Florence, the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Gallerie dell’ Accademia in Venice, the Albertina in Vienna, the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, and elsewhere.

This very fine sheet of studies, like several of Gandini’s drawings, was once attributed to both Correggio and the Lombard artist Bernardino Gatti, known as Il Sojaro (c.1495-1575), who was also much influenced by Correggio. The present sheet was first attributed to Giorgio Gandini del Grano by David Ekserdjian in 1996, and the attribution has since been confirmed in print by Andrea Muzzi in 2003 and 2004, Francesca Frucco – in her catalogue raisonné of the artist’s drawings – in 2010, and most recently by Mary Vaccaro in 2015. As Vaccaro has aptly noted of Gandini, ‘The artist’s corpus of drawings demonstrates stylistic coherence, technical range, and high quality. In approach, he exhibits strong analogies with his putative mentor, and many sheets once believed to be by Correggio, and later given to Gatti, are now recognized as his. He adopted Correggio’s preferred medium of red chalk, as did Gatti, but in a different manner to both of them. Their chalk strokes tend to be rounded, whereas Gandini’s are more linear with sharply defined contours…Although Gandini, like Correggio and Gatti, utilized pen and ink to elaborate initial sketches in chalk, he exploited ink’s potential more extensively and fluently than either of them. At times, Gandini’s sensibility for line is almost akin to calligraphy.’3 A stylistically comparable, double-sided sheet of studies of The Holy Family and the Virgin and Child by Gandini (fig.1) is in the Uffizi4. As Vaccaro writes of both the Uffizi drawing and the present sheet, each of which includes text in a distinctive hand that is probably the artist’s own; ‘both [drawings] investigate alternative compositional solutions. A sequence of visual ideas for the Virgin and Child with the Infant Baptist, filled with lively pentiments, spills across each page. Surprisingly ahead of its time, such an energetic and experimental style of draftsmanship is usually associated with later sixteenth-century artists, especially Taddeo Zuccaro (1529-1566) and Federico Barocci (c.1533-1612).’5 The studies on the present sheet can also be related to Gandini’s small painting of The Rest on the Flight into Egypt of c.1535 (fig.2), formerly in the Roschier-Holmberg and Mickwitz collections in Finland and recently acquired by the Sinebrychoff Art Museum of the Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki6. A preparatory study in red chalk by Gandini for the Helsinki painting, today in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle7, is likewise compositionally similar to the present sheet.

Among other stylistically analogous drawings by Giorgio Gandini del Grano is a Virgin and Child with Saints in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice8 and a sheet of four studies of seated angels in the collection of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth9. Also similar in handling and technique are a drawing of two embracing figures in the Uffizi10 and a study of The Virgin and Child with Angels Crowning Saint Catherine in the British Museum11.

The present sheet has a long and distinguished provenance, dating back to the 17th century in England.

Its first known owner was the portrait painter Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680), whose renowned collection of nearly ten thousand prints and drawings, the largest seen in England up to that time, was dispersed at auction in 1688 and 1694. The drawing was then acquired by either the South Sea Company director Richard Houlditch (c.1659-1736), or his son Richard Houlditch, Junior (d.1760), both of whom collected drawings.

This sheet of studies was next in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), the leading portrait painter in England in the 18th century, whose success allowed him to assemble a fine group of paintings, drawings and prints. Reynolds’s collection of several thousand drawings, mainly Italian works of the 16th and 17th centuries, included fifty-four drawings by or attributed to Correggio. While in his collection the present sheet was reproduced, as a fine example of Correggio’s draughtsmanship, in an engraving by William Wynne Ryland for Charles Rogers’s two-volume compendium A Collection of Prints in Imitation of Drawings, published in 1778. Reynolds’s vast collection of drawings was dispersed at two posthumous auctions in 1794 and 1798.

In the early 20th century, the present sheet came into the possession of the noted Swiss collector Dr. Tobias Christ (1888-1941) of Basel, and thence passed to the Swiss art historian and museum director Hans Schneider (1888-1953), before being sold at auction in Bern in 1952. This fine drawing then remained in a Swiss private collection for the next sixty-eight years, and has only been exhibited once before, in Zurich in 2013.

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4 BARTOLOMEO PASSAROTTI Bologna 1529-1592 Bologna Studies of Male Nudes Pen and brown ink, with framing lines in brown ink. Inscribed mihelange in pencil on the verso. Further inscribed Buonaroti (Michel Angelo) in brown ink on the former mount.

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

Watermark: LM(?) in a circle with a trefoil above.

PROVENANCE: Louis de Gassi, Paris (Lugt 1729); His anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 6 April 1858, lot 12 (as attributed to Michelangelo); Joë Bousquet, Carcassonne; Thence by descent.

Thought to be a student of the architect Jacopo Vignola, Bartolomeo Passarotti (or Passerotti) spent his early years in Rome, arriving there around 1551. There he worked with the painter Taddeo Zuccaro, with whom he also shared a home. Indeed, among his earliest known works are a series of etchings reproducing drawings by Taddeo, as well as further prints after the work of other artists that the young Passarotti would have seen in Rome in the early 1550s. However, no securely datable paintings and hardly any drawings by the artist survive from this formative Roman period. His first documented paintings – notably the high altar of the Bolognese church of San Giacomo Maggiore – date from the middle of the 1560s, when he was already in his mid-thirties, and several years after his return to Bologna from Rome.

Passarotti worked mainly as a portrait painter and soon established a reputation as the pre-eminent artist in this field in Bologna. Twice summoned to Rome to paint the portraits of Popes Pius V and Gregory XIII, he counted other members of the papal court among his sitters. In Bologna, Passarotti joined the local guild, the Compagnia delle Quattro Arti, and was awarded several important public commissions, including the altarpieces for the churches of San Petronio and San Giacomo Maggiore.

By the 1570s he was recognized as the leading painter in Bologna, although he never seems to have worked in fresco. He also painted a number of kitchen or genre scenes which, like some of his religious pictures, are often signed with his symbol of a passero, or sparrow. As a printmaker, Passarotti produced a handful of etchings, mostly after the work of other artists; this was probably in keeping with his own interests as a collector of paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures. Instrumental in the establishment of an artist’s guild in Bologna, Passarotti supervised a large and active studio, and his students included not only his four children, but also Agostino Carracci, who studied with him in the 1570s.

In his lifetime, Passarotti was particularly admired for his drawings, many of which were made as finished, independent works. His bold draughtsmanship was praised by such connoisseurs as the 17th century art historian Carlo Cesare Malvasia (‘la sua penna...fu delle più brave che mai si vedesse...che di qualche disegno di Passarotti non andasse vago e curioso’), and his biographers note that his drawings were highly regarded by his contemporaries as well as by later collectors. The 16th century priest and writer Ignazio Danti, whose portrait was painted by the artist, described Passarotti as ‘one of the most splendid luminaries that the art of Drawing had ever known, for in the handling of his pen he surpassed not only the artists of his own age, but everyone who has come down to us in recent memory. [He is] among those who deserve eternal praise, since it is impossible to attain such excellence without much studying and many a sleepless night.’1 As a draughtsman, Passarotti produced compositional and figure studies for his paintings, anatomical studies and drawings of animals; all executed with bravura penmanship. He also drew a series of elaborate and highly finished portraits and studies of heads, in thick, dark strokes of pen and ink, that were probably intended to be sold to collectors as works of art in their own right.

An interesting aspect of Passarotti’s drawn oeuvre are his boldly drawn nude and anatomical studies, in which the influence of the pen drawings of the Florentine sculptors Michelangelo and Baccio Bandinelli,

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with their strong crosshatching to denote musculature, is evident. The present sheet is a particularly fine and fresh example of the artist’s drawings of this type. As Paul Joannides has pointed out, ‘Whereas Passarotti seems not to have been intimate with Michelangelo or with those who possessed his drawings, he probably had direct access to drawings by Bandinelli: the two artist’s pen drawings have often been confused. Passarotti became a virtuoso in pen, a skill further developed by his work as an engraver, but there is often a stiffness and excessive systemization in his handling…Passarotti seems never to have been interested in the textures of the body, although he produced a number of anatomical drawings. There are very few surviving studies in chalk, a medium invariably employed by artists who wished to capture the movement of light on skin and of muscles below it.’2 The 16th century Florentine playwright, poet and art critic Raffaello Borghini noted that Passarotti compiled a now-lost album of his anatomical drawings, which were intended both as exercises and as studies for paintings. As Borghini wrote, ‘He has made a book of anatomies, of bones and flesh, in which he wants to show how one must learn the art of drawing in order to master it, and we can be sure that it will be a beautiful thing; because he draws very well.’3 Passarotti’s abiding interest in anatomy is also seen in a fascinating self-portrait drawing now in the University Library in Warsaw4, datable to the 1580s, which depicts the artist in the act of lecturing on anatomy, with three studies of skeletal, ecorché and posed studies of the male nude arrayed behind him.

Stylistically comparable drawings by Passarotti, with vigorous strokes of pen and ink hatching used to delineate the muscles of the body, include a drawing of a male torso in the Galleria dell’ Accademia in Venice5, a study of two standing putti6 and another of Two Studies of Male Nudes7, both in the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, and a drawing of a male torso that appeared at auction in 19788. Similar nudes are also found in a drawing of Studies for The Adoration of the Magi at Christ Church in Oxford9, which contains preparatory studies for an altarpiece of The Adoration of the Magi painted in the 1560s for the church of San Pietro and now in the Palazzo Arcivescovile in Bologna. An analogous treatment of nude musculature is likewise found in a pen and ink drawing of a naked soldier seen from behind, in a private collection in Rome10, and a drawing of several male nudes in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle11, as well as a double-sided sheet of studies formerly in the Baer collection and is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.12.

Like many of Passarotti’s drawings, this powerful study of male nudes was once thought to be by Michelangelo. As Joannides has noted, ‘In the eighteenth century, before large numbers of genuine Michelangelo drawings came onto the market, sheets by Passarotti were routinely given to Michelangelo, and protoromantic Michelangelism was based less on the master’s own work than on that of relatively distant followers like Passarotti.’13 This drawing bears the mark of the 19th century French collector Louis de Gassi, about whom almost nothing is known. De Gassi’s small but choice collection of 127 Italian, French and Nothern drawings was sold at auction in Paris in 1858, and a number of drawings bearing his recently identified collector’s mark are today in the Louvre and the British Museum. The present sheet later belonged to the French poet Joë Bousquet (1897-1950). In 1918, during the First World War, the young Bousquet was wounded in battle and thereafter paralyzed from the waist down. Despite being largely bedridden for the rest of his life, surrounded by a collection of books and paintings, he was highly productive as a writer and poet.

5 GIROLAMO SICIOLANTE DA SERMONETA Sermoneta c.1521-1575 Rome The Seated Virgin Black chalk, extensively heightened with white chalk, on blue paper, backed. Squared for transfer in black chalk, and with framing lines in black chalk.

264 x 172 mm. (10 3/8 x 6 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Benjamin West, London (Lugt 419), his drystamp at the lower left1; Geiger collection, New York (as Fra Bartolommeo); Private collection, Switzerland.

LITERATURE: Bernice F. Davidson, ‘Some Early Works by Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta’, The Art Bulletin, March 1966, p.64, fig.15; Raffaele Bruno, ‘Girolamo Siciolante: revisioni e verifiche ricostruttive’, Critica d’arte, no.136, 1974, p.33; Teresa Pugliatti, ‘Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta. Considerazioni e proposte per una ricostruzione del percorso stilistico’, in John Hunter, Teresa Pugliatti and Luigi Fiorani, Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta (1521-1575): Storia e critica, Rome, 1983, pp.99-100, fig.40; John Hunter, ‘The Drawings and Draughtsmanship of Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta’, Master Drawings, Spring 1988, p.19, p.37, no.13, pl.12; Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Generalverzeichnis, Vol.III, Vienna, 1995, p.1685, under Inv. 4873; Vincenzo Abbate, Maestri del Disegno nelle collezioni di Palazzo Abatellis, exhibition catalogue, Palermo, 1995-1996, p.161, under no.37 (entry by Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò); John Hunter, Girolamo Siciolante pittore da Sermoneta (1521-1575), Rome, 1996, p.159, under no.25, pp.265-266, p.279, no.D-15, fig.58.

Born in the hill town of Sermoneta, southeast of Rome, Girolamo Siciolante joined the Roman studio of Perino del Vaga around 1541, the same year as his earliest known painting, an altarpiece for a small church near his home town. He entered the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1543, and at around the same time painted his first significant work; a Pietà for the Roman church of Santi Apostoli. By 1544 he was assisting Perino on the fresco decoration of the Castel Sant’Angelo, mainly in the Sala Paolina.

However, as Marcia Hall has noted of the artist, ‘his temperament did not dispose him to sympathy with Perino’s ornate style. He seems from the start to have been predisposed to the direct expression of religious feeling.’2 After working briefly at the ducal court of Pier Luigi Farnese in Parma, he travelled to Bologna, where in 1548 he painted a Madonna and Child with Saints for the high altar of San Martino Maggiore.

A few months after Perino’s death in October 1547, Siciolante returned to Rome to complete some of the master’s unfinished projects, notably a fresco of The Baptism of Clovis in San Luigi dei Francesi, completed by 1549. Of around the same date is the decoration of the Caetani chapel in the church of San Giuseppe in the artist’s native Sermoneta, as well as a series of paintings for the chapel of the Chateau de la Bastie d’Urfé in France. Relatively little is known of Siciolante’s career during the decade of the 1550s, and no works survive from this period3.

Unlike his teacher Perino del Vaga and many of his Roman contemporaries, Siciolante seems to have been uninterested in competing for secular decorative commissions. Nevertheless, his somewhat conservative style as a painter found considerable success in post-Tridentine Rome. The 1560s and 1570s saw the artist at the forefront of artistic activity in the city, working in the Vatican and in churches throughout Rome and its environs, as well as receiving private commissions from noble Roman families and members of the papal court. Among the more significant works of his later career were the decoration of the Fugger chapel in the church of Santa Maria dell’Anima and a fresco of The Donation of Pepin for the Sala Regia of the Vatican, commissioned in 1565. He also produced important paintings for the Roman churches of Santa Maria Maggiore, San Tomaso ai Cenci, Santa Maria in Aracoeli and Santa Maria sopra Minerva, as well as the Basilica of Saint Peter. By the time of his death in 1575 Siciolante was one of the most prominent and successful painters in Rome, although he left no school or influenced any significant followers.

While Siciolante enjoyed a fruitful career that lasted some four decades, relatively few drawings by the artist, numbering less than thirty sheets, are known today. While his early drawings are strongly

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influenced by the example of Perino del Vaga’s pen draughtsmanship, his mature figure studies in black chalk, of which the present sheet is a particularly fine example, reflect the abiding influence of Michelangelo’s late work in Rome. This drawing is a preparatory study for the figure of the Virgin in the centre of a semi-dome fresco of The Assumption of the Virgin (fig.1)4, part of an extensive fresco cycle of scenes from the life of the Virgin in the Fugger chapel of the Roman church of Santa Maria dell’Anima, the church of the German congregation in Rome. The construction and decoration of the chapel had originally been commissioned by the German merchant and banker Anton Fugger, and at his death in 1560 patronage of the chapel passed to his nephew, Hans Jakob Fugger. It was he who probably commissioned the fresco decoration from Siciolante, sometime around 1560. As Hall has pointed out, ‘Siciolante was perhaps a logical choice of painter for a northern European patron like Fugger, who may have had little enthusiasm for the elitist sophistication and peculiar calligraphy of the Maniera. He may well have preferred the unadorned, more bourgeois style in which Siciolante rendered the familiar scenes.’5 Generally dated to the early 1560s, the frescoes in Santa Maria dell’Anima are among the artist’s finest surviving works in Rome. As the Siciolante scholar John Hunter has written, ‘These paintings in the Fugger Chapel are certainly Siciolante’s most harmonious works; the grand, powerful figures are wrapped in heavy garments that fall softly, with wide, gently swaying folds. The physical action is limited, the emotions restrained, but the figures are full of grace, inserted with a rhythm into meticulously described settings, as an architect would do before a project. The scenery creates a neutral, grey background against which the bright colours of the clothes – red, gold, blue, green, violet – stand out.’6 Nine preparatory figure studies for the Fugger chapel commission are known, more than for any other project undertaken by the artist. These drawings, almost all executed in black chalk on blue paper, include three studies for other figures in the half-dome fresco of The Assumption of the Virgin; a Standing Apostle in the British Museum in London7, a Kneeling Apostle in the Albertina in Vienna8 and a Striding Apostle in a private collection in Paris9. Preparatory drawings for other frescoes in the Fugger chapel are in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Museo Nazionale in Palermo, the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome and the Biblioteca Reale in Turin.

As has been noted of the figure studies for the Santa Maria dell’Anima frescoes, which appear to have been made from posed models, ‘The drawings for the Fugger chapel seem to reflect Siciolante’s deliberate evolution...There is no similar interest in life drawing in Siciolante’s early work, and his new desire to draw from models must have been a means of devising a more normative figural style…The technique of these drawings was also a new one for Siciolante, and one suspects he adopted it after seeing the drawings of Daniele da Volterra…and others in a finely hatched chalk style. Black and white chalk in blue paper had also come to be more frequently used in Rome in the 1550s…’10 John Hunter has commented on the present sheet in particular that ‘The Seated Virgin differs from the figure in the fresco in minor detail, primarily in the folds of the drapery. Unlike the other figure studies for the Fugger Chapel, this drawing is squared for transfer and is a more finished study.’11

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6 DIRCK BARENDSZ. Amsterdam 1534-1592 Amsterdam Christ is Stripped of His Garments Brown, black, grey and white oil on paper, with framing lines in brown ink, varnished and laid down.

Signed Theodorus in brown oil paint at the lower right. Numbered 21. and inscribed Jesus est depoüillé de ses habits in brown ink on the old mount.

254 x 205 mm. (10 x 8 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: An anonymous 18th century French collection, before 1759; Private collection, France, in 1851; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 19 April 1986, lot 83; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1987; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Felice Stampfle, Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries and Flemish Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1991, p.17, under no.28; Karel G. Boon, The Netherlandish and German Drawings of the XVth and XVIth Centuries of the Frits Lugt Collection, Paris, 1992, Vol.I, p.13, under no.3, note 7; Clifford S. Ackley, ‘The Intuitive Eye: Drawings and Paintings from the Collection of Horace Wood Brock’, in Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 2009, p.99 and p.157, no.121, illustrated p.121.

EXHIBITED: New York, Colnaghi, Old Master Drawings, 1987, no.11; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.121.

Dirck Barendsz., sometimes known as Theodorus Bernardus, left Amsterdam for Italy in 1555, at the age of about twenty-one. He spent several years in Venice, where, according to his biographer Karel van Mander, he worked as a pupil and assistant in the studio of Titian. He may also have spent some time in Rome. Nothing survives of Barendsz.’s work in Italy, however, although a monumental wall painting of The Last Judgement on the internal facade of the Imperial abbey church at Farfa in central Italy, unsigned but prominently dated 1561, has recently been attributed to him. Barendsz. was back in Amsterdam by 1562, the date of his earliest known work; a group portrait of the civic guard of Amsterdam which is now in the Rijksmuseum. He worked in Amsterdam for the remainder of his career, and van Mander praises his role in introducing the new and modern Italian style (‘de rechte manier van Italien’) into the Netherlands. Certainly, the particular influence of Venetian 16th century painting is evident in much of Barendsz.’s mature work. Very few paintings by the artist survive today, however, of which the most important is a triptych of The Adoration of the Shepherds of c.1565, now in the Stedelijk Museum in Gouda. That the artist must have received other major commissions is shown by the existence of a large drawing of The Fall of the Rebel Angels, in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, which is undoubtedly a study for a now-lost altarpiece. Much of his religious work, however, seems to have been destroyed by the later iconoclasm in the Netherlands. Apart from a handful of painted portraits, Barendsz.’s surviving oeuvre consists of oil sketches, drawings and engravings made after his designs.

The present sheet is part of an important group of forty monochrome sketches in oil by Dirck Barendsz., illustrating scenes from the life of Christ, from the entry into Jerusalem to the Ascension. Many of the drawings are signed with some variant of Barendsz.’s name, such as ‘Theo.’ or ‘Theodorus B.’. Sometime in the 18th century, a French collector seems to have pasted the sketches into an album1, numbering them and adding captions in French. The entire group was seen on two occasions by the 18th century

amateur and collector Pierre-Jean Mariette, the second time in Paris in 1759, when he noted that ‘ces desseins sont faits en mâitre; ils sont touchés avec une finesse et un esprit’2, although he mistakenly believed the drawings to be the work of the Antwerp engraver Johannes (Jan) Sadeler I (1550-1600), who had made engravings of a few of them.

This series of oil sketches by Barendsz. was last recorded as a complete set when they were offered to the Louvre in 1851, after which they disappeared for over a hundred and twenty years. It was not until the middle of the 1970s that individual examples began appearing on the Paris art market. In 1978 a handful of these small paintings on paper were first published by Jacques Foucart and Pierre Rosenberg, who noted that ‘The whole series has such an expressive quality, [and] such vivid and fresh originality... covering a refined chromatic scale – a range of tones from blacks, browns, maroons, yellows and golds executed with the brush with a swift and nervous touch.’3 Around twenty-seven sheets from this numbered series of scenes from the Passion are known today, almost all of which reappeared in France over the last two decades of the 20th century. They are now divided among the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille, the British Museum in London, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Musée du Louvre and the Fondation Custodia in Paris, the Musée des BeauxArts in Rouen, the Musée Lambinet in Versailles and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as well as in a number of private collections4.

As the scholar Joaneath Spicer has written of this distinctive group of grisaille drawings by Barendsz., ‘These chiaroscuro compositions are painted in oil in shades of rich brown, with cream and pale yellow highlights applied in light, quick, short strokes. Even allowing for the darkening of the pigments or varnish over time, a surprising number of scenes from this Passion series are represented as taking place at night or in semi-darkness, yet they are very evocatively rendered.’5 Engravings by Jan Sadeler after five of the drawings are known, and it is possible that, despite their freedom of execution, the entire set was intended to be translated into prints. However, as Martin Royalton-Kisch has noted, ‘Barendsz. has sacrificed none of his breadth of style in anticipation of the linear effects of the engraver’s burin…they make no stylistic concessions whatever towards engravers’ drawings. Indeed it says much for Jan Sadeler’s skill that he was able to translate these painterly sketches into line.’6 Given the relative scarcity of works by Barendsz., the dating of this series of monochrome studies has been a matter of some debate, with opinions ranging from the 1560s to the 1580s. Oil sketches on paper of this type are very rare in Netherlandish art of the 16th century, and the only other examples known are a few works by the artists Joachim Beuckelaer (c.1533-1575), executed in the mid-1560s, and Anthonie Blocklandt van Montfoort (1533/34-1583), which were done around 1575. Although Barendsz. may have adopted the practice during his time in Venice in the late 1550s and early 1560s, it should be noted that the production of oil sketches on paper only became popular among Venetian artists of the succeeding generation, notably Palma Giovane and Domenico Tintoretto.

These grisaille studies, with their freedom of handling and dramatic effects of light, provide valuable evidence of the artistic talents of Dirck Barendsz., by whom few other works are known. They show the particular influence of his time in Venice; as has been noted, ‘Barendsz’s Passion scenes with their flickering, indefinable lighting that gives the setting the stifling nature of a nightmare, are not really conceivable without the example of the late Titian or Tintoretto.’7 Furthermore, as Spicer has pointed out, ‘this is one of the most striking and original series, in terms of both its content and its style, by a sixteenthcentury Dutch artist.’8

7 AURELIO LUINI Milan c.1530-1593 Milan Sheet of Studies of Lower Torsos and Legs, Arms and a Shoulder Pen and brown ink. A faint study of a torso and legs drawn in pen and brown ink on the verso.

248 x 171 mm. (9 3/4 x 6 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 21 January 2003, lot 7.

The youngest son of the Milanese painter Bernardino Luini, who died when he was an infant, Aurelio Luini nevertheless worked in his father’s tradition as a pupil and one of the best followers of Leonardo da Vinci. Like his father, Aurelio worked for most of his life in Milan, often in collaboration with other local artists. Together with his brother Giovan Pietro, he was tasked in the mid-1550s with completing some of the fresco decoration begun by their father Bernardino in the Milanese church of San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore. In this cycle of scenes from the life of Christ, his first major independent work, Aurelio’s forms retain his father’s characteristic softness and chiaroscuro. Many of the younger Luini’s commissions came from religious societies, and his work can be found in several churches in and around his native Milan, including the Duomo. He also produced a large number of fresco cycles in the city and throughout Lombardy and Piedmont, notably in the Milanese church of San Vincenzo alle Monache and at Santa Maria di Campagna on the outskirts of Pallanza, on Lake Maggiore, where he worked alongside another Lombard painter, Carlo Urbino. The final and most significant works of Luini’s nearly forty-year career are the frescoed scenes from the life of Saint Ambrose for the vault of a chapel in the Tribunale di Provvisione in Milan, completed a few weeks before his death in 1593. As well as being a painter, Luini was also a poet, and was himself the subject of a sonnet composed by artist and writer Giovan Paolo Lomazzo: ‘Tu Aurelio, la cui mente più alto aspira, / Come per l’opere tui si vede e mira. / Oltre ch’in dolce lira / Dolce canti i pensier ne i tuoi disegni, / Dispiegandogli in versi ornate e degni.’1 Aurelio Luini was an accomplished draughtsman, and among such contemporaries as Lomazzo was highly regarded in particular for his masterful anatomical studies and figure drawings. The artist’s interest in anatomy was very likely the result of his close friendship with Carlo Urbino, who published a study of the principles of anatomy, perspective and proportion, inspired by the theories of Leonardo and known as the Codex Huygens, which is today in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

The present sheet is highly characteristic of Luini’s style as a draughtsman and, both in subject and in composition, reveals the particular influence of Leonardo’s anatomical studies, which the artist would certainly have known. (According to a contemporary biographer, Luini owned a large drawn cartoon of The Holy Family with Saint Anne as well as a group of about fifty drawings – apparently mainly caricatures and grotesque heads – by Leonardo, to which Luini may have turned for inspiration in producing his own small-scale drawn studies of teste caricate.) As Lucia Tantardini has noted of Luini’s abiding interest in Leonardo’s drawings, ‘Aurelio’s intellectual, yet original, approach to the great Florentine makes him one of the late sixteenth-century Italian artists who most acutely attempted to grasp the range of Leonardo’s draughtsmanship.’2 Stylistically comparable drawings by Aurelio Luini include a sheet of studies of legs, arms, a torso and a head in profile at Christ Church in Oxford3 and a study of Neptune in the British Museum in London4.

actual size

8 LELIO ORSI Novellara 1511-1587 Novellara The Rape of Ganymede Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, with touches of gouache, with framing lines in brown ink, on light brown paper. Inscribed Lelio da Novellara in brown ink at the bottom centre.

249 x 233 mm. (9 3/4 x 9 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: An unidentified [d’Este or Gonzaga?] armorial collector’s mark with an eagle (possibly the Gonzaga emblem) partially stamped in black ink near the lower left corner; Maria Teresa CyboMalaspina, Duchess of Massa and Crown Princess of Modena, Villa di San Michele, nr. Novellara, in 1770; Sir Joshua Reynolds, London (Lugt 2364); By descent to his niece, Mary Palmer, later Marchioness of Thomond; Probably the posthumous Reynolds sales, London, A. C. de Poggi, 26 May 1794 onwards or London, H. Philips, 5-26 March 1798 (part of lot 1604?); Thomas Blayds, Castle Hill, Englefield Green, Surrey (Lugt 416a); Possibly his posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 29 March 1849, as part of lot 36 (‘A Collection of Drawings by Old Masters, in 2 Scrapbooks, half-bound morocco’, sold for 23 guineas to ‘Thatcher’); Probably Samuel Jones Loyd, Lord Overstone, Overstone Park, Northamptonshire; His daughter Harriet Loyd, later Baroness Wantage; Robert Loyd-Lindsay, Baron Wantage, and Harriet, Baroness Wantage, Lockinge House, Berkshire; By descent to her nephew, Arthur Thomas Loyd, Lockinge House, Berkshire; By descent to his son, Christopher Lewis Loyd, Lockinge House, Berkshire; His sale, London, Sotheby’s, 28 November 1945, lot 35 (‘LELIO ORSI. Man on horseback with an eagle, pen and ink with wash, 10 in by 9 in. From the Sir Joshua Reynolds Collection.’, bt. Gernsheim for £64); Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 10 July 2001, lot 26; Flavia Ormond, London, in 2002; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Vincenzo Davolio, Memorie storiche della contea di Novellara e dei Gonzaghi che vi dominarono, Milan, 1833, [1987 ed.], Vol.III, p.188; Vincenzo Davolio, Notizie storiche di Lelio Orsi, 1836, MS 1836, Novellara, Museo Gonzaga; Giuseppe Campori, Raccolta di cataloghi ed inventarii inediti di quadri, statue, disegni, bronzi, smalti, medaglie, avorii, ecc. dal secolo XV al secolo XIX, Modena, 1870, p.669 (‘Lelio da Novellara. Ganimede a cavallo rapito dall’ aquila, disegno acquerellato, zecchini 2.’); Celestino Malagoli, Memorie storiche su Lelio Orsi, celebre pittore di Novellara, Guastalla, 1892, pp.21-22; Roberto Salvini and Alberto Mario Chiodi, Mostra di Lelio Orsi: Catalogo, exhibition catalogue, Reggio Emilia, 1950, p.6, under no.5; Massimo Pirondini, ‘Opere perdute o non rintracciate’, in Elio Monducci and Massimo Pirondini, ed., Lelio Orsi, exhibition catalogue, Reggio Emilia, 1987-1988, p.251, no.21 (as location unknown).

EXHIBITED: New York, Flavia Ormond Fine Arts at Adelson Galleries, Master Drawings 15001895, 2002, no.2; New York, Nicholas Hall, Metamorphosis: Liu Dan’s Fantastic Landscape and the Renaissance, 2018.

‘Lelio Urso in architectura magno, in pictura majori, et in Delineamentis optimo’, reads the epitaph on the tomb of Lelio Orsi, a provincial painter of considerable talent about whom relatively little is known today. He is not mentioned by Giorgio Vasari or by any other early sources, and most of his paintings are now lost, save for a few easel pictures and some fresco fragments. The son of a minor painter, Orsi is first recorded in 1536 in Reggio Emilia, where working on the design of a triumphal arch to celebrate the entry of Ercole d’Este into the city. He continued to work extensively in Reggio Emilia, decorating the façade of the Torre dell’ Orologio there in 1544. By 1546 Orsi was engaged by the Gonzaga of Novellara, a minor branch of the Mantuan family, who remained his most important patrons throughout his career. While he may have made a first visit to Rome some time in the late 1540s, he was definitively in the city from 1554 to 1555, and it was here that the influence of Michelangelo was added to the dominant early inspiration of Correggio, effecting a profound change in Orsi’s style.

Throughout the 1560s Orsi continued to work for the Gonzaga of Novellara, decorating their villa at Bagnolo and providing frescoes for the villas of the Casino di Sotto and the Casino di Sopra, as well as the Rocca di Novellara. Unfortunately, very little survives of any of these large-scale decorative projects.

In 1563 Alfonso Gonzaga decreed that all the houses in Novellara should be decorated with façade frescoes, and Orsi was given the responsibility of designing and executing several of these, including for his own home. As Daniele Benati has noted, ‘The decoration of façades, which was certainly not unknown in Emilia but depended mainly on Roman models (Polidoro, Maturino) found in Lelio Orsi an extraordinarily gifted interpreter, as is apparent from numerous surviving drawings.’1 For the most part, however, these façade frescoes no longer exist, and are merely recorded in drawings and prints. Since only fragments of his mural paintings survive, Orsi’s style as a painter is best seen in a small number of cabinet pictures of mythological and religious subjects that he produced; works which show the continued influence of Michelangelo, Correggio and the studio of Raphael. Little is known of his activity in the last fifteen years of his career, which are thought to have been spent working in Reggio Emilia before his death in Novellara at the age of seventy-six.

Orsi’s drawings, many of which are designs for wall or façade decorations, have survived in far greater number than his paintings, and were highly regarded in his lifetime. Often displaying the particular influence of Michelangelo, the artist’s drawings are characterized by a refined technique and an imaginative approach to composition. The inventories of the Gonzaga collections at Novellara list several sheets by the artist, and enough contemporary copies of his drawings exist to show that they were widely known and appreciated in the 16th century. In later years, the 18th century French collector and connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette noted how Orsi’s drawings were popular with collectors, while another 18th century French writer noted of the artist that ‘les desseins de ce peintre sont fort recherchés. Il a une assez belle plume, et joint au goût terrible de Michel-Ange les graces aimables du Corrège’2. Significant collections of drawings by Orsi are today in the British Museum, the Louvre, the Uffizi and the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

This highly finished drawing is a splendid example of Lelio Orsi’s refined technique as a draughtsman, typical both in the manner in which the highlights are applied and the distinctive facial types. The drawing is almost certainly a study for a lost fresco that once decorated the facade of a house in Novellara that belonged to the Gentili family in the 17th century, and which was destroyed towards the end of the 18th century3. The fresco was described in an anonymous account of Orsi’s paintings in Novellara, written around the middle of the 17th century, as depicting Ganymede on a horse; an unusual and quite innovative treatment of the subject: ‘Above another house of the Gentili family, he painted a Ganymede on horseback, that is still preserved there, and is esteemed by all those who see it.’4 The 19th century Novellara historian Vincenzo Davolio also mentions the lost fresco: ‘and we have seen, destroyed not many years ago, the last remnants of some shields depicting naval battles, the war of the Giants, a Ganymede on horseback, painted by Lelio on the facade of the old Gentili house.’5 A number of drawings by Orsi depicting the abduction of Ganymede by Jupiter, in the form of an eagle, are recorded in old inventories, and these may relate either to the lost Gentili facade fresco, which showed Ganymede on a horse, or to Orsi’s octagonal ceiling fresco of the Rape of Ganymede, formerly in a room of the Rocca di Novellara and now in the Galleria Estense in Modena6, in which the subject is treated more conventionally.

The present sheet is first recorded, valued at 2 zecchini, in a 1770 inventory of drawings for sale from the Casino di Sotto, part of the Villa di San Michele, near Novellara7; the property of Maria Teresa Cybo-Malaspina (1725-1790), Duchess of Massa, Princess of Carrara and Crown Princess of Modena.

In his biography of Lelio Orsi, published in 1892, the 19th century scholar Celestino Malagoli notes what must be the present sheet among the numerous drawings by the artist formerly in the Gonzaga collections in Novellara: ‘In the Gallery of the Gonzaga Princes there were...One hundred drawings in one hundred sheets of carta reale, partly in watercolour, partly in black chalk, and partly in pen, ornamented

with carved and gilded frames, and partly in [frames of] ebony with crystal...One can admire in these drawings...Ganymede on a horse abducted by the eagle, in watercolour...’8 A very similar rearing horse is found in a large pen and ink drawing of The Conversion of Saint Paul by Orsi in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford9, which was inspired by Michelangelo’s fresco of the subject in the Cappella Paolina in the Vatican. Similar horses are found throughout Orsi’s oeuvre, notably in a painting of Saint George and the Dragon in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples10, as well as in such drawings as Apollo on his Chariot at Windsor Castle11, The Rape of the Sabine Women in the Witt Collection at the Courtauld Gallery in London12, another Conversion of Saint Paul in the Louvre13 and A Battle Between Men and Lions in a private collection14.

This drawing must have been acquired at some point in the last quarter of the 18th century by the eminent painter and collector Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), whose collector’s mark it bears.

Another Orsi drawing from Reynolds’s collection, now in the British Museum, depicts a man restraining a similar rearing horse15, and was likely to have been a study for a Conversion of Saint Paul.

The Rape of Ganymede was one of several drawings from the Reynolds collection later acquired by the early Victorian banker and collector Thomas Blayds (1795-1849), about whom relatively little is known.

Blayds’s collection of drawings appears to have been acquired en bloc, possibly at auction in 1849, by the banker, politician, museum patron and art collector Samuel Jones Loyd, later Lord Overstone (1796-1883). The present sheet passed to Overstone’s daughter, Harriet Loyd-Lindsay, Baroness Wantage (1837-1920) and thence to her nephew, A. T. Loyd. In 1945, the year after his death, some of the drawings from the collection, including the present sheet, were sold at auction in London.

A very free copy of the present sheet by the 19th century English artist William Lock (1767-1847), executed in 1808, appeared at auction in 201316. Drawn in pen and ink, Lock’s copy is inscribed ‘W Lock pinx March 20 1808 / Memorandum of a Picture in distemper by Lelio Orsi / da Novellara’.

9 LUIGI BENFATTO, called ALVISE DEL FRISO Verona 1544-1609 Venice Christ in Limbo Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with framing lines in brown ink, and laid down on another sheet.

195 x 280 mm. (7 5/8 x 11 in.)

PROVENANCE: Giuseppe Vallardi, Milan (Lugt 1223)1; Juan and Felix Bernasconi, Milan; By descent to their sister Maria Bernasconi, Mendrisio, Canton Ticino, Switzerland; By descent to Alfonso Bernasconi Peluffo, Buenos Aires; His wife, Marià Elvira Celia Méndez de Bernasconi, Buenos Aires, by c.1977; Bernasconi sale, London, Christie’s, 5 July 1988, lot 11; Private collection, France.

LITERATURE: Mario di Giampaolo, ed., Disegno italiano antico: Artisti e opere dal Quattrocento al Settecento, Milan, 1994, illustrated p.130; Julien Abbadie, ‘Deux dessins d’Alvise Benfatto redécouverts’, Bella Maniera [Bella-Maniera.com], 19 May 2021 (https://www.bella-maniera.com/single-post/deuxdessins-d-alvise-benfatto-redécouverts).

A nephew of Paolo Veronese, who seems to have been his teacher, Luigi Benfatti was known as Alvise del Friso and entered his uncle’s workshop around 1562. He appears to have spent a relatively long time in Veronese’s studio – he is first listed in the registers of the Fraglia, the Venetian painter’s guild as ‘Alvise de Paolo Veronese’ and later as ‘Alvise Benfatto’ – and only began his independent career around 1584. Del Friso worked mainly in and around Venice, in a manner indebted to the example of Veronese’s mature style. Among his significant works for Venetian churches is a cycle of scenes from the life of Christ for San Nicolò dei Mendicoli and a painting of Christ and the Centurion, signed and dated 1587, in the church of the Angelo San Raffaelle.

Del Friso also painted a series of eight canvases for the Scuola di San Fantin (today the Ateneo Veneto) in 1576, as well as a Last Supper in the church of Sant’Eufemia and a now-lost painting of The Emperor Heraclitus Carrying the Holy Cross into Jerusalem for San Niccolò Grande. A canvas of The Resurrected Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene, painted for the high altar of Santa Maria Maddalena (also known as Church of the Convertite) on the Giudecca island, is now in the parish church of Mason Vicentino, north of Vicenza. Other works by Del Friso are in the Venetian churches of San Giovanni Grisostomo and San Marcuola, while a painting of a Procession to the Site of a Miraculous Apparition of the Virgin of 1593 is in the Duomo of Santa Maria Assunta in Chioggia. His last significant commission, on which he worked between 1606 and his death three years later, was the extensive fresco decoration of the upper hall of the Jacopo Sansovino’s Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice. Among Del Friso’s pupils were Maffeo Verona and Matteo Ingoli.

The draughtsmanship of Alvise del Friso has not yet been studied in depth, and the attribution of drawings to the artist rests mainly on stylistic comparisons with a study of A Scene before a Judge in the Albertina in Vienna, similar in medium and technique to the present sheet, which bears an old, though probably not contemporary, ascription to the artist2. Most of the very few drawings given to Del Friso are pen and wash studies which reveal the influence of Veronese’s spirited draughtsmanship, and are characterized by an impulsive technique of rapidly executed, free-flowing strokes of pen and ink lines.

Another stylistically comparable drawing of The Judgement of Solomon appeared at auction in 1986 and 20043, and other drawings by Del Friso, or which have been reasonably attributed to him, are in the Kunsthalle in Bremen4, the Art Institute of Chicago5, the Musée de Grenoble6, and the Musée du Louvre in Paris7, while two related studies of The Emperor Heraclitus Carrying the Holy Cross into Jerusalem are in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm8 and the Biblioteca Reale in Turin9.

10 PIETRO SORRI San Gusmè 1556-1622 Siena The Martyrdom of Saints Valerian, Tiburtius and Maximus Monochrome oil paint heightened with white on paper washed grey, laid down on canvas. A study of a male nude in black chalk on the verso, now laid down. The paper torn in several places and repaired.

Inscribed il Tintoretto in brown ink on the former mount.

448 x 349 mm. (17 5/8 x 13 3/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Boisgirard], 17 June 1993; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1994; Private collection.

EXHIBITED: New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1994, no.16; Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Classic Taste: Drawings and Decorative Arts from the Collection of Horace Brock, March-May, 2000.

Pietro Sorri was trained in the studio of Arcangelo Salimbeni in Siena, where he met Domenico Passignano, three years his junior. Passignano’s style was to prove influential on the older artist, his future brother-in-law. In the 1580s the two artists travelled together to Venice, where Sorri remained for a number of years. The influence of the Venetian masters on Sorri’s development can be seen in the many paintings executed by the artist in and around Siena, and also in Lucca, Rome, Florence, Genoa (where he made several trips, and came under the influence of Luca Cambiaso), Pisa, Pistoia and elsewhere. Among his significant works are an Adoration of the Magi painted in 1588 for the Duomo in Siena, as well as the fresco decoration of the sacristy of the Certosa at Pavia, where between 1599 and 1600 he worked for Cardinal Federico Borromeo alongside another Sienese painter, Alessandro Casolani. He also produced a number of portraits, most of which are now lost. The last two decades of Sorri’s career were spent mainly in Florence, from where he also sent paintings to the Royal court in Madrid. Among his pupils was the young Bernardo Strozzi in Genoa.

Although relatively few drawings by Sorri survive, he is today perhaps more highly regarded as a draughtsman than as a painter. One scholar has recently noted of the artist that ‘His drawings…are unqestionably freer and more vital than his paintings, which are excessively anchored to stiff compositional schemes and populated with figures who are arranged with chilly academic rigor.’1 As a draughtsman, Sorri was defined by his early experience of the Venetian tradition, and in particular the drawings and oil sketches of Jacopo Tintoretto and Palma Giovane. This is perhaps most noticeable in his monochrome oil sketches – arguably his most individual and impressive works – in which the artist made full use of the expressive qualities of the medium. As Marco Ciampolini has noted, ‘scholars agree that the best of [Sorri’s] work is represented by his studies and bozzetti, which most clearly convey the chief components of his style: the rigor of Passignano, the formal simplification of Cambiaso, and the painterly qualities of Palma il Giovane. Given that Sorri’s studies have been attributed to all these painters in the past, we can assume that these were lessons that he profoundly assimilated.’2 The most significant groups of Sorri’s drawings – which, as has been noted, have often been confused with those of Passignano, Casolani, Ludovico Cigoli and Palma Giovane – are today in the Uffizi in Florence and the Biblioteca Comunale in Siena.

Traditionally attributed to Tintoretto, this oil sketch is stylistically comparable to other bozzetti by Pietro Sorri, and in particular to an Adoration of the Magi (fig.1) in the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence3.

Both works are similar in composition and technique, and the figure of a man drawing his sword at the lower left of the present drawing reoccurs in the same pose but holding a dog on a leash in the Florentine sheet. The Marucelliana sketch is an early preparatory study for a painting of The Adoration of the Magi in the Duomo in Siena, completed by Sorri in 1588, shortly after his return from Venice.

As Laura Martini notes, both the painting and the Marucelliana bozzetto display the influence of Sorri’s Venetian contemporaries, and the same is true of the present sheet.

The attribution to Sorri of the Marucelliana oil sketch is not, however, unanimously accepted, and it was published with an attribution to Passignano in 19784. In 1990, Giulia Brunetti further noted that the relationship between the Marucelliana oil sketch and the altarpiece in Siena is rather loose, and she therefore adopted a more cautious attitude, preferring to catalogue the former as by ‘Pietro Sorri or Domenico Passignano’5.

The present sheet is, however, also closely comparable in both handling and technique to another oil sketch – a Madonna of the Girdle in the Uffizi6 – which is unanimously accepted as a work by Sorri, dating from his stay in Venice. The Uffizi bozzetto is a study for a lost painting of 1587-1588, which was once in the church of Sant’Agostino in Siena. Also similar in handling and technique is an oil sketch bozzetto of Christ Among the Doctors in the collection of the Monte de Paschi di Siena7, which is a study for an altarpiece by Sorri in the Duomo in Pisa. Furthermore, the black chalk study of a male nude visible on the verso of the present sheet, which has been laid down, appears to be stylistically closer to the draughtsmanship of Sorri than that of Passignano. Consequently, and in view of the lack of evidence to substantiate an alternative attribution to Passignano, an attribution to Pietro Sorri has been retained for this bozzetto, which must likewise be datable to the 1580s.

This large oil sketch also appears to be related to a later painting of The Martyrdom of Three Saints in the church of San Pietro in Modena8. The present sheet shares many of the same compositional elements, as well as the shape, of the painting in Modena, which has been dated to the 1620s and was formerly attributed to the 17th century Modenese painter Ludovico Lana (1597-1640).

1

11 FEDERICO ZUCCARO Sant’Angelo in Vado 1543-1609 Ancona A Design for a Wall Monument with a Papal Coat of Arms Flanked by Allegorical Figures Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, over an underdrawing in black chalk, laid down on a backing sheet extensively inscribed with a (library?) inventory and the code S.B118 in brown ink on the verso1.

263 x 200 mm. (10 3/8 x 7 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 8 January 1991, lot 134; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Cristina Acidini Luchinat, Taddeo e Federico Zuccari: fratelli pittori del Cinquecento, Milan and Rome, 1999, Vol.II, pp.2-4, fig.5, note 7; Edward Olszewski, A Corpus of Drawings in Midwestern Collections: Sixteenth-Century Italian Drawings, Turnhout, 2008, Vol.II, pp.506-507, under no.402 (entry by Robert Munman).

Among the most important and influential painters of the late 16th century in Italy, Federico Zuccaro was also an accomplished draughtsman. The present sheet is a design for a funerary monument for a pope, although no finished work after this design is known. Cristina Acidini Luchinat has suggested that the two allegorical female figures – one joyful and the other melancholy – may represent Heaven on the left, who will receive the dead Pope, and Earth on the right, who mourns the loss of the Holy Father. The tomb is topped with a blank coat of arms surmounted by crossed keys and a papal tiara.

The drawing may be dated on stylistic grounds to the end of the 1580s or the early 1590s, which would suggest that it may have been intended to commemorate one of the five Popes who died at around this time, namely Gregory XIII, who died in 1585, Sixtus V and Urban VII, who both died in 1590, or Gregory XIV and Innocent IX, who died within a few weeks of each other in 1591.

A similar composition is found in a drawing by Federico Zuccaro of a design for a wall monument to Ferdinando I de’ Medici (fig.1) in the Milwaukee Art Museum, in which a sculpted bust of the Medici cardinal and future Grand Duke is flanked by allegorical female figures representing Hope and Faith2.

The two allegorical figures in the Milwaukee drawing are closely paralleled by those in the present sheet, even to the extent that, like both figures in the Milwaukee sheet, the left-hand figure in this drawing is shown with her foot resting on a sphere.

1

12 PIETRO FACCINI Bologna c.1562-1602 Bologna An Allegory of the Immaculate Conception Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with touches of white heightening, with framing lines in brown ink, on paper washed brown. Laid down on a 19th century Ottley mount, with double border lines in red ink. Inscribed (by Ottley) Pietro Faccini, Pittore Bolognese. on the mount. Further inscribed Lawrence Collection, and Rugby School Art Museum / e dono Matt: H: Bloxam on the mount.

574 x 397 mm. (22 5/8 x 15 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: William Young Ottley, London (on his characteristic mount, with his inscription Pietro Faccini, Pittore Bolognese); His sale, London, T. Philipe, 6-23 June 1814, lot 508 (‘FACINI (Pietro)…

One – a design for an altar picture – pen and bistre, on brown paper, heightened – CAPITAL’, sold(?) for 19s.); Sir Thomas Lawrence, London (Lugt 2445); Purchased after Lawrence’s death, together with the rest of his collection, in 1834 by Samuel Woodburn, London; His posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 4-8 June 1860, part of lot 15 (‘The seizure of Christ, BASSANO; a scriptural subject, FACCINI; death of a saint, P. TESTA. &c.’, bt. Bloxam for 15 gns.); Matthew H. Bloxam, Rugby, Warwickshire; Presented by him to Rugby School, Rugby, Warwickshire, probably between 1879 and 1888.

LITERATURE: Elizabeth Llewellyn and Cristiana Romalli, Drawing in Bologna 1500-1600, exhibition catalogue, London, 1992, unpaginated, no.28.

EXHIBITED: London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, Drawing in Bologna 1500-1600, 1992, no.28.

Pietro Faccini’s brief career seems to have begun at a relatively late age, when around 1583 he entered the Carracci academy in Bologna. His precocious talent is said to have aroused the jealousy of Annibale Carracci, however, and in the 1590s Faccini left the Carracci academy. He later set up his own school, in which the importance of life drawing was particularly stressed. By this time he was already receiving independent commissions for altarpieces, and indeed his only known dated work, a Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence for the Bolognese church of San Giovanni in Monte, was painted in 1590. He may have traveled to Venice, and the influence of Tintoretto noted by his biographer Cesare Malvasia is evident in some of his later works. Faccini was a productive painter known for his small-scale decorative pictures, although only a handful of paintings by him are known today. As noted by Malvasia, ‘He was so novel and bizarre in his inventions, that I never knew who he had in mind, except his own ferocious imagination, so similar at times to that of Tintoretto, that he seemed to have had no one else in mind but that bold and copious master. He had a variety of sketches, great movement in his figures, and in his colouring he passed many of those who painted canvases in those days.’1 One of his last major works was an altarpiece of The Assumption of the Virgin for the church of Santa Maria dei Servi in Bologna. Although strongly influenced by both Annibale and Ludovico Carracci, Faccini developed a fairly original and idiosyncratic style, and unlike them had few followers of any note.

The paucity of extant paintings by Faccini has meant that he is today better known as a draughtsman.

Aptly described as ‘one of the most creative and original draftsmen of the Emilian school’2, he worked in a variety of techniques, using pen and ink wash, red and black chalk, watercolour and oiled charcoal.

He was an accomplished, versatile and intuitive draughtsman – interestingly, unlike many of his contemporaries, he rarely felt the need to square his studies for transfer – and his drawings were greatly admired for what Malvasia calls their ‘gran spirito’. Faccini’s drawings were popular with collectors, and Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici is said to have owned over a hundred drawings by the artist. Guercino also admired Faccini’s drawings, which were a strong influence on his early chalk style, and is known to have possessed a number of ‘nudi d’accademia’ by the older artist.

Catherine Loisel has described Faccini as a ‘fascinating artist whose drawings have retained their renown since the 17th century...Faccini distinguishes himself by a kind of exacerbation of effects: floating and expressive figures, an abandonment of anatomical naturalism in favour of a quest for intense emotional impact.’3

Another scholar, Diane DeGrazia, has noted of Faccini’s drawings that ‘He seems to have worked in many different media during his short working life, sometimes on the same compositions. When working on paper he was certainly more influenced by Venetian colore than were his Emilian contemporaries. He was far more interested in capturing the tones of light and shade in a composition than in understanding the anatomy of the figures. Even in single-figure studies, his powerful forms vibrate with movement in a light-charged atmosphere, making them studies in drama rather than in anatomy...His wide use of a variety of media simultaneously makes it especially difficult to date his sheets and to declare a firm stylistic development.’4 Important groups of drawings by Faccini, for the most part still unpublished, are today in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Uffizi in Florence, the Galleria Estense in Modena and the Louvre in Paris.

The subject of this sizeable and powerful drawing would appear to depict the Immaculate Conception, as witnessed by four prophets. In the apocryphal Christian narrative, Saints Joachim and Anne were an elderly married couple, devoted to each other but unhappy because they were childless. An archangel appeared to Anne to tell her that she would bear a daughter, who would become Queen of Heaven and Earth. The angel instructed her to meet her husband Joachim at the city gate of Jerusalem, and there the two embraced in joy. This moment is also taken to represent the miraculous conception of their daughter, the Virgin Mary, who was born free from original sin.

Faccini was particularly fond of altarpiece compositions on two levels. In the upper register of this drawing is shown the meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate, attended by four seated or standing prophets below, while at the apex of the composition God the Father sends the Virgin’s soul or spirit down to her parents. It has been suggested by the Bolognese scholar Michele Danieli that this drawing – one of the largest drawings by the artist to have survived – is Faccini’s modello for an altarpiece in the church of San Giacomo in Bologna, which has been lost since the late 17th century. Although designed by Faccini, the painting is recorded by one 17th century Bolognese writer as the work of his pupil, the obscure Sienese painter Agostino Marcucci, ‘who painted in San Giacomo Maggiore the panel of the altar of the Cantofoli, known as the altar of Saint Anne, where there are some prophets...’5 It was not uncommon for Faccini to provide finished drawings for his pupils and assistants to use. A drawing for the figures in the upper part of this composition is recorded in a private collection6, while among stylistically comparable drawings by Faccini is a Return of the Prodigal Son7 and an Apollo Flaying Marsyas8, both in the Louvre.

This impressive but little-known study by Faccini has a distinguished English provenance dating to the late 18th century. The sheet is laid down on the distinctive mount of the artist, collector, curator and art historian William Young Ottley (1771-1836). Ottley had spent the years between 1791 and 1799 in Italy, and it was there that he acquired much of his collection of drawings. Some of these were dispersed at four auctions held in London between 1803 and 1814, and the present sheet, with the attribution to Faccini noted by Ottley on his mount, was included in the last and most important of these sales. The drawing then entered the collection of the eminent portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), who may have acquired it at the Ottley sale in 1814, or else in 1823, when he purchased the remainder of Ottley’s collection of Italian drawings for the sum of £10,000. Lawrence assembled probably the single greatest collection of Old Master drawings ever seen in England, and at his death the collection was offered to the King and the British Museum at a price of £18,000, which is probably less than half of what it cost to put together, but was turned down.

Lawrence’s collection was eventually acquired in 1834 for £16,000 by the art dealer and collector Samuel Woodburn (1753-1853), who offered a large number of them for sale in a series of public exhibitions in London in 1835 and 1836. Several years after Woodburn’s death, many of the remaining drawings from Lawrence’s collection were sold at auction in 1860. The present sheet was one of several drawings purchased at that sale by Lawrence’s nephew, the antiquary and architectural historian Matthew Holbeche Bloxam (1805-1888). Bloxam had studied at Rugby School, of which he remained a devoted supporter throughout his life, and when the school’s Art Museum opened in 1879, he began donating drawings from his collection to the museum on a yearly basis.

13 Circle of BARTHOLOMEUS SPRANGER Antwerp c.1546-1611 Prague Jupiter, in the Guise of Diana, Seducing Callisto Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an extensive underdrawing in black chalk, with traces of red chalk and touches of white heightening. The outline shaped, and with framing lines in black chalk. The verso washed red for transfer. Inscribed Barth Spranger / Delliniavit in brown ink on the verso. Further inscribed (by Geissler) frederic Geissler / graveur a Nuremberg /1800 in brown ink on the verso.

125 x 109 mm. (4 7/8 x 4 1/2 in.) at greatest dimensions Watermark: Indistinct.

PROVENANCE: Johann Martin Friedrich Geissler, Nuremberg and Paris (Lugt 1072), with his inscription on the verso; His posthumous sale, Leipzig, R. Wiegel 10 June 1861 onwards, lot 1170 (‘B. Spranger.

Diana mit einer Nymph, als Barock-Medallion. Feder und Tusche. 4” 6”’ hoch, 4”’ breit.’); Iohan Quirijn van Regteren Altena, Amsterdam (his posthumous sale stamp [Lugt 4617] stamped on the verso), until 1980; By descent to his wife, Augusta Louisa Wilhelmina van Regteren Altena, née van Royen, Amsterdam, until 2006; Thence by family descent.

This fine drawing has long held an attribution to the Flemish painter and printmaker Bartholomeus Spranger (1546-1611), which is now thought to be untenable. Nevertheless, it is likely to be the work of a contemporaneous or slightly later German or Netherlandish hand. Spranger was active in Rome, Vienna and Prague, and his work became widely known throughout Northern Europe, particularly through reproductive engravings; as such, his style was to prove especially influential among a later generation of Dutch Mannerist painters. With its unusual shape, this small drawing may have been intended as a design for a part of a work of silverware, which is also suggested by the fact that the sheet has been washed red on the verso, to aid in transferring the image.

The inscription on the verso of the sheet identifies a previous owner of the drawing as the 19th century German engraver and draughtsman Johann Martin Friedrich Geissler (1778-1853). Born in Nuremberg, Geissler trained there with the art dealer and print publisher Johann Friedrich Frauenholz.

By 1803 he had settled in Paris, working with the publisher Henri Guttenberg and establishing a reputation as a landscape and reproductive engraver. He was one of several printmakers to provide plates for the four-volume Le Musée Français: Recueil complet des tableaux, statues et bas-reliefs qui compose la collection nationale, avec l’explication des sujets et des discours historiques sur la peinture, la sculpture et la gravure, published between 1803 and 1809. Geissler remained in France until 1814, when he returned to Nuremberg. His signature is found on a number of 16th and 17th century prints in museum collections, and it is thought that, alongside his work as a printmaker, he may also have dealt in Old Master prints.

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14 DENYS CALVAERT Antwerp c.1540-1619 Bologna Danaë Red chalk, heightened with white and squared for transfer in red chalk, with framing lines in red chalk.

Laid down on an 18th century English mount, inscribed A. Carracci in brown ink at the bottom.

159 x 139 mm. (6 1/4 x 5 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Sir Peter Lely, London (Lugt 2092)1; Probably his posthumous sales, London, Richard Tompson, 16 April 1688 onwards or London, Parry Walton, 15 November 1694 onwards; Michael Jaffé, Cambridge and Clifton Maybank, Dorset2; Thence by descent.

Born in Antwerp, Denys Calvaert was one of the few Flemish artists of the period who worked for most of his career in Italy, where he was known as ‘Dionisio fiammingo’. After an apprenticeship in the studio of the landscape painter Cerstiaen van Queckborne in Antwerp, Calvaert settled in Bologna sometime around 1561 or 1562, and there completed his artistic training with the painters Prospero Fontana and Lorenzo Sabatini, whose studio he joined in 1568 as an assistant. Calvaert’s earliest known signed and dated painting is an Allegory of Vigilance of 1568, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna.

Both Fontana and Sabatini were sometime collaborators with Giorgio Vasari, and in 1573 Calvaert accompanied Sabatini to Rome, where they worked together on the extensive fresco decoration of the Sala Regia in the Vatican for Pope Gregory XIII, which had been begun by Vasari. Although this was probably Calvaert’s only visit to Rome, the exposure to Tuscan and Roman Mannerism relatively early in his career was to have a profound effect on his later work. While in Rome, he is also known to have made numerous drawings after the paintings and frescoes of Raphael and Michelangelo, as well as copies of Roman antiquities.

Interestingly, Calvaert chose to return to Bologna in 1575 rather than try and establish himself in the larger and more competitive artistic environment of Rome. In Bologna he soon established his own academy, eventually counting among his pupils Guido Reni, Domenichino and Francesco Albani, all of whom later transferred to the Carracci’s rival Accademia degli Incamminati, founded a few years later.

In 1581 Calvaert received the commission for one of his most celebrated works, a large altarpiece of The Miracle of Saint Gregory for the Bolognese church of San Gregorio. He continued to run a large and busy studio in Bologna, receiving numerous commissions for religious pictures for local churches and smaller devotional works for private patrons. Alongside the Carracci, Calvaert was one of the leading painters in the city in the last quarter of the 16th century, at the height of the Counter Reformation. As one modern scholar has noted of the artist, ‘Throughout his career he remained faithful to the mannerist style of painting, producing works that are characterized by a barely perceptible Northern realism. Calvaert distinguished himself as a draftsman and painter of the highest quality.’3 Despite spending almost all of his career in Italy, Calvaert remained proud of his Netherlandish heritage, and often added the word ‘Fiammingho’ (‘Flemish’) or Antwerp, his city of birth, to his signature on his paintings. He also developed a market among collectors in the Netherlands for his small-scale paintings, often on copper.

Denys Calvaert was a prolific and talented draughtsman, and the emphasis he placed on drawing in his large workshop was to be a profound influence on a number of the succeeding generation of artists in Bologna. Malvasia writes that the artist was particularly admired for his drawings in red chalk, in which he was much infuenced by the example of Correggio; this is especially noticeable in his studies dating from around the turn of the century. Many of Calvaert’s drawings are either signed and dated, or can be connected with surviving paintings. Some of his finished drawings appear to have been produced as independent works for sale, while several were also reproduced as prints. The artist was greatly admired as a draughtsman in his lifetime, and many of his drawings were later acquired by such collectors as the Cardinals Luigi d’Este and Leopoldo de’ Medici; the latter eventually acquired almost forty drawings by Calvaert, which are today in the Uffizi in Florence.

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The present sheet is closely related, albeit in reverse, to one of Calvaert’s rare paintings of a secular or mythological subject; a Danaë of c.1616 (fig.1), painted for Jacob Arnold, Captain of the garrison of Papal Swiss Guards in Bologna and today in the collection of the Ferens Art Gallery in Kingston upon HuIl4. It was a common practice for Calvaert to reverse the composition and figures in his paintings when preparing them. Indeed, this drawing is also similar to another, somewhat larger version of the subject, now in the Pinacoteca in Lucca (fig.2), which is signed and dated 16145, and is also in reverse to the drawing. A third autograph painting of Danaë, signed by Calvaert, appeared at auction in London in 19676, while a fourth version was acquired in 2002 by the Historisches Museum Uri in Altdorf, Switzerland. As Nicole Dacos has written of these Danaë paintings, ‘Of the [different] versions, the Lucca picture was probably the first to be painted; even so, there are numerous compositional differences among the works. The Danaë group represents Calvaert’s late style. It was conceived only a few years before his death in 1619, at a time when the international mannerist movement had all but died.’7 More recently, however, Michele Danieli has dated the Hull Danaë somewhat earlier, to the very beginning of the 17th century8.

In the early 1600s Calvaert began to produce cabinet pictures with secular erotic themes, dominated by large female nudes and typified by the four Danaë paintings, that are very different from the mainly religious works he had painted up to that point. (Indeed, before 1600 female nudes are hardly to be found in Calvaert’s oeuvre.) Around a dozen of these paintings by Calvaert are known, several of which occur in more than one version, including not only the Danäe pictures but also paintings of The Death of Cleopatra, Diana at her Toilet and The Death of Lucretia. Danieli has suggested that Calvaert may have been inspired to paint these works by his knowledge of similar works commissioned by the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague from such artists as Bartholomeus Spranger and Joseph Heintz the Elder.

While there is no evidence that Calvaert had any direct contact with Rudolf or any of the artists at his court in Prague, he certainly knew the Nuremberg merchant Paulus Praun, who lived in Bologna from the end of the 16th century until his death in 1616. Praun acted as agent for Rudolf II in acquiring works

by Italian artists, and was friendly with Calvaert, owning several of his secular works, including a Danäe of 1613. Praun’s collection also included a large group of engravings by Rudolfine artists, and it is likely through these prints that Calvaert gained inspiration for some of these late paintings.

The present sheet has been dated by the Calvaert drawings scholar Michele Danieli to around 16009.

A related grisaille drawing of Danaë, executed in oil on paper, was formerly in the collection of Pierre de Charmant in Geneva and appeared at auction in Paris in 200210.

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2

15 GIOVANNI BATTISTA DELLA ROVERE Milan c.1561-c.1630 Milan The Blessing of a Cardinal Pen and brown ink and grey wash, extensively heightened with white, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, on blue paper. Signed and dated fiaminghino BR 1618 lulio(?) in brown ink on the verso.

Inscribed Juan Flamengo / XV siècle in brown ink the verso. Further inscribed (in a modern hand) D. Calvaert / 1540-1619 in pencil on the verso.

231 x 326 mm. (9 1/8 x 12 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Prince Ioan Cantacuzino, Bucharest (Lugt 4030)1, his collector’s mark stamped in black ink on the verso; Probably the posthumous Cantacuzène sale (‘Collection J.C.’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Rhiems], 4-6 June 1969; Private collection.

Giovanni Battista della Rovere was, like his younger brother Giovanni Mauro (c.1575-1640), known as ‘il Fiammenghino’ (‘the little Fleming’) due to the fact that their father was born in Antwerp. Giovanni Battista worked in numerous churches and monasteries throughout Milan, Lombardy and Northern Italy, very often alongside his brother. Among his earliest independent works are a cycle of scenes from the life of Saint John the Baptist in the Duomo in Monza, completed in 1586. Between 1602 and 1604 Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Mauro collaborated on a fresco cycle of scenes from the life of Saint Carlo Borromeo for the Duomo in Milan, followed by further joint work in the Milanese church of San Maria presso San Celso, at the Sacro Monte at Orta and the Abbey of Chiaravalle.

As Nancy Ward Neilson has written of the Della Rovere brothers, ‘Gian Mauro and his elder brother Giovanni Battista were enormously productive throughout Lombardy for a period of approximately fifty years. Active as decorators, they executed large narrative commissions which, judging from their number, must have been done very rapidly. None of this material has been systematically gathered so that their chronology is not easy to establish.’2 Such was the closeness of their association as artists that it is often difficult to differentiate between the work of the two brothers, both as painters and as draughtsmen. Giovanni Battista worked at San Calimero and Santa Maria della Passione in Milan, while later ecclesiastical commissions in Montemezzo, Como, Novara, Peglio and elsewhere in Lombardy resulted in a flourishing career. Among his last significant works were paintings in the church of Santa Maria della Grazia in Pavia, begun in 1629 and completed, after his death, by Giovanni Mauro in 1635.

The present sheet is a fine example of Giovanni Battista della Rovere’s robust draughtsmanship. Like his brother, the artist favoured the use of blue paper, often with extensive areas of white heightening to intensify the tonal contrasts. Also like Giovanni Mauro, he often signed and dated his drawings on the verso – as can be seen on the present sheet – usually inscribing his initials JBR together with the year and month (and sometimes the exact date) that the sketch was made. Although unsigned drawings by the two brothers are often not easy to attribute to one or the other, it has been noted that Giovanni Battista’s drawings tend to ‘differ from his brother’s in their more ornamental contour and less volumetric drapery.’3 Among stylistically comparable drawings by Giovanni Battista Della Rovere are a study of The Meeting of Saints Carlo Borromeo and Filippo Neri in the Albertina in Vienna4 and a drawing of Saint Ambrose Tries in Vain to Take the Body of Saint Dionysus to Milan (which like the present sheet is dated 1618), formerly in the Marquis de Lagoy and Flury-Hérard collections5; that drawing is a study for a fresco in the small church of San Dionigi in Cassano d’Adda, near Milan. Also similar is a drawing of Moses in the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum in Budapest6, which is a preparatory study for a fresco in the church of Sant’Angelo in Milan, and a study of A Bishop Saint (Ambrose?) Exorcising the Devil in the Art Institute of Chicago7.

16 BELISARIO CORENZIO Acaia (Greece) c.1558-c.1646 Naples Three Designs for Pendentives with Allegorical Female Figures Brush and blue wash, with touches of pen and brown ink. Squared for transfer in black chalk. Inscribed Bilisario a Monte Cassino in brown ink at the bottom. Rectangular sections at the central and upper portions of the left and right edges of the sheet cut out, and the whole sheet inlaid onto the mount.

237 x 168 mm. (9 3/8 x 6 5/8 in.) at greatest dimensions.

PROVENANCE: From an album of drawings, mostly by Neapolitan artists, belonging to Don Gaspar Méndez de Haro y Guzman, Marqués del Carpio, Rome and Naples1; The album sold and dispersed at auction, London, Christie’s, 20 March 1973, the present sheet as lot 12; Lorna Lowe, London; Purchased from her in 1973 by Ralph Holland, Newcastle; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Viviana Farina, ‘La collezione del Viceré: il Marchese del Carpio, padre Sebastiano Resta e la prima raccolta ragionata di disegni napoletani’, in Francesco Solinas and Sebastian Schütze, ed., Le Dessin Napolitain: Actes du colloque international, Paris, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 6-8 Mars 2008, Rome, 2010, pp.190-192, fig.8 (as location unknown).

EXHIBITED: Newcastle upon Tyne, Hatton Gallery, Italian and Other Drawings 1500-1800, 1974, no.44; London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, Italian and other Drawings 1500-1800, from the Ralph Holland Collection, 1975, no.31; Newcastle, Hatton Gallery, Italian Drawings 1525-1750 from the Collection of Ralph Holland, May-June 1982, no.36.

Of Greek origins, Belisario Corenzio is said by his biographer Bernardo de Dominici to have trained with Jacopo Tintoretto in Venice before settling in Naples, although this is unlikely. He was certainly already living in Naples at a very young age, since in 1574 he is documented as an apprentice in the workshop of another Greek painter there. Corenzio is further documented in Naples between 1590 and the 1640s, and seems to have worked in the city for his entire career, which lasted for over forty years. His earliest known works date from the early 1590s, and include major fresco cycles for the churches of Santa Maria la Nova and Sant’Andrea delle Dame. While working at the Certosa di San Martino in 1592 he came under the influence of the painter Cavaliere d’Arpino, who had worked there a few years earlier. By the turn of the century Corenzio had become the leading painter in Naples, producing altarpieces and fresco cycles for such major churches as the Gesù Nuovo, the Monte de Pietà, Santi Severino e Sossio, Santissima Annunziata and San Paolo Maggiore. He also painted a series of frescoes in the Palazzo Reale around 1630, and decorated the crypt of the Duomo at Salerno.

One of the first Neapolitan artists to leave a fairly large corpus of drawings, Corenzio developed a distinctive style as a draughtsman, with fluid washes and a liberal use of white heightening, often on coloured paper. De Dominici noted that ‘One sees many drawings by Belisario…and truly some of his [drawings] especially of figures, are so good that they could be from the hand of Tintoretto; in imitation of whom he used to draw on tinted paper, heightened with white.’2 The use of blue wash in this drawing is another particular characteristic of Corenzio’s draughtsmanship.

As the old inscription at the bottom of the sheet notes, this drawing comprises preliminary studies for Corenzio’s frescoes in the dome of the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, painted by the artist between 1625 and 1629 but destroyed in 1944, during the Second World War. The cupola of the dome was frescoed with a scene of The Glory of Saint Benedict, while the pendentives below were occupied by female representations of the four virtues required for monastic life, namely Poverty, Chastity, Contemplation and Obedience. The main figure in this drawing would appear to be a study for Contemplation, with an alternative design for the same figure at the lower right, while at the lower left of the sheet is a study for a figure of Chastity.

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17 GIOVANNI BILIVERT Florence 1585-1644 Florence A Woman and Child Seated in a Landscape Black chalk and grey wash, with framing lines in black chalk. Inscribed Parmigianino in brown ink at the bottom centre.

168 x 130 mm. (6 5/8 x 5 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Albin Schram, Lausanne; Thence by descent.

The son of a Dutch goldsmith and jeweller in the service of the Medici court, Giovanni Bilivert (sometimes Biliverti) trained with Alessandro Casolani in Siena before returning to Florence and joining the workshop of Ludovico Cigoli around 1590. He became one of Cigoli’s chief assistants, and remained in his studio for some fifteen years. Bilivert worked with Cigoli in Rome between 1604 and 1608, and upon his return to Florence entered the service of the Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, who in 1611 appointed him designer at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, a salaried post he retained until Cosimo’s death in 1621. Bilivert’s independent career as a painter, which began in Rome with an altarpiece for the church of San Callisto, continued with much success in Florence. Most of his work was in the form of altarpieces and easel pictures, and he seems to have been uninterested in obtaining fresco commissions.

Among the artist’s important Florentine commissions were a painting for the cycle of scenes from the life of Michelangelo for the Casa Buonarotti, painted between 1616 and 1620, a Discovery of the True Cross completed in 1621 for the church of Santa Croce, and a Guardian Angel executed four years later for the Certosa at Galluzzo, just outside the city. Bilivert also worked in Pisa, where he completed an Annunciation and a San Carlo Borromeo in Adoration for the church of San Nicola in 1611, followed several years later by a painting of Daniel and Habbakuk for the Duomo, executed between 1625 and 1630. From around 1636 onwards he produced mainly religious pictures. Among his last works are a Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, painted in 1642 for the Florentine church of Santissima Annunziata, and a Miracle of Saint Paul, dated 1644, in San Marco. Among his pupils and followers were Orazio Fidani – who wrote a manuscript biography of the master – and Agostino Melissi, both of whom derived the composition of a number of their early paintings from drawings by Bilivert.

The present sheet may depict the story of Hagar and her son Ishmael in the desert. Bilivert treated the related Biblical subject of Hagar and the Angel in a painting now in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg1, and the present sheet may perhaps be a first idea for that composition. Among particularly comparable drawings by Bilivert are five studies in black chalk of Mary Magdalene at the Tomb – one in the Louvre2, three in the Uffizi3, and one in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge4 – which are all preparatory studies for a large easel painting of 1627, today in an Italian private collection5.

Also similar in handling, albeit somewhat larger and more complex in composition, is Bilivert’s drawing of Pope Leo X Receiving King François I of France in the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome6, related to a painting of 1627 now in a private collection in Scotland, as well as a Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille7, which is a study for the major late altarpiece of 1642 in Santissima Annunziata in Florence. Other technically and stylistically comparable drawings in black chalk and grey wash by Bilivert include two studies in the Uffizi; one of Susanna and the Elders8 and the other a fragmentary compositional drawing9 for a late painting of Salome Presents the Head of Saint John the Baptist to Herod.

The present sheet belonged to the Austrian banker Albin Schram (1926-2005), an important collector of historical letters, written by significant literary, political, scientific and musical figures, dating from the 15th to the 20th centuries.

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18 GIOVANNI BILIVERT Florence 1585-1644 Florence An Allegory with a Satyr, a Nymph and a Winged Putto Playing a Flute Pen and brown ink, red and black chalk, with framing lines in both black and red chalk. Inscribed Biliferti in brown ink at the top.

165 x 126 mm. (6 1/2 x 5 in.)

PROVENANCE: Dr. George L. Laporte, New York (Lugt 1170); Thence by descent; His posthumous sale (‘Master Drawings from 16th to 19th Centuries, all from the Estate of a New York Private Collector’), New York, O’Reilly’s Plaza Art Galleries, 25 April 1968, probably part of lot 101 (‘Giovanni Biliverti, Giovanni Barbieri, Two Drawings of various sizes’); Paul Mathias Polakovits, Paris (Lugt 3561); Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 2 July 1997, lot 7; Margot Gordon, New York, in 1998; Private collection.

Somewhat less than four hundred drawings by Giovanni Bilivert survive, of which the largest groups are today in the Uffizi in Florence, with almost three hundred sheets, and the Louvre in Paris, which houses some forty drawings by or attributed to the artist. Like his teacher Cigoli, Bilivert’s drawings were for him an important means of artistic expression. Most of his drawings can be directly related to his paintings, with the same compositions often studied repeatedly; as the 17th century Florentine biographer Filippo Baldinucci noted of Bilivert, ‘he always made a great number of studies for his works.’1 However, he seems not to have made many drawings as autonomous works of art and, unusually for a Florentine artist of the period, produced no drawings of nudes, and almost no landscapes.

The present sheet depicts three figures – a woman holding a tree branch, a satyr, and a putto playing a flute – in a tightly compacted space. A similar arrangement of figures, although different in subject and composition, is found in a small painting on copper of Venus, Cupid and Pan by Bilivert which appeared at auction in 2012 and 20182, of which a much larger autograph variant is today in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden3. A somewhat similar subject also occurs in a small painting of Sleeping Venus Enchained by Cupid with Pan, signed and dated 1638, which was in a German private collection in 19294.

This drawing is likely to date to the first half of the 1630s, when Bilivert was engaged on a number of paintings of mythological subjects. Stylistically, the present sheet may be compared with a number of drawings in the Uffizi. These include a squared compositional study of Apollo and Daphne5, which can be related to a painting dated 1630 in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, and another squared drawing of Thetis Giving Arms to Achilles6, which is a study for a painting of 1634 in a private collection. Other comparable drawings in the Uffizi include a red chalk study of a winged putto playing a violin7 and a drawing of Hercules Freeing Hesione8, which is a first idea for a late painting by Bilivert, possibly executed with studio assistance, in an American private collection.

The first recorded owner of the present sheet was the New York physician George Ludwig Laporte (1874-1947), whose varied collection of drawings was sold, presumably by his heirs, at auction in 1968. Drawings from Laporte’s collection are today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere. This drawing was probably acquired at the time of the Laporte sale by the Hungarian-born journalist and passionate amateur of drawings Mathias Polakovits (1921-1987), who assembled a fine collection of Old Master drawings, mainly by French and Italian artists, over a period of about eighteen years. While the bulk of Polakovits’s collection of 17th and 18th century French drawings, numbering around three thousand sheets, was left to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris at his death, drawings by Italian artists and those of other schools were dispersed at auction in the late 1980s and beyond.

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19 CARLO DOLCI Florence 1616-1687 Florence The Head of a Boy Wearing a Cap Red chalk on buff paper.

248 x 180 mm. (9 3/4 x 7 1/8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Private collection, Florence.

Carlo Dolci’s close friend, pupil and biographer, Filippo Baldinucci, provides a fairly complete and thorough account of the painter’s life, written shortly after his death. A precocious artist, Dolci entered the studio of the painter Jacopo Vignali in 1625, at the age of nine, and within a few years was producing striking independent portraits. In 1648 he was admitted into the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, and soon became one of the leading painters in 17th century Florence. Baldinucci notes that he was a particularly devout man, and this is reflected in much of his work. The largest part of Dolci’s output, and the work for which he was best known, are his religious and devotional pictures, characterized by a meticulous and refined technique, rich colour, a jewel-like clarity and a high degree of finish. As one modern scholar has noted, ‘Dolci catered to the opulent taste of the Medici Grand-ducal court, embellishing his ecstatic, melancholy or tender figures with splendid jewels, gorgeous materials and flowers, real gold and precious ultramarine.’1 Since he worked very slowly, Dolci produced relatively few paintings a year. These were much soughtafter, particularly among the aristocracy and nobility, and he became one of the most highly-paid painters in Florence. Chief among his important patrons was Vittoria Della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and her son, the Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici, along with several other members of the Medici family and other important Florentine families. Although Dolci worked in Florence for almost his entire career, which lasted some sixty years, his reputation travelled well beyond Tuscany, and he received numerous commissions and sold several works to Venetian and English collectors. A chronology of his oeuvre is made easier by the fact that he often inscribed on the backs of his paintings the date that the canvas was begun or completed, and sometimes the name of the patron.

Carlo Dolci has been described as ‘the most sophisticated draughtsman of the Florentine seicento’2, and the present sheet is a particularly fine example of his work. As the Dolci scholar Francesca Baldassari has noted, ‘This beautiful face of a young man, meticulously defined and with great refinement in every detail, is stylistically one of the most expressive heads drawn by Carlo Dolci. Within his graphic corpus, the most striking comparisons are to be found with the ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Wife’ (Paris, Musée du Louvre, Inv.1140)3, characterized by similar minute marks and intricate crosshatching, which in this drawing is particularly visible in the neck and the cheerful cap. A peculiar characteristic of Dolci, also evident in this ‘Head of a Young Man’, is moreover that the image is both ‘ideal’ and ‘natural’, which he achieves by defining and punctuating the roundness and purity of the face in every detail. Since it cannot be linked to any known work by Dolci, this [drawing] would appear to belong to the category of autonomous studies, conceived as works of art in themselves, of which the artist produced many examples. Although it is quite difficult to date Dolci’s autonomous graphic works due to the invariability of his drawing style, this ‘Head of a Young Man’ would seem to be dated between the 1640s and 1660s, when the painter broke away from [Matteo] Rosselli’s decorative style and achieved results similar to the purist and sharply defined style of his fellow [Florentine] countrymen Lorenzo Lippi and Ottavio Vannini.’4 Dolci’s portrait drawings are among his most appealing works as a draughtsman. As another scholar has noted, ‘Portrait drawings…of family or friends, whether autonomous or preparatory for paintings in other genres, are not rare in Dolci’s oeuvre. Some of the most beautiful [are] made in the red or black, or red-and-black pencil technique traditional in Florence.’5 Among other stylistically comparable portrait drawings in red chalk by Dolci are studies of a small child6 and a portrait of Filippo Baldinucci7, both in the Louvre, a drawing of a sleeping child in the Uffizi8, and a drawing of a young boy looking upwards, which was on the London art market in 20009.

actual size

20 PIER FRANCESCO MOLA Coldrerio 1612-1666 Rome Landscape with Erminia Writing the Name of Tancred on a Tree Black and red chalk, with framing lines in black chalk, on buff paper, laid down. Numbered 1718 in black chalk at the lower left. Inscribed Mola. in black ink and PIETRO FRANCESCO MOLA / [?] in faded red chalk on the mount. Numbered 64 – 4 in brown ink on the mount. Further inscribed A Sketch for a Picture on cloth, in the French King’s Collection. / 2 ft. 1 1/4 Inch. high, by 2 ft. 3 1/4 Inch. wide. Vide Catalogue raisonné / des Tableaux du Roy, par M. Lépicié. Tom. II p.314-5. in brown ink on the reverse of the mount. Also inscribed Francesco Mola and Dijonval Colln in pencil on the reverse of the mount.

254 x 323 mm. (10 x 12 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly Gilbert Paignon-Dijonval, Paris (according to a note on the reverse of the mount)1; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 25 January 2006, lot 68; Private collection, California.

LITERATURE: Francesco Petrucci, Pier Francesco Mola (1612-1666): Matiera e colore nella pittura del ‘600, Rome, 2012, p.283, fig.B16.1; Véronique Damian, ed., Massimo Stanzione, Guercino, Hendrick De Somer, et Fra’ Galgario: Tableaux redécouverts du XVe au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Galerie Canesso, 2016, p.16; Heiko Damm and Henning Hoesch, ed., galleria portatile: Old Master Drawings from the Hoesch Collection, Petersberg, 2017, pp.258-261, under no.63, fig.1 (entry by Marco Simone Bolzoni).

Born in the province of Ticino (today a canton of Switzerland), Pier Francesco Mola settled with his family in Rome at the age of four. He entered the Roman studio of Cavaliere d’Arpino at a young age, and later worked in Bologna as an assistant to Francesco Albani. To the influence of Albani was added that of Pietro Testa, whom Mola met in Lucca in 1637, and Guercino, in whose Bolognese studio he may have spent time in the 1640s. Of equal importance to the development of his artistic style were two long stays in Venice, between 1633 and 1640 and again from 1641 to 1647, after which he settled for good in Rome. Mola’s only signed and dated painting is the splendid Oriental Warrior of 1650, now in the Louvre. The artist joined the Roman Accademia di San Luca in 1655, and the following year contributed to the redecoration of the Palazzo del Quirinale, painting a fresco of Joseph Greeting His Brothers on the end wall of the gallery of the palace that is regarded as one of his finest works. By 1658 Mola was working for Prince Camillo Pamphili, for whom he painted frescoes at the Pamphili palaces at Nettuno and Valmontone, although the latter was later overpainted by a fresco by Mattia Preti. Among other patrons was Queen Christina of Sweden, while an invitation from Louis XIV to work in France was turned down on the grounds of the artist’s poor health. Mola established a particular reputation as a painter of small-scale easel pictures, often with landscape settings that display something of the influence of the French artist Nicolas Poussin, whom he knew. In 1662 Mola was elected principe of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome.

A large number of drawings by Mola survive today, the majority of which are in pen and brown ink and wash, with only a handful in red or black chalk. As Ann Sutherland Harris has noted of the artist, ‘Mola was one of the outstanding draughtsmen of the seventeenth century. He loved to draw, both because he took visual pleasure in the physical properties of all the media involved and because he responded to the spontaneity of the creative act that drawing afforded him. It is surely significant that a relatively large number of his drawings have been preserved (probably over two hundred)...while Mola’s surviving oeuvre as a painter active for at least thirty years is relatively small. Mola preferred the play of compositional ideas that he could indulge in quickly in a drawing to the demands of the more disciplined elaboration of those ideas in paint.’2 Relatively few of Mola’s drawings may be identified as preparatory studies for his paintings. Most are unrelated to finished works and, in many cases, seem to have been done for the artist’s own pleasure; this is certainly true of a large number of caricature drawings. Significant groups of drawings by Mola

are today in the collections of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, the Teyler Museum in Haarlem and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, as well as in the Louvre and the British Museum.

A particularly fine and fresh example of Mola’s spirited draughtsmanship in chalk, the present sheet may be an early preparatory study for a painting of this subject by the artist, though different in composition, which was formerly in the collection of the 18th century French connoisseur Jean de Jullienne and was recently on the art market3. Datable to around 1640, the painting (fig.1) shows Erminia, wearing a similar robe as in this drawing, standing and writing Tancred’s name on a tree, but the composition is reversed from the present sheet, and shows her facing to the left.

The subject of this drawing is taken from Canto VII of the 16th century writer Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata. Erminia, a Saracen princess of Antioch, has fallen in love with the Christian knight Tancred. Jealous of Tancred’s love for the warrior-maiden Clorinda, Erminia steals Clorinda’s armour one night and leaves the besieged city to find Tancred among the Christian army. Mistaken for Clorinda by some Christian soldiers and almost killed, Erminia flees into the forest, where she is rescued by a family of shepherds by the river Jordan. Disguised as a shepherdess, she carves the name of her beloved on a tree trunk. In the words of a 19th century English translation of Tasso’s poem: ‘Oft when her flocks from summer’s noontime rays / lay in cool shades o’erarched by gadding vines, / she carved on beeches and immortal bays / her Tancred’s name, and left the mossy pines / with sad inscriptions flourished, silent signs / of the unhappy flame her fancy fed; / and when again she saw her own fond lines, / as she the melancholy fragments read, / Fresh tears of grief unchecked her lovely eyes would shed.’4 The subject of Tancred and Erminia seems to have appealed to Mola, as a number of drawings of scenes from this story are found in his painted and drawn oeuvre, of which the present sheet is arguably one of the most beautiful. This splendid drawing also highlights Mola’s abilities as a landscape draughtsman.

The lengthy inscription on the back of the mount of the present sheet refers to another, later painting

by Mola of Erminia Writing the Name of Tancred on a Tree, datable to the late 1650s, which was acquired

by King Louis XIV in 1685 and is now in the Louvre5. The Louvre painting is, however, quite different in composition, with Erminia seated on the ground.

1

21 GIUSEPPE PASSERI Rome 1654-1714 Rome The Virgin and Child with Saints Red chalk, pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, with framing lines in brown ink. A study of a mounted (female?) warrior in brown ink over red chalk, and a pair(?) of figures in red chalk, on the verso, backed. The sheet extended at the bottom edge, and made up at the lower right corner. Laid down.

230 x 226 mm. (9 1/8 x 8 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: An unidentified collector’s mark R (similar to Lugt 2169 [unknown] or Lugt 2170 [Jonathan Richardson, Junior]) stamped in black ink at the lower right; An unidentified collector’s mark OE (in ligature) stamped in black ink on the reverse of the old backing sheet; Yvonne ffrench, London, in 1961; Burnett Percy Pavitt, London; Bequeathed by him to the Royal College of Music, London; Their sale (‘The Property of the Royal College of Music’), London, Christie’s, 8 July 2003, lot 39; Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London; Private collection.

EXHIBITED: London, Yvonne ffrench at the Alpine Club Gallery, Old Master Drawings and Early English Watercolours, 1961, no.39; New York and London, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2004, no.35.

Giuseppe Passeri briefly studied with his uncle, the biographer and painter Giovanni Battista Passeri, before entering the studio of Carlo Maratti in Rome. He became one of Maratti’s favorite students, and worked with him on a number of significant projects. Passeri’s style, however, was less indebted to the master than most of Maratti’s pupils and followers, the so-called Maratteschi. His earliest known dated paintings were executed for the Palazzo Barberini in Rome in 1678, and he was to work in the city for almost his entire career, until his death at the age of sixty. Elected to the Accademia di San Luca in 1693, Passeri received numerous commissions for religious pictures, such as a Baptism of Constantine painted for the Albani chapel in the church of San Sebastiano fuori le Mura. Other Roman churches for which Passeri painted altarpieces include Saint Peter’s, Santa Maria in Vallicella, San Francesco a Ripa, Santa Maria in Aracoeli, Santa Caterina a Monte Magnanapoli and Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.

Passeri was a close friend of the Oratorian priest and noted collector of drawings Padre Sebastiano Resta, whom he accompanied on a study tour around northern Italy in 1690, and also made copies of several drawings in Resta’s collection. In 1700 he was appointed pittore della camera apostolica by Pope Clement VII, probably at the suggestion of Maratti. Passeri also received commissions for mural projects to decorate the palaces and villas of a number of Roman families, such as the Albani, Marescotti and Pallavicini. He painted elaborate ceiling frescoes for the presbytery of the Duomo at Viterbo, completed in 1699 but destroyed during the Second World War, as well as a large altarpiece of Christ in Glory with Saints for the Duomo in Fermo in 1701, and the dome and pendentives of the Roman church of Santo Spirito dei Napoletani, on which he worked between 1707 and 1708. In addition to his large-scale work, Passeri produced a number of cabinet pictures for private patrons, and was also active as a portrait painter and an occasional designer of prints.

As a draughtsman, Passeri worked in a variety of techniques, most distinctively using pen and ink in a free and painterly manner, combined with red chalk and extensive areas of white heightening, for compositional studies for pictures, while preferring red or black chalk for individual studies of figures, drapery, heads and limbs. (The artist also made use of oil sketches in preparation for some of his paintings.) Like his master Maratti, however, a far greater number of chalk studies than pen and wash drawings by Passeri survive, and the latter in particular have been admired by collectors of Italian drawings since the 18th century. The largest collection of drawings by Passeri, numbering over 1,100 sheets and representing some two-thirds of his extant oeuvre as a draughtsman, is today in the Museum

Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, while other significant groups are in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle and the Albertina in Vienna.

The present sheet is a fine example of the highly pictorial manner of Passeri’s draughtsmanship found in his compositional studies, displaying the artist’s characteristic use of dark brown ink and wash, red chalk and white heightening. As Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò has written, ‘Passeri developed an extremely personal and characteristic technique using various media right from the start of his graphic work: on a coloured base of red chalk he would trace the outlines of figures and objects, always letting the primary red sketch show through. In order to shade and create effects of light he would superimpose the brown wash and white lead in a second stage, mixing them with the still damp sanguine, achieving results of great painterliness. Even though this technique can also be found in certain drawings by [Pier Francesco] Mola, [Giovanni Benedetto] Castiglione and [Carlo] Maratta, he uses it with skill employing it to the point of virtuosity, attaining a mobility of gesture and light which foreshadows the Rococo and which is highly sought after by collectors.’1 And, as another recent scholar has further noted, ‘Bordering on the confectionary in their profuse use of white gouache, these [drawings] attain an unusually rich tonal and chromatic range close to that of an oil sketch.’2 While Passeri’s preparatory compositional drawings tend to be very close to the paintings for which they are studies, the present sheet remains unrelated to any surviving work by the artist, although a red chalk drawing in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, showing the Virgin and Child with a kneeling male saint3, may perhaps be related to the same composition. Also somewhat similar in theme and subject is a drawing of The Virgin and Child in Glory with Saints and Angels in the Albertina in Vienna4. Among stylistically comparable drawings is a Virgin and Child with Saints Theresa and Cajetan(?) in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid5 and a Pieta in the Albertina6, as well as a Madonna of the Rosary in Düsseldorf7.

The pen study of a mounted warrior on the verso of this drawing, now partly obscured by the backing of the sheet, may be tentatively related to a similar figure in a drawing of A King Before a Walled Town in the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf8. The Düsseldorf drawing, which may represent a scene from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata, is itself related to two drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle9. A similar mounted figure also appears in a drawing by Passeri of Clorinda Frees Sophronia and Olindo, today at Holkham Hall in Norfolk10.

22 HUBERT ROBERT Paris 1733-1808 Paris Laundresses at a Fountain near a Palace in Genoa Pen and black ink, with touches of watercolour and white heightening, over a red chalk counterproof.

Inscribed dessiné d’après nature à gènes in brown ink in the lower margin. Numbered 9486 in brown ink on the verso of the old mount. Stamped with the drystamp of the late 18th century mountmaker François Renaud (Lugt 1042) at the lower right corner.

284 x 358 mm. (11 1/8 x 14 1/8 in.)

Hubert Robert spent a total of eleven years in Italy, mostly in Rome, between 1754 and 1765. At the French Academy he met and befriended Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and both artists were engaged by the Abbé de Saint-Non to provide landscape illustrations for his Voyage pittoresque, ou description historique des royaumes de Naples, et de Sicile, eventually published between 1781 and 1786. Robert returned to Paris in August 1765, and the following year was admitted into the Académie Royale. He made his debut at the Salon in 1767, exhibiting picturesque landscapes and capricci, and soon developed a reputation for paintings of real and imagined Roman views, often incorporating ancient ruins. A versatile artist, Robert often repeated and developed favourite views or compositions in different formats, including chalk drawings, finished watercolours, small cabinet pictures and large-scale mural paintings.

The 18th century connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette noted of Robert’s drawings that they were very popular and sought-after. As Margaret Morgan Grasselli has recently written of the artist, ‘Over the course of his long career, he turned out thousands of works on paper, ranging from the slightest chalk sketches to fully completed sanguines, from swift pen and ink jottings to highly resolved watercolors. These works show Robert at his most versatile, spontaneous, and experimental, and constitute a significant part of his entire oeuvre, complementing and augmenting what he achieved in his paintings…Drawing was, in fact, the soul of Robert’s art, and he remained a dedicated draftsman until the end of his life.’1 The present sheet is drawn over a red chalk counterproof. Robert often made counterproofs of his drawings in both black and red chalk. This was an essential task, since by making a counterproof, any excess chalk dust, which otherwise might easily smear, would be removed from the original drawing2.

Often, the artist would then extensively rework the chalk counterproof, adding pen, ink and wash and watercolour to create a finished, reversed version of the original composition. Such is the case with the present sheet, which was probably intended as an autonomous work of art to be sold to a collector.

As Grasselli notes, ‘A surprisingly large portion of Robert’s drawing production involved the execution of complete compositions that he considered to be finished works in themselves.’3 This finished drawing is inscribed as having been done in Genoa, which the artist presumably visited on his journey back to France from Rome in the summer of 1765. Very few drawings or paintings of Genoese subjects by Robert are known, however. A painting of washerwomen by the staircase of the Palazzo Durazzo (now Durazzo Pallavicini) in Genoa, signed and dated 1772, was formerly in the collection of Felix Rohatyn and was recently sold at auction4, while a related drawing in black chalk of the same scene appeared at auction in London in 19855.

The present sheet bears the drystamp of François Renaud, one of the leading mountmakers in Paris in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Working from a shop on the rue Feydeau in Paris, Renaud is thought to have also acted occasionally as a dealer in prints and drawings.

23 MAURO GANDOLFI Bologna 1764-1834 Bologna An Elegantly Dressed Young Woman Wearing a Hat Pen and brush, with grey ink and grey wash, on vellum.

311 x 254 mm. (12 1/4 x 10 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2003.

EXHIBITED: New York and London, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Master Drawings, 2003, no.28.

Unlike his father Gaetano and uncle Ubaldo, Mauro Gandolfi enjoyed a relatively brief career as a painter, and only a few paintings by him survive to this day. In his manuscript autobiography, published posthumously in 1841, the artist noted that he learned to draw by copying his father’s drawings, and it is as a draughtsman that he is best known today. After training in his father’s studio, he left Bologna for France in 1782, at the age of eighteen, only returning to Italy five years later. He also spent a number of years in France later in his career, and his work can be seen to be a blend of the Bolognese tradition with the Neoclassical manner prevalent in late 18th century France. Mauro’s first independent works of any significance are two altarpieces painted in 1791 for the church of San Domenico in Ferrara, where they joined an altarpiece painted by his father. By 1794 he had been elected to the Accademia Clementina in Bologna, where he was later appointed to the post of professor of figure drawing.

Around the turn of the century Mauro Gandolfi seems to have largely abandoned painting in favour of working as a reproductive engraver, a practice he developed during a second stay in France between 1800 and 1806. Many of his prints were made after paintings by his father Gaetano, although he also produced engravings after the work of contemporaries such as Pelagio Palagi and earlier artists like Guido Reni. Gandolfi paid a visit to America in 1816, spending several months in New York and Philadelphia. His fame as a reproductive printmaker led to a commission to engrave John Trumbull’s painting of The Signing of the Declaration of Independence in the Capitol, though he turned it down. In an account of his travels in America, written in 1822, he notes that he brought with him finished drawings to sell, although none have as yet been identified. On his return to Italy he worked briefly in Florence before settling in Milan. Much of his work was in the form of highly finished drawings and watercolours for sale to collectors, as well as designs for engravings, to be published and sold by several art dealers and printsellers active in the city, notably Giuseppe Vallardi. After five years in Milan he returned to Bologna for good in 1823, and died there in impoverished circumstances just over ten years later.

As Mimi Cazort has noted, ‘the characteristic features of Mauro’s drawings [are] an elegant refinement of line, precision of detail, and certain stylistic conceits for the rendering of hands and faces.’1 The present sheet may a study for a lithograph or engraving, but is equally likely to have been drawn as an independent work of art for sale to a collector. It can be related to a handful of highly-finished drawings and watercolours, usually executed on vellum, produced by the artist for a sophisticated clientele in the first quarter of the 19th century. In many of these late works, Gandolfi adopted a sort of vignette composition, with large areas of paper left untouched on all sides. A similar technique and composition can be found, for example, in a self-portrait drawing in a private collection2. Another drawing in a private collection, showing the artist holding a guitar3 and derived from a painted self-portrait of c.1787, is also similar in its vignette format, while a less finished pen and wash drawing of this vignette type, depicting the heads of a young woman and an old man, is in another private collection4. In its degree of finish, this drawing may also be likened to two further drawings by Mauro Gandolfi on vellum; an elaborate allegorical watercolour, signed and dated 1811, in the Apolloni collection in Rome5, and a brush and grey wash drawing of a couple with a child, in a private American collection6.

24 THÉODORE GÉRICAULT Rouen 1791-1824 Paris Four Men Restraining a Wild Horse Pen and brown ink, with touches of white heightening, over an extensive underdrawing in pencil, and with partial framing lines in pencil.

226 x 321 mm. (8 7/8 x 12 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Marie-Joseph-François Mahérault, Paris; His posthumous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Pillet-Delestre], 27-29 May 1880, part of lot 74; Jean Dollfus, Paris; His posthumous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Lair-Dubreuil and Baudoin], 4 March 1912, part of lot 54; Pierre Olivier Dubaut, Paris (Lugt 2103b), by 1934; M. Marillier, by 1937; Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 22 January 2003, lot 102; Gérard Lhéritier, Nice.

LITERATURE: Lo Duca, ‘Parigi: Artisti francesi in Italia’, Emporium, December 1937, p.674 (illustrated); Pierre Dubaut, ‘Les Romantiques au Musée des Beaux-Arts de Poitiers. I. – Les dessins de Gericault’, Bulletin des amis des Musees de Poitiers: Dibutade I, 1954, pp.43; Wheelock Whitney, Gericault in Italy, New Haven and London, 1997, p.103 (where incorrectly listed as fig.133), p.124, illustrated p.105, fig.128 (as present whereabouts unknown); Germain Bazin, Théodore Géricault: Étude critique, documents et catalogue raisonné. Vol. IV – Le voyage en Italie: Étude critique et catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1990, p.74 and p.219, no.1400 (as author unknown).

EXHIBITED: Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Pavillon de Marsan, Les Artistes Français en Italie, de Poussin à Renoir, 1934, no.499 (‘Etude pour la “Course des Chevaux libres”. Plume.’, lent by Dubaut); Paris, Maurice Gobin, Exposition de dessins, aquarelles & gouaches par Géricault, 1935, no.19; Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Exposition Géricault, peintre et dessinateur, 1937, no.112 (lent by Marillier).

ENGRAVED: By Alexandre Colin.

When Théodore Géricault died in January 1824, at the age of thirty-three, he was best known as the painter of The Raft of the Medusa, which had caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1819. The public at large knew little or nothing of his work as a draughtsman, however, so when the contents of his studio – containing some 220 paintings and several hundred drawings and sketchbooks – were sold at auction in November 1824, the works on paper were a revelation, and were eagerly acquired by collectors. Several important collections of drawings and watercolours by Géricault were formed in France in the 19th century – by Louis Bro, Philippe de Chennevières, Alexandre Colin, L. J. A. Coutan, Horace His de la Salle and François Marcille, among others – and works by the artist have remained popular with collectors and connoisseurs ever since.

From a very early age, Géricault was fascinated by horses, and many of his most significant works involved equestrian subjects. As the scholar Philippe Grunchec has noted, ‘Throughout his career, Gericault painted and drew horses, beginning with the period of his apprenticeship to Carle Vernet and continuing up to his last, consummately finished watercolors.’1 The same author has added that, ‘In fact, the life and art of Théodore Géricault are both indissolubly joined under the sign of the horse. Not merely content to observe the animal from every angle, in drawing after drawing and painting after painting, Géricault would in a certain sense dedicate his entire existence to the horse, from his earliest childhood to his premature and tragic end, brought on by an accident with – a horse.’2 In 1816, having failed in his attempt to win the Prix de Rome earlier in the year, Géricault decided to travel to Italy at his own expense. He arrived there in October 1816 and by the following month had settled in Rome. Although he had intended to stay for two years, he remained in Italy for less than a year before returning to Paris in the autumn of 1817. This period in Italy, although relatively brief, was

nevertheless of particular importance to the young artist. As Wheelock Whitney has noted, ‘the effect of the Italian stay on his artistic development makes it a pivotal moment for Géricault. In certain respects, it was the year in which he came of age.’3 Both this and the following drawing are among a group of studies and oil sketches relating to the most important project of Géricault’s Roman years; a monumental painting depicting The Start of the Race of the Barberi Horses. It was in February 1817 that the young artist witnessed the annual event known as the corso de’ Barberi – a race of wild, riderless horses along the Via del Corso, from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza Venezia – that was the highlight and culmination of the Roman Carnival. (The untamed horses were of a particular breed originally from the Barbary Coast, and were therefore known, in later years, as Barberi.) Lorenz Eitner has noted that ‘The gaudy vigour of the show, spiced with danger and cruelty, could not fail to fascinate the ardent sportsman in Géricault, and the artist for whom the horse had always embodied nature’s energy and passion.’4 Géricault seems in particular to have been drawn to the periods just before the start of the race (known as ‘la mossa’), when young grooms would try to restrain the horses behind the starting rope, and at the end of the course (known as ‘la ripresa’), when the grooms would attempt to recapture the stampeding horses.

The present sheet depicts four grooms straining to control a horse before the start of the race; two at the head of the animal and two more at the tail, one of whom is only visible by his cap. (The motif of a groom pulling on the horse’s tail is one that appears in several of the artist’s studies for the Race of the Barberi Horses.) Writing some thirty years before Géricault’s visit to Rome, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe attended the corso de’ Barberi and described the scene at the start of the race: ‘Most of [the horses] are already frisky and impatient; the presence of so many people makes them nervous, and the grooms need all their strength and skill to manage them. They kick against the partition or try to jump over the rope, and all this commotion increases the excitement of the onlookers. The grooms, too, are overexcited, because, in deciding the outcome of the race, much depends upon the skill with which the horse is released at the start.’5 This figural group of four grooms restraining a rearing horse is the finest of several related versions of the same composition. In his 1879 catalogue of Géricault’s work, Clément listed four different drawn variants of this group. A smaller and more schematic drawing of this composition, likely to be a copy of the present sheet, was in a French private collection in the 1950s6, while another smaller version, drawn in black chalk alone, was in a private collection in Paris and recently appeared at auction there7.

A lithograph by Alexandre Colin reproduces both the present study and another drawing by Géricault on the same sheet8, while a tracing of this subject by Colin, in reverse, is also known9.

As Wheelock Whitney has written of this particular composition, ‘It is unclear why Géricault drew so many versions of this image, which does not appear in any of the subsequent stages of the Race project…

He may have considered making a small painting of this isolated group, for which all these drawings would have served as studies…Whatever his original intentions for this image, however, Géricault made partial use of it in various other Race studies as the project progressed…in a manner wholly typical of his resourceful and complex working method on the Race project, Géricault took elements from this drawing, altered them to a greater or lesser extent and inserted them in later, otherwise unrelated compositional studies, where they are barely recognizable in their new form.’10 The bold handling of pen and ink, applied with a reed pen, in this drawing is a characteristic of Géricault’s draughtsmanship both before and during his year in Italy. The present sheet may be compared stylistically with such pen studies of the same period as A Man Taming a Bull in the Louvre11 and drawing of Bull Tamers formerly in the collection of Robert von Hirsch in Basel and later in that of Alain Delon in Paris12.

The first known owner of this drawing was the 19th century art historian Marie-Joseph-François Mahérault (1795-1879). The drawing was then acquired, probably at the posthumous Mahérault sale of 1880, by the prominent Alsacian industrialist and collector Jean Dollfus (1823-1911), before entering the exceptional collection of paintings and drawings by Géricault assembled by the artist and scholar Pierre Olivier Dubaut (1886-1968).

25 THÉODORE GÉRICAULT Rouen 1791-1824 Paris A Wild Horse Rearing, Held by a Groom Black chalk on laid paper.

198 x 256 mm. (7 3/4 x 10 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Baron Joseph Vitta, Paris and Évian; His sale (‘Collection V***’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Lair-Dubreuil], 27 May 1926, lot 118 (as attributed to Gericault: ‘Cheval nu tenu en main, se cabrant.

Crayon noir. H. 200 – L. 255.’); Pierre Olivier Dubaut, Paris (Lugt 2103b); Thence by descent to a private collection in Paris, until 2011; Anonymous sale (‘Ancienne collection Pierre Olivier Dubaut’), Paris, Artcurial, 30 March 2011, lot 96; Arturo Cuéllar-Nathan, Zurich; Anonymous sale (‘Property of a Swiss Family’), London, Christie’s, 5 July 2017, lot 78.

LITERATURE: Philippe Grunchec, Géricault: Dessins et Aquarelles de Chevaux, Lausanne, 1982, illustrated p.50; Philippe Grunchec, Géricault’s Horses: Drawings and Watercolours, New York and Paris, 1984, pp.50-51, unnumbered; Philippe Grunchec, Master Drawings by Gericault, exhibition catalogue, New York, San Diego and Houston, 1985-1986, pp.82-83, no.31; Germain Bazin, Théodore Géricault: Étude critique, documents et catalogue raisonné. Vol. IV – Le voyage en Italie: Étude critique et catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1990, p.69 and p.194, no.1351; Wheelock Whitney, Gericault in Italy, New Haven and London, 1997, pp.131-132, fig.172 (as present whereabouts unknown); Amy Kurlander and Jill Newhouse, Théodore Géricault: Drawings, Watercolors and Small Oils from Private Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2014, unpaginated, no.9.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Pavillon de Marsan, Les artistes français en Italie, de Poussin à Renoir, 1934, probably no.500; Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Exposition Géricault, peintre et dessinateur, 1937, no.113; Paris, Galerie Bignou, Géricault, cet inconnu…(1791-1824): aquarelles, gouaches, dessins, 1950, no.32; London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Théodore Géricault 1791-1824, 1952, no.47; Winterthur, Kunstmuseum, Théodore Géricault 1791-1824, 1953, no.161; Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Gros, Gericault, Delacroix, 1954, no.51; Paris, Galerie Claude Aubry, Géricault dans les collections privées françaises, 1964, no.66; New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, and elsewhere, Master Drawings by Gericault, 1985-1986, no.31; New York, Jill Newhouse Gallery, Théodore Géricault: Drawings, Watercolors and Small Oils from Private Collections, 2014, no.9.

Théodore Géricault worked on numerous drawings and oil sketches on paper on the theme of the Race of the Barberi Horses for most of his time in Italy, culminating in a huge canvas, which measured some thirty feet in length. On his sudden return to France in September 1817, however, the unfinished painting was abandoned in his Roman studio, and no longer survives. Nevertheless, some idea of the genesis and development of the composition can be had from the approximately twenty oil sketches and sixty drawings related to the project which the artist brought back with him when he returned to Paris. As Charles Clément, Géricault’s early biographer and author of the first catalogue raisonné of his work, has noted, ‘The admirable drawings of the Race of the Riderless Horses which have survived are executed, in pen and ink for the most part, with details indicated very lightly with a few hatchings. One would be very wrong to regard these as improvisations, or mere sketches.’1 When working out his ideas for the Race of the Barberi Horses on paper, Géricault tried out many different solutions to the question of how best to depict the frenzied scene of wild horses and their attendants at the start of the race. (The starting rope is indicated in this drawing, below the horse’s front hooves.) As Wheelock Whitney has pointed out, ‘[Another] motif that characterizes the early phase of the final “start” composition…is that of the ramping horse at the right, its forelegs poised over the starting rope. Although this horse continues to appear in every successive compositional study in the series…

Géricault’s original idea seems to have been to depict the animal without the figure of a youth shown

running alongside in later versions, but instead to leave the long, powerful flank of the animal fully exposed to view. In this presentation…the only brake on the horse’s forward motion is provided by the figure barely indicated behind it, who seems to restrain the horse by the head.’2 This black chalk study is one of the finest drawings of the particular type noted by Whitney. As another Géricault scholar, Philippe Grunchec, has written of the present sheet, ‘This is a study of a Roman groom holding back a horse before the start of a race...At this stage in his planned composition, Gericault displays all his remarkable knowledge of horses: forelegs raised and poised to plunge past the rope, neck arched – for the groom has a strong hold – ears pinned back angrily, eyes bulging, hind legs bent under its weight in the horse’s effort to strain forward…every detail has been accurately noted and recorded by a true horseman.’3 Also referring to the present sheet, Whitney writes that ‘A black chalk study of [a] horse and its groom, now in a private collection, vividly demonstrates Géricault’s profound knowledge and appreciation of the equine anatomy as well as his superb graphic powers. (What other French artist working in 1817, apart from Ingres, and perhaps Prud’hon, could have produced a drawing of this quality?). This drawing is clear evidence that at this point in the project he had by no means abandoned the idea of depicting the scene of the start of the race as the modern event he had witnessed in the Piazza del Popolo. Not only is the figure fully dressed in contemporary clothing, but the horse is shown with its tail knotted and wearing a halter, by which the groom restrains it, descriptive touches that plant the image even more firmly in the world of observed reality.’4 A related, small-scale chalk study by Géricault of the same rearing horse in profile is today in the collection of Roberta J. M. Olson and Alexander B. V. Johnson in New York5, while an identical horse and groom appear as part of a larger composition in a chalk drawing in a private collection6. The same group appears as one of three sketches of horses on one sheet in another private collection7, as well as in a pen and ink compositional study in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bayonne8. In later, more developed treatments of the start of the race – such as an oil sketch in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles9 and the most fully realized version of the subject, an oil sketch in the Louvre10 – the same horse remains at the right of the composition, though with a groom in front of the animal rather than behind.

As Wheelock Whitney has incisively written of the drawings brought back by the artist from Italy, ‘One of the chief benefits of the Italian year was the maturation it brought about in Géricault’s style. The most notable evidence of this advance is the more fluid and confident graphic manner he developed in Italy, in no small part due to his lengthy and complex preparatory process for the Race of the Barberi Horses. The fact is rarely acknowledged, but Géricault was, with Ingres, one of the two greatest draughtsmen of the first half of the nineteenth century. His drawings, whether preliminary studies for ambitious works such as the Race, mere exercises in graphic dexterity or elaborate, finished compositions intended from the outset as finished works of art, fairly vibrate with energy and expressiveness…The drawings done in Italy, where Géricault’s graphic style reached its maturity, are marked by an unprecedented freedom of handling and a palpable assurance of touch that he maintained, even as his style evolved, for the rest of his brief career.’11 This fine drawing once belonged to the noted French financier and art collector Baron Joseph Vitta (1860-1942), whose collection included large and significant groups of works by Eugène Delacroix, Jules Chéret and Auguste Rodin, as well as important works by Albert Besnard, Félix Bracquemond, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and others. Sales of paintings and drawings from Vitta’s collection were held in Paris in 1924 and 1926 (when this drawing was sold), and again in 1935.

Like the previous drawing, the present sheet was also part of the collection of works by Gericault belonging to the artist and art historian Pierre Olivier Dubaut (1886-1968), who may have acquired it at the 1926 Vitta sale. As an artist, Dubaut produced paintings, watercolours and prints of horses and equestrian subjects. He was especially fond of the work of Géricault, and organized several important exhibitions of his oeuvre. He had planned to publish a catalogue of the artist’s work, in collaboration with the Duc de Trévise, but this never came to fruition.

26 CARL ROTTMANN Handschuhsheim 1797-1850 Munich Landscape with the Bay of Genoa and the Mouth of the Polcevera River Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil. Inscribed von. G Regel [?] STm and (Gwinner? [?])1 in pencil on the backing sheet.

151 x 315 mm. (5 7/8 x 12 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: G. Regel(?); Georg Karl Wilhelm Seibt, Frankfurt (Lugt 2279)2, his collector’s mark stamped on the reverse of the backing sheet; Anonymous sale, Berlin, Galerie Bassenge, 28 November 2014, part of lot 6411; Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, London, in 2015; Private collection, England.

Carl Rottmann settled in Munich and established a career as a landscape painter and draughtsman, eventually coming to the attention of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who sponsored a study trip to Italy in 1826-1827. Rottmann, who up to this point had only painted Bavarian views, was greatly inspired by his experience of the Italian countryside. On his return to Germany he painted frescoes of Italianate landscapes for the arcades of the Hofgarten in Munich, completed in 18333. Between 1834 and 1835 Rottmann travelled throughout Greece, again at the behest of Ludwig, who commissioned the artist to paint a series of Hellenic landscapes for the Hofgarten, executed between 1838 and 1850.

This watercolour depicts a view of the Ligurian coast at Genoa, looking west and showing the mouth of the Polcevera river where it empties into the Ligurian Sea, between the modern Genoese quartieri of Sampierdarena and Cornigliano4. Having left Munich in April 1826, Rottmann arrived in Genoa at the end of that month and remained there, with a side trip to Nice, for several months. The present sheet is closely related to one of the first works that he painted in Italy; a large view of the bay of Genoa (fig.1)5. The high view of the bay follows the coastline to the mountains in the middle and far distance.

As the artist described the view, in a letter to his wife Friederike, ‘The mountain range is the western shore of the Mediterranean Sea…At the end of the chain lies Monaco and 4 hours away on the right in a bay is Nice. The place in the foreground near the base is Cornigliano, where the Bolcevera [sic] flows into the sea.’6 Rottmann was fairly pleased with the composition, writing in the same letter, ‘The other picture with the blue mountains is quite good in colour, the landscape is so charming precisely because of these blue mountains, as are the blue distances in general. And when I resolved to paint this landscape, I just wanted to paint a blue distance, but as I drew it, I saw more and more that I could hardly hold on to anything; there were no forms that I liked or were good enough, and going into a blue distance, and not being able to stick to anything, is nonsense or dreaming, and yet I wanted to have the picture, and here it is; what you see in it is also in this nature, and much more that you do not see.’7 Typical of Rottmann’s technique are the areas of the sheet where the watercolour has not yet been applied, revealing the underlying pencil drawing. Three other preparatory watercolour drawings for the same painting are known8, each of which leaves much of the foreground and middle ground of the composition blank. This fine watercolour is arguably the most complete and fully developed of the four extant studies for the final painting.

1

27 GIOVANNI BOLDINI Ferrara 1842-1931 Paris Study of Bernini’s and Girardon’s Equestrian Statue of Louis XIV / Marcus Curtius at Versailles Pencil, with stumping, on ruled paper from a notebook. Inscribed and dedicated 8 mars – 9 juin 1963 – musée jacquemart andré / de l’album no.16, si souvent feuilleté, / ce dessin de Boldini au Comte Doria / avec la reconnaissante amitié de / Milli Boldini in pencil on the verso.

174 x 222 mm. (6 7/8 x 8 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Part of a sketchbook that was among the contents of Boldini’s studio in Paris at the time of his death; By descent to the artist’s widow, Emilia Cardona Boldini, Ferrara; Given by her in 1963 to Comte Arnauld Doria, Paris (with his collection label and number 979 on the reverse of the frame); Thence by descent.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, Boldini, 1963 [ex-catalogue].

This spirited drawing depicts the monumental equestrian statue of Louis XIV at Versailles (fig.1), designed and partially sculpted by Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). Commissioned from Bernini during his visit to Paris in 1665, the marble statue, over four metres in height, was only completed in Rome some twelve years later, around 1677. It was still in Bernini’s studio at the time of his death in 1680, and was only shipped to France in 1684, arriving in Paris the following year. The King was apparently so unhappy with the work, however, that he wished to have it destroyed, but was eventually dissuaded from doing so. Instead the statue was recarved in 1688 by the French sculptor François Girardon (1628-1715) and modified to depict the Roman hero Marcus Curtius, before being placed in the gardens of the royal palace of Versailles1. The original appearance of the statue is only recorded in Bernini’s terracotta model for the project, executed around 1669-1670, in the Galleria Borghese in Rome2.

Giovanni Boldini produced at least two other drawings of the equestrian statue situated in the park at Versailles. A chalk sketch, showing the sculpture from a different angle and from farther away, is in the collection of the Museo Boldini in Ferrara3, while a larger drawing after the same statue, executed in pen and ink with brown and blue wash, appeared at auction in Paris in 20184.

Boldini produced a handful of drawings of other sculptures by Bernini, notably a watercolour copy of the sculptor’s 1652 Bust of Francesco I d’Este, Duke of Modena, which was recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.5. The artist also owned a plaster cast of a bust of a Medici cardinal which he believed to be by Bernini and which figures in several paintings, drawings and watercolours of the interior of his Parisian studio in the 1890s6.

The present sheet was used to illustrate the invitation to the opening of the Exposition Boldini at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris in 1963. On the occasion of this important retrospective exhibition of Boldini’s work, this drawing was presented by the artist’s widow, Emilia Cardona Boldini (1899-1977), to the director of the Musée Jacquemart-André, Comte Arnauld Doria (1890-1977).

1

28 FRANÇOIS CLÉMENT SOMMIER, called HENRY SOMM Rouen 1844-1907 Paris La Japonaise Watercolour, with pen and black ink. Signed Hy. Somm in black ink at the lower right. Laid down.

208 x 163 mm. (8 1/4 x 6 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s South Kensington, 3 June 1992, lot 25.

After studying at the École Municipale de Dessin in Rouen, François Clément Sommier, known as Henry Somm, settled in Paris in the late 1860s, where he trained briefly with Isidore Pils. He enjoyed a successful career as an illustrator and draughtsman, contributing regularly to such popular journals as Le Monde Parisien and L’Illustration Nouvelle, as well as providing illustrations for satirical books such as Jacques Olivier’s Alphabet de l’imperfection et malice de femmes, published in 1876. Somm was also active as a graphic designer, providing menus, theatre programs, invitations and announcements for the many fashionable events of Belle Epoque Paris. He produced visiting cards and bookplates, as well as designs for the Haviland porcelain factory, commissioned by the firm’s artistic director, Félix Bracquemond.

At the invitation of Edgar Degas, Somm took part in the fourth Impressionist exhibition of 1879, showing his drawings alongside those of Degas, Bracquemond, Mary Cassatt and Camille Pissarro. In the 1880s he was among a group of artists associated with the Parisian cabaret Le Chat Noir, for whose eponymous journal he published reviews and articles. Somm’s finished drawings are often related to his more commercial work as an illustrator for magazines or such books as Georges Montorgeuil’s La Parisienne peint par elle-même, published in 1897. In the latter part of his career, he was chiefly employed by the periodical Le Rire. Required to provide several drawings for each issue, his draughtsmanship became both more economical in line and more self-assured. Somm died in 1907 in relative obscurity.

Like several of his contemporaries, Somm developed a fascination with Japan. He studied the Japanese language and in the early 1870s had planned a trip to Japan that was abandoned with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. He was friendly with the pioneering ‘Japoniste’ art critic and collector Philippe Burty, and often used oriental motifs in his work. Indeed, Somm became one of the earliest artistic exponents of Japonisme, his work in this genre first developed in his illustrations accompanying a series of articles by Burty under the general title of ‘Japonisme’, published in the magazine L’Art in 1875 and 1876. As the Somm scholar Elizabeth Menon has noted of the artist, ‘His fascination with Japanese art is manifested in countless drawings, watercolors, and etchings that depict Japanese geishas, street scenes, and gardens, as well as Oriental objets d’art…Several watercolors painted in the 1880s depict women in Japanese dress and some appear to be geishas – women trained to sing and dance for the pleasure of men.

Somm’s fascination and glorification of the Japanese woman appears to be a reaction against the “modern female”, who emerged during the belle époque.’1 The present sheet may be included among a group of vibrant watercolours by Somm of women in Japanese dress, several of which depict the subject in a nearly identical pose to that of the woman in this drawing2. Another closely comparable watercolour, of similar dimensions, was with Stephen Ongpin Fine Art in 2009 and is today in a private French collection3.

actual size

29 HENRI-JOSEPH HARPIGNIES Valenciennes 1819-1916 Saint-Privé Landscape with a Pond Watercolour, pen and grey ink and grey wash. Signed and dated h. harpignies 84. in brown ink at the lower right. Inscribed à mon ami Adam / souvenir de Haydn. Mozart. Beethoven / le 1er janvier 89 hharpignies on a card attached to the reverse of the frame.

112 x 265 mm. (4 3/8 x 10 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist in January 1889 to a M. ‘Adam’ (according to an inscription on a card attached to the reverse of the frame); Private collection, France.

Henri-Joseph Harpignies began drawing at the age of four or five, according to an unpublished autobiographical manuscript, but only came to realize his vocation as an artist at a relatively late age. It was not until 1848, when he was in his late twenties, that he decided to abandon a career as a travelling salesman and began training as an artist with the landscape painter Jean-Alexis Achard. Harpignies made his Salon debut in 1853, exhibiting views of Capri and Valenciennes, and he continued to show regularly at the Salons for the next sixty years or so. His luminous landscape paintings, depicting both rural and urban views, were inspired by his first meetings with Camille Corot in the early 1850s. (Indeed, Corot purchased two of the young artist’s watercolours in order to encourage him in his work.) In 1863 he made his second visit to Italy, and this sojourn was also to have a significant effect on his later work.

From 1883 onwards Harpignies began to sell his work through the Paris art dealers Arnold & Tripp, from whom he also received commissions that earned him an average of 70,000 francs per year. He continued to maintain an emphasis on a distinctive manner of tonal landscape, inspired by the example of Corot, in the paintings and drawings that he produced well into the early years of the 20th century.

Highly regarded as a landscape painter, Harpignies also produced superb landscape drawings in watercolour, a medium which accounts for much of the artist’s finest work, and was to be the basis of his reputation, particularly outside France1. He exhibited his first watercolours at the Salon of 1864, where they were praised by the critic Théophile Thoré. The freshness and luminosity of his watercolours soon gained him a wide audience, and Harpignies’ reputation spread to England, where he was invited by James McNeill Whistler to exhibit at the Royal Institute in London. In 1881 he was elected a member of the Société des Aquarellistes Français, and he also showed at the New WaterColour Society in London. From the early 1900s onwards, his drawings take on a silvery-grey tonality that is perhaps indicative of his failing eyesight.

In 1898 the English art critic Frederic Lees wrote that ‘Harpignies...[has] the power of producing the most powerful effects by teints unies; his sobriety of colour, breadth of treatment, firmness of touch, and precision of drawing placing him in the front rank of water-colour artists.’2 Eighteen years later, in an article published shortly after the artist’s death, the same writer opined that ‘As a water-colour artist, Harpignies was without a rival in France. His work in this branch of art cannot be too highly praised, for whilst attaining pre-eminence he proved himself to be a veritable pioneer…As one of the forerunners, if not the founder, of the modern school of water-colour painting in France, his work was much appreciated abroad, especially in England and the United States.’3 Despite the fame and success he enjoyed over his very long career, Harpignies seems to have remained at heart a simple man, deeply committed to his art. As Agnes Mongan has written, ‘Clearly, his happiness was in recording, whether in drawings, watercolor, or paint, the landscapes he saw around him…his ninety-seven years were productive of a large number of landscapes in a variety of media that have delighted and continue to delight those who enjoy their sensitive and particular artistic qualities.’4 The present sheet is dated 1884, and five years later was presented by the artist to a friend, a ‘M. Adam’, on New Year’s Day of 1889.

30 PAUL THOMAS Paris 1859-1910 Paris Woman at a Mirror Pastel on paper, laid down on board. Signed Paul Thomas in pencil at the lower right.

446 x 296 mm. (17 1/2 x 11 5/8 in.)

Relatively little is known of the painter, pastellist and sculptor Paul Thomas, who was a pupil of Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. He became a member of the Société des Artistes Français in 1885, the same year that he came second in the Prix de Rome competition. Thomas exhibited regularly at the Salon des Artistes Français, showing mainly interiors, portraits and genre scenes, and winning a bronze medal in 1892 and a silver medal the following year. In an account of the Salon of 1895 one critic praised ‘the portraits of young girls whose ingenue-like grace M. Paul Thomas has rendered by such simple means.’1 In 1900 the artist was awarded a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle, and in 1906 was admitted to the Legion of Honour. Paintings by Paul Thomas are today in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the museums of Amiens and Reims, as well as in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

31 PIERRE PRINS Paris 1838-1913 Paris The Mouth of the River Laïta at Le Pouldu, Brittany Pastel on paper, laid down on board. Signed Pierre Prins in black chalk at the lower right. Further signed and dated 1900 / PP in black chalk at the lower right. Inscribed La Laïta au Pouldu / 1899 in pencil and stamped COLL. J. Cl. BARRIÉ twice on the backing board. Stamped 65 on the backing board.

269 x 655 mm. (10 5/8 x 25 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Jean-Claude Barrié, the Barrié-Chevalier collection, Saint-Amans-des-Cots.

EXHIBITED: L’Isle-Adam, Musée Louis Senlecq, Charles Agard 1866-1950: Peintre de l’Ecole du Val d’Oise, 1993; Aulnay-sous-Bois, Galerie de l’Hôtel de Ville, Un certain regard (1850-1950): Oeuvres sur papier, 1994, no.28; Chatou, Musée Fournaise, Pierre Prins, l’ami de Manet, 1999, no.64, ‘Paysages’ no.4; Fécamp, Musée de Fécamp, Pierre Prins: un pastelliste impressioniste, 2013.

Shy and unassuming by nature, Pierre Prins worked in relative solitude for most of his career. Although he was close friends with several of the Impressionists, notably Edouard Manet, Alfred Sisley and Frederic Bazille, he preferred not to take part in the artistic debates and controversies of the period.

His style, while at times close to that of the Impressionist painters, remained distinctively his own. In 1878, inspired by Manet’s pastels, he began to work in the medium, becoming highly proficient and eventually working almost exclusively in pastel. In 1890, at the age of fifty, he had his first one-man exhibition, showing some forty landscapes, almost all executed in pastel, at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. Prins exhibited regularly at the Salons and with such dealers as Georges Petit, Durand-Ruel, Goupil and Boussod et Valadon. However, on his deathbed, he asked his heirs not to exhibit his work, nor to release any works from his studio, for a period of thirty years after his death. As a result, his work remained almost completely unknown for much of the period when that of his friends and contemporaries among the Impressionists rose to new heights. His paintings, pastels and drawings were only again exhibited in Paris during the Second World War, but it was not until a retrospective exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1963 that his work came to be better known and appreciated.

In the 1880s and 1890s Prins spent much time on the coast of Normandy and Brittany, and produced a large number of pastel studies of the sea and sky. While some of his pastel landscapes are very large, reaching almost two metres in size, most are smaller in scale and more intimate. He often used a coarse-grained coloured paper, and almost never used any fixative, so as to keep his pastels as bright and fresh as possible. An interest in atmospheric effects is evident in much of his work, with a particular interest in the sky at sunrise, in full sunlight, at twilight and at sunset. As Daniel Wildenstein has noted, ‘Prins was above all a painter of the sky and of light in their most subtle expressions. With the art of a visionary, and yet without any of the fairy-tale romance of Turner and Bonington, he was capable of catching their most fleeting effects. In this he was particularly successful with pastel, which he used with great mastery and which, in his hand, turns into a luminous haze in boundless space, resting on a very low, very distant horizon only slightly more substantial than the clouds. He makes the slightness of pastel serves [sic] the insubstantiality of the sky, thus bringing the means and the end into harmony.’1 Like artists such as Paul Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Paul Serusier and Claude-Emile Schuffenecker, Prins was fond of the small town of Le Pouldu, on the Atlantic coast of Brittany, which he visited four times, in 1888, 1892, 1899 and 1900. Drawn on the last of these trips, the present sheet has been exhibited several times, most recently in 2013, when it was noted that ‘With the pastel La Laïta au Pouldu, the artist offers...a wide view of the river flowing into the ocean; the eye is only stopped by the hills on the horizon. The vast expanse of water thus gives pride of place to the reflections of nature, the sky and the light on its surface. A sailing boat...seems ready to cross the mouth of the river.’2

32 GEORGES DE FEURE Paris 1868-1943 Paris Dutch Landscape with a Fisherman Gouache on buff paper washed blue, with framing lines in pencil, laid down on board. Signed de Feure in red gouache at the lower centre. Variously inscribed with mountmaker’s inscriptions(?) in pencil in the margins.

350 x 518 mm. (13 3/4 x 20 3/8 in.) [image] 497 x 648 mm. (19 5/8 x 25 1/2 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Private collection, in 1992.

LITERATURE: Ian Millman, Georges de Feure: Maître du Symbolisme et de l’Art Nouveau, Courbevoie, 1992, illustrated p.247 (where dated between 1905 and 1912).

Of Belgian and Dutch origins, Georges de Feure was largely self-taught as an artist. He was born Georges Joseph van Sluijters in Paris, but returned with his family to the Netherlands at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. De Feure did not come back to Paris until 1889. Settling in Montmartre, he began working as an artist and illustrator. De Feure soon allied himself with the Symbolist movement, taking part in the Exposition des Peintres Impressionistes et Symbolistes at the Galerie Le Barc de Boutteville, as well as showing his work at the Salons de la Rose + Croix of 1893 and 1894. In 1894 an exhibition of his watercolours was held at the Galerie des Artistes modernes in Paris, leading one critic to describe him as ‘an artist whose work is never banal, but whose symbolism is not always accessible.’1 By this time De Feure was also designing posters, many influenced by Japanese prints, and producing colour lithographs.

Like such contemporaries as Alphonse Mucha and Eugène Grasset, De Feure was equally adept in the field of applied or decorative arts. Aptly described by one modern scholar as ‘the most art nouveau of all the Symbolists’2, he embarked on an association with the Art Nouveau pioneer Siegfried Bing that was to establish his reputation. He decorated the facade and designed two suites of furniture for Bing’s Pavillon de l’Art Nouveau at the great Exposition Universelle of 1900, a project that earned extravagant praise from critics, and thereafter worked closely with Bing as an artiste-décorateur, providing numerous designs for furniture, stained glass, wallpaper, ceramics and lamps. In 1903 a large exhibition of his decorative work for Bing’s Galerie de l’Art Nouveau was held in Paris, later travelling to The Hague and Hamburg. De Feure also established his own atelier, which handled commissions from other sources, such as Julius Meier-Graefe’s gallery La Maison Moderne. He continued to work as a designer and interior decorator after Bing’s death in 1905, and also undertook a number of commissions for scenery and costume designs for the stage. Among his later projects were the decoration of the Parisian studio of the couturier Madeleine Vionnet in 1922. Late in his career De Feure was appointed Professor of Decorative Art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

The major exhibition of De Feure’s work held in 1903 at Siegfried Bing’s Galerie de l’Art Nouveau in Paris included 155 paintings, watercolours and prints, most of which had been produced during the previous three or four years. Among the revelations of this exhibition, for critics and collectors alike, were a group of over fifty landscape paintings and drawings, a previously little-known aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. The landscapes exhibited included forest and woodland scenes near Fontainebleau, as well as views in Holland. These works dominated the exhibition, and drew the attention of several critics.

33 GEORGES DE FEURE Paris 1868-1943 Paris Dutch Landscape with Woodcutters Gouache on buff paper washed blue, with framing lines in pencil, laid down on board. Signed de Feure in red gouache at the lower right.

352 x 517 mm. (13 7/8 x 20 3/8 in.) [image] 498 x 647 mm. (19 5/8 x 25 1/2 in.) [sheet] This pair of evocative landscapes are likely to date from the first decade of the 20th century, when Georges de Feure produced a number of small paintings and gouaches of towns and villages that are reminiscent of scenes in the Low Countries. As the scholar Ian Millman has noted of the artist, ‘Whether real or imaginary, the canals, windmills and estuaries of Flanders were an inexhaustible source of inspiration for him… In his Flemish landscapes, De Feure has masterfully captured the light of the North and the peaceful atmosphere of its canals and small towns.’1 Similarly, the French novelist Lucien Descaves praised the artist’s landscapes: ‘The light is not necessarily dazzling. There is as much light in Holland as in Italy...The painter breathes in the atmosphere and exhales it in colour.’2 On the occasion of the large exhibition of De Feure’s work held at the Galerie de l’Art Nouveau in Paris in 1903, the critic Gabriel Mourey praised the artist’s landscape gouaches, noting ‘the quiet peace of these small Dutch villages with pink brick walls, tiny painted houses, tiny gardens...with the bell tower of a tiny church stuck like a tulip above the roofs.’3 Another writer noted that De Feure ‘has applied the marvellous technique of the Japanese to European landscape, and has created a new style. The tones are worked in watercolors. Whatman and Bristol paper become the palette of the artist, and on them he mixes, dilutes, shades off, and works his colors, here leaving a spot clear white, there laying on thickly with gouache. In brief, he paints water-colors with the methods of oil.’4 Landscapes such as the present sheet find their origins in such earlier works by the artist as the gouache The Gust of Wind, Holland of c.19001903, in a private collection5, in which the landscape elements play a more significant role in what is still essentially an Art Nouveau composition.

The De Feure scholar Ian Millman has suggested that works such as these may, as a group, have been intended to represent a sort of panorama of landscapes in different seasons. As he further notes, ‘De Feure developed a highly personal, original approach to the [landscape] genre that may best be described as Art Nouveau landscape painting. It distanced itself from Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism on one hand and the reactions against these movements by Gauguin and the Pont-Aven Group and the Nabis on the other, yet the common factor underlying all these disparate currents was the impact of Japanese art.’6 From around 1903 onwards the artist chose to exhibit landscapes almost exclusively, and in June 1922 one of these, A Village in Holland, was acquired by the French state for the sum of two thousand francs.

34 JEAN-PIERRE LAURENS Paris 1875-1932 Fontenay-aux-Roses Portrait of a Young Prisoner, Full Face, Wearing a Cap Pen and brown ink and watercolour. Inscribed Witberg début [?] and numbered 18 in pencil on the verso.

187 x 165 mm. (7 3/8 x 6 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: By descent in the family of the artist.

LITERATURE: Jean Guitton, Jean-Pierre Laurens (1875-1932), Paris, 1957, illustrated pl.12 (where dated 1915).

The son of the history painter and sculptor Jean-Paul Laurens, Jean-Pierre (known as Pierre) Laurens entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1895, studying with Léon Bonnat. He made his debut at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1898, winning a third-class medal, while the following year he won a silver medal and a travel grant, which he used to visit North Africa and Italy. His earliest exhibited works were mainly genre subjects and portraits. He won another medal at the Salon of 1906, and in later years served as a member of the Salon jury. Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, Laurens enlisted in the French 25th Territorial infantry regiment. On 25 September 1914 at Rocquigny, near Péronne, he was wounded by a bullet in his right leg and taken prisoner by the Germans. He was transferred to the prisoner of war camp at Wittenberg, on the Elbe river in SaxonyAnhalt, which became notorious for its appalling conditions. With 15,000 French, Belgian, British and Russian prisoners of war confined in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, the camp was the scene of an outbreak of typhus in the winter of 1914-1915 that killed many prisoners.

During his three years as a captive at Wittenberg, Laurens produced a number of drawings and watercolours of everyday life in the camp and of his fellow prisoners. These drawings recorded the harsh conditions of captivity and, in particular, the ravages caused by the typhus epidemic in the camp.

In 1916 he was transferred to a ‘punishment’ camp at Courland, in western Latvia, where he spent seven months of hard labour before being sent back to Wittenberg. Severely weakened by his ordeal and suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion, a weak heart and heart failure’, Laurens was interned by the Red Cross at Montreux in Switzerland in June 1917, before being eventually sent back to France in September 1918.

After the war, Laurens continued his artistic career, and was appointed a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1924, a post he retained until 1931, when he retired for reasons of ill health.

Apart from elegant portraiture, Laurens became known for his religious pictures, executed in a simple and direct manner somewhat akin to that of Maurice Denis, who was a few years older. His most significant public commission was for the decoration of the newly-built church of Notre-Dame-duCalvaire in Chatillon, a suburb southwest of Paris, constructed between 1932 and 1934. Laurens had received the commission in 1928 from Cardinal Jean Verdier, archbishop of Paris, but was only able to produce sketches for the project before his death in 1932. The extensive fresco decoration of the church – supervised by the artist’s wife, the painter and sculptor Yvonne Diéterle Laurens – was undertaken by several of his students, and was only completed in 1962.

In 2019 the Musée de l’Armée in Paris acquired at auction a group of watercolours and drawings of the German prisoner of war camp at Wittenberg by Laurens. One of these watercolours depicts a young Russian infantryman seated on a cot1, who may have also posed for the present sheet.

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35 JEAN-PIERRE LAURENS Paris 1875-1932 Fontenay-aux-Roses Portrait of a Prisoner, Looking Down to the Right Pen and brown ink and brown wash, and watercolour. Signed Pierre Laurens in brown ink at the lower right. Numbered and dated III 1915 in black ink at the lower left. Numbered 16 and III in pencil on the verso.

198 x 260 mm. (7 3/4 x 10 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: By descent in the family of the artist.

This watercolour is likely to depict a Russian prisoner of war in the German camp at Wittenberg, one of several drawings and watercolours Laurens made of his fellow prisoners. As the artist recalled of his time in the camp, in a letter written after the war, ‘As soon as it was possible, I started to draw my comrades on a piece of paper, and then I was able to obtain a small album. A great day was the arrival of a block [of paper], paintbrushes and colours. This coincided with the arrival of the Russians in our hut.

They had been in the camp for a month, but we had not been able to see them up close. I was in awe of the grandeur of their appearance and had a burning desire to work on drawings of them. Events made it easier for me. When I received the paper, the barracks offered a sight that you cannot imagine. We had the Russians and the colonial riflemen. They were beautiful too. An unusual mix.’1 It may have been the arrival of Russian prisoners at Wittenberg that led to the typhus epidemic and the subsequent quarantine, which lasted for about six months, until the summer of 1915. The outbreak was so severe that the German doctors at Wittenberg abandoned the camp, while the prisoners, most of whom were British, were quarantined together, which made matters worse. The doctors only returned to the camp in August 1915. During this time of isolation, with the prisoners having little or no direct contact with the German soldiers outside the barbed wire, Laurens was able to work relatively freely. As he wrote in a letter of July 1915, ‘I have adopted a Russian barracks in which I draw very often…I put all my effort into keeping it together. It’s difficult. It always comes between you and nature.

To give chase is hard work. To look at a human face with an absolutely pure heart is an arduous test for one who has dedicated his life to the expression of visible forms. I have convinced myself of this here.’2 The present sheet may depict the same Russian prisoner who seems to appear in several other 1915 watercolours by Laurens3. In one of these the sitter is identified as ‘Yosef’, who is mentioned by the artist in a letter: ‘If you only knew what kind of people I have lived among! In the misery of the beginning, when I painted the head with half-closed-eyes and purple lips of poor Yosef, the Muslim from Siberia...’4 Some of Lauren’s drawings of the Wittenberg POW camp were later used to illustrate his book Prisonniers de guerre: Cahier à la mémoire des compagnons de captivité du camp de Wittenberg, published in 1918, first in Le Figaro and then as a book. Among other watercolour studies by Laurens of prisoners in the camp at Wittenberg is one of a man reading a book, dated 28 May 1915, which was on the London art market in 19985.

36 JEAN-PIERRE LAURENS Paris 1875-1932 Fontenay-aux-Roses Portrait of a Zouave Prisoner, Looking to the Left Watercolour. Signed and dated Pierre Laurens 1915 in brown ink at the lower left.

260 x 198 mm. (10 1/4 x 7 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: By descent in the family of the artist.

LITERATURE: Jean Guitton, Jean-Pierre Laurens (1875-1932), Paris, 1957, illustrated pl.19 (as Tirailleur Arabe).

The watercolours made by Jean-Pierre Laurens during his period of captivity at Wittenberg account for some of his most deeply personal works. In a note written in the camp in July 1915, the artist observed that, ‘The more I study, the more I feel how essential humility is to anyone who wants to do well...A ray of winter sunshine illuminating with its warmth a group of poor devils crouching on their straw mattresses is enough for the heart to fill with tenderness and adoration.’1 Writing in 1957, the prominent French theologian and philosopher Jean Guitton, who was himself interned in a German prisoner of war camp between 1940 and 1945, during the Second World War, noted of Laurens’s portraits of his fellow prisoners at Wittenberg: ‘Even before the camps, where he was reduced to watercolour by destitution, Laurens must have had an affinity for it...In captivity, watercolour found itself suited to the scenes of pure humanity, where the slow and weary gestures of its heroes, with their overly long garments like those of monks or the poor, were a grey liturgy, to which the plain and washed-out hues were well suited. The watercolour also suited these heads, which had been dulled by starvation and were even a little hallucinated, as can be seen in the most beautiful of the watercolours of his imprisonment…And it is understandable that he judged his watercolours of the camps, which are still unknown to the public, to be the best of his work ‘because they were done without timidity’. He had reached the height of his art, in this evocation of the state of men, the clothing of men, the burials of men.

After the second captivity, that of 1940-1945, these watercolours are even more beautiful to see. For me, who lived through similar conditions, I find the eternity of this ordeal translated into the eternity of art.’2 Laurens was fascinated by the cultural diversity of the soldiers from different nations which he encountered in the camp at Wittenberg. The present sheet depicts a solder in the distinctive uniform of one of the French army’s light infantry regiments of colonial troops, either Zouaves or tirailleurs.

Zouave soldiers were originally recruited mainly from Algeria, and in particular from the Zouaoua mountain tribe of Kabyle Berbers, who had a reputation as fierce fighters, and wore distinctive uniforms of red silk trousers, a blue tunic and a red fez. Also recruited in the French colonial territories in the 19th and 20th centuries, tirailleurs were used as light infantry skirmishers, often acting in advance of the main body of troops. Like Zouaves, many tirailleurs were from the Maghreb countries of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, while others were from Senegal and other West and Central African territories.

Several regiments of Zouaves and tirailleurs algériens served on the Western Front during the First World War. These colonial regiments wore their colourful uniforms only during the first few months of the conflict, however, since the development of the machine gun and improved artillery and gunnery meant that they became easier and more visible targets. By the end of 1915 the Zouave troops of the French army had switched to plain khaki uniforms, retaining their traditional dress only for ceremonial occasions or when off-duty.

37 EDOUARD VUILLARD Cuiseaux 1868-1940 La Baule Portrait of Jean Reiss Pastel on buff paper, laid down on board. Signed and dedicated pour Lucy / E Vuillard in black chalk at the lower right.

390 x 342 mm. (15 3/8 x 13 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Presented by the artist to Lucy Hessel, Paris, in April 1915; By descent to her adopted daughter, Lucie (Lulu) Grandjean-Hessel (Mme. Jacques Arpels), Paris; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Vuillard: The Inexhaustible Glance. Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, Milan, 2003, Vol.III, p.1265, no.X-190 (where dated 1915).

At the start of his career, Edouard Vuillard joined a group of young artists – including Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard and Kerr-Xavier Roussel – who called themselves the Nabis and were united by a desire to develop a new, more expressive pictorial language. In the 1890s, Vuillard began receiving a number of commissions for wall panels to decorate the rooms of private houses. Between 1892 and 1901 he painted a number of these large-scale panneaux décoratifs, almost all as the result of commissions from a small group of mutual friends and enlightened collectors. His work of this type remained largely unknown to the public at large, however, until several panels were exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. In the early years of the new century, Vuillard began expanding his repertoire of decorative panels and small, intimiste domestic interiors to include portraits and landscapes.

Although his work as a peintre-décorateur was largely confined to private homes, he received a handful of public commissions, notably the decoration of the foyer of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in 1912. The latter years of his career found Vuillard working primarily as a portrait painter, often depicting his sitters within an interior setting. He rarely exhibited in public after 1914, and it was not until a large retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1938, two years before his death, that interest in Vuillard was renewed.

From around 1900 onwards Vuillard used mainly pastel for his drawings, and he soon came to master the subtlety and vibrancy of this challenging medium. As the critic and art historian Claude Roger-Marx, in one of the earliest monographs on the artist, noted, ‘Vuillard often found expression by means of pastels’1, and indeed he made more extensive use of the medium than perhaps any French artist since Edgar Degas in the previous generation. Pastel was to become an essential part of Vuillard’s working process until the end of his career, and was used for landscapes, figure studies, compositional drawings and still-life subjects, as well as in preparatory studies for portraits.

The subject of this charming pastel portrait, executed in 1915, is Jean Reiss, a nephew of Vuillard’s close friend and muse Lucy Hessel, the wife of Vuillard’s principal agent and dealer, Jos Hessel. Depicted wearing a marinière, or sailor suit, the young Jean appears lost in thought, and oblivious to the artist drawing him.

Another pastel portrait of Jean Reiss of the same date, but of somewhat smaller dimensions (fig.1), is in a private collection in Canada2. The present sheet was given by the artist to Lucy Hessel on the 21st of April 1915, and remained in the collection of her descendants until 2018.

1

38 ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER Aschaffenburg 1880-1938 Frauenkirch Two Seated Women Sewing at a Table (Zwei Nähende Frauen am Tisch) Charcoal. Inscribed and numbered 7213 in pencil and B Da/Bi 15 in black ink on the verso.

340 x 508 mm. (13 3/8 x 20 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist, and by descent to his companion, Erna Schilling (Kirchner), ‘Wildboden’, Davos-Frauenkirch; Possibly acquired from her by Lise Gujer, Davos; Galerie Theo Hill, Cologne; Acquired from them in 1964 by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne; Their sale, London, Sotheby’s, 22 June 2016, lot 386; Private collection, France.

One of the finest exponents of figurative Expressionism in the early part of the 20th century, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was active as a painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. In 1905 he became a founding member of the artist’s group Die Brücke, alongside Erich Heckel, Fritz Bleyl and Karl SchmidtRottluff. Between 1905 and 1913 the Brücke artists, who were soon joined by Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein, mounted a series of group shows throughout Germany, and also issued portfolios of original prints that included woodcuts by Kirchner. His paintings and drawings of the cafés, cabarets and theatres of Dresden, as well as landscapes in Saxony, are among his finest early works. In 1911 Kirchner moved to Berlin, where he continued to develop a reputation as a painter of powerfully modern urban figure subjects. Between 1913 and 1915 he produced the seminal paintings of Berlin street scenes that became known as the ‘Streetwalker’ series, and which represent a high point of his oeuvre. The outbreak of the First World War upended his life and caused him great anxiety, however, and he began to drink heavily. In the spring of 1915 he entered military service but within a few months had suffered a nervous breakdown and was medically discharged from the army.

In 1917, following a long period of intense physical and psychological stress, Kirchner left Berlin and settled in the village of Frauenkirch, near Davos in the Swiss Alps, where he was to spend the remainder of his life. He continued to have periods of convalescence in Swiss sanatoriums, with occasional bouts of paralysis, and did not emerge from the grip of the worst of his mental difficulties until around 1920. In Switzerland he developed a late style that was somewhat more subdued than his earlier manner, while he also continued to produce superb woodcuts. Isolated from the circle of German dealers, collectors and critics who might have supported his career, Kirchner struggled for recognition and success in his native country. Perhaps as a result of his inclusion in the Nazi’s Entartete Kunst (‘Degenerate Art’) exhibition in 1937, as well as the removal of 640 of his works from German museums, Kirchner destroyed some of his earlier works. His increasing disillusionment with his status as an artist, and his despair at the Anschluss and the growing threat of war, led him to take his own life in June 1938.

Despite the destruction of many of his paintings by the Nazis, a large corpus of drawings by Kirchner survives today, often in the form of sketchbooks. While a handful of drawings were produced as studies for paintings, the vast majority were made for their own sake. In 1920 Kirchner published an article on his own drawings, written under the pseudonym Louis de Marsalle. As he wrote of himself in the third person, ‘If we are to understand Kirchner’s idiosyncratic manner of representation, his forms, and his compositions, it is best to look at his drawings…Kirchner draws as others write. Years of habitually recording in drawings everything that he sees and experiences have given him the ability to reproduce with ease, in lines and shapes, everything that appears before his actual or his mind’s eye. In so doing he uses the entire surface of the sheet he is working on. The image consists not only of the lines, and the shapes they constitute, but also of those areas of the sheet that are not drawn upon…Kirchner’s drawings are possibly the purest and loveliest of his works. They are without conscious design or intent; they mirror the sensations of a man of our time. Moreover, they contain the formal idiom of his graphic work, of his paintings, to which the other part of his work is devoted and in which a conscious will informs creation. But the living strength of this will is derived from drawing.’1

39 GIACOMO BALLA Turin 1871-1958 Rome Forme Rumore (Shapes of Noise) Gouache on thick paper. Signed FUTUR BALLA in red gouache at the lower right.

196 x 321 mm. (7 3/4 x 12 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Casa Balla, Rome; Acquired in 1974 by Roberto Gnisci, Rome; Galleria Arco d’Alibert, Rome; Galleria Editalia, Rome, in 1985; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 29 March 1988, lot 319; Branco Weiss, Zurich; Thence by descent.

EXHIBITED: Rome, Galleria Editalia ‘Qui Arte Contemporanea’, Il Futurismo a Roma: anni dieciquaranta, 1985.

A leading member of the Futurist movement in Italy, Giacomo Balla received almost no formal artistic training. Following the death of his father when he was aged just nine, he served an apprenticeship in a lithography shop, while at the same time taking drawing classes in the evenings. He showed some early promise as a portraitist, and also produced paintings which evince an interest in social issues. By the end of the first decade of the 20th century he was painting in a quasi-Divisionist style, resulting in such dramatic paintings as Street Light of 1909, today in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which evince the artist’s lifelong interest in the symbolism of light. In 1910 Balla was one of the signatories of the first Futurist artistic manifesto, the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi, and began to take an active role in the group, with whom he first exhibited in 1912.

Balla was to devote himself wholeheartedly to the new Futurist aesthetic, with a particular interest in the representation of speed and movement, showing four paintings of speeding cars in Florence at the end of 1913 and in the Futurist exhibition in London the following year. He began to experiment with paintings depicting speed using lines of force, abstract rhythmic curves and contrasting colours, resulting in dynamic, almost aggressively centrifugal compositions. Balla’s paintings, with their emphasis on lines of ‘speed’ or ‘force’, continued to exemplify the Futurist ideal in the years of the First World War and afterwards. During the second wave of Futurism in the 1920s, he remained one of the only artists of the first generation of Futurist painters to continue to express some of the same concerns as his younger contemporaries, with a growing interest in geometric forms. By the early 1930s, however, he had reverted to his early realism in landscape paintings and portraiture, including a series of introspective self-portraits.

Datable to the 1920s, this fine gouache is part of a large group of works by Balla that remained in his home and studio, the Casa Balla in Rome, after his death. Inherited by the artist’s daughters Luce and Elica Balla, Forme Rumore was eventually acquired from them in 1974 by the art historian Roberto Gnisci, and later entered the collection of the Swiss industrialist and art collector Dr. Branco Weiss.

A comparable gouache drawing by Balla, entitled Linee andamentali and datable to c.1925, was sold at auction in Italy in 20011. The present sheet may also be thematically related to a number of other works by the artist, also entitled Forme Rumore, which have generally been dated several years earlier.

These include a painting of c.1918 today in a Milanese private collection2 and a gouache of about the same date in another private collection3, as well as a gouache entitled Linea di Velocità e Forme Rumore that appeared at auction in 19804. Also somewhat similar is a collage of c.1915, in a private collection5.

The authenticity of this gouache has been confirmed by Elena Gigli, who dates the work to c.1928. As Gigli has noted of the present sheet, ‘In this tempera, we find the two elements of the universe combined together, forms plus noise in a symphony of bright colours (orange and red, cornflower blue and white) on terracotta-coloured card. Finally, note the handwritten signature written in a flash in the same red found in the composition.’6

40 WILLEM VAN DEN BERG The Hague 1886-1970 Leiden Klaas Zwarthoed (‘Pinkhof’), a Fisherman from Volendam Pencil, with stumping, on card. Signed and dated Willem vd Berg. / 29 Maart 1940. in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed ‘Pinkhof’ in pencil at the lower left.

249 x 162 mm. (9 3/4 x 6 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, The Netherlands.

The son of the painter and printmaker Andries van den Berg, who taught at the Koninklijke Academie in The Hague, Willem van den Berg also spent time in the studio of his cousin, the painter and painting conservator Carel de Wild. Soon after completing his training in The Hague, Van den Berg began exhibiting his work in group shows and solo exhibitions, including in 1912 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1913 he met the painter Willem van Konijnenburg, whose style was to prove influential on the young artist, and began to paint the fishermen, women and ships on the beach at Scheveningen.

A fine portraitist, Van den Berg also painted still lifes, landscapes and genre scenes, as well as studies of birds and animals. In 1926 one of his works was exhibited in Paris, and exhibitions of his paintings and drawings were held at galleries in The Hague in 1910, 1912 and 1926, Rotterdam in 1919 and Wassenaar in 1927.

In 1938 Van den Berg settled in Amsterdam, where he was appointed a professor at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, eventually becoming director of the institution. From Amsterdam he made frequent visits to the small picturesque fishing village of Volendam, where he found numerous subjects to paint and draw. A member of the artist’s societies Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam, of which he served as chairman in 1954, and Pulchri Studio in The Hague, Van den Berg worked well outside the avantgarde trends of the art of the 20th century. Although his realist style became less popular in Holland after the Second World War, the artist found some success in America in the 1960s, when several exhibitions of his work were held at galleries in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Exhibitions devoted to Willem van den Berg were likewise mounted at the Casino Hotel Hamdorff in Laren in 1960 and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in 1962. The artist also produced lithographs and linocuts, and his work can be found today in several Dutch museums.

Dated the 29th of March 1940, the present sheet is a portrait of Klaas Zwarthoed, known as ‘Pinkhof’ (1858-1941), one of several local fishermen from the port of Volendam who posed for Willem van den Berg. (Since many Volendammers shared the same surnames, they were often known by their nicknames.) Situated about twenty kilometres northeast of Amsterdam, Volendam was originally the harbour of the nearby town of Edam, at the mouth of the Ij bay. However, in the 14th century a shorter route from Edam to the Zuiderzee was dug as a canal, and the village was no longer used as a port.

The harbour was filled with earth (the name Volendam translates as something akin to ‘filled dam’) and the village was settled by fishermen and farmers, although for the most part it remained resolutely untouched by modern life. Village culture has always been deeply tied to the Catholic church, and Volendam has produced many missionaries and priests. It has also been an artistic colony, and such foreign painters as George Clausen, Walter Langley, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Renoir, Frits Thaulow and Théo van Rysselberghe are known to have spent time there. It remains a popular tourist destination today, known for its old houses, quaint fishing boats, and the traditional costumes worn by many of the Volendammers.

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41 WILLEM VAN DEN BERG The Hague 1886-1970 Leiden Volendammer (Frederik Schokker or ‘Grote Frerik’) Pencil, with stumping, on card. Signed and dated Willem vd Berg. / 9 Sept 1941- in pencil at the lower right.

232 x 153 mm. (9 1/8 x 6 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, The Netherlands.

During his visits to Volendam, Willem van den Berg painted and drew a number of the local inhabitants and their houses. His portraits of the Volendammers, dressed in their traditional costumes, are incisive character studies displaying intense concentration. As one art critic wrote of another of the artist’s Volendam portraits, in terms that are equally applicable to the present sheet, ‘this face encloses all familiar solitude that is committed to the distances, the sea and the clouds. This is the Volendammer as he used to be when Volendam was on the sea, still unknown to strangers. Such a tough and tanned face, typically individual and of a strong and unyielding personality, does not appear in the masses; it can only exist in space and in solitude.’1 Drawn in September 1941, the present sheet is a fine example of Van den Berg’s perceptive and sympathetic portrait drawings of Volendammers. The subject was one of the artist’s favourite models, Frederik Shokker, known as ‘Grote Frerik’ (1857-1943), a fisherman who appears in several portrait drawings by Van den Berg, as well as a number of his paintings2.

The subject of this drawing, Frederik Shokker (‘Grote Frerik’), seated at the left.

actual size

42 pAbLO pICASSO Málaga 1881-1973 Mougins Embracing Couple (Couple enlacé) III Pen and brown ink on a page from a large sketchbook. Dated and numbered 1.1.59 / 111 in brown ink at the upper left. Numbered 331 and 5790 in pencil on the verso.

370 x 270 mm. (14 1/2 x 10 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist (No.5790); By inheritance to the artist’s granddaughter, Marina Picasso1, Cannes, Geneva and New York (Lugt 3698), with her collection stamp on the verso.

This drawing probably comes from one of two spiral-bound sketchbooks used by Pablo Picasso in 1958 and 19592. As the scholar Brigitte Léal has noted, ‘sketchbooks form an integral part of the whole of Picasso’s creative activity’3, and some 175 sketchbooks by the artist are known or recorded, dating between 1894 and 1967. While several of Picasso’s carnets have survived, many others have been broken up, and are known only from a handful of individual pages4. As the artist’s son Claude has written of Picasso’s sketchbooks, ‘They are, from one page to the next, an adventure – a diary of the painter...They are the notes working up to something or bouncing off something else, perhaps a sculpture onto a painting and back. The pages of the notebooks are the sketches for paintings but they are also often the afterwords. Sometimes they stand as elaborate works on their own. Picasso’s notebooks are steppingstones to trampolines for somersaults.’5 Drawn on the 1st of January 1959, this large sheet was Picasso’s third drawing of the New Year. The previous drawing executed by the artist that day was a closely related composition of a dancing or embracing couple (fig.1), and shared the same provenance as the present sheet until it was sold at auction in 20176. Both drawings come from one of the few late sketchbooks by Picasso. While the last two decades of his career were a time of great productivity for the artist, not many sketchbooks are known from this fecund period. With the exception of 1962, when the artist filled eight sketchbooks with drawings inspired by Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Jacques-Louis David’s Rape of the Sabines, only eight other sketchbooks are known from the final decade or so of his career, before his last known carnet of 1967. As Léal has written of Picasso’s late sketchbooks, ‘The carnets are no longer places for preparatory studies for the paintings, which they accompany rather than precede, but supports for exercises combining relaxation…and discipline…, dominated by the theme of the nude, a pretext for variations on the arabesque, which appears clearly, through these final notebooks, as the formal link connecting him to the heritage of Delacroix, Ingres and Manet.’7 A photo-certificate from Claude Picasso, dated 12 November 2019, accompanies the present sheet.

1

43 ROSANNE (ROSIE) SANDERS Born 1944 Passion Watercolour on Arches paper. Signed with the artist’s initials RS in pencil at the lower right.

905 x 777 mm. (35 5/8 x 30 5/8 in.)

LITERATURE: Rosie Sanders, Rosie Sanders’ Roses: A celebration in botanical art, London, 2019, pp.8485.

A member of the Linnean Society and recipient of several awards for her horticultural studies, Rosie Sanders lives and works in Devon, on the edge of Dartmoor, and has exhibited widely in London and elsewhere. She studied at the High Wycombe College of Art and started a career as a botanical artist in 1974. Accepted as a printmaker into the Devon Guild of Craftsmen in 1997, Sanders has earned commissions for paintings of flowers from Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, as well as from the Royal Horticultural Society, where she has won several gold medals for botanical illustration. In 1988 Sanders wrote and illustrated The English Apple, followed in 2010 by The Apple Book. Her work has been exhibited at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in Pittsburgh and at the Kew Gardens Gallery, and is also included in the Shirley Sherwood Collection of contemporary botanical art.

This large and vibrant watercolour depicts a Tuscany Superb rose, a fragrant rose of the species Rosa gallica, with large crimson or magenta petals. In a book published in 2019 illustrating her studies and watercolours of various types of roses, Sanders described the present sheet: ‘There is something so luxurious about the velvety deep crimson petals of this Gallica rose Tuscany Superb. The flowers are semidouble and somewhat circular in form and have a beautiful scent but it is the cushion of golden yellow stamens in the centre that set it apart: the colour complements and enhances the crimson so well. The attractive foliage helps to make this a very pretty shrub rose and I have seen it growing next to an old cast-iron seat in the garden so I can enjoy the scent of the flowers on summer evenings. This ageing flower has lost a great many petals and it looks slightly wanton perhaps, dishevelled certainly, but the sumptuous colour, the scent and the passion it evokes remains.’1

NOTES TO THE CATALOGUE

No.1 Maso Finiguerra 1. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Florence, 1568; translated Gaston du C. de Vere, London, 1912 [1996 ed.], Vol.I, p.530.

2. Hugo Chapman and Marzia Faietti, Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings, exhibition catalogue, London and Florence, 20102011, p.150, under no.26.

3. Richard J. Kubiak, Maso Finiguerra, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Virginia, 1974, p.103.

4. Eitel-Porter and Marciari, op.cit., p.117, under no.18.

5 Grisolia, op.cit., p.303, figs.17-24.

6. Inv. 1986.70:1 to 1986.70:7; Melli, op.cit., pp.94-97, nos.127-128 and 134-138, pp.190-191, figs.142-144, pp.196-197, figs.149-154; Grisolia, op.cit., pp.301-302, figs.8, 9a, 9b and 12-15, p.307, fig.26b.

7. Inv. 1986.96.1; Eric M. Zafran, Master Drawings from Titian to Picasso: The Curtis O. Baer Collection, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, 1985-1987, p.17, no.1 (as Florentine School, c.1460-1470); Melli, op.cit., p.98, no.143, p.198, fig.159 (as location unknown); Grisolia, op.cit., p.302, fig.16.

8. Inv. D.1957.WF.4658; Melli, op.cit., p.97, no.141, p.198, fig.157; Grisolia, op.cit., p.302, fig.16.

9. Inv. 2002.362; Degenhart and Schmitt, op.cit., p.612, figs.949-950; Melli, op.cit., p.95, nos.129-130, pp.192-193, figs.145-146; Carmen Bambach, ‘Tuscan Drawings of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento in the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1998-2005’, in Nicoletta Baldini, ed., Invisible agli occhi: Atti della giornata di studio in ricordo di Lisa Venturini, Florence, 2007, pp.78-79, figs.88-89; Grisolia, op.cit., p.307, fig.26a.

No.2 Jacopo da Pontormo 1. The online article can be viewed at https://www.nicholashall.art/grey-matters-exhibition-checklist/carja008/ [accessed 13 December 2021].

2. Inv. KdZ 465 recto; Fritz Goldschmidt, ‘Zeichnungen von Jacopo Carrucci da Pontormo’, Amtliche Berichte aus den Königlichen Kunstsammlungen, February 1915, pp.84-86, fig.32 (as Pontormo); Hermann Voss, Die Malerei der Spätrenaissance in Rom und Florenz, Berlin, 1920 [English ed., Painting of the Late Renaissance in Rome and Florence, San Francisco, 1997], Vol.I, p.150, fig.55 (as Pontormo); Bernard Berenson, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Chicago, 1938, Vol.II, p.273, no.1954A (as Pontormo), not illustrated; Janet Cox-Rearick, The Drawings of Pontormo: A Catalogue Raisonne with Notes on the Paintings, 2nd ed., New York, 1981, Vol.I, p.359, no.A3 (as Naldini) [recto], not illustrated. The dimensions of the Berlin drawing, which is in poor condition, are 405 x 215 mm.

3. Berenson, ibid., p.273, under no.1954A. 4. Inv. KdZ 465 verso; Cox-Rearick, op.cit., Vol.I, p.189, no.159, Vol.II, fig.151 (as Pontormo).

5. Inv. 6515F recto, 6685F recto and 6599F recto; Cox-Rearick, op.cit., Vol.I, pp.180-181, nos.135-137, Vol.II, figs.127-129, respectively; Salvatore S. Nigro, Pontormo Drawings, New York, 1992, illustrated in colour pls.25-27. Inv. 6685F is also illustrated in colour in Anna Forlani Tempesti and Anna Maria Petrioli Tofani, I grandi disegni italiani degli Uffizi di Firenze, Milan, n.d. (1973?), unpaginated, no.46, while Inv. 6615F is illustrated in colour in Madrid, Fundación MAPFRE, Pontormo dibujos, exhibition catalogue, 2014, p.112, no.19.

6. Paola Barocchi, ‘Itinerario di Giovambattista Naldini’, Arte Antica e Moderna, July-December 1965, p.245.

7. Cox-Rearick, op.cit., Vol.I, p.5.

8. Cox-Rearick, op.cit., Vol.I, p.359, under no.A3.

9. Pilliod, op.cit., unpaginated.

10. Edmund P. Pillsbury, ‘Janet Cox Rearick, The Drawings of Pontormo’ [book review], Master Drawings, Summer 1977, p.178.

11. Inv. 445F, 459F recto, 526E recto, 671E and 6699F; Cox-Rearick, op.cit., Vol.I, pp.366-368, nos.A35, A42, A46 and A48 and pp.383-384, no.A131, respectively (none illustrated). Two of these are illustrated in Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, Gabinetto disegno e stampe degli Uffizi: Inventario: Disegni di figura 1, Florence, 1991, pp.191-192, no.445F (as Pontormo) and pp.197-198, no.459F (as a copy after Pontormo?). Two others are illustrated in Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, Gabinetto disegno e stampe degli Uffizi: Inventario 1: Disegni esposti, Florence, 1986, pp.235236, no.526E (as Pontormo) and pp.293-294, no.671E (as Pontormo).

12. Inv. 526E; Carlo Falciani, Pontormo: Disegni degli Uffizi, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1996, pp.69-71, no.V.4, fig.47.

13. E-mail correspondence, 26 November 2013. The attribution of the present sheet to Pontormo was also seconded by Larry Feinberg in July 2015.

14. Pilliod, op.cit., unpaginated.

15. ‘Una tendenza attuale vuole comunque ravvisare la mano del maestro nel disegno esposto a Colnaghi nel 1993 e, di conseguenza, in quello di Berlino (Kupferstichkabinett inv.4646 verso) [sic]: da parte nostra, non osiamo però pronunciarci su un caso tanto delicate.’; Costamagna, op.cit., p.13, note 24.

16. Inv. 445F, 671E and 6699F; see Note 11 above.

17. Pilliod, op.cit., unpaginated.

18. See Note 5 above.

19. Pilliod, op.cit., unpaginated.

20. Philippe Costamagna, ‘The Formation of Florentine Draftsmanship: Life Studies from Leonardo and Michelangelo to Pontormo and Salviati’, Master Drawings, Fall 2005, p.284.

21. Innis H. Shoemaker, The Engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi, exhibition catalogue, Lawrence and elsewhere, 1981-1982, p.125, no.34, where it is suggested that this small engraving may have been derived from a lost design by Raphael.

22. See Note 2 above and fig.1.

23. Pilliod, op.cit., unpaginated.

24. Maziès’s small collection of around thirty drawings included sheets by or attributed to Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, François Boucher, Jacques Callot, Nicolas Lancret, Ernest Meissonier, Henri Regnault and others.

No.3 Giorgio Gandini del Grano 1. Diane DeGrazia, Correggio and His Legacy: Sixteenth-Century Emilian Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Washington and Parma, 1984, p.184.

2. Ibid., p.185 and p.188, under no.57.

3. Vaccaro, op.cit., 2015, p.64.

4. Inv. 7385 S; Mario di Giampaolo, ed., Disegni emiliani del Rinascimento, Modena, 1989, pp.62-63, no.24; di Giampaolo and Muzzi, op.cit., pp.126-128, no.69; Frucco, op.cit., pp.199-200, no.41, figs.44a-b; Vaccaro, op.cit., 2015, p.65, fig.5.

5. Vaccaro, op.cit., 2015, p.64.

6. Inv. S-2020-284; Frucco, op.cit., fig.16; Matile, ed., op.cit., p.49, fig.1. The painting, executed in oil in canvas, measures 59.5 x 46.5 cm., and an image of it is visible online at https://www.kansallisgalleria.fi/en/object/2137074.

[accessed 14 November 2021]. Like the present sheet, the painting was formerly in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds, when it was likewise attributed to Correggio.

7. Inv. RL O0599; A. E. Popham and Johannes Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1949, p.233, no.337, pl.139 (as Bernardino Gatti); Frucco, op.cit., pp.174-175, no.14, fig.18; Matile, ed., op.cit., p.50, fig.2.

8. Inv. 521; DeGrazia, op.cit., pp.124-125, no.29; di Giampaolo, ed., op.cit., 1989, pp.58-59, no.22; Mario di Giampaolo, Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia: Disegni emiliani, Milan, 1993, p.35, no.12; Frucco, op.cit., pp.176-178, no.16, fig.21.

9. Inv. 769; Michael Jaffé, The Devonshire Collection of Italian Drawings: Tuscan and Umbrian Schools, London, 1994, p.144, no.113 [Chatsworth 769] (as Barocci); David Scrase, ed., A Touch of the Divine: Drawings by Federico Barocci in British Collections, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, 2006, pp.80-81, no.15 (as Barocci); Vaccaro, op.cit., 2015, p.71, fig.15 (as Gandini del Grano). The Chatsworth drawing, which, like the present sheet, includes handwriting that appears to be that of Gandini, was previously attributed to Correggio and the young Federico Barocci.

10. Inv.15116 F; Sylvie Beguin, Mario di Giampaolo and Mary Vaccaro, Parmigianino: The Drawings, Turin and London, 2000, p.197, no.21, illustrated p.225 (as Parmigianino); di Giampaolo and Muzzi, op.cit., pp.128-130, no.70 (as Gandini del Grano); Muzzi, op.cit., 2004, pp.30-32, fig.6; Frucco, op.cit., p.174, no.13, fig.17.

11. Inv. Ff, I.78; A. E. Popham, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Artists Working in Parma in the Sixteenth Century, London, 1967, Vol.I, pp.20-21, no.28, Vol.II, pl.24 (as Bernardino Gatti); DeGrazia, op.cit., pp.188-189, no.57; Frucco, op.cit., pp.171-172, no.10, fig.14.

No.4 Bartolomeo Passarotti 1. Ignazio Danti, Le due regole della prospettiva pratica di M. Iacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Rome, 1682, p.97; Quoted in translation in Valeria Cafà, ‘The Young Bartolomeo Passarotti and the “Sienese Sketchbook of Baldassare Peruzzi”’, Master Drawings, Spring 2013, p.18.

2. Paul Joannides, Michelangelo and His Influence: Drawings from Windsor Castle, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, 19971998, p.112, under no.32.

3. ‘Fa un libro di notomie d’ossature e di carne, in cui vuol mostrare come si dee apprendere l’arte del disegno per metterlo in opera, e si puo sperare che habbia ad essere cosa bella: perche egli disegna benissimo.’; Raffaelo Borghini, Il Riposo, Florence, 1584, p.566.

4. Inv. 1113; Corinna Höper, Bartolomeo Passarotti (1529-1592), Worms, 1987, Vol.II, pp.189-190, no.Z 328, pl.46a; Angela Ghirardi, Bartolomeo Passerotti, Bologna, 1990, illustrated pp.23 and 43. The drawing is inscribed, in what appears to be an 18th century hand, ‘Bartolomeo Passarotti Pittore Bolognese fece ed e di se stesso il ritratto che nel disegno si vede.’ (‘The Bolognese Painter Bartolomeo Passarotti made this and it is his selfportrait that can be seen in the drawing.’).

5. Inv. 822; Mario di Giampaolo, Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia: Disegni emiliani, Milan, 1993, p.41, no.19.

6. Inv. KA (FP) 3813; Höper, op.cit., Vol.II, p.122, no.Z 49 (not illustrated); Ghirardi, op.cit., p.149, under no.21, fig.21e; Sonja Brink, ed., Idea et Inventio: Italienische Zeichnungen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts aus der Sammlung der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf am Museum Kunstpalast, Petersberg, 2017, Vol.II, p.153, no.259.

7. Inv. KA (FP) 9486; Brink, ed., ibid., Vol.I, pp.115-116, no.A 44, Vol.II, p.153, no.260 (where dated to the mid-1570s).

8. Anonymous sale (‘A Collection of Old Master Drawings, The Property of a Continental Collector’), London, Christie’s, 16 May 1978, lot 6; Höper, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.150-151, no.Z 167 (not illustrated); Ghirardi, op.cit., p.257, under no.82, fig.82a. The same torso appears as a sculpture in the background of a painted portrait of an anonymous collector by Passarotti, datable to the 1570s, which is today in the Italian embassy in London (Ghirardi, op.cit., pp.257-258, no.82, illustrated in colour pl.XXIV).

9. Inv. 1393; James Byam Shaw, Drawings by Old Masters at Christ Church, Oxford, Oxford, 1976, Vol.I, p.238, no.894, Vol.II, pl.543; Diane DeGrazia, Correggio and His Legacy: Sixteenth-Century Emilian Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 1984, pp.329-329, no.109; Höper, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.177-178, no.Z 279, pl.23b; Ghirardi, op.cit., p.149, under no.2, fig.2a; Elizabeth Llewellyn and Cristiana Romalli, Drawing in Bologna 1500-1600, exhibition catalogue, London, 1992, unpaginated, no.39.

10. Höper, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.185-186, no.Z 311, pl.37b. The drawing is a preparatory study for a soldier in Passarotti’s Ecce Homo altarpiece in the Bolognese church of Santa Maria del Borgo, datable to c.1577.

11. Inv. 6041; A. E. Popham and Johannes Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1949, p.290, no.662 (not illustrated); Höper, op.cit., Vol.II, p.193, no.Z 342 (not illustrated); Joannides, op.cit., pp.112-113, no.32 (where dated c.1560).

12. Inv. 2000.124.1; Mimi Cazort and Catherine Johnston, Bolognese Drawings in North American Collections 1500-1800, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa, 1982, p.52, no.11; Eric M. Zafran, Master Drawings from Titian to Picasso: The Curtis O. Baer Collection, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, 1985-1987, pp.28-29, no.9.

13. Joannides, op.cit., p.112, under no.32.

No.5 Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta 1. The American-born history painter Benjamin West (1738-1820) succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy in London and, like him, was an avid collector of drawings. West’s collection of drawings and prints was largely dispersed in two posthumous sales in London in 1820.

2. Marcia Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, 1999, p.194.

3. A possible exception is a fresco cycle in the Palazzo Spada in Rome, which has been dated to the beginning of the 1550s. An altarpiece commissioned by Pope Julius II for the Roman church of Sant’Andrea in Via Flaminia, for which the artist received payment in 1553, was severely damaged by the flooding of the Tiber four years later.

4. Rome, Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant’Angelo, Gli affreschi di Paolo III a Castel Sant’Angelo, exhibition catalogue, 1981-1982, Vol.I, p.96, fig.6; Hunter, Pugliatti and Fiorani, op.cit., fig.38; Hunter, op.cit., 1988, p.18, fig.16; Hunter, op.cit., 1996, fig.51g.

5. Hall, op.cit., p.195.

6. ‘Questi dipinti della cappella Fugger sono certamente l’opera più armoniosa di Siciolante; le grandi, forti figure sono avvolte in abiti pesante che ricadono morbidi, con pieghe large, dolcemente ondeggianti. L’azione fisica è limitata, le emozioni trattenute, ma le figure sono piene di grazia, inserite con ritmo in ambienti meticolosamente descritti, come farebbe un architetto davanti a un progeto. Lo scenario crea uno sfondo neutro, color grigio, sul quale fanno spicco I colori accesi dei vestiti, rosso, oro, azzurro, verde, violetto.’; Hunter, op.cit., 1996, p.60.

7. Inv. 1946,12-21-1; Rome, Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant’Angelo, op.cit., Vol.II, p.17, no.5, fig.5; J. A. Gere and Philip Pouncey, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Artists Working in Rome c.1550-c.1640, London, 1983, Vol.I, p.162, no.261, Vol.II, pl.248; Hunter, op.cit., 1988, p.37, no.8, pl.10; Hunter, op.cit., 1996, p.277, no.D-9, fig.55.

8. Inv. 4873; Hunter, op.cit., 1988, p.38, no.21, pl.11; Birke and Kertész, op.cit., p.1685, Inv. 4873; Hunter, op.cit., 1996, p.282, no.D-24, fig.56.

9. Hunter, op.cit., 1996, p.280, no.D-20, fig.57.

10. Eitel-Porter and Marciari, op.cit., pp.360-361, under no.112.

11. Hunter, op.cit., 1988, p.19.

No.6 Dirck Barendsz.

1. The morocco binding of what would appear to be the portfolio in which these oil sketches were kept is today in the collection of the Fondation Custodia (Frits Lugt Collection) in Paris.

2. Pierre-Jean Mariette, Abecedario de P.J. Mariette et autres notes de cet amateur sur les arts et les artistes, ed. Ph. de Chennevieres and A. de Montaiglon, Paris, 1851-53, Vol.I, pp.65-68.

3. Jacques Foucart and Pierre Rosenberg, ‘Some ‘Modelli’ of Religious Scenes by Dirck Barendsz.’, The Burlington Magazine, April 1978, pp.203204.

4. A summary list of most of the known drawings in this series is found in Boon, op.cit., Vol.I, p.13, under no.3, note 7. Another drawing from this group, of The Last Supper, was acquired by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1995 (Inv. RP-T-1995-8; Henk van Os et al, Netherlandish Art in the Rijksmuseum 1400-1600, Amsterdam, 2000, pp.209-210, no.89), while a drawing of Pilate Washing His Hands as Christ is Condemned to Death was with Colnaghi in 1998 and is today in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (Inv. 1998.58.1; Joaneath Spicer, Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the National Gallery of Canada, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa and elsewhere, 2004, p.41, fig.13).

5. Spicer, ibid., p.40, under nos.9-10.

6. Martin Royalton-Kisch, ‘Dirck Barendsz. and Hendrick Goltzius’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 1989, No.1, p.15.

7. van Os et al, op.cit., p.209, under no.89.

8. Spicer, op.cit., p.40, under nos.9-10.

No.7 Aurelio Luini 1. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Rime di Gio. Paolo Lomazzi milanese pittor, Milan, 1587, p.105.

2. Lucia Tantardini, ‘On the Grotesque: Aurelio Luini and Leonardo’, in Alberto Jori, Caterina Zaira Laskaris and Andrea Spiriti, ed., Storia e storiagrafia dell’arte del Rinascimento a Milano e in Lombardia: Atti I Convegno Internazionale, Milano 9-10 Giugno 2015, 2016, p.224.

3. Inv. 0104; James Byam Shaw, Drawings by Old Masters at Christ Church, Oxford, Oxford, 1976, Vol.I, p.289, no.1140, Vol.II, pl.690.

4. Inv. SL,5237.34; Giulio Bora, ‘“Figure quadrate”: Modelli e figure naturali nelle fonti e nel disegno lombardo del secondo Cinquecento’, Raccolta Vinciana, 2015, pp.252-254, fig.27. An image of the drawing is visible online at https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_SL-5237-34 [accessed 1 December 2021].

No.8 Lelio Orsi 1. Mina Gregori, ed., Mural Painting in Italy: The 16th Century, Bergamo, 1997, p.118.

2. Charles-François Roland le Virloys, Dictionnaire d’architecture, civile, militaire et naval, antique, ancienne et moderne, et de tous es arts et métiers qui en dépendent, Paris, 1770, Vol.II, p.351.

3. Massimo Pirondini, ‘Opere perdute o non rintracciate’, in Monducci and Pirondini, ed., op.cit., p.246, no.34.

4. ‘Sopra un’altra casa de’ signori Gentili, dipinse un Ganimede a cavallo, che vi si conserva ancora, e viene stimato da chi lo considera.’; quoted in Elio Monducci, ‘Regesti e documenti’, in Monducci and Pirondini, ed., op.cit., p.298, Doc.274.

5. ‘e noi abbiamo veduto, non a molti anni distruggerne gli ultimi avanzi in alcuni scudi rappresentanti battaglie navali, la guerra de’ Giganti,un Ganimede a cavallo, dipinto di Lelio sulla facciata dell’antica casa Gentili...’; quoted in Pirondini, ‘Opere perdute o non rintracciate’, in Monducci and Pirondini, ed., op.cit., p.246, under no.34.

6. Inv. 51; Salvini and Chiodi, op.cit., pp.6-7, no.5; Vittoria Romani, Lelio Orsi, Modena, 1984, illustrated p.114, fig.24; Monducci and Pirondini, ed., op.cit., pp.80-81, no.36, illustrated in colour p.76.

7. ‘Lelio da Novellara. Ganimede a cavallo rapito dall’ aquila, disegno acquerellato, zecchini 2.’; Campori, op.cit., pp.663 and 669.

8. ‘Nella Galleria dei Principi Gonzaga di Novellara esistevano:…Cento Disegni in cento fogli di carta reale, parte ad acquarelli, parte a lapis nero, e parte a penna ornati di cornici intagliate e dorate, e parte d’ebano con cristalli...Si ammiravano in questi Disegni...Ganimede a Cavallo rapito dall’ Aquila ad acquarello...’; Malagoli, op.cit., pp.20-22.

9. Inv. 422A; K. T. Parker, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum; Volume II: Italian Schools, Oxford, 1956 (1972 ed.), Vol.I, pp.563-564, no.420* (not illustrated); Hugh Macandrew, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings Vol.III, Italian Schools: Supplement, Oxford, 1980, pp.46-47, no.422A, pl.XXX; Romani, op.cit., illustrated p.115, fig.26; Monducci and Pirondini, ed., op.cit., pp.141-143, no.125. A copy or variant of this drawing is in the Cleveland Museum of Art (Inv. 1951.348; Monducci and Pirondini, ed., op.cit., p.142, no.126).

10. Inv. 84526; Salvini and Chiodi, op.cit., pp.20-21, no.15; Romani, op.cit., illustrated p.134, fig.53; Monducci and Pirondini, ed., op.cit., p.135, no.115, illustrated in colour pp.12 and 121.

11. Inv. 0224; Salvini and Chiodi, op.cit., pp.102-103, no.9; Monducci and Pirondini, ed., op.cit., p.59, no.14.

12. Inv. 4527; Romani, op.cit., illustrated p.123, fig.38; Monducci and Pirondini, ed., op.cit., p.113, no.97.

13. Inv. 1646; Romani, op.cit., illustrated p.133, fig.52; Monducci and Pirondini, ed., op.cit., pp.144-145, no.129.

14. Monducci and Pirondini, ed., op.cit., p.145, no.132, illustrated in colour pp.153-155.

15. Inv. 1946,0713.38; A. E. Popham, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Artists Working in Parma in the Sixteenth Century, London, 1967, Vol.I, p.32, no.51, Vol.II, pl.46; Monducci and Pirondini, ed., op.cit., pp.142-143, no.128.

16. Anonymous sale, London, Bonham’s Knightsbridge, 10 April 2013, lot 234. The drawing, in pen and brown ink, measures 320 x 240 mm.

No.9 Alvise del Friso 1. Giuseppe Vallardi (1784-1863) was a Milanese dealer in prints and drawings.

2. Inv. 24037; Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat, The Drawings of the Venetian Painters in the 15th and 16th Centuries, New York, 1944 (1979 ed.), p.166, no.A697 (not illustrated); Otto Benesch, Disegni veneti dell’ Albertina di Vienna, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1961, p.52, no.68, pl.68; Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Generalverzeichnis, Vol.IV, Vienna, 1997, p.2318, Inv.24037; Hans Dieter Huber, Paolo Veronese: Kunst als soziales System, Munich, 2005, p.79, fig.89; Abbadie, op.cit., fig.4. The drawing is inscribed ‘Alvise ben fato deto del friso nipote d Paolo Veronese’.

3. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 1 July 1986, lot 32 (sold for £4,536); Sale (‘L’ancienne collection de Massimo Brooke, provenant de Oldstead Hall, Yorkshire’), Paris, Christie’s, 18 March 2004, lot 5 (sold for €12,925).

4. Inv. 1940.47.

5. Inv. 1959.42 (A Bishop Blessing a Kneeling Man or The Emperor Theodosius Kneeling at the Feet of Saint Ambrose); Suzanne Folds McCullagh and Laura Giles, Italian Drawings Before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Collection, Chicago, 1997, pp.301-320, no.403 (as Tuscan or Genoese, Late 16th Century); Abbadie, op.cit., fig.2 (as Attributed to Del Friso).

6. Inv. MG D 2102 (a double-sided sheet of studies of figures seen from below); Eric Pagliano, De chair et d’esprit: Dessins italiens du musée de Grenoble, XVe-XVIIIe siècle, exhibition catalogue, Grenoble, 2010, pp.88-91, no.30 (as Attributed to Del Friso); Abbadie, op.cit., fig.3 (as Attributed to Del Friso).

7. Inv. 5558 (Adoration of the Shepherds); Abbadie, op.cit., fig.5, and Inv. 11565 (The Emperor Theodosius Kneels at the Feet of Saint Ambrose); Abbadie, op.cit., fig.1, as Attributed to Del Friso.

8. Inv. NM A 1/1974; Per Bjurström, Drawings in Swedish Public Collections 3. Italian Drawings: Venice, Brescia, Parma, Milan, Genoa, Stockholm, 1979, unpaginated, no.131 (as Pietro Damini?); William R. Rearick, Il disegno veneziano del Cinquecento, Milan, 2001, pp.182-183, fig.95; Huber, op.cit., p.75, fig.81.

9. Inv. 15913; Tietze and Tietze-Conrat, op.cit., p.166, no.696, pl.CLXVIII; Aldo Bertini, I disegni italiani della Biblioteca Reale di Torino, Rome, 1958, p.29, no.159, fig.159; Huber, op.cit., p.75, fig.80.

No.10 Pietro Sorri 1. Marco Ciampolini, Drawing in Renaissance and Baroque Siena: 16th- and 17th-Century Drawings from Sienese Collections, exhibition catalogue, Athens (Georgia) and elsewhere, 2002-2003, p.94, under no.14.

2. Ibid., p.97, under no.15.

3. Inv. A62; Siena, Palazzo Pubblico, L’arte a Siena sotto i Medici 1555-1609, exhibition catalogue, 1980, pp.103-104, no.34 (as Sorri); Laura Martini et al, Itinerario di Pietro Sorri (1556-1622), Genoa, 1983, p.9, fig.2 (as Sorri); Giulia Brunetti, I disegni dei secoli XVe e XVIe della Biblioteca Marucelliana di Firenze, Rome, 1990, pp.59-60, no.275, fig.275 (as Sorri or Passignano?); Oreste Ferrari, Bozzetti italiani dal Manierismo al Barocco, Naples, 1990, p.235 (as Sorri; not illustrated); Marco Ciampolini, Pittori senesi del Seicento, Siena, 2010, Vol.III, p.841 (as Sorri; not illustrated).

4. Claudio Pizzorusso, Il disegno fiorentino del Seicento della Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence, 1978, p.30, no.35.

5. Brunetti, op.cit., pp.59-60, no.275.

6. Inv. 19205; Siena, Palazzo Pubblico, op.cit., p.102, no.33; Ciampolini, op.cit., 2010, Vol.III, illustrated p.857.

7. Inv. 10632; Ciampolini, op.cit., 2010, Vol.III, illustrated pl.438.

8. Emilio Negro and Massimo Pirondini, La scuola di Guido Reni, Modena, 1992, pp.284-285, figs.272-273.

No.11 Federico Zuccaro 1. The handwriting on the verso of the present sheet does not appear to be that of Federico Zuccaro himself.

2. Inv. M1990.87; Olszewski, op.cit., pp.506-507, no.402. The drawing was formerly in the collection of Wolfgang Ratjen, Munich.

No.12 Pietro Faccini 1. ‘Fu così nuovo e bizzarro nell’invenzione, ch’io non so mai chi s’avesse in testa, se non una propria ferace immaginativa, tanto simbolica alle volte a quella di Tintoretto, che parve non altri avere avuto egli in mente, che quell’arrischiato e copioso maestro. Ebbe varietà di ciere, mossa grande nelle figure, e nel colorito poi passò ben quanti illustrassero tele a que’ tempi.’; Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina pittrice, vite de’ pittori Bolognesi, Bologna, 1678, supplemented and annotated by G. Zanotti, Bologna, 1841, pp.398-400.

2. Diane DeGrazia, Correggio and His Legacy: Sixteenth-Century Emilian Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 1984, p.374.

3. ‘Artiste fascinant dont les dessins ont conservé la renommée dès XVIIe siècle…Cependant, très vite, Faccini se distingue par une sorte d’exacerbation des effets: figures flottantes et expressives, abandon du naturalisme anatomique au profit d’une recherche d’effet émotionnel intense.’; Catherine Loisel, Musée du Louvre: Département des arts graphiques. Inventaire général des dessins italiens X: Dessins bolonais du XVIIe siècle, Vol.II, Paris and Milan, 2013, p.134.

4. DeGrazia, op.cit., p.375.

5. ‘Fu suo discepolo Agostino Marucci, che dipinse in S. Giacomo maggiore, diero il Coro, la tavola dell’Altare de’Cantofoli, detto di S. Anna, dove sono alcuni Profetti...’; Antonio di Paolo Masini, Bologna perlustrata, Bologna, 1650, p.733.

6. According to Llewellyn and Romalli, op.cit., under no.28.

7. Inv. 8241; Loisel, op.cit., pp.151-152, no.175.

8. Inv. 8242; Loisel, op.cit., p.152, no.176. An autograph version of the same composition, also similar in handling to the present sheet, is in the Uffizi (Inv. 6195 F). The drawing is visible online at https://euploos.uffizi.it/inventario-euploos.php?aut=Faccini+Pietro#opimages-40975ng1-1 [accessed 5 December 2021]).

No.14 Denys Calvaert 1. The first known owner of the present sheet was the 17th century portrait painter Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680), whose renowned collection of nearly ten thousand drawings, the largest seen in England up to that time, was dispersed at auction in 1688 and 1694.

2. The art historian Michael Jaffé (1923-1997) served as director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge between 1973 and 1990.

3. Nicole Dacos, in Washington, National Gallery of Art, and elsewhere, The Age of Correggio and the Carracci: Emilian Painting of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, exhibition catalogue, 1986-1987, p.77.

4. Inv. KINCM:2005.4794; Teresa Montella, ‘Dionisio Calvart’, in Vera Fortunati Pietrantonio, ed., Pittura bolognese del ‘500, Bologna, 1986, Vol.II, illustrated p.701; Washington, National Gallery of Art, ibid., pp.80-81, no.18 (entry by Nicole Dacos); Cathy Santore, ‘Danae: The Renaissance Courtesan’s Alter Ego’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 1991, p.425, fig.11; Michele Danieli, ‘Pittura erotica tra Bologna e Praga: aggiunte a Denys Calvaert e Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn’, Czech and Slovak Journal of Humanities: Historia artium, 2016, p.49, fig.6. The dimensions of the painting are 110 x 78.3 cm.

5. Simone Bergmans, Catalogue critique des oeuvres du peintre Denis Calvart, Brussels, 1931, p.17, no.50 (not illustrated); Montella, ibid., illustrated p.708; Marc Shell, Art & Money, Chicago, 1995, p.29, fig.14; Danieli, ibid., p.50, fig.7.

6. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 16 June 1967, lot 133.

7. Dacos in Washington, op.cit., p.80, under no.18.

8. Danieli, op.cit., p.42. He further suggests that the patron who commissioned the Hull Danäe, the Swiss soldier Jacob Arnold, may also have been responsible for Calvaert receiving commissions for four altarpieces sent to Switzerland between 1595 and 1609.

9. E-mail correspondence, 23 October 2019.

10. Sale (‘La Collection Pierre de Charmant’), Paris, Christie’s, 21 March 2002, lot 39 (as Attributed to Calvaert).

No.15 Giovanni Battista Della Rovere 1. The Romanian physician and scientist Ioan (Jean) Cantacuzino (1863-1934), a member of the illustrious aristocratic Cantacuzino family, assembled a fine collection of drawings and prints of various schools. At his death, a group of works was donated by his widow to the Toma Stelian Museum in Bucharest, which later became part of the National Museum of Art of Romania. Most of the rest of the collection was dispersed by the collector’s heirs in two auctions in Paris in 1969.

2. Nancy Ward Neilson, ‘Notes on the frescoes at S. Dionigi at Cassano d’Adda’, Arte Lombarda, 1968, p.126.

3. Suzanne Folds McCullagh and Laura Giles, Italian Drawings Before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Collection, Chicago, 1997, p.214, under no.275.

4. Inv. 13098; Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Generalverzeichnis, Vol.III, Vienna, 1995, pp.17611762, Inv. 13098.

5. London, Yvonne Tan Bunzl at Faerber and Maison, Ltd., Old Master Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1971, unpaginated, no.19, pl.VII. The drawing, in pen and brown ink and grey wash, heightened with white, on blue paper, is signed, dated and inscribed ‘1618 17 giugno J.B.R. Casano’ on the verso.

6. Inv. 2359; Andrea Czére, 17th Century Italian Drawings in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts: A Complete Catalogue, Budapest, 2004, pp.266267, no.283.

7. Inv. 1922.897; McCullagh and Giles, op.cit., pp.214-215, no.276.

No.16 Belisario Corenzio 1. This drawing was part of an album of drawings once in the possession of the 17th century collector Don Gaspar Méndez de Haro y Guzman, Marqués del Carpio y Helice (1629-1687), who served as Spanish ambassador in Rome from 1677 to 1683, and then as Viceroy of Naples from 1683 until his death. It was while he was living in Italy that Carpio assembled his large collection of drawings, arranged into some forty-three albums. The album in which the present sheet was included was, for the most part, made up of drawings by Neapolitan artists, and its contents were dispersed at auction in London in 1973. The group included a total of five drawings by Corenzio, each inscribed Bilisario in the same hand, which is thought to predate Carpio’s ownership.

2. ‘si vedono di Belisario moltissimi disegni...E veramente alcuni de’ suoi massimamente di figure, sono di tanta bontà che sembrano di mano di Tintoretto; ad imitazione del quale usava egli disegnare su carta tinte, lumeggiata di biacca’; Bernardo de Dominici, Vite de’pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani, Naples, 1742-45, Vol.II, pp.315-316.

No.17 Giovanni Bilivert 1. Roberto Contini, Bilivert: saggio di ricostruzione, Florence, 1985, pp.81-82, no.12, pl.12 (where dated to the first half of the 1620s).

2. Inv. 13928; Piero Bigongiari, Il Seicento Fiorentino, Florence, 1982, pl.10; Catherine Monbeig Goguel, Musée du Louvre: Département des arts graphiques. Inventaire général des dessins italiens IV: Dessins toscans, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, pt.2: 1620-1800, Paris, 2005, pp.112-113, no.79.

3. Inv. 2026 S, 9582 F and 10340 F; Bigongiari, ibid., pls.11, 12 and 14.

4. Inv. PD.13-1981; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 11 December 1980, lot 27; Bigongiari, op.cit., pl.15; Christel Thiem, ‘Some Drawings

by Giovanni Biliverti and Their Iconography’, Master Drawings, Autumn 1983, pl.40; Contini, op.cit., p.90, under no.22, pl.22; Julian Brooks, Graceful and True: Drawing in Florence c.1600, exhibition catalogue, Oxford and elsewhere, 2003-2004, pp.60-61, no.13; David Scrase, Italian Drawings at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Cambridge, 2011, p.112, no.81.

5. Giuseppe Cantelli, Repertorio della pittura Fiorentina del Seicento, Florence, 1983, pls.49-50; Contini, op.cit., pp.89-91, no.22, pl.23; Anna Matteoli, ‘Una Maddalena in penitenza del Bilivert e le altre rappresentazione della Santa nella sua opera’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institutes in Florenz, 1999, p.245, fig.3. The painting, which measures 200 x 150 cm., was commissioned from Bilivert by the Marchese Luca degli Albizzi, and a final payment for the work is recorded as having been made to the artist on the 22nd of December 1627.

6.

Inv. FC 125918; Maria Catelli Isola et al, I grandi disegni italiani dal Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe di Roma, Milan, 1980, unpaginated, no.41 (entry by Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò); Contini, op.cit., p.89, under no.21, pl.24a; Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, Il Seicento Fiorentino: Arte a Firenze da Ferdinando I a Cosimo III. Vol.II – Disegno, incisione, scultura, arti minori, exhibition catalogue, 1986-1987, pp.226-227, no.2.183 (entry

by Roberto Contini).

7. Inv. PL 674; Catherine Monbeig Goguel and Claude Lauriol, ‘Giovanni Bilivert: Itinéraire à travers les dessins du Louvre’, Paragone, July 1979, pl.30; Marco Chiarini and Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, Bellezze di Firenze: Disegni fiorentini del Seicento e del Settecento dal Museo di Belle Arte di Lille, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1991, p.16-17, no.2; Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, Catalogue des dessins italiens: Collections du palais des beaux-arts de Lille, Lille, 1997, p.46, no.73.

8. Inv. 9638F; Anna Forlani Tempesti and Anna Maria Petrioli Tofani, I grandi disegni italiani degli Uffizi di Firenze, Milan, n.d. (1973?), unpaginated, no.76.

9. Contini, op.cit., p.102, under no.37, pl.48. The related painting is in the Pucci collection in Florence; Contini, op.cit., pp.101-102, no.37, pl.49, where dated to the early 1630s.

No.18 Giovanni Bilivert 1. Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie dei professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, Florence, 1681-1728, 1846 ed., Vol.4, p.311.

2. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 4 July 2012, lot 29 (sold for £541,250); Otto Naumann, New York; His sale (‘The Otto Naumann Sale’), New York, Sotheby’s, 31 January 2018, lot 18 (sold for $879,000); Federico Berti, ‘Bilivert ‘in piccolo’ e non solo’, Medicea, December 2012, p.9, fig.1.

3. Inv. 386; Catherine Monbeig Goguel and Claude Lauriol, ‘Giovanni Bilivert: Itinéraire à travers les dessins du Louvre’, Paragone, July 1979, pl.17; Roberto Contini, Bilivert: saggio di ricostruzione, Florence, 1985, pp.102-103, no.38, pl.50b (where dated to the early 1630s).

4. Contini, ibid., pp.120-121, no.60, pl.74. The painting was sold, from the collection of Joseph Cremer of Dortmund, at auction in Berlin in 1929.

5. Inv. 9646 F; Contini, op.cit., p.99, under no.33, pl.42; Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, Il Seicento Fiorentino: Arte a Firenze da Ferdinando I a Cosimo III. Vol.II – Disegno, incisione, scultura, arti minori, exhibition catalogue, 1986-1987, pp.229-230, no.2.185 (entry by Roberto Contini).

6. Inv. 2118 S; Piero Bigongiari, Il Seicento Fiorentino, Florence, 1982, pl.18; Contini, op.cit., p.107, under no.42, pl.56.

7. Inv. 2023 S. 8. Inv. 9637 F; Contini, op.cit., p.122, under no.63, pl.44. The related painting, which was in the Del Chicca collection in Chicago in 1985, has been dated to the late 1630s or early 1640s.

No.19 Carlo Dolci 1. Erika Langmuir, ‘Carlo Dolci Complete Catalogue of the Paintings’ [book review], The Burlington Magazine, October 2015, p.712.

2. David Scrase, ‘A Drawing of Dante after Bronzino by Carlo Dolci in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge’, in Maria Teresa Caracciolo, ed., Hommage au Dessin: Mélanges offerts à Roseline Bacou, Rimini, 1996, p.205.

3. Inv. 1140; Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, Il Seicento Fiorentino: Arte a Firenze da Ferdinando I a Cosimo III. Vol.II – Disegno, incisione, scultura, arti minori, exhibition catalogue, 1986-1987, pp.356-357, no.2.322 (entry by Charles McCorquodale); Francesca Baldassari, Carlo Dolci, Turin, 1995, p.158, fig.133b; Catherine Monbeig Goguel, Musée du Louvre: Département des arts graphiques. Inventaire général des dessins italiens IV: Dessins toscans, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, pt.2: 1620-1800, Paris, 2005, pp.238-239, no.307; Sandro Bellesi and Anna Bisceglia, ed., Carlo Dolci 16161687, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 2015, p.330, under no.73, fig.73a.

4. ‘Questo bellissimo volto di giovane, definito meticolosamente e con grande raffinatezza in ogni dettaglio, risulta stilisticamente una delle teste più espressive disegnate da Carlo Dolci. All’interno del suo corpus grafico i confronti più stringenti si colgono con il ‘Ritratto della moglie’ (Parigi, Museo del Louvre, inv. 1140) caratterizzato da un analogo segno minuto e da un intricato tratteggio, che in questo disegno è particolarmente visibile nel collo e nel simpatico berretto. Caratteristica peculiare del Dolci, palese anche in questa ‘Testa di giovine’, è inoltre quell’immagine insieme ‘ideale’ e ‘naturale’ che egli ottene definendo e puntualizzando in ogni minimo tratto la sfericità e la purezza del volto. Non essendo fino as oggi collegabile con alcuna opera nota del Dolci, questo ‘Studio di fanciullo’ sembrerebbe appartenere alla categoria degli studi autonomi, concepiti come opere d’arte in sè, di cui l’artista dette molti esempi. Sebbene, per l’invariabilità del suo stile disegnativo, risulti abbastanza difficile datare le prove grafiche autonome del Dolci, questa ‘Testa di giovane’ sembrerebbe collocabile tra gli Anni Quaranta e Sessanta del Seicento, quando il pittore si distaccò dallo stile decorativo del Rosselli e giunse a risultati affini a quelli puristici e nitidamente definiti dei conterranei Lorenzo Lippi e Ottavio Vannini.’; Francesca Baldassari, undated typescript certificate.

5. Erika Langmuir, ‘Carlo Dolci’ [exhibition review], The Burlington Magazine, October 2015, p.730.

6. Inv. 1141; Monbeig Goguel, op.cit., pp.236-237, no.304; Maria Cecilia Fabbri, ‘La “pazienza” di Carlino. Aspetti e novità nella produzione grafica di Dolci’, in Bellesi and Bisceglia, ed., op.cit., p.108, fig.13.

7. Inv. 1137; Monbeig Goguel, op.cit., p.235, no.300; Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato, ‘Carlo Dolci ritrattista’, in Bellesi and Bisceglia, ed., op.cit., p.93, fig.13.

8. Inv. 1174 F; Fabbri in Bellesi and Bisceglia, ed., op.cit., p.108, fig.12.

9. London, Thomas Williams Fine Art Ltd., Old Master Drawings: Recent Acquisitions, exhibition catalogue, 2000, unpaginated, no.6. The dimensions of the drawing are 190 x 143 mm.

No.20 Pier Francesco Mola 1. The collection of the 18th century French collector Gilbert Paignon-Dijonval (1708-1792) included some 6,000 drawings, as well as around 60,000 prints. However, the present sheet cannot be readily identified among any of the drawings by Mola in the Paignon-Dijonval collection, as catalogued in M. Bénard’s Cabinet de M. Paignon Dijonval, published in 1810.

2. Ann Sutherland Harris, ‘Pier Francesco Mola, 1612-1666’ [exhibition and book review], Master Drawings, Summer 1992, p.217.

3. Richard Cocke, Pier Francesco Mola, Oxford, 1972, p.50, no.26, pl.27 (as Erminia Guarding her Flock); Petrucci, op.cit., p.283, no.B16 (where dated c.1640); Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 27 January 2012, lot 469; later with Paris, Galerie Canesso, Paris (The Burlington Magazine, May 2015, p.i [advertisement]; Damian, ed., op.cit., pp.16-19, unnumbered).

4. J. H. Wiffen, Jerusalem Delivered; An Epic Poem in Twenty Cantos; translated into English Spenserian verse from the Italian of Tasso, London, 1824, p.314.

5. Inv. 398; Cocke, op.cit., p.52, no.33, pl.123 (as Erminia Guarding her Flock); Arnaud Brejon de Lavergnée, ‘A Picture by Mola Comes Back to the Louvre’, The Burlington Magazine, February 1987, p.79, fig.14; Lugano, Museo Cantonale d’Arte and Rome, Musei Capitolini, Pier Francesco Mola 1612-1666, exhibition catalogue, 1989-1990, p.176, no.I.24, illustrated p.180; Petrucci, op.cit., p.350, no.B85, illustrated in colour p.186, fig.132 (where dated c.1655-1660).

No.21 Giuseppe Passeri 1. Gianni Carlo Sciolla, ed., From Leonardo to Rembrandt: Drawings from the Royal Library of Turin, exhibition catalogue, Turin, 1990, p.274, under no.109.

2. Laura Giles, in Laura M. Giles, Lia Markey and Claire Van Cleave, Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, 2014, p.176, under no.73.

3. Inv. 8015; Gernsheim photograph no. 102820; Manuela B. Mena Marqués, Dibujos Italianos de los siglos XVII y XVIII en la Biblioteca Nacional, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 1984, pp.185-187, no.176.

4. Inv. 1139; Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Generalverzeichnis, Vol.I, Vienna, 1992, p.578, Inv. 1139.

5. Inv. 7959; Mena Marqués, op.cit., pp.186-187, no.177; Manuela Mena Marqués, Italian Drawings of the 17th and 18th Centuries from the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1989-1990, pp.94-95, no.66.

6. Inv. 1131; Birke and Kertész, op.cit., p.574, Inv. 1131.

7. Inv. KA (FP) 2306; Illa Budde, Beschreibener Katalog der Handzeichnungen in der Staatlichen Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, 1930, no.394, pl.61; Dieter Graf, Die Handzeichnungen des Giuseppe Passeri, Düsseldorf, 1995, Vol.I, pp.71-72, no.151, Vol.II, p.81, fig.466.

8. Inv. KA (FP) 2250; Budde, ibid., p.53, no.402, pl.60, fig.402; Graf, ibid., Vol.I, p.167, no.649, Vol.II, p.307, fig.1016.

9. Anthony Blunt and Hereward Lester Cooke, The Roman Drawings of the XVII & XVIII Centuries in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1960, p.75, nos.585 and 586, pl.63; Graf, ibid., Vol.I, p.401, figs.267 and 268.

10. Graf, op.cit., Vol.I, p.401, fig.266.

No.22 Hubert Robert 1. Margaret Morgan Grasselli, ‘Robert, Master Draftsman’, in Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Yuriko Jackall, Hubert Robert, exhibition catalogue, Paris and Washington, D.C., 2016, pp.13 and 20.

2. A large number of red chalk counterproofs of landscapes by Hubert Robert, mainly from the collection of the 18th century architect PierreAdrien Pâris, are today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie in Besançon.

3. Grasselli, op.cit., p.13.

4. New York, Wildenstein, Hubert Robert: The pleasure of ruins, exhibition catalogue, 1988, unnumbered, illustrated p.29; Sale (‘The Collection of Ambassador and Mrs. Felix Rohatyn’), New York, Sotheby’s, 14 October 2020, lot 16 (sold for $988,000).

5. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 10 April 1985, lot 118. The drawing is inscribed ‘a Genova, palazzo Durazzo’.

No.23 Mauro Gandolfi 1. Ulrich W. Heisinger and Ann Percy, ed., A Scholar Collects: Selections from the Anthony Morris Clark Bequest, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia, 1980-1981, p.108, under no.97.

2. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 1 April 1987, lot 79; Prisco Bagni, I Gandolfi: Affreschi dipinti bozzetti disegni, Cittadella, 1992, p.16, no.12, where dated 1818-1820. The drawing, which is signed ‘Mo Gandolfi fecit’, was later reproduced as an engraving by the Milanese printmaker Giuseppe Beretta.

3. Bagni, ibid., p.14, no.10; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 28 January 2016, lot 140.

4. London, P. & D. Colnaghi, Old Master Drawings, 1984, no.43; Bagni, op.cit., p.504, no.475.

5. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 1 December 1983, lot 201; Bagni, op.cit., p.499, no.470; Mimi Cazort, Mauro in America: An Italian Artist Visits the New World, New Haven and London, 2003, p.29, fig.18. The drawing is inscribed ‘Sogno lieto di M:o Gandolfi’ (‘Blessed dream of Mauro Gandolfi’), and is dated 1811.

6. Esther Bell et al, The Age of Elegance: The Joan Taub Ades Collection, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2011, pp.61-62, no.24 (entry by Anne Varick Lauder).

No.24 Théodore Géricault 1. Philippe Grunchec, Master Drawings by Gericault, exhibition catalogue, New York, San Diego and Houston, 1985-1986, p.21.

2. Philippe Grunchec, Géricault’s Horses: Drawings and Watercolours, New York and Paris, 1984, p.5.

3. Whitney, op.cit., p.1.

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

5. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italienische Reise, 1786-1789; Quoted in translation in Whitney, op.cit., p.91.

6. Paris, Maurice Gobin, op.cit., 1935, unpaginated, no.18, illustrated; Maurice Gobin, Géricault dans la Collection d’un Amateur, Paris, n.d. [1959], unpaginated, no.12; Whitney, op.cit., p.103 (as an inferior copy, not illustrated); Bazin, op.cit., pp.219-220, no.1401 (as author unknown). The drawing, in pen and ink over pencil, measures 140 x 180 mm.

7. Bruno Chenique and Sylvie Ramond, Géricault: La folie d’un monde, exhibition catalogue, Lyon, 2006, no.21, illustrated p.88, fig.24; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Ader], 11 June 2021, lot 64. The dimensions of the drawing are 180 x 230 mm.

8. Bazin, op.cit., p.143, no.1217A. 9. Bazin, op.cit., p.219, no.1399A. Bazin also illustrates another anonymous tracing after the present sheet as no.1399B. 10. Whitney, op.cit., pp.103-107.

11. Inv. 795; Eitner, op.cit. 1983, p.109, fig.93; Bazin, op.cit., p.145, no.1220; Whitney, op.cit., p.79, fig.106.

12. Von Hirsch sale, London, Sotheby’s, 27 June 1978, lot 806; Whitney, op.cit., p.81, fig.107.

No.25 Théodore Géricault 1. ‘Les admirables dessins qui nous sont restés de la Course de chevaux libres sont exécutés au trait, à la plume pour la plupart, avec les détails indiqués très-sommairement par quelques hachures. On se tromperait lourdement si on les prenait pour des improvisations, pour des croquis.’; Charles Clément, Géricault: Etude biographique et critique, Paris, 1879, pp.101-102.

2. Whitney, op.cit., p.131.

3. Grunchec, op.cit., 1985-1986, p.83, under no.31.

4. Whitney, op.cit., pp.131-132.

5. Bruno Chenique, Les chevaux de Géricault, Paris, 2007, p.31, fig.28; Kurlander and Newhouse, op.cit., unpaginated, no.10. Executed in black chalk, heightened with white, on brown paper, the drawing measures 102 x 134 mm.

6. Bazin, op.cit., pp.194-195, no.1352; Whitney, op.cit., p.132, fig.173.

7. Bazin, op.cit., pp.193-194, no.1349; Whitney, op.cit., p.118, fig.150.

8. Inv. 718; Bazin, op.cit., p.194, no.1350; Whitney, op.cit., p.129, fig.167.

9. Inv. 85.PA.406; Bazin, op.cit., p.198, no.1358; Whitney, op.cit., p.139, fig.178.

10. Inv. RF 2042; Bazin, op.cit., pp.202-203, no.1368; Whitney, op.cit., p.147, fig.184.

11. Whitney, op.cit., p.199.

No.26 Carl Rottmann 1. The verso of the backing sheet of this drawing bears an incorrect attribution, in a modern hand, to the German architect and watercolourist Alexander Gwinner (1832-1866), who was known for his watercolours of Italian and Spanish views.

2. The present sheet was previously in the collection of drawings and prints assembled by the 19th century German art historian Wilhelm Seibt (1823-1901).

3. This cycle of landscape frescoes, which has suffered from exposure to the elements, is now in the Residenz in Munich. Rottmann’s large preparatory cartoons for the frescoes are today in the Hessisches Landesmusuem in Darmstadt.

4. The area shown here is now heavily industrialized and contains the Port of Genoa. In August 2018 the Ponte Morandi, a road bridge built in the 1960s over this part of the Polcevera, collapsed during a severe rainstorm and was later demolished.

5. Erika Bierhaus-Rödiger, Carl Rottmann 1797-1850: Monographie und kritischer Werkkatalog, Munich, 1978, pp.182-183, no.77, illustrated in colour pl.IV; Christoph Heilmann and Erika Rödiger-Diruf, ed., Landschaft als Geschichte – Carl Rottmann 1797-1850: Hofmaler König Ludwigs I., exhibition catalogue, Munich, 1998, p.353, no.51, illustrated in colour p.171; Anonymous sale, Berlin, Galerie Bassenge, 10 June 2021, lot 6059 (sold for €34,440). The painting which was formerly in the Passavant, Nathan and Bührle collections and most recently in a private collection in Switzerland, measures 52 x 78.5 cm. The painting is in fact the second version of the subject, after the artist had decided that his first attempt was too small. The first version of the composition, which measures 35 x 48 cm., is in a private collection; Heilmann and RödigerDiruf, ed., ibid., p.353, no.50, illustrated in colour p.170.

6. Letter of 19 August 1826: ‘Die Gebirgskette ist die westliche Küste des mittelländischen Meere…An dem Ende der Kette liegt Monaco und 4 Stunden davon rechts in einer Bucht Nizza. Das Ort im Hintergrund nächst dem Fuße ist Cornigliano, bei dem sich die Bolcevera ins Meer ergießt.’; Hugo Decker, Carl Rottmann, Berlin, 1957, p.144.

7. Letter of 19 August 1826: ‘Das andere Bild mit den blauen Bergen ist in der Farbe ziemlich gut, die Landschaft ist eben wegen diesen blauen Bergen so reizend, wie überhaupt die blauen Fernen es sind. Und als ich mir vornahm, diese Landschaft zu malen, da wollte ich eben auch nur eine blaue Ferne malen aber als ich daran zeichnete, sah ich immer mehr, daß ich mich fast an nichts halten könnte; da waren keine Formen, die mir gefielen oder nicht gut genug und in blaue Ferne gehen, und sich an nichts halten können, ist Unsinn oder Träumerei, und doch wollte ich das Bild haben, nun da ists; was Du darauf siehst, ist auch in dieser Natur, und noch viel mer, was Du nicht siehst.’; Decker, ibid., p.144.

8. The three drawings are all in private German collections; Bierhaus-Rödiger, op.cit., pp.181-182, nos.74-76. One of these is also illustrated in Decker, op.cit., p.67, no.221, pl.40, and in Heilmann and Rödiger-Diruf, ed., op.cit., p.353, no.49, illustrated in colour p.169. A finished watercolor copy of the painting, by another hand, is in a private collection; Bierhaus-Rödiger, op.cit., p.460, fig.5.

No.27 Giovanni Boldini 1. Robert W. Berger, ‘Bernini’s Louis XIV Equestrian: A Closer Examination of Its Fortunes at Versailles’, The Art Bulletin, June 1981, p.233, figs.1-3; Simone Hoog, Le Bernin Louis XIV: une statue “déplacée”, Paris, 1989, p.6, fig.1.

2. Inv. CCLXIX; Andrea Bacchi and Anna Coliva, ed., Bernini, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 2017-2018, pp.300-301, no.VIII.18; Hoog, ibid., p.33, fig.17.

3. Inv. 2421; Andrea Buzzoni and Marcello Toffanello, Museo Giovanni Boldini: Catalogo generale completamente illustrato, Ferrara, 1997, p.423.

4. Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 21 March 2018, lot 123 (unsold). The dimensions of the drawing are 458 x 303 mm.

5. Inv. 2021.31.1; Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 21 March 2018, lot 122.

6. For example, in two paintings in the Museo Boldini in Ferrara; Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Giovanni Boldini 1842-1931: Catalogo ragionato. Vol. III: Catalogo ragionato della pittura a olio con un’ampia selezione di pastelle e acquerelli, Turin, 2002, pp.400-401, nos.740 and 742. The original of the bust of which Boldini owned a cast is not, however, by Bernini, and is instead probably a work by a sculptor of the succeeding generation, Giovanni Battista Foggini (1652-1725).

No.28 Henry Somm 1. Elizabeth K. Menon, ‘Henry Somm: Impressionist, Japoniste or Symbolist?’, Master Drawings, Spring 1995, No.1, p.3 and p.8.

2. See, for example, a large watercolour in a private collection in London, measuring 470 x 305 mm. (Menon, ibid., p.9, fig.4, where dated to c.1889). Another variant of this composition of a woman dressed in a kimono and holding a fan is seen in a drawing, with dimensions of 205 x 155 mm., that was on the art market in France in c.1991 (Maisons-Laffitte, Jean-François Guérin Fine Art, Henry Somm: “La vie parisienne”, n.d., no.22).

3. London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, Nineteenth Century French Drawings and some Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, 2000, no.29 (as La toilette japonaise); New York and London, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Master Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 2009, no.32. The dimensions of the drawing are 208 x 160 mm.

No.29 Henri-Joseph Harpignies 1. A contemporary English critic, writing in 1905, noted that ‘one ventures to prophesy that the day will come, if it has not already arrived, when the water-colours of M. Harpignies will be prized even more dearly than his paintings in oils. As an aquarellist M. Harpignies is practically without a living rival in his own country...’; Frank Rutter, ‘Henri Harpignies’, in London, Leicester Galleries, Catalogue of an Exhibition of 85 Water-Colour Drawings

by Henri Harpignies, 1905, p.8. Another English writer, in an obituary for the artist published in 1916, wrote of his watercolours, ‘We marvel at the delicate tints his hand, accustomed to the vigorous touch of his oil painting, can produce.’; H. V. S., ‘Henri-Joseph Harpignies’, The Burlington Magazine, October 1916, p.268.

2. Frederic Lees, ‘Henri Harpignies’, The Studio, April 1898, p.150.

3. G. Frederic Lees, ‘Henri Harpignies: In Memoriam’, The Studio, December 1916, p.136.

4. Agnes Mongan, ‘Henri-Joseph Harpignies’, in John Wilmerding, ed., Essays In Honor of Paul Mellon, Collector and Benefactor, Washington, 1986, pp.233 and 237.

No.30 Paul Thomas 1. ‘…les portraits de jeunes filles dont M. PAUL THOMAS a rendu la grâce ingénue par des moyens si simples’; François Thiébault-Sisson, Salon de 1895, Société des artistes français et Société nationale des beaux-arts, Paris, 1895, p.17.

No.31 Pierre Prins 1. Daniel Wildenstein, ‘Pierre Prins’, in London, Wildenstein, Pierre Prins 1855-1913, exhibition catalogue, 1975, p.3.

2. ‘Avec le pastel La Laïta au Pouldu, l’artiste propose…un point de vue large du cours d’eau se jetant dans l’océan; l’oeil n’est arrêté que par les collines à l’horizon. La vaste étendue d’eau offer ainsi la part belle aux reflets de la nature, du ciel et de la lumière à sa surface. Une embarkation à voile… semble prête à franchir l’embouchure.’; Fécamp, Musée de Fécamp, op.cit., p.79.

No.32 Georges de Feure 1. ‘Aquarelles de M. Lefeure’ [sic], L’Art Français, 31 March 1894; Quoted in translation in Ian Millman, ‘From Baudelaire to Bing: Aesthetic Orientations in the Symbolism and Art Nouveau of Georges de Feure’, in Ian Millman, Georges de Feure 1868-1943, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, 1993-1994, p.11 2. Philippe Julian, The Symbolists, London, 1973, p.231, under no.40.

No.33 Georges de Feure 1. ‘Qu’il s’agisse de scènes réelles ou imaginaires, les canaux, les moulins et les estuaires des Flandres lui furent une source inépuisable d’inspiration…

De Feure a rendu magistralement dans ses paysages flamands la lumière du Nord et l’atmosphère paisable de ses canaux et de ses petites villes.’; Ian Millman, Georges de Feure: Maître du Symbolisme et de l’Art Nouveau, Courbevoie, 1992, pp.191 and 238.

2. ‘La lumière n’est pas nécessairement éblouissante. Il y a autant de lumière en Hollande qu’en Italie…Le peintre la respire dans l’atmosphère et l’exhale en couleur.’; Quoted in Millman, ibid., p.239.

3. ‘La paix quiète de ces petits villages hollandaise paves de brique rose, miniscules maisons peintes, miniscules jardinets…avec le clocher d’une miniscule église piqué comme une tulipe au-dessus des toits.’; Gabriel Mourey, ‘L’exposition Georges de Feure’, Art et décoration, May 1903, quoted in Millman, op.cit., p.244.

4. René Puaux, ‘An Appreciation of the Art of Georges de Feure’, Brush and Pencil, May 1903, p.104.

5. Millman, op.cit., illustrated p.203.

6. Ian Millman, Georges de Feure 1868-1943, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, 1993-1994, p.27.

No.34 Jean-Pierre Laurens 1. Inv. 2019.42.29. The watercolour, which measures 249 x 324 mm., is illustrated at https://basedescollections.musee-armee.fr/ ark:/66008/20194229/v0001.simple.highlight=laurens.selectedTab=record [accessed 28 November 2021].

No.35 Jean-Pierre Laurens 1. ‘Dès que cela m’a été possible, j’ai commence à dessiner des camarades sur un bout de papier, puis je me suis procuré un petit album. Un grand jour a été l’arrivée du bloc, des pinceaux et des couleurs. Cela a coïncidé avec la venue des Russes dans notre baraque. Ils étaient dans le camp depuis un mois, mais nous n’avions pas pu les voir de près. J’étais dans l’admiration de la grandeur de leur aspect et j’avais un ardent désir de travailler d’après eux. Les événements m’ont facilité la chose. Quand j’ai reçu le bloc, la baraque offrait un aspect dont vous ne pouvez vous faire une idée. Nous avions les Russes et les tirailleurs. Ils étaient beaux aussi ceux-là. Mélange inouï .’; Quoted in Jean Guitton, Jean-Pierre Laurens (1875-1932), Paris, 1957, p.31.

2. ‘J’ai adopté une baraque de Russes dans lequelle je dessine très souvent…J’ai mis tout mon effort à me garder du tout fait. C’est difficile. Il se met toujours entre la nature et vous. Lui donner la chasse est un dur travail. Regarder d’un coeur absolument pur une face humaine est une épreuve ardue, pour celui qui a donné sa vie à l’expression des formes visibles. Je m’en suis convaincu ici.’; Quoted in Guitton, ibid., p.31.

3. Guitton, op.cit., pls.14-15 and 18.

4. ‘Si tu savais parmi quels êtres ignores de toi j’ai vécu! Dans la misère du début, quand j’ai peint la tête aux yeux mi-clos, aux lèvres violettes de ce pauvre Yosef la musulman de Sibérie…’; Quoted in Guitton, op.cit., p.19.

5. London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Drawings and Oil Sketches, exhibition catalogue, 1998, unpaginated, no.32.

No.36 Jean-Pierre Laurens 1. ‘Plus j’étudie, plus je sens combien l’humilité est essentielle à qui veut bien faire…Il suffit à un rayon de soleil d’hiver illuminant de sa chaleur un groupe de pauvres diables accroupis sur leurs paillasses pour que le coeur s’emplisse de tendresse et d’adoration.’; Quoted in Guitton, op.cit., p.26.

2. ‘Même avant les camps où il fut réduit à l’aquarelle par la pauvreté, Laurens devait avoir une affinité pour elle…En captivité, l’aquarelle se trouva convenir avec les scenes du pure humanité, où les gestes lents et fatigués de ses héros, avec ces vêtements trop longs de moines ou de pauvres, étaient une liturgie grise, à laquelle le ton uni et lavé s’accordait bien. Et aussi, l’aquarelle convenait à ces têtes éteintes par le jeûne et même un peu hallucinées, comme on le voit dans la plus belle de ses aquarelles de captivité…Et on comprend qu’il ait jugé que ses aquarelles des camps, qui sont encore inconnues du public, etaient le meilleur des son oeuvre “parce que faites sans timidité”. Il avait attaint l’akmé de son art, dans cette évocation des statures d’hommes, des vêtures d’hommes, des sépultures d’hommes. Après la seconde captivité, celle de 1940-1945, ces aquarelles sont encore plus belles à voir. Pour moi, qui ai vécu des états comparables, j’y trouve l’éternité de cette épreuve traduite dans l’éternité de l’art.’; Guitton, op.cit., p.18.

No.37 Edouard Vuillard 1. Claude Roger-Marx, Vuillard: His Life and Work, New York, 1946, p.185.

2. Salomon and Cogeval, op.cit., Vol.III, p.1265, no.X-191. The drawing measures 360 x 300 mm.

No.38 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1. Louis de Marsalle, ‘Zeichnungen von E. L. Kirchner’, Genius, 1920; reprinted in translation as ‘E. L. Kirchner’s Drawings’, in Jill Lloyd and Magdalena M. Moeller, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Dresden and Berlin Years, exhibition catalogue, Washington and London, 2003, pp.209-210.

No.39 Giacomo Balla 1. Anonymous sale, Milan, Sotheby’s, 30 May 2001, lot 301 (sold for 38,775,000 ITL or $17,108 USD). The drawing measured 147 x 377 mm.

2. Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco and Elena Gigli, Balla a sorpresa: astrattismo dal vero, decor pittura. “realtà nuda e sana” 1919-1929, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 2000-2001, p.62, no.6, illustrated in colour p.28, pl.6. The painting measures 22 x 36 cm.

3. Ibid., p.62, no.10, illustrated in colour p.31, pl.10. The gouache measures 184 x 410 mm.

4. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 3 December 1980, lot 146b (where dated c.1920). The gouache measures 250 x 370 mm.

5. Fagiolo dell’Arco and Gigli, op.cit., p.63, no.19, illustrated in colour p.37, pl.19. The work measures 190 x 320 mm.

6. ‘In questa tempera, troviamo combinati insieme i due elementi dell’universo forme più rumore in una sinfonia di accesi colori (arancio e rosso, bluette e bianco) su un cartoncino color terracotta. Da notare, infine, la grafia della firma scritta di getto con lo stesso rosso presenta nella composizione.’; Certificate of authenticity by Elene Gigli, dated 21 May 2013. The gouache is included in her archives under the number 2013/553.

No.41 Willem van den Berg 1. De Telegraaf, 1941.

2. For example, Anonymous sale, Amsterdam, Christie’s, 19 January 2000, lot 668 and Anonymous sale, The Hague, Venduehuis der Notarissen, 11 November 2015, lot 132.

No.42 Pablo Picasso 1. 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. As the only legitimate grandchild of the artist alive at the time of his death in 1973, she therefore received the second-largest inheritance, after that of Picasso’s second wife Jacqueline. As Picasso’s biographer 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.’ (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). This drawing from Marina Picasso’s collection, however, appears not to have previously been exhibited.

2. Arnold Glimcher and Marc Glimcher, ed., Je suis le cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso, exhibition catalogue, London, 1986, either p.339, no.146 or p.341, no.151. The dimensions of each of these two sketchbooks are 270 x 370 mm.

3. Brigitte Leal, ‘The Sketchbooks from the Rose Period’, in Núria Rivero et al, Picasso 1905-1906: From the Rose Period to the Ochres of Gósol, exhibition catalogue, Barcelona and Bern, 1992, p.97.

4. A comprehensive list of Picasso’s known sketchbooks, compiled by Matthew Marks, is included in Glimcher and Glimcher, ed., op.cit., pp.303347.

5. Claude Picasso, ‘Foreword’, in Glimcher and Glimcher, ed., op.cit., pp.4-5.

6. Cannes, Centre d’art La Malmaison, Picasso: L’atelier de La Californie, exhibition catalogue, 1994, unnumbered, illustrated; Cannes, Centre d’art La Malmaison, Picasso: Le nu en liberté. Collection Marina Picasso, exhibition catalogue, 2013, unnumbered, illustrated; Sale (‘Picasso – Man & Beast: Works from the Collection of Marina Picasso’), New York, Sotheby’s, 18 May 2017, lot 66 (sold for $62,500). The dimensions of the drawing are 369 x 296 mm.

7. ‘Les carnets ne sont plus les lieux d’études préparatoires aux tableaux, qu’ils accompagnent plus qu’ils ne les precedent, mais les supports d’exercises combinant détente (les pastiches de Rembrandt) et discipline (les variations d’après Jupiter et Thétis d’Ingres), dominés par le theme du nu, pretext aux variations sur l’arabesque qui apparaît clairement, à travers ces ultimes carnets, comme le lien formel qui le rattache à l’héritage de Delacroix, Ingres et Manet.’ Brigitte Léal, Musée Picasso. Carnets: Catalogue des dessins, Vol.2, Paris, 1996, p.281.

No.43 Rosie Sanders 1. Sanders, op.cit., p.85.

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

No.2 Pontormo Fig.1 Jacopo Pontormo Standing Male Nude Pen and brown ink 405 x 215 mm.

Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Inv. KdZ 465 recto Photo © bpk – Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen Berlin No.27 Boldini Fig.1 Photo courtesy of Kees van Tilburg.

INDEX OF ARTISTS BALLA, Giacomo; No.39 BARENDSZ., Dirck; No.6 BILIVERT, Giovanni; Nos.17-18 BOLDINI, Giovanni; No.27 CALVAERT, Denys; No.14 CORENZIO, Belisario; No.16 DE FEURE, Georges; Nos.32-33 DEL FRISO, Alvise, Luigi Benfatti, called; No.9 DELLA ROVERE, Giovanni Battista; No.15 DOLCI, Carlo; No.19 FACCINI, Pietro; No.12 FINIGUERRA, Maso; No.1 GANDINI DEL GRANO, Giorgio; No.3 GANDOLFI, Mauro; No.23 GERICAULT, Théodore; Nos.24-25 HARPIGNIES, Henri-Joseph; No.29 KIRCHNER, Ernst Ludwig; No.38 LAURENS, Jean-Pierre; Nos.35-37 LUINI, Aurelio; No.7 MOLA, Pier Francesco; No.20 ORSI, Lelio; No.8 PASSAROTTI, Bartolomeo; No.4 PASSERI, Giuseppe; No.21 PICASSO, Pablo; No.42 PONTORMO, Jacopo Carucci, called, No.2 PRINS, Pierre; No.31

ROBERT, Hubert; No.22 ROTTMANN, Carl; No.26 SANDERS, Rosie; No.43 SICIOLANTE da Sermoneta, Girolamo; No.5 SOMM, Henry; No.28 SORRI, Pietro; No.10 SPRANGER, Bartholomeus [circle]; No.13 THOMAS, Paul; No.30 VAN DEN BERG, Willem; Nos.40-41 VUILLARD, Edouard; No.37 ZUCCARO, Federico; No.11

Pier Francesco Mola (1612-1666) Landscape with Erminia Writing the Name of Tancred on a Tree No.20

Back cover: Bartolomeo Passarotti (1529-1592) Studies of Male Nudes No.4

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