Master Drawings 2011

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MASTER DRAWINGS STEPHEN ONGPIN

STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART

www.stephenongpin.com

2011

6 Mason’s Yard, Duke Street St James’s London SW1Y 6BU Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 Fax [+44] (20) 7839-1504 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com

STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART

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Front cover: British School, c.1850 A Young Woman in Eastern Costume No.23

Back cover: Jacopo da Pontormo (1494-1557) Two Studies of a Male Nude No.2

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Sir George Clausen Study of Sea and Sky [detail] No.40

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STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART AN EXHIBITION OF

MASTER DRAWINGS NEW YORK 2011 at Mark Murray Fine Paintings 39 East 72nd Street New York, NY 10021

19th to 29th January, 2011 Weekdays 10:00 am – 6:00 pm Saturdays 11:00 am – 5:00 pm

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

29th March to 4th April, 2011

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

1st to 29th July, 2011

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am very grateful to my wife Laura for her patience and support, as well as to Lara Smith-Bosanquet and the following people for their help and advice in the preparation of this catalogue and its accompanying exhibition: Deborah Bates, Carole Blumenfeld, Babette Bohn, Hugo Chapman, Glynn Clarkson, Katia Cordova, Caroline Corrigan, Janet Cox-Rearick, Prudence Cuming Associates, the late François Daulte, Edouard Dumont, Gino Franchi, Andrea Gates, Mike Gaydon, Meg Grasselli, Dean Hearn, Paul Joannides, Catherine Johnston, Deborah Lenert, Briony Llewellyn, Christopher Lloyd, Rupert Maas, Suz Massen, Elizabeth McKeown, Mark Murray, Nick Nicholson, Anna Ongpin, Monica Ongpin, Laura Pecheur, the late Stephen Pepper, Guy Peppiatt, Sophie Richard, Gill Robinson, Rick Scorza, Kim Sloan, Paul Soden, Martin Sonnabend, Larry Sunden, Betsy Thomas, Nicholas Turner, Jorge Virgili, Sarah Vowles, Tracey Walker, Joanna Watson and Aidan Weston-Lewis.

Stephen Ongpin

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

Unless otherwise noted, paper is white or whitish.

Please note that drawings are sold mounted but not framed.

All enquiries should be addressed to Stephen Ongpin or Lara Smith-Bosanquet at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art 6 Mason’s Yard, Duke Street St James’s London SW1Y 6BU Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 or [+44] (7710) 328-627 Fax [+44] (20) 7839-1504 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com or during the exhibition in New York [January 2011 only] at Tel. [+1] (917) 587-1183 Fax [+1] (212) 585-2383 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com

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MASTER DRAWINGS PRESENTED BY

STEPHEN ONGPIN

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PIETRO BUONACCORSI, called PERINO DEL VAGA Florence 1501-1547 Rome Caesar on the River Aoös Pen and brown ink and brown wash, extensively heightened with white, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk. Framing lines in brown ink. Inscribed Cesar Ini . . . [M]iro il fiume . . . I aniene(?) in brown ink in the lower margin and, in a different hand (Lanier?), Polidoro in brown ink in the lower right margin.

137 x 152 mm. (5 3/8 x 6 in.)

PROVENANCE: Nicholas Lanier, London (Lugt 2886); Probably John Evelyn, Deptford and London; By descent to J. H. C. Evelyn and Major Peter Evelyn; Their posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 July 1977, part of lot 1 (as Circle of Perino del Vaga); Private collection, England; Anonymous sale, London, Phillips, 13 December 2000, lot 121; Mia Weiner, New York; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Paul Joannides, ‘Some New Drawings by Perino del Vaga’, in Elena Parma, ed., Perino del Vaga: prima, durante, dopo. Atti delle Giornate Internazionali di Studio, Genova 26-27 maggio 2001, Palazzo Doria “del Principe”, Genoa, 2004, pp.18-19, fig.7; Elena Parma, ‘Introduzione’, in Parma, ed., ibid., p.8; Dominique Cordellier, Louis-Antoine Prat and Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken, ed., Maîtres du dessin européen du XVI e au xx e siècle: La collection Georges Pébereau, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2009-2010, p.20, fig.1, under no.2 (entry by Dominique Cordellier).

Characterized by considerable inventiveness, range and skill, Perino del Vaga’s drawings mark him as one of the most gifted draughtsmen of the 16th century in Italy. Giorgio Vasari rated him very highly (‘the best and most finished draughtsman that there was among all who were drawing in Rome’), and noted that he drew constantly. His drawings range from sheets of rapid sketches to elaborate and highly finished figure and composition studies. The majority of Perino’s surviving drawings are studies in pen and ink; a medium the artist seems to have preferred by virtue of its fluidity and expressiveness. His drawings often serve as the only record of large-scale damaged or destroyed commissions, and relatively few examples can be related to surviving works.

This small drawing was first attributed to Perino del Vaga by Paul Joannides in 2000, and published by him four years later. The drawing, which would appear to depict a scene from Roman history, is unconnected to any surviving painting or fresco by the artist. Although Joannides had identified the subject of this drawing as Caesar Crossing the Rubicon, Dominique Cordellier has recently recognized that the composition in fact depicts Caesar on the River Aoös, another episode from the Civil War1.

A closely related drawing appears on the recto of a double-sided sheet of small compositional sketches and figure studies by Perino del Vaga formerly in the Reynolds, Calando and Lebel collections and today in the collection of Georges Pébereau in Paris2. The lower sketch on the recto of the Pébereau sheet (fig.1) is clearly preparatory for the composition of the drawing here under discussion, and the two are very similar in size and scale, with the sketch on the former measuring approximately 136 x 182 mm.

The present sheet must have been worked up from the preliminary sketch on the Pébereau drawing, although there may have been other, intervening studies3. Apart from the related sketch for Caesar on the River Aoös, the drawing in the Pébereau collection includes compositional sketches for two other narrative scenes, probably all from the life of Caesar and intended for a series of such episodes4. Although no such painted decoration by Perino del Vaga survives, a further quick sketch on the verso of the Pébereau drawing may, as Joannides has pointed out, provide a clue as to the purpose of these drawings; it shows a design for a painted frieze, with alternating square and oblong compartments divided from one another by either paired putti or putti holding shields5. It would seem probable, therefore, that the present sheet, like the three historical scenes studied in the Pébereau drawing, is a design for a painted composition intended to be placed within this planned frieze.

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While the sketch of Caesar on the River Aoös on the Pébereau drawing shows Perino at his lightest and most fluent, the present sheet is a carefully worked-up modello, with strong and decisive line-work. The forms are carefully modelled with white heightening, delicately and precisely applied with the tip of the brush, which serves to emphasize the relief nature of the composition. The overall effect is inspired by Roman sarcophagus reliefs, and it would seem likely that this drawing was intended for a relief-like composition, probably in grisaille. An obvious conceptual link may be made with such works as Perino’s large monochrome canvas of The Crossing of the Red Sea in the Brera in Milan6, painted in Florence in 1522.

While the dating of the present sheet is difficult to establish with any precision – not unusual in the work of an artist whose graphic chronology remains notoriously unstable – it would seem to have been made fairly early in Perino’s career. Although the related drawing in the Pébereau collection has been dated to the artist’s Genoese period, none of the sketches it contains can be related to any work planned or executed by Perino in Genoa. Furthermore, the developed drawings produced by Perino for secular projects in Genoa tend to be lighter in handling, freer in their application of wash and more simplified in form than the present sheet. Joannides has instead suggested that the present sheet was drawn before Perino’s move to Genoa in 1527. The closest analogies in style and technique are with such drawings of the early 1520s by Perino as the Scene of Pillage in the Devonshire collection at Chatsworth7 and the Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand in the Albertina8, in which the application of heightening in white bodycolour is closely comparable.

This visual sophistication evident in the design of this drawing of Caesar on the River Aoös, and the related sketches of Caesarian narratives on the Pébereau sheet of studies, would suggest that the unknown project for which they were preparatory was the result of a commission from a patron of refined taste and knowledge, perhaps someone at the papal court in Rome. Such a frieze of scenes from the life of Caesar can well be imagined as an apt decorative scheme for the façade or interior of a Roman palace.

The first known owner of this drawing was the 17th century court musician Nicholas Lanier or Lanière (15881666), one of the foremost collectors of drawings in England in the 17th century. The drawing may have then been acquired by the writer and diarist John Evelyn (1620-1706).

Although Evelyn does not mention Lanier in his diary and may not have known him, he does record two visits to the collection of Lanier’s uncle, the musician Jerome Lanier, in 1652, and would also have come under the influence of Lanier’s patron Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel.

We are grateful for Paul Joannides for his help and advice in the preparation of this catalogue entry.

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JACOPO CARUCCI, called PONTORMO Pontorme 1494-1557 Florence Two Studies of a Male Nude, One Arm Raised Black chalk. Numbered 20 in black chalk at the lower right.

256 x 169 mm. (10 1/8 x 6 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Jacques Petithory, Paris, in 19811; Private collection, Los Angeles; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 1 July 1991, lot 131 (as Cherubino Alberti).

LITERATURE: Janet Cox-Rearick, ‘Aggiunte al corpus dei disegni del Pontormo: 1981-1994’, in Roberto P. Ciardi and Antonio Natali, ed., Pontormo e Rosso: Atti del convegno di Empoli e Volterra, Venice, 1996, pp.64-65 and p.202, fig.43 (as Pontormo); Catherine Monbeig Goguel, ed., Francesco Salviati o la Bella Maniera, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 1998, p.92, under no.5, as Pontormo (entry by Paul Joannides); David McTavish, ‘Nature and Art in the Early Drawings of Francesco Salviati’, Master Drawings, Autumn 2010, p.313, note 64 (as Pontormo).

EXHIBITED: Paris, Jacques Petit-Horry, Dessins anciens: Ecoles française et italienne, 1981, no.24 (as Giovanni Alberti).

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. Of more lasting importance, however, 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. With this painting Pontormo established a new, more expressive and idiosyncratic pictorial language, with strongly lit, agitated figures. Around 1520, he worked alongside Del Sarto and Franciabigio at the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano, where he painted a lunette fresco of Vertumnus and Pomona. Escaping an outbreak of the plague in 1522, 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 Capponi chapel of the church of Santa Felicità. Following the death of Andrea del Sarto in 1530 Pontormo assumed his position as 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 last decade of his life he worked on the decoration of the choir of the Medici church of San Lorenzo, completed after Pontormo’s death in 1556 by his pupil and assistant Agnolo Bronzino.

A supremely inventive draughtsman, Pontormo worked almost exclusively in chalk. He used both red and black chalk in the early years of his career, although the latter becomes predominant in the 1530s and is used almost exclusively after 1545. In very general terms, the artist seems to have used black chalk for the purposes of experimentation and invention when developing his compositional ideas, and either black or red chalk for more refined figure studies. Janet Cox-Rearick has noted that ‘in his chalk drawings Pontormo relied to an uncommon extent on the simplest and most difficult of graphic means – line itself.

There was no attempt to create pictorial effects, to imitate the language of painting through the exploitation of color or of combined media. Pontormo expressed in a singularly undistilled form the linear bias that is uniquely and characteristically Florentine.’2

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Most of Pontormo’s drawings are studies of single figures, often nude, and many appear to be preparatory studies for paintings, although this is by no means always self-evident. As Cox-Rearick has written, ‘a large number of Pontormo’s preparatory drawings are actually independent sketches of a most private and spontaneous sort, quite unlimited by a preconceived scheme leading in a predictable and direct line to the final painted solution.’3 Although Pontormo 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 quite scarce outside the Uffizi, which houses the vast majority of his drawn oeuvre. Indeed, relatively few drawings by this seminal Mannerist artist are today to be found in public collections outside Italy.

The present sheet was first presented with an attribution to Pontormo by Janet Cox-Rearick in a supplement to her catalogue raisonné of the artist’s drawings in a 1994 symposium paper, published in 1996. The attribution to Pontormo was subsequently confirmed by Dr. Cox-Rearick on first-hand inspection of the drawing in 1998. This drawing – which depicts a male nude studied from the side with, at the right, a subsidiary sketch, more rapidly drawn, of the same figure seen frontally – may on stylistic grounds be dated to the first years of the 1520s.

Janet Cox-Rearick has compared the present sheet stylistically with three black chalk drawings by Pontormo of the early 1520s, all of which are in the Uffizi. The first of these is a sheet of studies of male nudes (fig.1) – one related to the lunette fresco of Vertumnus and Pomona painted by Pontormo at Poggio a Caiano – in which one of the nudes is posed in a very similar manner, with his right arm raised over his head, to the main figure in the present sheet4. Closely related to the present sheet, the elongated male nudes of the Uffizi drawing appear to have been intended for the Poggio a Caiano fresco but, as Cox-Rearick has pointed out, ‘both the expressive intensity and the assertive plasticity of these youths proved unsuitable to Pontormo’s final conception of the lunette’5, and they were replaced by smaller and less dramatically posed putti in the final composition.

Another black chalk drawing in the Uffizi6, a study of a horse and rider (fig.2) that is one of several drawings related to a lost or unexecuted composition of The Israelites in the Desert, is also stylistically

1.

2.

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very close to the drawing here exhibited, as is a sheet of studies for a Lamentation composition (fig.3) also in the Uffizi7, which can be related to the decoration of the Certosa at Galluzzo, painted by Pontormo between 1523 and 1525. Other stylistically similar drawings in black chalk of the early 1520s include a Study for a Virgin and Child in the Uffizi8 and a sheet of studies of male nudes, also in the Uffizi9, which are thought to be preparatory for Pontormo’s fresco of The Way to Calvary at Galluzzo.

The spontaneity of the draughtsmanship evident in the present sheet would suggest that it was made from a posed model. Nevertheless, as Philippe Costamagna has noted, ‘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.’10 It is interesting to note that, as Janet Cox-Rearick was the first to point out, the figure in this drawing by Pontormo may have been the inspiration for the similarly posed male nude holding a camel by a bridle in Rosso Fiorentino’s contemporaneous painting of Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well. Painted in Florence around 1523-1524, before the artist’s move to Rome in the spring of 1524, Rosso’s Rebecca and Eliezer is now lost but its composition is known through a painted copy (fig.4) in the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa11.

Janet Cox-Rearick has suggested that Rosso Fiorentino may have derived the pose of the male nude leading a camel from Pontormo’s drawing, which is much more spontaneous in appearance and is likely to be the artist’s own invention. Referring to the present sheet, she has noted that, ‘I have quoted a few instances, referring to Bandinelli, Bronzino and Salviati, in which these artists made reciprocal use of one another’s drawings. It is therefore not far-fetched to suggest that Rosso may have used this nude study by his friend Pontormo as a model for the camel driver in Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well.’12 The striding male nude in Rosso’s painting, probably adapted from the main figure in the present sheet by Pontormo, was to be influential on later Florentine artists, as can be seen in a drawn copy of the same figure by Francesco Salviati, today in the collection of the Albertina in Vienna13.

A new and fascinating addition to the corpus of drawings by Pontormo, the present sheet adds to our knowledge of the artist’s activity in the early 1520s, and provides a further example of the boundless energy and creativity of this remarkable 16th century draughtsman. As Janet Cox-Rearick has perceptively written, ‘Pontormo’s drawings have an independent stylistic identity and development, a specifically graphic language of their own that extends significantly, and in often unpredictable directions, our understanding of his total artistic achievement.’14

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LUDOVICO CARRACCI Bologna 1555-1619 Bologna Study of a Male Nude Red chalk, with touches of white chalk, on light brown paper. Laid down on a 19th century French mount.

205 x 220 mm. (8 x 8 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Lucien Solanet, Paris.

The oldest member of the Carracci dynasty, Ludovico Carracci worked closely with his cousins Annibale and Agostino Carracci, with whom he shared a workshop in Bologna, throughout the 1580s. The three Carracci also established a private academy, whose teachings were to become a dominant influence on Bolognese painters of the succeeding generation. Ludovico’s earliest independent paintings date from the mid-1580s, although he continued to work with his cousins on the fresco decoration of the Palazzo Fava and the Palazzo Magnani in Bologna. Following Annibale’s departure for Rome in 1595, Ludovico took over the Carracci academy and workshop. He worked on numerous decorative projects in and around Bologna, culminating in the frescoes at San Michele in Bosco of 1605-1606, and continued to oversee the Carracci academy, the Accademia degli Incamminati, until his death.

A basic tenet of the Carracci academy was the importance of life drawing, and Ludovico, like his cousins, produced several academic studies of male nudes in red chalk. This was especially true of the years before 1600, a period which accounts for the majority of his drawings in the medium. A recent reassessment of Ludovico’s draughtsmanship has led to a clearer understanding of the artist’s use of chalk in the last two decades of the 16th century, especially in comparison to Annibale’s better-known chalk studies of the same period. As Babette Bohn has written, ‘During the 1580s and 1590s, Ludovico’s style was quite naturalistic, because he was much more active as a draftsman in chalk and much more involved in the careful preparation of his pictures in preliminary drawings than had previously been supposed.

Ludovico emerged as an artist who was quite committed to the use of chalk figure studies in preparation for his paintings and prints before 1600, although the drawings were sometimes used for different purposes than Annibale’s chalk figure drawings.’1 Most of Ludovico’s surviving chalk drawings before 1610 are studies of single male figures, depicted either full or half-length, and reflect the practice of drawing from the posed model.

The attribution of the present sheet to Ludovico Carracci has been confirmed by Babette Bohn, who dates the drawing to the second half of the 1580s, early in the artist’s independent career. Based on a close examination of the drawing, Bohn has noted that ‘the relatively strong command of anatomy, somewhat compromised by the handling of the neck and shoulder area, is characteristic of many Ludovico drawings, particularly during ca. 1585-90. The convincing sense of weight, notwithstanding the dynamic patterns of light and shadow that break up forms rather than furthering the portrayal of volume, is also characteristic of Ludovico’s drawings during the later 1580s.’2 A stylistic comparison may be made with such Correggesque red chalk drawings of this period by Ludovico as a half-length study of the nude torso of a youth in the British Museum3, which is in turn a study for a figure standing at the right edge of a painting of The Flagellation, traditionally attributed to Ludovico, in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo4.

The present sheet cannot be related to any surviving painting by Ludovico Carracci, and may have been done simply as an exercise in life drawing, like many of the artist’s chalk drawings of the 1580s. Babette Bohn has pointed out, however, that this drawing may have been an unused idea for a terminus figure in a fresco decoration, similar to the ignudi that appear in the frescoes of scenes from the story of Aeneas painted by the three Carracci in the Palazzo Fava, and variously dated to between 1586 and 15935.

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CRISTOFORO RONCALLI, called IL POMARANCIO Pomarance 1552-1626 Rome The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne Black chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk, on two joined sheets of paper, laid down. Made up at the top right and lower right corners.

319 x 389 mm. (12 5/8 x 15 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly Charles Grey, Colchester and thence by descent to James Round, Little Birch; The Round family, Colchester; Their sale, Colchester, Bonham’s, 1 April 1954 (according to a note formerly attached to the old mount).

Little is known of Cristoforo Roncalli’s artistic training, and he is first documented working in Siena between 1576 and 1579. He then settled in Rome, where he is recorded by 1582, and was active there for the remainder of his career. He was associated with a circle of artists active in the city that included his compatriot Niccolò Circignani (confusingly also known as Il Pomarancio) as well as Cavaliere d’Arpino, Cesare Nebbia and Paris Nogari. Roncalli received numerous public and private commissions, and was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca in 1588. He earned a reputation as an ecclesiastic mural painter of the first rank, gaining the patronage of such Roman families as the Crescenzi, Mattei and Giustiniani, and working in the churches of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, San Giovanni Decollato, Santa Maria in Vallicella and San Silvestro in Capite in Rome. Between 1599 and 1604 he supervised the decoration of the Cappella Clementina in St. Peter’s for Pope Clement VIII, and also worked on the decoration of the transept of San Giovanni in Laterano. Around 1607 Roncalli was named a cavaliere di christo by Pope Paul V, shortly after receiving the most significant commission of his career; the fresco decoration of the sacristy and cupola of the Basilica of the Santa Casa at Loreto, on which he worked between 1605 and 1615.

An exceptional draughtsman, Roncalli worked mostly in both black and red chalk, switching easily between them for both compositional and figural studies, although using the former slightly more in the 1580s and 1590s. (While a number of pen drawings by the artist are known, after the 1580s he seems to have worked almost exclusively in chalk.) His earliest datable drawings – studies for works of the late 1570s, as well as copies after Raphael – already show a mastery of form and line and a sophistication that would be characteristic of the artist’s drawings throughout his career. The largest extant group of drawings by Roncalli is today in the Uffizi.

This large and impressive sheet is drawn on two sheets of paper, with the sheet containing the figure of Saint Anne carefully joined at the left onto the sheet with the Virgin and Child. This would suggest that the artist may have originally intended the composition to include another figure, instead of Saint Anne, or that the figure of the saint was considerably altered from its original conception. The handling of black chalk and the extensive shading with hatched lines in the background are characteristic features of Roncalli’s draughtsmanship. Although unrelated to any surviving painting or fresco by the artist, this drawing may, on stylistic grounds, be dated to the very end of the 16th century or the early years of the 17th century. The physiognomy of the Virgin and the voluminous draperies are typical features of Roncalli’s work of this period, as seen in such paintings as The Madonna and Child with Saints in the Roman church of San Gregorio al Celio, painted between 1602 and 16031, or the fresco of The Flight into Egypt in the sanctuary at Loreto, painted between 1605 and 16092. An increase in the size and monumentality of the figures in Roncalli’s paintings, as well as in the preparatory drawings for them, becomes evident around 1600. Among stylistically comparable drawings in black chalk by Roncalli are a study of The Visitation in the British Museum3 and a group of four drawings of the Fathers of the Church in the collection of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth4.

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PIETRO FACCINI Bologna c.1562-1602 Bologna Study of a Seated Youth, Leaning to the Right Red chalk, with stumping. The upper corners cropped. Inscribed Coreggio in brown ink at the lower left.

237 x 330 mm. (9 3/8 x 13 in.) at greatest dimensions.

Watermark: A fleur-de-lys in a shield.

PROVENANCE: Sir Joshua Reynolds, London (Lugt 2364); By descent to his niece, Mary Palmer, later Marchioness of Thomond; The posthumous Reynolds sales, London, A. C. de Poggi, 26 May 1794 onwards or London, H. Philips, 5-26 March 1798; John Bacon Sawrey Morritt, Rokeby Park, nr. Barnard Castle, County Durham; By descent to Major Henry Edward Morritt, Rokeby Park; Presumably Robin Morritt; Ian Woodner, New York; His posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 July 1991, lot 105; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1992; James Fairfax, Bowral, N.S.W., Australia, until 2010.

LITERATURE: Catherine Legrand, Le dessin à Bologne 1580-1620: La réforme des trois Carracci, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1994, p.101, under no.66; Jean Goldman, ‘A New Attribution to Pietro Faccini’, Antichità viva, 1996, Nos.2-3, pp.28-29, fig.3; Richard Beresford and Peter Raissis, The James Fairfax Collection of Old Master Paintings, Drawings and Prints, exhibition catalogue, Sydney, 2003, pp.82-83, no.21; Plymouth, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius, exhibition catalogue, 2009-2010, p.129, under no.55 (entry by Donato Esposito).

EXHIBITED: New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1992, no.18; Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, The James Fairfax Collection of Old Master Paintings, Drawings and Prints, 2003, no.21.

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, later setting up his own school.

By this time he was already receiving independent commissions for altarpieces, and indeed the one known dated work by him, an early Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence painted 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. According to Malvasia, Faccini was a productive painter known for his small-scale decorative pictures, although only a handful of paintings by him survive today. Held in high regard by his contemporaries, he was elected alongside Guido Reni and Francesco Albani as one of the fifteen consiglieri of the Compagnia dei Pittori in Bologna in 1599. One of his last major works was an altarpiece of The Assumption of the Virgin, painted for the church of Santa Maria dei Servi in Bologna. Although strongly influenced by both Annibale and Ludovico Carracci, Faccini developed a fairly idiosyncratic style, and unlike them had few obvious followers.

Aptly described as ‘one of the most creative and original draftsmen of the Emilian school’1, Faccini worked in a variety of techniques, using pen and ink wash, red and black chalk, watercolour and oiled charcoal.

He was an accomplished and versatile draughtsman, and his drawings were greatly admired for what Malvasia calls their ‘gran spirito’. They were especially 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 artist. In fact, Malvasia reserves special praise for Faccini’s drawings of the male nude, which he notes were often confused with those of Annibale Carracci: ‘so many

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drawings from the nude, that one sees an infinity of his models in all the most famous collections...so sensational, so darting, fluttering, and what is more, so easy and frank, that look as if they were by his master [ie. Annibale Carracci], many are sold every day as if the work of his hand.’2 Important groups of drawings

by Pietro Faccini, for the most part unpublished, are in the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin and the Galleria Estense in Modena.

The attribution of this beautiful sheet to Faccini was first proposed by Babette Bohn in 1991, and was subsequently confirmed by the late Mario di Giampaolo. The drawing shows the influence of Annibale Carracci in the use of soft, stumped red chalk, and probably dates to the period of Faccini’s study with Annibale in the late 1580s, when both artists were inspired by the drawings of Correggio. The Correggesque quality of this drawing is further evidence of its early date; indeed, it was long attributed to Correggio himself, as evidenced by the inscription at the lower left. The present sheet is, in fact, inspired by the figure of an ephebus (fig.1) in Correggio’s fresco of The Assumption of the Virgin on the cupola of the Duomo in Parma, painted in the second half of the 1520s3. Faccini has omitted the foreshortened, dangling legs of Correggio’s figure and given the youth a more lively expression.

The soft, sensuous application of stumped red chalk to depict the play of light and shade on the nude form – note, for example, the way in which the artist has depicted the shadow of the youth’s arm as it falls across the side of his chest – is a characteristic feature of Pietro Faccini’s draughtsmanship of the 1580s. A stylistically comparable early drawing by Faccini of a Reclining Male Nude is in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford4, while in handling and effect a sheet of studies of Saint Francis in the Louvre5 provides a further point of comparison with the drawing here exhibited.

It has recently been suggested that a red chalk study of a youth in the collection of the British Museum, where it is attributed to Annibale Carracci, may depict the same model as the present sheet6. An interesting comparison may also be made with a drawing of a male nude by Annibale in the Louvre7, which appears to be a similarly free interpretation of the type of youthful figure frescoed by Correggio on the cupola of the cathedral in Parma.

This drawing bears the collector’s mark of the 18th century English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792). The leading portrait painter in England, Reynolds’ fame and success allowed him to assemble one of the largest collections of drawings and prints of his day. His collection of several thousand drawings, for the most part Italian works of the 16th and 17th centuries, was sold at two auctions in 1794 and 1798. The present sheet, which may be counted among the 54 sheets by or attributed to Correggio owned by Reynolds, then passed into the collection of the traveller and classical scholar J. B. S. Morritt (1771-1843) of Rokeby Hall in Yorkshire, who likely acquired the drawing at one of the sales of Reynolds’ collection.

1.

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6

AURELIO LOMI Pisa 1556-1622 Pisa Studies of Youths Pulling on Ropes Black chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk on blue paper. A faint study of the main figure repeated in black chalk on the verso. Signed(?) lomi in brown ink at the bottom centre. A made up section at the lower left corner.

200 x 301 mm. (7 7/8 x 11 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: An anonymous 17th or 18th century Florentine collection, possibly that of Giuseppe Santini, Florence1; Possibly Comte Eugène d’Oultremont, Chateau de Presles, Aiseau-Presle, Belgium, and thence by descent until 1985; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Nobleman’), London, Christie’s, 12 December 1985, lot 190.

LITERATURE: Lawrence Turcic and Mary Newcome, ‘Drawings by Aurelio Lomi’, Paragone, September 1991, p.46, no.29 (not illustrated).

The half-brother of the painter Orazio Gentileschi, Aurelio Lomi was a pupil of Ludovico Cigoli and Alessandro Allori in Florence and worked mainly in Tuscany and Liguria. Admitted into the Accademia del Disegno in Florence in 1578, he spent the early years of his independent career in Rome, where among his chief works were the vault frescoes of the Assunta chapel of Santa Maria in Vallicella, painted between 1587 and 1588. Lomi painted numerous altarpieces for churches in his native Pisa, including several works for the Duomo. He also painted religious works for such Florentine churches as Santo Spirito, San Lorenzo, Santissima Annunziata and the Chiesa del Carmine, as well as churches in Bologna, Lucca and Pistoia. Lomi worked in Genoa between 1597 and 1604, and altarpieces by him are today to be found in Santa Maria in Castello, San Siro, Santa Anna, Santa Maria Maddalena and other churches in the city and elsewhere in Liguria. Among the handful of paintings by Lomi outside Italy is a canvas of Christ Washing the Feet of Saint Peter in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Aurelio Lomi’s charming drawings take the form of preparatory figure studies for paintings, and many of these can be connected with surviving works by the artist. In general, Lomi’s practice was to draw compositional studies in pen and ink, while using black chalk for studies of individual figures and motifs.

The present sheet is a typical example of the latter, and displays the artist’s characteristic habit of repeating studies of parts of the figure on the same sheet. While it has not proved possible to relate the two figures in this drawing to any surviving painting by the artist, it may be noted that the pose of the righthand youth is similar to that of a man throwing a stone in Lomi’s painting of The Martyrdom of Saint Stephen, today in the Galleria del Palazzo Bianco in Genoa2.

Among stylistically comparable drawings by Lomi are a drawing of four studies of a youth in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen3, which is preparatory for an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi, painted between 1600 and 1604 and today in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin, and a drawing of a man seen from behind, in a private collection in Paris4, which is a study for a painting of Saint Francis Curing a Blind Man of 1611-1614 in Pisa. Also similar are two double-sided drawings of figure studies, one in the Louvre5 and the other in the British Museum6, both of which are studies for a painting of The Feast of Ahasuerus in the Duomo in Pisa, painted by Lomi between 1610 and 1617.

An identical signature or inscription ‘lomi’ is found on a double-sided chalk drawing in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin7, which contains studies for Lomi’s 1610 altarpiece of Christ Healing the Blind Man, also in the Duomo in Pisa.

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GUIDO RENI Calvenzano 1575-1642 Bologna The Head of a Young Woman Looking Upwards Black and red chalk, with touches of white chalk, on pale brown paper. Inscribed No 35, Reni Guido and 1609 no 23 Guido Reni in brown ink at the bottom of the sheet1. Further inscribed Raccolta di S.M.G. San Germano in brown ink on the former backing sheet.

377 x 270 mm. (14 7/8 x 10 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: William H. Schab Gallery, New York, in 1981; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 13 January 1988, lot 129; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 7 July 1992, lot 170; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1993; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Stephen Pepper, ‘Guido Reni at the Albertina’, The Burlington Magazine, September 1981, p.574, fig.96; Mario di Giampaolo, ed., Disegno italiano antico: Artisti e opere dal Quattrocento al Settecento, Milan, 1994, illustrated p.193; Ursula Verena Fischer Pace, Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Graphische Sammlung: Die italienischen Zeichnungen, Vol.I, Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2008, p.259, under no.588.

EXHIBITED: New York, William H. Schab Gallery, Old and Modern Master Prints & Drawings, No.62, undated (1981?), no.11; New York, Paris and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1993, no.20.

Guido Reni was a pupil of Denys Calvaert in Bologna and, like Domenichino and Francesco Albani, transferred in 1595 from the studio of the Flemish artist to the Carracci’s Accademia degli Incamminati.

His earliest major work, a Coronation of the Virgin painted in c.1595 and now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, shows the influence of both Calvaert and the Carracci. A number of altarpiece commissions for churches in and around Bologna followed before Reni moved to Rome in 1601. He remained there for some thirteen years and received several important commissions; unlike Albani and Domenichino, however, he did not join the Roman workshop of Annibale Carracci. Among Reni’s most important Roman works were the decoration of the chapel of the Annunciation in the Palazzo Quirinale, painted in 1610, and the ceiling fresco of the Triumph of Aurora for the Villa Borghese, completed in 1614. Reni returned to Bologna that year and after the death of Ludovico Carracci in 1619 was established as the city’s leading painter. He remained the dominant figure in local artistic circles for the next three decades, enjoying the patronage of collectors and connoisseurs not only in Italy but also in Spain and France.

Among the important works of this period are four large scenes from the legend of Hercules painted between 1617 and 1621 for Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua; these are now in the Louvre. In the late years of his career his painting style became looser and broader, with figures of a somewhat ethereal quality painted with silvery tones.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Reni does not seem to have made much effort to preserve his drawings. The biographer Cesare Malvasia noted of the artist that ‘Of his drawings he kept no account, letting them lie all over the room for everyone. Although they all handled them, because of a certain sense of respect there were few who dared to steal them…He brought out bundles of drawings for any stranger who turned up and asked about them’2, and adds that at Reni’s death large groups of drawings and sketches were sold for minimal sums. As Ann Sutherland Harris has written, ‘Modern collectors and curators of drawings at major museums anxious to possess one of Reni’s splendid chalk studies of drapery or a handsome head gazing at the sky are well aware of the difficulty of acquiring examples of these studies

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now, yet after the artist’s death, according to Malvasia, Reni’s drawings were virtually given away in bundles.’3 Although the inventory of the contents of Reni’s studio after his death lists more than nine hundred drawings, less than a third of these survive today, of which the largest group – numbering around fifty sheets – is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

Guido Reni often produced individual, large-scale chalk drawings of heads as studies for the figures in his paintings. The present sheet was first published, as a work of Reni’s Roman period, by the late Stephen Pepper in 1981, and the attribution has since been confirmed by Babette Bohn and other scholars. While the drawing is not related to any surviving work by the artist, Pepper suggested that the 17th century inscription ‘Raccolta di S.M.G. San Germano’ on the old backing sheet may refer to a certain Bartolo di Villa San Germano, a figure mentioned in an interesting passage in Malvasia’s biography of Reni.

As Malvasia relates, ‘Guido also gave works by his hand to whomever he found pleasing, and whomever, by showing they were disinterested, won him over . . . [including] a very lovely little Madonna for a certain Bartoli of Villa di S. Germano in the diocese of Rimini, a very handsome robust old man 105 years old, whose venerable head Guido painted a good eight times; but the painting was wickedly taken away from him by a gentleman in the Roman countryside, where he, Bartoli, was showing it to everyone and receiving incredible alms for it.’4 The present sheet may perhaps be related to this now-lost Madonna, although this can only be conjecture. Alternatively, Pepper proposed that the drawing may have been a study for a fresco, as the precise technique and defined contours of the sheet would suggest. (In a letter of 1993, Pepper reiterated his conviction that the present sheet was intended as a study for an unknown fresco project

by Reni, further noting that ‘the feathery touch of the shading around the nostrils and the cheeks [is] typical of the master.’5) The date of 1609 inscribed on the sheet is in keeping with the period of Guido Reni’s most frequent use of the fresco medium and, if correct, would make the drawing one the few studies that survive from this phase of his career. The scarcity of early drawings by Reni, however, complicates any attempt to establish a definitive dating of the present sheet to this period. Catherine Johnston has, however, tentatively noted some similarities between the head in the present sheet and that of the allegorical figure of Night, albeit in reverse, in a ceiling fresco by Reni of The Separation of Night and Day – an early work variously dated between 1599 and 1604 – painted for the Palazzo Zani in Bologna and now at Kingston Lacy House in Dorset6.

The physiognomy and pose of the head in this drawing is, as Aidan Weston-Lewis has further pointed out, also very close to that in a painting

by Reni of Lucretia (fig.1) that is known in at least two autograph versions, including one in a private collection in New York7 and another in an Italian private collection8.

1.

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8

CLEMENTE BOCCIARDO Genoa c.1600-1658 Pisa A Male Nude Kneeling on a Rock, His Arms Raised Black chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk, on light brown paper, laid down on a 17th or 18th century Italian mount. Inscribed di Clemente Bocciardi do il Clementone in brown ink in the lower margin of the mount.

400 x 276 mm. (15 3/4 x 10 7/8 in.)

Watermark: A cross on six mounts.

PROVENANCE: An anonymous 17th or 18th century Florentine collection, possibly that of Giuseppe Santini, Florence1; Possibly Comte Eugène d’Oultremont, Chateau de Presles, Aiseau-Presle, Belgium2, and thence by descent until 1985; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Nobleman’), London, Christie’s, 12 December 1985, lot 217.

Nicknamed Il Clementone, apparently because of his large size, Clemente Bocciardo was trained in the studio of Bernardo Strozzi in Genoa. On the evidence of a signed painting of the Madonna and Child in Glory with Saints, dated 1623 and today in the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona, the influence of Strozzi was apparent in Bocciardo’s earliest independent works. According to his biographers Raffaele Soprani and C. G. Ratti, Bocciardo joined Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione in Rome in the early 1630s.

After a few years of working in Rome, he returned to Genoa where, as Soprani and Ratti note, he painted ‘vari quadri di storie, e di capricci con si bella invenzione’. Among the handful of recorded works of this period in Genoa are a Last Supper painted for the Oratory of the Confraternity of San Germano and a Corpus Domini for the church of Sant’Andrea. Bocciardo also established an Accademia del Nudo, or school of life drawing, in his Genoese studio, where among the teachers was the painter Gioacchino Asseretto.

Much of the second half of Bocciardo’s career was spent in Tuscany. He worked for some time in Florence before settling around 1639 in Pisa, where he remained until his death in 1658. One of Bocciardo’s first works in Pisa was a canvas of Saint John the Baptist, dated 1639, painted for the church of Santa Croce in Fossabanda and today in the Palazzo della Prefettura in Pisa. Other significant works in Pisa include paintings of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in the Certosa and The Virgin Appearing to Saint Charles Borromeo in the Duomo, as well as an Intercession of the Virgin in the church of San Matteo and a Madonna of the Rosary, completed in 1655 for a Pisan confraternity and today housed in the church of San Salvatore. Bocciardo also painted several easel pictures of both religious and secular subjects for private patrons, and produced a number of commissioned portraits.

The present sheet has the appearance of having been drawn from a posed model, and as such may be related to Bocciardo’s establishment of a school of life drawing in his Genoese studio in the later 1630s.

However, the way in which the figure is drawn, with its strong echoes of contemporary Florentine draughtsmanship of the period, would argue in favour of a later date in the 1640s or 1650s, when the artist was working in Tuscany. The distinctive 17th or 18th century Florentine mount that surrounds the sheet, and its likely provenance from a Florentine collection, would further suggest that the drawing may date from Bocciardo’s later years.

Drawings by Clemente Bocciardo are very rare. A self-portrait in red and black chalk, part of an extensive series of drawn portraits and self-portraits of artists assembled by the 18th century Florentine collector and historian Niccolò Gabburri, is today in the British Museum3. A pair of drawings of pastoral and mythological subjects in the Louvre, of a particularly Castiglionesque nature, have been tentatively attributed to Bocciardo4.

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GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called IL GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna Saint Christopher and the Christ Child Red chalk, with framing lines in red chalk. Made up areas (not encroaching on the figures) at the left, top and right edges of the sheet, backed.

285 x 260 mm. (11 1/4 x 10 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s nephews, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari (the ‘Casa Gennari’), Bologna and thence by descent to Carlo Gennari, Bologna; Possibly Francesco Forni, Bologna.

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Il Guercino (‘the squinter’) because he was cross-eyed, was by the second decade of the 17th century one of the leading painters in the province of Emilia. Born in Cento, a small town between Bologna and Ferrara, Guercino was largely self-taught, although his early work was strongly influenced by the paintings of Ludovico Carracci. In 1617 he was summoned to Bologna by Alessandro Ludovisi, the Cardinal Archbishop of Bologna, and there painted a number of important altarpieces, typified by the Saint William Receiving the Monastic Habit, painted in 1620 and now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna. When Ludovisi was elected Pope Gregory XV in 1621, Guercino was summoned to Rome to work for the pontiff and his nephew, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi.

It was in Rome that Guercino painted some of his most celebrated works, notably the ceiling fresco of Aurora in the Casino Ludovisi and the large altarpiece of The Burial and Reception into Heaven of Saint Petronilla for an altar in Saint Peter’s. The papacy of Gregory XV was short-lived, however, and on the death of the Pope in 1623 Guercino returned to his native Cento. He remained working in Cento for twenty years, though he continued to receive commissions from patrons throughout Italy and beyond, and turned down offers of employment at the royal courts in London and Paris. Following the death of Guido Reni in 1642, Guercino moved his studio to Bologna, where he received commissions for religious pictures of the sort that Reni had specialized in, and soon inherited his position as the leading painter in the city.

Guercino was among the most prolific draughtsmen of the 17th century in Italy, and appears to have assiduously kept his drawings throughout his long career, and to have only parted with a few of them.

Indeed, more drawings by him survive today than by any other Italian artist of the period. On his death in 1666 all of the numerous surviving sheets in his studio passed to his nephews and heirs, the painters Benedetto and Cesare Gennari, known as the ‘Casa Gennari’. Guercino’s drawings – figural and compositional studies, landscapes, caricatures and genre scenes – have always been coveted by later collectors and connoisseurs. Indeed, the 18th century amateur Pierre-Jean Mariette noted of the artist that ‘Ce peintre a outre cela une plume tout-à-faite séduisante’. The largest extant group of drawings by Guercino is today in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle; these were acquired from the Gennari family by King George III’s librarian, Richard Dalton, between about 1758 and 1764.

The use of red chalk was a fundamental part of Guercino’s repertoire as a draughtsman, although it never really replaced pen and ink as his preferred medium. In his handling of red chalk, which he exploited with great skill to achieve subtle gradations of texture and tone, Guercino was particularly influenced by the drawings of the Carracci and, especially, Correggio. (Indeed, he appears to have owned a number of the latter’s drawings.) As Nicholas Turner has noted, ‘Guercino was . . . skilled in the use of red chalk, obtaining with it many outstanding effects. Red chalk limits the draughtsman to a narrower tonal range than black chalk or pen and wash, but it facilitates more subtle gradations within the range; it also provides an attractively warm hue, which Guercino exploited to the full to bring his figures to life in all their sensuousness.’1 After his return to Bologna from Rome in 1623 Guercino began to use red chalk regularly, usually to further study the pose of a figure once the initial compositional studies in pen and

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ink had been completed. As his career progressed, however, his use of red chalk became more frequent, especially from the 1650s onwards. Although Guercino remained very busy with commissions until his death in 1666, he seems to have drawn much less in his later years, and only a comparatively few drawings, many of which are in red chalk, survive from his last fifteen years of his career.

This splendid large drawing remains unrelated to any surviving painting by Guercino, nor is any painting of this subject recorded in the artist’s account book, the libro dei conti. The existence of such a highly finished drawing, however, would suggest that the artist was thinking of a painted composition, even if none was commissioned or completed. Superbly drawn in red chalk, the present sheet is notable for such charming details as the way in which the Christ Child sits on Saint Christopher’s shoulder, resting his foot on the saint’s index finger while at the same time grasping onto his hair for support.

The present sheet has been dated by Nicholas Turner to the 1630s, contemporary with such drawings as a Young Man Standing in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle2, which is a study for a lost painting of Apollo Flaying Marsyas of 1637. Also stylistically comparable is an equally highly finished red chalk drawing of Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist in the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art3, which is related to an altarpiece commissioned for a church in Pesaro in 1631 and later destroyed.

David Stone’s comments on the Los Angeles drawing may equally be applied to the present sheet; ‘[the drawing] contains passages of red-chalk drawing technique of unparalleled beauty and luminosity. The condition of the drawing is equally remarkable, especially when one considers that the sheet was “squeezed” for a counter-proof (or “offset”) to record its composition, probably in the early eighteenth century by Guercino’s heirs, the Gennari.’4 Like a number of red chalk drawings by Guercino, a counterproof was made of the present sheet, and is today in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle5. A large number of such counterproofs, or offsets, were in the possession of Guercino’s heirs, and seem to have been made as a record of red chalk studies by the master before they were sold. In some cases, however, these counterproofs may have been made to sell in place of original drawings by Guercino that the Gennari wished to keep. As Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner have pointed out, ‘It is possible that the Windsor offsets were sold by Guercino’s heirs instead of the original red chalk drawings that they were either unwilling to sell to Richard Dalton or that he was unwilling to buy; he was apparently satisfied with the purchase of some of these ‘reproductions’ as supplements to the large group of autograph drawings he had already secured.’6 Over 230 of these offsets, some of which were crudely retouched by later hands, are today at Windsor. The existence among them of a counterproof taken from the present sheet would therefore indicate that this original drawing by Guercino was among those not sold by his heirs in the 18th century, and was instead retained by them in the Casa Gennari in Bologna.

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STEFANO DELLA BELLA Florence 1610-1664 Florence A Man on a Horse in a Landscape Pen and brown ink. Laid down on a late 18th century or 19th century mount. Numbered 8 in brown ink on the reverse of the mount.

139 x 190 mm. (5 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: From an album of miscellaneous, mostly Bolognese drawings, assembled by a certain Mr. Yeates in Italy in 1823 (according to an inscription on the first page of the album).

A gifted draughtsman and designer, Stefano della Bella was born into a family of artists. Apprenticed to a goldsmith, he later entered the workshop of the painter Giovanni Battista Vanni, and also received training in etching from Remigio Cantagallina. He came to be particularly influenced by the work of Jacques Callot, although it is unlikely that the two artists ever actually met. Della Bella’s first prints date to around 1627, and he eventually succeeded Callot as Medici court designer and printmaker, his commissions including etchings of public festivals, tournaments and banquets hosted by the Medici in Florence. Under the patronage of the Medici, Della Bella was sent in 1633 to Rome, where he made drawings after antique and Renaissance masters, landscapes and scenes of everyday life. In 1639 he accompanied the Medici ambassador to the Parisian court of Louis XIII, and remained in France for ten years. Della Bella established a flourishing career in Paris, publishing numerous prints and obtaining significant commissions from Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, as well as other members of the court and the aristocracy. Indeed, the majority of his prints date from this fertile Parisian period. After his return to Florence in 1650, Della Bella continued to enjoy Medici patronage, producing drawings of the gardens of the Medici villa at Pratolino, the port of Livorno and the Villa Medici in Rome, and becoming drawing master to the future Duke, Cosimo III. He was also active as a designer of costumes for the various pageants, masquerades and ballets of the Medici court. After suffering a stroke in 1661, Della Bella appears to have worked very little before his death three years later.

Only a handful of paintings by Della Bella (several of which are painted on coloured stone, or pietra paesina) survive to this day, and it is as a graphic artist that he is best known. A hugely talented and prolific printmaker and draughtsman, he produced works of considerable energy and inventiveness, with an oeuvre numbering over a thousand etchings, and many times more drawings and studies.

Significant groups of drawings by Della Bella are today in several public collections, with around six hundred sheets in both the Uffizi and the Louvre, and approximately 150 drawings apiece in the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome and the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

This lively sketch is typical of Stefano della Bella’s interest in everyday rural life, and his keen observation of the world around him. The drawing is likely to date from relatively early in the artist’s career, when he was working in Florence and Rome before his move to Paris in 1639. At this time he seems to have often worked outdoors, filling several sketchbooks with lively scenes of people, buildings and festivities, all drawn on the spot and used as a stock of images and motifs for his etchings and more finished drawings.

A closely comparable pen and ink drawing of a horseman at a fountain, probably drawn in Rome, is in the collection of the Louvre1, and was later used for an etching from the series Diverses figures et griffonnemens of c.16462. Among other drawings of similar subjects by Della Bella is a sheet in the Czartorsyki collection at the National Museum in Krakow3, which is in turn related to one of a series of etchings of peasant subjects first published around 1641, and a drawing of a peasant seated on a mule in the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome4. Two related subjects among Della Bella’s etchings can also be found in the series of Diversi capricci of c.16475.

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CARLO CIGNANI Bologna 1628-1719 Forli A Standing Putto Oil on paper washed brown.

377 x 230 mm. (14 7/8 x 9 in.)

PROVENANCE: Ferruccio Asta, Venice (Lugt 116a), his stamp at the lower right1.

A pupil of Francesco Albani, Carlo Cignani was among the leading painters in Bologna in the later 17th century, enjoying a stature akin to that of Carlo Maratta in Rome. He was the first director of the Bolognese academy, the Accademia Clementina, and among his patrons were such important foreign collectors as Prince Johann Adam of Liechtenstein and the Elector of Bavaria. Something of a perfectionist as a painter, Cignani worked in a very slow and painstaking manner, particularly in the field of fresco painting, in which he was very highly regarded by his contemporaries. Among his most important fresco commissions was a cycle of mythological subjects ordered by Duke Ranuccio II Farnese in 1678 for the Palazzo del Giardino in Parma, a project which had been left incomplete by Agostino Carracci some seventy-five years earlier. In completing the work, Cignani was assisted by his chief pupil and disciple, Marcantonio Franceschini. Another significant commission was the fresco decoration of the dome of the Cappella della Madonna del Fuoco in the Duomo at Forlì, which was begun in 1683. Cignani worked on the project, inspired by Correggio’s cupola frescoes in the Duomo in Parma, for over twenty years, eventually completing the decoration in 1706. He had transferred his studio to Forlì by 1685, and lived and worked there for the remainder of his career.

Drawings by Carlo Cignani are rare, and oil sketches by the artist even more so. This grisaille study of a putto reflects the enduring influence of Correggio and Parmigianino on the succeeding generations of artists in Bologna, and in particular on Cignani; indeed, he was regarded by his contemporaries and biographers as the artistic heir to the two great masters of Emilian painting of the previous century2.

Similar putti can be found throughout Cignani’s paintings of the 1660s and 1670s, such as the fresco of The Triumph of Venus in the Palazzo del Giardino in Parma and a painting of the Triumph of Love in the Liechtenstein collections3. The almond-shaped eyes and tousled hair of the putto in this oil sketch also find particularly close parallels in the angioletto holding a wreath and a martyr’s palm (fig.1) in Cignani’s altarpiece of Saints Sebastian and Roch in the church of San Paolo in Massalombarda, painted in the second half of the 1660s4.

The present sheet may, however, be most closely related with one of Cignani’s most significant commissions of the 1660s; the frescoed medallions decorating the nave of the Benedictine monastery church of San Michele in Bosco in Bologna, completed in 1665. Widely praised by scholars since Cesare Malvasia, these overdoor frescoes depict pairs of putti flanking oval medallions containing scenes from the life of the Archangel Michael, which the putti reveal by drawing back fictive curtains5.

Each pair of putti is shown in contrasting poses, and facing in opposite directions.

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The putto in this oil sketch is almost a mirror image of that on the left of one of these four frescoed medallions (fig.2), showing Saint Michael appearing to a kneeling bishop6. It is interesting to note, however, that the putto opposite, on the right-hand side of the medallion, has been completely repainted. The present sheet may therefore represent Cignani’s study for the original pose of this righthand putto, depicted with only slight variations in pose and expression from that on the left of the medallion. It can be further posited that this pair of putti may have been the first to be painted, and that as Cignani continued on to the other medallions, he began to allow for more variation and contrast in the poses of the flanking putti. As such, once the project was completed, it may have been decided – either by the artist himself or his patrons – to replace the right-hand putto with one with a more animated pose. The fact that this ‘new’ putto is painted in the less durable technique of fresco a secco – unlike than the rest of the project, which is painted in buon fresco – would further suggest that it was an afterthought. If so, the present sheet may represent the only surviving evidence of Cignani’s original conception for this figure.

Preparatory studies in chalk by Cignani for four of the eight putti in the San Michele in Bosco frescoes are known. Two drawings of pairs of putti are in the collection of the Konstmuseum in Gothenburg7, while two other drawings, depicting the same four putti as those in Gothenburg, were sold from the collection of the Royal Institution of Cornwall in Truro in 19658. (It may be noted that no preparatory drawings by Cignani are known for either of the two putti in the particular fresco to which the present sheet may be related.) A grisaille oil sketch by Cignani of two putti embracing, in the collection of the Klassik Stiftung in Weimar9, is stylistically similar to the present sheet, although unrelated to the San Michele in Bosco frescoes.

Cignani’s overdoor frescoes in San Michele in Bosco were very highly regarded in his lifetime, and confirmed his status are the foremost advocate of the manner of Correggio in 17th century Bologna.

As Dwight Miller has noted, ‘The four groups of putti in these sopraporte were celebrated among eighteenth-century visitors for their unsurpassed delicacy of modeling and coloring of the flesh, and for their extraordinarily lifelike quality. Their fundamentally Correggesque inspiration was widely commented upon.’10

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12

BENEDETTO LUTI Florence 1666-1724 Rome The Head of an Apostle Pastel on grey paper. Signed and dated Roma 1712 / Benedetto Luti fece in brown ink on the verso.

Further signed and dated Roma 1712 / Benedetto Luti fece (fig.1) in brown ink on the frame backing board.

408 x 333 mm. (16 x 13 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 14 January 1987, lot 120 (bt. Colnaghi); P. & D. Colnaghi, London; R. Crosby Kemper, Jr., Kansas City, Missouri, in 1987.

LITERATURE: Ann H. Sievers, Linda Muehlig and Nancy Rich, Master Drawings from the Smith College Museum of Art, New York, p.79, note 2 (with incorrect location); Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800 [online edition].

Benedetto Luti was a pupil of Anton Domenico Gabbiani in Florence in the 1680s, and at the end of the decade was sent to Rome to complete his training at the Medici academy there. Admitted to the Accademia di San Luca in 1695, Luti worked in Rome for the remainder of his successful career, becoming one of the most important and influential artists in the city. He earned commissions from Pope Clement XI and several cardinals, as well as members of the Roman nobility and the city’s leading families, and painted altarpieces and decorations for churches and palaces in Rome and elsewhere. Luti continued to maintain close contacts with Florence, however, and enjoyed the particular patronage of Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany; he also sold paintings to collectors in England, France and Germany.

Yet he was not a prolific painter, and less than eighty paintings by the artist are known today. A gifted teacher with a large studio, Luti held private classes in life drawing and took a leading role in the affairs of the Accademia di San Luca, of which he was elected Principe in 1720. Recognized as a fine connoisseur himself, he was also active as an art dealer, agent and collector in Rome, eventually assembling a large collection of drawings by earlier artists, said to have numbered almost 14,000 sheets.

Luti was particularly noted by his contemporaries for his work as a draughtsman in pastel and coloured chalks. The 18th century biographer and art historian Lione Pascoli noted that Luti ‘lavorava eccellentemente di pastelli di tanta forza, e di tanta bellezza’, while Peter Bowron has written of the artist that ‘His earliest biographers expressed their admiration for his pastel and coloured chalk drawings, which, for their relatively early date in the Settecento, are characterized by unexpected freshness and brilliance.’1 Luti’s interest in the medium of pastel was developed as a student in his native Florence in the 1680s, where the works in the technique were popular at the Medici court. (The young artist would also have been able to study the coloured chalk drawings of Federico Barocci in the Medici collections at the Palazzo Pitti.) The earliest known pastel drawings of heads by Luti are two examples, dated 1703 and 1704, in the Danish Royal Collections in Copenhagen, and the artist continued to produce such works throughout his later career.

Luti’s chalk and pastel studies of heads, produced as autonomous works of art, were highly sought-after by collectors and connoisseurs, and account for a small but significant part of the artist’s oeuvre.

Bowron has pointed out that ‘Luti produced intermittently throughout his career highly finished drawings and pastels 1.

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for the trade. These fresh and luminous studies of heads and bust-length figures are historically significant as among the first of their kind to be created and appreciated strictly as independent works of art rather than as preparatory studies for a canvas or fresco...The result was a thriving trade in pastel heads of young children, saints, and angels, and in portraits.’2 Among the collectors of these highly finished pastel drawings of heads by Luti were the Gran Principe Ferdinando de’ Medici in Florence and both the Marchese Niccolo Maria Pallavicini and Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in Rome, as well as such eminent foreign visitors to Rome as Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester.

In superb condition, the present sheet is one of a set of twelve pastel heads of apostles by Luti, executed in 1712, which first appeared at auction in 19873, and which have been aptly described as ‘among the most handsome creations of the artist’4. The identification of the individual apostles is not possible, however, since Luti has depicted them without their respective attributes. Although it has been suggested that this series of pastels were drawn as studies for heads in finished paintings by the artist, it is more likely that they were intended as autonomous works of art. This is further confirmed by the signature and dating of most of the pastels on the backing boards of their original frames – as seen in the present example – which would further suggest that the works were either framed in Luti’s studio, or under his supervision.

This splendid drawing is a particularly fine and fresh example of Luti’s mastery of the pastel medium. The pastel is handled with great skill and a refined technique, with areas of stumping contrasted and complemented with individual chalk strokes of unblended colour. Neil Jeffares has written of this 1712 group of pastel heads of apostles that ‘The subtle coloration of these heads achieves a remarkable sense of volume and luminosity; reds and oranges predominate. Distinctive traces of black chalk – in hair and on clothing – betray the graphic conception behind what are some of the earliest true paintings in pastel.’5 Bowron adds that ‘Luti’s technique is characterized by the use of the stump to fuse colour and tone and to create an even, luminous pictorial surface . . . the aesthetic properties of Luti’s pastels [include] novelty, liveliness of handling, gran gusto in colouring, delicate effects of lighting and sfumato, and expressive tenderness.’6 While it is likely that this set of twelve pastel heads of apostles was the result of a particular commission, the identity of the patron or original owner of these drawings remains as yet unknown. Certainly, Luti’s position as one of the leading collectors, art dealers and connoisseurs in Rome allowed him an excellent opportunity to market his finished pastel drawings, and the likelihood is that the entire series of twelve heads were intended for one patron or collector, and acquired en bloc. They remained together as a group, in their original 18th century Roman frames, for 275 years before being dispersed at auction in 1987. At least half of the pastel heads of apostles from this 1712 group are today in museum collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art7 and the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, MA.8, as well as the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, OK., the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA., the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, KS., and the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, MA. Other, similar pastel heads by Luti, dated between 1710 and 1719, are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC., the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne, and elsewhere.

Benedetto Luti’s significance as a painter and draughtsman was aptly summarized by the pioneering scholar of 18th century Italian art, Anthony Clark, in 1970: ‘Luti was a lovely and careful artist; and he is rather a rare one. His originality was appreciated, but not without reservations and misunderstanding. Highly intelligent, solitary, melancholy, and sickly, Luti was a great collector of drawings and prints, and not overfond of the act of painting – at which he was more brilliant and easy than any Roman colleague of the day. His honors and fame in Europe were considerable…His perfectly executed paintings, his drawings of exquisite quality (including the famous pastels usually of nubile girls and boys), are one of the finest and most formative achievements of the century.’9

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13

PIETRO GIACOMO PALMIERI Bologna 1737-1804 Turin Landscape with Figures in a Storm Pen and brown ink. Signed Palmerius. in et fecit in brown ink at the lower left.

325 x 403 mm. (12 3/4 x 15 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Émile Louis Dominique Calando, Paris (Lugt 837); His son, Émile Pierre Victor Calando, Paris and Grasse; His sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Lair-Dubreuil], 17-18 March 1927, lot 184 (‘Palmerius (XVIIe siècle) . . . Le coup de vent. Plume. – Monture ancienne. Signé en bas à gauche: Palmerius in. et fecit.

H. 325 – L. 405.’); Private collection, Paris.

Active as both a painter and printmaker, Pietro Giacomo Palmieri was a pupil of Ercole Graziani at the Accademia Clementina in Bologna. His earliest known works are a series of landscape prints, after his own designs and those by other artists, which were published in 1760. Palmieri soon established a reputation as an engraver, working in a manner that reflected the influence and inspiration, in terms of both style and composition, of such 17th century masters as Jacques Callot, Stefano Della Bella, Salvator Rosa and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione. Similar stylistic tendencies can also be found in his drawings.

Palmieri was a member of the academies of Bologna and Parma, and taught at the latter. He spent some years in Paris in the 1770s, and also visited England, Spain and Switzerland before settling in Turin in 1778.

There he worked for the Savoy court, both as an artist – in 1781 he was named draughtsman to Vittorio Amedeo III of Savoy – and as curator of the Royal collection of drawings. In 1802 he was appointed a professor of drawing at the academy in Turin.

A gifted draughtsman, Palmieri often signed his work with the Latinized form of his name ‘Palmerius’, as in the present sheet1. As the scholar Giuseppe Delogu noted, in one of the earliest studies of Palmieri’s graphic manner, ‘this versatile artist’s importance does not lie in his vigorous, facile and masterly copperplates; it is rather in his drawings – whether preparatory designs for engravings or ones of simple narrative and illustrative character – that he is best shown to be a close observer, an artist of inventive mind, an accurate draughtsman with absolute mastery of line and technique. These works manifest a picturesque freedom, a lightness of touch that stand diametrically opposed to the dry, graphical and calligraphic effect of Palmieri’s copperplate engravings.’2 This drawing belongs with a group of spirited landscapes in pen and ink by Palmieri – intended as finished works of art for sale – that are clearly inspired by the draughtsmanship of Guercino. That such drawings were greatly admired by the artist’s contemporaries in France is seen in the words of the draughtsman and engraver Jean-Georges Wille, who noted in his journal of January 1775 that, ‘M. Palmieri, Italien, m’a fait deux dessins, un peu dans le goût du Guerchin. Je les lui ay payés un louis pièce.’3 Palmieri also produced landscape drawings in the manner of other 17th century artists working in Italy, such as Claude Lorrain and the Dutch Italianate artists Jan Both and Karel Dujardin. Many of these drawings were sold to French aristocrats visiting Italy, as souvenirs of their travels. As Agnes Mongan and Paul Sachs have noted of such drawings by Palmieri, ‘The fact that the drawings were in the grand manner of the previous century gave evidence of the excellence and cultivation of the taste of those who purchased them.’4 Stylistically comparable landscape drawings by Palmieri in the manner of Guercino include examples in the Louvre5, the Uffizi6, the National Gallery of Scotland7, and elsewhere.

The present sheet bears the collector’s mark of the 19th century Parisian amateur Émile Louis Dominique Calando (1840-1898), whose collection (and collector’s mark) was largely inherited by his son Émile Pierre Victor Calando (1872-1953). A group of 269 drawings from the collection, including the present sheet, was sold at auction in Paris in 1927, with the remainder dispersed several years after the younger Calando’s death.

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14

GABRIEL-JACQUES DE SAINT-AUBIN Paris 1724-1780 Paris The Rape of the Sabine Women Graphite and stumping on paper laid down onto another sheet, with framing lines in brown ink. Signed and dated G. de St. Aubin del. 1763 in brown ink the lower margin. Faint traces of a signature or inscription at the lower left. Inscribed Composé par gabriel d. S aubin 17[63?] in brown ink on the verso, laid down. Further illegibly inscribed in ink on the verso, laid down.

187 x 135 mm. (7 3/8 x 5 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Étienne-André Philippe de Prétot, Paris1; Private collection, France; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Piasa], 16 June 2004, lot 78.

LITERATURE: Philippe de Prétot, Spectacle de l’histoire romaine, Paris, 1776, Vol.I, pl.II; Abbé Milliot, Abrégé de l’histoire romaine, Paris, 1789, pl.II; Jérôme Delaplanche, Le goût de la grâce et du joli. La collection Oulmont: Dessins, peintures et pastels du XVIIIe siècle, exhibition catalogue, Épinal, 2007, p.75, under no.28, fig.10 (as location unknown).

ENGRAVED: By Pierre Aveline, for Philippe de Prétot’s Spectacle de l’histoire romaine, 1776, and later published as part of the Abbé Milliot’s Abrégé de l’histoire romaine, 1789.

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s career was, by and large, devoted to drawing. Only a relative handful of paintings and etchings by him exist, and it is as a draughtsman that he is best known, and on which his modern reputation rests. Trained in the studio of François Boucher, Saint-Aubin is first recorded in 1747 as a teacher in the Ecole des Arts established in Paris by the architect Jacques-François Blondel. He tried to gain admission to the Académie Royale by competing for the Prix de Rome three times, between 1752 and 1754, without success. By the end of the 1750s he had largely abandoned painting in favour of an almost obsessive focus on drawing. Saint-Aubin produced countless scenes, usually on a small and intimate scale, of 18th century Parisian daily life, society, theatrical performances and public events. As his elder brother noted of him, ‘he drew all the time and everywhere’2, while another posthumous account recorded that ‘He was the most prolific draughtsman that we have, perhaps, ever seen. One never met him without a pencil in his hand.’3 The present sheet is a preparatory study by Saint-Aubin for an engraving used to illustrate Philippe de Prétot’s monumental history of ancient Rome, the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine, depuis la fondation de Rome, jusqu’à la prise de Constantinople par Mahomet II, l’an de J.C. 1453, published in 1776 and 1777.

The drawing appears, in reverse, as the second plate in the book; reproduced in an engraving (fig.1) by the printmaker Pierre Aveline4. Philippe de Prétot commissioned Saint-Aubin to provide drawings or painted designs for twenty-nine of the forty-four illustrations for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine, with the remainder of the scenes designed by Charles Eisen, Hubert François Gravelot and other artists.

Given by far the largest share of the commission, Saint-Aubin worked on the project for much of the 1760s; between 1760 and 1768.

A noted cartographer and professor of history and geography, Étienne-André Philippe de Prétot (c.17081787) first announced a plan to publish a lavish illustrated history of Rome in April 1762. It was not until 1776, however, that the first volume, illustrated with a set of twenty engravings of scenes from ancient Roman history, including one after the present sheet, was published. A further twenty prints – devoted

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to Roman battles, military triumphs, ceremonies and public games – were issued with the second volume the following year5. Plans to publish a third set of engravings were abandoned with the death of Philippe de Prétot in 1787, and only seven of the engravings were completed. The complete set of engravings was then acquired by the publisher Nyon and used to illustrate a similar book by the Abbé Claude-François-Xavier Millot, the Abrégé de l’histoire romaine, published in Paris in 1789.

As the eminent Saint-Aubin scholar Émile Dacier has written of the artist’s drawings for this project, ‘Excellent when he observes, insignificant if he invents, Saint-Aubin can show himself at his most advantageous when he can enrich a detail taken from reality with the product of his imagination. Nowhere is this clearer than in a series of illustrations – the largest he produced, the most important in his eyes and the one on which he worked on the longest – in which one would not think, at first sight, that it would offer the means of arriving at such a verification: I mean the compositions destined for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine.’6 Certainly, the commission from Philippe de Prétot was the most significant project undertaken by SaintAubin to this stage of his career, and he lavished a great deal of time and effort on the drawings. As has been noted by a recent scholar, ‘Judging from the virtual disappearance of Philippe’s Roman history, its long postponed publication ended in commercial failure. Back in 1759, though, Gabriel had no way of anticipating this disappointing outcome. At the time he can only have felt very fortunate to be included at the inception of such an expansive project, promising years of employment and possibly the sort of public notice that had eluded him so far. As the work progressed steadily into the 1760s, he would have had every reason to believe that his most favorable expectations were being fulfilled.’7 Two earlier preparatory studies by Saint-Aubin for The Rape of the Sabine Women are known. A first idea for the composition, rapidly drawn in chalk, pen and wash, appeared on the art market in Paris in 19848, while a more advanced stage in the development of the composition is seen in a drawing in the collection of the Musée départemental d’art ancien et contemporain in Épinal9. Much sketchier than the present sheet and with many significant differences, the Épinal drawing predates this drawing, which represents the definitive model for the engraving10.

All of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s final preparatory drawings for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine remained together in a private collection until being dispersed in 2004. Twenty-eight of the drawings, including the present sheet (as well as an unpublished design for a frontispiece), appeared at auction in Paris in June 200411. These were preceded three months earlier by the two largest drawings executed by SaintAubin for the project, intended as double-page illustrations, which are today in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles12.

Stylistically, the series of drawings for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine may be compared with the illustrations designed by SaintAubin for Jean-Bernard Bossu’s Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes occidentales, published in 1768, as well as the same author’s Nouveaux Voyages dans l’Amérique septentrionale, published in 177713. It was during this period that Saint-Aubin’s achievements as an illustrator, of which his work for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine may be regarded as the culmination, resulted in some of his finest works, and was also perhaps the closest he came to his youthful ambitions as a peintre d’histoire. As Kim de Beaumont has noted, ‘Gabriel’s astonishing production of the 1760s and 1770s, prolific and rich in memorable works of very description, testifies to his ultimate success in expressing his native genius.’14

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15 ANTOINE-JEAN DUCLOS Paris 1742-1795 Paris Figures Seated at a Table in an Interior Pen and black ink and grey wash, with framing lines in black ink. Laid down. Signed and dated A.J. Duclos inv. et del. 1770 in black ink in the lower left margin.

175 x 101 mm. (6 7/8 x 4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Comte Henri de Greffulhe, Paris and Bois-Boudran; By descent to the Comtesse Greffulhe and the Duc and Duchesse de Gramont; Their sale, London, Sotheby’s, 22 July 1937, lot 16 (bt.

Colnaghi for £30); P. & D. Colnaghi, London; Frost and Reed, London, in 1938.

Antoine-Jean Duclos was a pupil of the draughtsman and engraver Augustin de Saint-Aubin, whose drawings he often reproduced as prints. Adept at the art of engraving and etching on a small scale, Duclos is perhaps best known as a book illustrator, his first efforts in this field coming around 1765.

Alongside Charles-Nicolas Cochin and Hubert François Gravelot, he provided illustrations and vignettes for the Almanach iconologique, published between 1774 and 1781, and also contributed illustrations for such works as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Oeuvres and Choiseul-Gouffier’s Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce.

Much of his work was in the form of engravings after drawings by other artists, notably Cochin, Gravelot, Charles Eisen, Clément-Pierre Marillier and Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard. He is recorded as exhibiting at the Salon just once, in 1795. Drawings by Duclos – ‘quelques dessins à la facture petite et gentillette’, in the words of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt – are rare. In their Les graveurs du dix-huitième siècle, published between 1880 and 1882, Roger Portalis and Henri Béraldi noted that ‘Duclos était en outré un excellent dessinateur, dont la manière rappelait celle de Gravelot; nous avons vu de lui un certain nombre de dessins, qu’il a généralement gravés lui-même, pour des pièces de théâtre.’1 Carole Blumenfeld has kindly pointed out that the present sheet illustrates a scene from the opera Lucile by the Belgian composer André Grétry, based on a story by Jean François Marmontel. The drawing served as a preparatory study for one of a series of six etchings illustrating scenes from the opera, drawn

by Duclos and engraved by him and four other printmakers, which was published by François-Nicolas Martinet in Paris in 1770-17712. (This was in turn part of a series of 126 etchings illustrating scenes from popular opéras-comiques of the day, published by Martinet between 1762 and 1772.3) The etching after the present sheet (fig.1), signed by the printmaker Jean Baptiste(?) Patas, is captioned ‘Ils s’asseyent autour d’une table ou l’on sert le dejeuner.’

Another small drawing by Duclos of the same date, illustrating a scene from Michel-Jean Sedaine’s play Le Déserteur and also used for an etching published by Martinet, was formerly in the Goncourt’s own collection and is today in a private collection in New York4. Two similar genre drawings by Duclos, also dated 1770, appeared at auction in London in 19755. The present sheet was once in the collection of Comte Henri Greffulhe (1848-1932) and his wife, the Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe (1860-1952), queen of Parisian society and the inspiration for Marcel Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes.

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16 REINIER VINKELES Amsterdam 1741-1816 Amsterdam A View of the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam, with Figures Leaving the Stadsschouwburg Theatre Pen and black ink and grey wash, with watercolour, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk. Laid down. Signed and dated R. Vinkeles Delineavit 1760 in brown ink at the lower left.

277 x 434 mm. (10 7/8 x 17 1/8 in.)

Active as a draughtsman and printmaker, Reinier Vinkeles was a pupil of the artist and actor Jan Punt and was admitted to the Drawing Academy in Amsterdam in 1762, becoming a director of the institution in 1765. The same year he undertook a trip to Brabant with the artists Jurriaan Andriessen and Izaak Schmidt, and five years later is recorded in Paris, living and studying with the engraver Jacques Philippe Le Bas. On his return to Amsterdam in 1771, Vinkeles embarked on a lucrative and highly successful career, receiving numerous commissions for book illustrations, topographical views, historical subjects, portraits and reproductive engravings. Indeed, it has been estimated that some 2,500 prints were engraved by the artist or under his direct supervision. Much of Vinkeles’s finest work may be dated to between 1760 and 1800.

Writing in 1817, the Dutch biographer and collector Adriaan van der Willigen noted of Vinkeles that ‘Among his early drawings, those in color depicting the entering and exiting of the Amsterdam Theater stand out.’1 The present sheet is one of the earliest and largest of a number of drawings by Vinkeles of figures outside the theatre on the Keizersgracht canal in Amsterdam. One of the first theatres in the city, the Duytsche Academie was founded in 1617 by Samuel Coster, and established in a wooden building on the Keizersgracht. In 1632 the architect Jacob van Campen was commissioned to design a new building for the theatre, now known as the Schouwburg, which over the succeeding years hosted performances of plays by Shakespeare, Voltaire, Corneille and Moliere, as well as numerous works by Dutch playwrights. (In this drawing, the poster on the wall by the entrance to the theatre advertises the play Le Cid by Pierre Corneille, first published in 1636 and a popular success.) The theatre was rebuilt and significantly enlarged in 1665, to a design more in keeping with the Baroque manner. In 1737 Antonio Vivaldi conducted the theatre’s orchestra, and illustrious visitors to the theatre included the Prince of Orange, the Czar of Russia and the King of Poland. In May 1772, twelve years after the present sheet was drawn, the theatre was completely destroyed by fire. The site is now a luxury boutique hotel, whose Michelin-starred restaurant is named The Vinkeles, in honour of the artist.

Vinkeles seems have made several finished versions of a pendant pair of scenes – of various sizes and each with different staffage – of the Stadsschouwburg on the Keizersgracht canal; one with figures arriving at the theatre in daylight and the other with people leaving the theatre at night. In the drawings of figures arriving at the theatre, Vinkeles has placed the scene in summer, with the trees in full foliage and the artist looking north with the canal at the right, while the nighttime scenes are depicted in winter, with the trees bare and the canal at the left, viewed from the opposite direction. A pair of such views, considerably smaller than the present sheet, appeared at auction in Paris in 1999 and are today in the collection of the Noro Foundation in the Netherlands2. A slightly later pair of views by Vinkeles of the same scene on the Keizersgracht, dated 1762 and also smaller in dimensions than the drawing here exhibited, are part of an group of watercolours, drawings, prints and maps assembled by the 19th century collector Louis Splitgerber and today in the collection of the Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief, the municipal archives in Amsterdam3.

The popularity of Vinkeles’s topographical views of the Keizersgracht is reflected in the fact that the motif of crowds entering and leaving the theatre was later adopted by other artists, including Dirk Verrijk and Hermanus Petrus Schouten.

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JACOB VAN STRIJ Dordrecht 1756-1815 Dordrecht A Rhine Landscape with Peasants at Work, after Herman Saftleven Watercolour, pen and brown and grey ink, with framing lines in brown ink. Signed, dated and inscribed Roelofseck: / Herman Saftleven. f. A: Utrecht / Anno 1664. / na het orgeneele het welk berust by den / wel edele Heer Mr Barthout van Slingelandt, vryheer van Slingeland / en Goidschalxoord te dordrecht. door Jacob van Stry 1784 in black chalk on the verso. Numbered 7 in brown ink on the verso.

187 x 235 mm. (7 3/8 x 9 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The ‘Pictura’ society, Groningen (Lugt 2028), their stamp on the verso.

Together with his older brother Abraham, Jacob van Strij was trained in the Dordrecht studio of his father, the decorative painter Leendert van Strij. He completed his studies with Andries Lens in Antwerp, and also drew after the posed model at the city’s Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten, graduating in 1776. He returned to Dordrecht and there established a successful career. While his brother Abraham specialized in genre scenes, Jacob gained a reputation as a painter of landscapes and pastoral subjects; works which were particularly indebted to the example of the 17th century Dordrecht painter Aelbert Cuyp, whose style he could imitate quite closely. The two brothers often worked in collaboration on mural paintings and decorative wall hangings for private homes in the city. However, Jacob seems to have given up large-scale mural painting around 1800, producing only cabinet pictures from then on. A gifted draughtsman and etcher, Jacob produced a number of fine figure drawings, pastoral subjects and landscapes in watercolour. These were often highly finished works intended for sale to collectors and, like his paintings, were often inspired by the example of the artists of the Dutch Golden Age. This watercolour is a fine example of a type of highly finished drawing that Jacob van Strij produced throughout his career. The present sheet is among the relatively few signed and dated drawings by the artist, and was almost certainly executed as an independent work of art. It is a faithful copy of a small oil painting on panel, dated 1664, by the 17th century Dutch artist Herman Saftleven (1609-1685). As the inscription on the verso of the sheet notes, van Strij made the drawing in 1784 from Saftleven’s painting, which was at the time in the collection of M. Barthout van Slingeland, lord of Slingeland and Goidschalxoord, near Dordrecht. Saftleven’s small painting, one of a pair of Rhineland compositions of 1664, appeared with its pendant on the art market in 1999, and is today in a private collection1. The painting is signed, dated and inscribed ‘Roelofseck’ on the reverse, and it has been suggested that this may refer to the town of Rolandseck, on the Rhine south of Bonn. Saftleven made numerous trips along the Rhine valley in his lifetime, including one in 1663, the year before the date of the painting.

Like many Dutch artists of the 18th century, Jacob van Strij made a number of elaborate watercolour drawings after the work of earlier Dutch masters, including Cuyp, Jan Both, Jan Wijnants, Meindert Hobbema and Gerard Ter Borch, among others. One such drawing by van Strij, after a pastoral landscape by Nicolaes Berchem, is in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam2, and two other watercolours, copying works by Both and Cuyp, are in the Amsterdams Historisch Museum3.

Often, as in the case of the present sheet, van Strij would base his watercolour copies on paintings to be found in local Dordrecht collections.

The stamp on the verso of this drawing is that of a society of amateurs and connoisseurs known as ‘Pictura’, founded in Groningen in 1820 to further the appreciation of Netherlandish art.

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SIR EDWIN HENRY LANDSEER, R.A. London 1803-1873 London An Ecorché Study of the Head of a Horse Black, red and white chalk on blue-grey paper. A sketch of a lion and a male torso in pencil on the verso.

500 x 310 mm. (19 3/8 x 12 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s studio sale (‘The Remaining Works of that Distinguished Artist, Sir E. Landseer, R.A., Deceased’), London, Christie’s, 8-14 May 1874, probably lot 981 (‘Anatomical Studies – in chalks.

16’), bt. Mansel Lewis; Charles Mansel Lewis, Stradey Castle, Llanelli, South Wales; Thence by descent until 2010.

LITERATURE: Richard Ormond, Sir Edwin Landseer, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia and London, 1981, p.44, no.6, fig.6.

EXHIBITED: London, Royal Academy of Arts, Paintings and Drawings by Sir Edwin Landseer RA, 1961, no.149; Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art and London, Tate Gallery, Sir Edwin Landseer, 1981-1982, no.6.

One of the most popular and successful artists of Victorian England, Edwin Landseer was widely regarded as the greatest animal painter of his day. His interest in animal subjects was manifest from a very early age, and accounts for many of the precocious artist’s earliest drawings. These are often not only of dogs and farmyard animals but also of wild beasts, which Landseer would have seen and sketched at the menageries at Exeter Change and the Tower of London. Trained in the studio of Benjamin Robert Haydon and, from 1816, at the Royal Academy Schools, Landseer had by the age of fourteen already exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Society of Painters in Oil and Watercolours. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1826, at the age of only twenty-four, and rose to become a full Academician in 1831. He gained the patronage of several noble and aristocratic families, and enjoyed a position of some regard at the court of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who were to become among his most loyal patrons. Several of his paintings were engraved – many by his older brother Thomas – and these prints widely sold and distributed; indeed, Landseer may be claimed to have been the most published artist of the period. Despite suffering a nervous breakdown in 1840, at the height of his success, he continued to paint and to receive important commissions. Knighted by Queen Victoria in 1850, Landseer was commissioned in 1857 to sculpt four bronze lions to be placed at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square in London. This was to be his last significant commission, and occupied much of his time over the next decade. His nervous condition, aggravated by alcoholism, became more acute near the end of his career, and by the last few years of his life he seems to have worked very little before his death in 1873.

Throughout his life, Landseer made countless studies and sketches of animals, in oil, watercolour, chalk and pencil. Most of these are unrelated to his larger finished paintings, and seem to have been done as exercises or to capture the appearance of an unusual animal or breed. This magnificent ecorché study of the head of a horse is among the finest of a small but significant group of anatomical studies of animals dating from the early years of Landseer’s independent career, which the artist kept among the contents of his studio until his death.

Landseer had begun his formal training in 1815 with the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who encouraged his young pupil to study the anatomy of various animals. Seven years later, Haydon recalled in his diary that Landseer ‘dissected animals under my eye, copied my anatomical drawings, and carried

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my principles of study into animal painting! His genius, thus tutored, has produced solid & satisfactory results.’1 Haydon felt, however, that in later years Landseer did not credit the elder artist’s support and influence, noting in a diary entry of February 1824 that, ‘The higher a man is gifted by nature, the less willing he is always to acknowledge any obligation to any other being, however just or decent. This applies to Edwin Landseer particularly. He is a young man of most extraordinary genius, but his genius was guided by me, & first brought to notice by my enthusiastic recommendation of him. When his Father brought him to me with his other Brothers, I advised him to dissect animals, as I had done. I lent him my dissections from the Lion, which he copied, and when he began to shew real power, I took a portfolio of his drawings to Sir George Beaumont’s one day at a grand dinner, & shewed them all around to the nobility, when they retired to their coffee . . . In short, I was altogether the cause of bringing him so early into notice.’2 Despite Haydon’s disparaging account, it seems that Landseer did credit his master with imparting a precise knowledge of anatomy to his young pupil. As the eminent Victorian painter William Powell Frith was later to recall of Landseer, ‘I have often heard Edwin say that he owed no little of his success to Haydon’s insisting upon dissection of animals as a vital element in the practice of an animal painter, just as he maintained that a thorough knowledge of the human form could not be acquired without the information that dissection only could give.’3 Nevertheless, that the precocious Landseer had already developed an interest in anatomical studies some time before his apprenticeship with Haydon can be seen in a very early drawing of the skull of a dog, signed and dated 1812, which is annotated by the young artist with the names of the different parts of the skull4. Landseer is also known to have attended the classes in anatomy held by the Scottish surgeon and anatomist Charles Bell at his Great Windmill Street School of Anatomy in London. In later years, Landseer acquired George Stubbs’s magnificent preparatory drawings for his The Anatomy of the Horse from Colnaghi’s, reportedly in exchange for a painting. These graphite and chalk drawings by Stubbs he valued very highly and refused to part with in his lifetime; they were presented by his brother Charles to the Royal Academy in 1879.

The present sheet is part of a group of youthful drawings by Landseer – including several large ecorché studies of horses, dogs and cats drawn in black and red chalk – acquired at the artist’s estate sale by the Welsh landowner Charles William Mansel Lewis (1845-1931). A close friend of the artist Hubert von Herkomer, whose work he also collected, Mansel Lewis was himself an amateur artist, installing a studio in his home at Stradey Castle in South Wales5. He purchased a large number of works from the six-day Landseer estate sale, held at Christie’s in May 1874. As Richard Ormond has noted, ‘The lots that Mansel Lewis bought at the Landseer sale were almost entirely examples of his early work, in the form of oil sketches, chalk and pencil drawings and ecorché studies of flayed animals . . . They were sketches acquired for private study by a well-to-do connoisseur who was himself a practising artist . . . Only a collector of a special kind would appreciate the artistry and scientific know-how that had gone into the production of these painfully precise studies of flayed horses, cats and dogs. They are not for the squeamish and it would require an artist’s eye to appreciate their significance in the training of England’s most brilliant animal painter of the nineteenth century. In these records of dissected animals Landseer built up a profound knowledge of anatomy, which was the bedrock on which his art was built . . . They are both accurate representations of skinned animals and examples of virtuoso draughtsmanship . . . Landseer goes beyond the conventions of scientific illustration to infuse his studies with character, life and movement.’6 A related group of eleven anatomical drawings by Landseer formerly in the Mansel Lewis collection – ecorché studies of dogs and cats, in black and red chalk – have recently been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Richard Ormond has dated these anatomical studies by Landseer to between 1817 and 1822, and has further written that ‘Landseer’s superb anatomical drawings reveal how essential to his art was his knowledge of animal forms. From the beginning, it was the extraordinary naturalism of his works, quite as much as his technical ability, which so impressed his contemporaries. Such studies gave him the assurance of a virtuoso style in which to explore his powers of imagination in painting.’7

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FRANÇOIS-MARIUS GRANET Aix-en-Provence 1775-1849 Malvallat The Cloister of an Italian Monastery Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with touches of watercolour. Laid down. Signed Granet. in brown ink in the lower left margin.

117 x 141 mm. (4 5/8 x 5 1/2 in.) [sheet] Trained in the studio of Jean-Antoine Constantin, Granet was from his youth recognized as a gifted draughtsman. His early sketchbooks already show an interest in architectural ruins and church interiors; motifs to which he would remain devoted throughout his career. After studying briefly in the studio of Jacques-Louis David in Paris, where his simple brown attire and ascetic personality led his fellow pupils to give him the nickname ‘the Monk’, he eventually resolved to return to Provence. Before his departure, however, he submitted a painting depicting the cloister of a church on the rue St. Honoré to the Salon of 1799. Greatly admired at the exhibition, this painting marked the beginning of the artist’s successful career. In 1802 Granet traveled to Rome, where he remained for most of the next twenty-two years.

He set up his studio in an abandoned monastery and working extensively in the city and the surrounding countryside. Although never a pensionnaire at the Académie de France, he was able to make a reasonable living selling views of Rome to the many French tourists who visited the city during the Napoleonic occupation. At the Salon of 1819 he exhibited a painting of The Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, widely praised by critics, which firmly established his reputation in France. Although coveted by King Louis XVIII, the painting was eventually purchased by Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples. Two years after his return to France in 1824, Granet was appointed to a position as a curator at the Louvre, and in 1830 was given by Louis-Philippe the task of establishing the Museé Historique, a museum of French history, at Versailles. From then on, he seems to have been less active as a painter, although he continued to draw, and his stay in Versailles saw him produce a series of charming watercolours of the gardens.

Granet’s work is characterized by an appreciation for and understanding of the effects of light, and he delighted in achieving atmospheric effects in his drawings and watercolours. The freshness and immediacy of his watercolours show him to be the equal of such contemporary English masters of the medium as William Callow, Thomas Shotter Boys and Richard Parkes Bonington, all of whom were active in Paris in the 1820s and 1830s. After Granet’s death, some two hundred of his drawings and watercolours were presented to the Louvre. The remainder of his studio, numbering around three hundred paintings and some 1,500 drawings, were left to his native city of Aix; a bequest that forms the nucleus of the Musée Granet there.

The present sheet, which may once have been part of a sketchbook1, dates from Granet’s long stay in Italy, when he produced a large number of drawings, sketches and watercolours. He was never happier than when wandering about Rome, sketchbook in hand: ‘Young, healthy, busy, what circumstances could be finer or more desirable? And so my happiness lacked nothing. I would work the whole week through, sometimes in a square, another time in a cloister or under a palace portico’2. Although he completed many finished watercolour views of the city and its environs – he recalls bringing about a hundred such studies back to Paris in 1824 – Granet does not appear to have ever exhibited these works. Executed with transparent layers of ink and wash, this drawing captures a tranquil moment in the busy life of Rome.

Granet seems to have sought out quiet, unpopulated scenes away from the hustle and bustle of the city itself, and this drawing, like most of his landscape studies, has a particular calm, atmospheric quality that exemplifies the scholar Henri Focillon’s apt description of the artist as a ‘true poet of meditative light’.

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RICHARD PARKES BONINGTON Arnold 1802-1828 London A Young Woman Asleep Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil. A sketch of a young girl in pencil on the verso.

133 x 110 mm. (5 1/4 x 4 3/8 in.)

LITERATURE: Patrick Noon, Richard Parkes Bonington: the complete paintings, New Haven and London, 2008, p.410, no.383a.

Despite his very brief career, Richard Parkes Bonington occupies a key role in the artistic relationship between England and France in the first quarter of the 19th century. Born in a town near Nottingham, he moved with his family to Calais in 1817. There he studied with the French artist François Louis Francia, who encouraged Bonington’s interest in watercolour. The following year the young Englishman settled in Paris, where he met Eugène Delacroix, who was to become a lifelong friend, and entered the studio of Baron Gros. Two of his watercolours were exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1822, and within a few years Bonington had secured a reputation as an accomplished watercolourist, painter and lithographer. He briefly shared a studio with Delacroix in Paris, and travelled extensively throughout Northern France, as well as making sketching tours of Belgium and Italy, spending several weeks in Venice. Working in a variety of genres, including landscapes and marine subjects as well as historical and literary themes, Bonington exhibited at the Salons in Paris and at the British Institution and the Royal Academy in London. Severely weakened by tuberculosis over the last year of his life, he nevertheless continued to work until his death in September 1828, shortly before his twenty-sixth birthday.

Much of Bonington’s finest work is in watercolour, and he is today regarded as one of the masters of the medium. As one modern scholar has written, ‘Technically, he seems to have possessed from the start all the resources that gave his water-colours their particular clarity and brilliance.’1 The influence of Bonington’s watercolour technique on later artists working in England and France, including Delacroix, Turner and Corot, is readily evident. Many years after Bonington’s death, Eugène Delacroix recalled of him: ‘To my mind, one can find in other modern artists qualities of strength and of precision in rendering that are superior to those in Bonington’s pictures, but no one in this modern school, and perhaps even before, has possessed that lightness of touch which, especially in watercolours, makes his works a type of diamond that flatters and ravishes the eye, independently of any subject and any imitation.’2 This charming watercolour may be grouped with a handful of other drawings of a young woman, wearing a cap or bonnet, of around 1827-1828. These late works by Bonington include four pen and ink drawings in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT3, as well as pencil studies of what appears to be the same sitter in the Yale Center for British Art4, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT.5, and a private collection in Paris. Patrick Noon has noted that ‘The woman in these drawings was undoubtedly more than a casual acquaintance or professional model, since she sat for the artist in different contemporary dresses and several of the sketches appear to be portraits rather than pose studies. In all likelihood she was one of the artist’s friends, such as a daughter of the Rev. Edward Forster, the Protestant minister in Paris whom Bonington had befriended several years earlier.’6 A stylistic comparison may be made with Bonington’s only extant self-portrait drawing; an equally small and intimate pen and wash study in the British Museum, dated to between 1825 and 18267. Both drawings show the particular influence of the French artists with whom Bonington was friendly in Paris, and in particular Delacroix.

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JOHN FREDERICK LEWIS, R.A. London 1804-1876 Walton-on-Thames A Young Woman from Bursa Black chalk and watercolour, heightened with touches of gouache, on light brown paper. Laid down.

Signed and inscribed Jf. Lewis / Brus[sa] in pencil at the lower right.

418 x 271 mm. (16 3/8 x 10 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Carl Winter, London and Cambridge; By descent to his wife, Theodora Gertrude Winter, London; Thence by descent until 2010.

LITERATURE: Michael Lewis, John Frederick Lewis, R.A. 1805-1876, Leigh-on-Sea, 1978, p.100, no.650 (‘A Turkish Lady, Brussa’).

After some early success as a painter, mostly of animal subjects (an interest he shared with his childhood friend and neighbour Edwin Landseer), John Frederick Lewis seems to have largely given up painting around 1830, in favour of drawings and finished watercolours. These works were exhibited at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours (to which he had been elected as an associate in 1827, at the age of just twenty-one), the Royal Academy, the British Institution and elsewhere. He made his first trip abroad in 1827, visiting Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Between 1832 and 1834 Lewis lived and worked in Spain, producing numerous drawings, watercolours and lithographs of local sights, figures, costumes, buildings and landscapes. Spanish subjects dominated his exhibited output of finished watercolours for most of the succeeding years, as well as two volumes of lithographs published in 1835 and 1836, earning him the nickname ‘Spanish Lewis’. In 1837 Lewis left London to travel to Italy, where he spent two years, and from there went on to Greece, Albania and Turkey before eventually settling in Egypt at the end of 1841.

Lewis resided in Cairo for ten years, living as an Oriental gentleman in an elegant Ottoman house in the Azbakiyyah quarter of the city, dressing in the Turkish manner and enjoying what one visitor, the writer William Makepeace Thackeray, described as a ‘dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life.’ He produced a large number of watercolours and drawings during his decade in Egypt before his return to England in 1851.

For the remainder of his career he painted Orientalist subjects inspired by his years in the East, and based largely on the drawings made in Cairo. These depictions of mosques, bazaars, Eastern interiors, desert encampments and imaginary harem scenes proved immensely popular with collectors. (As one scholar has noted, ‘Without doubt Lewis’s depictions of Oriental and, in particular, harem life were given greater veracity in the eyes of his European audience because of his well-publicised adoption of an elite Ottoman lifestyle.’1) In 1855 Lewis was elected President of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, although the previous year he had also begun to exhibit paintings at the Royal Academy. His growing interest in oil painting, at the expense of watercolours, led him in February 1858 to resign from the Old Water-Colour Society, and for the remainder of his career Lewis’s exhibited works were mainly paintings.

Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1859 and an Academician in 1864, Lewis showed regularly at the Academy until his death in 1876.

Lewis’s paintings and watercolours of exotic Eastern subjects, executed in a meticulous and detailed manner, remained popular with collectors and connoisseurs throughout the later stages of his career.

As his fellow artist and traveller Edward Lear noted, in a letter to Lewis’s wife written the year before the painter’s death, ‘There have never been, and there never will be any works depicting Oriental life – more truly beautiful and excellent – perhaps I might say – so beautiful and excellent. For, besides the exquisite and conscientious workmanship, the subjects painted by J. F. Lewis were perfect as representations of real scenes and people.’2

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Between 1840 and 1841 Lewis spent almost a year living in Constantinople. The first recorded mention of his arrival in the city occurs in two letters written by his fellow artist David Wilkie on the 14th and 15th of October, 1840; ‘We have encountered John Lewis from Greece and Smyrna…He has been making most clever drawings as usual.’3 Some time in 1841 Lewis visited the town of Bursa (then called Brussa), about one hundred miles south of Constantinople in northwestern Turkey. A centre of the silk trade, Bursa in the 19th century was populated by peoples of different ethnic origins hailing from the Ottoman territories in Europe. Lewis made a number of superb drawings of the local inhabitants, as well as some of the main sites of the city, such as the late 14th century mosque of Ulu Cami and the Yesil Türbe, the mausoleum of Sultan Mehmet I, built in the 1420s.

The present sheet, as shown by the signature and inscription at the lower right, was drawn during the artist’s stay in Bursa in 1841. The fact that the woman depicted in this drawing is not veiled would indicate that she was not Muslim but rather a Christian of an Eastern denomination, probably from an Armenian merchant family in Bursa. It seems likely that, during his stay in Bursa, Lewis gained access to the home of a wealthy local Armenian family, to judge from the handful of drawings he produced of female members of the same family in the interior of what appears to be their home. The same young woman, for example, is seen at the left of a larger, finished watercolour by Lewis depicting four women in an interior, also signed and dated ‘Brussa 1841’, which recently appeared at auction in London4. The same model also appears in another of Lewis’s Bursa drawings of 1841; a study of two women today in the collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery of the University of Manchester5. A slightly larger, unsigned autograph replica of the present sheet is in the collection of the British Museum6.

As Briony Llewellyn has noted, chief among Lewis’s reasons for travelling to the Near East in 1840 was ‘a desire for novelty, a need to infuse his art with exotic and colourful subjects that represented a culture other than European. Surviving sketches suggest that his sole aim was to accumulate ethnographic information, but with an unprecedented accuracy and comprehensiveness . . . Lewis’s images are often of anonymous native men and women, in which the focus is as much on the elaborate details of their costume as on their individuality.’7 We are grateful to Briony Llewellyn for confirming the attribution of the present sheet, and for her help and advice in the preparation of this catalogue entry.

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22

CARLO BOSSOLI Davesco 1815-1884 Turin The Neptune Fountain and the Paseo del Prado, Madrid Watercolour and gouache. Signed C. Bossoli in pencil at the lower left.

256 x 458 mm. (10 1/8 x 18 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, St. Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo; Given by her to a British diplomat c.1860; Thence by descent until 1990; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 28 November 1990, lot 8; Guillermo de Osma Galería, Madrid, in 1997; Private collection.

EXHIBITED: Madrid, Guillermo de Osma Galería, La Espanã Romántica 1830-1860, 1997, no.39.

Arguably the foremost topographical artist in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, Carlo Bossoli was born near Lugano in Switzerland and grew up in Odessa in the southern Ukraine. As a young artist of considerable ability, he came to the attention of the Countess Vorontsov, wife of the governor of the province, and by the age of eighteen was selling his drawings of urban and landscape views. He travelled extensively around the Crimea, particularly in the early 1840s, and produced a large number of drawings, watercolours and gouaches of views of the main sites and cities there. Bossoli and his family returned to Europe in 1843, eventually settling in Milan. In 1850 he made his first visit to England and Scotland, and the following year visited Spain and Morocco. By 1853 Bossoli had settled in Turin. With the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, however, Bossoli decided to travel to London, where his knowledge of the Crimea stood him in good stead. The immense interest on the part of the British public for views of Sebastopol, Balaklava, Inkermann and the other battlegrounds mentioned in news reports encouraged Bossoli to produce a series of fifty-two Crimean views which were reproduced as lithographs for a lavish volume entitled The Beautiful Scenery and Chief Places of Interest Throughout the Crimea from Paintings by Carlo Bossoli, published in London in 1856. Among the many avid collectors of Bossoli’s watercolours of Crimean views were Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington. Bossoli exhibited his works at the Royal Academy between 1855 and 1859, and in 1857 undertook his longest journey yet, travelling through France, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Switzerland. Each of his travels resulted in drawings and watercolours of the cities and sites that he visited. Between 1859 and 1861 he produced a series of over a hundred gouaches illustrating the military campaign for the independence of Italy, commissioned by Prince Eugenio di Savioia-Carignano.

Carlo Bossoli made a long trip to Spain and Morocco in 1851, and this splendid watercolour is likely to date from this year or shortly thereafter. Another view of Madrid, depicting the Plaza Mayor and almost certainly of the same date, shares the same Russian provenance as the present sheet1. Apart from Madrid, Bossoli is also known to have visited a number of other cities in Spain in 1851, and in later years produced spirited watercolour and gouache drawings of Seville2 and Cadiz3, as well as views of the Escorial4, Burgos, Aranjuez and Barcelona5. Some of these views may have been commissioned by the Spanish-born Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoléon III, who is listed in Bossoli’s account book as the purchasor of eleven ‘vedute della Spagna’ in 1858.

The present sheet is one of four highly finished drawings in gouache and watercolour by Bossoli that were once part of the collection of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia (1798-1860), born Princess Charlotte of Prussia and the wife of Tsar Nicholas I. The other three watercolours were views of the Royal Palace in Berlin, the Plaza Mayor in Madrid and the colonnade of the summer palace at Sanssouci, near Berlin6. The set of four watercolours by Bossoli were presented as gifts to a British diplomat shortly before or after the Dowager Empress’s death in 1860, and remained in the possession of the diplomat’s family for the next 130 years before being dispersed at auction in 1990.

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23

BRITISH SCHOOL Circa 1850 Study of a Young Woman in Eastern Costume Oil and pencil on prepared paper.

429 x 343 mm. (16 7/8 x 13 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Maas Gallery, London, in 1997; Private collection.

EXHIBITED: Possibly London, The Maas Gallery, Exhibition of Victorian Paintings, Water-Colours and Drawings, 1968, no.23 (as J. F. Lewis, ‘Study of a girl, oil on prepared paper, 15 1.2 x 12.’)

The present sheet would appear to depict an Englishwoman dressed in Oriental costume, rather than representing an actual portrait of a woman of Eastern origins. Despite the evidently high quality of the work, its attribution has remained a mystery. Although a tentative attribution to John Frederick Lewis was once put forward1, this oil sketch is perhaps more likely to be by an artist with little or no direct experience of the Near East.

An attribution to Francis John Wyburd (1826-1909) may be considered. A portraitist and painter of genre, historical and literary subjects, Wyburd was active between 1845 and 1893. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1848, having already exhibited at the Society of Arts and at the Academy itself, and in later years also exhibited at the Society of British Artists and the British Institution. Wyburd made a particular specialty of paintings of young woman in languid poses, often in an Eastern setting. He exhibited a number of paintings, of such subjects as women lounging in a harem, at the Royal Academy and elsewhere. One contemporary critic noted that ‘The characteristics of Mr. Wyburd’s art are, principally, a perfect realisation of female beauty, an attractive manner in setting out his figures, and a refinement of finish which is sometimes carried almost to excess.’2

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WILLIAM CALLOW, R.W.S. Greenwich 1812-1908 Great Missenden The Temple of Vesta and the Falls at Tivoli Watercolour, over a pencil underdrawing, heightened with touches of bodycolour, on paper laid down on board. Signed and dated William Callow / 1859 in brown ink at the lower left. Inscribed (in a modern hand) No. 3 / Temple of Vesta / Tivoli in pencil on the backing board.

748 x 577 mm. (29 3/8 x 22 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Peter and Olive Belton, Leicester, until 2009.

LITERATURE: H. M. Cundall, ed., William Callow, R.W.S., F.R.G.S.,: An Autobiography, London, 1908, p.154; Jan Reynolds, William Callow R.W.S., London, 1980, p.213.

EXHIBITED: London, Society of Painters in Water-colours, 1859, no.190.

Over the course of a very long career, William Callow established a reputation as among the most talented, and prolific, watercolour artists in England. He completed his training in Paris, where he remained working as an independent artist until 1841. He took over the Parisian studio of Thomas Shotter Boys, exhibited his watercolours at the Salons every year, and gave lessons in drawing to King Louis-Philippe and other members of the French royal family. In 1838, while still living and working in Paris, Callow was elected an Associate of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours; a most unusual honour for an artist not based in England, and requiring a special exemption from the rules of the Society.

Between 1836 and 1840 Callow made three extensive tours through France, Switzerland and Italy. In March 1841 he left Paris and settled in London, where he was as yet relatively unknown. He began again to work as a drawing master, for which he was soon in great demand, and to show his work at the annual exhibitions of the Old Water-Colour Society, to which he contributed every year until his death in 1908.

Sketching tours of Germany in 1844 and Holland in 1845 were followed by a honeymoon with his new wife through Germany, Switzerland and Northern Italy in 1846.

Elected a full member of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1848, Callow had by this time established a successful and lucrative career. In 1855 the Callows settled in a cottage in the village of Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, although the artist would travel to London daily in the summer. He continued to make frequent tours throughout Britain and Europe, the last foreign trip being a visit to Italy in 1892, at the age of eighty. In 1907 a retrospective exhibition on his watercolours was held at the Leicester Galleries in London; this was, in fact, the artist’s first and only solo exhibition in his lifetime.

Callow died a few months after the exhibition, at the age of ninety-five. In the preface to an interview with the artist published shortly before his death, the Burlington Magazine noted that ‘In the annual shows of the ‘Old’ Water Colour Society the drawings of Mr. William Callow have been a remarkable feature for very many years. In the face of body colour and every device that the ingenuity of modern water colour artists has discovered to obtain greater power and force, these modest wash drawings have more than held their own, and even the brilliant mastery of men as great as Mr. Sargent cannot extinguish their more retiring dignity.’1 Exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society in London in 1859, this stunning, large watercolour is likely to have been based on sketches made by Callow when he first visited Tivoli on his inaugural trip to Italy in 1840. In that year he produced a number of watercolours of the falls, one of which was exhibited in London the following year. (Another Tivoli watercolour drawn during this 1840 trip, much smaller than the present sheet, is today in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio2.) In 1860 Callow showed another large watercolour of Tivoli – a view of The Villa d’Este and the Cascatelle at Tivoli, of horizontal format – at the Old Water Colour Society3, while a view of Tivoli with the Cascade and Temple of the Sybil was exhibited there in the summer of 18754.

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SIR EDWARD COLEY BURNE-JONES Birmingham 1833-1898 London The Head of a Young Girl Pencil. Signed and dated EBJ 1874 in pencil at the lower right.

288 x 212 mm. (11 1/4 x 8 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, UK; Piccadilly Gallery, London, in 1998; Private collection, New York.

The leading member of the second generation of Pre-Raphaelite painters, Edward Burne-Jones was a passionate and prolific draughtsman. He produced countless preparatory studies and cartoons for his paintings, as well as drawings intended as independent works of art in their own right, in black and red chalk, pencil, pen and watercolour. His drawings were, indeed, of arguably greater significance to him than his finished paintings; as John Christian has noted, Burne-Jones ‘was always a draughtsman first and a painter second.’1 Similarly, the artist’s friend Graham Robertson wrote that ‘He was pre-eminently a draughtsman, and one of the greatest in the whole history of Art . . . as a master of line he was always unequalled; to draw was his natural mode of expression – line flowed from him almost without volition.’2 Although he occasionally gave drawings away as presents, and also sometimes exhibited them in public, Burne-Jones seems to have kept most of his drawings in his studio until his death, after which they were dispersed.

Contemporary artists, writers and critics were particularly taken with Burne-Jones’s studies of the heads of women. As one critic noted, on the occasion of an exhibition of the artist’s drawings held in 1896, ‘And yet most of us will find a charm that is still more rare in the row of portrait-heads, some of which have only been completed within the last few months. These fair women, with the mysterious smile on their lips and the look of infinite sadness in their eyes, these faces, so alike in their type of beauty, so unlike in their endless variety of expression, have all the spiritual refinement of Lionardo’s art. Their wistful and sorrowful loveliness lingers in the mind like some old melody, and haunts us long afterwards with its pathetic music.’3 Another author, writing shortly after the artist’s death, noted that ‘It is quite possible that had BurneJones been able to do things with greater ease we should have missed the careful reverence that is so characteristic of his drawings . . . Burne-Jones’s tender and beautiful visual power, though it may have suffered from incomplete expression, may, on the other hand, owe much to the very difficulties which, making him less readily satisfied, carried him to greater heights. It is to his powers of self-criticism that we owe the long series of his pencil studies, and it is not unlikely that posterity will come to set more value on them, especially some of the beautifully drawn heads of women, so expressive of his art’s intention, than upon his finished paintings, for in no other work of our time is there so much tenderness and delicacy of execution bearing such an intimate message.’4 Drawn in 1874, the present sheet, which is both signed and dated, is likely to have been intended as an independent, finished drawing rather than a preparatory study for a painting5. That Burne-Jones saw his drawings as autonomous works of art is seen in the fact that he often exhibited them independently of his paintings, and frequently gave them as gifts to friends. A resemblance may be noted with BurneJones’s model and sometime mistress, Maria Zambaco, who appears in many of his paintings and drawings of the late 1860s through the mid-1870s. Many years later, in a letter written in 1893, the artist recalled of Zambaco that she had ‘a wonderful head, neither profile was like the other quite – and the full face was different again.’6

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FREDERIC, LORD LEIGHTON, P.R.A. Scarborough 1830-1896 London Drapery Study for Captive Andromache Pencil and white chalk on brown paper. Inscribed Leighton in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed by Lord Leighton / of Stretton / PRA in pencil on the verso.

515 x 266 mm. (20 1/4 x 10 1/2 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Among the contents of the artist’s studio at his death, with part of the posthumous studio stamp, with the letters LLC in a circle (Lugt 1741a), stamped in black at the lower left corner; Acquired with the rest of Leighton’s drawings by The Fine Art Society, London, in 1896.

LITERATURE: Annie Williams, ‘Expression in Drapery’, The Magazine of Art, 1889, illustrated p.65.

EXHIBITED: Probably London, The Fine Art Society, A Collection of Studies for Pictures, Designs and Sketches by the Late Lord Leighton, P.R.A., December 1896.

One of the leading figures of the art establishment in Victorian London, the painter and sculptor Frederic Leighton enjoyed a very successful career. Elected to the Royal Academy in 1868, he rose to a position of considerable prominence in artistic and social circles. Leighton was appointed President of the Royal Academy in 1878 and was raised to the peerage as Baron Leighton of Stretton in 1896, shortly before his death.

This large sheet is a study for the drapery of one of the woman drawing water from a well at the righthand side of Leighton’s large painting of Captive Andromache (fig.1), today in the Manchester City Art Galleries1. Over four metres in length, the painting was the largest work of the artist’s late period, and has been described as ‘arguably [Leighton’s] masterpiece, and certainly the greatest single work painted in the last decade of his life.’2 The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1888, accompanied by a fragment from the Iliad, as translated by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘Some standing by / Marking thy tears fall, shall say, ‘This is she, / The wife of that same Hector that fought best / Of all the Trojans when all fought for Troy.’’ Andromache was the loyal wife of the Trojan prince Hector. Following her husband’s death and the fall of Troy, she was taken as a concubine by Neoptolemus, ruler of Epirus. Leighton’s painting depicts the mourning Andromache standing among the women of Epirus, waiting for her turn to draw water from a well. Leighton’s Captive Andromache was purchased by the Manchester Art Gallery in 1899 for the considerable sum of four thousand pounds, raised by public subscription.

1.

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Leighton had been planning a work of this subject for several years, as can be seen in a drawing at Leighton House in London3, which includes studies for both Captive Andromache and the much earlier painting of Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871. After the composition of the large painting of Captive Andromache had been determined in the form of drawings and oil sketches, the artist turned to the poses of the individual figures. As was his usual practice, these were studied first as nude figures and then with draperies.

Leighton seems to have taken about a year to paint the final work.

A large number of preparatory studies for Captive Andromache are known, totaling some sixty drawings.

These included drawings for the entire composition and for individual figures, both nude and draped, as well as a compositional oil study with all of the figures nude4. Twenty-five preparatory drawings for the painting, including several drapery studies akin to the present sheet, are today in the collection of the Leighton House Museum in London. A drapery study for the central figure of Andromache, presented by Leighton himself to the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, is in the Louvre. Other drawings for Captive Andromache are in the collections of several museums, including the Royal Academy, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Britain and the Courtauld Institute Gallery in London, the City Art Galleries and the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge (MA) and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto5.

As Leonée and Richard Ormond have noted of the drawings of the artist’s late period, such as the present sheet, ‘The painstaking technique of Leighton’s early pencil drawings gave way to more tonal effects.

Though outline still plays an important part in these later drawings, they are softer and more aesthetic in style, like comparable drawings by Whistler and Albert Moore. Many of them have a studied elegance and finish that seems to belie their status as studies. They were, however, extensively used in the process of picture making. For some of his major compositions, Leighton drew as many as thirty or forty separate studies. They fall into various categories: studies from the nude and draped model; detailed studies of drapery, with the figure left out or sketched in outline…The drawings remain languid and beautiful, and, looking at them, one can appreciate why Leighton’s most successful works were his decorative studies of models.’6 Not long after it was drawn, the present sheet was selected as one of four drapery studies for Captive Andromache used to illustrate an article on ‘Expression in Drapery’ in The Magazine of Art, published in 1889, shortly after the large painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy. Marion Harry Spielmann, the editor of the periodical and a noted Victorian art critic, wrote that ‘We are here permitted to publish reproductions of Sir Frederick Leighton’s original studies of drapery for his picture of “Captive Andromache” in this year’s Royal Academy exhibition. The drawings of no living artist could better illustrate the subject than those of the great English master of drapery.’7 This particular drawing also appears in a photograph of the interior of Leighton’s Holland Park studio, taken the year before his death, in which it is seen framed and resting on a chair beneath the north window of the studio8. The artist seems to have made a practice of selecting and framing a number of his drawings to be displayed in the alcove beneath the studio window. As Alison Smith has noted, ‘Leighton never found his drawings dispensable once they had played their particular function. Rather he would display selected examples with pride, as can be seen in the photograph of 1895 of the platform beneath his main studio window, where the framed drawings and statuettes are arranged.’9 Another scholar adds that Leighton ‘would frequently direct visitors to view this display of his studies.’10 The present sheet was almost certainly among those shown at the Fine Art Society in London in December 1896, part of a large retrospective exhibition of drawings long kept by the artist in his studio and acquired by the gallery after his death. As the critic and collector Samuel Pepys Cockerell wrote, shortly before the exhibition opened, ‘[Leighton] left behind him a vast number of drawings of exquisite beauty…which will, one may venture to think, attract considerable attention and admiration. They amount to a record of his life and a statement of his artistic creed.’11

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HENRY MONNIER Paris 1799-1877 Paris Before the Reading of the Will Pen and brown ink and watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil, on buff paper, laid down. Signed and dated Henry Monnier / 1874 in brown ink at the lower left. Inscribed Héritiers / avant l’ouverture du testament in brown ink at the bottom.

239 x 285 mm. (9 3/8 x 11 1/4 in.)

A writer, satirist and versatile actor as well as a celebrated painter, draughtsman and printmaker, Henry Bonaventure Monnier is best known for his depictions of bourgeois life in 19th century Paris. However, he only exhibited once at the Salon, in 1831, when he showed ‘plusieurs portraits à la sepia’. Monnier worked as a lithographer, contributing to various books and magazines illustrating Parisian society types and manners, including the Moeurs parisiennes of 1826 and Six quartiers de Paris, published in 1828. With Eugène Lami, he traveled to England, where he took lessons in watercolour drawing from the English caricaturist George Cruikshank. Between 1829 and 1830 Monnier and Lami published a series of lithographs entitled Voyage à Londres, published in both Paris and London. As Edith Melcher has noted of the artist’s work of this period, ‘From a technical point of view, Monnier’s [watercolours and lithographs]…show a method that was extremely simple and at the same time painstaking…His skill lay in the choice and combinations of colors and in the delicacy of the pen work, in both of which traits he may have profited by his study in England and especially his contact with Cruikshank.’1 In 1830, Monnier wrote and published the Scènes populaires dessinées à la plume par Henri Monnier, wherein he introduced the character Joseph Prudhomme, ‘professeur d’écriture, expert assermenté près les cours et les tribunaux’. The Scènes populaires were immensely popular, and went through twelve editions in the author’s lifetime. The portly, self-important M. Prudhomme was to appear in many of Monnier’s drawings and also in plays, cast in various roles but always representative of the bourgeoisie.

In 1853 Monnier produced the most successful of these plays, the Grandeur et décadence de Joseph Prud’homme, and the following year he published the character’s Memoires. (Indeed, so successful and popular was the figure of Prudhomme that he was adopted by Honoré Daumier for some of his own caricatures.) Among the many works written or illustrated by Monnier are Les Industriels: Métiers et professions en France, published in 1842, and Les Bas-fonds de la societé, published in 1862. Between 1866 and 1874 he also produced a series of watercolours entitled Les Diseurs de riens. The later years of his career were spent making finished, independent watercolours – masterful scenes of social observation and elegant conversation pieces, typified by the present sheet – as well as coloured versions of his early lithographs.

Referring to the artist’s drawings and lithographs, a modern biographer has noted that ‘Monnier’s style has certain easily recognizable traits which distinguish his work from that of his contemporaries...There is a conspicuous lack of grace in his personages; they are drawn with heavier lines than the figures of Eugene Lami, for instance, or of Gavarni; they are solidly planted on their feet, their bodies are short and stocky. They are clothed with almost photographic veracity, with minute attention to the details which are appropriate to their social status. But the most remarkable thing about them is the way in which Monnier made them live: the vivacity and variety of their facial expressions, and the precision, appropriateness, and restraint of their gestures…The setting in which the characters appear is presented with the same accuracy of detail.

Compared with the caricatures of Travies or Grandville, or the deadly irony of Daumier’s studies of manners, Monnier’s work is unmistakably closer to everyday life. It is in the composition of his scenes, however, that he rises above reality to a height of comic art that is peculiarly his own…Monnier made of his drawings genre pictures in which the figures are subordinated to the setting as they are in certain seventeenth-century Dutch paintings . . . The result is an admirable evocation of that middle-class world Monnier was interpreting, with its petty preoccupations and stunted aspirations.’2

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HILAIRE-GERMAIN-EDGAR DEGAS Paris 1834-1917 Paris The Head of a Young Woman, after Perugino Pencil on coarse, flocked pale grey paper. Stamped with the Degas vente stamp (Lugt 658) in red at the lower left.

280 x 207 mm. (11 x 8 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, Paris; The fourth Vente Degas, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 2-4 July 1918, lot 113c (‘Tête de jeune fille’)1; Bernard Chappard, Paris and Venezuela; His sale (‘Vente au profit de la Fondation Daniela Chappard’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Cornet de Saint-Cyr], 13 March 2000, lot 22; Private collection.

LITERATURE: John Walker, ‘Degas et les maîtres anciens’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, September 1933, p.185; Franco Russoli and Fiorella Minervino, L’opera completa di Degas, Milan, 1970, pp.86-87, no.3; Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey, ‘Da David a Picasso, il Perugino e la Francia’, in Laura Teza, ed., Pietro Vannucci il Perugino: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di studio, 25-28 ottobre 2000, Perugia, 2004, p.378, p.394, fig.15; Caterina Zappia, ‘La sfortuna di Perugino nella Francia dell’Ottocento’, in Vittoria Garibaldi and Francesco Federico Mancini, ed., Perugino, il divin pittore, exhibition catalogue, Perugia, 2004, p.415, note 54.

‘One of the most passionate and convinced copyists of his time’2, Edgar Degas spent much of the early years of his career engaged in a serious study of Renaissance art, resulting in a significant number of drawn and painted copies by the artist. He first registered as a copyist at the Louvre in April 1853, and soon began making drawings after Old Master paintings in the museum’s collection, with a particular emphasis on Italian art of the 15th and early 16th centuries. (At the same time he also began copying Old Master prints in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, as well as works in the collection of the École des Beaux-Arts.)

Degas maintained the practice during his three-year stay in Italy between 1856 and 1859, drawing numerous copies after works in Florence, Rome and Naples; a task in which he was also encouraged by his father. In a letter of January 1859, written to his son in Florence, Auguste De Gas advised the young artist that ‘the masters of the fifteenth century are the only true guides; once they have thoroughly made their mark and inspired a painter unceasingly to perfect his study of nature, results are assured.’3 On his return to Paris, Degas carried on copying works of art in the Louvre, and in fact continued to register as a copyist in the museum until 1862. Among the Quattrocento and Cinquecento paintings copied by the young Degas were works by Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Filippino Lippi, Mantegna, Lorenzo di Credi, Vittore Carpaccio, Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Perugino, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian and many others. As the artist himself said, ‘One must copy and recopy the masters, and only after having given every proof of being a good copyist can one reasonably be expected to paint a radish from nature.’4 Most of the drawn and painted copies by Degas may be dated to the formative years of the artist’s career, between 1858 and 1861, and several of the motifs and figures he copied were later integrated into his own paintings. As Theodore Reff has noted, ‘The interest in older art . . . was indeed so extensive in Degas’s early career, and at the same time so pervasive an influence on his own art, that his activity throughout the 1850s may be described as essentially that of a copyist’5, while another scholar has written that ‘Through copying Degas acquired at a very early stage that sureness and maturity which always astonished critics.’6 In many of these early drawings Degas used a soft pencil and a coarse, flocked greyish paper, as in the present sheet.

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This recently rediscovered drawing is a copy after the head of the Virgin in a panel painting of The Virgin and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Catherine of Alexandria (fig.1) by the Umbrian artist Pietro Perugino (c.1450-1523) in the Louvre7. Painted around 1493, at the height of the Perugino’s career, this small devotional picture was acquired by the Louvre in 1821.

The present sheet is typical of Degas’ copies after Renaissance masters, and his own particular interest in individual studies of heads and figures, isolated from a more crowded composition. As one scholar has noted of Degas, ‘In loose drawings, and more rarely in oils, he recorded memorable portraits as he encountered them . . . Sometimes he singled out individual heads in altarpieces or frescos and treated them as portraits . . . His liking for the precision, for the unadorned purity of early portraits persisted for decades.’8 Studies such as this were also of particular importance to Degas’s own development as a portrait painter: ‘The young portraitist was making himself conversant with the prototypes in the history of the genre, in all its many variants, as they had been formed at the time of the Italian Renaissance. In copying he was laying out his imaginary portrait gallery. He was primarily concerned with artistic questions rather than physiognomy.

His interest as a copyist was directed primarily to the composition, from head only to full length, from profile to full face.’9 Degas copied several other paintings by Perugino, including figures from an Ascension of Christ in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, in a sketchbook now in the collection of the in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris10. It was perhaps thinking of paintings by Perugino that Degas is said to have once remarked: ‘So there is no bias in art? What about the Italian Primitives, who express the softness of lips by imitating them with hard lines, and make eyes come to life by cutting off the eyelids as if with a pair of scissors?’11

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GIOVANNI BOLDINI Ferrara 1842-1931 Paris A Path Through Trees in the Bois de Boulogne Watercolour, with some traces of an underdrawing in pencil. Laid down. Signed Boldini in black ink at the lower right.

538 x 367 mm. (21 1/8 x 14 1/2 in.)

Giovanni Boldini settled in Paris in October 1871, taking a studio on the Place Pigalle and selling his work through the Goupil gallery and other dealers. He made his Salon debut in 1879, and his exuberant style of painting was to prove immensely popular in Paris. In the late 1870s and early 1880s he produced genre paintings of elegantly dressed women portrayed in lavish interiors – subjects made popular by Alfred Stevens and James Tissot – and these works found a ready market in England and America through the efforts of Adolphe Goupil and a number of foreign dealers. By the time Boldini moved to a new Parisian studio in 1885, he had begun to paint society portraits, and soon developed a formidable reputation for his dazzling, elegant depictions of the fashionable women of Paris, painted with a virtuoso technique of bold, fluid brushstrokes. Within a few years Boldini had risen to a position of prominence in Parisian art circles, and was appointed commissioner of Fine Arts for the Italian pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in 1889. He befriended other society portrait painters such as Paul Helleu, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, and became a close friend of Edgar Degas, who is said to have once told the artist, “Vous êtes un monstre de talent!”. By the turn of the century Boldini had become the most sought-after portraitist in Paris, achieving such success that his reputation rivalled that of his friend Sargent in London.

Although Boldini’s reputation as a fashionable portrait painter was well established by the 1880s, an abiding interest in landscape subjects is evident in his work from the start of his career. Indeed, among his earliest paintings are a series of landscape frescoes for the Villa ‘La Falconiera’, near Pistoia, commissioned by the Englishman Sir Walter Falconer and completed in 1870, shortly before the artist moved to Paris. Alongside the interior scenes and portraits for which he was to become best known, Boldini painted a number of landscapes of the countryside around Paris. Indeed, by 1878 one American art critic could write that ‘Boldini’s best work is his landscapes . . . and in these landscapes the best feature is the delightful and masterly rendering of sunshine and daylight.’1 Large-scale landscape watercolours such as the present sheet are a relatively small but choice feature of Boldini’s oeuvre as a draughtsman. This impressive sheet, which can be dated to the early years of the 20th century, may be compared with a number of other large watercolour landscapes by the artist of the same period. These include a study of the Bois de Boulogne in a private collection in Bologna2, as well as a study of poplars along a riverbank, signed and dated 1905, in a private collection3 and a large watercolour known as After the Storm, today in the Museo Boldini in Ferrara4. Writing of another, stylistically comparable landscape in watercolour by Boldini, one recent scholar noted that ‘its thin washes and delicate touches of opaque paint record the scene with a great economy of means. The direct, spontaneous quality of this work, almost certainly painted outdoors on the site, suggests that the artist had fully absorbed the principles of plein-air painting, though . . . he seems to have considered it most often in its traditional role as preparatory work, rather than as complete in its own right. This further differentiates him from his Impressionist colleagues.’5 The present watercolour probably depicts trees in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, which the artist used as the setting for one of his finest paintings, a full-length double portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Lyding Walking in the Bois de Boulogne, now in the collection of the Museo Boldini in Ferrara6. A possibly related compositional sketch in pencil is in a Milanese private collection7.

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GIOVANNI BOLDINI Ferrara 1842-1931 Paris The Porte Saint-Denis, Paris Pencil on ruled paper; a page from a notebook. Inscribed (by Emilia Cardona Boldini) no 122le at. Boldini.

E. Boldini – Cardona / 1937 in black ink on the verso. Numbered 532 and 138-35652–26 in pencil on the verso.

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

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

LITERATURE: Tiziano Panconi, ed., Boldini Mon Amour: opere note e mai viste, nuove scoperte, fotografie e documenti inediti, exhibition catalogue, Montecatini Terme, 2008, illustrated p.424.

EXHIBITED: Possibly Rome, Galleria d’Arte di Renato Attanasio, Giovanni Boldini, no.55 (‘Porte S. Denis’); Possibly Florence, Istituto Francese, Boldini e Parigi, 1959, no.49 (‘La porte St. Denis’).

Giovanni Boldini was a gifted and somewhat compulsive draughtsman, and filled many sketchbooks with drawings. (He would also use whatever paper came to hand, and there are examples of quick sketches drawn on menu covers, receipts, ledger paper, postcards, hotel stationery, pages torn from auction catalogues, and so forth.) His drawings, characterized by a restless energy and a spirited technique wholly in keeping with the bravura brushwork of his oil paintings, range from quick sketches of figures, landscapes, buildings and objects to more elaborate studies of these same motifs. As Richard Kendall has recently written, ‘Evident in almost all of [Boldini’s drawings] is a vivid engagement with the pleasures of looking and with the nervous exuberance of the drawing process, irrespective of the chosen subject…Some of these drawings would have taken only minutes or even seconds to complete, while others are the work of hours of concentrated labor . . . This engagement was vividly physical and sensuous, as his hand erupted in wild flourishes of pencil, pen and ink, crayon, and charcoal, or opted for extreme delicacy as the situation demanded.’1 Among of the contents of Boldini’s Parisian studio on the Boulevard Berthier at the end of his long career, the present sheet – like most of the artist’s drawings – is not related to a finished painting. From the time of his arrival in Paris in 1871 until the early years of the 20th century, Boldini made countless pencil drawings and sketches of the people, cafes, buildings, streets and sights of the sprawling city. As Kendall has noted, ‘In Paris, most of the works on paper from his first years were directed at the city itself.

This considerable body of drawings – all of them left tantalizingly undated – is both more disparate and more vivacious than any known sheets that had preceded them.’2 The largest surviving group of drawings

by Boldini, bequeathed by the artist’s widow, is today in the collection of the Museo Boldini in Ferrara.

Built between 1672 and 1676, the Porte Saint-Denis was, along with the nearby Porte Saint-Martin, the only city gate from the old fortifications of Paris to survive Baron Haussmann’s extensive renovation of the city in the 1850s and 1860s. A similar pencil drawing by Boldini of the Porte Saint-Martin was exhibited in Paris in 19823.

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31 FRANCESCO PAOLO MICHETTI Tocco di Casauria 1851-1929 Francavilla al Mare The Head of a Sheep Pastel, black chalk and touches of gouache on light brown paper. Signed Michetti in black chalk at the lower right.

527 x 438 mm. (20 3/4 x 17 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Chile, until 2010.

A pupil of Domenico Morelli at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples, Francesco Paolo Michetti enjoyed his earliest success in Paris, where he participated in the Salons of 1872 and 1875. However, it was not until 1877, when his large canvas of The Procession of the Corpus Domini at Chieti was exhibited in Naples to popular acclaim, that he secured his reputation in Italy. Michetti developed a distinctive style of painting, with the use of bold colours and vibrant effects achieved with a confident handling of the brush. A common thread in his work is his interest in rural themes, and particularly the beliefs and traditions of his native Abruzzi region, seen in such paintings of the 1880s as The Vow, now in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. In 1883 he purchased an old convent in the town of Francavilla al Mare that he transformed into a large studio.

A close friend of Gabriele d’Annunzio, who published an essay on the artist in 1896, Michetti exhibited frequently throughout Italy, often showing large groups of studies in pastel and tempera. At the third Biennale in Venice, held in 1899, Michetti was honoured with a retrospective exhibition of some two hundred works covering the whole of his career. His last major paintings, large canvases entitled The Cripples and The Snakes which continued his interest in local customs, were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, and are today in the Museo Michetti in Francavilla al Mare. After 1900 Michetti seems to have abandoned painting in favour of photography, becoming one of the first artistic practitioners of the new medium in Italy. In fact, by the early 1880s Michetti had already begun to base his paintings and drawings on his own photographs, preferring these to using posed models in his studio.

During the last thirty years of his life, Michetti continued to experiment with photography, while also producing a series of almost monochromatic drawings and sketches in gouache, oil and pastel, until his death in 1929.

As a draughtsman, Michetti had a particular fondness for the medium of pastel, which he was able to exploit for its strong colour and luminous effects. He was introduced to the medium by the painter Eduardo Dalbono, and from about 1877 onwards worked as a draughtsman almost exclusively in pastel or mixed media. His use of the pastel medium was also to be a distinct influence on a number of younger artists in Naples, such as Giuseppe Casciaro.

Sheep, goats and other animals appear in several of Michetti’s paintings of pastoral subjects in the 1880s and 1890s. The present sheet, executed with the artist’s characteristic bravura handling of a combination of pastel and gouache, may be compared stylistically with a large sheet of studies of goats in pastel, datable to 1886, in a private collection1. A similar large pastel study of the head of a goat was sold at auction in Italy in 20022, while another study of a goat, drawn in gouache and pastel, appeared at auction in Italy in 19943. Between 1895 and 1900 Michetti also made several photographs of sheep and goats4, which he may also have used as preparatory studies for paintings.

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WILLIAM FRASER GARDEN Gillingham 1856-1921 Huntingdon The Bridge at St. Ives, Huntingdonshire Watercolour. Signed with initials and dated W. F. G. ’99. in grey ink at the lower right. Laid down.

120 x 155 mm. (4 3/4 x 6 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Christopher Wood, London and Marston, Somerset.

Born into a family of artists, Garden William Fraser changed his name to William Fraser Garden so as to distinguish himself from his six brothers, all but one of whom were also active as landscape artists.

Arguably the best of the so-called ‘Fraser Brotherhood’, Fraser Garden exhibited his watercolours at the Royal Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours. The subjects of his watercolours were by and large views of the fen villages along the river Ouse, such as Holywell, Hemingford Grey and St. Ives, characterized by a remarkable attention to detail and crisp, cool lighting. Throughout the 1880s Garden was represented by the Dowdeswell gallery in New Bond Street in London, who sold a number of his works. By 1890, however, he seems to have given up exhibiting in London, and from then on relied on a small number of local collectors in Huntingdonshire.

He was never, however, a very prolific artist. As Charles Lane has noted of Garden, ‘His apparent lack of ambition and the consequently few watercolours which he painted each year, even when at his busiest, resulted naturally enough in his failing to come to the notice of all but a local audience.’1 Although he was the most successful of the Fraser brothers, Garden was very poor for most of his life, and was declared bankrupt in 1899. He lived at in the village of Hemingford Abbots and later at Holywell, and in his old age is said to have paid his bills with drawings instead of bank notes. Long forgotten by scholars and collectors, Garden’s body of work has only fairly recently been rediscovered, and his reputation as among the finest Victorian landscape watercolourists firmly established.

Garden’s watercolour views of his native Huntingdonshire and along the river Ouse in Bedfordshire are masterpieces of clarity and detail. As Christopher Newall has written, ‘Garden’s watercolors are a manifestation of the late-century revival of interest in the representation of landscape subjects in minute and painstaking detail. He chose picturesque but unremarkable subjects in his immediate locality – decrepit mill buildings and riverside inns along the banks of the Great Ouse, as well as pure landscapes…His works of the late 1880s and early 1890s are extraordinary in their pellucid clarity of light and their exact delineation of architectural and landscape detail.’2 Another writer has noted of the artist that ‘his drawing of buildings is nearly photographic in quality. Despite this almost too detailed approach his work lives, though he seldom populated his drawings except with a few high-flying birds.’3 The narrow stone bridge in the small town of St. Ives, on the left bank of the river Ouse, was built around 1415. The chapel dedicated to St. Leger (or possibly St. Lawrence), constructed on the eastern, downstream side of the bridge with an altar consecrated in 1426, is one of only three surviving examples of bridge chapels in England. The present sheet depicts the upper two-story extension to the chapel which was added in 1736, when the structure was converted to a house4. The bridge chapel was returned to its original appearance in 19305.

Fraser Garden painted several views of town and bridge of St. Ives. These include a watercolour drawing of the bridge, seen from the opposite side6, and another view of the bridge and the town, dated 18907.

Garden also produced views of the bridge from a much closer vantage point along the riverbank; one such example, dated 1895, was formerly in the collection of David Fuller8, while another, dated 1890, appeared at auction in 1984 and 20089.

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FRENCH SCHOOL Circa 1900 An Elegant Woman Wearing a Fancy Hat Pastel. Signed R. Ravin(?) in red chalk (over an earlier signature in pencil) at the lower right.

670 x 525 mm. (26 3/8 x 20 5/8 in.) [sight]

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PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR Limoges 1841-1919 Cagnes-sur-Mer Study of a Bather Watercolour over an underdrawing in pencil. A faintly sketched figure of a reclining nude bather drawn in pencil at the right of the full sheet. Signed Renoir in pencil at the lower left. Numbered 171 in red chalk on the verso.

321 x 231 mm. (12 5/8 x 9 1/8 in.) [image] 324 x 309 mm. (12 3/4 x 12 1/4 in.) [sheet] Watermark: GERHARD LOEBER. PROVENANCE: Marcel Guérin, Paris; Maurice Gobin, Paris (Lugt 1124a and 1124b); Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Audap, Solanet, Godeau-Velliet], 17 December 1993, lot 14; Private collection; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1995.

LITERATURE: Maurice Gobin, L’art expressif au XIXe siècle Français: 120 dessins, aquarelles, gouaches et pastels, Paris, 1960, unpaginated, under Chapter XX (with incorrect dimensions).

EXHIBITED: Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, Exposition Renoir, 1933, no.132 (‘Étude de Baigneuse. Etudes pour les Baigneuses de l’ancienne coll. du prince de Wagram peintes vers 1897.’), with incorrect dimensions.

Auguste Renoir was an inveterate draughtsman, equally adept in pencil, pen, chalk, charcoal, watercolour and pastel. Yet he seems to have thought little of his drawings, throwing away or destroying most of them, and is said to have even used drawings to light the kitchen stove. Apart from pastels, Renoir only rarely exhibited his drawings in his lifetime, and it was not until two years after his death that a significant exhibition of his drawings was held, at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1921. The exhibition comprised a large number of drawings, watercolours and pastels from all periods of the artist’s career, numbering almost 150 works. For many visitors, the exhibition was a revelation; as one critic wrote, ‘We make our way into the artist’s studio, he opens his portfolios for us, hides nothing from us, from the most accomplished works to the faintest of notes.’1 For much of the last two decades of his life Renoir’s hands were crippled by arthritis, so that by around 1913 his hands were so bent that he was no longer able to draw. Yet it remains true of Renoir that, as François Daulte wrote, ‘It is in his sketches and studies, rather than his large paintings, that he reveals all his originality and freshness of vision.’2 The motif of young women bathing by a river or lake was one to which Renoir returned throughout his late career, and most significantly in the large painting known as the Great Bathers (Les grands baigneuses), painted between 1884 and 1887 and today in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art3. This major canvas, on which he worked for four years, was to be of seminal importance in the artist’s career, establishing the female nude as a central and recurring theme in Renoir’s work from then on. It was also important in establishing the artist’s renewed interest in figure drawing. As John House has written of Renoir’s work of the late 1880s, ‘during these years [he] focused on one issue in particular, on the relationship of drawing to painting, of contour to colour. He worked out the compositions of paintings like Bathers in a long sequence of preparatory studies in different media (pencil, chalk, ink, watercolour), so that he could control as fully as possible the varied elements that he wanted to unite in the final painting.

This was the only phase in his career when he made such complex preparations and gave so important a role to drawing. Few preparatory drawings have survived from his earlier years, and he probably used them only sporadically.’4

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This lively watercolour is a preparatory study for the figure at the left of Renoir’s painting Bathers in the Forest (fig.1) of c.1897, in the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania5, a painting executed some ten years after the Great Bathers. In the Barnes canvas, more loosely painted than its larger predecessor, Renoir adapted the formal grandeur of the Great Bathers into a more casual idiom. As John House has noted of the Barnes painting, ‘in contrast to the stiffness and stillness of the figures in the earlier canvas, the figures are far more animated and the softly brushed paint-handling gives the whole canvas a sense of movement and energy.’6 Like the Great Bathers, the composition of the Bathers in the Forest appears to have been similarly inspired by the Baroque sculptor François Girardon’s lead bas-relief frieze of bathing nymphs on the wall of a fountain and pond at one end of the Allée d’Eau at Versailles7.

1.

The present sheet is the most highly finished of the handful of preparatory studies for the Barnes Foundation Bathers in the Forest that are known. A pencil study for the same figure, with the second, reclining figure also lightly sketched in (fig.2), is today in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra8. A very large study of the entire composition of the Barnes painting, with the figures drawn in outline in pencil, is in the Grob Collection in Saanen9, while much of the same composition is found in an oil sketch of several of the figures, in a private collection in Paris10.

The faintly sketched reclining figure at the right of the present sheet also appears in the Barnes canvas, and echoes a similar figure in the Great Bathers. Indeed, in painting the Bathers in the Forest Renoir appears to have incorporated 2.

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several motifs he had previously developed for the Great Bathers, some of which were not used in the earlier work but which appear in studies for it. As Christopher Riopelle has noted, ‘as he worked on the Great Bathers Renoir considered several individual figures and figure groups he later laid aside, only to take them up again in the 1890s. Though painted a decade later, the Barnes canvas reflects some of the options for figures and figure groups with which Renoir juggled as he contemplated the Great Bathers.’11 Among drawings which contain elements related to both the Bathers in the Forest and the Great Bathers are two closely-related sheets of figure studies12, several of which were used in the Barnes canvas, as well as a study of a splashing nude13 and two studies of the same figure with a reclining nude, both formerly on the art market in London14.

The number of preparatory drawings that may be related to the Barnes painting of Bathers in the Forest is a testament not only to the importance of the painting to Renoir, but also to the significance the artist attached to the practice of drawing in the 1890s. John House has noted of Renoir’s drawings of this period that ‘linear concerns were not an alternative to colour. He also made jewel-like watercolour studies in preparation for paintings such as Bathers, and in the final pictures luminous colour lies between even the sharpest contours. The forms in them are crisply defined at their margins, but their internal modelling is suggested by nuances of colour, not by chiaroscuro; Renoir thus starkly juxtaposed on the canvas the two basic conventions for representing form in paint, traditionally seen as opposites: by form and tone, and by colour.’15 Unlike landscape drawings, however, figure studies in watercolour by Renoir remain rare today. A stylistically similar study of a female nude, also drawn in pencil and watercolour, is in the collection of the Albertina in Vienna16. Renoir’s interest in achieving colouristic effects in his drawings of this period is also seen in a vibrant pastel sketch of approximately the same date as the present sheet, in the collection of the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania17, which is a study for a painting of Bathers Playing with a Crab in the Cleveland Museum of Art, completed around 1897.

As one recent scholar has noted of Renoir’s late works, ‘In drawing as in painting, it is the female form that dominates, both in the group studies and in those of isolated figures. Everything contrives to show off the female body in all its glowing splendour.’18 Renoir’s drawings of nude bathers were also greatly admired by his fellow artists. After a visit to his studio in January 1886, the painter Berthe Morisot wrote in her private notebook: ‘He is a draughtsman of the first order; it would be interesting to show all these preparatory studies for a painting, to the public, which generally imagines that the Impressionists work in a very casual way. I do not think it is possible to go further in the rendering of form; two drawings of women going into the water I find as charming as the drawings of Ingres. He said that nudes seemed to him to be one of the essential forms of art.’19 The present sheet once belonged to two notable Parisian amateurs of the early 20th century. The collector Marcel Louis Guérin (1873-1948) assembled a superb group of 19th century prints, with an emphasis on the graphic work of Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Forain. (He also published important catalogues and articles on the prints of these artists, as well as on Gauguin and Manet.) Following the dispersal of his collection of prints at auction in 1921 and 1922, Guérin built a second collection devoted to 19th and early 20th century drawings, including works by Degas, Delacroix, Forain, Manet, Renoir, Rodin and Toulouse-Lautrec20. This watercolour by Renoir was later acquired – probably directly from Guérin – by the noted Parisian art dealer Maurice Gobin (b.1883) for his personal collection, which also included a significant group of works by Théodore Géricault. Gobin lent the drawing to the seminal retrospective exhibition of Renoir’s paintings and drawings at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in 1933.

This drawing has been requested for the forthcoming exhibition Impressionism on Paper, to be held at the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Albertina in Vienna between 2011 and 2012.

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PAUL-EMILE COLIN Lunéville 1867-1949 Bourg-la-Reine Nocturne: A Barge on the Seine Watercolour. Stamped with the Colin atelier stamp (Lugt 3734) in violet ink on the verso.

239 x 186 mm. (9 3/8 x 7 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Colin atelier sale, Metz, Nouvel Hôtel des Ventes, 25 January 2004, lot 137.

After beginning his studies as a doctor in Nancy, Paul-Émile Colin moved to Paris to complete his education in 1887. His interest in drawing led him also to enroll at the Atelier Colarossi, where he met and befriended the artist Charles Filiger, though on the whole Colin seems to have been largely selftaught. In the summer of 1890 he travelled with Filiger to Le Pouldu in Brittany, where they met Paul Gauguin, Jacob Meyer de Haan and Paul Sérusier, and where both Filiger and Colin contributed to the decoration of the dining room of La Buvette de la Plage, the inn owned by Marie Henry where the artists stayed. Colin soon embarked on a secondary career as a printmaker, working primarily in the medium of wood engraving. His first prints – strongly influenced by the graphic manner of Gauguin, Félix Vallotton and Henri Rivière – were produced in 1893, and his early work continued to show the influence of the Pont-Aven and Nabis schools throughout the decade.

Living in Lagny-sur-Marne in the eastern suburbs of Paris, Colin carried on practicing medicine until 1901, when he decided to devote himself fully to printmaking and book illustration. He illustrated several books, including editions of works by Anatole France, Emile Zola, Jules Renard, Rudyard Kipling and Maurice Barrès, and also worked in lithography, watercolour, pastel and, from around 1920 onwards, as a painter in oils. Apart from visits to Italy in the 1920s and to Spain, Portugal and Morocco in the early 1930s, Colin worked mainly in the Parisian suburb of Bourg-la-Reine, where he had settled in 1911.

During the Second World War he worked as a doctor with the Red Cross. A member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Colin was also a founder member of the Société de la Gravure sur Bois Originale, established in 1911, and was eventually elected vice-president of the group. In the 1920s, retinal problems associated with the artist’s severe myopia led to his giving up wood engraving, for which precise vision was a prerequisite, in favour of painting and drawing.

Although Colin remains much better known today as a printmaker than as a draughtsman, his works in oil, pastel and watercolour appear to have been of equal importance to him. As a contemporary critic wrote in 1913, ‘In spite of the considerable effort and work that his woodcuts represent, Colin has never allowed himself to become totally absorbed by his craft. He has always been attracted to colour. His paintings are still little known and they are rare…His pastels are quite an important body of work that we are trying to judge. They belong to all the periods of his artistic activity; they evoke the landscapes of all the regions where Colin has endeavored to understand the spectacle that Nature offers us.’1 A large group of prints and drawings by Paul-Émile Colin, numbering nearly five hundred works, is today in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy.

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GEORGES DE FEURE Paris 1868-1943 Paris Winter Landscape with Skaters Gouache on board. Signed de Feure in white gouache at the lower right.

377 x 448 mm. (14 7/8 x 17 5/8 in.)

Of Belgian and Dutch origins, Georges de Feure was largely self-taught as an artist. He was born Georges Joseph van Sluijters in Paris, where his father worked as an architect. Returning with his family to the Netherlands with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, De Feure did not come back to Paris until 1889. Settling in Montmartre, he may have trained with Jules Chéret and 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, alongside Gauguin and the Nabis artists, as well as showing his work at the Salons de la Rose + Croix of 1893 and 1894, where his watercolours garnered some critical praise. De Feure exhibited at the Societé Nationale in 1894, and the same year 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 seemingly influenced by Japanese prints, as well as producing colour lithographs.

Like such contemporaries as Alphonse Mucha and Eugène Grasset, Georges 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, De Feure 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 significant later projects was the decoration of the Parisian studio of the couturier Madeleine Vionnet in 1922, and interiors and pavilions for various expositions. Late in his career De Feure was appointed Professor of Decorative Art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

This evocative winter landscape is likely to date from the early 1920s, when De Feure produced a number of paintings and gouaches of small towns and villages. (In June of 1922 one of these, A Village in Holland, was acquired from the artist by the French sate for the sum of 2,000 francs.) A comparable Dutch winter scene is in a private collection in Munich3, while another snow scene in gouache, though probably somewhat earlier in date, is in another private collection4. Ian Millman has written of such works as these that, as a group, they may have been intended by the artist to represent a sort of panorama of landscape in different seasons.

The present sheet is accompanied by a certificate from Ian Millman, dated 7 April 2010.

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FEDERICO BELTRÁN MASSES Guiara de la Melena (Cuba) 1884-1949 Barcelona Landscape with a Stormy Sky Watercolour, over pencil, on blue paper. Signed F. Beltran Masses in black ink at the lower right.

253 x 363 mm. (9 7/8 x 14 1/4 in.)

Watermark: MICHALLET / FRANCE. PROVENANCE: Private collection, Spain.

LITERATURE: Jose Manuel Arnáiz, et al., Cien Años de Pintura en España y Portugal (1830-1930), Vol.I, Madrid, 1988, illustrated in colour on pp.294-295.

Born in Cuba to a Spanish military officer, Federico Armando Beltrán Masses returned with his family to Barcelona in 1899. There he studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, where he became a disciple of the Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla. In 1905 he visited Madrid to study at the Prado, and until 1909 spent much time travelling around the province of Asturias, where he painted landscapes and genre subjects.

After winning a prize at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1916, Beltrán Masses launched his career as fashionable society portrait painter. Living in Paris, he painted numerous portraits of princes, noblemen, financiers, cultural figures and society beauties, in which the subjects were depicted in a bold and overtly theatrical manner, often with more than a touch of latent eroticism. (As one contemporary critic noted of the artist, ‘He has no fear of a touch of exaggeration in form nor even of slight distortion (think again of El Greco) in order to symbolize the mood engendered in him by the actual presence of an interesting sitter.’1) A superb colourist, Beltrán was particularly fond of a distinctive shade of deep blue in his paintings, which came to be known as ‘Beltrán blue’. Apart from portraits, he also painted subjects of a mythological or allegorical nature – works that have been aptly described as ‘decadent and perversely sensual’2 – exemplified by a scandalous painting of an exotic nude Salome, exhibited at the Biennale in Venice in 1920.

Beltrán Masses enjoyed a highly successful career, receiving numerous portrait commissions from patrons all over Europe, America and as far afield as India. Among the portraits he painted were several of Rudolph Valentino, who first encountered the artist’s work at an one-man exhibition at the Wildenstein gallery in New York in 1924, as well as the actors Douglas Fairbanks and Pola Negri, the Shah of Persia, Kings Alfonso XIII of Spain and George VI of England and several members of European nobility. Beltrán exhibited his work throughout Europe, winning several awards and prizes, and was a member of the fine art academies of Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Córdoba, Málaga and Lisbon. He gained a particular level of success in England, where his first gallery exhibition in London drew around 20,000 visitors. Selfportraits by the artist are today in the Uffizi, and other paintings by Beltrán Masses are in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and elsewhere.

This spirited, vibrant watercolour is a rare surviving example of the artist’s interest in landscape. While Beltrán Masses remains best known as a portrait painter, it should be remembered that the early part of his career was spent mainly working as a landscape painter in Spain, under the influence of Sorolla.

The artist also exhibited at the Royal Watercolour Society in London in 1934.

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KIRILL ZDANEVICH Tbilisi 1892-1969 Tbilisi The Aviator Watercolour. Signed K. Zdanevich in Russian and dated 27. in black ink at the lower right.

242 x 232 mm. (9 1/2 x 9 1/8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Galerie Darial, Paris; Private collection, France.

EXHIBITED: Probably Paris, Galerie Darial, Dessins cubistes de Kyrill Zdanevich, 1973-1974.

Born in the city of Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia, Kirill Mikhailovich Zdanevich was devoted to drawing from an early age. (When he was ten years old, his mother noted in her diary that ‘Kira can never wait to finish dinner for fear he’ll be late for drawing class. There’s no doubt that he’s developing a deep love of drawing, a growing aesthetic sense, and I feel sure that soon his burgeoning love of art will burst into flower…’1) Zdanevich entered the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg in 1911, studying there for two years. The following year he met and became friendly with Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, and sent three paintings to Moscow to be exhibited with the Oslinyy Khvost (Donkey’s Tail) group; an association of Russian artists led by Larionov and Goncharova. In 1913 Zdanevich went to Paris, where he visited the studios of Picasso and Matisse and befriended the expatriate Russian painter Serge Charchoune. Returning to Russia in 1914, Zdanevich participated in another exhibition organized

by Larionov and Goncharova in Moscow, entitled No.4, where he showed seven paintings and fifteen drawings.

With the outbreak of war in 1914, Zdanevich served as an officer in the Russian army on the East Prussian front. He was wounded several times, and in 1917 was discharged and settled in Tiflis. In October of that year he organized a large retrospective exhibition of his work in Tiflis and at the same time, together with his younger brother Ilya and the writers Aleksandr Kruchenykh and Igor Terentyev, founded the Futurist group 41°, dedicated to the advancement of avant-garde poetry. Working in close collaboration with Ilya, a noted writer and engraver, Zdanevich created designs for some of the finest Futurist books of the period, such as the Treatise on Total Indecency, written by Terentyev and published in Tiflis in 1920. During this period Zdanevich, who had signed the Rayonist and Futurist manifestos, painted a series of small watercolours but few oil paintings. His Cubo-Futurist style was characterized by a strong sense of colour; as Charchoune said of him, ‘He brought us colour, which the Cubists had virtually abandoned.’ In 1922 he applied for a visa to go to America, but was unsuccessful, and was also unable to obtain permission to visit France, where Ilya was living. The 1920s found Zdanevich worked primarily as a designer of stage sets and as a book illustrator, dividing his time between Tiflis and Moscow.

Following the Second World War, he was deported to a work camp for about ten years. In the late 1950s and 1960s Zdanevich wrote several books and articles on Georgian art and artists. After repeatedly applying for a visa to visit France, he was finally able to do so in 1966, when he was reunited with his brother. Kirill Zdanevich died three years later, in Georgia.

This Cubo-Futurist composition, dated 1927, is likely to have been intended as an illustration for a book or periodical. The drawing may have been among a group of drawings by Zdanevich exhibited at the Galerie Darial in Paris in 1973. A similar composition, entitled Radio, Karl Marx, The City, was exhibited in New York in 19872.

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39 CONRAD FELIXMÜLLER Dresden 1897-1977 Berlin Recto: Luca Peeling an Orange (Die Apfelsine) Verso: Circus Scene Watercolour. Signed and dated C. felixmüller / 29. in black ink at the upper left, and -lixmüller [partially cut off] in brown ink on the verso. Titled and dated Die Apfelsine 1929 in blue ink on the verso.

551 x 364 mm. (21 3/4 x 14 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Felixmüller estate, and thence by descent in the family of the artist until 2010.

LITERATURE: Jutta Penndorf, Antje Birthälmer and Sabine Fehlemann, Conrad Felixmüller. Die Dresdner Jahre: Aquarelle und Zeichnungen 1912-1933, exhibition catalogue, Wuppertal and Altenburg, 1997, p.35, no.33 (recto illustrated only).

EXHIBITED: Dortmund, Museum am Ostwall, Weisbaden, Nassauischer Kunstverein and Saarbrücken, Saarland-Museum, Conrad Felixmüller 1897-1977, 1978-1979, no.117; Wuppertal, Von der HeydtMuseum and Altenburg, Lindenau-Museum, Conrad Felixmüller. Die Dresdner Jahre: Aquarelle und Zeichnungen 1912-1933, 1997, no.33.

Konrad Felix Müller took drawing lessons and seems to have taught himself the basic techniques of printmaking before being accepted into the Academy of Art in Dresden at the end of 1912. His first oil paintings date from 1913, and in the same year he produced a series of woodcuts in a distinctively Expressionist manner, followed a year later by a group of etchings that were exhibited at a gallery in Berlin. By 1915 the young artist had taken to calling himself Conrad Felixmüller, and had embarked on an independent career. He spent some time in Berlin, where he briefly shared a studio with the artist Ludwig Meidner, and also contributed to Herwarth Walden’s avant-garde magazine Der Sturm.

Established as a leading member of the second generation of Expressionist artists In Dresden, Felixmüller was associated with a group of progressive artists and writers in the city, and illustrated the work of several writers as well as publishing treatises on art himself. Marriage in 1918 and fatherhood the same year inspired a new interest in domestic themes, the result of the contentment he found in family life.

A burst of activity as a painter, printmaker and illustrator, as well as experiments in sculpture and stage design, saw Felixmüller exhibiting his work in Berlin, Dresden and Hanover, while several portfolios of his engravings, etchings and woodcuts were published.

By the middle of the decade, however, there began to be a pronounced change in the Felixmüller’s style, with the Expressionist tendencies of his work of the late teens and early 1920s eventually giving way to a brighter, more naturalistic manner. This break was codified in 1929 in an article written by Felixmüller for the magazine Kunst und Künstler, entitled ‘Malerglück und Malerleben’ (‘Painter’s Happiness and Painter’s Life’), in which the artist gave notice of his break with Expressionism. His paintings and drawings began to focus on a more private and optimistic approach to subject matter and mood, with a particular emphasis on depictions of domestic life. Nevertheless, during the years of Nazi rule, Felixmüller found his work labeled as ‘degenerate’ and struggled to work freely. He was excluded from official artist’s organizations, and between 1937 and 1938 some 150 of his works which were in public collections were confiscated by the Reich and either sold or destroyed. After the war Felixmüller continued to work as a painter, printmaker and illustrator, although living in East Germany he remained isolated from avant-garde trends in the West. He taught drawing and painting at Martin Luther University in Halle and later settled in East Berlin, where he worked in relative anonymity before he and his wife were allowed to move to West Berlin to join their sons in 1967. In the years before his death ten years later his graphic work in particular began to earn the artist a considerable reputation outside Germany.

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Drawn in the same year that the artist’s manifesto declaring his break with the tenets of Expressionism was published in the periodical Kunst und Künstler, this vibrant drawing is a portrait of Felixmüller’s son Luca, the artist’s eldest child, born in 1918.

Luca and his younger brother Titus were to be the painter’s favourite models throughout their childhood, and he produced numerous painted and drawn portraits of them at rest and play.

A pendant watercolour of the same size and date, entitled Die Milch and depicting Titus drinking a glass of milk (fig.1), is in a private collection1.

Shortly after Conrad Felixmüller’s death, his son Titus provided an account of the way in which he and his elder brother would pose for their father. As he recalled, ‘for the sons, modeling created a special relationship with their father which lasted past their childhood years and carried over into manhood…Ideas for family portraits or scenes arose spontaneously. Watching one of his children playing, be it with a wooden train, a cat or a paper 1. hat, would end with the categorical demand: “Just keep standing still like that, I will be back with pencil and paper.” We then knew what was in store for us; we had been trapped into being his models again…After a few sketches or sometimes even grand drawings – of which a few still exist – came the fine scratching noise of charcoal on canvas to fix the composition. That often signaled the end of the first day of modeling...A day of modeling lasted two to three hours, interrupted by short breaks which gave the children the opportunity to view the picture and also to criticize it…I draw from these times of being together an understanding for the great work of my father. I am happy about that, even if it meant many “quiet” hours which are not always easy for children.’2 A closely related painting of the same subject, dated 1929, in which a potted plant is seen on the table, is in a German private collection3. Also related in subject is an earlier work of 1925; a painting of Luca seated and drawing at a table on which rests a vase of flowers4. Stylistically, the present sheet may also be compared with a watercolour Self-Portrait of 1928, today in the collection of the Staatliches LindenauMuseum in Altenburg5.

The verso of the present sheet, drawn in a bold, Expressionist manner typical of the artist’s work of the early 1920s, must predate the portrait of Luca on the recto by several years. It is, in fact, closely related to a watercolour of a pair of circus performers (fig.2), dating from 1921, which is today in a private collection in Germany6. Felixmüller produced a handful of drawings of clowns, acrobats, tightrope walkers and other circus folk in the first half of the 1920s. The artist must have decided to use the reverse of an old drawing when he came to make the portrait of his son several years later.

Dated 1929, this watercolour portrait of Luca, which the artist kept throughout his life and which has remained in the possession of his family until recently, gains added poignancy in its depiction of the happiness and tranquility of the artist’s family life in the years before the Nazi rise to power and the subsequent upheavals in the artist’s life and career.` 2.

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40 SIR GEORGE CLAUSEN, R.A., R.W.S. London 1852-1944 Newbury Study of Sea and Sky Watercolour on white paper. Signed G. CLAUSEN in brown ink at the lower right.

255 x 316 mm. (10 x 12 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: E. Stuart-Smith (according to a label on the old backing board).

EXHIBITED: London, Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours (according to a label on the old backing board).

George Clausen worked from age of sixteen as a draughtsman in a firm of decorators in London before winning a scholarship to the South Kensington Schools. He also studied with Edwin Long in London and William Bouguereau in Paris, although his work had very little in common with either. A far more significant influence on the young artist was Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose work he first saw at the Grosvenor Gallery in London, and who inspired him to take up the theme of rural life as his subject matter. In 1881 Clausen left London to settle in Childwick Green in Hertfordshire, later moving to the village of Widdington, near Saffron Walden in Essex. Working directly from nature, he painted scenes of rural life, and in particular the landscape and peasants of the farmlands of Essex. As one scholar has written, ‘His preoccupation was with light; the dazzle of sun on cornfields and haystacks and mowers at midday, the stilled radiance of blossom in orchards, the woods and empty fields at evening, and the subtle atmospheric effects in shadowy barn and stable.’1 Clausen exhibited at the New English Art Club and the Royal Academy, although he did not have a one-man gallery exhibition until 1902. By the 1890s the influence of Bastien-Lepage had been tempered by that of Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, artists whom Clausen greatly admired. He was appointed a Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy Schools, and was elected an A.R.A. in 1895, becoming a Royal Academician in 1908. In 1926 he received a commission for a large mural for St. Stephen’s Hall in the House of Commons, and on its unveiling the following year received a knighthood. Clausen continued to enjoy a successful career until his death in 1944, at the age of ninety-two. A retrospective exhibition of his work at the National Gallery, proposed just a few months before the artist’s death, sadly never took place.

As a draughtsman, Clausen was a gifted and prolific master of different media, and some forty sketchbooks from throughout his long career survive. His drawings were often preparatory studies for his pictures, although their significance as works of art in their own right can be seen in the fact that, at his first one-man exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in London in 1902, he actually exhibited more drawings and pastels than oil paintings, with thirty-one of the former and twenty of the latter. As a watercolourist, Clausen produced both landscape studies and smaller variants of his oil paintings. He showed regularly at the Royal Watercolour Society, which he had joined in 1898, and in 1921 exhibited forty-one of his watercolours at the Grosvenor Gallery. Indeed, in the latter part of his career watercolours came to dominate his output.

Writing in 1930, Clausen noted of his technique that ‘I try to work as simply and directly as possible in water-colour…I try (though, of course, I can seldom do it) to put the colour on in one wash, without retouching, for I think there is nothing so beautiful as a clean tint in water-colour that is exactly right. And even if it does not exactly run into the right place (for water-colour is a tricky medium) the quality of the colour has something of the spontaneity and effortless rightness that one finds in Nature itself – a quality that is always lost by labouring and stippling a drawing...It seems to me that water-colour painting depends more on simplicity of method than oil-painting, and this means, of course, that you must know pretty well what you are want to do before you begin.’2

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41 TAMARA DE LEMPICKA Warsaw 1898-1980 Cuernavaca Portrait of Louisanne Kuffner de Dioszegh Pencil. Inscribed Louisianne 1940 / Beverly Hills, Cal. in pencil on the verso.

141 x 91 mm. (5 1/2 x 3 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to the sitter, Louisanne Kuffner de Dioszegh, later Mrs. Nathaniel Glickman, Thousand Oaks, California and Medford, Oregon; Thence by descent until 2010.

Born in Poland to upper class parents, Tamara Gurwik-Gorska was educated in Switzerland and settled in St. Petersburg in 1914. Two years she married a young lawyer, Count Tadeusz Lempicki. In 1918, fleeing the Bolshevik revolution, the couple moved to Paris, where Tamara was to live for the next twenty years. She began studying with Maurice Denis and André Lhote, who was to be a particular influence on her painting style. In 1922 she exhibited for the first time at the Salon d’Automne, and was to show yearly there and also at the Salon des Indépendants. The late 1920s and early 1930s found the artist at the height of her career, enjoying an exalted position in Parisian society and exhibiting her portraits at the annual Salons and with the Galerie Colette Weill in Paris. In 1932 the Musée de Luxembourg acquired one of her paintings for 8,000 francs, and the following year she married her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner de Dioszegh. The second half of the 1930s saw a dramatic reduction in her output, largely due to bouts of depression. After recovering her health, she decided to relaunch her career in America. Early in 1939, De Lempicka and Kuffner left Europe and sailed to New York, where the artist had her first major American exhibition at the Paul Reinhardt Gallery. The following year the couple settled in Los Angeles, and De Lempicka once again enjoyed a busy social life in Hollywood. A large retrospective exhibition of her work at the Julien Levy galleries in New York and Los Angeles in 1941 and 1942 served to secure her artistic reputation in America. The Kuffners moved to New York in 1942, and after the war De Lempicka began to travel extensively around Europe, as well as visiting Cuba and Mexico. Her work of the postwar period, however, achieved little public recognition or success, and she stopped exhibiting her work after 1962. Tamara de Lempicka’s work began to be rediscovered in the early 1970s, a few years before her death in Mexico in 1980.

This drawing is a portrait of the artist’s stepdaughter, Louisanne Kuffner de Dioszegh (1925-2009), the daughter of Baron Kuffner from his first marriage. Executed when the sitter was at the age of fifteen, the drawing is related to a full-length painted portrait of Louisanne which, however, was never finished. As Louisanne recalled in later years, ‘When the Second World War broke out in 1939, my step sister Kizette and I were in France, my brother Peter was in Scotland, and my parents, Baron Raoul Kuffner de Dioszegh and my stepmother, the artist Tamara de Lempicka, were in the United States. They could not return to Europe and we had to apply for immigration visas to the Unites States. It was the end of July, 1940, when Kizette and I arrived in Beverly Hills…It was at this time that Tamara de Lempicka began a full length portrait of me.

Unfortunately, she did not finish it that summer…as a result, the full length painting was never completed.’1 Following the death of Baron Kuffner in 1961, De Lempicka cropped the unfinished canvas to show just the head of Louisanne, looking to the left, and sent the painting (fig.1) to her. Sold at auction in 2000, the painting is now in an American private collection2. The present sheet, however, remained in the possession of Louisanne until her death in 2009.

1.

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42 ANNA AIRY Greenwich 1882-1964 Playford, nr. Ipswich Verdure and Decay Pen and black ink and watercolour. Signed with the artist’s monogram in black ink at the lower right centre1.

425 x 538 mm. (16 3/4 x 21 1/8 in.) [sheet] EXHIBITED: London, R.B.A. Galleries, Anna Airy: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, 1952, no.15; London, Royal Academy, The [Summer] Exhibition, 1956, no.880; Ipswich, Ipswich Art Club, Retrospective Loan Exhibition: Oils, Water-Colours, Pastels, Etchings, Drawings by Anna Airy, 1985, no.90.

A student of Henry Tonks and Phillip Wilson Steer at the Slade School of Art in London between 1899 and 1903, Anna Airy first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1905, and continued to do so almost every year until 1956, showing a total of around eighty works. By the time of her first one-man show at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1907 she was regarded as one of the most promising young female painters of her generation. (In a review of the Carfax Gallery exhibition one critic succinctly noted of the artist, ‘she can paint, can draw and she can etch.’) In 1908 Airy was admitted to the Royal Society of PainterEtchers and the following year to the Royal Society of Oil Painters. As well as the Royal Academy, Airy exhibited her work at the New English Art Club, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. She had many students, and in 1951 published Making a Start in Art, a practical guide to painting and drawing. The following year a retrospective exhibition of her paintings, drawings and prints was held in London. In the introduction to the catalogue, the critic and art historian Martin Hardie noted of Airy that ‘She is an artist of infinite variety in her choice of divers themes and manifold methods. She has ranged from delicate intricacy of line with etching needle and penand-ink to summary breadth of bold impressionism in oil, watercolour and pastel.’2 Anna Airy was particularly admired as a draughtsman, and her interest in botanical studies was manifest from the earliest years of her career. On the occasion of an exhibition of her work at the Fine Art Society in 1915, one critic noted that ‘We have then in these drawings the expression of passionate sympathy with the refinements of leaf and stem-forms. We have here the realism that alone can satisfy an eager love of Nature for herself. What is novel is the careful art, almost Japanese in spirit, with which naturalism is controlled and exploited on behalf of decoration…An artist has not such a conscience for truth to nature as Miss Airy’s for nothing; not a line is drawn by her except in the presence of nature. The pen-work is done out of doors direct from the “model” branch as it grows on a tree, and the colouring is done in the same circumstances. A whole summer, with hours from six until sunset, has been spent in an orchard by the artist.’3 Similarly, in the catalogue to the 1952 exhibition of Airy’s work, in which the present sheet was included, Martin Hardie praised her ‘untiring patience, a Durer-like analysis, an almost Pre-raphaelite precision, in recording the minutest detail and the material structure and anatomy of living organism in pendant fruit, sprays of blossom, bees, birds, butterflies, struggling twigs or insect-eaten leaves.’4 He noted in particular works such as the present sheet: ‘in the hedgerow pictures, in pen-and-ink with a wash of colour…the draughtsman-painter has had to weave a thousand intricate designs into one big living design.

Nothing is blurred, nothing overstressed; all is the result of sheer honest observation and comprehension.

Endless patience and endurance have clearly gone to the rendering of all the intricacies of form, the complexities of light and shade and colour, the thrust and growth, the turns and twists of leaf and twig, and (what her fellow-artists will perhaps best realize at the greatest problem) the turns and twists of the space between leaf and twig.’5 This large watercolour was the last work to be exhibited by Airy at the Royal Academy, where it was shown in 1956. It must, however, date from at least 1952, as it had been exhibited that year at the retrospective exhibition held at the R.B.A. Galleries in London.

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43 RENÉ GRUAU Covignano 1909-2004 Rome Woman in a Lanvin Dress Brush and black ink, sprayed watercolour, over traces of an underdrawing in pencil. A made up section at the lower left corner. Signed Gruau in black ink at the lower right, and dedicated to Gene, / with my friendship / and my sincere admira- / tion for his talent / René in pencil at the upper right.

435 x 327 mm. (17 1/8 x 12 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to Gene Loyd in c.1953; Given by Loyd to a Dr. Ettinger; Private collection, until 2010.

LITERATURE: L’Officiel de la Couture et de la Mode de Paris, March 1953, p.205.

Born to an Italian nobleman and a French mother in Covignano, near Rimini, Renato Zavagli Ricciardelli enjoyed a life of luxury as a child, living between Rimini, Milan, Paris and Monte Carlo. He displayed an innate talent as a draughtsman from an early age and, adopting his mother’s maiden name of Gruau, embarked on a career as an illustrator while still in his late teens. Settling in Paris in the early 1930s, he soon found employment providing drawings of the latest fashions for the newspaper Le Figaro and the fashion magazine Femina. He also recorded the collections of such Parisian designers as Pierre Balmain, Jacques Fath, Jean Patou, Elsa Schiaparelli, Cristobal Balenciaga and, in particular, Christian Dior, who was a close friend. Gruau worked closely with the couturier, designing numerous advertisements and posters for the atelier, and indeed may be said to have helped to shape the public image of the house of Dior.

By the end of the Second World War Gruau’s reputation was firmly established. Following the death of Dior in 1957, Gruau largely abandoned the field of fashion illustration, and began providing designs for advertisements for such products as Martini, Lindt chocolates and Perrier, as well as theatre posters. In the 1980s he returned to fashion illustration, working in Paris for Vogue France, Elle and Madame Figaro.

At the time of his death, in 2004, it was noted that, ‘Before photography reigned supreme in fashion, its new collections and attendant luxuries...were recorded and publicised in magazines by specialist artists, of whom the most successful in the heyday of haute couture was René Gruau. His uncluttered draughtsmanship is instantly recognisable, consisting of sinuous lines rapidly executed with a limited but dramatic palette, often just white, black and red. “La femme Gruau” is charming, haughty and feline, inhabiting…a world of timeless elegance that owed much to the artist’s upbringing on Europe’s rivieras in the 1910s.’1 The present sheet depicts a dress in white chiffon designed by Antonio Canovas del Castillo for the House of Lanvin. The drawing was used as a full-page illustration in the fashion magazine L’Officiel in May 19532, with the caption ‘Robe de grand soir de Jeanne Lanvin (Castillo) en mousseline blanche à pois noirs que des noeuds en ruban de moire d’un rouge écarlate ponctuant de leur note vive. L’ampleur souple de ce modèle est tout à fait marquante.’3 The distinctive technique of ‘sprayed’ dots of pigment in the background of this drawing is a characteristic feature of Gruau’s drawings of the first half of the 1950s.

Even within the seemingly free-spirited world of fashion illustration, René Gruau was an exacting draughtsman: ‘The idea for a drawing comes very gradually. You have to do a lot of sketches. It’s like a sneeze – it either happens or it doesn’t. Sometimes you just have to leave it alone and come back to it a few days later. The hardest thing is to do a very plain drawing. The perfect line, drawn in a single movement – but you have to work very hard before you’re ready. It may seem simple but it’s not. It takes an enormous amount of work that no one sees…Sometimes it doesn’t happen. I try. I put the drawing aside, I rip it up, I wait. It’s no good unless I’m completely satisfied. I make a preliminary drawing in charcoal or pencil. Then when I’m ready, I use gouache or acrylics or Indian ink.’4 He added that, ‘When I do a drawing, I need a live model that I can have move around as much as I need to. I can’t work from a photo. I need to feel the presence of a person. If there’s no human raw material, the drawing has less personality.’5

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44 FRANCISCO ZÚÑIGA Guadalupe, San José (Costa Rica) 1912-1998 Mexico City Recto: Elena Resting Verso: Elena Black chalk, brush and black ink and watercolour. The verso in brush and black ink and black chalk.

Signed and dated Zúñiga 1962 in black chalk at the lower right.

499 x 650 mm. (19 5/8 x 25 5/8 in.)

A native of Costa Rica, Francisco Zúñiga studied sculpture and painting there, and his first sculptures date from around 1930. In 1936 he moved to Mexico to complete his training, and was to live and work there for the remainder of his career. As a sculptor, Zúñiga worked mainly in bronze but also in marble and alabaster. Although he received several commissions for monumental public sculptures, much of his work was in the form of sculptures for more intimate settings, though often still heavy and massive in form. Zúñiga was devoted to the female form, whether nude or clothed, and male figures appear only rarely in his oeuvre. He was particularly inspired by the native women of southern Mexico, whose large bodies and peasant features recur frequently in his work, always imbued with a marked, solemn dignity.

As Ida Rodríguez Prampolini has written of Zúñiga, ‘He captured in his lines, volumes and composition the spirit of the Indian and mestizo of America...Through drawing or carving he concentrated, in volume and composition, the soul of a people whose essence he understood better than any other artist.’1 Naturalized as a Mexican citizen in 1986, Zúñiga trained a large number of local sculptors. In 1990 he started to go blind, and began to concentrate on working in terracotta. He eventually gave up all artistic activity in 1993, five years before his death.

Zúñiga was a prolific draughtsman, and his drawings are usually related to sculptures. As the artist noted, ‘I think a lot through different drawings in order to make a sculpture, guided by volumetric forms.’2 He also created drawings as studies for lithographs, a field in which he was particularly productive from the early 1970s onwards. The present sheet depicts the artist’s wife, Elena Laborde, whom he met when she was a student at La Esmeralda, the national art school in Mexico City where Zúñiga taught. The couple were married in 1947, and had three children. Elena appears frequently in Zúñiga’s drawings and lithographs and, like many of his female subjects, often appears isolated and distracted, lost in thought and unaware of the attentions of both the artist and the viewer. As Rodríguez Prampolini has pointed out, ‘We can divide Zúñiga’s women according to their posture, between women who know they are being observed and women in intimate moments.’3 An earlier work of a similar theme and composition is a watercolour portrait of Elena from 1951 – apparently a study for an unfinished painting – in the collection of the Fundación Zúñiga Laborde in Mexico4.

Also in the collection of the Zúñiga family, and closely related to the present sheet, are two large drawings of the artist’s wife at a table in a similar pose5.

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45 SIR KYFFIN WILLIAMS, R.A. Llangefni, Anglesey 1918-2006 Anglesey Hill Farmer (Wil Ifan) Brush and grey ink and grey wash. Signed with initials KW. in pencil at the lower right. Numbered 8 in pencil on the verso.

420 x 297 mm. (16 1/2 x 11 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Thackeray Gallery, London; Purchased from them in May 2006 by Simon Barnes; Private collection, until 2008.

John Kyffin Williams spent a lifetime painting and drawing the landscape and people of North Wales. He entered the Slade School of Art in London in 1941, having served for five years in the Royal Welch Fusiliers before being discharged on the grounds of epilepsy. (The army doctor is said to have told him, “As you are, in fact, abnormal, I think it would be a good idea if you took up art.”) Williams won the Slade’s portrait prize in 1944, and in 1948 had his first one-man exhibition at Colnaghi’s in London. He enjoyed a successful career, working in a distinctive style, and his views of the landscape of Snowdonia, painted with thick slabs of oil paint applied with a palette knife, earned him a considerable reputation. Between 1944 and 1973 he taught art at the Highgate School in London, where among his pupils was Patrick Procktor, but would return to Wales as often as possible to paint. He eventually settled permanently in Anglesey in the mid 1970s. Although best known for his dark Welsh mountain landscapes, Williams was also a gifted portrait painter, and an exceptional draughtsman. He was admitted to the Royal Academy in 1974, and was given a retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of Wales in 1987. Knighted in 1998, Williams died in 2006, at the age of eighty-eight.

Drawn in 1991, the present sheet depicts a Welsh hill farmer named, if perhaps apocryphally, Wil Ifan (or William Evans)1. Williams cared deeply for the rugged hill farmers of the Welsh mountains, and they appear in his paintings and drawings throughout his career. As Rian Evans has noted, ‘Perhaps nothing defines Kyffin Williams as well as his drawings of old Welsh farmers and shepherds…Having grown up walking the mountains with them, it was to these men that the artist owed his intimate knowledge of the landscape and his profound love of it. His portrayals honour their integrity and tenacity, they show his respect.’2 Williams himself has written of these hill farmers: ‘They come in all shapes and sizes; tall, short, lean or rotund, dark or fair, broad or narrow of face. They may be Ordovician or Silurian celts but whatever their distant origins they are the same in their determination to make a living in a harsh environment. But farming, especially hill-farming, is changing so that one day the sheep will go to be replaced by the scrub oak. The farmer will disappear & the landscape will change forever.’3 The hill farmer in the present sheet is here studied in isolation, divorced from the rugged Welsh landscape in which he so often appears in Williams’s paintings.

The artist has noted that ‘The hazel stick is so much a part of the farmer in North Wales. The handle is of the same piece as the shaft and when used it points forward with the thump along it so that the full weight of the arm is pressed into the ground. Farmers lean on it, use it for balance when crossing a steep hillside and also for sorting out sheep. It is an invaluable piece of equipment.’4 As a draughtsman, Williams was fond of using a brush loaded with ink: ‘One method I use is to sharpen the wrong end of a brush to a wedge shape so that I have one broad side and one pointed side, and I dip the brush in ink rather like a reed pen. This has the advantage of producing a line which can be very thick or very fine or very faint, because you can ease off the ink on the end of the brush and you can vary your tones, your linear tones as well as your mass tone…Sometimes when I’m out drawing and it’s below freezing the actual putting on of the water colour or Indian ink produces a very nice mottled effect.’5 As Nicholas Sinclair has noted of Williams, ‘His rapid and spontaneous method of drawing, his way of combining and balancing irrational and illustrative marks in the same composition and his openness to chance make his drawings and watercolours amongst his most suggestive and convincing work.’6

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46 DAVID HOCKNEY, R.A. Born 1937 Dettifoss from the Other Side Watercolour on four sheets of paper. Signed and dated D.H. ’02 in pencil at the lower left.

915 x 1216 mm. (36 x 47 7/8 in.) overall dimensions PROVENANCE: L. A. Louver Gallery, Los Angeles.

David Hockney came to watercolour relatively late in his career. As he has recently said, ‘It’s not an easy medium but I like the discipline it gives you. Once you put down the marks, that’s it. You know you can’t fudge it. There are certain ways you have to work. You can’t put a light colour on a dark colour . . . one watercolour technique you use is with transparent colours and the white of the paper. How many layers you put on depends on how much glow there’ll be. If there are too many layers, the image will become dull.’1 In March 2002 Hockney made several visits to the exhibition American Sublime at Tate Britain in London.

The exhibition, devoted to the 19th century tradition of epic landscape painting in America, made a particular impression on the artist. As he recalled later that year, ‘The subject matter of American Sublime – the large landscape – made me, in April 2002, think of going North. I know sunsets don’t last long in the South West. To have longer periods of twilight (when colour is not bleached but extremely rich) one has to go North. I made a trip to Norway in May, was very taken with the dramatic landscape and returned to go much further north, when in June the sun never sets at all. You can see the landscape at all hours, 24 hours a day. There is no night. I found myself deeply attracted to it, and then went to Iceland twice to tour the island.’2 These trips to Scandinavia and Iceland, close to the Arctic Circle, resulted in a series of large-scale, panoramic watercolours, drawn on several sheets of paper of equal size3. These large watercolour drawings, made up of several joined sheets of paper, were in turn based on a series of double-page drawings in small sketchbooks, which remain in the artist’s collection4. Hockney has noted of these monumental works that ‘overcoming the technical difficulties of the watercolour medium for large scale works was a solvable problem. The main difficulty is that washes have to be put on horizontally, but drawing really has to be done vertically to enable one to see it. As all this developed it opened out the medium, leading eventually to the large double portraits . . .’5 The present sheet depicts a panoramic view of the waterfall of Dettifoss in the north of Iceland, one of the largest and most powerful falls in Europe. There the glacial river Jökulsá á Fjöllum, one hundred metres wide, plunges over a basaltic cliff some forty-five metres in height into a deep gorge in the Jökulsárgljúfur canyon. Access to the waterfall is difficult, and the site can only be reached by a rough dirt road.

A closely comparable large watercolour view of the waterfall of Godafoss in Iceland, drawn on eight sheets of paper and twice the width of the present example, is illustrated in a recent retrospective catalogue of Hockney’s work5.

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PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

No.28 Degas Fig.1 Pietro Perugino The Virgin and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Catherine of Alexandria Oil on panel.

80 x 66 cm.

Musée du Louvre, Paris.

No.34 Renoir Fig.1 Pierre-Auguste Renoir Bathers in the Forest (Baigneuses dans la forêt) c.1897 Oil on canvas.

74.3 x 100.3 cm.

BF901, The Barnes Foundation.

Photograph ©2010 reproduced with Permission of The Barnes Foundation.

Fig.2 Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Two Bathers c.1897 Pencil, pen and ink.

267 x 235 mm.

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

No.36 Leighton Fig.1 Frederic, Lord Leighton Captive Andromache Oil on canvas.

197 x 407 cm.

Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester.

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NOTES TO THE CATALOGUE No.1 Perino del Vaga 1. The river Aoös (also called Anius or Aoüs), flows through Greece and Albania, and is here personified by a river god reclining at the lower left of the composition. The subject of the drawing is recorded in Plutarch’s life of Julius Caesar: ‘He in the meantime was posted in Apollonia, but had not an army with him able to fight the enemy, the forces from Brundisium being so long in coming, which put him to great suspense and embarrassment what to do. At last he resolved upon a most hazardous experiment, and embarked, without any one’s knowledge, in a boat of twelve oars, to cross over to Brundisium, though the sea was at that time covered with a vast fleet of the enemies. He got on board in the night time, in the dress of a slave, and throwing himself down like a person of no consequence, lay along at the bottom of the vessel. The river Anius was to carry them down to sea, and there used to blow a gentle gale every morning from the land, which made it calm at the mouth of the river, by driving the waves forward; but this night there had blown a string wind from the sea, which overpowered that from the land, so that where the river met the influx of the sea-water and the opposition of the waves, it was extremely rough and angry; and the current was beaten back with such a violent swell, that the master of the boat could not make good his passage, but ordered his sailors to take about and return. Caesar, upon this, discovers himself, and taking the man by the hand, who was surprised to see him there, said, “Go on, my friend, and fear nothing; you carry Caesar and his fortune in your boat.” The mariners, when they heard that, forgot the storm, and laying all their strength to their oars, did what they could to force their way down the river. But when it was to no purpose, and the vessel now took in much water, Caesar finding himself in such danger in the very mouth of the river, much against his will permitted the master to turn back. When he was come to land, his soldiers ran to him in a multitude reproaching him for what he had done, and indignant that he should think himself not strong enough to get a victory by their sole assistance, but must disturb himself, and expose his life for those who were absent, as if he could not trust those who were with him.’; A. H. Clough, ed., Plutarch’s Lives, Vol.IV, London, 1893, pp.296-297.

2. Paris, Sotheby’s, Collection Robert Lebel: Dessins anciens et du XIXe siècle, 25 March 2009, lot 13; Cordellier, Prat and van Tuyll van Serooskerken, ed., op.cit., pp.20-23, no.2. The drawing, which measures 285 x 202 mm., bears several old inscriptions attributing the sheet to Perino.

3. Hugo Chapman has pointed out that what may be a related drawing, of similar dimensions, is in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt (Inv. 5590, as Anonymous Italian 16th Century). The unpublished drawing, in pen and black or grey ink and grey wash, measures 156 x 131 mm.

4. Dominique Cordellier has plausibly suggested that the compositional sketch on the verso of the Pébereau drawing may be intended to depict Caesar Refusing the Crown Offered to Him by Mark Anthony.

5. This small sketch for a frieze is drawn upside down on the verso of the Pébereau drawing (illustrated in Cordellier, Prat and van Tuyll van Serooskerken, ed., op.cit., p.23).

6. Elena Parma, ed., Perino del Vaga tra Raffaello e Michelangelo, exhibition catalogue, Mantua, Palazzo Te, 2001, pp.118-119, no.22.

7. Inv. 72; Ibid., p.114, no.19.

8. Inv. 2933; Parma, op.cit., 2001, pp.115-116, no.20.

No.2 Jacopo da Pontormo 1. The French marchand-amateur Jacques Petithory (1929-1992) dealt in Old Master drawings from a stall at the Marché aux Puces in Paris from the mid-1950’s onwards. He left much of his interesting and eclectic collection of mainly Italian and French drawings, numbering 186 sheets, together with paintings, sculptures, ceramics and other objets d’art, to the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne at his death in 1992.

2. Janet Cox-Rearick, The Drawings of Pontormo: A Catalogue Raisonné with Notes on the Paintings, 2nd ed., New York, 1981, Vol.I, p.5.

3. Ibid., Vol.I, p.6.

4. Inv. 6660F recto; Cox-Rearick, op.cit., 1981, Vol.I, p.186, no.150, Vol.II, fig.142; Cox-Rearick, op.cit., 1996, p.200, fig.36.

5. Cox-Rearick, op.cit., 1981, Vol.I, p.41.

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6. Inv. 6722F recto; Cox-Rearick, ibid., 1981, Vol.I, p.237, no.230, Vol.II, fig.226; Cox-Rearick, op.cit., 1996, p.202, fig.44; Carlo Falciani, Pontormo: Disegni degli Uffizi, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1996, pp.130-131, no.VII.21, fig.83.

7. Inv. 6702F verso; Cox-Rearick, op.cit., 1981, Vol.I, p.225, no.213, Vol.II, fig.206; Cox-Rearick, op.cit., 1996, p.204, fig.50; Falciani, ibid., pp.45-46, no.III.4, fig.30.

8. Inv. 6728F recto; Cox-Rearick, op.cit., 1981, Vol.I, p.244, no.249, Vol.II, fig.238; Philippe Costamagna, Pontormo, Milan, 1994, illustrated p.163, under no.38.

9. Inv. 6529F verso; Cox-Rearick, op.cit., 1981, Vol.I, p.220, no.202, Vol.II, fig.196; Elizabeth Pilliod, Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori: A Genealogy of Florentine Art, New Haven and London, 2001, p.57, fig. 52.

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

11. David Franklin, Rosso in Italy: The Italian Career of Rosso Fiorentino, New Haven and London, 1994, p.115, pl.82. Rosso’s original painting, commissioned by Giovanni Cavalcanti, was sent to England and was eventually lost. The Pisa copy has been tentatively attributed by Paul Joannides to the Aretine painter Giovanni Antonio Lappoli (1492-1552).

12. ‘Ho citato alcuni casi riguardanti Bandinelli, Bronzino e Salviati, nei quali questi artisti fecero uso reciprocamente dei propri disegni. Non è improbabile quindi che Rosso possa avere usato questo studio di nudo del suo amico Pontormo come modello per il cammelliere in Rebecca ed Eliezer al Pozzo.’; Cox-Rearick, op.cit., 1996, p.65.

13. Inv. 4865 SC. R 566; Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Generalverzeichnis, Voll.III, Vienna, 1995, p.1680, Inv.4865; Monbeig Goguel, ed., op.cit., pp.92-93, no.5 (entry by Paul Joannides). A free copy by Salviati after the entire composition of Rosso Fiorentino’s Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, drawn in red chalk and highly finished, is in the Uffizi (Inv. 14610F; Monbeig Goguel, ed., op.cit., pp.90-91, no.4; David Franklin, ed., Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and the Renaissance in Florence, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 2005, pp.194-195, no.62; McTavish, op.cit., p.304, fig.23).

14. Cox-Rearick, op.cit., 1981, Vol.I, p.4.

No.3 Ludovico Carracci 1. Babette Bohn, Ludovico Carracci and the Art of Drawing, Turnhout, 2004, p.71.

2. E-mail correspondence, 27 July 2010.

3. Inv. 1943,1009.36; Tokyo, National Museum of Western Art, Italian 16th and 17th Century Drawings from the British Museum, exhibition catalogue, 1996, pp.162-163, no.57; Bohn, op.cit., p.151, no.43 and illustrated in colour on the cover.

4. Francesco Rossi, Accademia Carrara 2: Catalogo dei dipinti sec. XVII-XVIII, Cinisello Balsamo, 1989, p.52, no.583 (as Ludovico Carracci?); Tokyo, National Museum of Western Art, ibid., p.162, fig.57a. It may be noted in passing that the Bergamo painting also includes, in the lower right corner, a figure seen in a pose somewhat similar to that of the nude in this drawing, although in reverse.

5. Alessandro Brogi, Ludovico Carracci, Ozzano Emilia, 2001, Vol.II, figs.118-130.

No.4 Cristoforo Roncalli, il Pomarancio 1. Ileana Chiappini di Sorio, Cristoforo Roncalli detto Il Pomarancio, Bergamo, 1983, p.115, no.42, p.170, fig.1.

2. Ibid., pp.95-99, no.9, illustrated in colour pl.75.

3. Inv. 1981,1003.13; 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.155, no.250A, Vol.II, pl.241. The drawing is a preparatory study for a fresco at Loreto, painted between 1605 and 1610.

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4. Inv. 212-215; Michael Jaffé, The Devonshire Collection of Italian Drawings: Roman and Neapolitan Schools, London, 1994, pp.172-173, nos.299-302. The drawing of St. Augustine is also illustrated in W. Chandler Kirwin, ‘The Life and Drawing Style of Cristofano Roncalli’, Paragone, January 1978, pl.45.

No.5 Pietro Faccini 1. Diane DeGrazia, Correggio and His Legacy: Sixteenth-Century Emilian Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 1984, p.374.

2. ‘…tanto disegni dal nudo, che infiniti si vedano di que’ suoi modelli in tutte le più famose raccolte...così strepitosi, così guizzanti, svolazzanti, e quel ch’è più, così facile e franchi, che sembrano del suo maestro, come per di sua mano molti tutto il di si vendono.’; Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina pittrice: vite de’ pittori Bolognesi, Bologna, 1678, supplemented and annotated

by G. Zanotti, 1841 ed., p.398.

3. This particular figure is illustrated in Cecil Gould, The Paintings of Correggio, London, 1976, pl.132, and in Carolyn Smyth, Correggio’s Frescoes in Parma Cathedral, Princeton, 1997, fig.65.

4. Inv. 172; DeGrazia, op.cit., p.378, under no.128, note 3 and fig.128b.

5. Inv. 7982; Ibid., p.378, note 2 and fig.128a; Legrand, op.cit., p.101, no.66.

6. Inv. Pp,3.14; Catherine Loisel, ‘Ludovico, Agostino et Annibale Carracci: Une aventure artistique’, in Catherine Loisel, Musée du Louvre: Département des arts graphiques. Inventaire général des dessins italiens VII: Ludovico, Agostino, Annibale Carracci, Paris, 2004, p.31, fig.33; Esposito in Plymouth, op.cit., p.129, no.55. Both the British Museum drawing and the present sheet belonged to Sir Joshua Reynolds.

7. Legrand, op.cit., pp.66-67, no.41; Loisel, ibid., pp.212-213, no.424.

No.6 Aurelio Lomi 1. A number of Florentine drawings with the same later provenance as the present sheet are inscribed in the distinctive handwriting of the 17th century Florentine engineer, draughtsman and collector Giuseppe Santini.

2. Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Maria Clelia Galassi and Pierluigi Carofano, Aurelio Lomi: Maniera e invenzione, Pisa, 1989, p.211, no.31, illustrated in colour p.108, pl.XL. 3. Inv. 975-4-1883; Mario di Giampaolo, ‘Aurelio Lomi disegnatore’, in Disegni genovesi dal Cinquecento al Settecento: Giornate di Studio (9-10 Maggio 1989), Florence, 1992; reprinted in Cristiana Garofalo, ed., Mario Di Giampaolo: Scritti sul disegno italiano 1971-2008, Florence, 2010, p.307, fig.11; Cristiana Garofalo et al, Le dessin en Italie dans les collections publiques françaises. Le Rayonnement de Florence sous les derniers Médicis: Dessins des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, exhibition catalogue, Bayonne, Musée Bonnat, 2006-2007, pp.42-43, no.11.

4. di Giampaolo, ibid., p.313, fig.25; Turcic and Newcome, op.cit., p.43, no.21.

5. Inv. RF 5306; di Giampaolo, op.cit., pp.305-306, figs.7-8; Turcic and Newcome, op.cit., p.40, no.14.

6. Inv. 1966,0303.1; Ciardi, Galassi and Carofano, op.cit., pp.239-240, nos.55a and 55b, figs.21 and 22; Turcic and Newcome, op.cit., p.41, no.15; Nicholas Turner, The Study of Italian Drawings: The contribution of Philip Pouncey, exhibition catalogue, London, British Museum, 1994, pp.79-80, no.94.

7. Inv. KdZ 16368; Turcic and Newcome, op.cit., pp.39-40, no.12, pls.36-37.

No.7 Guido Reni 1. A very similar inscription and numbering - ‘no 23 Guido Reni del’, written in brown ink - appears at the bottom edge of a drawing of a bearded man, traditionally (if implausibly) attributed to Guido Reni, in the collection of the Klassik Stiftung in Weimar (Inv. KK 8672; Fischer Pace, op.cit., p.259, no.588).

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2. Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina pittrice; vite de pittori bolognesi, 1678; translated in Catherine and Robert Enggass, The Life of Guido Reni, University Park, 1980, pp.121-122.

3. Ann Sutherland Harris, ‘Guido Reni’s “First Thoughts”, Master Drawings, 1999, p.3.

4. Malvasia, trans. Enggass, op.cit., pp.124-125.

5. Written correspondence, 28 May 1993.

6. D. Stephen Pepper, Guido Reni. A Complete Catalogue of his Works with an Introductory Text, Oxford, 1984, pp.211-212, no.9, pl.9; Dominique Cordellier, ‘Guido Reni’s ‘Separation of Day and Night’’, The Burlington Magazine, February 1987, p.81, fig.16; Stephen Pepper, Guido Reni: L’opera completa, Novara, 1988, p.216, no.9, pl.9 (where dated 1598-1599).

In a letter of 1 February 1993, Johnston noted that she retained some reservations about the attribution of the drawing, which she only knew from a photograph, since it is unconnected to any work by the artist.

7. Pepper, ibid., 1984, p.247, no.89, pl.113 (where dated 1622-1623); Pepper, ibid., 1988, p.277, no.134, fig.125 (where dated 1632).

8. Pepper, op.cit., 1988, p.333, no.22, pl.16 (where dated 1622-1623); Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Andrea Emiliani and Erich Schleier, ed., Guido Reni und Europa: Ruhm und Nachruhm, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt, 1988-1989, pp.140-141, no.A9.

An autograph variant of the composition, showing just the head and bust of the figure of Lucretia, is in a private collection in Italy (D. Stephen Pepper, ‘Guido Reni’s Practice of Repeating Compositions’, Artibus et Historiae, 1999, No.39 p.50, fig.31, where dated c.1620).

No.8 Clemente Bocciardo 1. Several drawings by Florentine artists with the same later provenance as this sheet bear inscriptions in the hand of the 17th century Florentine engineer and collector Giuseppe Santini.

2. The inscription on the mount is similar to those found on a number of drawings by Tuscan artists from albums formerly in the collection of Comte Eugène d’Oultremont (1845-1916) in Belgium, and in all likelihood originally compiled in Florence in the 17th or 18th century. A number of drawings with this provenance, and with similar mounts and inscriptions, are in the Louvre.

3. Inv. 1934,1001.2; Mary Newcome, ‘Artists in the Shadow of Castiglione’, Paragone, 1982, pl.13; Tokyo, National Museum of Western Art, Italian 16th and 17th Century Drawings from the British Museum, exhibition catalogue, 1996, pp.246-247, no.96. The appearance of the artist is also recorded in two painted self-portraits in the Uffizi. A portrait engraving of Bocciardo, based on a drawing by Giovanni Domenico Campiglia and engraved by Pier Antonio Pazzi, was included as part of the Serie di ritratti dei pittori, published in Florence between 1752 and 1762.

4. Inv. 9471 and 1928; Mary Newcome-Schleier, Le dessin à Gênes du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1985, pp.92-93, nos.78-79. The first of these is also illustrated in Piero Boccardo et al, Le dessin en Italie dans les collections publiques françaises. Gênes triomphante et la Lombardie des Borromée, exhibition catalogue, Ajaccio, Musée Fesch, 2006-2007, pp.118-119, no.4, where the attribution to Bocciardo is rejected.

No.9 Guercino 1. Nicholas Turner and Carol Plazzotta, Drawings by Guercino from British Collections, exhibition catalogue, London, British Museum, 1991, p.18.

2. Inv. 2842; Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge, 1989, pp.54-55, no.91, pl.96; Turner and Plazzotta, ibid., p.142, no.116.

3. Inv. M 78.25; David M. Stone, Guercino: Master Draftsman. Works from North American Collections, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, and elsewhere, 1991, pp.68-69, no.27; Bruce Davis, Master Drawings in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1997, pp.52-53, no.19; Julian Brooks, Guercino: Mind to Paper, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles and London, 2006-2007, pp.52-53, no.15. Like the present sheet, a counterproof was made of the Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist and is now in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

4. Stone, ibid., p.68, under no.27.

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5. Inv. 3036; Mahon and Turner, op.cit., p.196, no.676 (not illustrated). The counterproof, which measures 312 x 263 mm., is one of more than two hundred counterproofs of original chalk drawings by Guercino which were formerly in the Gennari collection, and are today in the Royal Collection at Windsor.

6. Mahon and Turner, op.cit., p.177.

No.10 Stefano della Bella 1. Inv. 373; Françoise Viatte, Musée du Louvre: Cabinet des dessins. Inventaire général des dessins italiens II: Dessins de Stefano della Bella, Paris, 1974, p.67, no.65, illustrated p.70.

2. Alexandre de Vesme and Phyllis Dearborn Massar, Stefano della Bella: Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1971, Vol.I, p.103, no.477; Vol.II, p.105, fig.477.

3. Jolanta Talbierska, Stefano della Bella (1610-1664): Etchings from the Collection of the Print Room of the Warsaw University Library, Warsaw, 2001, illustrated p.332.

4. Inv. FC 125977; Maria Catelli Isola, Disegni di Stefano Della Bella dalle collezioni del Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 1976, p.20, no.6, fig.6.

5. De Vesme and Massar, op.cit., Vol.I, p.72, nos.132-133; Vol.II, p.41, figs.132-133.

No.11 Carlo Cignani 1. The present sheet bears the collector’s mark of the Venetian art dealer Ferrucio Asta (1900-1952). Resident at the Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice, Asta acquired a large number of drawings formerly in the collection of the Contessa Rosa Piatti-Lochis around 1935, as well as works from the collection assembled by the noble Polish Lubomirski family.

2. The pose of the figure in the present sheet recalls in particular that of the putti in Parmigianino’s lunette frescoes in the Camerino of the Rocca Sanvitale at Fontanellato, painted between 1523 and 1524, as well as the Christ Child in his Virgin in Glory with Saints Jerome and John the Baptist in the National Gallery in London, completed in 1527 (David Ekserdjan, Parmigianino, New Haven and London, pp.90-92, figs. 81-85 and p.48, fig.39, respectively).

3. Beatrice Buscaroli Fabbri, Carlo Cignani: affreschi dipinti disegni, Cittadella, 1991, pp.158-159, no.38c and p.181, no.59, respectively.

4. Buscaroli Fabbri, ibid., pp.122-123, no.13.

5. Jadranka Bentini and Angelo Mazza, ed., Disegni emiliani del Sei-Settecento: I grandi cicli di affreschi, Cinisello Balsamo, 1990, illustrated in colour pp.148, 150 and 153, no.22; Buscaroli Fabbri, op.cit., pp.116-117, nos.9a-9d, illustrated in colour pp.14-15 and 17.

6. Bentini and Mazza, ibid., illustrated in colour p.153; Buscaroli Fabbri, op.cit., p.117, no.9d.

7. Bentini and Mazza, op.cit., illustrated pp.149 and 151, figs. 22.1 and 22.2; Buscaroli Fabbri, op.cit., pp.222-223, nos.99a99b.

8. Sale, London, Christie’s, 30 November 1965, lot 140 (bt. Duits); Bentini and Mazza, op.cit., illustrated p.152, figs. 22.3 and 22.4; Buscaroli Fabbri, op.cit., pp.224-226, nos.100a-100b.

9. Inv. KK 8923; Ursula Verena Fischer Pace, Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Graphische Sammlung: Die italienischen Zeichnungen, Vol.I, Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2008, pp.138-139, no.282. Although unrelated to any known fresco decoration by the artist, the two putti are similar to those - albeit depicted fighting, rather than embracing - in Cignani’s painting of a Pastoral Scene, datable to the 1680’s, at the palace of Sansoucci in Potsdam (Buscaroli Fabbri, op.cit., p.161, no.39).

10. 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.412.

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No.12 Benedetto Luti 1. Edgar Peters Bowron, ‘Benedetto Luti’s Pastels and Coloured Chalk Drawings’, Apollo, June 1980, p.440.

2. Ibid., pp.443 and 445.

3. Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 14 January 1987, lots 120-131. Six examples are illustrated in Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800, London, 2006, pp.366-367. Most of the pastels were, like the present sheet, signed and dated 1712 on the frame backing boards.

4. Sievers, Muehlig and Rich, op.cit., p.77, under no.16.

5. Jeffares, op.cit., p.366.

6. Bowron, op.cit., pp.440 and 444.

7. Inv. AC1996.29.1; Bruce Davis, Master Drawings in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1997, pp.72-73, no.29, and illustrated on the cover.

8. Inv. 1989.33; Sievers, Muehlig and Rich, op.cit., pp.77-79, no.16.

9. John Maxon and Joseph J. Rishel, ed., Painting in Italy in the Eighteenth Century: Rococo to Romanticism, exhibition catalogue, Chicago, Minneapolis and Toledo, 1970-1971, p.200.

No.13 Pietro Giacomo Palmieri 1. The signature ‘Palmerius Fecit’ is also found, for example, on a drawing in the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne (Inv. CMNI 3114; Pierre Rosenberg, ed., La donation Jacques Petithory au musée Bonnat, Bayonne: objets d’art, sculptures, peintures, dessins, Paris, 1997, pp.301-302, no.312) and in a Guercinesque landscape drawing, signed and dated ‘P. Palmerius Invenit, et Fecit 1774’, formerly in the Bick collection (Franklin W. Robinson and John T. Paoletti, ed., Italian Drawings from the Bick Collection, exhibition catalogue, Dartmouth and elsewhere, 1971-1972, unpaginated, no.45).

2. Giuseppe Delogu, ‘Pietro Giacomo Palmieri’, Pantheon, December 1935, p.45.

3. Georges Duplessis, ed., Mémoires et journal e J.-G. Wille, graveur du roi, Paris, 1857, p.1.

4. Agnes Mongan and Paul J. Sachs, Drawings in the Fogg Museum of Art, Cambridge, 1946, Vol.I, p.168, under no.337.

5. For example, a Landscape with Two Figures and a Tower Beyond (Inv. 9545) and a Landscape with a Bridge (Inv. 9540); the latter illustrated in Delogu, ibid., p.391.

6. A Landscape with Riders in a Storm (Inv.12290S; Delogu, op.cit., p.389).

7. Inv. D1721; Keith Andrews, National Gallery of Scotland: Catalogue of Italian Drawings, Cambridge, 1968, Vol.I, p.86, no.D1721, Vol.II, p.106, fig.606.

No.14 Gabriel de Saint-Aubin 1. Saint-Aubin appears to have sold his drawings for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine individually to Philippe de Prétot, who had commissioned them. This may be inferred from an inscription on the artist’s copy of a book of poetry by Michel Sedaine, in which he notes ‘Manlius vendu à M. Philippe le 9 8bre 1761’, referring to his drawing of Manlius Torquatus Ordering the Execution of his Son from the series (Kim de Beaumont, Reconsidering Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724-1780): The Background for his Scenes of Paris, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, New York University, 1998, Vol.II, Appendix C, p.520, note 4).

2. Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin, Recueil de plantes, quoted in translation in Ellen D’Oench, ‘Gabriel de Saint-Aubin and his Time’, in Victor S. Carlson, Ellen D’Oench and Richard S. Field, Prints and Drawings by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, exhibition catalogue, Middletown and Baltimore, 1975, p.5.

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3. Mémoires secrets, 13 February 1780; quoted in translation in D’Oench, ibid., p.8.

4. Émile Dacier, L’oeuvre gravé de Gabriel de Saint-Aubin: Notice historique et catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1914, p.89 (not illustrated); Émile Dacier, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin: Peintre, dessinateur et graveur, Vol.II, Paris, 1931, p.176, no.924a (not illustrated). The engraving, which measures 208 x 143 mm., is captioned G. de St Aubin del. and P. Aveline sculp. in the lower margins and is captioned L’enlèvement des Sabines pendant les jeux publics.

5. A pair of highly-finished and coloured drawings by Saint-Aubin for the two largest prints in the second volume of the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine, with the same provenance as the present sheet and illustrating The Triumph of Pompey and The Roman Victory over the Carthaginians at the Battle of Cape Ecnomus, appeared at auction in Paris in 2004. The drawings are today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, respectively (Colin B. Bailey et al, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin 1724-1780, exhibition catalogue, New York and Paris, 2007-2008, pp.128-133, nos.11 and 12). See also note 12 below.

6. ‘Excellent quand il observe, insignifiant dès qu’il invente, Saint-Aubin se montre encore à son avantage quand il peut enrichir d’un détail pris sur le vif le produit de son imagination. Nulle part on ne s’en rend mieux compte que dans une suite de dessins d’illustration, - la plus nombreuse qu’il ait donnée, la plus importante à ses yeux et celle qui l’a retenu le plus longtemps, - don’t on ne croirait pas, à première vue, qu’elle peut offrir le moyen de faire une telle verification: je veux parler des compositions destinées au Spectacle de l’histoire romaine.’; Émile Dacier, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin: Peintre, dessinateur et graveur, Vol.I, Paris, 1929, p.79.

7. De Beaumont, op.cit., Vol.I, p.176.

8. Paris, Galerie Cailleux, Le dessin en couleurs: aquarelles – gouaches – pastels 1720-1830, exhibition catalogue, 1984, unpaginated, no.61. The drawing measures 192 x 143 mm.

9. Dacier, ibid., 1931, p.176, no.924 (not illustrated); Delaplanche, op.cit., pp.74-75, no.28. The drawing, in black chalk and brown wash and measuring 194 x 153 mm., includes on the verso an unrelated drawing of Jupiter and Venus in black chalk.

10. The present sheet and the other finished preparatory drawings for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine from the same collection were unknown to Kim de Beaumont at the time of her 1998 thesis on Saint-Aubin, in which she suggests that the ‘sketchy character of the very few surviving preparatory drawings for the series’ (op.cit., Vol.I, p.211, note 235) might be explained by the artist’s participation in the printmaking process, noting that, apart from providing the drawings, SaintAubin may have assisted the engravers with the etching of the plates themselves.

11. Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Piasa], 16 June 2004, lots 77-104. This group of drawings included Saint-Aubin’s design for a frontispiece for the book, dated 1766, which was, however, never engraved. One of the other drawings from this group has recently been acquired by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

12. Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Piasa], 19 March 2004, lots 56 and 58. The two drawings, executed in watercolour, gouache and ink, measured 215 x 396 mm. and 208 x 392 mm. See also note 5 above.

13. A stylistically comparable study by Saint-Aubin for one of these illustrations, depicting The Reception of the Chevalier Bossu in Arkansas, is today part of an album of drawings by the Saint-Aubin brothers in the collection of the Louvre (Pierre Rosenberg, Le Livre des Saint-Aubin, Paris, 2002, pp.92-93, no.28).

14. De Beaumont, op.cit., Vol.I, p.183.

No.15 Antoine-Jean Duclos 1. Baron Roger Portalis and Henri Béraldi, Les graveurs du dix-huitième siècle, Paris, 1881, Vol.II, p.41.

2. Ibid., Paris, 1882, Vol.III, p.28, no.12 (where the group is described as ‘C’est la plus jolie de toutes ces series’, with reference to the other etchings of scenes from plays and operas published by Martinet), not illustrated; Max Sander, Die Illustrierten Französischen Bücher des 18. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart, 1926, p.197, no.1304 (not illustrated).

3. A complete volume of these etchings, entitled Illustrations des opéras-comiques et comédies du XVIIIème siècle, par Desrays, Duclos, Quéverdo, Martinet, etc., including an additional eight proof states to four of the etchings and thus numbering 134 prints in total, is in the collection of the New York Public Library (Spencer Coll. French 1762 92-92; the Lucile prints as No.4).

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4. Élisabeth Launay, Les frères Goncourt, collectionneurs de dessins, Paris, 1991, p.276, no.72. The drawing measures 170 x 100 mm. and is signed and dated A. J. Duclos invenit 1770’. It is captioned ‘Le Déserteur / oüi je déserte.’.

5. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 29 May 1975, lot 136 (one illustrated). Both drawings were executed in pen and brown ink and brown wash, and measured 171 x 99 mm., and each is signed and dated ‘A. J. Duclos invenit 1770’.

No.16 Reinier Vinkeles 1. ‘Onder dergelijke Teekeningen van zijnen vroegen tijd muntten die met kleuren, verbeeldende het aan- en uitgaan van den Amsterdamschen Schouwburg, uit.’; Roeland van Eijnden and Adriaan van der Willigen, Geschiedenis der Vaderlandsche Schilderkunst, 1816-1840, 1979 ed., Vol.II, p.318; quoted in translation in Hans Verbeek and Robert-Jan te Rijdt, Travels through Town and Country: Dutch and Flemish Landscape Drawings 1550-1830, exhibition catalogue, Haarlem, Teyler Museum, 2000, p.160, under nos.75-76.

2. Verbeek and te Rijdt, ibid., pp.160-161, nos.75-76. The pair of watercolours, each measuring 185 x 250 mm., are signed and dated 1760 (the night scene, with the same composition as the present sheet) and 1761 (the daylight scene). Both sheets are also inscribed ‘Gezigt van de Keyzers graft & Amsteldamsche Schouberg 1760’.

3. Inv. Atlas Splitberger 481-482. Both watercolours measure 222 x 295 mm.

No.17 Jacob van Strij 1. Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 28 May 1999, part of lot 129. The present sheet is of similar dimensions to Saftleven’s painting, which measures 15.6 x 24.1 cm.

2. Inv. PAK 213; Marius van Dam, Miscellanea delineata: Dutch drawings 1780-1860 from the Ploos van Amstel Knoef collection, Rotterdam, 2007, pp.147-149, no.81.

3. Inv. A10875 and 10873, respectively; Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum and Enschede, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, In helder licht. Abraham en Jacob van Strij: Hollandse meesters van landschap en interieur omstreeks 1800, exhibition catalogue, 2000, pp.248-249, nos.207 and 209, figs.374-375.

No.18 Sir Edwin Landseer 1. Willard Bissell Pope, ed., The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Vol.II, Cambridge (MA), 1960, pp.357-358.

2. Ibid., p.466.

3. W. P. Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences, Vol.III (Further Reminiscences), London, 1888, p.242.

4. William Cosmo Monkhouse, The Studies of Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A., London, 1877, p.10, fig.10.

5. A thorough account of Mansel Lewis’s life, work and patronage is found in Stephanie Jones, Charles William Mansel Lewis: Painter, Patron and Promoter of Art in Wales, Aberystwyth, 1998.

6. Richard Ormond, ‘The Mansel Lewis Collection of Drawings by Sir Edwin Landseer’, in London, Sotheby’s, Old Master & British Drawings, 6 July 2010, p.100.

7. Ormond, op.cit., 1981, pp.42-43.

No.19 François-Marius Granet 1. Granet must have used a number of these sketchbooks. Three were included, for example, in the 1893 Hippoltye Destailleur sale (Paris, Hôtel des Commissaires-Priseurs, 26-27 May 1893, lots 44 to 46), one of which contained ‘dessins, croquis, esquisses et chargés, exécutés à Rome de 1822 à 1824...Album composé de 61 dessins à la plume, à la sépia et à l’aquarelle’.

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2. ‘Memoirs of the Painter Granet’, translated by Joseph Focarino, in François-Marius Granet: Watercolors from the Musée Granet at Aix-en-Provence, exhibition catalogue, New York and elsewhere, 1989, p.28.

No.20 Richard Parkes Bonington 1. Carlos Peacock, Richard Parkes Bonington, New York, 1980, pp.92-93.

2. In a letter of 1861 to Théophile Thore; quoted in translation in Noon, op.cit., 2008. p.77.

3. Noon, op.cit., 2008, pp.411-412, nos.383b-383e.

4. Inv. B1975.4.70; London, P. & D. Colnaghi, Exhibition of Old Master and English Drawings, 1969, no.110; Patrick Noon, Richard Parkes Bonington: ‘On the Pleasure of Painting’, exhibition catalogue, New Haven and London, 1991, p.295, no.157.

The 1969 Colnaghi exhibition included another related pencil drawing by Bonington as no.107 (‘Study of a Seated Lady’, pencil on grey paper, 175 x 128 mm., not illustrated), bought by F. Gachon for £120.

5. Inv. 1953.252.

6. Noon, op.cit., 2008, p.412, under no.383e. Bonington is said to have been greatly upset by the sudden death of one of the Rev. Forster’s daughters in 1828. Patrick Noon has also tentatively suggested that the sitter may be the dancer Eugénie Dalton, who was friendly with both Bonington and Delacroix, although he notes only a slight resemblance with known portraits of her.

7. Inv. 1984, 1006.28; Noon, op.cit., 1991, p.161, no.58; Noon, op.cit., 2008, pp.372-373, no.329; Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan, The Intimate Portrait: Drawings, Miniatures and Pastels from Ramsay to Lawrence, exhibition catalogue, Edinburgh and London, p.119, no.71. The drawing measures 125 x 104 mm.

No.21 John Frederick Lewis 1. Christine Riding, ‘Travellers and Sitters: The Orientalist Portrait’, in Nicholas Tromans, ed., The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, exhibition catalogue, New Haven, London and Istanbul, 2008-2009, p.56.

2. Quoted in Lewis, op.cit., p.33.

3. Ibid., p.21.

4. Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Lady’), London, Christie’s, 15 June 2010, lot 10. The drawing, which measures 368 x 527 mm., may be the same as that entitled ‘Armenian Ladies, Brussa, 1841’ sold at the posthumous Lewis studio sale at Christie’s, London, 4 May 1877, lot 188.

5. Inv. D.1984.4; Charles Nugent, British Watercolours in The Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester: A Summary Catalogue of Drawings and Watercolours by Artists born before 1880, London, 2002, illustrated p.172. Measuring 348 x 485 mm., the drawing was, like the present sheet, also at one time in the collection of Theodora Winter.

6. Inv. 1953,1211.11; Lewis, op.cit., p.79, no.350 (as ‘Armenian Girl’), with incorrect dimensions, not illustrated. The drawing measures 504 x 369 mm., and was inscribed Armenian girl on the old mount or backing sheet.

7. Briony Llewellyn, ‘David Wilkie and John Frederick Lewis in Constantinople, 1840: an artistic dialogue’, The Burlington Magazine, September 2003, pp.629-630.

No.22 Carlo Bossoli 1. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 28 November 1990, lot 6.

2. View of Seville seen from the Guadalquivir River, dated 1858; Anonymous sales, Milford, CT., Shannon’s, 26 April 2007, lot 200 and London, Sotheby’s, 14 November 2007, lot 235.

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3. Market Day in Cadiz; Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 26 October 2005, lot 67.

4. View of the Escorial; Anonymous sale, Zurich, Schuler Auktionen, 21 June 2002, lot 4788.

5. A gouache view of Barcelona was in a private collection in Turin in 1974 (Lugano, Villa Ciani and Turin, Palazzo Madama, Carlo Bossoli: cinquant’anni di vita europea nei disegni e nei dipinti del pittore ticinese, exhibition catalogue, 1974, p.33, no.123, illustrated.)

6. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 28 November 1990, lots 5-7, respectively.

No.23 British School, c.1850 1. Referring to the present work in a letter of 1997, Michael Lewis noted that, while the technique of oil on paper is not found elsewhere in the oeuvre of John Frederick Lewis, the draughtsmanship has some affinities with other works by him, and he posited a somewhat hesitant attribution to the artist. Briony Llewellyn has, however, recently confirmed that the present work is not by Lewis.

2. James Dafforne, ‘The Works of Francis John Wyburd’, The Art Journal, June 1877, p.164.

No.24 William Callow 1. ‘The Water Colour Method of Mr. William Callow’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1907, p.160.

2. Photograph in the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London. The watercolour, which measures 10 13/16 x 14 1/2 in., was probably the same as that exhibited at Walker’s Galleries in London in April 1927; one of three views of Tivoli from a group of around three hundred drawings and watercolours acquired from Callow’s widow Mary Louisa. Another view of the falls at Tivoli, also dated 1840 and of similar dimensions, appeared at auction in London in 1999 (Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 9 November 1999, lot 113, measuring 362 x 260 mm.).

3. Reynolds, op.cit., p.213 (not illustrated); Anonymous sales, London, Christie’s, 14 June 1983, lot 122 and New York, Christie’s, 30 October 1985, lot 468. The drawing measures 545 x 823 mm.

4. Reynolds, op.cit., p.218 (not illustrated). This is probably the same work, dated 1875, which was included as No.61 in the exhibition of watercolours by Callow held at the Leicester Galleries in 1907 (Reynolds, op.cit., p.241).

No.25 Sir Edward Burne-Jones 1. John Christian, ‘The Compulsive Draughtsman’, in John Christian, Elisa Korb and Tessa Sidey, Hidden Burne-Jones: Works on paper by Edward Burne-Jones from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, exhibition catalogue, 2007, p.7.

2. W. Graham Robertson, Time Was, London, 1931, p.84.

3. Julia Cartwright (Mrs. Ady), preface to London, Fine Art Society, Studies & Drawings by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart., exhibition catalogue, April 1896, p.6.

4. T. Martin Wood, Drawings of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, London and New York, n.d. (1907?), p.3.

5. Nevertheless, similarities may be noted with female heads in a number of Burne-Jones’s paintings of this period, such as the Laus Veneris now in the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, painted in sporadic periods between 1873 and 1878 (Stephen Wildman and John Christian, Edward Burne-Jones, Victorian Artist-Dreamer, exhibition catalogue, New York and elsewhere, 1998-1999, pp.167-169, no.63).

6. In a letter to Helen Mary Gaskell of January 1893; quoted in Penelope Fitzgerald, Edward Burne-Jones: A Biography, London, 1975, p.114.

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No.26 Frederic, Lord Leighton 1. Leonée and Richard Ormond, Lord Leighton, New Haven and London, 1975, colour pl.VII, details illustrated pls.169 and 170; Christopher Newall, The Art of Lord Leighton, Oxford and New York, 1990, pp.114-115, pl.78; Margot Th. Brandlhuber and Michael Buhrs, ed., Frederic Lord Leighton 1830-1896: Painter and Sculptor of the Victorian Age, exhibition catalogue, Munich, Museum Villa Stuck, 2009, pp.26-27, fig.17. The painting measures 196.8 x 406.5 cm.

2. Ormond, ibid., p.126.

3. Newall, op.cit., p.73, pl.47; Stephen Jones, ‘Leighton the Academic’, in Stephen Jones et al., Frederic Leighton, exhibition catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1996, p.64, fig.41.

4. Examples of these types of preparatory drawings for Captive Andromache are illustrated in Ernest Rhys, Frederic Lord Leighton, Late President of the Royal Academy of Arts: An Illustrated Record of his Life and Work, London, 1898, between pp.42 and 43. A colour sketch for the painting was in the Tanenbaum collection (Louise d’Argencourt and Douglas Druick, The Other Nineteenth Century: Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of Mr and Mrs Joseph M. Tanenbaum, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa, 1978, pp.142-144, no.47; Ormond, op.cit., no.335, illustrated in colour pl.II).

5. A nearly complete list of drawings for Captive Andromache, with most illustrated, may be found on the Leighton Drawings website at http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/lordleightonsdrawings/ldcollection/searchresults.asp?txtKeyword=andromache&cmdsubmit=Search.

6. Ormond, op.cit., p.122.

7. Williams, op.cit., p.561.

8. Philippa Martin, ‘The Creation of the Leighton Drawings Collection’, in London, Leighton House Museum, A Victorian Master: Drawings by Frederic, Lord Leighton, exhibition catalogue, London and elsewhere, 2006-2008, p.13, fig.4.

9. Alison Smith, ‘‘Art Disguising Art’: The Drawings of Frederic Leighton’, in London, Leighton House Museum, ibid., p.15.

10. Martin, op.cit., p.12.

11. S. P. Cockerell, ‘Lord Leighton’s Drawings’, The Nineteenth Century, November 1986, p.809.

No.27 Henry Monnier 1. Edith Melcher, The Life and Times of Henry Monnier, Cambridge, 1950, p.42.

2. Ibid., pp.41-42.

No.28 Edgar Degas 1. At the fourth and final Degas studio sale, held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in July 1919, the present sheet was sold framed together with two other drawings after Italian Renaissance works; one a Head of Christ and the other a study after the figure of an executioner in Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael’s Massacre of the Innocents.

2. Emil Maurer, ‘Degas’s Copies’, in Felix Baumann and Marianne Karabelnik, ed., Degas Portraits, exhibition catalogue, Zurich and Tübingen, 1994-1995, p.151.

3. In a letter to Degas of 4 January 1859; Quoted in translation in Jean Sutherland Boggs et al, Degas, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Ottawa and New York, 1988-1989, p.88, under no.27.

4. ‘Il faut copier et recopier les maîtres, et ce n’est qu’après avoire donné toutes les preuves d’un bon copiste qu’il pourra raisonnablement vous être permis de faire un radis d’après nature.’; quoted in Ambroise Vollard, Degas, Paris, 1924, p.64.

5. Theodore Reff, ‘New Light on Degas’s Copies’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1964, p.250.

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6. Maurer, op.cit., p.156.

7. Carlo Castellaneta and Ettore Camesasca, L’opera completa del Perugino, Milan, 1969, p.93, no.35; Pietro Scarpellini, Perugino, Milan, 1991, p.87, no.57, p.183, fig.90; Vittoria Garibaldi, Perugino: Catalogo completo, Florence, 1999, p.114, no.34, illustrated in colour p.36; Jean Habert et al, Catalogue des peintures italiennes du musee du Louvre: Catalogue sommaire, Paris, 2007, p.43, Inv.720.

8. Maurer, op.cit., pp.152-153.

9. Emil Maurer, ‘Portraits as Pictures: Degas between Taking a Likeness and Making a Work of Art (Tableau)’, in Felix Baumann and Marianne Karabelnik, ed., Degas Portraits, exhibition catalogue, Zurich and Tübingen, 1994-1995, p.101.

10. Dupuy-Vachey, op.cit., p.397, figs.24-26; Théodore Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar Degas, Oxford, 1976, Vol.I, p.40 [Notebook 2, pp.47, 49 and 51].

11. ‘Pas de parti-pris dans l’art? et les primitifs italiens, qui expriment la douceur des lèvres en les imitant par des traits durs, et qui font vivre les yeux, en coupant les paupières comme avec des ciseaux…’; Daniel Halévy, Degas parle…, Paris and Geneva, 1960, p.56; quoted in translation in Maurer, ‘Degas’s Copies’, op.cit., p.154.

No.29 Giovanni Boldini 1. ‘Our Steel Engravings: The Connoisseur’, Art Journal, 1878, p.217; Quoted in Sarah Lees, ‘Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris’, in Sarah Lees, Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris, exhibition catalogue, Ferrara and Williamstown, 2009-2010, p.19.

2. Carlo Ragghianti and Ettore Camesasca, L’opera completa di Boldini, Milan, 1970, pp.122-123, no.426, illustrated in colour pl.IL (where dated to 1906); Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Giovanni Boldini 1842-1931: Catalogo ragionato. Vol.III: Catalogo ragionato della pittura a olio con un’ampia selezione di pastelle e acquerelli, pt.2: Addenda al catalogo ragionato, Turin, 2002, p.467, no.892. The watercolour measures 450 x 500 mm.

3. Dini and Dini, ibid., p.468, no.893. The drawing is signed and dated 1905, and measures 445 x 295 mm.

4. Ragghianti and Camesasca, op.cit., p.123, no.448, illustrated in colour pl.LIV (where dated 1908); Andrea Buzzoni and Marcello Toffanello, Museo Giovanni Boldini: Catalogo generale completamente illustrato, Ferrara, 1997, p.154, illustrated in colour pl.32; Dini and Dini, op.cit., pp.500-501, no.970. The drawing measures 450 x 450 mm.

5. Lees, op.cit., p.35.

6. Ragghianti and Camesasca, op.cit., pp.124-125, no.461a, illustrated in colour pl.LV; Buzzoni and Toffanello, ibid., pp.138139, illustrated in colour pl.31; Bianca Doria, Giovanni Boldini: Catalogo generale dagli Archivi Boldini, Milan, 2000, Vol.I, no.555, Vol.II, pl.555 (where dated to 1909); Dini and Dini, op.cit., p.511, no.987.

7. Vito Doria, Boldini: Inedito / Inédit / Unpublished work, Bologna, 1982, illustrated p.42 (where dated 1884).

No.30 Giovanni Boldini 1. Richard Kendall, ‘Drawing Paris: Boldini as a Draftsman in the 1870s’, in Sarah Lees, Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris, exhibition catalogue, Ferrara and Williamstown, 2009-2010, pp.70-71.

2. Ibid., p.76.

3. Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Dessins Parisiens de Giovanni Boldini, exhibition catalogue, 1982, unpaginated, no.61 (where dated to c.1910).

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No.31 Francesco Paolo Michetti 1. Rome, Palazzo Venezia and Francavilla al Mare, Museo Michetti and Palazzo San Domenico, Francesco Paolo Michetti: Dipinti, pastelli, disegni, exhibition catalogue, 1999, p.155, fig.22. The drawing, which measures 500 x 855 mm., may further be associated with a pair of equally large sheets of pastel studies of turkeys, in the same collection, which are also signed and dated 1886 (Ibid., p.154, figs.20-21).

2. Anonymous sale, Rome, Christie’s, 27 May 2002, lot 282. The pastel measures 500 x 650 mm.

3. Anonymous sale, Rome, Christie’s, 31 May 1994, lot 130. The drawing measures 475 x 625 mm.

4. Renato Barilli, L’ultimo Michetti: pittura e fotografia, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1995, pp.129-134, figs.145-154.

No.32 William Fraser Garden 1. Charles Lane, The Fraser Family, London, 2010, p.75.

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

3. Charles Lane, ‘Art as a Family Affair: The Paintings of the Fraser Brothers’, Country Life, 28 June 1979, p.2108.

4. A photograph of the bridge chapel with four storeys, as Garden drew it, is illustrated in Royal Commission on Historical Monuments: An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Huntingdonshire, London, 1926, frontispiece and pl.121, no.3 and in William Page et al., ed., The Victoria History of the County of Huntingdon, Vol.II, London, 1932, illustrated facing p.212.

5. A photograph of the bridge as it appears today is found in Page, ibid., facing p.213, and also in Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Bedfordshire and the County of Huntingdon and Peterborough, 1968, pl.2.

6. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s Belgravia, 27 April 1982, lot 76. The drawing, which is undated, measures 280 x 360 mm.

7. London, Christie’s South Kensington, 11 December 2007, lot 701. The watercolour measures 190 x 277 mm.

8. London, Christopher Wood Gallery, The Year of the Watercolour: 16th Annual Exhibition of English Watercolours and Drawings of the 18th and 19th Centuries, 1993, no.14; London, Christie’s, The Fuller Collection of Victorian Landscape Watercolours, 7 April 2000, lot 116 (sold for £21,150); Lane, op.cit., 2010, illustrated p.34. The drawing, which is signed and dated 1895, measures 462 x 578 mm.

9. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 18 December 1984, lot 170; Anonymous sale (‘Victorian Watercolours and Illustrations from a Private Collection’), Bonham’s, 19 November 2008, lot 218. The watercolour measures 201 x 285 mm.

No.34 Pierre Auguste Renoir 1. François Fosca, ‘Les Dessins de Renoir’, Art et décoration, July 1921; quoted in translation in Isabelle Gaëtan, ‘“A painter who has never learned how to draw but who draws well – that is Renoir”’, in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Renoir in the 20th Century, exhibition catalogue, 2009-2010, p.84.

2. François Daulte, Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Water-colours, pastels and drawings in colour, London, 1959, p.8.

3. Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville, Renoir: Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, Vol.II (18821894), Paris, 2009, pp.375-376, no.1292.

4. London, Hayward Gallery, and elsewhere, Renoir, exhibition catalogue, 1985-1986, p.242.

5. Richard Wattenmaker et al, Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-impressionist, and Early Modern, London, 1993, p.94, fig.2.

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6. John House, ‘Renoir and the Art of the Past’, in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, op.cit., p.36.

7. Barbara Ehrlich White, ‘The Bathers of 1887 and Renoir’s Anti-Impressionism’, The Art Bulletin, March 1973, p.116, fig.22; Christopher Riopelle, ‘Renoir: The Great Bathers’, Bulletin of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fall 1990, p.28, fig.30; Stéphane Pincas, Versailles: The History of the Gardens and Their Sculpture, London, 1996, illustrated pp.69-70. Girardon’s relief in métail for the fountain, known as the Bains des Nymphes de Diane, was executed between 1668 and 1670, and gilded the following year.

8. Inv. NGA 80.987; Riopelle, ibid., p.21, fig.20; Terence Maloon and Peter Raissis, Michelangelo to Matisse: Drawing the Figure, exhibition catalogue, Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1999, p.98, no.31; Dauberville, op.cit., p.561, no.1600. The drawing measures 267 x 235 mm.

9. François Daulte, Renoir, London, 1973, illustrated p.5; Riopelle, op.cit., p.20, fig.19. The sheet measures 630 x 975 mm.

10. Formerly in the collection of Paul Pétridès, Paris; Daulte, ibid., p.45, fig.3; Riopelle, op.cit., p.21, fig.21. The oil sketch measures 62 x 95 cm.

11. Riopelle, op.cit., pp.18-20.

12. One illustrated in John Rewald, Renoir Drawings, New York, 1946, p.19, no.35, pl.35 (where dated 1883), and the other sold New York, Sotheby’s, 12 November 1987, lot 116.

13. Riopelle, op.cit., p.19, fig.16.

14. White, op.cit., p.109, figs.6 and 7.

15. London, Hayward Gallery, op.cit., p.242.

16. Christine Ekelhart, Die französischen Zeichnungen und Aquarelle des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts der Albertina, Vienna, Cologne and Weimar, 2007, pp.604-605, no.277; Emmanuelle Amiot-Saulnier, Renoir: pastels, crayons, sanguines, aquarelles, 2009, pp.72-73, no.7.

17. Sylvie Patry, ‘Renoir and Decorative Art’, in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, op.cit., illustrated p.58, fig.21.

18. Gaëtan, in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, op.cit., pp.86-87.

19. Denis Rouart, ed., The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, London, 1957, p.130.

20. The present sheet does not appear in the auction of part of Guérin’s collection of drawings, held in Paris in 1932, although two other drawings of bathers by Renoir were included in the sale (Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 9 December 1932, lots 65 and 66). Guérin also owned another watercolour by Renoir, depicting a reclining bather and apparently related to the present sheet, which he lent to the 1933 Renoir exhibition in Paris (Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, op.cit., no.142: ‘Baigneuse couchée…A l’aquarelle. H. 0,160; L. 0,315., Signé en bas, à droite: Renoir. Exécuté vers 1897.’)

No.35 Paul-Émile Colin 1. ‘Malgré l’effort et le travail considérables que représentent ses bois gravés, Colin ne s’est jamais laissé absorber entièrement par son métier. Il a toujours été attiré vers la couleur. Ses tableaux sont encore peu connus et ils sont rares…Ses pastels forment un ensemble assez important que l’on essaie de les juger. Ils appartiennent à toutes les époques de son activité artistique; ils évoquent les paysages de toutes les contrées où Colin s’est efforcé de comprendre les spectacles que nous offre la nature.’; Gaston Varenne, ‘Les pastels de P.-E. Colin’, Revue Lorraine Illustrée, January-March 1913, p.2.

No.36 Georges de Feure 1. ‘Aquarelles de M. Lefeure’, 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 18681943, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, 1993-1994, p.11 2. Philippe Julian, The Symbolists, London, 1973, p.231, under no.40.

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3. Ian Millman, Georges de Feure: Maître du Symbolisme et de l’Art Nouveau, Courbevoie, 1992, illustrated p.269. Executed in oil on board, the sheet measures 585 x 730 mm.

4. Ibid., illustrated p.265.

No.37 Federico Beltrán Masses 1. R. R. Tatlock, ‘Beltran-Massés, his Mind and Art’, in London, R. W. S. Galleries, Paintings by Federico Beltran-Massés, exhibition catalogue, 1934, unpaginated.

2. London, The Maas Gallery, British Pictures, exhibition catalogue, 2004, p.30, under no.28.

No.38 Kirill Zdanevich 1. Diary of Valentina Kirillovna Zdanevich; quoted in translation in Françoise Le Gris-Bergmann, ‘Kirill Zdanevich: A Georgian Futurist Painter’, in New York, Rachel Adler Gallery, Kirill Zdanevich and Cubo-Futurism: Tiflis 1918-1920, exhibition catalogue, 1987, unpaginated, 2. New York, Rachel Adler Gallery, ibid., no.90 (where dated c.1940).

No.39 Conrad Felixmüller 1. Penndorf, Birthälmer and Fehlemann, op.cit., p.34, no.32. The watercolour measures 550 x 360 mm.

2. Titus Felixmüller, ‘The father as painter – his son as model’, 1978; quoted in translation in Angelika Schmiegelow Powell, ed., Conrad Felixmüller 1897-1977: Prints and Drawings from the Collection of Dr. Ernst and Anne Fischer, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge (MA) and Charlottesville, 1979, pp.7-9.

3. Heinz Spielmann et al, Conrad Felixmüller: Monographie und Wekverzeichnis der Gemälde, Cologne, 1996, p.267, no.448.

The painting is dated the 22nd of June, 1929.

4. Spielmann et al, ibid., p.252, no.358 (as location unknown); Berlin, Fischer Kunsthandel, Conrad Felixmüller: Die frühen Jahre, exhibition catalogue, 2007, unpaginated, illustrated in colour. The painting is dated the 5th of September, 1925. A variant of this composition was produced as an etching the following year (Gerhart Söhn, Conrad Felixmüller: Die Graphische Werk 1912-1977, Düsseldorf, 1987, p.123, nos.364-365).

5. Shulamith Behr, Conrad Felixmüller: Works on Paper, exhibition catalogue, London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, n.d., (1994), p.52, no.49, illustrated in colour p.58, pl.V; Penndorf, Birthälmer and Fehlemann, op.cit., p.37, no.35.

6. Penndorf, Birthälmer and Fehlemann, op.cit., p.61, no.71 (where dated 1921). The drawing measures 730 x 510 mm.

No.40 Sir George Clausen 1. J. Wood Palmer, in London, Arts Council, A Time of Harvest: Pastels and Drawings by Sir George Clausen, R.A., exhibition catalogue, 1949, unpaginated.

2. J. Littlejohns, British Water-Colour Painting & Painters of To-day, London, 1931, pp.30-31.

No.41 Tamara da Lempicka 1. Cologne and elsewhere, International Auctioneers [Butterfields], Modern Art, 7 June 2000, under lot 122.

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2. Alain Blondel, Tamara de Lempicka: Catalogue raisonné 1921-1979, Lausanne, 1999, p.304, no.B.217; Gioia Mori, Tamara de Lempicka, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 2006-2007, p.14, no.46. The painting, which measures 28 x 23 cm., is today in the collection of Richard and Anne Paddy, Michigan.

No.42 Anna Airy 1. The present sheet was also inscribed and titled by the artist Verdure & Decay in pencil in the right hand margin, which has since been trimmed.

2. Martin Hardie, ‘Foreword’, in London, R.B.A. Galleries, Anna Airy: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, 1952, p.1.

3. T. W., ‘Anna Airy’s Drawings of Fruit, Flowers and Foliage’, The International Studio, May 1915, pp.189-190.

4. Hardie, op.cit., p.2.

5. Hardie, op.cit., p.2.

No.43 René Gruau 1. ‘Obituaries: René Gruau’, The Times, 13 April 2004.

2. Gruau provided numerous cover drawings and illustrations for L’Officiel between 1946 and 1968.

3. ‘Evening dress by Jeanne Lanvin (Castillo) in white chiffon with black polka dots colourfully animated with knots made of shimmering scarlet red ribbons. The supple fullness of this model is positively striking.’ Castillo oversaw the haute-couture activities of the House of Lanvin between 1951 and 1963.

4. In a 1999 interview; quoted in translation in Réjane Bargiel and Sylvie Nissen, René Gruau, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée de la Publicité, 1999-2000, pp.38 and 42.

5. Ibid., p.38.

No.44 Francisco Zúñiga 1. Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, La obra de Francisco Zúñiga, Canon de la belleza Americana / The Work of Francisco Zúñiga, Canon of the American beauty, Mexico City, 2002, pp.22 and 26.

2. Quoted in translation in ibid., p.26.

3. Rodríguez Prampolini, op.cit., p.30.

4. Juan Coronel Rivera et al, Francisco Zúñiga, Mexico, 1994, illustrated in colour p.78; Ariel Zúñiga and Andrew Vlady, Francisco Zúñiga: Catálogo razonado / Catalogue Raisonné, Vol.II: pintura al óleo, estampas y reproducciones / Oil Paintings, Prints & Reproductions 1927-1986, Mexico, 2003, illustrated p.244.

5. Ariel Zúñiga and Andrew Vlady, Francisco Zúñiga: Catálogo razonado / Catalogue Raisonné, Vol.III: dibujos / drawings 19271970, p.292, nos.1444 and 1445 (where dated 1967). Both drawings are similar in dimensions to the present sheet.

No.45 Sir Kyffin Williams 1. As Williams noted in the catalogue of an exhibition of his work in 2002, he often gave these figures names that were not their own: ‘All the hill-farmers I put into my pictures, I name John Jones for sometimes I know who they are & sometimes I don’t…to me he is always John Jones whether he be fat or thin, dark or fair, old or young: he is always the man who lived amongst the rocks and valleys of Wales for centuries. He is part of our landscape but I wonder often how much longer he will be there.’ (London, Thackeray Gallery, Kyffin Williams, R.A., exhibition catalogue, 2004, p.22.)

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2. Rian Evans, ‘Kyffin Williams, Defining Horizons’, in Nicholas Sinclair and Rian Evans, The Art of Kyffin Williams, London, 2007, p.129.

3. London, Thackeray Gallery, Kyffin Williams, R.A., exhibition catalogue, 2002, p.16.

4. Kyffin Williams, Portraits, Llandysul, 1996; 2007 ed., p.168.

5. ‘Nicholas Sinclair in conversation with Kyffin Williams’, in London, Thackeray Gallery, Kyffin Williams, exhibition catalogue, 1998, p.4.

6. Nicholas Sinclair, ‘Sir Kyffin Williams’, in London, Thackeray Gallery, Kyffin Williams, R.A., exhibition catalogue, 2000, pp.5-6.

No.46 David Hockney 1. ‘David Hockney in conversation with David Blayney Brown’, in Simon Grant, ed., Hockney on Turner Watercolours, exhibition catalogue, London, Tate Britain, 2007-2008, p.18.

2. London, Annely Juda Fine Art, David Hockney: Painting on Paper, exhibition catalogue, 2003, unpaginated.

3. Several of Hockney’s drawings and watercolours from his visits to Norway and Iceland are illustrated in David Hockney, ed., Hockney’s Pictures: The Definitive Retrospective, New York and Boston, 2004, pp.324-339, and on the cover.

4. One example is illustrated in ibid., pp.334-335.

5. London, Annely Juda Fine Art, op.cit., unpaginated.

6. Hockney, ed., op.cit., illustrated pp.336-337. The entire drawing measures 914 x 2438 mm.

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INDEX OF ARTISTS

AIRY, Anna; no.42 BARBIERI, Giovanni Francesco, called Il Guercino; no.9 BELTRÁN MASSES, Federico; no.37 BOCCIARDO, Clemente; no.8 BOLDINI, Giovanni; nos.29-30 BOSSOLI, Carlo; no.22 BONINGTON, Richard Parkes; no.20 BRITISH SCHOOL, circa 1850; no.23 BUONACCORSI, Pietro, called Perino del Vaga; no.1 BURNE-JONES, Sir Edward Coley; no.25 CALLOW, William; no.24 CARUCCI, Jacopo, called Pontormo; no.2 CARRACCI, Ludovico; no.3 CIGNANI, Carlo; no.11 CLAUSEN, Sir George; no.40 COLIN, Paul-Émile; no.35 DE FEURE, Georges; no.36 DEGAS, Edgar; no.28 DELLA BELLA, Stefano; no.10 DUCLOS, Antoine-Jean; no.15 FACCINI, Pietro; no.5 FELIXMÜLLER, Conrad; no.39 FRASER GARDEN, William; no.32 FRENCH SCHOOL, circa 1900; no.33 GRANET, François-Marius; no.19 GRUAU, René; no.43 GUERCINO, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called; no.9

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HOCKNEY, David; no.46 LANDSEER, Sir Edwin Henry; no.18 LEIGHTON, Frederic, Lord; no.26 LEMPICKA, Tamara de; no.41 LEWIS, John Frederick; no.21 LOMI, Aurelio; no.6 LUTI, Benedetto; no.12 MICHETTI, Francesco Paolo; no.31 MONNIER, Henry; no.27 PALMIERI, Pietro Giacomo; no.13 PERINO DEL VAGA, Pietro Buonaccorsi called; no.1 POMARANCIO, Cristoforo Roncalli called; no.4 PONTOMRO, Jacopo Carucci called; no.2 RENI, Guido; no.7 RENOIR, Pierre Auguste; no.34 RONCALLI, Cristoforo, called Il Pomarancio; no.4 SAINT-AUBIN, Gabriel-Jacques de; no.14 VAN STRIJ, Jacob; no.17 VINKELES, Reinier; no.16 WILLIAMS, Sir Kyffin; no.45 ZDANEVICH, Kirill; no.38 Zﾃ堙選GA, Francisco; no.44

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Georges de Feure Winter Landscape with Skaters [detail] No.36

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Front cover: British School, c.1850 A Young Woman in Eastern Costume No.23

Back cover: Jacopo da Pontormo (1494-1557) Two Studies of a Male Nude No.2

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