STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART
Front cover: Claudio Bravo (1936-2011) A Seated Man Seen from Behind No.58
. .
Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) Still Life with Pears and Lemons No.52
STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART
MASTER DRAWINGS 2014 An exhibition at Mark Murray Fine Paintings 39 East 72nd Street 5th Floor New York, NY 10021
22nd January to 1st February, 2014 Weekdays 10:00 am - 6:00 pm Saturdays 11:00 am - 5:00 pm
A selection of the drawings in this catalogue will also be exhibited at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) Maastricht
13th to 23rd March, 2014 and The Salon du Dessin Paris
25th to 31st March, 2014
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am, as ever, very much indebted to my wife Laura for her advice, patience and constant support. I am also grateful to Lavinia Harrington for her invaluable assistance in all aspects of preparing this catalogue (as well as for the occasional doughnut). I would also like to thank the following people for their help and advice in the preparation of this catalogue and the drawings included herein: Claire Anderson, Deborah Bates, Marco Simone Bolzoni, Julian Brooks, Glynn Clarkson, Nathalie Dioh, Franco Faranda, Cheryl and Gino Franchi, Julie Frouge, Laura Giles, Corinna Giudici, Dean Hearn, Sammy Jay, Rupert Keim, David Lachenmann, Olivier Lefeuvre, Diane de Loës, Lauro Magnani, John Marciari, Elizabeth McKeown, Maria Nuzzo, Michelle Schröer Ongpin, Guy Peppiatt, Anya Perse, Sophie Richard, Sarah Ricks, Maria Novella Romano, Martin Royalton-Kisch, Max Rutherston, Lara SmithBosanquet, Anne Charlotte Steland, Larry Sunden, Betsy Thomas, Todd-White Photography, Nicholas Turner, Vera Laura Verona, Joanna Watson, Georges Winter and Jenny Willings. 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. High-resolution digital images of the drawings are available on request. All enquiries should be addressed to Stephen Ongpin or Lavinia Harrington 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 Between 19 January and 4 February 2014 only: Tel. [+1] (917) 587-1183 Fax [+1] (212) 585-2383
MASTER DRAWINGS 2014 PRESENTED BY
STEPHEN ONGPIN
1 BERNARDINO GATTI, called IL SOJARO Pavia c.1495-1575 Cremona Recto: Study of Legs Verso: Study for a Saint Sebastian Red chalk, heightened with white, on buff paper, the lower left corner cut. Squared for transfer in red chalk. The verso in red chalk. Numbered 182 in brown ink at the upper right. 110 x 197 mm. (4 3/ 8 x 7 3/4 in.) Bernardino Gatti worked for much of his career in Cremona, Parma and Piacenza. Throughout his life he was particularly inspired by the art of Correggio, as can be seen in his earliest altarpiece, a Resurrection painted in 1529 for the Duomo in Cremona. In 1543 he was working in the church of Santa Maria in Campagna in Piacenza, where he was tasked with the completion of a series of frescoes of the Life of the Virgin in the cupola, which had been begun by Pordenone. The late 1540’s found Gatti working on several projects in Cremona, notably an Assumption of Christ painted in 1549 for San Sigismondo and a Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes in the convent of San Pietro al Po, completed in 1552. In 1560 the artist settled in Parma, where he frescoed an Assumption of the Virgin for the dome of Santa Maria della Steccata, completed in 1572; a work that reveals the influence of Correggio’s cupola fresco in the nearby church of San Giovanni Evangelista. Gatti was back in Cremona by 1573, where he began an Assumption of the Virgin for the Duomo, left unfinished at his death. This drawing is likely to be a study for one of Gatti’s earliest and best-known works; the large painting of The Virgin Mourning the Dead Christ of c.1528-1530 (fig.1), painted for the church of San Domenico in Cremona and now in the Louvre1. As Giulio Bora has noted of the artist, with particular reference to the Louvre painting, ‘Because of his early training in the Po Valley…and his later association with Correggio, Gatti was deeply rooted in the Leonardesque tradition…This aspect of Gatti’s work also informs the dramatic Lamentation, once in San Domenico, Cremona, and now in the Louvre. The artist’s impressive ability to realistically portray anatomy anticipated the realism of later painters by several decades. Longhi, for example, named the Lamentation one of the important influences on Caravaggio. Gatti’s accomplishment is especially extraordinary because, as the same time and in the same city, other artists were painting in the refined language of Mannerism, which enjoyed widespread popularity in the Po Vallery.’2 The small sketch on the verso of the present sheet would appear to be a study, in reverse, for a more finished drawing of Saint Sebastian in the Uffizi3, which is unrelated to any surviving painting by Gatti.
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verso (detail)
2 DENYS CALVAERT Antwerp c.1540-1619 Bologna An Angel Red chalk, heightened with white, on buff paper. 266 x 194 mm. (10 1/ 2 x 7 5/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Nicholas Lanier, London (Lugt 2886 twice on the recto); Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (according to the Mayor catalogue); Sir Peter Lely, London (Lugt 2092); William Mayor, London (Lugt 2799); James Stewart Hodgson, Lythe Hill, Haslemere, Surrey; Thence by descent until 1921; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 20 May 1921, part of lot 15; Lt. Col. Oliver Hawkshaw, Hollycombe House, Liphook, Hampshire; Thence by descent to private collection until 2012. LITERATURE: A Brief Chronological Description of a Collection of Original Drawings and Sketches by the Old Masters of the Different Schools of Europe...formed by the late Mr. William Mayor of Bayswater Hill, London, London, 1875, p.85, no.400 (‘Denis Calvert…Study of an Angel. Red chalk, heightened with white. H. 10 3/8 in. W. 7 1/2 in. Ex Collections Earl of Arundel and Sir Peter Lely.’) Born in Antwerp, Denys Calvaert was one of the few Flemish artists of the period who worked for most of his career in Italy. He settled in Bologna sometime around 1561 or 1562, and there completed his artistic training with the painters Prospero Fontana and Lorenzo Sabatini. In 1572 he accompanied Sabatini to Rome, where they worked on the fresco decoration of the Sala Regia in the Vatican for Pope Gregory XIII. On his return to Bologna in 1575, he established his own studio, counting among his pupils Guido Reni, Domenichino and Francesco Albani, all of whom later transferred to the Carracci’s rival Accademia degli Incamminati. Calvaert ran a large and busy studio in Bologna, receiving numerous commissions for religious pictures for local churches and smaller devotional works for private patrons. Alongside the Carracci, he was one of the leading painters in the city in the last quarter of the 16th century. Calvaert was a prolific and talented draughtsman, and many of his drawings are either dated or can be connected with surviving paintings. The present sheet would appear to be a preparatory study, with some differences, for the angel which appears at the lower right of an altarpiece of The Assumption of the Virgin (fig.1), datable to around 1569-1570. Formerly the high altar of the Bolognese church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, the painting is today in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna1. The attribution of the The Assumption of the Virgin has been the subject of scholarly debate. As early as 1570, when the altarpiece is mentioned in a description of the inauguration of the church in April of that year, the painting has generally been identified as the work of Lorenzo Sabatini (c.1530-1576). However, in his magisterial Felsina pittrice, published in 1678, the Bolognese art historian Carlo Cesare Malvasia records that the altarpiece was in fact painted by the young Calvaert when he was still in Sabatini’s studio, working from drawings provided by his master, and that the elder artist only retouched the final painting. Modern scholarship has tended to refer to the altarpiece as the work of Sabatini, with the possible contribution of his student Calvaert noted, although a few scholars have preferred to attribute the painting in its entirety to Calvaert. Furthermore, it should be noted that the style of the present sheet is much closer to the drawings of Calvaert than those of Sabatini, which would suggest that Calvaert must have at least been responsible for the design of the angel in the painting. Malvasia records that Calvaert was particulary admired, as a draughtsman, for his drawings in red chalk. A stylistically comparable red chalk drawing by Calvaert of a standing saint seen from below, on the
London art market in 19882, depicts the figure with his front foot resting on a horizontal rod, thereby allowing the artist to study the fall of drapery from beneath; the same method of posing the model is likely to have been used for the present sheet. Among other stylistically comparable drawings in red chalk by the artist is a Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine in the Louvre3 and an Annunciation, formerly in the collection of Edmund Pillsbury and sold at auction in 20054. The present sheet has a long and interesting provenance. The first known owner of the drawing was Nicholas Lanier or Lanière (1588-1666), whose collector’s mark of a small five-pointed star appears twice on the sheet. Lanier served Master of the King’s Musick at the court of King Charles I, and was one of the first serious collectors of drawings in England in the 17th century. His collection was largely composed of 16th century Italian drawings, as well as some sheets by contemporary artists of the early 17th century, such as Calvaert. Lanier also acted as agent for the courtier and Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel (1585-1646) – the other major collector of drawings in England in the first half of the 17th century – who may also have owned the present sheet. The drawing was probably acquired from Arundel’s heirs by the painter Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680), whose renowned collection of nearly 10,000 drawings, the largest ever seen in England up to that time, was dispersed at auction in 1688 and 1694. The drawing also bears the stamp of the art dealer and collector William Mayor (d.1874), who assembled a fine personal collection of Italian, French and Netherandish drawings, keeping examples of some of the best drawings that passed through his hands over a career of nearly fifty years. In 1871 he pubished a catalogue of his collection, which listed 522 sheets. The present sheet was not included in the 1871 catalogue, and must have been acquired after that date. The drawing does, however, appear in the second edition of the catalogue, published in 1875 after Mayor’s death5. It was acquired, possibly from Mayor, by James Stewart Hodgson (1827-1899), a banker, magistrate and art collector, by whose descendants it was sold at auction in 1921.
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3 CHERUBINO ALBERTI Borgo San Sepolcro 1553-1615 Rome Design for a Wall Decoration or Fountain, with a Nymph (Venus?) Flanked by Satyrs Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Laid down. Inscribed Cristofano Rosa detto / Dal Vasari / Il Bresciano in brown ink at the lower left1. 429 x 243 mm. (16 7/ 8 x 9 1/ 2 in.) PROVENANCE: Michel Gaud, Saint-Tropez (Lugt 3482). A painter and engraver, Cherubino Alberti was born into a family of artists in the Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro (today Sansepolcro) that included his father Alberto, his brothers Giovanni and Alessandro and his cousin Durante. He was in Rome by 1571, and there learned the art of engraving in the studio of Cornelis Cort. Alberti produced some 180 prints, mostly reproductive works after Michelangelo, Raphael, Polidoro da Caravaggio, the Zuccari and other artists. Most of his prints date from the 1570’s and early 1580’s, after which he seems to have devoted himself mainly to painting. His earliest documented work as a painter is a fresco decoration on the rear facade of the Vatican Library, painted in 1587. Together with his brother Giovanni, Cherubino Alberti was particularly admired for his skills as a painter of di sotto in su ceiling decorations, a talent he employed in several Roman churches. The two brothers worked together frequently, and were engaged by Pope Clement VIII on the decoration of the Sala Clementina – the largest room in the Vatican – between 1596 and 1604, and again in the sacristy of San Giovanni in Laterano, completed in 1602. The brothers also collaborated on the fresco decoration of the Oratorio del Crocifisso in the church of San Rocco in their native town of Sansepolcro. A number of other joint projects by Cherubino and Giovanni Alberti are now lost. Cherubino’s last major papal commission was the decoration of the vault of the Aldobrandini chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, completed in 1610. Three years later he was elected principe of the Accademia di San Luca. This large and impressive drawing by Cherubino Alberti is unrelated to any surviving work by the artist. The coat of arms at the top of the sheet, which would presumably be those of the patron, incorporates stars similar to those found on the arms of the noble Aldobrandini family, for whom Cherubino worked extensively, most notably for Pope Clement VIII. The helmet at the top of the coat of arms would seem to identify the patron as a cavaliere, or knight. Among stylistically and thematically comparable drawings by Cherubino Alberti is a design for the wall decoration of the Farnese Gallery of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, today in the collection of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin2, and a project for the decoration of a loggia, in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples3. Both drawings share a similar handing of pen and wash with the present sheet, and incorporate analogous figures flanking coats of arms. The satyrs in this drawing are also stylistically very similar to those in a pen study of Two Satyrs, formerly part of the collection assembled by Don Gaspar Mendéz de Haro y Guzman, Marqués del Carpio, while serving as Viceroy of Naples in the 1680’s, and more recently in the collection of the late Alfred Moir of Santa Barbara, California4. Although the Moir drawing bears an old attribution to the Cavaliere d’Arpino, and has indeed been published as an early work by that artist5, it has recently been removed from the corpus of Arpino’s drawings by Marco Bolzoni, who has suggested instead a tentative attribution to Cherubino or Giovanni Alberti6.
4 FRANCESCO VANNI Siena 1563/64-1610 Siena The Head of Saint John the Baptist Oil, over an underdrawing in black chalk, on paper laid down on canvas. 418 x 278 mm. (16 3/ 8 x 10 7/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 10 July 2003, lot 162 (as Bartolomeo Passarotti); Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2004. LITERATURE: Peter Humfrey et al, The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art from Scottish Collections, exhibition catalogue, Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland, 2004, p.248, under no.106 (as Bartolomeo Passarotti); John Marciari, ‘Francesco Vanni: Artistic Vison in an Age of Reform’, in John Marciari and Suzanne Boorsch, Francesco Vanni: Art in Late Renaissance Siena, exhibition catalogue, New Haven, 2013-2014, p.7, fig.3 and p.87, under no.16 (as Francesco Vanni). EXHIBITED: New York and London, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2004, no.12 (as Bartolomeo Passarotti). The leading painter in Siena at the end of the 16th century, Francesco Vanni began his training with his stepfather Arcangelo Salimbeni before entering the studio of Giovanni de’ Vecchi in Rome around 1581. Perhaps the most significant influence on the artist, however, was the work of Federico Barocci, although the two artists do not seem to have ever met. For most of his career Vanni worked in and around Siena, where one of his earliest independent commissions was a massive altarpiece of The Baptism of Constantine for the church of Sant’Agostino, painted between 1586 and 1587. Later paintings followed for San Domenico, Santa Caterina, San Francesco and other Sienese churches, including a Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine painted in 1601 for the Chiesa del Rifugio. Vanni also worked in Pistoia, Cortona, Pisa and Rome, where he painted two scenes from the life of Saint Cecilia for the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere and a large altarpiece of The Fall of Simon Magus for St. Peter’s, completed in 1603. Vanni returned to Siena from Rome in 1604 at the height of his fame and success and, together with his half-brother Ventura Salimbeni, came to dominate the artistic scene in Siena in the early years of the new century. Formerly attributed to the Bolognese painter Bartolomeo Passarotti (1529-1592), this striking oil sketch has recently been identified by John Marciari as a study by Francesco Vanni for the head of the Baptist in his large altarpiece of The Baptism of Christ (fig.1), painted between 1587 and 1588 for the Compagnia dei SS. Giovannino e Gennaro. Placed in the Sienese church of San Giovannino sotto il Duomo, the painting is today on deposit in the Oratorio di San Bernardino in Siena1. It is interesting to note that, while the angle of the head of the Baptist is identical in both this oil sketch and the finished painting, the facial features of the sketch are in fact closer to those of the Christ in the final work. No other preparatory drawing for this important early painting is known. While the practice of painting heads in oil on paper is a characteristic feature of Federico Barocci’s artistic practice, it is unlikely that Vanni had access to Barocci’s studio and would have been familiar with this aspect of his working method. Instead, it has been posited that Vanni adopted the practice of making such oil sketches from the Carracci in Bologna (although it should also be noted that a precedent had been set in Siena by Domenico Beccafumi a generation or so earlier). It is thought that the young Vanni made a trip to Bologna sometime between 1586 and 1587, where he would have come into contact with the work of Annibale, Ludovico and Agostino Carracci. The influence of the Carracci, as well as of Barocci, is evident in The Baptism of Christ, which was among the first paintings begun by the artist after this Bolognese sojourn.
The practice of making oil studies of heads on paper was used occasionally in the Carracci studio in the 1580’s and early 1590’s. As Marciari has written, ‘contact with the Carracci can begin to explain the new naturalism that appears in Vanni’s work [around 1587]…Two of the most characteristic innovations of the Carracci workshop in the 1580s are the emphasis on life drawing and the related exercise of making studies with oil paint on paper. Both life drawings and oil sketches appear in Vanni’s work beginning precisely in 1586-87.’2 As he further notes, with particular reference to this oil sketch, ‘Vanni’s earliest head study in oil on paper seems to have been made for the painting begun just after the trip to Bologna, the Baptism of Christ of 1587-88…Vanni’s drawings of this type open a new chapter in Sienese art, one directly related to the experience of the Carracci.’3 A handful of similar bozzetti of heads painted in oils on paper by Vanni are known. These include an oil sketch of a Head of a Young Girl in the Chigi Saracini (Monte dei Paschi di Siena) collection in Siena4, which was used for the head of an angel in the painting of The Madonna della Pappa of c.1595 in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut5. Also similar is an oil sketch of a bearded old man in the Louvre6, preparatory for a painting of The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes of c.1606, and a presumed Self Portrait by Vanni, in the Chigi Saracini collection7, which was used for the head of an observer in the background of Saint Ansanus Baptising the Sienese of 1596, in the Duomo in Siena. An oil sketch of The Head of Saint Bernardino of Siena, on the art market in 20058, is a study for Vanni’s altarpiece of The Virgin and Child with Saints Bernardino of Siena, Francis and Leonard in the Capuchin church near the town of Arcidosso, south of Siena. Most of these oil sketches by Vanni date from the decade of the 1590’s, or a few years later than the present sheet.
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5 FELICE DAMIANI Gubbio c.1530-c.1609 Gubbio The Baptism of Saint Augustine Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, on blue-green paper. The sheet lightly squared for transfer in black chalk. Laid down on an 18th or early 19th century mount. 407 x 258 mm. (16 x 10 1/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Alister Mathews, Bournemouth (as Domenichino); Purchased from him in 1955 by Ralph Holland, Newcastle; Thence by descent until 2013. LITERATURE: John Gere, ‘Drawings by Niccolò Martinelli, Il Trometta’, Master Drawings, Winter 1963, pp.9 and 17, no.29, pl.13 (as Trometta); Denis Morganti, ‘Su Felice Damiani disegnatore’, Paragone, May-July 2013, p.12, pl.28 (as location unknown). EXHIBITED: Newcastle upon Tyne, Hatton Gallery, Old Master Drawings, From the XVIth to the XIXth century, 1960, no.14 (as Italian School, second half of the 16th Century); Newcastle upon Tyne, Hatton Gallery, Old Master Drawings, 1964, no.11 (as Trometta); Newcastle upon Tyne, Hatton Gallery, Italian and Other Drawings 1500-1800, 1974, no.23 (as Trometta); London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, Italian and other Drawings 1500-1800, from the Ralph Holland Collection, 1975, no.18 (as Trometta); Newcastle, Hatton Gallery, Italian Drawings 1525-1750 from the Collection of Ralph Holland, May-June 1982, no.13 (as Trometta). The present sheet has long been regarded as the work of Niccolò Martinelli, known as Il Trometta (c.1540-1611), and was first published as such by John Gere in his seminal 1963 article on that artist’s drawings1. Recently, however, this large sheet has been recognized by Denis Morganti as a rare and significant drawing by the Umbrian artist Felice Damiani, who was active between 1562 and 1608. Relatively little firm biographical information exists for Damiani, although a large number of signed and dated paintings by him survive, from which a chronology of his career may be deduced. He was born in Gubbio and is thought to have trained there with the local painter Benedetto Nucci, although a study of Venetian painting is also evident in some of his early work. Later in his career, in the 1580’s, Roman influences come to the fore, in particular the paintings of the Zuccari, Cesare Nebbia and Girolamo Muziano. Damiani was active mainly in Umbria and the Marches, painting altarpieces for churches in Foligno, Gualdo Tadino, Gubbio, Macerata, Recanati, Spello, Todi and elsewhere. In 1585 he completed a Last Supper for the refectory of the Palazzo Apostolico in Loreto, and the same year painted frescoes of the Life of the Virgin in the Castello Brancaleoni in Piobbico. Among his most celebrated works are a series of paintings and frescoes for two chapels in the Santuario dei Madonna dei Lumi in the Marchigian town of San Severino Marche, executed between 1594 and 1597. After 1600 he continued to produce numerous altarpieces for churches throughout Central Italy. As Hugo Chapman has noted of Damiani, ‘His work is typical of the reformed devotional style of the post-Tridentine era, and can be compared to that of such artists as Durante Alberti and Santi di Tito in its austere approach to composition and narrative, the monotony of which is only slightly relieved by passages of touchingly immediate naturalism.’2 The present sheet is a preparatory study for Damiani’s altarpiece of The Baptism of Saint Augustine of 1594 (fig.1) in the church of Sant’Agostino in Gubbio3, a painting regarded by several early writers as the artist’s masterpiece. In his Della Zecca di Gubbio, published in 1772, the historian Rinaldo Riposati noted of Damiani that ‘La più bella sua Opera è il Battesimo di S. Agostino nella Chiesa de’ Padri Agostiniani’4, while another 18th century scholar, Luigi Lanzi, wrote of the artist that ‘His most studied
and powerful work is at S. Agostino di Gubbio, the Baptism of the Saint, painted in 1594, a picture abounding in figures, and which surprises by the novelty of the attire, by its correct architecture, and by the air of devotion exhibited in the countenances. He received for this picture two hundred scudi, by no means a low price in those times.’5 Only six other drawings may be confidently attributed to Felice Damiani. The present sheet is particularly close in style and technique to a drawing of the Visitation in the British Museum6, which was recognized by Hugo Chapman as a study for one of Damiani’s paintings in the Santuario della Madonna dei Lumi in San Severino Marche, executed in 15947. Another, earlier and somewhat more sketchy preparatory study for the same altarpiece was also identified by Chapman in the collection of the National Gallery in Prague8. Four further drawings by Damiani, three of which are for paintings at San Severino Marche, have recently been identified by Morganti. A Flight into Egypt in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford9 seems to be a first idea for Damiani’s painting of The Voyage of Mary and Joseph in the Santuario della Madonna dei Lumi10, while a drawing of The Circumcision in the Museo Poldi Pezzoni in Milan11 is a compositional study for another painting in the same church12. A drawing of an Adoration of the Shepherds in the Museo Cerralbo in Madrid13 is a study for Damiani’s fresco on the vault of one of the chapels in the Santuario14. Finally, a squared drawing of The Madonna and Child with Saints in the Louvre15 is a study for an altarpiece, signed and dated 1587, in the church of Santa Margherita in Gualdo Tadino16. Much still remains to be understood of Damiani as a draughtsman. No drawings are known, for example, from the first half of the artist’s career. Indeed, apart from the Louvre study for an altarpiece of 1587, all the other extant drawings by Damiani are connected with works painted in a two-year period between 1594 and 1596. No individual figure studies by the artist are known and, the Prague drawing aside, no rapidly drawn compositional sketches. Nevertheless, to judge from the small group of finished compositional drawings by Damiani that have been identified, of which the present sheet is a particularly fine example, the artist may be characterized as one of the more interesting and talented draughtsmen active in central Italy at the end of the 16th century.
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6 ANTONIO TEMPESTA Florence c.1555-1630 Rome The Abduction of Persephone Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk, backed. 123 x 219 mm. (4 7/ 8 x 8 5/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 2 July 1997, lot 147; Private collection, Florida. Antonio Tempesta was probably trained in the studio of Jan Stradanus in Florence, where he is thought to have contributed to the decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio. He is listed as a member of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence in 1576, but not long afterwards had settled in Rome, where he worked for the remainder of his career. Tempesta was employed by Pope Gregory XIII on the fresco decoration of several rooms in the Vatican, and received commissions for paintings and frescoes for various churches and palaces in Rome. Further afield, he participated in the decoration of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, the Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola and the Villa Lante at Bagnaia. He also painted a number of easel pictures, sometimes on coloured stone, or pietra paesina. Although he worked in Rome for most of his career, Tempesta earned significant commissions of Florentine patrons, including the Medici Grand Dukes, for whom he painted several battle scenes. Among his students in Rome was the young Jacques Callot. Tempesta’s oeuvre as a painter remains less well known today, however, than his activity as a draughtsman and printmaker. A productive etcher who ‘stands out as one of the most prolific and influential printmakers of the 17th century...[and] dominated the printmaking business in Rome between 1590 and 1630’1, Tempesta produced more than 1,400 prints, including a large number of hunting and battle scenes. He was also a prolific draughtsman, and a large number of drawings by him are today in the collections of the Louvre, the British Museum, the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, and elsewhere. A fine example of Tempesta’s draughtsmanship, this drawing of The Abduction of Persephone may be related to an etching of the same subject by the artist (fig.1), published in 1606 as part of a series of etchings for an illustrated edition of the Metamorphoses of Ovid2. Among stylistically comparable drawings by Tempesta is a Conversion of Saint Paul in the Louvre3, which is in turn related to another print.
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7 GIULIO CESARE PROCACCINI Bologna 1574-1625 Milan Study for an Angel Black chalk, with framing lines in brown ink. Inscribed Giulio Cesare in brown ink at the lower right. 130 x 95 mm. (5 1/ 8 x 3 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Prince Poniatowski. Born into an artistic dynasty, Giulio Cesare Procaccini received his earliest training was as a sculptor, but around 1600 took up painting. By the first quarter of the 17th century he was established as one of the leading Mannerist artists in Lombardy. A visit to Genoa in 1618 had a profound effect on his style as a painter, the result of his exposure to the paintings of Rubens that he saw there. As one modern scholar has aptly noted, ‘He forged a style as a painter that combines brilliant, rhythmic, impasted brushwork and dense, energetic compositions that exploit both maniera spatial compression and baroque energy.’1 The 17th century biographer Cesare Malvasia described Procaccini was a fine draughtsman, ‘tanto di lapis, come di penna’, while his contemporary Raffaele Soprani wrote that ‘Procaccini was as excellent a draughtsman as he was a painter, and handled the chalk-holder and pen with inimitable bravura.’2 Although, as Nancy Ward Neilson has noted, ‘Giulio Cesare, a prolific draftsman, rarely drew to prepare for his finished pictures’3, the present sheet is a relatively unusual example of a drawing by the artist that can be connected with a known painting. This chalk drawing, whose attribution has been confirmed by Ward Neilson, is a preparatory study for the archangel Gabriel in one of Procaccini’s finest late works, the large altarpiece of The Annunciation (fig.1) of c.16204. Today in the Louvre, The Annunciation has been described as ‘a painting of rare beauty…[combining] a calm, static and almost classical composition, a facture and a colour whose warmth and softness evoke Barocci and Rubens.’5 Nothing is known of the early history of the altarpiece, which was unrecorded before its acquisition by the Louvre in 1987.
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8 ABRAHAM BLOEMAERT Gorinchem (Gorcum) c.1565-1651 Utrecht Recto: Studies of the Heads of an Old Man and a Young Boy Verso: Study of Drapery Red chalk, heightened with touches of white, on buff paper. Traces of framing lines in brown ink. Numbered 59 in brown ink at the upper right, and numbered 61 in brown ink on the verso. 162 x 161 mm. (6 3/ 8 x 6 3/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Probably André Giroux, Paris; Probably the posthumous vente Giroux, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 18-19 April 1904, as part of lot 175 (‘Etudes de personnages, de paysages et d’animaux. Cent trente-six dessins, la plupart exécutés à la sanguine, un certain nombre avec d’autres croquis au verso’); Adolphe(?) Verdé-Delisle; Thence by descent in the Verdé-Delisle family until 2012. Abraham Bloemaert received his artistic training in Utrecht and Paris but, unlike many of his contemporaries, never travelled to Italy. Indeed, apart from two years in Amsterdam in the early 1590’s, he worked in Utrecht from 1583 until his death. Almost nothing is known of his work before 1590, however, and it is only after his brief stay in Amsterdam that he began to establish a reputation as an artist of note. Together with Cornelis van Haarlem and Joachim Wtewael, Bloemaert came to be one of the last major exponents of the Northern Mannerist tradition. Among his most important religious works are the altarpieces of God with Christ and the Virgin of 1615 in the Sint Janskerk in ’s-Hertogenbosch and an Adoration of the Magi painted in 1624 for the Jesuit church in Brussels and now in Grenoble. Bloemaert enjoyed a very long and productive career of some sixty years, resulting in an oeuvre of around two hundred extant paintings, including landscapes, religious scenes, history subjects and genre scenes. He was a founding member of the painter’s guild of Saint Luke in Utrecht in 1611. As a teacher, Bloemaert’s influence was considerable, with artists such as Jan Both, Cornelis van Poelenburgh, Gerrit van Honthorst, Hendrick Terbrugghen and Jan Baptist Weenix all spending some time in his studio. Bloemaert was a gifted and prolific draughtsman, praised as such by his biographer Karel van Mander, who noted that the artist ‘has a clever way of drawing with a pen, and, by adding small amounts of watercolour, he produces unusual effects’. He produced numerous studies for paintings and engravings – some six hundred prints after his designs are known – as well as several landscape drawings and many sheets of studies of heads, hands and arms. Some of the latter were reproduced as engravings by his son Frederik and published in the 1650’s as the Konstryk Tekenboek, a sort of model-book for students. The Tekenboek proved very popular and was reprinted several times, serving to perpetuate Bloemaert’s influence on later generations of artists. (Indeed, the 18th century French artist François Boucher published a series of etchings after Bloemaert’s figure studies, known as the Livre d’etude d’après les desseins originaux de Blomart, which appeared in Paris in 1735.) The bulk of Bloemaert’s enormous corpus of drawings appear to have been retained by his descendants for over fifty years, and it is not until the first half of the 18th century that they began to be sold and dispersed. Jaap Bolten has noted that ‘The artistic merit of Bloemaert’s drawings must mainly be sought in his talent for enticing the viewer to partake in the scene, which is usually achieved by the dignified, non-trivial subject matter, the alluring compositions and a handsome execution. The elements of Bloemaert’s disegno are few but convincing…He taught himself by observing nature and by studying the work of other artists. And by his indefatigable efforts he learned how to suggest the human body and mind in motion and movement, how to set the baroque stage for his saints and heroes.’1 Sheets of studies such as the present sheet were an integral part of Bloemaert’s working method. While in some cases the different studies on such a sheet were simply exercises, at other times the artist seems to have been working towards a painting, with the drawing intended to prepare different parts of a single multifigural composition.
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The head of an elderly man on the recto of the present sheet is closely related to a drawing (fig.1)2 in the so-called Cambridge Album, in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, which represents Abraham Bloemaert’s studies for the Tekenboek. The model appears to be the same as that used by the artist for three drawings of Saint Luke the Evangelist (fig.2) of 16293, and is also found in the background of a painting of The Preaching of Saint John the Baptist of c.1630, in the Herzog Anton UlrichMuseum in Braunschweig4. The same man also appears in two other drawings from the Cambridge Album and their respective plates from the Tekenboek5. The study on the verso of this sheet may be compared stylistically with a number of similar studies of drapery by Bloemaert, such as a drawing in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York6 and another in a French private collection7. This double-sided drawing was almost certainly part of a large group of 136 studies – mostly figure studies, and almost all drawn in red chalk – that were at one time in the collection of the French landscape painter André Giroux (1801-1879), and were dispersed at auction in 1904. Most of these drawings are numbered on the upper right corner of the sheet, which suggests that they may have formed part of an album, perhaps assembled by one of the artist’s sons. Jaap Bolten has suggested that the drawings from this album were not meant as preparatory studies for paintings but as a sort of modelbook or sketchbook of motifs to be copied by Bloemaert’s students. Other drawings by Abraham Bloemaert from the ex-Giroux group are today in the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Frits Lugt Collection (Fondation Custodia) in Paris, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, and elsewhere.
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9 HERMAN VAN SWANEVELT Woerden c.1603-1655 Paris Landscape with the Ruins of the Grotto of Egeria Pen and brown ink and grey wash, laid down and mounted onto a large album page, with a grey wash border. A sketch of a fountain in front of two arches, with temples beyond, drawn in pen and brown ink on the verso. Inscribed Fontaine de la Nymphe Egerie. in pencil at the upper left and numbered 49 in pencil on the album sheet. Further inscribed Bartolomeus in pencil on the verso. 138 x 185 mm. (5 3/ 8 x 7 1/4 in.) A painter, draughtsman and etcher, Herman van Swanevelt lived in Rome between 1629 and 1641, where he is almost certain to have come into contact with Claude Lorrain. That the two artists must have known and influenced each other is particularly evident in the similarity of their drawings. When he was admitted into the Schildersbent, the association of Netherlandish artists in Rome, Swanevelt was given the nickname ‘Heremyt’ or hermit, apparently because his preference for depictions of Italian ruins often led him deep into the remote countryside around Rome. Swanevelt’s paintings and frescoes of landscapes with religious or mythological subjects were in great demand, and his patrons included the Barberini family and Philip IV of Spain. He spent the last eleven years of his career in Paris, where he was admitted to the Académie Royale in 1653. Some two hundred landscape drawings by Swanevelt are known, with the largest group – numbering fifty-eight sheets and for the most part consisting of preparatory studies for etchings – in the Uffizi in Florence. As has been noted of the artist’s preparatory drawings for his etchings, ‘the painterly effects of the drawings…[are] converted into a great richness of surface texture in the print.’1 The attribution of this drawing to Swanevelt was first made by Martin Royalton-Kisch and has been confirmed by Anne Charlotte Steland. The drawing depicts a view of the so-called grotto of the nymph Egeria (in actual fact part of the estate of the suburban villa of Herodus Atticus), near the Via Appia to the southeast of Rome. The natural grotto was developed into a man-made arched interior, with a statue of Egeria set in a niche in the apse, and the walls faced with mosaics and marble. A later, more finished drawing of the same scene is in the Uffizi2 and is, in turn, a preparatory study for an etching of The Grotto of the Nymph Egeria (fig.1), one of an undated series of twelve landscape prints by Swanevelt3. The present sheet represents an early study for the composition. Swanevelt’s practice seems to have been to produce preliminary studies of a landscape in wash, drawn from nature and capturing the atmospheric qualities of a particular scene. These would then be adapted to the size and format of a print, with the inclusion of figures and drawn in a more linear manner, in a second drawing that would serve as a modello for the etching itself. Such drawings are ‘the record of Swanevelt’s response to the stimulus of the Roman Campagna, expressed in the classical vocabulary through which artists in Rome were defining landscape…his drawings are highly controlled and methodical products, and yet they do have that freshness that the paintings sometimes lack.’4
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10 GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called IL GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna Roman Charity: Cimon and Pero Pen and brown ink. Inscribed Guercino in brown ink at the lower left. Traces of framing lines in brown ink. Numbered d.82 in brown ink at the lower right. 216 x 170 mm. (8 1/ 2 x 6 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Padre Sebastiano Resta, Rome; Presented by him to Monsignor Giovanni Matteo Marchetti, Arezzo, in 1698; By descent to his nephew, Cavaliere Orazio Marchetti da Pistoia; Sold in 1710 with the Resta collection of drawings to John, Lord Somers, London (Lugt 2981), with the RestaSomers number d.82 at the lower right; Probably his sale, London, Peter Motteaux, 16 May 1717; Richard Houlditch, London (Lugt 2214), with his associated number 13 in brown ink at the lower right; By descent to his son, Richard Houlditch Jr.; Probably his sale, London, Langford, 12-14 February 17601; Private collection, London, by 1950; Thence by descent until 2013. LITERATURE: Anon., An Alphabetical Catalogue of the Painters in the Collection, with the Drawings of each respective Master, referring to the several Books in which they are placed, British Library MS Lansdowne 803, undated, p.34v (‘Guercino da Cento 1590...The Woman giving Suck to her Father. EE.7.’). This drawing is related to a half-length painting of Cimon and Pero, now lost, which was commissioned from Guercino by the Marchese Bentivoglio as a gift for the then Monsignor (later Cardinal) Mazarin, who served as papal nuncio in France. The painting is mentioned in Guercino’s account book, the libro de’ conti, which records a payment of 66 scudi for the picture, received by the artist on the 23rd of August, 16392, and describes the subject of the painting as ‘Carità Romana’, or Roman Charity. The story of Cimon and Pero is taken from the Roman historian Valerius Maximus. The aged Cimon is imprisoned and left to die of starvation, but is secretly nursed by his daughter Pero, who keeps him alive by doing so. This act of filial piety impresses the old man’s jailers, and he is set free. At least four other drawings of this subject by Guercino are known, all of which may be also be related to the Bentivoglio commission. A pen and ink drawing of Cimon and Pero, from the Casa Gennari, Bouverie, Earls of Gainsborough and Oppé collections, appeared at auction in 1971 and 20063, while another pen and ink study of the same subject was on the art market in 19944; in both of these drawings the arrangement of the figures is identical to that in the present sheet. A drawing of Roman Charity in red chalk, with the figures transposed with Cimon at the right and Pero at the left, was at one time in the H. S. Reitlinger collection and was sold at auction in 19535. Another red chalk drawing of the subject of Cimon and Pero was recently on the art market in New York6, of which an offset or counterproof is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle7. Guercino also treated the closely related subject of The Roman Daughter, in which a woman suckles her imprisoned mother, in two pen and ink drawings; one in the Royal Collection8 and the other sold at auction in 1999 and now in a private collection9. The present sheet once belonged to one of the leading collectors of drawings in Italy in the 17th century, the Oratorian priest Padre Sebastiano Resta (1635-1714). Resta assembled a significant group of some 3,500 drawings, gathered into about thirty albums. At least nineteen of these albums, containing almost 2,500 drawings, were compiled by Resta for his patron and fellow collector Monsignor Giovanni Matteo Marchetti (1647-1704), Bishop of Arezzo. After Marchetti’s death in 1704, the Resta albums were eventually acquired by John, Lord Somers (1651-1716), Lord Chancellor of England. The albums were in England by 1711, but Somers soon decided to break up them up and have the drawings remounted10. The year after Somers’ death in 1716, his collection was sold at auction in London; this drawing was probably acquired at the Somers sale by the collector Richard Houlditch (c.1659-1736), who owned several drawings by Guercino.
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11 GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called IL GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna Andromeda Red chalk, with framing lines in red chalk, on buff paper, backed. A large made up area at the lower left corner1. Inscribed Jph / 78751 and Guercino in pencil on the backing sheet. Inscribed A mon cher ami Emmanuel des Collections Henry Scipio Reitlinger / et Dennis J. Ward, 1954 in pencil on the reverse of the old backing sheet. 297 x 208 mm. (11 3/4 x 8 1/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Henry Scipio Reitlinger, London (Lugt 2274a), his collector’s mark stamped in black ink on the old backing sheet; His posthumous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 9 December 1953, part of lot 59 (‘Andromeda, red chalk; and another’, bt. Ward for £9); Dennis J. Ward, Brighton(?), in 1954 (according to an inscription on the old backing sheet); Private collection, France. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Il Guercino (‘the squinter’) because he was cross-eyed, was one of the most prolific draughtsmen of the 17th century in Italy, and more drawings by him survive today than by any other Italian artist of the period. He seems to have assiduously kept all of his drawings throughout his long career, and to have only parted with a few of them. On his death in 1666 all of the numerous surviving sheets in his studio (according to his biographer Cesare Malvasia, ‘ten albums of drawings, some in pen, some in red chalk, and black’ (‘Dieci Libri di disegni, parte à penna, parte di lapis rosso, e nero’) passed to the Bolognese studio of his nephews and heirs, the painters Benedetto and Cesare Gennari, known as the ‘Casa Gennari’. Guercino’s drawings, made up of figural and compositional studies for paintings, as well as landscapes, genre scenes and caricatures, have always been greatly admired by collectors and connoisseurs. 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.’2 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 ink had been completed. As his career progressed, however, his use of red chalk became more frequent, especially from the 1650’s 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. The present sheet is a preparatory figure study for Guercino’s large painting of Perseus and Andromeda of 1648 (fig.1), which was until recently in the Palazzo Balbi Senàrega in Genoa 3. The painting was commissioned from Guercino by his friend, the Bolognese collector Commendatore Giovanni Battista Manzini (1599-1664); one of several works by the artist in his collection. (Manzini also seems to have secured commissions for Guercino from other collectors.) Somewhat unusually, Guercino’s account book, the libro de’ conti, records that the painting seems to have been paid for by Manzini, on the 24th of September 1648, not with money but with various goods4.
Although this finished study for the figure of the captive Andromeda – a rare example in Guercino’s drawn oeuvre of a female nude in red chalk – differs from the final painting in several ways, such as the position of the arms, the two share several significant features, notably the position of the legs and the drapery. In the present sheet, pentimenti are visible in the figure’s left shoulder and the fingers of her outstretched left hand. Four other drawings by Guercino have been proposed as preparatory studies for the 1648 painting. An earlier stage in the development of the composition is found in a pen and ink drawing of the figure of Andromeda, in which she is chained at the left wrist rather than the ankle, in the collection of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin5. A now-lost pen and ink drawing of Andromeda – horizontal in orientation, with the figure at the left and the sea monster at the lower right, as it appears in the final painting – was at one time in the collection of Pierre-Jean Mariette and was last recorded at auction in Paris in 19266. Two further pen studies of nude female figures, in the collections of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan7 and the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart8, have also been related to the painting of Perseus and Andromeda, but are less definitively connected to the composition of the 1648 canvas. Guercino’s libro de’ conti records another version of Perseus and Andromeda, painted by the artist in 1660, which may be identified with a small oil on copper painting of the subject recently on the art market in New York9, in which Andromeda faces to the left. The present sheet is characteristic of Guercino’s draughtsmanship in red chalk in the late 1640’s and 1650’s, and accords well with such drawings of this period as a drawing of Erminia of c.1648, formerly in the Ratjen collection and today in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.10. Among other comparable red chalk drawings of the same period are a study of The Apostles at the Tomb11 and a drawing of Diana Burning the Instruments of Love12, both in private American collections. The first known owner of this drawing was the English collector Henry S. Reitlinger (1882-1950). In 1922 Reitlinger published Old Master Drawings: A Handbook for Amateurs and Collectors, one of the first guides to the collecting of drawings, illustrated with examples from the author’s own extensive collection of Italian, French, German, Netherlandish and English drawings. As he wrote of another red chalk drawing by the artist in his collection, ‘The style of Guercino is unmistakable...Guercino is the Secento [sic] incarnate. The warm lighting, the soft but capable drawing...– all this represents Italy in the pleasant, inglorious afternoon of her grandeur.’13
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12 DOMENICO PIOLA Genoa 1627-1703 Genoa The Triumph of Bacchus Pen and brown ink and brown wash, squared for transfer in red chalk. Inscribed Lepiola in brown ink at the lower right. Laid down on an 18th century French mount, with the mountmaker’s blind stamp ARD (Lugt 172)1 at the lower right corner of the mount. 231 x 310 mm. (9 1/ 8 x 12 1/ 8 in.) Working almost exclusively in his native Genoa, Domenico Piola was among the most important and influential artists active in Liguria in the second half of the 17th century. He was the leading member of a local artistic dynasty, and one of the most sought-after fresco painters in the city, working on the decoration of numerous churches, palaces and villas. The 1670’s and 1680’s mark the peak of Piola’s activity as a frescante in Genoa. The French bombardment of the city in May 1684, however, led to the destruction of much of his work in various churches and palaces, as well as the contents of his home and studio. As a result, relatively few paintings and drawings from the first part of the artist’s career survive today. Piola’s facility as a draughtsman was aptly described by his biographer C. G. Ratti, who notes that the artist ‘used to spend the whole evening drawing at the small table, setting down ideas on paper in pen with light shading in bistre...he made so many drawings that besides the largest number destroyed by a fire in his house and apart from those in the possession of foreigners and other painters in the city, his heirs preserved more than four thousand of them. And the wonder is that in such a copious number, one never encounters in any one example an invention similar to others already executed by him.’2 The present sheet is one of the very finest and most elaborate examples of Piola’s fluent and spirited draughtsmanship. Although squared for transfer, it remains unrelated to any known painting by the artist. A comparable large and highly finished drawing by Piola of a related subject of A Bacchanal with the Drunken Silenus on an Ass (fig.1), in which the ass is very similar to that depicted in the present sheet, was sold at auction in London in 1970 and was later on the art market in Genoa3. A similar theme is also found in a less compositionally complex drawing of The Triumph of Silenus, formerly on the art market in Los Angeles4. A large painting by Domenico Piola of an analogous composition, though of a different subject, is the Chariot of the Sun in the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa5.
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13 GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO Venice 1696-1770 Madrid A Sheet of Studies of Three Heads of Satyrs and the Head of Bacchus Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Two small made up areas at the right centre and right centre edge. 229 x 135 mm. (9 x 5 1/4 in.) The leading painter in Venice for much of his career, Giambattista Tiepolo was also undoubtedly one of the finest Italian draughtsmen of the 18th century. (That his drawings were greatly admired in his lifetime is confirmed by contemporary accounts; as early as 1732 the writer Vincenzo da Canal remarked that ‘engravers and copyists are eager to copy his works, to glean his inventions and extraordinary ideas; his drawings are already so highly esteemed that books of them are sent to the most distant countries’.) From the late 1730’s until his departure for Spain in 1762, Tiepolo enjoyed his most productive period as a draughtsman, creating a large number of spirited pen and wash studies that are among the archetypal drawings of the Venetian Settecento. As one recent scholar has commented, ‘From the start of his career [Tiepolo] had enjoyed drawing as an additional means of expression, with equally original results. He did not draw simply to make an immediate note of his ideas, nor to make an initial sketch for a painting or to study details; he drew to give the freest, most complete expression to his genius. His drawings can be considered as an autonomous artistic genre; they constitute an enormous part of his work, giving expression to a quite extraordinary excursion of the imagination; in this respect, Tiepolo’s graphic work can be compared only with that of Rembrandt.’1 Many of Tiepolo’s drawings were bound into albums by theme or subject, and retained by the artist in his studio as a stock of motifs and ideas for use in his own work, or that of his sons and assistants. A splendid example of Tiepolo’s facility as a draughtsman, this lively sheet of sketches may be related to a group of similar teste di fantasia drawn in pen and wash, generally dated to the 1740’s and 1750’s. More specifically, the drawing is likely to be contemporary with the series of etchings by the artist known as the Scherzi di fantasia, in which similar satyr’s heads appear2. While the dating of the twenty-three Scherzi etchings has remained problematic, with opinions ranging from the mid-1730’s to the late 1750’s, they appear to have been produced over a period of at least a decade. The present sheet may be associated with a number of drawings of similar subjects by Tiepolo. A pair of drawings with studies of the heads of satyrs, women and masks is in the collection of the Musée Atger in Montpellier3, while two further drawings – a study of masks and the heads of satyrs and a drawing of the heads of a Punchinello and a bearded old man – in the Museo Civico di Storia ed Arte in Trieste are also comparable4. A drawing of the head of a satyr and Medusa was sold at auction in 19965, while a similar sheet of studies of fantastical or grotesque heads, in grey ink and wash, is in a private collection in New York6. Similar masks also appear individually in other drawings by Tiepolo, such as a study of ceiling figures in Trieste7 and a drawing which was on the London art market in 19638. Drawings such as this sheet of studies seem to have served as a repertoire of motifs to be used in paintings or prints by the artist or his studio. Indeed, drawings of this type may have been studied by Tiepolo’s son Domenico, who etched a frieze of similar studies of the heads of satyrs9, as well as by Tiepolo’s friend and patron Francesco Algarotti, who also produced a number of etchings of similar subjects10.
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14 PHILIPPE-JACQUES DE LOUTHERBOURG, R.A. Strasbourg 1740-1812 Chiswick, London Pastoral Scene with a Shepherd and Shepherdess Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over a pencil underdrawing. Inscribed P. Loutherbourg in pencil on the verso1. 285 x 414 mm. (11 1/4 x 16 1/4 in.) Watermark: Fleur-de-lys. PROVENANCE: An unidentified collector’s mark (in Cyrillic?), not in Lugt, stamped in black ink on the verso. Born in Strasbourg in Alsace, the son of an engraver and miniaturist of Swiss origins, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg arrived in Paris in 1755. Although he was to be mainly active as a landscape painter, he received a comprehensive artistic education, studying with the history painter Carle Vanloo, the battle painter Francesco Casanova and the engraver Jean-Georges Wille. Agrée at the Académie Royale in 1763, the same year as his Salon debut, he gained full membership in 1767. He continued to exhibit regularly at the Salon, where his pastoral landscapes, painted with fresh and vivid colours and imbued with a Romantic sensibility, proved very popular with the public. Loutherbourg submitted a total of some eighty works to the Salons between 1763 and 1771 when, despite his success in Paris, he decided to move to England, and the second phase of his career began. It was in England, where he arrived in November 1771 and remained for the rest of his career, and where he was known as Philip James de Loutherbourg, that he first took up the practice of producing designs for the stage. Employed by David Garrick as the chief scene designer of the Drury Lane Theatre, Loutherbourg soon became as well known for his scenographic work as for his paintings. Elected to the Royal Academy in 1781, he exhibited views of England and Wales during much of the following decade. A failed attempt at working as a faith healer aside, he continued to enjoy a measure of public success in England. In 1784 one critic wrote of Loutherbourg that ‘We may observe in general, that this great Artist discovers in all his works a fine Imagination; that his choice of objects is made with judgment; that his colouring is harmonious; that he has a thorough knowledge of the Chiaro Obscuro, and a wonderful freedom of pencil.’2 By the 1790’s he had begun to produce grandiose history pictures and battle scenes, and in 1807 was appointed historical painter to William Frederick, the Duke of Gloucester. Many of Loutherbourg’s drawings were intended for engravings, and several of his English views were published as The Picturesque Scenery of Great Britain in 1801, followed four years later by The Picturesque and Romantic Scenery of England and Wales. This large pastoral landscape may be dated to between 1772 and 1774, during the early years of the artist’s time in England. Its composition reflects the influence on the young Loutherbourg of Dutch 17th century painters such as Nicolaes Berchem. The present sheet is not a study for a painting but was, in all likelihood, intended as a finished work of art in its own right. Nevertheless, the drawing may be compared with a number of paintings of a similar pastoral theme and composition by the artist that are datable to the period just before and after he settled in England, such as a canvas known as The Enterprising Shepherd, which was on the art market in Paris in 20093.
15 JOHN HAMILTON MORTIMER, A.R.A. Eastbourne 1740-1779 London Cupid Pen and black ink and a reddish wash. Laid down on a late 18th or 19th century mount. Inscribed Mortimer and John Hamilton Mortimer [partially cut off] in pencil on the mount. Numbered 321 in pencil on the reverse of the mount. Numbered H 320 in brown ink on a label pasted onto the old backing board, and 321 in black chalk on the old backing board. 163 x 148 mm. (6 3/ 8 x 5 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Galerie Barbazanges, Paris, in 1919. EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Barbazanges and Zurich, Salon Bollag, Les maitres Anglais 1740-1840: Exposition de pastels – aquarelles et dessins, 1919-1920, no.142 (‘Cupidon. Aquarelle.’). Among the most eccentric and imaginative artists of the 18th century in England, John Hamilton Mortimer left his native Eastbourne around 1757 to study in London, first with Thomas Hudson (where among his fellow students was Joseph Wright of Derby) and later with Robert Edge Pine, Joseph Wilton and Giovanni Battista Cipriani. Mortimer won prizes for drawing at the St. Martin’s Lane Academy between 1759 and 1762, and also attended Shipley’s art school on the Strand. He began his independent career as a history painter, exhibiting yearly from 1762 onwards at the Society of Artists, where he showed both paintings and drawings. To begin with he exhibited mainly portraits and conversation pieces, but by the 1770’s had begun painting literary, theatrical or mythological subjects, as well as scenes from early Engish history. In 1771 he worked with Francis Wheatley on the ceiling decorations for Brocket Hall, commissioned by Lord Melbourne. He was by this time known as an artist of prodigious ability but also of seemingly unbounded recklessness, and many stories arose of the artist becoming extremely drunk and acting strangely. Nevertheless, in 1775 he married and settled in Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, and three years later exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy. Mortimer was accepted as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1778, three months before his early death at the age of thirty-eight. Mortimer was recognized by his contemporaries as a highly inventive and original artistic talent. His work was strongly influenced by the example of such Italian artists as the Carracci, Guercino, Giambattista Piazzetta and, in particular, Salvator Rosa. (Indeed, he was sometimes known as ‘the English Salvator’.) He was especialy admired as a draughtsman, and several of his numerous drawings – after Shakesperean subjects or other literary themes, as well as more fantastical compositions – were reproduced as engravings and etchings. Mortimer’s close friend, the architect James Gandon, recalled of the artist that ‘the rapidity of his execution was astonishing, and his powers of drawing superior to anything produced by his contemporaries.’1 Such appreciation of Mortimer’s talent as a draughtsman has continued to the present day. As one modern scholar has noted, ‘From all accounts Mortimer possessed prodigious facility. Those sheets we now prize so highly were thrown off in a few minutes, and soon littered the studio. Hundreds have been lost, and this is why, among those that happen to survive, it is so seldom possible to connect one with another.’2 More recently, John Sunderland has written that ‘Mortimer’s pen-and-ink drawing style, with its use of hatching and dotting, is so peculiar to his work that it can be seen as one of his most significant contributions to the art of the 1770s.’3
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16 Circle of PIAT-JOSEPH SAUVAGE Tournai 1744-1818 Tournai A Frieze of Putti with a Chariot Pen and brown ink and brown wash, extensively heightened with white, on two joined sheets of blue paper, with framing lines in brown ink. Numbered 37 in pencil on the reverse of the old mount. Inscribed No.572 / Collection / Eugène Fould in brown ink on a label pasted onto the backing board. 60 x 443 mm. (2 3/ 8 x 17 3/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Baron Eugène Fould-Springer, Palais Abbatial de Royaumont, Asnières-sur-Oise; By descent to his son, Baron Max Fould-Springer, Palais Abbatial de Royaumont, Asnières-sur-Oise; By descent to his nephew, Nathaniel de Rothschild, New York, until 2011. This charming drawing displays the influence of the frieze-like compositions – often depicting putti at play or in a procession, in the form of a fictive or trompe l’oeil relief sculpture in grisaille – which are a characteristic feature of the work of the Belgian painter Piat (or Pieter)-Joseph Sauvage. After studying in Tournai and Antwerp, Sauvage settled in Paris in 1744, where he established himself as one of the leading proponents of decorative trompe l’oeil painting. He received commissions from the Prince de Condé and later served as court painter to Louis XVI, becoming a member of the Académie Royale in 1783. He returned often to Flanders, where he acquired paintings for the Comte d’Angivillier in 1785 and 1786. Although he painted a number of official portraits, Sauvage made a particular specialty of decorative grisaille friezes in imitation of classical sculptures in marble, bronze or terracotta, as well as miniatures inspired by antique cameos. His decorations may still be seen at the chateaux of Compiègne, where he worked in 1785, Rambouillet, painted between 1786 and 1787, and Fontainebleau, painted in 1786. Sauvage exhibited at the Salons in Paris between 1781 and 1804, and between 1804 and 1807 worked as a designer for the Sèvres porcelain factory. In 1808 he left Paris to take up a post as a professor of drawing at the Academy in his native Tournai. Among his significant works of his later career are a series of paintings of the Seven Sacraments for the cathedral in Tournai. Other paintings by Sauvage are today in museums in Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Lille and Tournai, as well as in the Hôtel de la Prefecture in La Rochelle and a number of churches in Belgium. The present sheet was once part of the impressive collection of Old Master and Neoclassical drawings and paintings, sculpture, furniture and objets d’art assembled by the banker Baron Eugène Fould-Springer (1876-1929) for his country home, the 18th century Abbey Palace of Royaumont, located about thirty kilometres north of Paris, near Chantilly.
detail (actual size)
17 SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE, P.R.A. Bristol 1769-1830 London Portrait of Master Charles Malton Pencil, with red and brown chalks. Traces of an inscription in brown ink at the extreme lower left. Inscribed Charles Malton / Lawrence in pencil on the verso. 293 x 194 mm. (11 1/ 2 x 7 5/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Thomas Malton the Younger, London; By descent to his son, Charles Malton (the sitter); Edwin Marriott Hodgkins, London and Paris, by 1911; His sale, London, Christie’s, 29 June 1917, lot 67; Anonymous sale, Paris, Galerie Charpentier, 24 May 1955, lot 129. LITERATURE: Algernon Graves, ‘A Catalogue of the Exhibited and Engraved Works of Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A.’, in Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, Sir Thomas Lawrence, London, 1900, p.148; George Somes Layard, ed., Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Letter-Bag, London, 1906, engraving illustrated facing page 70; ‘The American Collector and Connoisseur: A Collection of Early English Drawings of the 18th Century’ [editorial], Arts & Decoration, January 1912, p.111; Sir Walter Armstrong, Lawrence, London, 1913, p.185 (‘Malton, Charles. Son of Thomas Malton, the architectural painter...Chalk drawing. Boy of 6 or 7. Standing, facing, nearly full face. Enormous shock of hair. Signed “T. Lawrence, April, 1790.”’); Kenneth Garlick, ‘A catalogue of the paintings, drawings and pastels of Sir Thomas Lawrence’, The Walpole Society, Vol.XXXIX (1962-1964), 1964, p.236; Phillip H. Highfill, Jr. et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800, Vol.10, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1984, p.66. EXHIBITED: London, Royal Academy, 1791, no.516 (as Portrait of a Child); New York, Hodgkins Galleries, A Collection of Early English Drawings of the 18th Century, 1911. ENGRAVED: By F. C. Lewis, London, in 1831. The leading portrait painter of his generation in England, and indeed arguably in Europe, Sir Thomas Lawrence was, from his early childhood, recognized as a brilliant and gifted draughtsman, and it was through his drawings that he established his initial reputation. (When he first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1787 he showed a total of seven works, all of which were drawings or pastels.) Indeed, his abilities as a draughtsman are all the more notable in that it was a skill in which he was, for the most part, self-taught. The importance of drawing in Lawrence’s artistic process throughout his career cannot be overstated. He began each portrait painting by drawing in oiled black chalk on the canvas, and also created a large number of both preparatory studies and autonomous portrait drawings, deftly executed in red and black chalks. As Cosmo Monkhouse noted of Lawrence, ‘As a draughtsman, especially of faces and hands, he is scarcely equaled by any English artist…His most perfect works are his drawings in crayon and pencil, which he continued to execute throughout his life.’1 More recently, Michael Levey has written of the artist that, ‘It is not just that Lawrence had been profoundly trained – self-trained – as a draughtsman and that he continued to draw expertly throughout his life. For him, drawing was the method by whereby he pinned down his prime visual sensations.’2 Lawrence’s ability as a draughtsman continued to be praised long after his death. Writing in 1913, one art critic wrote that, ‘Of the many who admire Sir Thomas Lawrence, as one of the most individual and fascinating of English portrait painters, few realise that he was greater with the pencil than with the brush; and that the grace and elegance which characterise his art are more superbly expressed in the delicate tints of water-colour than in the heavier, more solid, and more opaque oil pigments…Lawrence thought in pencil what he expressed in oil. Unlike his great contemporaries and predecessors, he found it necessary to
make elaborate drawings from his sitters before setting down their likeness in color. Thus it is almost only in his drawings that he attained that perfect ease and spontaneity of expression which is the hall-mark of a great master.’3 It has been noted that, among Lawrence’s contemporaries, perhaps only Jean-BaptisteDominique Ingres in France may be said to have been his equal as a draughtsman in the delicacy and precision of his technique. It was also Lawrence’s close study and appreciation of the great draughtsmen of the past that led him to assemble one of the finest collection of Old Master drawings ever put together in Britain. Lawrence was particularly admired for his portraits of young children, whom he depicted with great sensitivity and charm. Kenneth Garlick has observed that ‘Lawrence was noted for his success not only in drawing children but also in identifying with them. They loved him, and his quick, sympathetic eye could catch their movements to perfection.’4 This striking drawing is a portrait of the young Charles Malton, born in 1788 and the son of the scene painter and architectural draughtsman Thomas Malton the Younger (1748-1804). In later years, Charles Malton would study architecture with Sir John Soane. Although he won a silver medal for architecture at the Royal Academy in 1807, there is no evidence that the younger Malton ever worked as an architect. Many of Lawrence’s portrait drawings, and especially those of children, were reproduced as prints, often at the artist’s instigation. For much of the last two decades of his career, Lawrence commissioned the engraver Frederick Christian Lewis (1779-1856) to reproduce many of his finest portrait drawings in the form of stipple engravings, both to serve as a record of them and also as a means of disseminating his most significant and appealing works to the public at large. Lewis was to be occupied almost exclusively on prints after Lawrence’s work until the artist’s death in 1830. The present sheet was one of those later reproduced by Lewis, with the stipple engraving (fig.1) published by Colnaghi in 18315. This drawing was once in the collection of the English art dealer and collector Edwin Marriott Hodgkins (1860-1932), who worked from premises in London, Paris and New York, and was exhibited by him in his New York gallery in 19116. In the same year Hodgkins presented seven English drawings from his collection to the Louvre, including works by Richard Cosway, John Downman and Lord Leighton, as well as one drawing by Lawrence; a portrait of Charlotte Augusta, Princess of Wales7.
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18 NICOLAS HUET THE YOUNGER Paris c.1770-1828 Paris An Indian Elephant Pen and brown ink and watercolour, with touches of gouache, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, on vellum laid down on board. Framing lines in brown ink. Signed and dated huet fils 1810 in brown ink at the lower right. Inscribed L’Elephant femelle, Elephas indien, / Par huet peintre du Muséum d’histoire naturelle à Paris. in brown ink on the verso. 251 x 399 mm. (9 7/ 8 x 15 3/4 in.) [image] 312 x 446 mm. (12 1/4 x 17 5/ 8 in.) [sheet] Born into a family of artists, Nicolas Huet the Younger was the eldest son and pupil of Jean-Baptiste Huet and the grandson of the animalier Nicolas Huet the Elder, and like both of them specialized in depictions of animals. The young Nicolas first exhibited at the Exposition de la Jeunesse in 1788, showing a still life. He took part in Napoleon’s scientific and artistic expedition to Egypt between 1798 and 1801, and made his Salon debut in 1802 with several animal pictures. A gifted watercolourist and engraver, Huet developed a reputation as a natural history draughtsman. In 1804 he was appointed painter to the Muséum d’Histore Naturelle and to the Ménagerie of the Empress Joséphine, who was a collector of animal, bird and plant specimens, many of which were drawn by Huet. Among his most significant works were a series of 246 elaborate drawings on vellum – studies of mammals, reptiles, birds, insects and sea life – for the library of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, published in 1808 as Collection de mammifères du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. Among other works of natural history to which he contributed illustrations was the Baron de Férussac’s Histoire naturelle des mollusques terrestres et fluviatiles, published between 1819 and 1832. Huet continued to exhibit at the Salons until 1827 and, apart from his official duties, also made elaborate drawings of animals, usually on vellum, for private collectors such as King Friedrich Augustus II of Saxony, the military officer André Masséna, Prince d’Essling and Duc de Rivoli, and other connoisseurs. Writing at the end of the 19th century, one art historian noted of Huet, in comparison with his older contemporary, the natural history artist Nicolas Maréchal, that ‘The works on vellum by Nicolas Huet may be the finest after those of Maréchal; sometimes he even does just as well and better than him. If he did not have the anatomical accuracy of Maréchal, he had something more precious perhaps from an artistic point of view: the gift of life; his animals, his birds, always have their familiar attitude, with which they are characterized: they live.’1 Smaller than African elephant, the Indian elephant (Elephas maximus indicus) is native to mainland Asia. Huet drew this creature at the menagerie of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, part of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. This is likely to have been one of a pair of elephants – a male and a female, originally from Ceylon – taken from the menagerie at Het Loo during the French occupation of the Netherlands in 1795 and presented to the Muséum in 1798. Two years before the present sheet was drawn, Huet exhibited another drawing of what may have been the same female elephant at the Paris Salon of 18082. He also drew an elephant, depicted eating some grass with a curled trunk, for the Collection de mammifères du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle of 18083. The present sheet may be grouped with a handful of highly finished drawings in watercolour and gouache on vellum by Huet. These include an American Cougar, signed and dated 18114, and a Tiger, drawn in 18125, as well as a drawing of a giraffe presented to Charles X by the Viceroy of Egypt, dated 1827 and on paper rather than vellum, which is today in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York6.
19 JEAN-BAPTISTE-CAMILLE COROT Paris 1796-1875 Ville d’Avray The Forum with the Temple of Venus and Roma Pencil. Inscribed temple de Venus & de Rome and Rome – Xbre 1825 in pencil at the lower right centre. Stamped with the vente stamp (Lugt 460a) in red ink at the lower left. 171 x 348 mm. (6 3/4 x 13 5/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: The vente Corot, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 26 May 1875 onwards, probably as part of lots 507-513; Georges Viau, Paris; Paul Cassirer, Amsterdam; Franz Koenigs, Haarlem; By descent to Mr. and Mrs. van der Waals-Koenigs, Heemstede, by 1964; Thence by descent in the Koenigs family until 2001; Koenigs sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 23 January 2001, lot 43; Lucien Solanet, Paris. LITERATURE: Ch. Desavary, Album de fac-similies, d’apres les dessins de C. Corot, Arras, 1873, Ve série, no.8; Alfred Robaut, L’oeuvre de Corot: Catalogue raisonné et illustré, Vol.IV, Paris, 1905, p.10, no.2473 (not illustrated); Paris, Institut Néerlandais, Le dessin français de Claude a Cézanne dans les collections hollandaises, exhibition catalogue, 1964, Vol.I, p.124, no.147, Vol.II, pl.122; Peter Johnston Galassi, Corot in Italy, 1825-1828, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 1986, pp.439 and 455; Josine M. Eikelenboom Smits, The Architectural Landscapes of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Stanford University, California, 1991, Vol.I, pp.107-108, Vol.II, fig.76; Peter Galassi, Corot in Italy. Open-Air Painting and the Classical-Landscape Tradition, New Haven and London, 1991, p.131; Dorit Schäfer, ‘>>Man darf in keiner Sache unentschieden bleiben.<< Corots Zeichnungen in Italien von 1825 bis 1828’, in Dorit Schäfer, ed., Camille Corot: Natur und Traum, exhibition catalogue, Karlsruhe, 2012-2013, p.82, illustrated p.86. EXHIBITED: Amsterdam, Paul Cassirer & Co., Fransche Meesters uit de XIXe eeuw: Teekeningen, Aquarellen, Pastels, July-August 1938, no.30; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Teekeningen van Fransche Meesters 1800-1900, 1946, no.28; Paris, Institut Néerlandais and Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Le dessin français dans les collections hollandaises, 1964, no.147; Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Camille Corot: Natur und Traum, 2012-2013, no.33. Towards the end of 1825, at the age of twenty-nine, Camille Corot left Paris for Italy. He arrived in Rome in November or at the very beginning of December, and soon began making drawings and oil sketches of views in the city and the surrounding countryside. He remained in Italy for three years, producing around 220 drawings and 150 landscape paintings and oil sketches. Many of the drawings are precisely dated and with the views identified, and from these it is possible to gain a clear idea of his travels in Italy. While he was to return to Italy twice more, in 1834 and 1843, this first Italian period was to remain of fundamental importance for the artist. The works produced during these early years in Italy were personal and private exercises; indeed, none of Corot’s Italian paintings or drawings seem to have left his studio during his lifetime, and only one landscape painting from this period is known to have been exhibited by him at the Salon. Soon after Corot’s death, however, the rediscovery of these smallscale, spirited Italian landscapes, produced en plein air, led to a reappraisal of the artist’s significance as a precursor of later movements in modern art, in particular Impressionism. This fine pencil study, dated December 1825, is one of the earliest of Corot’s Roman drawings. The artist here depicts a view of the Forum with the apse of the Temple of Venus and Roma at the left, the church of San Francesco Romana and its bell tower to the left of centre, the tower of the Palazzo Senatorio in the distance and part of the Basilica of Constantine at the right. Undoubtedly one of the first drawings produced by Corot in Italy, the present sheet would seem to be one of only two known Roman drawings by the artist which are dated 1825. The other, today in the Louvre, is a view of the Arch of Constantine with, in the background, another, more distant view of the Temple of Venus and Roma and the church and tower of San Francesco Romana1.
Both the present sheet and the Louvre drawing are part of a series of oil sketches and pencil drawings, produced soon after his arrival in Rome, in which Corot began to systematically study the more picturesque monuments and sights of the ancient city. As one scholar has written, ‘During his first year in Rome Corot also made separate studies – in oil and in pencil – of some of the most important ruins on or around the Forum, as a part of his education as a painter of historical landscape. [He] accumulated a series of precise outline drawings, in which he recorded the ancient monuments in their topographical setting with accurate outlines and detail…In these pencil sketches done from the motif, Corot skillfully arranged the architectural masses to enhance their distinctive formal traits.’2 Situated at the eastern end of the Forum, near the Colosseum, the Temple of Venus and Roma was the largest temple in Ancient Rome. Designed by the Emperor Hadrian, it was begun in AD 121 and completed twenty years later. Largely destroyed by an earthquake in the 9th century, part of the temple was integrated into the 10th century church of Santa Maria Nova, renamed San Francesca Romana in the 16th century, following after an extensive program of rebuilding and renovation. Apart from the present drawing and its counterpart in the Louvre, Corot also depicted some of the same buildings in a number of paintings and oil sketches. Corot’s use of a sharp lead pencil for this drawing is typical of his Italian drawings, ‘in which force of execution vies with accuracy of observation’3, as they have been described. (As the artist later recalled, ‘In those days I had wonderful pencils! They never broke; they were more likely to tear the paper.’4) The present sheet is unrelated to any known painting by Corot, and would appear to have been made independently of the many small-scale paintings and oil sketches, which are themselves often on paper, that he produced during this first Italian period. Nevertheless, other, similar pencil drawings of Roman views may be identified as preparatory studies for paintings, and are of particular significance in the development of Corot’s compositions. As Peter Galassi has noted, ‘For [Corot] the initial drawing was not merely an expedient, or a crutch, or a starting point; it became an integral and active element in his work. The preparatory drawing…allowed Corot to establish a fully resolved composition in which each constituent element had a precisely determined function in the overall design. Here is the reason why these small works have a monumental scale: it is the logical hierarchy of forms, from the smallest to the largest, that gives Corot’s studies the authority of big pictures.’5 The majority of the extant drawings from Corot’s first trip to Italy are today in the Louvre, which holds around 135 sheets from this period, from the combined collections of the Corot scholars Alfred Robaut and Etienne Moreau-Nélaton. Of the Italian drawings by Corot which are not today in the Louvre, several were reproduced in facsimile in a large volume compiled by the artist’s close friend and collaborator, the painter and lithographer Charles Desavary, and published in 1873, shortly before the master’s death. The present sheet was selected as one of this small but choice group of around sixty drawings, dating from all periods of Corot’s career, which were reproduced in facsimile in Desavary’s Album. Included in the posthumous sale of the contents of Corot’s studio in 1875, this drawing entered the collection of Dr. Georges Viau (1855-1939), a successful dentist and prominent collector of 19th and early 20th century French art who also owned several paintings by Corot. The present sheet later entered the outstanding collection of drawings assembled by the German banker Franz Koenigs (18811941), who settled in the Netherlands in 1922. One of the leading drawings collectors of the first half of the 20th century, Koenigs owned some 2,600 Old Master and 19th century drawings, for the most part acquired in the 1920’s and early 1930’s. Much of the Koenigs collection is today in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, while around three hundred drawings from the collection are in the Pushkin State Museum in Moscow. However, Koenigs retained a smaller group of drawings, including the present sheet, in a ‘Second Collection’ that remained with his descendants until 2001. A comparable drawing by Corot of The Palatine Hill in Rome, of about the same size and date as the present sheet, was also once in the Koenigs collection, and is today in the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York6. The attribution of the present sheet has been confirmed by Martin Dieterle. The drawing will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Corot’s drawings.
20 JOHN FREDERICK LEWIS, R.A. London 1804-1876 Walton-on-Thames The Entrance to the Hall of Ambassadors at the Alhambra, Granada Pencil and watercolour, heightened with white bodycolour, on blue-grey paper. Indistinctly inscribed The Entrance of the Hall of Ambassa- in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed Mr. Charrington in pencil on the corner of the old mount. 270 x 373 mm. (10 5/ 8 x 14 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: A. W. Reus(?); Sold by him to P. & D. Colnaghi, London, on 24 August 1951 for £201; Purchased from them on 26 September 1951 for £40 by N. D. Charrington, Dye House, Thursley, Surrey; Private collection. LITERATURE: John Frederick Lewis, Lewis’s Sketches and Drawings of the Alhambra, made during a Residence in Granada in the Years 1833-4, London, 1835, pl.9 (reproduced as a lithograph in colour). ENGRAVED: By W. Gauci, for Sketches and Drawings of the Alhambra. After some early success as a painter, John Frederick Lewis began exhibiting finished watercolour drawings at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, the Royal Academy and the British Institution. He made his first trip abroad in 1827, and between 1832 and 1834 lived and worked in Spain and Morocco. In 1837 he travelled 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, producing a large number of watercolours and drawings 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. Lewis’s growing interest in oil painting led him to resign from the Old Water-Colour Society in 1858, and for the remainder of his career his exhibited works were mainly paintings. The years that Lewis spent in Spain, between 1832 and 1834, resulted in numerous drawings, watercolours and lithographs of local sights, figures, costumes, buildings and picturesque landscapes. Spanish subjects dominated his exhibited output of finished watercolours for most of the succeeding years, earning the artist the nickname ‘Spanish Lewis’. After a period of time in Madrid, he settled in Granada in Andalusia, where he stayed with his patron and friend Richard Ford at the Casa Sanchez, an old house on the grounds of the Alhambra palace. Lewis was captivated by the palace and fortress of the Alhambra, and made a number of drawings of the Moorish architecture of the palace, with a view to publishing a series of lithographs on his return to England. Many of his Spanish drawings – including the present sheet – were indeed reproduced as lithographs, appearing in Sketches and Drawings of the Alhambra, made during a residence in Granada in the Years 1833-4, published in 1835, and Lewis’s Sketches of Spain and Spanish Character, which was issued the following year. The artist remained in Granada until 1834, when he moved to Seville. Lewis’s beautiful drawings of the Alhambra have long been recognized as among the finest works of his Spanish period. The present sheet depicts the entrance to the largest and most important room in the Moorish palace; the grand reception and throne room of the sultans known as the Hall of the Ambassadors. A comparable drawing of the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra is in the collection of the Ackland Art Museum at Chapel Hill, North Carolina2. Other drawings by Lewis for the Alhambra lithographs are in the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Fitzwiliam Museum in Cambridge.
21 JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, R.A. London 1775-1851 London A Storm at Sea Watercolour on white paper. Inscribed from Arthur Lord Balfour’s Collection in pencil on a label formerly attached to the old backing board. 180 x 291 mm. (7 1/ 8 x 11 1/ 2 in.) PROVENANCE: Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, Carlton Gardens, London and Whittingehame House, East Lothian1; Thence by descent until 1986, when purchased by a private collector; Private collection, until 2008; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 4 June 2008, lot 27; W/S Fine Art, London. LITERATURE: J. R. Piggott, ‘Salesrooms Report’, Turner Society News, No.110, December 2008, pp.1819; Pieter van der Merwe, ‘Bonington and Turner off Boulogne’, Turner Society News, No.119, Spring 2013, p.16; Richard Johns, ‘Imagining the Sea’, in Christine Riding and Richard Johns, Turner and the Sea, exhibition catalogue, Greenwich and Salem, 2013-2014, p.211. In 1831 J. M. W. Turner made a visit to Scotland, where at the invitation of Sir Walter Scott, with the intention of making drawings to illustrate a new edition of Scott’s Poetical Works. During a period of several weeks in Scotland, Turner travelled extensively in the Highlands and the Isles. The present watercolour may be dated to this period, and would appear to be a first idea or ‘colour beginning’ for the sea and sky in Turner’s major painting Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (fig.1), today in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut2. Turner visited Staffa – an uninhabited island in the Inner Hebrides, dominated by a large sea cave known as Fingal’s Cave, formed of basalt columns – in August or September 1831, and the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year. Like the present watercolour, the painting depicts an arching storm cloud over a stormy sea. In the painting, the clouds are paralleled by the smoke from the funnel of a steamship at the right of the composition, and what may be a mast or funnel can just be seen as a vertical element above the waves near the left edge of the composition of this watercolour. On his visit in 1831, Turner had taken the paddle steamer Maid of Morven from Tobermory, on the island of Mull, on a day trip to visit the islands of Staffa and Iona. What is perhaps most apposite about the present watercolour is that it may reflect Turner’s experience of the storm that he and his fellow
1.
travellers endured on the boat as they visited the island. As the artist recalled many years later, in a letter to the first owner of the painting of Staffa, Fingal’s Cave, the New York collector James Lenox, ‘We left the Sound of Mull, in the Maid of Morven, to visit Staffa, and reach Iona in due time; but a strong wind and head sea prevented us making Staffa until too late to go on to Iona. After scrambling over the rocks on the lee side of the island, some got into Fingal’s Cave, others would not. It is not very pleasant or safe when the wave rolls right in. One hour was given to meet on the rock we landed on. When on board, the Captain declared it doubtful about Iona. Such a rainy and bad-looking night coming on, a vote was proposed to the passengers: ‘Iona at all hazards, or back to Tobermoray.’ Majority against proceeding. To allay the displeased, the Captain promised to steam thrice around the island in the last trip. The sun getting towards the horizon, burst through the rain-cloud, angry, and for wind; and so it proved, for we were driven for shelter into Loch Ulver, and did not get back to Tober Moray before midnight.’3
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When the finished painting of Staffa, Fingal’s Cave was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1832, Turner appended to the catalogue an extract from Scott’s Lord of the Isles: ‘…nor of a theme less solemn tells / That mighty surge that ebbs and swells, / And still between each awful pause, / From the high vault an answer draws.’ The painting remained in Turner’s studio until 1845, when it was purchased by Lenox for £500, becoming the first painting by the artist to be sent to America. The present sheet may be grouped with a large number of rapidly drawn watercolours by Turner that have been defined, by Alexander Finberg in his 1909 inventory of the Turner Bequest at the Tate, as ‘Colour Beginnings’. Finberg was referring to a miscellaneous group of 386 watercolours in the Turner Bequest – including numerous colour sketches, as well as preparatory studies, test sheets, and finished and unfinished watercolours – spanning a period of more than thirty years of the artist’s career4. Many of these watercolours are studies of the sea, the sky, or both. As one scholar has noted, ‘If such works are experiments, as they have often been described, they are only so in the loosest sense of the word, as exercises in imagination. After a lifetime of experiencing and imagining the sea, there was little practical value to be learned from such experiments, which seem to convey their maker’s undiminished delight in the materials and techniques of his profession, and in the process of transforming unadulterated colour into a boundless seascape.’5 Although Turner produced numerous watercolours of this type, colour studies such as the present watercolour are only rarely found outside of the Turner Bequest at the Tate6. Richard Johns’s apt description of some of these watercolours may equally be applied to the present sheet: ‘They employ a startling range of colours, from subdued greys to pale pinks and electric blues, and see the artist dragging his fingers across the saturated page, flicking paint from his brush and even more inventive results. By working in watercolour on paper (a technique sometimes known as ‘wet-on-wet’), Turner allowed the colours to bleed in unexpected ways, creating an ephemeral effect that mimics the fluid interaction of sea and light at different times and in different weather conditions: sky and sea merge, ships and figures are merely suggested, as he focuses entirely on the aquatic possibilities of the medium.’7 This watercolour is unlikely to have been originally part of a sketchbook, and instead was probably part of a large Imperial sheet of paper (measuring about 560 x 760 mm.) that was divided roughly into eight smaller sheets8. Turner’s late, ephemeral watercolours were an aspect of his working process that he kept very much to himself, and the present sheet is a rare example of one of these private works which seems to have left the artist’s studio in his lifetime or soon afterwards. A superb example of Turner’s remarkable gifts as a watercolourist, this expressive study of a storm at sea represents an aspect of the artist’s method that, as Johns has noted, has only recently been studied, and the results recognized as works of seminal importance: ‘In the past fifty years, especially, this once-hidden aspect of Turner’s enterprise has shaped his posthumous international reputation at least as much as any of the oil paintings that were finished and exhibited during his lifetime. The private world of Turner’s sketchbooks and studio has been investigated, exposed and selectively called upon as evidence in the shifting assessment of the painter’s long-term significance for the history of art. This is nowhere more apparent than in those drawings and watercolours that are concerned with the sea.’9
22 BENOIT CHIRAT Lyon 1795-1870 Lyon(?) Study of Apples on a Branch Coloured chalks on light blue paper faded to brown. Laid down. Inscribed, signed and dated Dessine d’apres nature par Chirat 1839 in brown ink over pencil at the lower right. Framing lines in black ink. 263 x 357 mm. (10 3/ 8 x 14 in.) Little is known about the Lyonnais still life and botanical painter Benoit Chirat, who was a student of Antoine Berjon and Pierre Révoil at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, where he won a prize for flower design in 1813. Chirat worked mainly as a textile designer in Lyon, exhibiting at the Salon in Lyon in 1842 and 1843. In 1842 he settled in Paris, exhibiting at the Paris Salon that year and continuing to do so until 1866, showing mainly pastels and oil paintings of fruit and flowers, often incorporating bronze or stone vases, as well as the occasional portrait. A group of thirty-one lithographs of flowers and garlands, after original designs by Chirat, is in the collection of the National Museums and Galleries of Wales in Cardiff. His daughter Anaïs Duchesne (1820-c.1869) was also active as an artist in Lyon and Paris, and exhibited at the Salons between 1840 and 1849. The present sheet dates from 1839, before Benoit Chirat’s move from Lyon to Paris.
23 FRANÇOIS-AUGUSTE RAVIER Lyon 1814-1895 Morestel Landscape in the Roman Campagna, with a Ruined Wall or Aqueduct Pen and brown ink and watercolour, over a pencil underdrawing, on blue paper, laid down on a backing sheet. Signed with the artist’s initials FAtR in brown ink at the lower left. An unidentified collection stamp (not in Lugt), stamped in blue ink on the backing sheet. 198 x 547 mm. (7 3/4 x 21 1/ 2 in.) PROVENANCE: Galerie Jonas, Paris, in 1975. EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Jonas, F. A. Ravier, November 1975, no.60. Auguste Ravier was trained as an artist in the studios of Jules Coigniet and Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny, and early in his career met Camille Corot, who was to be a lifelong influence on his work. Apart from several trips to Italy between 1840 and 1847, where he painted landscape oil sketches very similar to those of Corot, Ravier worked for his entire career in his native Lyon and the Dauphiné, taking his subjects from the countryside around the towns of Crémieu and Morestel. He seems to have been something of a recluse, avoiding visits to town and living a life of country solitude. Ravier was particularly adept as a watercolourist, and was especially fond of scenes at dawn and dusk, often making studies on the spot that would later be worked up into finished oils or watercolours in his studio. His atmospheric landscapes in watercolour have earned comparisons with those of Turner, whose work he greatly admired. (As he noted in a letter of August 1874 to his friend and biographer Félix Thioller, ‘I believe that I have made some progress in regard to the rendering of light. I want to get at Turner, with whose work I find I have more in common than with anyone else.’1) Ravier only rarely exhibited his work, and when he did so it was almost always in Lyon. He hardly ever visited Paris, and it was not until 1884 that several of his watercolours were shown at the Salon. In the same year he lost the sight in one eye, forcing him to give up painting, and by 1889 had become totally blind. That Ravier was something of a perfectionist in his watercolour technique is seen in another letter to Thioller, written in 1876: ‘For myself I have one pre-occupation: sincerity, the expression of the scene of the moment as felt by my senses as that moment...Without doubt I sometimes get my water-colours too heavy. These I give up; I have to wash them, sponge them, rub them out. It is an effort which has not succeeded; but it is an effort, and it would be more convenient and more easy not to have made it. I try everything, for I have a thirst for the unknown, the madness of research; but that is where my value lies. It is imperfect, but it is not commonplace.’2 A fine and luminous example of Ravier’s watercolour style, the present sheet would appear to date from one of the artist’s visits to in Italy in the 1840’s. It is typical of his poetic landscapes, in which there is almost always no trace of a human presence. As Ravier noted in a letter written from Rome soon after his arrival there in 1840, his first visits to the countryside beyond the city walls made a deep impression on him: ‘Around three quarters of a mile outside the walls there begins a desert where there is nothing but wild plants and ruins. I walked for an hour without meeting anyone other than a monk who said his breviary…But that which brings to the utmost degree the beauty and sadness of this place, are the ancient tombs in ruins which line the road on both sides at the left and right…It is the landscape which has made the greatest impression on me.’3
24 MAX HAUSCHILD Dresden 1810-1895 Naples a. A View Through a Window, with Vine Leaves Oil on paper. Inscribed Max Hauschild (1810-1895) in pencil on the verso. 134 x 123 mm. (5 1/4 x 4 7/ 8 in.) b. A View Through a Window, with Green Vine Leaves Watercolour. Inscribed Max Hauschild (1810-1895) / Hauschild in pencil on the verso. 141 x 112 mm. (5 1/ 2 x 4 3/ 8 in.) In 1826 Maximilian Albert Hauschild was enrolled in the architecture school of Akademie in Dresden, where he was to return as a teaching assistant between 1838 and 1852. By 1833 he was in Rome, where he developed a particular interest in Italian architecture, notably the churches of the Gothic and Romanesque eras. He returned to Rome in 1841 and 1846, and from 1852 onwards lived between Dresden and Italy, eventually settling in Naples. Hauschild painted works in oil, gouache and watercolour, with his preferred subjects being accurate and highly detailed views of the interiors of churches and monasteries throughout Italy and Germany, all depicted with a particular sensitivity for light effects. Paintings by Hauschild are today in the collections of museums in Bamberg, Dresden, Erfurt and Karlsruhe, as well as in Naples, Oslo and St. Gallen. A handful of watercolours and drawings by the artist have appeared on the art market in Germany1, while a pencil drawing of the interior of the Cathedral at Naumberg an der Saale is in the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California2.
a.
b. actual size
25 JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET Gruchy 1814-1875 Barbizon A Peasant at Work in a Field Charcoal, with stumping, on buff paper. Laid down. 353 x 307 mm. (13 7/ 8 x 12 1/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Pierre Berès, Paris. One of the founders of the Barbizon school of painting in France, Jean-François Millet studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. It was in Paris in the 1840’s that Millet became associated with a group of landscape painters who were to become part of the Barbizon circle, including Théodore Rousseau, Constant Troyon, Narcisse Diaz de la Peña and Charles Jacque. Although his early career was dominated by portraits, by the 1850’s Millet began to paint pastoral subjects, many of which were acquired by his first patron and future biographer Alfred Sensier. He established his public reputation as a painter of peasant life with three seminal paintings; The Sower, exhibited in 1850, The Gleaners, painted in 1857, and The Angelus, completed in 1859. By the 1860’s Millet enjoyed a very successful career, receiving many commissions for paintings and, from the Parisian architect and collector Emile Gavet, for a series of highly finished pastel drawings. Honoured with an exhibition of his work at the Exposition Universelle in 1867, Millet was elected to the jury of the Salon in 1870, but by this time was already beginning to suffer from poor health. Four months after the artist’s death in January 1875, the contents of his studio were dispersed at auction. Millet was a skilled draughtsman, whose work ranged from quick sketches and more elaborate figure studies, to landscape studies in pen and watercolour, to highly finished pastel drawings that were sold as autonomous works of art, often for considerable sums of money. Robert Herbert has noted that ‘Millet’s penchant for drawing was catered to by the nature of his market. In the early years at Barbizon he sold few paintings at all, and at such derisory prices that the sale of three or four drawings could produce the same income…As the decade progressed – especially after the relative success of his Salon of 1853 – Millet acquired more opportunities for selling oils. Drawings still held priority, however, for they were his instinctive way of creating. Almost all his paintings were chosen from among drawings that had already been completed.’1 In the last decade of his career, landscape began to assume a more important role in his art, inspired in part by his travels beyond Barbizon. Although Millet lived in Barbizon from 1849 till the end of his career, he often spent summers elsewhere, such as his native Normandy and the Auvergne. Many of Millet’s finest drawings are studies of peasant men and women at work. This was a world he knew well, and one that he was born into. As a young boy in the small village of Gruchy in Normandy, Millet had worked alongside his father on his family’s farm – looking after the animals, tilling the soil, sowing and reaping – and remained proud of these experiences throughout his later life as an artist. It was his obvious talent as a draughtsman that persuaded the young man’s father to send him away from the farm to study with a painter, and which led him towards a different career. But Millet remained deeply attached to the idea of the French countryside, and to the people who lived and worked there, and strove to accurately and sympathetically represent their daily lives in the paintings he sent to the annual Salons. As Herbert has written, ‘[Millet’s] view of the peasant was a conservative one. He was convinced that man is condemned forever to bear his burdens, hence he made the peasant into a victim of unyielding fate that kept him in the unchanging cycle of work and exhausted repose, the cycle that has been his lot since ancient times.’2 But at the same time Millet’s peasant figures are often imbued with a sense of dignity, and at times even of grandeur. Indeed, as Herbert points out, ‘His work joined in a complex process that resulted in the elevation of common man to the rank of history painting.’3
Previously unknown and unpublished, this powerful sheet is unusually large among Millet’s charcoal drawings, and has the appearance of a finished work for sale, or perhaps to be given away as a present. However, the lack of a signature would suggest that it was part of a repertory of figure poses that the artist chose to keep in his studio. Millet often produced drawings that served to celebrate any and all manner of farm work, even such prosaic activities as the spreading of manure depicted in the present sheet. A related chalk drawing (fig.1), smaller in scale and horizontal in format, showing the same figure in an extensive landscape with a waggon in the distance, is in the collection of the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo, Egypt4. As Alexandra Murphy has noted of the Cairo drawing, ‘Millet understood the twisting, tiring movements involved in spreading manure’, and this is even more evident in this large and impressive sheet, which focuses on the vigorous actions of the man. The Cairo drawing is part of a group of around a dozen drawings executed in Barbizon around 1849 that served as inspiration for the artist for the remainder of his career. The present sheet may be similarly dated to between 1849 and 1852, with the broad plain of Chailly, on the outskirts of Barbizon, visible in the background of both drawings. A related painting of this subject, but with the figure facing to the right, is in the collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina.6 Among stylistically similar drawings by Millet is a study of a Woodcutter in the collection of the Musée Grobet-Labadie in Marseille7 and Two Peasants Splitting Wood in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford8. A drawing of a related subject, depicting a peasant resting from the task of spreading manure and leaning on his pitchfork, is in a private collection9. The attribution of this drawing has been confirmed by Alexandra Murphy.
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26 WILLIAM WYLD London 1806-1889 Paris Wooded Landscape Pencil and watercolour, heightened with gum arabic. 149 x 358 mm. (5 7/ 8 x 14 1/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: The artist’s studio, Paris; The posthumous vente Wyld, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 30-31 May 1890, with the sale stamp (Lugt 2587b) at the lower left. Born in England but raised largely in France, William Wyld came late to his vocation as an artist, having worked in Calais as first secretary to the British consul and later owning a wine business in Epernay. It was in Calais that he met the watercolourists François Louis Francia and Richard Parkes Bonington, who were both to have a profound influence on his work. He also met the Anglo-French collector John Lewis Brown and became a close friend and later travelling companion of the painter Horace Vernet. Having made his debut at the Salon in 1831, Wyld travelled to Algiers in 1833, spending some six months there and occasionally working alongside Vernet, whom he later accompanied to Italy. Wyld’s drawings and sketches from his trip to North Africa resulted in an illustrated publication entitled Voyage pittoresque dans le régence d’Alger pendant l’année 1833, published in 1835 with lithographs by Wyld and Emile Lessore. By 1834 Wyld had decided to abandon the wine trade in favour of working full time as an artist. Although he occasionally painted in oils, Wyld’s reputation was established by his work as a watercolourist. By the 1850’s he had developed a market for elaborate and highly finished watercolour views of European cities, based on his extensive travels in Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Spain and Italy, as well as England, Scotland and France. While he worked mainly in France and exhibited in the French section at the Paris Salons, Wyld always retained his British nationality. He exhibited regularly in London at the Royal Academy, the British Institution and the New Water-Colour Society – where he showed some two hundred works between 1849 and 1882 – and in 1879 he was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour. Many of Wyld’s British patrons were wealthy Northern industrialists, and he also gained a measure of Royal patronage from Queen Victoria, who commissioned a series of views of the landscape around Balmoral Castle in 1852. He remained active until his death in Paris in 1889. In one of the few contemporary references to Wyld, a long article published in 1877, the critic P. G. Hamerton noted of the artist that, ‘Few painters in the present century have enjoyed more of what constitutes success, much labour in a beloved occupation sustained by excellent health, public recognition in several different nations, and also that pecuniary success which an artist values as much for the appreciation which it implies as for its convenience…His art belongs, as may be expected, more to the first than the second half of the nineteenth century, both in its temper and its tendencies. It is not so intime or affectionate as recent landscape-painting, but excels it both in the evidence of learning and in the exercise of taste.’1 More recently, another scholar has written that ‘William Wyld is arguably Bonington’s most interesting successor, not in the sense that he slavishly imitates the other man’s work but in the sense that he acquired from a study of Bonington’s work a sharpness of eye, a dexterity of handling and an individual sense of location which he exploited to the full in the markets of England and France.’2
27 EDWIN LORD WEEKS Boston 1849-1903 Paris Study of a White Horse Oil on canvas. 386 x 485 mm. (15 1/4 x 19 1/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: By descent in the family of the artist to his niece, Elizabeth Goodwin; By descent to Burton W. F. Trafton, Jr., South Berwick, Maine; Mervyn E. Bronson, Portland, Maine; Bernard Broder, Gorham, Maine, until 2012. LITERATURE: Kathleen Duff Ganley and Leslie K. Paddock, The Art of Edwin Lord Weeks, exhibition catalogue, Durham, 1976, illustrated p.32, no.35; To be included in the forthcoming Edwin Weeks catalogue raisonné in preparation by Dr. Ellen Morris. EXHIBITED: Durham, University of New Hampshire, University Art Galleries, The Art of Edwin Lord Weeks, 1976, no.35. Little is known of Edwin Lord Weeks’s artistic training before 1874, when he enrolled in the studio of Léon Bonnat in Paris. By this time, however, he had already visited Morocco, Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and had exhibited several paintings inspired by this journey in his native Boston in 1874. The artist made his home in Paris, where he exhibited with great success at the annual Salons, and he never returned to live in America. Weeks continued to travel to the Near East and North Africa, spending a considerable amount of time in Morocco between 1878 and 1880. He was one of the few Westerners to visit Rabat, Salé and Marrakech, and nearly died from typhoid fever. He made his debut at the Paris Salon in 1878 with a painting of a Moroccan camel driver, and continued to show Moroccan subjects for several years thereafter, both at the Salons in Paris and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Indeed, between 1879 and 1882 Weeks painted almost exclusively Moroccan subjects. He also published an extensive account of his travels in Morocco in the April 1901 issue of Scribner’s Magazine. This oil sketch was part of a collection of paintings, drawings and oil sketches by Weeks, many dating from the early years of his career, which remained with the artist’s descendants until recently. A very similar white horse is found in a large painting of A Blacksmith’s Shop in Tangiers (fig.1), dated 1876, which appeared at auction in New York in 19891.
1.
28 THOMAS MILES RICHARDSON, JUNIOR, R.S.A., R.W.S. Newcastle 1813-1890 Newcastle A Rocky Stream in Scotland Pencil and watercolour, heightened with white, on two joined sheets of buff paper. Signed TMRichardson in brown ink at the lower left. 345 x 845 mm. (13 1/ 2 x 33 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 15 September 1977, lot 164; With Bruton Knowles, Cheltenham; Martyn Gregory, London (according to a photograph in the Witt Library); Anonymous sale, Newcastle, Anderson & Garland, 27 April 2005, lot 105; The Maas Gallery, London, in 2006. EXHIBITED: London, The Maas Gallery, British Pictures, 2006, p.19, no.16. The son of the Newcastle landscape painter of the same name, Thomas Miles Richardson, Junior was trained by his father, and was to become arguably even more successful than him. He began his career in his native Newcastle, where he first exhibited his work at the age of fourteen. By the 1830’s his watercolour landscapes were achieving a measure of commercial and critical success, and he was sending his work to be exhibited at the British Institution and the Royal Academy in London. In 1838 he published a large folio of twenty-six plates entitled Sketches on the Continent, a series of views in France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Holland, etc. from sketches made during a tour in 1837, with eleven of the plates lithographed by himself. In Newcastle Richardson ran a private art academy with his elder brother and fellow artist George, but in 1846, three years after being elected an Associate of the Old Water-Colour Society, he decided to settle in London. In 1851 Richardson became a full member of the OWCS, and from then until his death took part in every summer and winter exhibition of the Society, eventually showing over seven hundred watercolours there. Richardson travelled extensively throughout Scotland and the North of England, and also widely in Europe. His exhibited works, often on a panoramic scale, were made up mostly of landscapes in the Borders and the Scottish Highlands, Italian views and, in later years, Alpine scenes in Switzerland, France and Italy. As one contemporary writer noted of Richardson, shortly after his death, ‘The history of his life is almost written in the account of his exhibited drawings, nearly all of which are local views, British and foreign, which imply many seasons of sketching both at home and abroad...The works of T. M. Richardson are specially characterized by clever drawing and workmanlike skill in manipulation of material. They are rendered attractive by bright contrasts of colour, and a deftness of handling which is particularly apparent in his sketches…In depicting extensive moorland and other scenes he not unfrequently extends the field of vision laterally by the use of paper of widely oblong proportions.’1 Following a few years of poor health, Richardson died in January 1890, and the contents of his studio were dispersed at auction in London in June of that year. A large group of watercolours by the artist is today in the collection of the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, while several others are in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Panoramic Scottish views such as this account for much of Richardson’s output, and his exhibition watercolours – often quite large in scale and overtly horizontal in format – proved popular with both critics and collectors, usually fetching high prices. As John Ruskin noted of one Highland view, a Scene in Glen Nevis exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society in 1857, ‘Mr. Richard [sic] is gradually gaining in manual power, and opposes cobalt and burnt sienna very pleasantly. But he seems always to conceive a Highland landscape only as a rich medley of the same materials – a rocky bank, blue at one place and brown at another; some contorted Scottish firs; some ferns, some dogs, and some sportsmen: the whole contemplated under the cheering influence of champagne, and considered in very way delightful.’2
29 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE Damvillers 1848-1884 Paris Orpheus Charcoal, with stumping, and white chalk, on light brown paper. Signed J. BASTIEN LEPAGE in brown ink at the lower left. Numbered 102 in brown ink at the upper left. 455 x 303 mm. (17 7/ 8 x 11 7/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Probably Dr. Joseph Liouville, Paris1; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 26 April 1985, lot 29. LITERATURE: Probably Masters in Art: Bastien-Lepage, Boston, 1908, p.402; Marie-Madeleine Aubrun, Jules Bastien-Lepage 1848-1884: Catalogue raisonné de l’Oeuvre, Paris(?), 1985, p.116, no. D.130. Jules Bastien-Lepage enjoyed a brief but remarkably successful career of barely fifteen years, establishing a reputation as a painter of portraits and genre scenes of peasant life. Despite his international fame, however, his reputation dimmed soon after his death at the age of thirty-six. It was not until the last quarter of the 20th century that his paintings were rediscovered and underwent a scholarly reappraisal, and his importance as one of the leading artists of the Realist tradition in France was fully recognized. This drawing is a study for an unfinished and now-lost painting of Orpheus, painted in 1877. The artist mentions the painting in a letter written to his parents in January 1877: ‘I went back to work starting a small painting (I mean small in size). It represents Orpheus asking once again for Eurydice from the god of the underworld…Orpheus walks in front, as it was agreed; as he walks, he plays the lyre. Distracted or rather tormented by the desire to see Eurydice, we feel that he will soon turn his head, and Mercury, who does not lose sight of him, will abduct his beloved. All of this is outlined, and I hope to finish it in a short time.’3 Although this painting of Orpheus was eventually abandoned, its composition is nevertheless recorded in a handful of preparatory oil sketches4, most of which are also now lost, as well as five drawings5 and an etching6 for the figure of Orpheus. Bastien-Lepage also produced a small sculpted statuette of Orpheus (fig.1), which is today in a private collection7. This statuette of Orpheus reappears in Bastien-Lepage’s magisterial portrait of the actress Sarah Bernhardt (fig.2), painted in 1879 and arguably the definitive portrait of the famous actress8. In the painting the artist has depicted Bernhardt admiring the small sculpture of Orpheus that he had executed two years earlier.
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30 GIUSEPPE SIGNORINI Rome 1857-1932 Rome A Moorish Soldier Holding a Pistol Watercolour over traces of a pencil underdrawing. Signed, dated and inscribed Giuseppe Signorini / Roma 78 in brown ink at the lower right. 533 x 373 mm. (21 x 14 5/ 8 in.) [sheet] Giuseppe Signorini studied with the painter Aurelio Tiratelli in Rome and first exhibited his work at the Mostra del Circolo Artistico in that city. Early in his career he decided to devote himself to the medium of watercolour, and indeed relatively few oil paintings by him are known. Before he was twenty he was so highly regarded as a watercolourist that his finished drawings – of exotic Orientalist genre subjects, costume studies or lavish interiors, typified by a masterful technique – were avidly sought after by dealers and collectors in Italy, France, England and America. Although he seems never to have travelled to the Near East or the Maghreb, Signorini maintained a large collection of Oriental costumes in his studio, as well as furniture and tapestries, which he used to add a level of authentic detail to his compositions. He established a studio on the Via Margutta in Rome, and in 1881 organized an Arab festival, with participants, made up mostly of fellow artists, parading along the streets around the Piazza del Popolo, dressed in Oriental robes and turbans. Although he continued to maintain a studio in Rome, from 1899 onwards Signorini also spent much of his time in Paris, where he lived and worked for over thirty years. He won a number of prizes at the annual Paris Salons, and served as director of the Académie des Champs-Elysées. At the height of his career, Signorini’s Orientalist watercolours were being sold for high prices in Italy, France and America. A leading member of the Società degli Acquarellisti in Rome, Signorini also taught a number of the succeeding generation of Italian Orientalist painters. His work remained popular for many years after his death, and was the subject of a number of retrospective exhibitions in Milan and Turin in the years after the Second World War. Works by Signorini are today in the collections of museums in Barcelona, Bremen, Hamburg, Madrid, New York, Paris, St. Petersburg and elsewhere. Drawn in Rome in 1878, this large sheet is a fine and typical example of Giuseppe Signorini’s Orientalist watercolours of single figures dressed in elaborate costumes, drawn with great verve and confidence. Drawings such as this were not studies for larger compositions, but were sold as independent works of art in their own right. Among a number of stylistically comparable drawings is an unfinished watercolour of A Man in a Turban in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey1 and a Nubian Soldier on the art market in Paris in 19872.
detail (actual size)
31 VINCENZO GEMITO Naples 1852-1929 Naples The Artist’s Daughter Giuseppina Asleep Black chalk, with touches of white chalk, on buff paper. Inscribed Proprietà di Giuseppina Gemito in pencil on the verso. 625 x 477 mm. (24 3/ 8 x 18 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: The artist’s daughter, Giuseppina Gemito (according to the inscription on the verso); Mario and Pico Cellini, Rome; Private collection, Florence, since the 1970’s. Vincenzo Gemito was, after Antonio Canova, perhaps the foremost Italian sculptor of the 19th century. A precocious talent, the sixteen-year old Gemito exhibited a sculpture at the Promotrice di Belle Arti in Naples in 1868 that attracted the attention of the King of Italy, Vittorio Emmanuele II, who acquired a bronze cast of the work for the palace at Capodimonte. Between 1877 and 1880 Gemito lived in Paris, where at the Salon of 1877 he exhibited his sculpture of a Neapolitan Fisherboy to considerable critical acclaim. He continued to participate in the Paris Salons after his return to Naples, winning the Grand Prix for sculpture in 1889 and a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle the following year. Around 1887, after he began to experience bouts of mental illness, Gemito gave up sculpture almost entirely, and spent much of next eighteen years as a recluse in his own home. He nevertheless continued to produce a large number of drawings, mostly portraits of family, friends and colleagues, as well as studies of street urchins, Neapolitan girls and other city folk. It was not until around 1909 that Gemito again took up sculpture full time, and it was in this later period of his career that he produced some of his finest work in bronze, executed with a delicacy and fineness of detail ultimately derived from his drawings. Immensely gifted as a draughtsman, Gemito produced a large number of figure and portrait studies in pen, chalk, pastel and watercolour. His drawings were greatly admired throughout his career, and were avidly collected by his contemporaries. Yet his drawings have remained little known outside Italy, and it may be argued that he deserves to be recognized as not only one of the most significant sculptors of the period, but also one of its most talented and distinctive draughtsmen. Young children appear in a significant number of Gemito’s drawings, and the motif of a sleeping child was a particular favourite of the artist1. This large drawing may be dated to 1885 or 1886, and can be identified as a portrait of the artist’s only child, his daughter Giuseppina (also known by the nickname ‘Peppinella’), who was born in 18852. A related series of pen and ink and pencil sketches of the baby Giuseppina, including several of her similarly asleep or nursing at her mother’s breast, is in the Minozzi collection in Naples3, and the pose of the child in the present sheet is almost identical to that of the sleeping Giuseppina (fig.1) in one of these drawings4. As the inscription on the verso of the sheet confirms, in later years this drawing belonged to Giuseppina Gemito herself.
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32 HENRY RYLAND, R.I. Biggleswade 1856-1924 London(?) Study of Bay Leaves Pencil on dark green paper. Signed with the artist’s initials H.R. in pencil at the lower right centre. 531 x 381 mm. (20 7/ 8 x 15 in.) PROVENANCE: Christopher Wood, London; Katherine Woodward Mellon, Stonington, CT; Thence by descent until 2012. LITERATURE: The Artist, Vol.XXIII, September-December 1898, illustrated between pp.48 and 49. EXHIBITED: New York, Shepherd Gallery, English Romantic Art 1840-1920: Pre-Raphaelites, Academics, Symbolists, 1994, no.131. A gifted painter, watercolourist, illustrator, decorator and designer, Henry Ryland studied at the South Kensington Art Schools (later the Royal College of Art) and Heatherley’s School of Art in London, before completing his studies in Paris in the studio of Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, and at the Académie Julian with Gustave Boulanger. Ryland exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1890 onwards, and also showed his work at the Grosvenor Gallery, the New Gallery and the New Watercolour Society, of which he was admitted as a full member. Like his contemporary George Lawrence Bulleid, Ryland’s work was made up primarily of classical subjects in the manner of Lawrence Alma–Tadema or Albert Moore. While he did paint in oils, much of his output took the form of highly finished watercolours, many of which were reproduced in the form of prints, which added to his reputation. He also designed a number of stained-glass panels, and produced woodcut illustrations for magazines, notably the English Illustrated Magazine. This large and impressive pencil drawing of bay leaves was chosen for reproduction as a full-page illustration in the magazine The Artist in 1898. As the accompanying article noted of Ryland, ‘The backgrounds to many of his works are occupied with carefully-wrought floral designs as ingeniously composed as for a wall-paper. Quite as much time is given to them as to the rest of the composition, for the workmanship is very delicate, and the delineation of natural forms shows both knowledge and sympathy. The studies for these are carefully made from nature, as the reproductions given will show.’1 A handful of other drawings of flora by Ryland are known, including a group of four finished drawings of Cowslips, Water Violets, Primroses and ‘The Rathe Primrose’2.
33 HILAIRE-GERMAIN-EDGAR DEGAS Paris 1834-1917 Paris After the Bath (La toilette après le bain) Charcoal, with stumping, on light brown papier calque, mounted on card. Stamped with the Degas vente stamp (Lugt 658) in red ink at the lower left. Inscribed with the Durand-Ruel stock number Pb 576 in blue chalk and numbered 1220 in blue chalk on the reverse of the card. 260 x 323 mm. (10 1/4 x 12 3/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: The Atelier Degas, Paris, with the atelier stamp (Lugt 657) on the reverse of the card; The third vente Degas, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 7-9 April 1919, part of lot 177 (‘La toilette après le bain.’, framed together with another drawing), bt. Stettiner; Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris; Acquired in Paris in c.1937 by Karl Arnold, Munich1; Thence by descent to a private collection, Germany, until 2011. LITERATURE: Sue Welsh Reed and Barbara Stern Shapiro, Edgar Degas: The Painter as Printmaker, exhibition catalogue, Boston, Philadelphia and London, 1984-1985, p.241, under no.65, note 1; Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Ottawa and New York, 1988-1989, p.502, under no.297, note 1. This drawing can be related to a series of six lithographs of nude women after a bath, executed by Degas in the early 1890’s2. Degas had often been attracted to the motif of a woman stepping out of a bathtub and drying her hip while her long hair hangs down in front of her, and produced several paintings, drawings and pastels on this theme. The suite of lithographs of 1891-1892 have been described by one scholar as ‘Degas’s last great enterprise as a print-maker…technically immensely audacious and complex’3, while another has noted that ‘In the series, Degas displayed his mastery of the lithographic medium, which he used not only to produce diverse visual effects but also to integrate a single figure into variously composed pictorial contexts.’4 Two of the lithographs show the nude bather facing left, while the other four depict her facing right. Similarly, in four of the prints the nude is depicted alone, but in the other two she is faced by a maid holding out a towel or robe (fig.1). Around seventeen drawings by Degas may be related to this important suite of lithographs, including examples associated with the present sheet in the British Museum5, the Burrell Collection in Glasgow6 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York7. This drawing has been in a German private collection since the 1930’s, and has never before been exhibited. Like many of the charcoal drawings of the artist’s late career, it is drawn on thin papier calque, or tracing paper. As George Shackelford has noted, ‘In the 1890s…Degas turned to a new shortcut for transferring a successful idea from one surface to another. For this purpose, he used tracing paper – papier calque – through which he could see a drawing below. The smooth, uniform surface of the hard-milled paper provided an unusual but ideal foil for the charcoal sticks that he favored as drawing tools, allowing him both to obtain very smooth, continuous lines unbroken by the tooth of rougher papers and also to smudge and wipe the charcoal, or even to erase it, to create shadow or to correct a misplaced contour. Such tracings could stand on their own as independent sheets are were sometimes signed and sold by Degas, but the vast majority of them remained in the studio, to be discovered at the time of his death.’8
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34 WALTER RICHARD SICKERT, R.A. Munich 1860-1942 Bath The Church of Santa Maria Maddalena, Venice Oil, pen and black ink on paper, laid down on board. Signed Sickert in ink at the lower left. 244 x 148 m. (9 5/ 8 x 5 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Probably Judge William Evans, Bayswater, London and Ilmington Manor, Warwickshire; His wife, Mrs. Frances Louise Evans; Given by her to Dr. Lloyd Williams; Given by him to a private collector; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 3 March 1989, lot 311 (sold for £5,500); Piccadilly Gallery, London; Max Rutherston, London, in 1990; Purchased from him by the Misses A. and O. Heywood; Private collection, until 2012. LITERATURE: Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, New Haven and London, 2006, p.275, under no.181, no.1. EXHIBITED: London, Max Rutherston, The Influence of the Slade, 1890-1920, October-November 1990, no.85. Walter Sickert once described Venice as ‘the loveliest city in the world’, and made several visits there, first briefly in 1894 and again in 1895-1896, 1900, 1901 and 1903-1904, staying for several months each time. He produced a large number of drawings, oil sketches and finished paintings of Venetian subjects. As Robert Upstone has noted, ‘For nearly a decade Venice formed the dominant subject in his art and the city inspired him to discover new modes of expression. Through hard work and experimentation in Venice, Sickert became the painter who was to be recognized as the most significant figure in early Modern British art. In short, Venice was the crucible in which Sickert’s mature work was formed.’1 During his first proper campaign of painting in Venice, in 1895 and 1896, Sickert wandered throughout the city, making numerous drawings and oil sketches of both the major sites and the less visited areas of the city. As he wrote to his friend, the painter Phillip Wilson Steer, during this visit, ‘Venice is really first-rate for work…and I am getting some things done. It is mostly sunny and warmish and on cold days I do interiors in St. Mark’s.’2 Probably datable to Sickert’s first lengthy stay in Venice, this oil sketch depicts the small domed church of Santa Maria della Maddalena, seen from the Ponte Correr on the Fondamenta delle Colonnette. Built around 1760 by the architect Tommaso Temanza, the Neoclassical church is located in a relatively isolated area of the Cannarregio district of Venice. The present sheet may be related to two other oil sketches of the same view by Sickert, both painted on panel. A painting that recently appeared at auction is much more sketchy in appearance, and has been dated by Baron to c.19033. The present sheet is, however, closer in style and handling to another small panel, of similar dimensions, which was last recorded in the collection of Viscount Radcliffe in 19604. Lillian Browse’s succinct description of the latter painting may equally be applied to the present work: ‘This small panel is large in conception, dark and sonorous in colour, and rich and ‘juicy’ in handling.’5 The first recorded owner of this sketch was Mrs. Frances Evans, who, with her husband Judge William Evans (1847-1918), was among Sickert’s most loyal patrons and collectors between 1907 and 1914. Judge and Mrs. Evans commissioned paintings from the artist based on drawings he showed them in his studio. As Lillian Browse has written, ‘Mrs. Evans says that when she and her husband, Judge Evans, went to Sickert’s studio he would show them a pile of small sketches and drawings and ask them to take their pick. He would then paint an oil from whatever they chose, usually for £25.’6 The Evanses bought or commissioned at least four paintings of Venetian views by Sickert, and also owned several paintings of Dieppe, as well as a handful of figure compositions7.
35 WILLIAM STRANG, R.A. Dumbarton 1859-1921 Bournemouth Portrait of a Seated Young Woman Red, black and white chalks on pink prepared paper. Signed and dated W. STRANG / 1903 in pencil at the lower left. 420 x 270 mm. (16 1/ 2 x 10 5/ 8 in.) [sheet] Watermark: Large armorial. PROVENANCE: The Fine Art Society, London, in October 1976; Acquired from them by Leo Herzel, Chicago; Thence by descent until 2012. The Scottish artist William Strang was a student of Alphonse Legros at the Slade School of Art in London between 1876 and 1880, and after his graduation continued to assist Legros in his printmaking class. Much of the first two decades of his career was spent as a printmaker, and he produced etchings of landscape and pastoral subjects, as well as some 150 portraits of prominent artistic and literary figures. A founder member of the Royal Society of Painter Etchers in 1880, Strang was elected an Associate Engraver at the Royal Academy in 1906 and an Academician Engraver in 1921, the year of his death. The realism and psychological intensity of his etched portraits reflect the particular influence of Legros, and was carried through into the paintings Strang began to produce around the turn of the century, and which came to dominate his output in the latter half of his career. Strang exhibited his first oil painting at the Royal Academy in 1892, and later in the decade showed paintings at the New English Art Club and at the first Secessionist Exhibition in Vienna. By the turn of the century Strang was exhibiting paintings regularly alongside his etchings. In 1901 he completed a series of ten large mural paintings on the theme of Adam and Eve for the library at Compton Hall in Wolverhampton, commissioned by the collector and patron Laurence Hodson. Strang was also a gifted portrait painter, whose sitters included Thomas Hardy, Lucien Pissarro and Vita Sackville-West. Although his work was widely admired, as one contemporary critic noted, ‘Strang is not readily rubricised: he is neither an Academicist nor a Classicist, nor a Romanticist; neither an Impressionist nor a Post-Impressionist; he presents himself indeed to the impatient or merely casual observer in Protean illusiveness. Yet Strang is not only a very solid and unevasive personality but a singularly simple and ingenuous one to boot.’1 From early in his career, Strang was recognized as a brilliant draughtsman. He was in particular much admired for his portrait drawings, inspired by those of Hans Holbein in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, which he had studied closely. Between 1898 and 1909 Strang produced some five hundred drawings of this ‘Holbein’ type, characterized by the use of red and black chalks on paper washed pink or beige, and he continued to make them until the end of his career. (In the years leading up to the First World War he received a commission for fourteen drawn portraits of the members of the Order of Merit, and these drawings are themselves now in the collection of the Royal Library at Windsor.) An exhibition of Strang’s portrait drawings – for which each sitting took about three hours – was held at E. J. van Wisselingh’s Dutch Gallery in London in 1904. His reputation as a portrait draughtsman also led to several commissions from collectors in New York, which the artist visited in 1904 and 1905. Strang’s portrait drawings were never idealized and, as the designer Charles Ashbee, who sat for the artist, later recalled, ‘in each of his portraits there is some touch of his sitters’ ugliness revealed in the beauty of the draughtsmanship.’2
36 HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY Meigs Creek (Ohio) 1873-1952 New York An Elegant Woman in a Fur-Trimmed Coat Charcoal, pastel and watercolour. Signed and dated HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY. 1902 in black chalk at the lower right. 894 x 445 mm. (35 1/4 x 17 1/ 2 in.) [sight] PROVENANCE: Brooke Astor, New York; Thence by descent until 2012. One of the best-known American artists of his day, Howard Chandler Christy was a pupil of William Merritt Chase. He began his career as an illustrator, working for many of the leading publications in America in the first quarter of the 20th century, and also briefly taught at the Art Students League and the Cooper Union in New York. A stint as a war artist-correspondent in Cuba led to a series of drawings of scenes from the Spanish-American War, published in Harper’s Magazine, Leslie’s Weekly and Scribner’s Magazine, which garnered the artist considerable renown and earned him numerous magazine commissions. Around the turn of the century Christy began to develop a particular specialty of depictions of an idealized kind of young American womanhood, a type which soon came to be known simply as the ‘Christy Girl’. These works proved very popular and were often reproduced as posters or calendars. (A selection of drawings of this type was published in a book entitled The Christy Girl in 1906, with each plate accompanied by brief poems composed by the artist; this was to be the one of several such published books.) As the writer S. J. Woolf recalled in 1948, ‘The way Christy drew the Christy Girl she was popular with the males because of her charm, while the young women liked her because she embodied their dreams of emancipation.’1 By 1910 Christy was earning some $50,000 a year, with numerous magazines commissioning illustrations from him, and was among the most recognized artists of the time. He also provided illustrations for books and short stories by such authors as Jack London, H. G. Wells and Thomas Nelson Page. During the First World War Christy designed a number of popular recruiting posters for the Navy and the Marine Corps, many of which were also reproduced as postcards. Around 1920 Christy abandoned commercial illustration in favour of a second career as a portraitist, producing portraits of such prominent social and political figures as the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, Presidents Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover, the aviator Amelia Earhart, General Douglas MacArthur and Charles Evan Hughes, U. S. Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, as well as the Prince of Wales. In 1940 he began to paint large mural pictures of historical subjects for public buildings, of which undoubtedly the most prominent is the monumental canvas of The Signing of the Constitution of the Unites States, completed in 1940 and measuring twenty by thirty feet, which hangs on the grand staircase of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. This large drawing, executed in 1902, is a splendid example of the depictions of young American women with which Christy established his reputation. This ideal of feminine youth and beauty, which came to be known simply as the ‘Christy Girl’ – and for which hats, shoes and dresses were also named – was a type described by the artist as ‘high bred, aristocratic and dainty though not always silken-skirted; a woman with tremendous self-respect.’2
37 ADOLF HIRÉMY-HIRSCHL Temesvár 1860-1933 Rome A Waterfall in Switzerland Watercolour and gouache. Laid down. Signed a hiremy in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed Svizzera in a modern hand in pencil on the verso. Stamped with both a Carlo Virgilio gallery stamp and with an Adolf Hiremy studio stamp (not in Lugt), numbered 167; both in the lower right margin of the backing card. 573 x 412 mm. (22 1/ 2 x 16 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: The artist’s studio, Rome, and by descent to his daughter Maud; Thence by descent to a private collection1; Galleria Carlo Virgilio, Rome, in 1981; Matthiesen Fine Art, London, in 1987. EXHIBITED: Rome, Galleria Carlo Virgilio, Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl; Disegni, acquerelli e pastelli, 1981, no.167; London, Matthiesen Fine Art Ltd., Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, 1987, no.74, illustrated in colour pl.VI. Born in Hungary, Adolf Hirschl was raised in Vienna, where in 1878 he obtained a scholarship to the Akademie der bildenden Künste. In 1882 he won a prize that allowed him to visit Rome, and his two years there were to have a profound effect on his work, notably in his preference for scenes from ancient Roman history. On his return to Vienna Hirschl soon established a successful career as a painter, receiving numerous commissions and producing grand, complex compositions of historical or allegorical subjects that were widely praised by critics and connoisseurs. Hirschl’s paintings were exhibited throughout Europe, and the artist reached the peak of his Viennese career when he won the Imperial Prize in 1891. Despite his status as one of the leading artists in fin-de-siècle Vienna, as the turn of the century approached his work began to be overshadowed by the more progressive and radical paintings of Gustav Klimt and the artists of the Vienna Secession movement. In 1898 Hirschl married an Austrian-born Englishwoman who divorced her husband to marry him; the wedding scandalized polite society in Vienna and led the artist to sever his links with the city. Adopting the Hungarian name Hirémy, he soon moved to Rome, where he spent the last thirty-five years of his career. An eminent member of the expatriate artistic community in Rome, Hirémy-Hirschl was honoured with a retrospective exhibition of seventy of his works in 1904, and was admitted into the Accademia di San Luca in 1911. He remained largely immune to the latest avant-garde trends in art, both in Vienna and in Rome, preferring to work in his own distinctive manner, and devoting much of his time to smaller paintings, seascapes and nature studies. He also produced book illustrations and other graphic work, as well as several etchings and a handful of sculptures. An accomplished draughtsman, Hirémy-Hirschl produced a large number of figure and drapery studies in charcoal or chalk, intended as preparatory studies for his paintings, as well as autonomous landscape studies in pastel, watercolour and gouache. As one scholar has noted, ‘In his nature studies, Hirémy Hirschl found for the first time a way to achieve a subtle but at the same time a more natural colour scheme, and from 1900 onwards critics regularly praised the beauty of his small landscapes and portraits as compared to his historical paintings, about which opinion tended to be rather negative…his best productions were on paper in watercolours, gouache, and pastel.’2 This large watercolour presumably depicts a waterfall in the mountain valley of Engadin in the Swiss canton of Graubünden, where the family of the artist used to visit for holidays. A comparable watercolour and gouache drawing of a mountain waterfall by Hirémy-Hirschl was included in an exhibition of the artist’s work in Chicago in 19843.
38 FRANZ VON STUCK Tettenweis 1863-1928 Munich Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter Mary Black and white chalk, pastel, watercolour and touches of gouache on cardboard. Signed FRANZ / VON / STUCK in pencil at the right centre. 610 x 465 mm. (24 x 18 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Private collection, Thuringia, Germany. Born in lower Bavaria, Franz Stuck received his artistic training in Munich. Active as a painter, sculptor, printmaker and architect, he was one of the founders of the Munich Secession in 1892, and soon became among the most successful and renowned artists in the city. His large and boldly coloured mythological paintings, characterized by Symbolist overtones, won medals and prizes at exhibitions in Germany, Europe and America over the next three decades. He was also much in demand as a portrait painter. In 1895 Stuck was appointed a Professor at the Akademie in Munich, where his pupils were to include Paul Klee, Josef Albers, and Wassily Kandinsky. In 1897 he began work on the construction and elaborate decoration of a new home and studio in Munich, known as the Villa Stuck, for which he also designed the furniture. Completed in 1898, the house is today a museum devoted to the artist’s life and work. In 1905 he was awarded a Knight’s Cross of the Order of the Bavarian Throne, which raised him to the nobility, and from this point onwards he signed his works as ‘Franz von Stuck’. At the International Exhibition in Venice in 1909 Stuck was given a room to himself, and in the later years of his career began to focus on sculpture over paintings. Although his reputation in Munich remained undimmed throughout his career, his work and reputation had fallen into a gradual neglect elsewhere in Germany and the rest of Europe by the second decade of the century. Mary Stuck (1896-1961) was Franz von Stuck’s only child, born from an affair with a woman named Anna Maria Brandmaier. The following year the artist married the American Mary Lindpainter, and in 1904 the couple formally adopted the young girl, who had been christened Maria Franziska but was simply known as Mary. Mary Stuck posed frequently for her father in the 1910’s and 1920’s, often dressed in costume as a Greek or Spanish girl, bullfighter or gypsy, in works which were much prized by collectors1. Working from photographs which the artist took of her, the resulting portraits of Mary were, as one modern scholar has noted, ‘assured of a certain degree of likeness, but they underwent the process of stylization that was habitual in Stuck’s work from photographs to paintings…The regular and still unindividualized features of the young girl offered an excellent basis for aesthetic treatment…The numerous paintings of Mary, done as portraits, masquerade studies or impersonal symbolic works, sold extremely well.’2 This striking portrait can be dated to around 1910, when the sitter was around fourteen years old. Mary is shown here wearing her new motoring bonnet, in which she also appears in several of the artist’s photographs of her3, including one on which the present composition is based. As in several other paintings and drawings of Mary wearing the same bonnet, the deep blue hat here becomes a decorative motif in its own right. As Thomas Raff has written of another painting of Mary wearing the same bonnet, ‘[Stuck] has made from the hat and the ribbon at the neck a sort of luminous blue halo, but that of a seductive saint, a child-woman à la Wedekind’s Lulu.’4 A more finished painted variant of this composition is in a private collection5, while a smaller, circular version is the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich6. A small octagonal painted portrait of Mary wearing the same bonnet, in which she is seen full face, is in a private collection7. A large pastel study for that painting, also in a private collection, may be stylistically compared to the present sheet8.
39 EDMUND DULAC Toulouse 1882-1953 London Venise Watercolour. Signed Edmund / Dulac in watercolour at the lower left. 354 x 272 mm. (13 7/ 8 x 10 3/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: The Leicester Galleries, London, in 1912; The Fine Art Society, London, in 1954; Private collection, Switzerland. LITERATURE: ‘Venise, quatre aquarelles d’Edmund Dulac pour la poésie d’Alfred de Musset’, L’Illustration, Christmas 1912, unpaginated (p.453); Colin White, Edmund Dulac, London, 1976, p.56; Ann Conolly Hughey, Edmund Dulac – His Book Illustrations: A Bibliography, Potomac, 1995, unpaginated, under no.30. EXHIBITED: London, The Leicester Galleries, An Exhibition of Drawings Entitled “Mary, The Mother of Jesus,” by R. Anning Bell, R.W.S., and Water-Colours Illustrating the Poems of Edgar Allan Poe by Edmund Dulac, November-December 1912, no.43; London, The Fine Art Society, Paintings and Water-Colours by British Artists, March 1954, no.60 (as ‘The Assignment’). One of the leading book illustrators of the first half of the 20th century, the Frenchman Edmund Dulac arrived in London in 1904, and soon earned a commission to illustrate a new edition of the Brontë novels. These illustrations ‘mark the beginning of a long preoccupation with blues...Dulac showed an interest in the richness and refinement of blue that was to distinguish his work for the next few years.’1 Further commissions followed, including one which firmly established Dulac’s reputation, when in 1907 he provided fifty illustrations for an edition of the Stories from the Arabian Nights. As another scholar has pointed out, in drawings of this period, ‘Dulac makes extensive and highly evocative use of a Whistlerian greeny-blue tone. Its effect is to give the illustrations a dawn, dusk, or night-time setting, thus adding to their mystery and, in the case of dawn and dusk images, creating a feeling of time passing and of a dream being ended by the coming of day or of nocturnal oblivion.’2 The present sheet is the first of a series of four drawings used to illustrate the poem Venise by Alfred de Musset3, published in the special Christmas issue of the French magazine L’Illustration in December 1912. (The artist had been providing illustrations, commissioned by the magazine’s publisher Henri Piazza, for the Spring and Christmas issues of L’Illustration since 19094.) Dulac’s full-page illustrations for Venise were deemed to be the ideal accompaniment to de Musset’s poem, as noted on the cover of this particular issue; ‘The indolent and voluptuous Venice of Alfred de Musset, evoked in compositions of a mysterious and disturbing charm by the very personal art of Edmund Dulac, that is the surprise reserved for the admirers of this prestigious watercolourist as well as for lovers of the old city of the Doges by the illustration of the famous poem whose gently rocking rhythm sings to the ear with the same rhythm of oars beating the water along the sides of gondolas...Another face of this incomparable city is revealed here, – her nocturnal face, passionate and langourous, where love displays all its melancholic grace. She appears, veiled in this blue transparent shadow, that follows the fine days in fortunate lands in which not even the darkness is black.’5 The model for the woman in this drawing, ‘waiting in an archway at the water’s edge for her lover’6, is the artist’s wife Elsa Bignardi, who also appears in each of the other three drawings by Dulac used to illustrate the poem7. These four drawings for Venise were among the last of the artist’s works in this distinctive tonality, and display ‘Dulac’s skill in depicting moonlight...the colours are still crepuscular but far warmer...warm purples rather than the blues of the Stories from the Arabian Nights. They were Dulac’s farewell to his ‘Blue Period.’8
40 JULIO GONZÁLEZ Barcelona 1876-1942 Arcueil Women and Child with a Dog (Maternité au chien) Watercolour, pencil and gouache on buff paper. Signed juli in pencil at the right centre. Inscribed (by Roberta González) Julio Gonzalez / Maternité au Chien in blue ink on the backing board. 263 x 167 mm. (10 3/ 8 x 6 5/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: The artist’s daughter, Roberta González, L’Hay–les-Roses; By descent to Carmen Martinez and Viviane Grimminger, Paris; Private collection, until 2011. LITERATURE: Luigi Mallé, Julio Gonzalez, exhibition catalogue, Turin, 1967, illustrated p.47, pl.2; Josette Gibert, Julio González dessins: les maternités, Paris, 1975, illustrated p.27 (where dated c.1904-1907); Tomàs Llorens Serra, Julio González: Catálogo general razonado de las pinturas, esculturas y dibujos, Vol.I [1900-1918], Valencia, 2007, p.176, no.157 (where dated c.1906). EXHIBITED: Turin, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Julio Gonzalez, 1967, no.1; Pully, Maison Pulliérane and Nice, Palais de la Méditerranée, Dessins de sculpteurs française de Rodin à nos jours, 1968-1969, no.69; Madrid, Galería Elvira González, Julio González – Juan González, 2004, no.13. Julio González is regarded, alongside Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso, as one of the most innovative and original sculptors of the 20th century. Despite his professional training as a metalworker, before 1928 González worked mainly as a painter. He also drew throughout his career, and his early drawings – such as the present sheet, which may be dated to around 1906 – display the artist’s origins in the turn of the century style of the School of Barcelona, despite the fact that he had been living in Paris since 1900. The influence of French painting of the same period is also readily evident. As Tomàs Llorens has noted of the early years of the 20th century, when Picasso and González worked closely together in Paris, ‘Gauguin and the style of a group of his followers, Synthetism, left a visible mark on the work which Picasso and González did during that period, especially in the case of Picasso, who was going through what he later called his “Blue Period”. The works by González that we can date to those years – numerous drawings devoted to subjects such as mother and child, landscape and daily life, and a few oil paintings – sometimes show a clear resemblance to Picasso’s “Blue” style, though they are graver in style and more reminiscent of Puvis de Chavannes than of the painter from Málaga.’1 The present sheet may be associated with a series of watercolour drawings of mothers and children, usually titled Maternité, which González produced between around 1904 and 1914, although the earliest dated examples were drawn in 1906. Often depicted in poor urban or rural landscapes, these figures are imbued with a distinct melancholy, and are, as has been noted, somewhat reminiscent of the figures in the Blue Period paintings of Picasso. As Llorens has described these drawings: ‘Although other figures occasionally appear, the dominant figure is that of a mother with a child in her arms, standing out as a static, weightless form against a landscape of houses on the outskirts of a town, or sometimes against a flat background.’2 In his catalogue raisonné of the artist’s early drawings, Tomàs Llorens has grouped the present sheet with one painting and sixteen other drawings by González, several of which are dated 19063. As he writes of this group, ‘The subjects now are varied scenes with mothers and children, treated with a more descriptive, anecdotal view and in a less formalized naturalistic style than the group of early 1906.’4 González returned to the theme of the standing mother and child around 1925, working in his more schematic manner of drawing of this period, and he continued to treat the theme in his drawings until his death.
41 HIPPOLYTE PETITJEAN Mâcon 1854-1929 Paris The Wave Watercolour on buff paper. 323 x 250 mm. (12 3/4 x 9 7/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, with the atelier stamp (Lugt 2022c) at the lower right; Private collection, Paris; Private collection, since 1990. Four years after his Salon debut in 1880, Hippolyte Petitjean met Georges Seurat, who was to become a close friend. He soon joined the group of artists led by Seurat and Paul Signac and known collectively as the Neo-Impressionists. Petitjean exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants in Paris from 1891 onwards, and also took part in a number of gallery exhibitions devoted to the Neo-Impressionist artists. He was to maintain an adherence to Neo-Impressionist principles throughout his career, even after the decline in the movement’s critical fortunes after Seurat’s death in 1891. Unlike many of his NeoImpressionist colleagues, he struggled financially for much of his life, and for many years lived in relative poverty, earning a modest salary as an art teacher. It was not until the sale of some of his paintings at a group exhibition of Neo-Impressionist artists at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1899 that he achieved a small measure of financial stability. In later years, however, Petitjean continued to find sales few and far between, with paintings, drawings and watercolours often sold to creditors in exchange for services, or to pay bills. Nevertheless, he continued to exhibit at the Indépendants, and in the 1909 exhibition a painting was bought by the State, while the following year a landscape was acquired by the museum in the artist’s native town of Mâcon. Although he lived to the age of seventy-five, Petitjean was never very prolific as a painter, and after 1917 his output slowed considerably. His oeuvre of around 350 paintings includes landscapes, urban scenes, mythological subjects and some portraits. In May 1929, shortly before his death, an exhibition of twentyeight of his works was mounted at a Parisian gallery, from which one painting was purchased by the State for the Musée du Luxembourg. The present sheet is a fine example of what are arguably Hippolyte Petitjean’s most distinctive and original works; his vibrant pointillist watercolours, which were often made as independent works of art, to be sold to French or foreign collectors. As one modern scholar has noted, ‘As with most of [Petitjean’s] works, his watercolors are not dated, nor are their locations identified. In executing them, he employed the divided color technique very freely, applying dabs of color in a loose network that allows the white of the paper to show through...in his pure landscapes the artist takes a more individual approach, subtly modulating the different areas of color to suggest gradual spatial recession or the light effects of a setting sun.’1 The range and variety of Petitjean’s pointillist watercolours were only rediscovered several years after his death, at a centenary exhibition of the artist’s work held at the Galerie de l’Institut in Paris in 1955. A comparable watercolour study of waves by Petitjean is in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey.2 A photo-certificate from Stéphane Kempa accompanies the present sheet, which will be included in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Petitjean’s work.
42 AUGUSTE HERBIN Quiévy 1882-1960 Paris Flower Pot (Pot de Fleurs Stylisées) Watercolour on buff paper. Signed herbin in pencil at the lower right. 308 x 209 mm. (12 1/ 8 x 8 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Private collection, Paris; Galerie Antoine Laurentin, Paris; Private collection, France, until 2011. Auguste Herbin studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lille between 1898 and 1901, when he moved to Paris. His earliest paintings were of landscapes and still life subjects, executed in a fairly typical PostImpressionist manner, several of which were exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants from 1906 onwards. In 1909, however, Herbin moved to a studio in the building known as the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, where he came into contact with the community of artists and writers living and working there, including Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris. Herbin’s paintings were exhibited with those of Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes at the Salon des Indépendants of 1910, and two years later he took part in the second exhibition of the Section d’Or group, alongside other artists involved in the development of Cubism, including Metzinger, Gleizes, Léger and Jacques Villon. Herbin produced his first abstract paintings in 1917. His work was promoted by the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, who exhibited the artist’s paintings and relief sculptures at his Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in 1918 and 1921. In 1931 Herbin was one of the founders of the Abstraction-Création group, alongside Georges Vantongerloo, Jean Hélion, František Kupka and Theo van Doesburg. Herbin’s continuing devotion to the principles of pure abstract art and colour theories meant that his work was influential on a younger generation of artists, as was the publication of his book L’art non-figuratif non-objectif, which appeared in 1949. The book outlined the artist’s theories concerning the relationship of colours, forms, musical notes and the alphabet. In the 1950’s Herbin established the Salon des Réalites Nouvelles, and in his later years designed a number of tapestries. This vivid watercolour has been dated by Geneviève Claisse to around 1910, when Herbin’s landscapes and still life subjects, which had previously shown the influence of the Impressionist and PostImpressionist painters, were developing into a form of analytic Cubism. Although pots and vases of flowers appear in many of Herbin’s still life compositions of this period, this drawing appears to be unrelated to any surviving painting by the artist. This drawing is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Geneviève Claisse, dated 27th January 2005.
43 PABLO PICASSO Malaga 1881-1973 Mougins Reclining Female Nude (Nu couché) Pencil on paper. Signed Picasso in brown ink at the lower left. Inscribed 473 PP in black chalk on the verso. 195 x 270 mm. (7 5/ 8 x 10 5/ 8 in.) Watermark: Anchor. PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist by Hugo Perls (Galerie Käte Perls), Berlin and Paris; Lee A. Ault, New York; Perls Galleries, New York, in 1979; Acquired from them on 17 January 1980 by a private collector; Private collection, Los Angeles; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 8 November 2001, lot 255; Private collection, Dallas, Texas, until 2012. EXHIBITED: Possibly New York, Valentine Gallery, The Lee Ault Collection: Modern Paintings, 1944, no.38 (‘“Playful Nude” 1904, Drawing 7 1/2 x 11’); New York, Perls Galleries, Master Drawings, 1979, no.36. Unknown to Christian Zervos when he published his monumental catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s work, this drawing is a previously unrecognized study for a sleeping peasant woman in Sleeping Peasants (La sieste), a highly finished drawing in tempera and watercolour (fig.1), executed in August 1919 and today in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York1. As one scholar has described the work, ‘Sheltered from view by a haystack from the open field and farm behind them, the napping couple is blissfully unaware of the viewer’s – or imaginary passerby’s – gaze. The close cropping of the massive figures confined to a long narrow rectangular format and their undulating bodies make the sleepers seem to burst out of the frame...While the subject is rustic, the forms are monumental.’2 Of the sleeping figures in the gouache drawing, William Rubin further points out that ‘their sculptural modeling…endow these figures with epic
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weight and solidity. This bulk makes them seem very much of the earth they work, typing them closely to the cycle of nature, to which they are also bound by the sunlight that permeates the scene. The heat of the sun and the exaggeration of the figures’ mass also intensify the sense of exhaustion in their sleep. It is as if the feeling of great weight in their tired bodies has found its counterpart in their shapes. We imagine their prior lovemaking – implied by the disposition of their bodies – to have been primal in nature, more procreative than erotic.’3 The present sheet underscores Picasso’s close study of the paintings and drawings of one of the greatest French draughtsmen of the previous century, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), whose work was to be a lifelong touchstone for the Spaniard. As Susan Grace Galassi has noted of the equivalent figure in the finished gouache, ‘The posture of the female peasant brings to mind the foreground figure with arms above her head in Ingres’s Turkish Bath, as well as sources in antiquity, particularly the prototypical figure of the maenad with her head thrown back – a symbol of unbridled sexuality – which would reappear in many works in his Surrealist period in the 1920s and 1930s.’4 Similarly, Rubin has noted of the final composition that ‘Sleeping Peasants reflects an aspect of Picasso’s study of Ingres quite different from that which we see in many of his classical line drawings. Here, in the foreshortened head and upper torso of the woman’s figure there are mannered effects reminiscent of the French painter’s late style…But the effect of Picasso’s drawing is more monumental, and in that respect this small gouache anticipates his more colossal “Roman” or “Pompeiian” figures of the early twenties.’5 Throughout his career, and particularly in his drawings, Picasso would look to Ingres as an exemplar, an inspiration and, at times, a rival, to be challenged and outdone. A handful of drawings by Picasso have been related to the Museum of Modern Art gouache. A closely related drawing of a nude woman in an identical pose, drawn in pen and ink and of identical dimensions to the present sheet, was formerly in the collection of Jacques Sarlie in New York and was sold at auction in 19606. Two pencil studies for the composition of La sieste are also known; one in the Arkansas Art Center Foundation in Little Rock, Arkansas7 and the other in a private collection8. A later watercolour variant of the composition of the finished gouache – dated January 14th, 1921 – was formerly in the Lewyt collection and was recently sold at auction in New York9. This little-known drawing was acquired from Picasso by the German art dealer Hugo Perls (1886-1977), who established the Käte Perls Gallerie, named for his wife, in Berlin in the early 1920’s. In 1931 he moved the gallery to Paris, where he continued to deal in the work of Impressionist and Modern masters, notably Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch and Vincent Van Gogh, as well as Picasso. In 1941 he settled in New York, where his son had established a gallery a few years earlier. By the early 1940’s the present sheet had entered the collection of the publisher and collector Lee Ault (19151996), who owned several works by Picasso. The present sheet is accompanied by a certificate from Maya Widmaier Picasso, dated 1 May 2000.
44 TSUGUHARU FOUJITA Tokyo 1886-1968 Zurich Poppies in a Yellow Jug Gouache, watercolour and brush and black ink on paper, backed. Signed T. Foujita and again in Japanese (as ‘Foujita done in Paris’) and dated 1917 in pale green ink at the lower left. 409 x 328 mm. (16 1/ 8 x 12 7/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Guy Loudmer], 26 November 1990, lot 8; Private collection, Paris. LITERATURE: Sylvie Buisson, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, Paris, 2001, Vol.II, p.152, no.17.72. A painter, draughtsman and printmaker, Tsuguharu Foujita studied at the School of Fine Arts in his native Tokyo. Disappointed by the conservative nature of the training he received there, he decided to move to Paris, where he arrived in 1913. Foujita soon made his mark in the artistic milieu of bohemian Paris, becoming friendly with such artists as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine and Juan Gris. From quite early in his career he achieved considerable financial rewards from the sale of his paintings. (Indeed, such was his success that he was able to install a bathtub with hot running water in his studio in Montparnasse; a great luxury that was used by many of the artist’s models in the area, most notably Man Ray’s lover Kiki, who also posed nude for Foujita.) Although he was associated with the artists of the School of Paris, and in 1920 became a permanent member of the Salon d’Automne, Foujita created his own individual style, characterized by a combination of Japanese, French and European influences. His favourite subjects included portraits, views of Paris, still-lives, nudes and cats, and he also designed a number of posters. In later years his fame spread beyond France, and in 1931 he undertook a hugely successful tour of Central and South America, while two years later he was welcomed back to Japan as something of a celebrity. He remained in Japan during the Second World War, working as an official propaganda and war artist for the Army and Navy Ministries, for which he was much criticized by his countrymen after the war. Foujita returned to settle for good in France in 1950, and became a French citizen in 1955. Following his conversion to Catholicism in 1959 (when he adopted the baptismal name Léonard, in honour of Leonardo da Vinci), he began producing paintings of religious subjects, culminating in the decoration of the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix in Reims with murals and stained glass, completed in 1966. Still life compositions of flowers account for a relatively small but choice part of Foujita’s oeuvre. A stylistically comparable drawing of a vase of roses, also dated 1917, appeared on the art market in London in 20031, while a watercolour and gouache study of flowers in a vase, similarly datable to 1917, is in a private collection2. Other gouache and watercolour drawings of floral still life subjects from the same year include a Vase of Flowers, sold in Paris in 19893, and a large study of Peonies, which appeared at auction in 20084.
45 ROGER DE LA FRESNAYE Le Mans 1885-1925 Grasse Portrait Arabesque Pencil on buff paper. Laid down. 249 x 197 mm. (9 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: André Level, Paris1; Galerie Percier, Paris; Acquired from them by a private collector in 1938; Edwin Livengood, Paris, in 1950; Thence by descent until 2013. EXHIBITED: Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Roger de la Fresnaye, July-October 1950, no.152; Paris, Musee d’Art Moderne, Le dessin de Toulouse-Lautrec aux cubistes, 1954, no.85. In 1910 Roger de La Fresnaye began exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne. Shortly thereafter he began to be associated with a group of artists later known as the Section d’Or, including Jacques Villon, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, František Kupka and Francis Picabia, among others. La Fresnaye exhibited four paintings at the first exhibition of the Section d’Or in 1911, and took part again in the second exhibition of the group the following year. In 1914 he had his first oneman exhibition – the only one in his lifetime – at the Galerie Levesque in Paris, where he showed fortyseven paintings, sixteen drawings and twelve watercolours. His paintings of still life compositions, landscapes and figural scenes were all executed in a highly toned manner derived from Cubist principles. La Fresnaye was honourably discharged from the army in 1918 after suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, from which his health never fully recovered. After the war, the artist lived in the Provençal town of Grasse, where, despite his frail condition, he continued to be productive. However, by 1922 his poor health meant that had largely stopped painting, although he continued to make drawings and watercolours, including several self-portraits, before his death at the age of forty. Included in the major retrospective exhibition of La Fresnaye’s work at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1950, the present sheet may be dated to the later years of artist’s career, and more precisely to the early 1920’s. As Germain Seligman has written of La Fresnaye’s work of this period, ‘There are few oils, none after 1922, but the drawings, watercolours, and gouaches are among the most beautiful he ever produced, infinite in their variety and often extremely moving. It was a time of constant experiment with new techniques, new media, and new subject-matter, and the works have few links with those of the pre-war years. There [is] a humanity and warmth in the late works…New also is the sensuous quality of the sinuous lines – an emotionalism which becomes more and more evident in the movingly beautiful late drawings.’2 A stylistically comparable drawing – a schematic portrait of the artist Marie Laurencin (fig.1), dated 1921 and drawn in ink – is in a private collection3. Also similar is a pencil drawing of the head of a man, again dated 1921, which was formerly in the collection of Helena Rubinstein4.
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46 EGON SCHIELE Tulln 1890-1918 Vienna Portrait of a Child (Anton Peschka, Jr.) Black crayon. Signed and dated EGON / SCHIELE / 1918 in pencil at the lower right. The upper left corner of the sheet previously torn and reattached. 381 x 283 mm. (15 x 11 1/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Estate of the artist; Private collection, Australia, since the late 1990’s. In a brief artistic career that lasted just twelve years before his death from influenza in October 1918, at the age of just twenty-eight, Egon Schiele produced a few hundred paintings and nearly three thousand drawings and watercolours. It was not until the last year or so of his life, however, that he began to achieve a modest amount of financial success. Following the death of Gustav Klimt in February 1918 and the critical success of his one-man exhibition at the Vienna Secession the following month, Schiele had become the leading avant-garde artist in Vienna in the final months of the First World War. It was at this time that his drawings began to display a distinct change in his approach to the depiction of the figure, with a new emphasis on line over colour. As Jane Kallir has written, ‘During the last years of his life, the pace of Schiele’s artistic development slowed markedly. The stylistic shifts that occurred between 1917 and the artist’s death in October 1918 are almost imperceptible, and they evidence none of the volatility that characterizes his work through mid 1915…Soft pencil gives way to black crayon, which yields heavier, more even lines that are less prone to fluctuations in density and strength. The artist’s contours now hew exclusively to the requirements of representational accuracy, with little latitude for expressive deviation…Overall, Schiele’s palette is more subdued and naturalistic than ever before. He was less concerned with color than with volume and shape, and increasingly he was driven to explore his subjects through drawing alone.’1 Drawn in the last months of Egon Schiele’s brief career, the present sheet is a portrait of the artist’s young nephew, Anton Peschka, Jr. (fig.1). The son of his younger sister Gertrude (Gerti) Schiele and Anton Peschka, a painter and close friend of the artist, the child, known as ‘Toni’, was born on December 27th, 1914. Within a few months Schiele had begun to make drawings of the baby2, and used him as a model for a painting of A Mother with Two Children, painted between 1915 and 19173. Schiele continued to make drawings of his nephew in 19164, continuing the series of gouache and watercolour studies begun the previous year. As the boy grew older, Schiele began to develop ideas for a painted portrait of him, and to this end produced several charming drawings of the child in 19175. The present sheet is one of only three portrait drawings of Schiele’s young nephew to date from 1918. Of the other two drawings, likewise drawn in black crayon alone, one shows him seated on his mother’s lap (fig.2)6, while in the other, the child is shown seated and facing forward7, in much the same way as in this drawing. This is indeed how he appears in Schiele’s painting of 1918, today in a private collection (fig.3), which was left unfinished at the artist’s death in October of that year8. In the painting, as in the present sheet and other drawings of the young Toni Peschka at the age of two or three, the child is depicted wearing a dress, which was not uncommon for small boys at that time.
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It has been noted of Schiele that ‘his formal portraits of children are as insightful as his adult portraits’9, and this is certainly true of the portrait of young Anton (‘Toni’) Peschka, Jr. As Alessandra Comini has described the 1918 painting, ‘Schiele’s four-year-old nephew, Toni, sits quietly on the edge of a large chair, holding a violet and looking out at the beholder with solemn eyes…his head is on a level with the chair arms and the chubby little legs hang down without reaching the floor. The child’s small size in relation to his surroundings is further emphasized by the multi-colored horizontal stripes of the chair’s upholstery which climb out of the picture to an unspecified height.’10 Of the three 1918 drawings of Toni Peschka, the present sheet is closest to the unfinished painting in the pose of the boy, and also gives an indication of the stripes of the chair on which he sits in the painting. This charming portrait drawing is a fine example of Schiele’s draughtsmanship in 1918, when ‘the artist evinces a far greater economy of line, fixing his subjects in single, perfect strokes and avoiding the complicated retracing and doubling of earlier times.’11 In this intimate portrayal of his young nephew – who, like his father and uncle, was to become a painter and a student at the Akademie in Vienna – Schiele was able to capture something of the essence of childhood. It has been noted that, ‘If Schiele felt most at ease with himself as a model, he gradually discovered that children could be nearly as congenial. Since he was (in his own words) an ‘eternal child’…it is understandable that he would relate more readily to children than to adults...Schiele’s skill in working with young models derived from his ability to put them totally at ease, to allow them simply to be who they were.’12 In later years, Anton Peschka, Jr. would recall sitting for his uncle at Schiele’s studio on Hietzinger Hauptstrasse in Vienna, for which sessions his mother and the artist would always make precise appointments. He also remembered that whenever he became restless the artist would placate him with candy, and would sometimes also show him a toy steam train. Of the drawings produced in the last year of the artist’s life, Kallir has written; ‘Always the speedy worker, Schiele had finally found the perfect line. In 1917 and 1918 he was usually able to capture his subjects with a single, virtually unbroken sweep of his crayon. In his works on paper, he became more and more focused on the qualities of drawing as such, and therefore relatively few of his 1918 studies are colored. Instead he was increasingly interested in sculpting volume…Schiele had no need, as formerly, to redraw or embellish faulty contours…he was in complete control, and in these drawings Schiele achieved an unprecedented degree of accuracy.’13 The authenticity of this drawing, which is previously unrecorded, has been confirmed by Jane Kallir.
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3.
47 EMIL NOLDE Nolde 1867-1956 Seebüll Marsh Landscape with Farmhouses at Utenwarf Watercolour, brush and black ink on thin Japan paper, laid down on card. Signed Nolde. in black ink at the lower right. 346 x 473 mm. (13 5/ 8 x 18 5/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Marlborough Fine Art, New York; Albert Otten, New York and Teaneck, New Jersey; By descent to his widow, Mildred Otten, Teaneck, New Jersey; Galerie Cazeau-Béraudière, Paris, in 2005; Galerie Jacques de la Béraudière, Geneva. Born Emil Hansen, Emil Nolde took his name of his birthplace, on the border of Germany and Demmark, in 1902. He grew up and spent much of his life in the province of Schleswig-Holstein, and apart from some time spent in Berlin was never far from the sea. His first studio was a hut on the beach on the island of Alsen, where he spent summers beginning in 1903, and there he delighted in observing the sea at close hand. This obsession with the sea and its power was to remain with him throughout his career, and provided the inspiration for a large number of paintings and watercolours. He was briefly a member of the expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge) in 1906-1907 and the Berlin Secession between 1908 and 1910, but eventually left both groups. He also exhibited with the Der Blauer Reiter (The Blue Rider) group in 1912, although he was never a member. Despite being a successful and highly regarded artist, Nolde found himself, at the age of seventy, crushed by the Nazi party’s official condemnation of modernism in art. In 1937 he was declared a ‘degenerate’ artist by the Nazis, and nearly fifty of his works were included in the Entartete Kunst (‘Degenerate Art’) exhibition held that year. More than a thousand of his works – more than those of any other artist – were confiscated from museums and private collections, as well as from his studio, and many of his paintings and drawings were destroyed. In 1941 he was expelled from the Reichskunstkammer (the Reich Chamber of Art), and was forbidden to paint, even in private; he was also prohibited from exhibiting or selling his work. As a result he turned towards working on paper, producing a large number of small watercolours and gouaches that he referred to as his ‘unpainted pictures’. Nolde produced watercolours almost continuously from around 1908 onwards, and the medium would come to dominate his output over oil paintings. As one scholar has noted, ‘Numerically...it is the watercolours which occupy pride of place in his oeuvre: indeed, he can claim to have been one of the most prolific watercolourists of the twentieth century – one of the relatively few modern artists to devote such close attention to what seemed to many an old-fashioned medium. In his hands, watercolour revealed new possibilities...It was the medium to which he would confide his most intimate thoughts...It was also the one in which he felt most thoroughly at home.’1 Nolde’s watercolours are characterized by a technical proficiency and a preference for the finest materials. He would occasionally use tempera colours rather than watercolour, to achieve greater permanence, diluting the tempera with water. He painted ‘wet on wet’, using very wet brushes and large amounts of diluted colour to soak the highly absorbent, translucent Japanese paper he preferred – at times, he would even apply colour to the back of a sheet and let it bleed through to the recto – so that the colour took on a particular intensity, as if it were in the paper itself rather than lying on the surface. Among Nolde’s favourite subjects were the low-lying marsh landscapes of the border province of North Schleswig, where he was born and raised on a farm. In 1912 he had purchased a farmhouse, named ‘Utenwarf’, in just such a marshy landscape, near the town of Tondern (now a part of Denmark) and
not far from Nolde, the village of his birth. In 1926 he moved a few kilometres south and west to Seebüll, where he designed a house and studio in which he lived and worked for the rest of his life. As has been noted of Nolde, ‘he felt a profound, almost spiritual attachment to his native land, by which he meant that flat landscape of dykes and marshes penned in between the North Sea and the hilly coastal area to the East, giving on to the Baltic – a region which is his own day marked the disputed border between Germany and Denmark. It was this locality…which provided him with not merely spiritual nourishment but also by far the most significant repertoire of motifs and subjects: the fields and pastures that surrounded the isolated farmhouses of his nearest neighbours, clouds and sea, flowers and gardens...Nolde invests his landscapes with an undisguised symbolic significance, exploiting marshes and fields, clouds and sky as metaphors for the awesome power of nature and the eternal confrontation between man in his natural state and the elements.’2 Nolde’s views of these wide expanses of marshland, with isolated farmhouses dwarfed by high skies above a low horizon, account for much of his most appealing work. The present sheet displays the luminous intensity of colour that is a particular characteristic of Nolde’s finest watercolours. These often come close to abstraction in the repeated soaking of the paper with pigment that was a hallmark of the artist’s technique. Nolde’s second wife Jolanthe has left a fascinating account of his watercolour technique, noting that the artist applied colours ‘five, six or more times, producing the most remarkable effect of depth...patiently the brush caresses the surface, the wet paper cockles, the colour gradually accumulating in the little hollows...Because he painted with such diluted colours, the contours would stray across the surface of the paper for up to an hour before they were finally dry...He would paint, the paper would soak up the colour, the contours would spread as if the material had become liberated.’3 Similar watercolours of marsh landscapes by Nolde are in the collections of the Stiftung Nolde in Seebüll and several museums in Germany, as well as the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and elsewhere. A number of comparable watercolours of marsh landscapes with farmhouses by Nolde, of similar size and date, have also appeared on the art market in recent years. Three such examples, all from a private collection in Germany, were sold at auction in London in 20134, while another comparable watercolour, from another private German collection, was sold in Munich in 20125. This fine watercolour belonged to the German industrialist and collector Albert Otten (1886-1985). Born Albert Ottenheimer, he was active as a supporter of the arts in Cologne, and donated a number of works to the Wallraf Richartz Museum. Following Hitler’s rise to power, he left Germany in 1937 and settled in America in the early 1940’s, changing his surname to Otten. A part of Otten’s collection, including works by Hans Arp, Edgar Degas, André Derain, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Fernand Leger, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein, is today in the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine. Dr. Manfred Reuther, director of the Stiftung Nolde in Seebüll, has confirmed the authenticity of this watercolour, which he has dated to between 1920 and 1925. The present sheet is accompanied by a photo-certificate from Dr. Reuther, dated 6 December 2004.
48 FRANTIŠEK KUPKA Opocno 1871-1957 Puteaux Composition Watercolour, pencil and gouache on paper. Signed Kupka in pencil in the lower right margin. 217 x 200 mm. (8 1/ 2 x 7 7/ 8 in.) [image] 277 x 251 mm. (10 7/ 8 x 9 7/ 8 in.) [sheet] Trained in Prague and Vienna, František Kupka settled in Paris in 1896, and there established a successful career as an illustrator. Around 1911 he came to be associated with a group of artists known as the Section d’Or – including Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia and Albert Gleizes – who were attracted to Cubism but at the same time wished to move beyond the largely monochromatic or muted tones of much Cubist work, in favour of a more radical use of colour. As Czech artist living in Paris, Kupka remained somewhat apart from the art world of both his native country and his adopted city. He also tended to avoid any close association with many of the prominent artists of the day, preferring instead to work in relative isolation in his studio in Puteaux, outside Paris. He suffered periodically from depression, which limited his output considerably. A significant group of paintings and works on paper by Kupka is today in the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne in Paris. Kupka may be regarded as one of the true pioneers of abstraction. At the Salon d’Automne of 1912, he exhibited two of the first purely abstract paintings to be seen in Paris. Entitled Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colours and Amorpha: Warm Chromatic, they were composed of circular shapes of prismatic colours, leading the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who noted musical qualities in the work, to label the style Orphic Cubism. A few months later, he exhibited a further abstract composition, dominated not by curved but by vertical elements, at the Salon des Indépendants. As the American scholar and curator Alfred Barr noted, in the catalogue of a seminal 1936 exhibition of Cubism and Abstract Art in New York, by the end of 1912 Kupka ‘had painted what are probably the first curvilinear and the first rectilinear pure abstractions in modern art. In comparison with these conclusive and carefully considered achievements the slightly earlier abstractions of Kandinsky and Larionov seem tentative.’1 Working more often in pastel and gouache than in oil, Kupka created works in series based on a particular visual or chromatic theme. As one modern scholar has commented, ‘Kupka often worked simultaneously in thematic series, including vertical planes, verticals and diagonals, circular and curvilinear compositions, and cosmological abstractions which sometimes merged into each other even within the same painting.’2 He identified an underlying cosmic order that was composed of a ‘kaleidoscope of changing light, colour forms, and space’, and his ideas about cosmic rotation are, in particular, a significant part of his art. This vivid watercolour may be loosely associated with an important series of pastels, gouaches and watercolours generally entitled Autour d’un point (or Around a Point), which Kupka produced at various times between 1911 and 1930, but with particular emphasis in the 1920’s. The artist’s study of the theme of universal gravitation is vividly expressed in these works on paper, with the spiralling motion of the forms further reflecting his interest in the dynamic forces and rhythms of movement in space. The only painting in the Autour d’un point series is a very large canvas, painted between 1925 and 1930 and reworked around 1934, in the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris3. The present sheet is accompanied by a photo-certificate from Pierre Brullé, who dates the drawing to c.1925.
49 HEINRICH CAMPENDONK Krefeld 1889-1957 Amsterdam The Horse in the Port (Das Pferd am Hafen) Watercolour and pencil on paper. 481 x 604 mm. (19 x 23 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Private collection, in 1972; Galerie Wolfgang Ketterer, Munich, in 1976; Anonymous sale, Amsterdam, Christie’s, 22 May 1991, lot 543; Kunsthandel Loek Brons, Amsterdam in 1996; Private collection, Holland, until 2012. LITERATURE: Andrea Firmenich, Heinrich Campendonk 1889-1957: Leben und expressionistisches Werk, Recklinghausen, 1989, unpaginated, no.975. EXHIBITED: Düsseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle, Heinrich Campendonk: Gemälde, Aquarelle, Hinterglasilder, Grafik, 1972-1973, no.128; Bonn, Städtisches Kunstmuseum, Heinrich Campendonk: Gemälde, Aquarelle, Hinterglasilder, Grafik, 1973, no.128; Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Heinrich Campendonk, 1973, no.106; Munich, Galerie Wolfgang Ketterer, Heinrich Campendonk – Edith van Leckwyck, 1976, no.20. A painter, stained glass artist and printmaker, Heinrich Campendonk was invited by Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky to become a member of the Munich artist’s group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1911. Later that year he took part in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition, and his paintings were illustrated in the Blaue Reiter almanac. Campendonk was an admirer of primitive art and folklore, and animals often figure in his work. His paintings of animals in nature, often mystical in tone, were influenced by the example of Marc, although unlike him Campendonk often included figures in his compositions. After the First World War and the deaths of Marc and August Macke, Campendonk’s style changed. He destroyed much of his earlier work, and began to paint in a manner indebted to the dreamlike imagery of Marc Chagall, whom he had met in 1914. In the early 1920’s he took up the practice of stained glass design, and in 1925 had his first one-man show in New York. He received numerous commissions for largescale stained glass decorations, and this public form of art was to occupy him for much of his later career. Appointed a professor at the Akademie in Düsseldorf in 1926, Campendonk was one of many modernist painters labeled ‘degenerate artists’ by the Nazi regime, and he was forced to resign his teaching post in 1933. He chose to leave Germany that year and emigrated first to Belgium before settling in 1935 in Amsterdam, where he was appointed a professor at the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten. Campendonk’s work as a stained glass artist continued to earn him considerable acclaim – winning a Grand Prix at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1937 – and it was not until after the Second World War that he resumed painting. He eventually became a naturalized Dutch citizen. Much of Campendonk’s work in the first half of the 1930’s was devoted to drawings and watercolours, for which he was much admired, as well as designs for stained glass. In a review of the 12th International Watercolor Exhibition, held in Chicago in 1932, at which one of his watercolours won a prize, one writer noted of the artist that he ‘goes back to peasant art and legend and to the tradition of early stained glass. He is master of pattern, overlapping and fitting in his flat forms to achieve a unique design. In this way his use of different textures and combinations of low color, lit by an occasional bright flash, and held together by wide lines of black, show a highly original application of peasant motifs.’1 This large and vibrant watercolour can be dated to 1933, the year that Campendonk left Germany for good. A related subject is found in another large watercolor of the same date, Figures in the Port (Menschen am Hafen), which was exhibited alongside the present sheet in Germany in 1976, and is today in a private collection2.
50 JEAN DUPAS Bordeaux 1882-1964 Paris Study for The Chariot of Poseidon Mural for the SS Normandie Pen and black and grey ink, brown wash, charcoal and stumping. Squared for transfer in black ink. Signed and dated Jean Dupas / 1935 in black ink at the lower right. The left and lower right edges of the sheet show losses from fire damage. 422 x 725 mm. (16 5/ 8 x 28 1/ 2 in.) at greatest dimensions. PROVENANCE: Marguerite Grain, Paris1; Her estate sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Christian Grandin], 26 February 1987, lot 5 bis; Steven A. Greenberg, New York. LITERATURE: To be included in the forthcoming Dupas catalogue raisonné in preparation by Romain Lefebvre. One of the leading artists of the Art Deco period, Jean Théodore Dupas won the Prix de Rome in 1910 and studied at the Académie de France in Rome, from where he sent several paintings to the Paris Salons. His work came to public prominence on the occasion of the seminal Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1925, when he was chosen by the furniture designer Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann to provide paintings for the latter’s Maison d’un collectionneur, alongside furniture and objects by many of the leading Art Deco craftsmen of the day. In the late 1920’s and 1930’s Dupas won a number of important and prestigious commissions. Writing in 1927, his fellow artist George Barbier could already note that ‘Few artists have at such an early age attained such a degree of success, or gathered around them such swarms of imitators and disciples.’2 Dupas reached the height of his fame in the 1930’s, and in 1934 he received his most important commission to date; a series of large glass murals to decorate the Grand Salon of the new French ocean liner, the Normandie. He also provided murals for the Salon de l’Argenterie in the Royal Palace in Bucharest, although the work was only partly completed, and participated in the extensive programme of decoration for the Bourse du Travail in Bordeaux in 1936 and the French Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. In 1940 Dupas was named curator of the Musée Marmottan in Paris, and the following year was admitted to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He ended his career as the Director of the Musée Marmottan. This large drawing is a preparatory compositional study for The Chariot of Poseidon3, part of Dupas’s most famous work; the four hundred square metres of glass mural decoration installed in the Grand Salon of the French steamship Normandie. The most beautiful and luxurious ocean liner of its day, the Normandie was launched in 1932 and made its maiden transatlantic voyage in May 1935. Intended as an exemplar of French engineering and design, the ship’s lavish interiors served as showcase of French Art Deco, incorporating specially commissioned work by such leading designers and craftsmen as Ruhlmann, Jean Dunand, René Lalique and Jean-Michel Franck, as well as Dupas. Completed in 1935, the panels for the Grand Salon were in executed on giant glass panels in the technique of verre églomisé, and were the result of a collaboration between Dupas and the glassmaker Jacques-Charles Champigneulle (1882-1964). The four murals depicted The Chariot of Poseidon, The Sea Nymph Thetis, The Birth of Venus and The Rape of Europa, and were made of painted and engraved glass panels, with the designs etched and painted onto the reverse. Each composition was comprised of a mosaic of dozens of glass panels, held together with bronze brackets at each corner. As Bruno Foucart has described them, ‘Dupas’s glass reliefs, aureated, silvered, and painted on the reverse side by the glazier Champigneulle, using “gold, silver, platinum, and palladium” colors, became the pièces des resistance of the Grand Lounge. There were four such reliefs, each measuring 21 feet high and 49 feet wide…These great golden panels have about them a joyousness, a humor, and a sophistication that now seems the very
embodiment of the 1930s, a between-the-wars world that, in the middle of the ocean, could appear like an interlude between pleasures. Dupas himself stated that the panels had been conceived “with the desire to create an abundant, splendid effect.”’4 In December 1941, following the entry of America into the Second World War, the Normandie was requisitioned by the US government, to be converted into a troop ship. In February 1942 a fire broke out while the ship was being refitted at Pier 88 in Manhattan, and the Normandie was severely damaged and eventually capsized. However, the ship had already been stripped of much of her decorations, with Dupas’s glass panels removed from the Grand Salon and placed in storage. The mural of The Chariot of Poseidon (fig.1) is today preserved in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York5, which also houses a smaller preparatory drawing for the composition6. Jean Dupas’s Normandie panels have long been recognized as his finest work. As one scholar has written, ‘“The larger my work, the happier I am’, writes Dupas who, with this ensemble, realizes his most accomplished masterpiece. The brilliance of glass, sumptuously enhanced with panels of gold, silver and palladium, exalts the supreme rhythm that runs through these panels, a composition both tumultuous and majestically organized against a backdrop of tangled sails and large vessels. Sea horses, tritons and dolphins, under the control of sculpted deities, prance on a sea of shells; there reigns a sort of Golden Age jubilation which is like the dream, at last fully made real, of Dupas.’7 This large sheet shows traces of the damage it received in a fire in Dupas’s studio that destroyed much of his work. A glimpse of the artist’s crowded studio was provided by the Art Deco illustrator George Barbier: ‘The activity of our artist is amazing; in his atelier, frames accumulate constantly against the walls; canvases cover canvases; the tables are heaped with sketches; loose leaves are pinned to the walls – sketches of some graceful movement, of some Virgilian landscape. One is forced to climb over the cartons on which Dupas traces his life-sized figures, or the large scrolls representing the columns for some temple yet unbuilt. Enough cannot be said in praise of these charming studies, where the black pencil, here and there relieved by a touch of red chalk, takes on a caressing sweetness, a voluptuous grey.’8
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51 PAUL NASH London 1889-1946 Boscombe Maiden Castle, Dorset Watercolour, red chalk and pencil on paper. Signed Paul Nash in brown ink at the lower left. Indistinctly inscribed with colour notes in pencil at the lower right centre. Titled and dated Maiden Castle / (Dorset) / traces for / painting in pencil on the verso. 289 x 403 mm. (11 3/ 8 x 15 7/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Arthur Tooth & Sons, London, in November 1943; Jeffrey Dell, by 1948; His sale, London, Sotheby’s, 3 April 1963, lot 129; Arthur Tooth & Sons, London, in 1963; Commander Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, 5th Bt., Rockingham, Northamptonshire and nr. Bridport, Dorset; By descent to his stepdaughter, Gemma Nesbitt, Bridport, Dorset. LITERATURE: Margot Eates, ed., Paul Nash: Paintings, Drawings and Illustrations, London, 1948, pp.53, 64 and 78, pl.70; Anthony Bertram, Paul Nash: The Portrait of an Artist, London, 1955, pp.238 and 323; Sir John Rothenstein, Paul Nash, Norwich, 1961, unpaginated, illustrated alongside pl.11; Margot Eates, Paul Nash: The Master of the Image 1889-1946, London, 1973, p.126; David Brown, Paul Nash 1889-1947, exhibition catalogue, Edinburgh, 1974, pp.18-19, no.20; London, Tate Gallery, Paul Nash: paintings and watercolours, 1975, pp.99-100, no.207; Andrew Causey, Paul Nash, Oxford, 1980, p.323, pl.390, p.462, no.1156; Pennie Denton, Seaside Surrealism: Paul Nash in Swanage, Swanage, 2002, p.72, pl.14. EXHIBITED: London, Tate Gallery, Paul Nash: A Memorial Exhibition, 1948, no.110; London, The Arts Council, Paul Nash’s Camera: An Exhibition of Photographs by the Artist, 1951, no.49; Cardiff, National Museum of Wales, British Art and the Modern Movement 1930-40, 1962, no.76; Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Paul Nash 1889-1947, 1974, no.20; London, Tate Gallery, Paul Nash: paintings and watercolours, 1975, no.207. Throughout his career, the landscape painter Paul Nash found considerable inspiration in the countryside of Britain, and in particular areas with an essence of ancient history. As the Nash scholar Andrew Causey has noted, ‘The natural world afforded Nash unique spiritual refreshment, and he drew from nature in almost all periods of his career...Landscape offered Nash the possibility of a more personal artistic expression, and subjected him to greater discipline since he had to translate specific visual information into his drawings.’1 This magnificent late watercolour of Maiden Castle in Dorset was drawn in the early 1940’s, at a time when Nash seems to have preferred watercolour to oil for his landscapes. As Causey writes, ‘[Nash’s] late landscape watercolours are a remarkable advance even on those of 1925, which mark the peak of his achievement in this area hitherto. From 1938 his pictures become increasingly relaxed, he worked more in terms of tonal gradation and intensity of colour which grew more vibrant as drawing became less important; some underdrawing in soft pencil or black chalk is usual to the end, but it was employed increasingly to briefly mark out the composition rather than to define forms.’2 Maiden Castle is an Iron Age hill fort – one of the largest and most complex hill forts in Europe – situated near the town of Dorchester in Dorset. Nash was greatly inspired by Maiden Castle, a place he adored and venerated. He photographed the site in 1935, when it was being excavated by Dr. Mortimer Wheeler, and wrote about it in his text for the Dorset Shell Guide, published in 1936: ‘Maiden Castle has been described as the largest and most perfect earthwork in the world. To say it is the finest in Dorset is, perhaps, enough, for in no part of any country, I believe – not even in Wiltshire, where Avebury stands – can be found so complete a sequence of hill architecture…The Maiden…is in the form of an irregular oval. Its measurements are 400 yards wide and 900 yards long. The outer circumference amounts to two miles,
enclosing an area of 130 acres. It is a phenomenon which must be seen to be believed if you consider that it was constructed throughout a series of occupations, the earliest of which can be ascribed to a period approaching 2000 B.C. Its presence to-day, after the immense passage of time, is miraculously undisturbed; the huge contours strike awe into even the most vulgar mind; the impervious nitwits who climbed on to the monoliths of Stonehenge to be photographed, slink out of the shadow of the Maiden uneasily.’3 This fine watercolour dates from Nash’s trip to Dorset with his friend Lance Sieveking in September 1943. Sieveking was a Regional Programme Director for the BBC, with Dorset one of the five counties for which he was responsible, and he asked Nash – who had written the Dorset Shell Guide several years earlier – to accompany him on a tour of the county. Together they visited Maiden Castle, Chalbury, Cerne Abbas, Dorchester and the Isle of Portland. In his autobiography, published in 1957, Sieveking recalled that they travelled ‘back and forth, across that beautiful county, in sunny days and warm clear nights, stopping ever and again for Paul to draw, to make notes, to take photographs, and to scan the distance through powerful field-glasses. He said that through field-glasses one sees a landscape that one can see in no other way.’4 Shortly after their return, Nash wrote to Sieveking that ‘Looking back over the great voyage to the hills and the heaths and the sea, it seems all a dream but most favourably a dream remembered – and so incredibly varied – I shall never quite get over it…I am pleased with my drawings and have hopes of making something from them.’5 A slightly smaller preparatory pencil study for this composition, formerly in the collection of the Nash Trust, appeared at auction in 19866. Nash had visited Maiden Castle several years earlier, in 1935, and two earlier watercolour views of the grass-covered hill fort are known; one in a private collection7 and the other in the Robert Hull Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont8. The present sheet may be claimed as one of Paul Nash’s finest late watercolours. As one scholar has written of the artist, ‘it was as a water-colourist that Nash must be acknowledged to have been supreme, watercolour, the most subtle of all media being entirely suited to the most poetic origins of his imagination.’9
Paul Nash at Maiden Castle
Reverse of the frame
52 RAOUL DUFY Le Havre 1877-1953 Forcalquier Still Life with Pears and Lemons Gouache and watercolour on buff paper. Signed, dated and dedicated a Marcelle Oury que je retrouve / à Perpignan ce 23 fév. 1946 Raoul Dufy in pencil at the lower left and centre. Further extensively inscribed with mounting and framing instructions in pencil on the verso. 329 x 502 mm. (13 x 19 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Given by the artist in February 1946 to Marcelle Oury, Paris; By descent to her son, Gérard Oury, Paris; By descent to his daughter, Danièle Thompson, Paris, until 2009; Gérard Oury collection sale, Paris, Artcurial, 20 April 2009, lot 1; Private collection. LITERATURE: Fanny Guillon-Laffaille, Raoul Dufy: Catalogue raisonné des aquarelles, gouaches et pastels, Paris, 1982, Vol.II, p.140, no.1446. According to the artist’s inscription at the bottom of the sheet, this still life was drawn in Perpignan on the 23rd of February 1946, and given by Dufy to Mme. Marcelle Oury (1894-1980). A journalist and sometime art critic, Marcelle Oury was a friend of the couturier Paul Poiret, through whom she met Dufy in 1911. Oury enjoyed friendships with many leading figures in the artistic and literary circles of Paris in the 1920’s and 1930’s, notably Tsuguharu Foujita, Jean Cocteau, André Derain, Kees Van Dongen and Jacques Villon. She spent the years of World War II in Vichy and Geneva, returning to Paris in October 1944. After the war, Dufy had settled in Perpignan in the French Pyrenees, where the climate was better for his health, and Marcelle Oury visited him there. As the artist wrote in a letter to Oury’s son in November 1946, ‘What a pleasure it is for me to receive your mother as my guest here. She brings a bit of Paris with her and all sorts of souvenirs that are welcome in my Roussillon retreat.’1 Marcelle Oury and Dufy were to remain close friends until the artist’s death in 1953, and in 1965 she published a book on the artist, entitled Lettre à mon peintre, Raoul Dufy. Oury acquired several works from Dufy as gifts, which decorated her apartment on the rue de Coucelles in Paris. (In later years, as her son recalled, ‘I know that four, five times a night, she would get up, contemplate her Dufys and, her eyes full of purple regattas, of fields of wheat, of racetracks where elegant people paraded...Mother would fall asleep again, her mind full of vivid images.’2) This watercolour appears in the background of a photograph of Marcelle Oury with the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, taken around 19763. After Marcelle Oury’s death in 1980, the present sheet passed to her son, the celebrated French actor, screenwriter and filmmaker Gérard Oury (1919-2006), who continued to add to the collection, eventually assembling a significant group of works by Raoul Dufy. Gérard Oury has left an interesting account of visits he made with his mother to Dufy’s studio, on the Impasse de Guelma in Paris: ‘Paintings leaning against the walls, stacked against each other, portfolios swollen like the stomach of a pregnant woman, stuffed with watercolours...Raoul Dufy ruthlessly tore and erased watercolours and paintings. Rarely satisfied, he steps back and judges his work: “Not bad!...” The ultimate compliment. And if someone enthuses: ‘But you only took ten minutes to do it!”; he would reply, “No, monsieur, fifty years!”’4 An earlier variant of this composition, with the addition of a coffee pot, appears in a watercolour dedicated by the artist to the French novelist and performer Colette5.
53 HENRI MATISSE Le Cateau-Cambrésis 1869-1954 Nice Flowers (Verve, 1948) Red and blue chalk on paper; drawn on the title page of an issue of Verve magazine. Signed, dated and dedicated à / Max Pellequer / Henri Matisse / Nice 28/1 49 in black ink at the upper left centre. Sold with Verve, Vol.VI, Nos.21-22. Quarto. Original plain boards in colour lithograph wrappers by Matisse. Wrappers faintly dust-soiled and slightly rubbed at the extremities but internally fresh and overall in excellent condition. Full page colour lithograph frontispiece by Matisse. 65 full page illustrations, of which 25 are in colour. Paris, 1948. 354 x 529 mm. (13 7/ 8 x 20 3/4 in.) [drawing] 357 x 268 mm. (14 x 10 1/ 2 in.) [magazine] PROVENANCE: Given by the artist in January 1949 to Max Pellequer, Paris; Private collection, France. The present sheet is drawn on the first blank verso and title page of an issue of Verve magazine, a quarterly artistic and literary review published between 1937 and 1960 in both English and French editions, and edited by the Greek-born writer, critic and publisher Stratis Eleftheriades, known as Tériade (1897-1983). The drawing is sold with a copy of the magazine, which also includes an original colour lithograph frontispiece and cover designed by Matisse. This particular issue of Verve (No.21/22) appeared in October 1948, and was devoted entirely to a series of reproductions of paintings and drawings by Matisse, executed in his studio in Vence between 1944 and 19481. The ink drawings by Matisse reproduced within the magazine, as well as the original colour lithographs for the front and back covers (figs.1-2)2 and the frontispiece (fig.3)3, were specially commissioned for this issue of Verve, which contains a total of twenty-five plates in colour and forty plates in black and white. Matisse and Tériade had collaborated on a previous issue of Verve, published three years earlier, in November 1945, with the title De la Couleur. The success of that project led Tériade to devote another entire issue of the magazine to Matisse’s recent work. As Michel Anthonioz has written, ‘The project got
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under way while Tériade was spending Christmas of 1947 at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. The paintings strewn about Matisse’s studio and house were important enough (and there were enough of them) to fill an issue of Verve. Apparently, Matisse was quite willing to round out reproductions of his work with line drawings he would do in his garden and in the garden of Tériade’s Villa Natacha. Pomegranates, acanthus leaves, oranges and orange-tree leaves, ivy leaves cast on white pages, provide this issue with a rhythmic “breathing” and act as interstitial tissue between the paintings. These line drawings, done quickly without corrections, were repetitions of a single motif. Matisse drew them while sitting in his wheelchair; often the work was physically taxing. Today they strike us as spiritual, an ascesis of the eyes.’4 Anthonioz further notes that ‘Matisse’s cover for Verve Nos.21/22, an original lithograph, fairly bursts with delight in the sun and Mediterranean light. A blinding yellow background sets off some of those half-plant, half-shell cut-outs of which the artist was so fond. (Reminiscences of Tahiti?) This ‘hymn to the sun” spills over onto the back cover, where its rays overwhelm the entire surface, and is extended to include the frontispiece (a lithograph that features a solar eclipse). There is no text in this issue, aside from some prefatory lines handwritten by Matisse…The absence of any literary contribution is striking: this is the only issue of Verve that does include a poem, article, or some other form of original writing.’5 Matisse was quite pleased with how this issue of Verve turned out. As he wrote in a letter to Tériade, dated 14 November 1948: ‘Yesterday I received two copies of the Verve-Matisse. It’s all right! Word has reached me that Bérès displayed it in his window and that it looked very nice. I’m not surprised. Red-whiteblack – well-proportioned, or well enough…Anyway, let’s wish it every success. Everyone did his best. As we all know, reproductions can only be approximate.’6 Four days later, he wrote again to Tériade: ‘Take a look at the November 15 issue of Combat. A Mr. Charles Etienne, whom I do not know, talks about our recent Verve and hails it as ‘an event, for it gives us our first look at the paintings Matisse did in Vence, and in flawless colour reproductions.’ Obviously that’s what all of us were hoping for. So let’s all be happy and satisfied.’7 The original studies of flowers in red and blue chalk on this double-page spread of the title page of the magazine were drawn by Matisse on January 28th, 1949, when he presented this issue of Verve to Max Pellequer. A Parisian banker and art collector, Pellequer was a close friend of both Matisse and Pablo Picasso, for whom he acted as financial advisor and banker. Matisse presented at least one other drawing to Pellequer; a portrait of Lydia Delectorskaya drawn in April 19488, as well as a copy of the limited edition livre d’artiste of his illustrations for Henri de Montherlant’s Pasiphaé, Chant de Minos, published in 1944, which is today in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts9. A gouache and collage maquette drawing by Matisse for the colour lithograph of the front and back covers of Verve No.21/22, with the letters V.E.R.V.E. spelled out in vegetal form on the front and a sunburst design on the back, was in the Tériade collection in Paris in 197710, as was a design for the frontispiece page of the same issue, which later appeared at auction in 199011. Another copy of the same issue of Verve, bearing a dedication by Matisse to the painter Pierre Brune and decorated with a chalk drawing of a single flower, appeared at auction in Paris in 201112. This present drawing is listed in the Archives Matisse under no.CR31. A photo-certificate from Wanda de Guébriant, dated 26 August 2011 (ref. no. I 82-8118) accompanies the work.
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54 BEN NICHOLSON, O.M. Denham 1894-1982 London Rome (July 1, 1954) Pencil and gouache on paper. Signed, inscribed and dated Rome Ben Nicholson July 1 – 54 in pencil on the verso. Further signed and inscribed Rome July 1 – 54 / Ben Nicholson in pencil on the backing board. 488 x 354 mm. (19 1/4 x 13 7/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Gimpel Fils, London; Acquired from them in September 1965 by a private collector; By descent to Janice Newman Rosenthal, until 2011. EXHIBITED: Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Exposition Ben Nicholson, British Council, 1955, no.82; Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Exposition Ben Nicholson, British Council, 1955, no.82; Zurich, Kunsthaus Zürich, Ausstellung Ben Nicholson, British Council, 1955, no.82; London, Tate Gallery, Ben Nicholson: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1955, no.83. In 1950 Ben Nicholson made his first visit to Italy since the end of the Second World War, and over the next few years produced a number of drawings of views, sites and buildings throughout the provinces of Tuscany, Lazio and Umbria. As Peter Khoroche has noted of the artist during this period, ‘He might spend the morning wandering around a town, then be struck by some architectural feature or grouping and feel moved to draw it. Laying no claim to a technical or historical knowledge of architecture, what interested him was the shape, the proportion, the lie of a building – its inner essence or personality would speak off an idea for a free variation upon it. Buildings, like still life objects, were a starting point only: naturally there was no point in mere imitation. On the contrary, Nicholson realized that he had to dare to be free when creating one work of art out of another. Architecture in landscape offered an opportunity to combine his love of precise structure with his feeling for poetry and acute sensitivity to the spirit of place.’1 This large drawing was made in Rome at the beginning of July 1954, when Nicholson was staying with his niece Jenny Nicholson at Torre del Grillo, between the Forum of Trajan and the Quirinale. (He also paid a visit to the gardens at Ninfa, southeast of Rome2.) The present sheet is one of only three or four drawings made during this trip, as the artist found the Roman climate too hot to work, although he returned to Torre del Grillo in the autumn of the following year. Shortly after it was made, this drawing was lent by Nicholson to the important retrospective exhibition of his work organized by the British Council in 1954 and seen in Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels and Zurich before culminating at the Tate Gallery in London in the summer of 1955. Many of Nicholson’s Italian drawings show his fondness for local architecture. As the artist’s second wife Felicitas Vogler has written, ‘‘When I draw an Italian cathedral’, says Ben Nicholson, ‘I don’t draw its architecture, but the feeling it gives me.’...I have often observed on our travels how B.N. will sit rapt for an hour or two before his subject, usually motionless, but sometimes walking around it to view it from all angles...His landscapes and architectural drawings...are to my mind distinguished from a very early stage by clarity and the great art of omission. They have a delicacy combined with mastery in their strokes, which seem to become more and more economical with the passage of time. For all their fineness they are often of an almost palpable plasticity.’3 A closely related drawing of the same view, dated July 30, 1954, was part of the extensive collection of drawings by Nicholson belonging to the artist’s close friends, the pioneering collector Helen Sutherland and, later, the scholar Nicolete Gray4.
55 PABLO PICASSO Málaga 1881-1973 Mougins The Artist and his Model (Le peintre et son modèle) Pen and black ink and white chalk on light brown card. Dated 30.6.70. in black ink and signed Picasso in pencil at the upper left. Dated and numbered 30.6.70. / I in brush and black ink and white chalk on the reverse. 224 x 309 mm. (8 3/4 x 12 1/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris, in 1971; Acquired from them by a private collector in 1992; Private collection, until 2013. LITERATURE: Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, Picasso: Dessins en noir et en couleurs 15 décembre 1969 – 12 janvier 1971, exhibition catalogue, 1971, no.93, illustrated p.56; Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Vol.XXXII: Oeuvres de 1970, Paris, 1977, p.61, no.178; The Picasso Project, Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 1885-1973. The Final Years – 1970-1973, San Francisco, 2004, p.62, no.70-209. EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, Picasso: Dessins en noir et en couleurs, 15 décembre 1969 – 12 janvier 1971, April-June 1971, no.93. In the last two decades of his career Pablo Picasso produced a large number of paintings, drawings and prints on the theme of the artist and model. These works take a variety of forms, but in general depict a painter, armed with a palette and brushes, facing a canvas, usually seen from the side, and a nude model, either sitting or reclining. Sometimes the painter is shown alone with the canvas but without the model, while at times the scene is set in a studio, or else out of doors. One scholar has seen these late works as part of a larger theme; that of painting itself: ‘In the last twenty years of his life, Picasso literally
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took painting as his model, his subject, or his example…Whether in variations on the old masters, or in depictions of the place of creation (the studio), or of the model (the woman, the nude), or of the painter (young or old, bearded, wit or without palette, costumed or stripped bare), all the works of this period have to do with a single theme, that of painter and model. This theme enables him to illustrate the mechanics of creation through the relationship between the three principal participants, the artist, the model and the canvas, ie. the subject, the object and the verb, with all the thousand ways in which it can be conjugated.’1 In the summer months of June and July 1970, Picasso turned with renewed energy to the subject of the artist and model in a substantial number of drawings, executed in pencil, chalk, ink, gouache or coloured crayons. Indeed, more than half of the nearly two hundred drawings exhibited at the Galerie Louis Leiris the following year – representing the vast majority of the drawings which the artist had executed over a period of thirteen months, between December 1969 and January 1971 – were devoted to this theme. Drawn on the 30th of June, 1970, the present sheet came in the midst of this period of frenzied activity, and is one of two drawings executed on the same day3. In drawings such as this, Picasso depicts the artist as both creator and voyeur, in the act of painting and observing a sleeping nude model. We are here watching a work in progress, rather than the finished result, and are observing the act of artistic creation. As in many of these drawings, the artist in the composition may be – indeed, was almost certainly intended to be – identified with Picasso himself, although here depicted in the guise of a much more youthful painter. (It should be noted, however, that unlike the artist in these drawings, Picasso did not usually use a palette – he preferred newspaper – and only rarely worked from a posed model; nor, indeed, did he often use an easel.) As another scholar has noted, ‘During Picasso’s later years, as he grew ever more obsessed with the theme, the repeated focus on the artist and his model became a means by which he could explore the mysteries of the creative process, parody the effects of aging and his own image as a living Old Master, while also, on a deeper level, actively denying his own fear of death.’2 Gary Tinterow’s perceptive description of a closely comparable drawing from this period – executed two days later, on July 2nd, 19704 – may equally be applied to the present sheet: ‘Picasso delineates both the painter and the recumbent woman with the same fluid line, highlighting the forms with white crayon to achieve an effect of low relief. The consistent treatment of the figures suggests that the contributions of both painter and model to the achievement of the work of art are equal, and at the same time establishes a certain ambiguity. For the observer is unsure whether he should read the model as a drawing or painting on a canvas, or as a woman lying adjacent to the painter’s stool, or both. This ambiguity is further heightened by the position of the tacking edge of the canvas at the extreme left. Or finally, this same clue can be interpreted as an indication that the entire scene takes place only in the fictional realm of art, which of course it does.’5 Picasso’s fertile imagination can be seen in the immense variety of the drawings devoted to the artist and model theme during this particular period in the summer of 1970. This compositional diversity is especially evident in the case of drawings executed on the same day. For example, a series of eight successive drawings of The Artist and his Model, all drawn on the 4th of July, 1970, and today in the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris6, retains the same relative positions of the artist, model and canvas but varies the appearance of the artist and the pose of the model, as well as the interplay between them, in each composition. This superb drawing, drawn just three years before the artist’s death, is a testament to Picasso’s undiminished skills as a draughtsman at the age of eighty-nine. Executed while the great exhibition of his recent paintings and drawings was on display at the Palais des Papes in Avignon, this drawing demonstrates the artist’s continuing exploration of a theme that had occupied him since about 1963. After 1970, however, and for the final two years of his life, Picasso only rarely returned to the subject of the artist and model.
56 BRIDGET RILEY, C.H. Born 1931 Sequence Study: No.1 Gouache and pencil on paper. Titled, signed and dated Sequence Study; No. 1. and Bridget Riley ’75 in pencil at the lower left and right. 890 x 353 mm. (35 x 13 7/ 8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Rowan Gallery, London; Marlborough Gallery, London; Private collection, Cleveland, Ohio; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 22 June 2007, lot 228; Douglas Cramer, Roxbury, Connecticut1. Bridget Riley has always used assistants to paint her finished paintings, based on her preparatory drawings and gouaches; a practice begun as early as 1961, before her first solo exhibition. Her drawings have often been exhibited alongside her finished paintings, and for her they have been vital. As she has noted, ‘Because my work is based on enquiry, studies are my chief method of exploration and my way into paintings. That is to say, when I start I don’t have an aim or an image in mind for how the painting is going to look…When I started to do studies at the beginning of the 1960s, few other artists made preparatory works…But I felt that – I didn’t just feel, I knew from all the evidence of what was to be seen in museums – that drawing and preparatory work had always played a large part in an artist’s practice. So, I persevered in various ways with whatever elements I was then studying.’2 Drawn in 1975, the present sheet may be closely related to a series of so-called ‘Curve Paintings’ executed by Riley between 1974 and 1978. Paul Moorhouse has noted that ‘Riley’s work from the mid1970’s until the end of the decade took her concern with colour interaction and its relationship with light to new levels of complexity. The vehicle for these developments was her adoption, in 1974, of the curve form as the fundamental unit of her paintings…Underlying her reintroduction of the curve was the realisation that the length of the edge is crucial in facilitating the interaction of colour: a meandering wave form extends that edge…A broadening and deepening of Riley’s understanding of the relation of colour and light can be discerned in her curve paintings. The key to this is the role of the curve in creating a more pliable, less assertive structural armature…so that occasionally the effect is as delicate as stained glass. This is also a structure in subtle movement. The eye follows the course of a curve and loses the thread as the shapes begin to fuse, dissolving like a rising haze of heat or undulating like ripples on the surface of water. These effects are non-descriptive yet tantalisingly evocative, recalling the patterns and rhythms of nature. They are also deeply expressive…The curve paintings include some of the most serene and emotionally radiant that she has ever painted.’3 In an unpublished 1978 interview, Riley recalled that, ‘In the mid-Seventies I started to use the curve again, this time as a rhythmic vehicle for colour…By using twisted curves I could bunch up colour sensations in a way that went further than the lateral groupings…When colours are twisted along the rise and fall of a curve their juxtapositions change continually. There are innumerable sequences each of which throws up a different sensation. From these I build up clusters which then flow one into another almost imperceptibly.’4 More than thirty years later, she again addressed this important series of ‘Curve Paintings’ of late 1970’s: ‘The curves came and with them a rise and fall in space. They were very delicately balanced; each of the five colour groups had to be adjusted and readjusted. Only when a group had been examined, in many different juxtapositions, and all preliminary studies had been completed, could I see the thing as a whole…I worked on them and their studies until I got them to a point of such refinement that they became too delicate, not robust enough.’5 Riley also developed the composition of this drawing in an important series of three large colour screenprints – entitled Green Dominance, Blue Dominance and Red Dominance – published in 19776.
57 JUDY CHICAGO Born 1939 Study for The Dinner Party: Saint Bridget Watercolour and pencil. Signed, dated and inscribed Study for the Dinner Party – St. Bridget – 5th Century Irish saint, abbess, feminist – She was the goddess of milk and fire – Judy Chicago – 1975 in pencil around the circular edge of the design. Dedicated For Kathleen and With appreciation & respect in pencil at the lower left and right. 275 x 275 mm. (10 7/ 8 x 10 7/ 8 in.) [image] 293 x 368 mm. (11 1/ 2 x 14 1/ 2 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to Kathleen Schneider; Private collection, until 2012. A leading American feminist artist, Judy Chicago is best known for her work examining the role and place of women in history and culture. Her masterpiece is The Dinner Party, a large installation that since 2007 has been in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum in New York. This immense collaborative project took five years to complete, between 1975 and 1979, and involved the assistance of over four hundred volunteers. The installation is in the form of a large triangular table, set with thirty-nine individual place settings, each representing a famous woman from history or mythology. Each place setting is made up of a plate, utensils, a goblet and an embroidered table runner. This watercolour is a design for one of the plates for The Dinner Party, representing Saint Bridget (fig.1)1. Saint Bridget (or Brigid) of Kildare (c.451-525), was a patron saint of Ireland, and founded several convents there. As the artist has written, ‘Through Bridget the Celts maintained their religious ties to Mother Goddess worship, for she came to be associated with all the symbols that had formerly belonged to the Celtic goddess…Fire was holy to the Goddess, who was often depicted with a column of fire – an image of immortality which I incorporated into Saint Bridget’s plate, painted in the colors of Ireland.’2 The present sheet was presented by Judy Chicago to Kathleen Schneider, a young artist from Idaho who became part of the Women’s Collective in Santa Monica that assisted in the production of The Dinner Party, working in particular on the stitching of the table runners and the embroidery. Schneider worked on the project for about a year between 1976 and 1977, with responsibility for much of the needlework, including the runner for the Saint Bridget place setting3. As Schneider later recalled, ‘Helping to design runners with Judy was always the high point of my work at the studio. It allowed me to use my painting and design skills – acquired over six years of schooling – and become involved in an immediate creative process. Working with Judy on this level, opening, exchanging ideas, mixing colors, and painting side by side, became a comfortable and stimulating experience.’4
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58 CLAUDIO BRAVO Valparaiso 1936-2011 Taroudant (Morocco) A Seated Man Seen from Behind Pastel and graphite on buff paper. Signed and dated CLAUDIO BRAVO / MCMLXXXIII in red chalk at the upper right. 381 x 300 mm. (15 x 11 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Marlborough Gallery, New York; Acquired from them by a private collector, New York; By descent to a private collection, New York. The Chilean painter Claudio Bravo received a Jesuit education in Santiago and took art classes in the studio of the painter Miguel Venegas Cienfuentes, eventually deciding to become an artist himself. He had his first exhibition at the age of seventeen, and was soon in demand as a portrait painter. In 1961, after several years living and working in Santiago and Concepción, Bravo left Chile for Europe. Settling in Madrid, he established a very successful career as a painter and society portraitist. In 1968 he spent six months working in the Philippines, and in 1970 had his first solo exhibition in New York. In 1972 he abandoned his busy life in Madrid for a large house and studio in Tangier in Morocco, where he began to focus on still life and landscape painting. Dividing his year between his studio in Tangier and another in Marrakech, Bravo enjoyed a successful career until the end of his life. As one scholar noted, at the time of an exhibition of his work which toured four American museums in 1987 and 1988, ‘Claudio Bravo is one of the most significant artists working in a realist mode today. A painter and draftsman with a singularly fertile imagination, Bravo draws upon a myriad of sources in the art of the past and present, combining them in a uniquely personal manner.’1 In 1994 a large exhibition of his paintings was mounted at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile. Works by Claudio Bravo are in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago and elsewhere. A superb draughtsman, Bravo was a master of pencil, coloured chalks and pastel, which he applied with precision and delicacy. Speaking in 1985, the artist noted that ‘Drawing and color are the bases of my work. However, I seem to be doing fewer drawings these days – either preliminary drawings or studies for paintings. I draw directly onto the canvas and use that as the basis for my colors. I find that drawing is less and less important for me…I had a large exhibition of my pastels at the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1985. I realized then the magic quality of the medium. Pastels seem to embody a special light effect, directly reflecting the sun of mid-day while oil evokes the qualities of afternoon sun with its more sober tones. I feel that there are relatively few great works in pastel. Someday I’d like to do a large-scale human figure in pastel of the importance of Quentin de la Tour’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour, the most important work ever done, I think, in that medium. I also have enormous regard for the pastels of Degas and Manet.’2 The artist’s close friend Mario Vargas Llosa has written that ‘As Claudio Bravo always paints live models, in his house in Tangier it is not in the least surprising to come across the faces who posed for his christs, martyrs and anchorites, his madonnas and diviners, his bird charmers, dancers and musicians, his characters from mythology…They are in the kitchens, they are the family of the caretaker, the gardeners, the cleaning ladies, the man who looks after the pigeons.’3 Drawn in 1983, the present sheet may be compared stylistically with another portrait, in colored pencils, of the same year4, or a large-scale head of a man, drawn in black and red chalk, executed two years later5.
59 DONALD SULTAN Born 1951 Black Roses Charcoal on paper. Signed with initials and dated July 16 1988 DS in pencil along the left edge, and titled Black Roses in pencil at the lower left centre. 356 x 441 mm. (14 x 17 3/ 8 in.) PROVENANCE: Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. Donald Sultan came to prominence as a contemporary artist in the 1980’s, painting large-scale still life subjects, as well as landscapes and urban scenes. Born in Asheville, North Carolina, he studied at the University of North Carolina and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He had his first one-man exhibition in New York in 1977, and since then has been the subject of numerous gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide. Sultan’s abiding interest in still life subjects is a characteristic of his artistic process. As he has said, ‘I paint still life because I thought it was the perfect vehicle for advancing art. If I was going to be involved in abstraction and painting and figuration, still life was perfect because it could be very abstract and I could put a lot of things back into abstract paintings that had been removed, like space and volume and light.’1 As an artist, Sultan works in a slow and methodical manner, and only paints fifteen or so large paintings a year, as well as a number of drawings, prints and small-scale canvases. He lives and works in New York. The present sheet may be associated with a series of large charcoal drawings of flowers – tulips and irises in particular – in which the rich, velvety blackness of the medium was essential to the artist’s conception of the whole. As the art historian and critic Roger Bevan has noted, ‘In charcoal, Sultan conjures magnificent forms on large sheets of smooth, heavy etching paper…Boldly carved with sticks of charcoal which splinter and crumble under the pressure which he applies, these elemental shapes are provocatively sensuous, their contours softly dusted with powder…his masterly fusion of a deposit of charcoal upon the surface of a crisp, clean sheet of paper recalls those incomparable drawings of Seurat whose control of crayon as it caressed the paper’s tufts has never been surpassed. The common thread which binds these artists to a galaxy of other European masters is a love of the colour of blackness and nobody has explored its special characteristics as obsessively as Sultan.’2 This drawing may also be related to a later series of three aquatints of Black Roses, executed by Sultan in December 1989 and published in 19903. In a survey of the artist’s printmaking, Barry Walker noted that ‘Any consideration of Sultan’s unique work is incomplete without an examination of his drawings. They are also essential in any discussion of his aquatints, the most innovative aspect of his printed oeuvre, as the development of technique in each is inextricably related to the other. The drawings comprise an independent body of work rather than studies for paintings; they are mostly large-scale and highly finished. In the earlier ones he employed some graphite with charcoal, but the more recent ones, those executed since late 1983, are done in pure charcoal on paper.’4 Sultan was inspired to use the aquatint process as a way of approximating the appearance of his charcoal drawings. As the artist has recalled, ‘I got the idea of making the prints from the charcoal drawings. I worked the charcoal a lot as powder, let it spread out over the paper, and then fixed it. One day I thought, ‘Aquatint is already powder, so if you work it dry and don’t melt it until you’ve made the images, instead of doing the reverse, you won’t have hard edges…I realized that I couldn’t get the charcoal drawings as powdery as I wanted them. With charcoal you’re adding, so you develop a technique to get your whites clean and your edges fuzzy. It gets really fussy. But with the prints it’s the reverse. In the aquatints, I solved the problem of how to make mysterious, intimate drawings without having to fuss with the damn thing.’5
60 SAM SZAFRAN Born 1934 The Staircase at 54, rue de Seine, Paris Watercolour on silk. Signed Szafran in pencil at the lower right. 172 x 471 mm. (6 3/4 x 18 1/ 2 in.) Born Samuel Berger in Paris in 1934 to Polish immigrants, Sam Szafran took the maiden name of his mother when he began to sign his works in the 1960’s. Although he was briefly enrolled at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière in Paris in the mid 1950’s, he was largely self-taught as an artist. He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1957 and two years later at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. While his earliest work was based in abstraction, from around 1960 onwards he began to depict representational subjects, drawn in dry pastels, charcoal or watercolour. Content with studying a limited range of subjects – notably studio interiors, staircases and plant forms – Szafran produced drawings which are characterized by a very skillful handling of the medium and an abiding interest in perspectival effects. From 1965 onwards his work was exhibited extensively in France, and also in Switzerland, but only rarely elsewhere. Szafran contributed to the Nouvelle Subjectivité exhibitions curated by Jean Clair in Paris in 1976 and Brussels in 1979. His work continues to be exhibited widely, most recently in a retrospective exhibition held at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny, Switzerland. Drawn in 1991, the present sheet depicts one of Szafran’s favourite subjects, the staircase in the apartment building at 54 rue de Seine in Paris, seen from above in steep perspectival foreshortening. Szafran began making pastel drawings and photographs of the spiral staircase in the 1960’s, studying it from multiple viewpoints and attempting to capture something of the sense of vertigo one felt when looking down the stairwell from a high floor. He returned to the theme in the 1990’s in such works as the present sheet, painted in watercolours on Chinese silk. These later works are largely based on his photographs and memories of the escalier, and in many of them the staircase seems to float in space, and at times becoming even more abstract in conception, flattened out and spread open like a fan. Sometimes just the balustrade remains, curving and twisting into the centre of the composition. As the artist’s friend James Lord has described these works, ‘Plunging views of vertiginous staircases repeated sometimes again and again on the same sheet with shifting, dizzying variations in points of view, intense but fastidious in color, nearly supernatural in the cadenza virtuosity of execution, verging almost upon abstraction though never quite letting slip the desperate affirmation of a specific subject matter, within which we can occasionally make out, as if glimpsed sidelong in the galactic swirl, the tiny, lovely, fragmentary semblance of a human being. Staircases that begin nowhere and lead everywhere, start from nothing and end in everything, where descending is forever ascending and the fullness of emptiness is dense as a white dwarf. Spirals of stair railings tracing the continuum eked out of invisible space which nonetheless balloons beneath coffered skylights and out of windows bluer than the sky…Szafran’s staircases…are the output of an eye dedicated to the absolutism of its own experience, disciplined by self-effacement before what sight alone can convey to the senses but submissive at the same time to the sublimating want of selfexpression…Seeing Szafran shows how wonderfully well looking can think.’1 Among comparable large watercolour drawings on silk depicting the same staircase is one dated the following year, 1992, which recently appeared at auction in Paris2.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
No.1 Gatti
No.43 Picasso
Fig.1 Bernardino Gatti, called Il Sojaro The Virgin Mourning the Dead Christ Paris, Musée du Louvre © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Gérard Blot
Fig.1 Pablo PIcasso Sleeping Peasants New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) © 2013. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence
No.2 Calvaert Fig.1 Lorenzo Sabatini The Assumption of the Virgin Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale
No.49 Dupas Fig.1 Jean Théodore Dupas History of Navigation New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art © 2013. Image copyright, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Art Resource / Scala, Florence
No.7 Procaccini Fig.1 Giulio Cesare Procaccini The Annunciation Paris, Musée du Louvre © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Franck Raux
No.12 Piola Fig.1 Domenico Piola A Bacchanal with a Drunken Silenus on an Ass Image courtesy of Sotheby’s
No.21 Turner Fig.1 Joseph Mallord William Turner Staffa, Fingal’s Cave New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
No.56 Chicago Fig.1 Judy Chicago The Dinner Party [detail] New York, Brooklyn Museum © 2013 Judy Chicago / Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York
NOTES TO THE CATALOGUE
No.1 Bernardino Gatti, Il Sojaro
1. Inv. 160; Roberto Longhi, ‘Quesiti caravaggeschi’, Pinacotheca, March-June 1929, p.300, fig.41; Arnaud Brejon de Lavergnée and Dominique Thiébaut, ed., Catalogue sommaire illustré des peintures du muse du Louvre, Vol.II: Italie, Espagne, Allemagne, Grande-Bretagne et divers, Paris, 1981, illustrated p.177; Mina Gregori, ed., Pittura a Cremona dal Romantico al Settecento, Milan, 1990, pp.267-268 (entry by Patrizia Zambrano), illustrated in colour p.147, pl.77. The painting measures 163 x 163 cm.
2. Giulio Bora, ‘Towards a New Naturalism: Sixteenth-Century Painting in Cremona and Milan’, in Andrea Bayer, ed., Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, exhibition catalogue, Cremona and New York, 2004, p.150.
3. Inv. 2097F; Giulio Bora, I disegni lombardi e genovesi del Cinquecento, Treviso, 1980, pp.60-61, no.68, pl.68. No.2 Denys Calvaert
1. Inv. 501; Simone Twiehaus, Dionisio Calvaert (um 1540-1619): Die Altarwerke, Berlin, 2002, pp.210-211, no.A17, fig.40 (as Calvaert); Jadranka Bentini et al, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. Catalogo generale: 2. Da Raffaello ai Carracci, Venice, 2006, pp.162-164, no.110 (as Lorenzo Sabatini). The altarpiece measures 341 x 226 cm. A much smaller variant of the composition, painted on copper and measuring 47 x 37 cm., appeared at auction in London in 1976 (Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 12 May 1976, lot 15, as Sabatini).
2. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 19 April 1988, lot 39; London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1988, no.18. 3. Inv.11330; Inv. 11330; Emmanuel Starcky, Musée du Louvre: Inventaire général des dessins des Écoles du Nord. Supplément, Paris, 1988, p.71, no.72. The drawing, which measures 233 x 192 mm.
4. Anonymous (Pillsbury) sale (‘Property of a Distinguished Private Collection’), New York, Sotheby’s, 26 January 2005, lot 86. 5. The present sheet does not appear in the pubished catalogue of the auction of part of William Mayor’s collection of drawings at Sotheby’s in London on 17 March 1882. The sale, however, does not appear to have actually taken place.
No.3 Cherubino Alberti
1. The inscription at the lower left of the sheet refers to the obscure Brescian artist Cristofano Rosa (d.1576), of whom Vasari writes, ‘The brothers Cristofano and Stefano, painters of Brescia, have a great name among craftsmen for their facility in drawing in perspective.’ (Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Florence, 1568; translated Gaston du C. de Vere, London, 1912 (1996 ed.), Vol.II, p.471). The present sheet would, however, appear to be slightly later in date.
2. Inv. 15806; Walter Vitzthum, ‘A Drawing for the Walls of the Farnese Gallery and a Comment on Annibale Carracci’s ‘Sala Grande’’, The Burlington Magazine, October 1963, pp.444-447, fig.27. The drawing measures 305 x 428 mm.
3. Inv. 5; Ibid., p.447, fig.30; Kristina Hermann-Fiore, Disegni degli Alberti: Il volume 2503 del Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, Rome, 1983, p.104, under no.48. The drawing measures 239 x 198 mm.
4. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 20 March 1973, lot 21; Richard J. Campbell and Jane Immler Satkowski, ed., Master Drawings from the collection of Alfred Moir, exhibition catalogue, Minneapolis and elsewhere, 2000-2002, p.19, no.4 (as Cavaliere d’Arpino).
5. Herwarth Röttgen, Il Cavalier Giuseppe Cesari D’Arpino: Un grande pittore nello splendore della fama e nell’incostanza della fortuna, Rome, 2002, p.18, fig.10; Herwarth Röttgen, Cavalier Giuseppe Cesari d’Arpino: Die Zeichnungen / I Disegni. Vol.I: Anfänge und frühe Meisterschaft / Inizi e maestria precoce 1583-1592, Stuttgart, 2012, pp.116-117, no.44.
6. Marco Simone Bolzoni, Il Cavalier Giuseppe Cesari d’Arpino: Maestro del disegno. Catalogo ragionato dell’opera grafica, Rome, 2013, p.12, p.434, no.R95.
No.4 Francesco Vanni
1. Laura Bonelli, ‘Francesco Vanni e la maniera di Barocci: colore, artificio, devozione’, in Siena, Santa Maria della Scala, Federico Barocci 15351612: L’incanto del colore. Una lezione per due secoli, exhibition catalogue, 2009-2010, p.1505, fig.65; Marco Ciampolini, Pittori senesi del Seicento, Vol.III, Siena, 2010, p.957 (not illustrated); Marciari, op.cit., illustrated in colour p.6, fig.2. The painting measures 234 x 165 cm.
2. Marciari, op.cit., p.7. 3. Marciari, op.cit., p.7. 4. Inv. MPS 58; Marco Ciampolini, Drawing in Renaissance and Baroque Siena: 16th- and 17th-Century Drawings from Sienese Collections, exhibition catalogue, Athens (Georgia) and elsewhere, 2002-2003, pp.116-118, no.20; Marco Ciampolini, Annotazioni a margine di una mostra: Il disegno a Siena dal Cinquecento all’inizio del Settecento. Breve storia e novità attributive, Siena, 2003, p.28, no.20; Ciampolini, op.cit., 2010, p.929, pl.469; Marciari and Boorsch, op.cit., pp.138-141, no.44.
5. This oil sketch must have been retained in the artist’s studio, as a similar head appears in several later works by Vanni, such as his altarpiece of The Virgin and Child with Saints of 1608-1609 in the Sienese church of San Niccolò in Sasso.
6. Inv. 2058; Françoise Viatte, Musée du Louvre: Inventaire général des dessins italiens III. Dessins toscanes XVIe – XVIIIe siècles, pt.1: 15601640, Paris, 1988, p.268, fig.545; Marciari and Boorsch, op.cit., p.87, under no.16, fig.16a.
7. Inv. MPS 421; Ciampolini, op.cit., 2002-2003, pp.98-101, no.16 (as a Portrait of Giugurta Tommasi); Ciampolini, op.cit., 2003, p.27, no.16 and also illustrated on the cover (as a Study for a Self Portrait); Ciampolini, op.cit., 2010, p.945 (not illustrated). Another self-portrait executed in oil on paper is in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena (Inv. 601; Ciampolini, op.cit., 2010, p.949; Marciari and Boorsch, op.cit., pp.192-193, no.69).
8. New York and London, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2005, no.5; Marciari and Boorsch, op.cit., pp.87-89, no.16. No.5 Felice Damiani
1. Gere recognized, however, that while this drawing displays the influence of Federico Zuccaro, it was quite different in style from most drawings by Trometta, such as those connected with his frescoes in the Roman church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli: ‘the drawing in Mr. Ralph Holland’s collection of a bearded man being baptized by a bishop in the presence of a crowd of onlookers reveals, in the shape of the composition, in the heavily simplified style of the architecture, and in the relation of the architectural background to the figures, an unmistakable derivation from Federico’s Raising of the Widow’s Son; but Mr. Holland’s drawing is so different from the early group of studies for the Aracoeli decoration that I would be inclined to date it much later than the 1560’s and to see in it the mature, or even elderly, Trometta reverting to something he admired in his youth, rather than evidence of Federico’s influence on his formative years.’; Gere, op.cit., p.29.
2. Hugo Chapman, ‘Two drawings by Felice Damiani’, Apollo, March 2001, p.24. 3. Morganti, op.cit., pl.29. 4. Rinaldo Riposati, Della Zecca di Gubbio e delle gesta dei Conti e Duchi d Urbino, Bologna, 1772-1773, Vol.II, p.464. 5. Luigi Lanzi, The History of Painting in Italy, from the Period of the Revivak of the Fine Arts, to the End of the Eighteenth Century, [trans. by Thomas Roscoe], London, 1828, Vol.II, p.163.
6. Inv. 2000-3-25-11; Chapman, ibid., p.24, fig.2. The drawing, in the same technique as the present sheet and also on faded blue paper, measures 383 x 240 mm.
7. Chapman, op.cit., p.25, fig.3. 8. Inv. K41845; Martin Zlatohlávek, ed., Italian Renaissance Art from Czech Collections: Drawings and Prints, exhibition catalogue, Prague, 19961997, pp.244-247, no.XLV (as Taddeo Zuccari); Chapman, op.cit., p.24, fig.1. The verso of the drawing contains ornamental designs for what appear to be architectural elements.
9. Inv. A117; Hugh Macandrew, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings Vol.III, Italian Schools: Supplement, Oxford, 1980, p.215, no.A117 (as Circle of Federico Zuccaro), not illustrated; Morganti, op.cit., pl.20. The drawing measures 304 x 270 mm..
10. Morganti, op.cit., pl.21. 11. Inv. 5000; Morganti, op.cit., pl.22. The drawing measures 294 x 251 mm. 12. Morganti, op.cit., pl.23.
13. Inv. 4733; Consuelo Sanz Pastor, Museo Cerralbo: catálogo de dibujos, Madrid, 1976, p.201, no.184 (as Federico Zuccaro); Madrid, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Disegni italiani del Museo Cerralbo di Madrid, exhibition catalogue, 1977, p.69, no.46; Morganti, op.cit., pl.24. The drawing measures 340 x 275 mm.
14. Morganti, op.cit., pl.25. 15. Inv. 4489; Morganti, op.cit., pl.26. Previously attributed to both Federico Zuccaro and Trometta, the drawing measures 407 x 231 mm. 16. Morganti, op.cit., pl.26. No.6 Antonio Tempesta
1. Eckhard Leuschner, The Illustrated Bartsch. Vol.35 – Commentary Part 1: Antonio Tempesta, New York, 2004, p.vii. 2. Sebastian Buffa, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch. Vol.36 – Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Century: Antonio Tempesta, New York, 1983, p.33, no.684 (151); Eckhard Leuschner, Antonio Tempesta: Ein Bahnbrecher des römischen Barock und seine europäische Wirkung, Petersberg, 2005, p.572, fig.16.5. The print is captioned ‘Rapta Proserpina, Cyane in stagnum sui nominis convertitur.’ Impressions of the print are in the collections of the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and elsewhere.
3. Inv. 1817; Françoise Viatte, Musée du Louvre: Cabinet des dessins. Inventaire général des dessins italiens III: Dessins toscans XVIe – XVIIIe siècles, pt.1: 1560-1640, Paris, 1988, pp.219-220, no.440.
No.7 Giulio Cesare Procaccini
1. Ann Sutherland Harris, in Babette Bohn et al, The Katalan Collection of Italian Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Poughkeepsie and elsewhere, 1995-1996, p.86, under no.36.
2. Raffaele Soprani and Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti genovesi, Genoa, 1768; quoted in translation in William Breazeale et al, The Language of the Nude: Four Centuries of Drawing the Human Body, exhibition catalogue, Sacramento and elsewhere, 2008-2009, p.34, under no.7.
3. Nancy Ward Neilson, Giulio Cesare Procaccini disegnatore, Busto Arsizio, 2004, p.19. 4. Inv. RF 1987-13; Hugh Brigstocke, ‘Un don des Amis du Louvre: L’Annonciation de G. C. Procaccini’, La revue du Louvre et des Musées de France, 1990, No.4, pp.279-284, fig.5; Marco Rosci, Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Soncino, 1993, pp.138-139, no.40; Hugh Brigstocke, ‘Appendix II: A Checklist of Pictures by G. C. Procaccini’, in Hugh Brigstocke, Procaccini in America, exhibition catalogue, Hall & Knight Ltd., New York, 2002, illustrated p.182. The painting measures 2.36 x 1.63 metres.
5. ‘un tableau d’une rare beauté…Cette peinture allie à une composition calme, statique et presque classique, une facture et un coloris dont la chaleur et le moelleux évoquent Barocci et Rubens...Procaccini a su conférer à la scène une grande présence humaine tout en créant une atmosphère contemplative, plus détachée, d’introspection spirituelle.’; Brigstocke, ibid., 1990, p.279.
No.8 Abraham Bloemaert
1. Jaap Bolten, Abraham Bloemaert: The Drawings, Leiden, 2007, Vol.I, p.8. 2. Ibid., p.393, no.1296, Vol.II, p.410, fig.1296. The related print in the Tekenboek is illustrated in Marcel G. Roethlisberger, Abraham Bloemaert and His Sons: Paintings and Prints, Doornspijk, 1993, Vol.I, p.397, no.T20, Vol.II, fig.T20.
3. Bolten, op.cit., Vol.I, p.103, no.251, Vol.II, p.127, figs. 251a-c. 4. Roethlisberger, op.cit., Vol.I, p.315, no.490, Vol.II, fig.672. 5. Bolten, op.cit., Vol.I, pp.382-383, nos.1237 and 1241, Vol.II, p.402, figs. 1237 and 1241; Roethlisberger, op.cit., Vol.I, p.398, nos.T29 and T35, Vol.II, figs. T29 and T35.
6. Bolten, op.cit., Vol.I, p.346, no.1076, Vol.II, p.377, fig.1076. 7. Bolten, op.cit., Vol.I, p.306, no.923, Vol.II, p.355, fig.923.
No.9 Herman van Swanevelt
1. Alison Micklethwaite, The Drawings of Herman van Swanevelt, unpublished MA dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1981, p.52.
2. Inv. 705 P; Anne Charlotte Steland, Herman van Swanevelt (um 1603-1655): Gemälde und Zeichnungen, Petersberg, 2010, Vol.I, p.266, no.Z1, 18E, Vol.II, p.608, fig. Z 121. The drawing measures 188 x 282 mm.
3. Bartsch 91; Hollstein 95; Mark Carter Leach and Peter Morse, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch, Vol. 2: Netherlandish Artists, New York, 1978, p.295, no.91 (301); Albert Blankert et al, Het zuiden tegemoet: De landscappen van Herman van Swanevelt 1603-1665, exhibition catalogue, Worden, 2007, p.67, fig.59, enlarged detail illustrated p.62, also p.60, fig.45.
4. Micklethwaite, op.cit., pp.10-11. No.10 Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Il Guercino
1. The catalogue of the Houlditch sale of February 1760 lists a total of fifteen drawings by Guercino, including two landscapes, but the subjects of most are not identified.
2. ‘Dall Ill.mo Sigro Marchese Bentiuoglio, si è riceuto per intiero pagam.to del Quadro della Carità Romana fatoli L. 274. in ducat.no di fiorenza, che fano Schudi 66-.’; Barbara Ghelfi, Il libro dei conti del Guercino, Bologna, 1997, pp.98-99, no.204.
3. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 29 June 1971, lot 26 (sold for 1,100 gns. to Agnew’s); Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 4 July 2006, lot 27 (sold for £33,600). The drawing measures 228 x 190 mm.
4. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 19 April 1994, lot 62. The drawing measures 195 x 184 mm. 5. Henry S. Reitlinger sale, London, Sotheby’s, 9 December 1953, lot 58 (‘Roman Charity, red chalk’, sold for £20). 6. New York, Hill-Stone Inc., Fine Old Master & Modern Prints & Drawings, 2012, no.5. The drawing measures 239 x 187 mm. 7. Inv. 3130; Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge, 1989, p.201, no.720 (not illustrated).
8. Inv. 2573; Ibid., pp.91-92, no.187, pl.184. 9. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s South Kensington, 15 December 1999, lot 28 (as Follower of Guercino). 10. Before doing so, however, he had fourteen original Resta volumes lettered from A to O, with each drawing within them numbered consecutively, together with the album letter, on the recto. On the present sheet, this so-called Resta-Somers number is the d.82 inscribed near the lower right corner.
No.11 Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Il Guercino
1. The made-up area at the lower left of the sheet, around the left or lower part of the head of the sea monster, can be seen in an old photograph of the drawing when it was in the H. S. Reitlinger collection, in the files of the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
2. Nicholas Turner and Carol Plazzotta, Drawings by Guercino from British Collections, exhibition catalogue, London, British Museum, 1991, p.18.
3. Luigi Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino, Rome, 1988, p.327, no.254; David M. Stone, Guercino: catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence, 1991, p.248, no.237; David M. Stone, Guercino: Master Draftsman. Works from North American Collections, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge and elsewhere, 1991, p.123, fig.53a.
4. ‘Per il Quadro dell’Andromeda fatta al Sig.re Comendatore Manzini, si è riceuto / Castelate il Specchio, et altro.’; Barbara Ghelfi, Il libro dei conti del Guercino, Bologna, 1997, p.139, no.393.
5. Inv. 312.1999; Stone, Guercino: Master Draftsman, ibid., pp.123-124, no.53; Jonathan Bober, I grandi disegni italiani del Blanton Museum of Art dell’Università del Texas, Cinisello Balsamo, 2001, unpaginated, no.39.
6. Boussac sale (‘Collection de M. J. Boussac’), Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 10-11 May 1926, lot 85; Catalogue des Dessins et Aquarelles des écoles françaises & étrangères du XVe au XIXe siècle, Enluminures, Composant la Collection de M. J. Boussac, Paris, 1926, illustrated p.41. The drawing measures 195 x 250 mm.
7. Inv. 6; Andrea Emiliani, Disegni del seicento emiliano nella Pinacoteca di Brera, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 1959, p.55, no.77, fig.77. 8. Inv. 1234; Christel Thiem, Italienische Zeichnungen 1500-1800, Stuttgart, 1977, pp.114-115, no.233. 9. With Adam Williams Fine Art Ltd, New York. The painting measured 39.5 x 30 cm. 10. Inv. 2007.111.101; David Lachenmann, Fünfzig Italienische Zeichnungen des 16.-18. Jahrhunderts aus der Stftung Ratjen, Vaduz, exhibition catalogue, Vaduz, 1995, unpaginated, no.27; Hugo Chapman and David Lachenmann, Italian Master Drawings from the Wolfgang Ratjen Collection, 1525-1835, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 2011, pp.72-73, no.29.
11. Stone, Guercino: Master Draftsman, op.cit., pp.131-135, no.58. 12. Stone, Guercino: Master Draftsman, op.cit., pp.138-139, no.60. 13. Henry Scipio Reitlinger, Old Master Drawings: A Handbook for Amateurs and Collectors, London, 1922, p.118, under pl.9. No.12 Domenico Piola
1. It has been recently suggested that the unknown 18th century French mountmaker who stamped his mounts with an ARD blind stamp may have been named Ardouin.
2. Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, Delle vite de’pittori, scultori ed architetti genovesi..., Genoa, 1769 [1797 ed.], p.48; Quoted in translation in Montreal, Museum of Fine Arts, Italian XVIIth-Century Drawings from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, exhibition catalogue, 1986, p.64.
3. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 June 1970, lot 36 (later with the Galleria del Giudice in Genoa). The drawing, in brush and brown ink with touches of oil paint, measures 345 x 510 mm..
4. At one time with Tobey C. Moss Gallery, Los Angeles. The drawing, in pen and black ink and wash, measured 235 x 363 mm. 5. Daniele Sanguinetti, Domenico Piola e I pittori della sua “casa”, Soncino, 2004, Vol.II, pp.374-375, no.I.3, illustrated in colour p.273, pls.III-V. No.13 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
1. Adriano Mariuz, ‘Giambattista Tiepolo’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and New York, 1994-1995, pp.180-182.
2. For example, the Scherzi etching of A Woman Kneeling in Front of Magicians and Other Figures (Preparations for a Sacrifice); Aldo Rizzi, The Etchings of the Tiepolos, London, 1971, pp.48-49, no.11.
3. Inv. MA 169 and 170; Adriano Mariuz and Giuseppe Pavanello, ed., Tiepolo: Ironia e comico, exhibition catalogue, Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 2004, pp.123-125, nos.37-38. One of these is also illustrated in Massimo Favilla et al., Le dessin en Italie dans les collections publiques françaises. Venise – l’art de la Serenissima, exhibition catalogue, Montpellier, Musée Fabre, 2006-2007, p.156, under no.68 (entry by Rachel George). Both drawings are signed ‘Tiepolo fecit’.
4. Giorgio Vigni, Disegni del Tiepolo, Padua, 1942, p.40, no.54, fig.54 and p.51, no.121, fig.121, respectively. The latter is illustrated in colour in Mariuz and Pavanello, ibid., pp.103-104, no.18.
5. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 2 July 1996, lot 165. 6. New York and London, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2005, no.25. 7. Vigni, ibid., p.54, no.139, fig.139. 8. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 25-26 March 1963, lot 329, illustrated pl.XXV. 9. Rizzi, op.cit., pp.338-339, no.156; Mariuz and Pavanello, op.cit., pp.123-124, no.39. 10. See, for example, Rizzi, op.cit., pp.444-445, no.252 and Mariuz and Pavanello, op.cit., pp.101-103, nos.14 and 15.
No.14 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg
1. The pencil inscription on the verso may transcribe the artist’s signature on a previous mount. Loutherbourg traditionally signed his drawings not on the sheets themselves, but on their mounts, which he often made himself.
2. The St. James’s Chronicle, 1-4 May 1784; quoted in Olivier Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg 1740-1812, Paris, 2012, p.97. 3. Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 12 June 2009, lot 66 (unsold); Lefeuvre, ibid., p.229, no.111. No.15 John Hamilton Mortimer
1. James Gandon, The Life of James Gandon, Esq., Dublin, 1846, p.202. 2. Benedict Nicholson, in Eastbourne, Towner Art Gallery and Kenwood, Iveagh Bequest, John Hamilton Mortimer ARA 1740-1779: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, exhibition catalogue, 1968, p.10.
3. John Sunderland, ‘John Hamilton Mortimer, His Life and Works’, The Walpole Society, Vol.52 (1986), 1988, p.61. No.17 Sir Thomas Lawrence
1. William Cosmo Monkhouse, ‘Lawrence, Sir Thomas’, in The Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford and London, 1892-1893, [19211922 ed.], Vol.XI, pp.725-726.
2. Michael Levey, Sir Thomas Lawrence, exhibition catalogue, London, 1979-1980, p.16. 3. Cecil Reginald Grundy, ‘Foreword’, in New York, Scott & Fowles Co., Catalogue of Original Drawings by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A., 1913, unpaginated.
4. Kenneth Garlick, Sir Thomas Lawrence: Portraits of an Age, 1790-1830, exhibition catalogue, New Haven and elsewhere, 1993, p.34, under no.8.
5. The print bears the inscription ‘A Portrait / by Sir Thomas Lawrence PRA at the Age of 20 / from the original drawing in the possession of Charles Malton Esqre.’ An impression of the print is in the British Museum (Inv. 1841, 1113.183).
6. As the review of the exhibition in Arts & Decoration commented, ‘A noted English collector and connoisseur who has recently opened a gallery in New York has afforded, in his remarkable exhibition of eighteenth-century English drawings, an exceptional opportunity for the study of the art and character of that period. The drawings…comprise…some examples by Cosway, Downman, Gardner, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Smart and a number of other well-known draughtsmen and painters. There is a prevalent quality of delicacy and ease which seems common to all the work of the masters of the period, and perhaps the most surprising particular is the strong expression of character in all the portrait sketches – an expression which is so marked and salient a feature of the work as to constitute a standing refutation of the frequently heard criticism that all the painters of the period (Romney, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Raeburn and Lawrence) painted portraits of which the only differentiating details were the titles. That this criticism (if such can be called) is stupid in the extreme is strongly evidenced in this exhibition of drawings where character and personality speak from every line…By Sir Thomas Lawrence there are six portrait sketches, of which that of Master Charles Malton was engraved by Lewis. Near this delicate little portrait hangs one of George Hibbert, Esq. by John Hoppner…’
7. Inv. 4018; Paul Jamot and Jean Vergnet-Ruiz, Portraits et figures de femmes: pastels et dessins, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1935, no.101. No.18 Nicolas Huet the Younger
1. ‘Les vélins de Nicolas Huet sont peut-être les meilleurs après ceux de Maréchal; quelquefois même il a fait aussi bien et mieux que celui-ci. S’il n’avait pas le science anatomique de Maréchal, il avait quelque chose de plus précieux peut-être au point de vue artistique: le don de la vie; ses animaux, ses oiseaux, ont toujours l’attitude qui leur est familière, qui les caractérise: ils vivent.’; C. Gabillot, Les Hüet: Jean-Baptiste et ses trois fils, Paris, 1892, p.134.
2. No.306: ‘L’elephant femelle. Elephas indicus.’ 3. Collection de mammifères du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle…dessinée d’après nature par HUET fils, Dessinateur du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris. et de la Ménagerie de Sa Majesté L’IMPÉRATRICE et REINE; et grave pr [sic] J.-B. HUET, jeune , Paris, 1808, pl.30.
4. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 July 2004, lot 148 (sold for £28,680). 5.
Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 24 January 2007, lot 70 (sold for $108,000).
6.
Inv.1994.1; Cara Dufour Denison, Fantasy and Reality: Drawings from the Sunny Crawford von Bülow Collection, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1995-1996, pp.62-63, no.27.
No.19 Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot 1.
Inv. RF 8994; Robaut, op.cit., Vol.IV, p.10, no.2471 (not illustrated). The Louvre drawing, also in pencil, measures 200 x 370 mm. It should be noted, however, that the online catalogue of drawings in the Louvre describes this drawing as being dated 1827. There are also ten landscape paintings or oil sketches by Corot which are dated 1825.
2.
Eikelenboom Smits, op.cit., pp.106 and 108.
3.
Arlette Sérullaz, ‘“Drawing is the first thing to pursue – then values – relations between forms and values – those are the mainstays – afterwards colour – last execution”’, in Arlette Sérullaz, Drawing Gallery: Corot, Paris, 2007, p.8.
4.
Robaut, op.cit., Vol.I, p.34; quoted in translation in Ibid., p.8.
5.
Galassi, op.cit., 1991, pp.156-157.
6.
Inv. 1975.1.588; Richard R. Brettell et al., The Robert Lehman Collection, Vol.IX: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century European Drawings, New York, 2002, pp.61-62, no.30 (entry by Richard Brettell). The drawing measures 190 x 365 mm.
No.20 John Frederick Lewis 1.
This drawing was one of eight Spanish drawings by J. F. Lewis purchased by Colnaghi from A.W. Reus (or Rees?) in August and September 1951. Other drawings by Lewis from this group are today in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and formerly in the collection of Sir Brinsley Ford (Sold, London, Christie’s, 2 July 2013, lot 83).
2.
Carol C. Gillham and Carolyn H. Wood, European Drawings from the Collection of the Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, 2001, pp.150151, no.58.
No.21 J. M. W. Turner 1.
The first recorded owner of this watercolour was the distinguished Conservative politician and statesman Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour (1848-1930), who served as Prime Minister between 1902 and 1905. A noted philosopher, Balfour served as a President of the British Academy between 1921 and 1928. He also collected works by members of the Arts and Crafts movement, notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Balfour is known to have owned a painting by Turner of The Pass of St. Gothard, which he purchased from Agnew’s in 1910, but it is not known how he acquired this dramatic watercolour. The present sheet does not appear in the catalogue of the 1929 auction of the contents of Balfour’s London home at 4 Carlton Gardens (London, Knight, Frank & Rutley, 15-18 July 1929).
2.
Andrew Wilton, J. M. W. Turner: His Art and Life, New York, 1979, p.280, no.P347, illustrated in colour p.197, fig.213; Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London, 1984, Vol.I, pp.198-199, no.347, Vol.II, pl.350; Riding and Johns, op.cit., pp.252-253, no.128.
3.
Letter of 16 August 1845 from Turner to James Lenox; John Gage, ed., Collected Correspondence of J. M. W. Turner, Oxford, 1980, pp.208-209, no.288.
4.
London, Tate, Turner Bequest TB CLXXIII.
5.
Richard Johns, ‘Imagining the Sea’, in Riding and Johns, op.cit., p.203.
6.
Among several comparable watercolours in the Turner Bequest at the Tate are a Study of Sea (TB CCLXIII 314; Gerald Wilkinson, Turner’s colour sketches 1820-34, London, 1975, p.138; Riding and Johns, op.cit., p.222, no.103), a Sunlit Headland with a Stormy Sky (TB CCLXIII 222; Wilkinson, ibid., p.132), and a Storm at Sea (TB CCLXIII 215; Wilkinson, op.cit., p.133).
7.
Riding and Johns, op.cit., p.222.
8.
Peter Bower has suggested that the present sheet may be on the same paper as two colour studies of sea and clouds in the Turner Bequest, dating from between 1820 and 1830, although these are different in tonality, the paper having been toned with a thin yellowish wash (London, Tate, Turner Bequest TB CCLXIII 245 and 312; the latter is illustrated in Wilkinson, op.cit., p.137).
9.
Johns, ‘Imagining the Sea’, in Riding and Johns, op.cit., p.204.
No.23 François-Auguste Ravier 1.
Quoted in translation in Paul Jamot, ‘Ravier and the Influence of England on French Landscape Work of the Nineteenth Century’, The Burlington Magazine, August 1923, p.91.
2.
‘A trois quarts de lieue en dehors des murs commence un desert où il n’y a que des plantes sauvages et des ruines. J’ai marché une heure sans rencontrer d’autres personnes qu’un moine qui disait son bréviaire…Mais ce qui porte au supreme degré la beauté et la tristresse de ce lieu, ce sont les tombeaux antiques ruinés qui bordent des deux côtés la route à droite et à gauche…C’est le paysage qui m’a fait le plus d’impression.’; quoted in ‘Chronologie’, in Paris, Galerie Jonas, op.cit., unpaginated, under 1840.
3.
Quoted in translation in Jamot, op.cit., p.91.
No.24 Max Hauschild 1.
These include a watercolour of a Street Scene in Munich, dated 1831, which appeared at auction in Königstein im Taunus, Reiss & Sohn, 4 June 2003, lot 243, while two watercolour views of the interior of the churches of San Sisto in Viterbo and San Miniato in Florence, the latter dated 1849, were sold at auction at Heidelberg, Winterberg Kunst, 8 May 2010, lots 393 and 394, respectively. A pencil drawing of the village of Lacco Ameno in Ischia, from the collection of Graf von Bredow in Potsdam, was sold at Winterberg Kunst, 5 November 2011, lot 340. Other pencil drawings by Hauschild to have appeared on the art market include detailed views of the facades and interiors of churches in Amalfi, Assisi, Palermo and Verona. A drawing of the Duomo at Viterbo was at one time in the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden but was lost in the bombing of the city in 1945.
2.
Inv. 1871.532; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Central European Drawings in the Collection of the Crocker Art Museum, Turnhout, 2004, pp.208-209. The drawing, which is dated August 23rd, 1836, measures 300 x 232 mm.
No.25 Jean-François Millet 1.
Robert L. Herbert, Jean-François Millet, exhibition catalogue, London, 1976, p.111.
2.
Robert L. Herbert, ‘Peasant Naturalism and Millet’s Reputation’, in Ibid., p.11.
3.
Herbert, op.cit., p.12.
4.
Inv. 86; Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Les Oubliés du Caire: Chefs-d’oeuvre des musées du Caire, exhibition catalogue, 1994-1995, p.70, no.32. The drawing, in black chalk, measures 150 x 220 mm.
5.
Alexandra R. Murphy et al, Jean-François Millet: Drawn into the Light, exhibition catalogue, Williamstown, 1999, p.47, under no.12.
6.
Herbert, op.cit., pp.81-82, no.39 (where dated 1854-1855).
7.
Inv. G.319; Marseille, Musée Cantini, Dessins des musées de Marseille, exhibition catalogue, 1971, unpaginated, no.125. The drawing measures 293 x 212 mm.
8.
Inv. 1951.23; Herbert, op.cit., pp.70-71, no.33; Jon Whiteley, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, Volume VII: French School, Oxford, 2000, Vol.I, pp.397-398, no.1365, Vol.II, pl.1365.
9.
Murphy et al, op.cit., pp.46-47, no.12.
No.26 William Wyld 1.
Philip Gilbert Hamerton, ‘Sketches in Italy by William Wyld’, The Portfolio: An Artistic Periodical, 1877, p.196.
2.
Marcia Pointon, Bonington, Francia & Wyld, London, 1985, p.65.
No.27 Edwin Lord Weeks 1.
Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Private Collector, New York’), New York, Christie’s, 23 February 1989, lot 479.
No.28 Thomas Miles Richardson, Junior 1.
John Lewis Roget, A History of the ‘Old Water-Colour’ Society, London, 1891, Vol.II, pp.284-285.
2.
John Ruskin, ‘Academy Notes’; quoted in Martin Hardie, Water-colour Painting in Britain. Vol.II: The Romantic Period, London, 1967, p.231.
No.29 Jules Bastien-Lepage 1.
The present sheet was, in all likelihood, at one time in the collection of Dr. Joseph Liouville (1809-1882), an eminent mathematician who was a close friend of the artist and acquired several paintings and drawings by him. Bastien-Lepage also painted a portrait of Liouville in 1880.
2.
‘He also made a drawing for the statuette which is full of remarkable and subtle qualities.’
3.
‘Je me suis remis au travail en commençant un petit tableau (je veux dire de petite taille). Il représente Orphée redemandant Eurydice au dieu des Enfers…Orphée marche le premier, comme il a été convenu; tout en marchant, il joue de la lyre. Distrait ou plutôt tourmenté par le désir de revoir Eurydice, on sentira qu’il va bientôt tourner la tête, et Mercure, qui ne le perd pas de vue, lui ravira sa bien-aimée. Tout cela est ébauché, et j’espere bien le finir en peu de temps.’; Henry Amic, ‘Jules Bastien-Lepage: Lettres et souvenirs’, Revue Générale Internationale Scientifique, Littéraire et Artistique illustrée, Paris, 1896, p.578.
4.
Aubrun, op.cit., p.115, nos.125-128. All but one of these esquisses peints are recorded in old auctions or exhibitions but are now lost. An oil sketch, measuring 610 x 460 mm., was in the collection of Jean-Claude Barrié in Paris in 1985 and is illustrated in Aubrun, op.cit., p.115, no.126.
5.
Aubrun, op.cit., p.116, nos.D129-D133, figs.D129 and D130 (all as location unknown). One of these is also illustrated in Kenneth McConkey, ‘After Holbein: A Study of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Portrait of the Prince of Wales’, Arts Magazine, October 1984, p.107, fig.11 (as location unknown).
6.
Aubrun, op.cit., p.116, under no.D129, illustrated as fig.G129.
7.
Aubrun, op.cit., pp.114-115, under no.125, illustrated as fig.S125. The statuette measures 25 x 12 cm.
8.
Aubrun, op.cit., pp.166-167, no.234; Kenneth McConkey, Edwardian Portraits: Images in an Age of Opulence, Woodbridge, 1987, pp.7273, no.5; Carol Ockman and Kenneth E. Silver, Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama, exhibition catalogue, New York, The Jewish Museum, 2005-2006, p.120, illustrated in colour fig.24. The painting is today in a private collection.
No.30 Giuseppe Signorini 1.
Inv. 1968-195; Roberta J. M. Olson, Italian Drawings 1780-1890, exhibition catalogue, Washington and elsewhere, 1980-1981, pp.232233, no.99. The undated watercolour measures 537 x 357 mm.
2.
Caroline Juler, Les Orientalistes de l’école Italienne, Paris, 1987, illustrated p.232.
No.31 Vincenzo Gemito 1.
See, for example, a study of the head of a sleeping, fifteen-month old baby, dated 1911 and drawn in on panel, that was on the art market in 1992 and 1994 (Milan, La Portantina, Disegni e stampe dal XVI al XX secolo, 1992, no.49; New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1994, no.53; Denise Maria Pagano, ed., Gemito, exhibition catalogue, Naples, 2009, illustrated p.23).
2.
A photograph of the baby Giuseppina is illustrated in Bruno Mantura, ed., Temi di Vincenzo Gemito, exhibition catalogue, Spoleto, 1989, p.131.
3.
Maria Simonetta de Marinis, Gemito, L’Aquila and Rome, 1993, pls.186-196.
4.
Ibid., pl.186.
No.32 Henry Ryland 1.
F. M., ‘Henry Ryland, Art Worker, With a few Personal Notes’, The Artist, Vol.XXIII, September-December 1898, p.9.
2.
Photographs of these works, taken from an unknown English periodical, are in the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
No.33 Edgar Degas 1.
This drawing was acquired in Paris in the 1930’s by the German artist Karl Arnold (1883-1953). One of the leading caricaturists and illustrators of the first half of the 20th century in Germany, Arnold was closely associated with the satirical magazine Simplicissimus for much of his career. Arnold’s graphic work began to be recognized again in the 1970’s, with a retrospective of his drawings and caricatures held in Berlin and elsewhere in 1975.
2.
Reed and Shapiro, op.cit., pp.220-252, nos.61-66.
3.
Ronald Pickvance, Degas, exhibition catalogue, Martigny, 1993, p.152.
4.
Richard Brettell, in Richard R. Brettell and Suzanne Folds McCullagh, Degas in the Art Institute of Chicago, New York, 1984, p.170.
5.
Inv. 1925,0314.1; Reed and Shapiro, op.cit., pp.244-245, no.66a; Richard Thomson, The Private Degas, exhibition catalogue, London, 1987, p.126, no.87, fig.173. The drawing, in lithographic crayon and pencil, measures 360 x 333 mm.
6.
Reed and Shapiro, op.cit., pp.245-246, no.66b; Boggs et al., op.cit., p.500, fig.286, under no.295. The drawing, in charcoal and pencil, measures 380 x 340 mm.
7.
Inv. 61.101.18; Boggs et al. op.cit., pp.501-502, no.297. The drawing is executed in pastel and charcoal, heightened with white, on papier calque, and measures 264 x 264 mm.
8.
George T. M. Shackelford and Xavier Rey, Degas and the Nude, exhibition catalogue, Boston and Paris, 2011-2012, p.173.
No.34 Walter Richard Sickert 1.
Robert Upstone, Sickert in Venice, exhibition catalogue, London, 2009, p.9.
2.
In a letter written in the autumn of 1895; Robert Emmons, The Life and Opinions of Walter Richard Sickert, London, 1941, p.107.
3.
Sale, London, Christie’s, 9 June 2006, lot 60 (as A Quiet Canal, Venice), sold for £31,200; Baron, op.cit., p.275, no.181 (where dated c.1903). The painting measures 190 x 145 mm.
4.
Lillian Browse, Sickert, London, 1960, p.69, no.32, pl.32 (incorrectly titled Santa Maria Formosa), where dated c.1901; Baron, op.cit., p.275, under no.181, no.2 (not illustrated). The painting measures 248 x 143 mm.
5.
Browse, ibid., p.69, no.32. Two drawings related to this composition are also recorded in Wendy Baron’s catalogue of Sickert’s works. One of these, drawn in charcoal with touches of pastel and titled ‘The Sea is in her Broad, her narrow Streets’, appeared at auction in 1968 (Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 19 July 1968, lot 35, not illustrated; Baron, op.cit., p.275, under no.181, no.3, not illustrated), while a pen and ink drawing of the church was formerly in the collection of Vera Russell and was sold at auction in 1971 (Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 4 June 1971, lot 7 (as Santa Maria Formosa, Venice), not illustrated; Baron, op.cit., p.275, under no.181, no.4, not illustrated.
6.
Browse, op.cit., p.20.
7.
Judge and Mrs. Evans formed their collection over a period of some twenty years. In an obituary, The Burlington Magazine noted of Judge Evans that ‘He was a very genial and discriminating patron of contemporary art, and was, with Mrs. Evans who shared his taste, a constant visitor at all exhibitions, galleries, and sales where works of contemporary painting or drawing were exhibited. He and Mrs. Evans collected a large number of works which show contemporary art in England at its best.’ (The Burlington Magazine, March 1918, p.120). An exhibition of works from the Evans collection was held at the Goupil Gallery in London in May 1918, and included, apart from several works by Sickert, paintings and drawings by Charles Conder, Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, William Orpen, Phillip Wilson Steer, William Strang, Henry Tonks and many others. As a review of the exhibition noted, ‘The interesting collection of pictures which was formed by the late Judge Evans…consists principally of works by living British artists, and might serve in some ways as a model to patrons of modern art.’ (R[andolph] S[chwabe]., ‘Judge William Evans’s Collection of Contemporary Pictures’, The Burlington Magazine, May 1918, p.205).
No.35 William Strang 1.
Herbert Furst, ‘The Paintings of William Strang, R.A.’, The Studio, May 1921, p.171.
2.
C. R. Ashbee, ‘Memoires’, unpublished MS; quoted by Phillip Athill in Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery and elsewhere, William Strang RA 18591921: Painter-Etcher, exhibition catalogue, 1980-1981, p.22.
No.36 Howard Chandler Christy 1.
S. J. Woolf in The New York Times, 18 January 1948; Quoted in Norris F. Schneider, Howard Chandler Christy, Zanesville, 1975, p.10.
2.
Mimi C. Miley, ‘The Artist: Life and Work’, in Allentown, Allentown Art Museum, Howard Chandler Christy: Artist/Illustrator of Style, exhibition catalogue, 1977, unpaginated (p.8).
No.37 Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl 1.
This watercolour, together with the rest of the contents of Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl’s studio in Rome, remained in the possession of the artist’s descendants for many years after his death. This large cache of drawings, watercolours, pastels and oil sketches was only dispersed in the early 1980’s.
2.
Jörg Garms, in London, Matthiesen Fine Art Ltd., Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, exhibition catalogue, 1987, p.20.
3.
Chicago, Roger Ramsay Gallery, Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl: The Beauty of Decline, 1984, no.98, illustrated (where dated 1920). The drawing measured 545 x 378 mm.
No.38 Franz von Stuck 1.
She also appears in such grand works as Family Portrait: Franz von Stuck with his Wife and Daughter of 1909, today in the Musées Royaux de Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, in which she is costumed as a Spanish infanta in a ‘Velasquez’ dress.
2.
Eva Mendgen, Franz von Stuck 1863-1927: “A Prince of Art”, Cologne, 1995, pp.55-56.
3.
Ibid., illustrated p.56; Birgit Jooss, Franz von Stuck und die Photographie: Inszenierung und Dokumentation, exhibition catalogue, Munich, 1996, no.209, illustrated p.105 (where dated 1908-1910); Thomas Raff, Modell und Maler: Mary Stuck und ihr Vater, exhibition catalogue, Tettenweis, 2007-2008, illustrated p.61. One photograph in particular reproduces the pose of the present drawing.
4.
‘Bei der Umsetzung ins Gemälde wurde aus dem Hut und der Halsschleife eine Art blau leuchtender Heiligenschein, wobei es sich um eine verführerische Heilige, eine Kindfrau à la Wedekinds Lulu handelt.’; Raff, ibid., p.60.
5.
Heinrich Voss, Franz von Stuck 1863-1928: Werkkatalog der Gemälde mit einer Einführung in seinen Symbolismus, Munich, 1973, p.296, no.362/582, illustrated p.179, fig.362/582. The painting measures 54.5 x 48.5 cm.
6.
Inv. G 0 1-1; Raff, op.cit., illustrated p.61.
7.
Voss, op.cit., p.296, no.364/568, illustrated p.180, fig.364/568; Alexander Rauch and Eva Heilmann, Franz von Stuck: Gemälde, Zeichnung, Plastik aus Privatbesitz, exhibition catalogue, Aschaffenburg and elsewhere, 1994, no.20; Mendgen, op.cit., illustrated p.56; Edwin Becker, Franz von Stuck: Eros & Pathos, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, 1995-1996, p.81, no.46; Raff, op.cit., illustrated p.60. The painting measures 31.1 x 31.1 cm.
8.
Raff, op.cit., illustrated p.60. The drawing measures 560 x 480 mm.
No.39 Edmund Dulac 1.
White, op.cit., p.20.
2.
James Hamilton, ‘Edmund Dulac’, in Sheffield, Mappin Art Gallery and elsewhere, Edmund Dulac: Illustrator and Designer 1882-1953 – A Centenary Exhibition, 1982-1983, p.7.
3.
In the magazine, Dulac’s illustration was captioned by one stanza of de Musset’s poem: ‘-Ah! maintenant plus d’une / Attend, au clair de lune, / Quelque jeune muguet, / L’oreille au guet.’ (‘Oh! Now more than one lady listens anxiously in the moonlight for some young gallant.’) The poem Venise appeared in Alfred de Musset’s Premières poesies 1829-1835, first published in 1852. The poem was later set to music by the composer Charles Gounod in 1842, and the song Venise was published in 1855.
4.
A drawing by Dulac of The Entomologist’s Dream, for the Christmas 1909 issue of L’Illustration, is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Alison Smith, ed., Watercolour, exhibition catalogue, London, Tate Britain, 2011, pp.162-163, no.114). A drawing of Circe, for the Christmas 1911 issue of the magazine, is in a private collection (Pierre Nouilhan, Edmund Dulac 1882-1953: de Toulouse à Londres, exhibition catalogue, Toulouse, 2008-2009, illustrated p.46).
5.
‘La Venise indolente et volupteuse d’Alfred de Musset, évoquée en des compositions d’un charme mystérieux et troublant par l’art si personnel d’Edmund Dulac, telle est la surprise que réserve aux admirateurs de ce prestigieux aquarelliste comme aux amoureux de la vielle cité des Doges l’illustration de la fameuse poésie dont le rythme berceur chante à l’oreille comme le rythme même des rames battant l’eau aux flancs de gondoles...Une autre visage de la ville incomparable se découvre ici, – son visage nocturne, ardent et langoureux, où l’amour met toute sa grâce mélancolique. Elle apparait, voilée de cette ombre bleue, transparente, qui suit des beaux jours aux pays fortunés pour qui les ténèbres mêmes ne sont pas noirs.’; L’Illustration, op.cit., unpaginated (p.449).
6.
White, op.cit., p.56.
7.
These depict a woman getting ready for a masked ball, a pair of lovers in a gondola, accompanied by a musician, and a scene of masked figures in the Piazza San Marco. Dulac’s drawing for this last illustration appeared on the art market in 1987 (Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 25 February 1987, lot 254).
8.
White, op.cit., pp.54-56.
No.40 Julio González 1.
Llorens Serra, op.cit., p.32. González’s friendship with Picasso ended abruptly in 1908, for reasons that are not quite clear, and was not reestablished until the 1920’s, when Picasso asked for González’s help and advice in working in metal sculpture.
2.
Llorens Serra, op.cit., p.149. Another scholar, Josette Gibert (op.cit., p.4), notes of these early Maternités that, ‘They are so rarely evocative of joy, of serenity. Humble women, with sad faces, hold in their arms a child which, very often, they are not looking at. Poor country or suburban houses, surrounded by trees stripped of their leaves, this is the landscape that provides a setting for these scenes.’ (‘Elles ne sont alors que très rarement évocatrices de joie, de sérénité. D’humbles femmes, au visage triste, tiennent dans les bras un enfant que, très souvent, elles ne regardent pas. De pauvres maisons de campagne ou de banlieue, au milieu d’arbres dépouillés de leurs feuilles, tel est le paysage qui sert de cadre à ces scènes.’).
3.
Llorens Serra, op.cit., pp.175-184, nos.156-173.
4.
Llorens Serra, op.cit., p.175.
No.41 Hippolyte Petitjean 1.
Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, ‘Neo-Impressionist Drawings’, in Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Andrew Robison, ed., Color, Line, Light: French Drawings, Watercolors, and Pastels from Delacroix to Signac, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 2012-2013, p.132.
2.
New York and London, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Master Drawings, 2009, no.42.
No.43 Pablo Picasso 1.
Inv. 148.1951; Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Vol.3 (Oeuvres de 1917 a 1919), Paris, 1949, pl.125, no.371; William Rubin, Picasso in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1972, pp.108-109 (as Sleeping Peasants); William Rubin, ed., Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1980, illustrated p.215; The Picasso Project. Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 1885-1973: From Cubism to Neoclassicism 1917-1919, San Francisco, 1995, p.191, fig.19-066; Josep Palau I Fabre, Picasso: De los Ballets al Drama (1917-1926), Barcelona, 1999, p.153, no.497; Carsten-Peter Warncke and Ingo F. Walther, Pablo Picasso 1881-1973, Vol.I, Cologne, 2007, illustrated p.259; John Richardson, A Life of Picasso. Vol. III: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, London, 2007, illustrated p.138; Susan Grace Galassi and Marilyn McCully, Picasso’s Drawings 1890-1921: Reinventing Tradition, exhibition catalogue, New York and Washington, 2011-2012, pp.251-255, no.67. The drawing, in gouache, watercolour and pencil, measures 311 x 489 mm.
2.
Galassi in Galassi and McCully, op.cit., pp.251-254, under no.67.
3.
Rubin, op.cit., 1972, p.108.
4.
Galassi and McCully, op.cit., p.254, under no.67.
5.
Rubin, op.cit., 1972, p.108.
6.
Sarlie sale (‘Important Modern Paintings and Drawings, The Property of Jacues Sarlie, Esq., of New York City and of The Jacques Sarlie Foundation, New York City’), London, Sotheby’s, 12 October 1960, lot 13 (bt. N. H. Wise for £700); Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Vol.29 (Supplément aux années 1914-1919), Paris, 1975, pl.171, no.464; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.191, fig.19-067 (where dated to Spring 1919). The drawing measures 190 x 265 mm.
7.
The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.190, fig.19-065 (where dated to Spring 1919). The drawing measures 310 x 480 mm.
8.
Zervos, op.cit., Vol.3, 1949, pl.124, no.369; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.190, fig.19-064 (where dated to Spring 1919). The drawing measures 300 x 452 mm.
9.
Sale (‘The Collection of Alex and Elisabeth Lewyt’), New York, Sotheby’s, 7 May 2013, lot 15 (sold for $1,325,000); Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Vol.30 (Supplément aux années 1920-1922), Paris, 1975, p.52, no.137; The Picasso Project. Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 1885-1973: Neoclassicism I 1920-1921, San Francisco, 1995, p.170, no.21020. The watercolour measures 210 x 275 mm.
No.44 Tsuguharu Foujita 1.
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 5 February 2003, lot 261. The drawing measures 310 x 212 mm.
2.
Buisson, op.cit., p.157, no.17.96. The drawing measures 360 x 245 mm.
3.
Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Guy Loudmer], 19 November 1989, lot 7. The drawing measures 360 x 245 mm.
4.
Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 2 December 2008, lot 106; Sylvie Buisson, Foujita inédits, Paris, 2007, p.385, no.C17.158, illustrated in colour p,99. The drawing measures 438 x 259 mm.
No.45 Roger de La Fresnaye 1.
The present sheet was once in the collection of the art dealer André Level (1863-1946), owner of the Galerie Percier in Paris. In 1904 Level founded the La Peau de l’Ours, the first modern art investment fund, for which he purchased several works by Pablo Picasso (with whom he enjoyed a close relationship), Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Vuillard, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and other artists. The collection was sold at auction in 1914 and achieved considerable financial success, quadrupling the initial investment.
2.
Germain Seligman, Roger de La Fresnaye, London, 1969, pp.72-74.
3.
Ibid., p.249, no.502. The drawing was one of a large number of drawings by the artist in the collection of Paul Chadourne, Garches, in 1969.
4.
Rubinstein sale (‘The Helena Rubinstein Collection’), New York, Parke-Bernet Galleries, 28 April 1966, lot 776. The drawing measured 406 x 274 mm.
No.46 Egon Schiele 1.
Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolours, London and New York, 2003, p.388.
2.
At least five drawings of Anton Peschka, Jr. as a newborn baby are known, all in private collections (Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, New York, 1990, p.547, nos. D1702-D1706; one of these is illustrated in colour in Kallir, op.cit., 2003, p.355 and Klaus Albert Schröder, Egon Schiele, exhibition catalogue, Vienna, 2005-2006, pp.328-331, no.185).
3.
Alessandra Comini, Egon Schiele’s Portraits, Berkeley, 1974, pl.168; Kallir, op.cit., 1990, pp.335-336, no.P303, illustrated in colour p.183, pl.69.
4.
Studies of Anton Peschka, Jr. as a toddler include a drawing in the Cleveland Museum of Art (Kallir, op.cit., 1990, p.560, no.D1814; illustrated in colour in Kallir, op.cit., 2003, p.363 and Diane De Grazia and Carter Foster, ed., Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art, exhibition catalogue, Cleveland and elsewhere, 2000-2001, pp.236-237, no.99) and two drawings in private collections (Kallir, op.cit., 1990, p.560, nos.D1813 and D1815; the former also illustrated in colour in Kallir, op.cit., 2003, p.362). All three drawings are dated 1916, although the Cleveland drawing seems to have been first dated 1915.
5.
Kallir, op.cit., 1990, pp.568-569, nos.D1872 and D1881-D1884; all are in private collections. One of these is illustrated in colour in Kallir, op.cit., 2003, p.393.
6.
Kallir, op.cit., 1990, p.602, no.D2167, today in a private collection. The drawing recently appeared at auction in New York and Vienna (New York, Christie’s, 4 February 2008, lot 82 [withdrawn]; Vienna, Im Kinsky, 9 November 2010, lot 82, sold for €500,000 EUR).
7.
Kallir, op.cit., 1990, p.602, no.D2166. The drawing, formerly in the collection of Mona Ackerman, recently appeared at auction (Sale, New York, Christie’s, 9 May 2013, lot 144).
8.
Comini, op.cit., pl.167; Alessandra Comini, Egon Schiele, London, 1976, pl.23; Gianfranco Malafarina, L’opera di Schiele, Milan, 1982, p.119, no.321, illustrated in colour pl.XLIV; Kallir, op.cit., 1990, p.341, no.P318. The painting, in a private American collection, was completed after Schiele’s death by another hand. According to the Gertrude Schiele Peschka, her husband completed the painting of the feet.
9.
Kallir, op.cit., 2003, p.446.
10. Comini, op.cit., 1974, p.168. 11. Kallir, op.cit., 1990, p.567. 12. Kallir, op.cit., 2003, pp.76 and 189. 13. Kallir, op.cit., 2003, pp.441-442.
No.47 Emil Nolde 1.
Peter Vergo and Felicity Lunn, Emil Nolde, exhibition catalogue, London and Copenhagen, 1995-1996, p.170.
2.
Peter Vergo, ‘Nolde’s Place in Twentieth-Century Painting’, in Ibid., p.13, and p.128.
3.
Jolanthe Nolde, ‘Beim Malen zugeschaut’, in Emil Nolde: Gemälde, Aquarelle, Graphik, exhibition catalogue, Villingen-Schwenningen, 1974, pp.45-46; quoted in translation in Vergo and Lunn, op.cit., pp.170-171.
4.
Anonymous sale, (‘Property from a Private German Collection’), London, Christie’s, 7 February 2013, lots 202, 203 and 206 (sold for £397,250, £325,250, and £289,250 respectively).
5.
Anonymous sale, Munich, Ketterer Kunst, 9 June 2012, lot 56 (sold for €286,700).
No.48 František Kupka 1.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art, exhibition catalogue, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1936, pp.73-74.
2.
Jaroslav Andel, ‘A Wanderer between Chaos and Order’, in Jaroslav Andel and Dorothy Kosinski, Painting the Universe: František Kupka: Pioneer in Abstraction, exhibition catalogue, Dallas and elsewhere, 1997-1998, p.85.
3.
Inv. AM 3213 P; Ibid., p.208, no.124, fig.124. The painting measures 194 x 200 cm.
No.49 Heinrich Campendonk 1.
Daniel Catton Rich, ‘The Twelfth International Water Color Exhibition’, Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, April-May 1932, pp.43-44.
2.
Munich, Galerie Wolfgang Ketterer, Heinrich Campendonk – Edith van Leckwyck, 1976, no.17 (priced at DM 39,000); Firmenich, op.cit., unpaginated, no.972. The watercolour, which measures 468 x 606 mm., is inscribed and dated 1933 by the artist’s wife, Edith van Leckwyck-Campendonk.
No.50 Jean Dupas 1.
The first owner of this drawing was the painter Marguerite Grain (1899-1986), a pupil of Dupas who also posed for a number of paintings by the artist.
2.
George Barbier, ‘Jean Dupas’, La Renaissance de l’Art Français et les Industries de Luxe, September 1927, p.429.
3.
Penelope Hunter-Steibel, ‘Decorative Arts of the Twentieth Century’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Winter 1979/80, illustrated in colour pp.32-33 and on the covers; Bruno Foucart et al, Normandie: Queen of the Seas, New York, 1985, illustrated in colour p.67; John Maxtone-Graham, Normandie: France’s Legendary Art Deco Ocean Liner, New York and London, 2007, illustrated in colour pp.93 and 245.
4.
Foucart, ibid., pp.66-67.
5.
Inv. 1976.414.3a-ggg. The overall dimensions of the work are 662.3 x 885.8 cm. (245 x 348 3/4 in.).
6.
Inv. 1996.175. The drawing, in ink, watercolour, gouache and pencil on paper, measures 308 x 483 mm. Four cartoons by Dupas for each of the Grand Salon panels are illustrated in Foucart, op.cit., pp.72-73.
7.
‘“Plus grand est mon travail plus je suis heureux”, écrit Dupas qui, avec cet ensemble, réalise son chef-d’oeuvre le plus accompli. La brillance du verre, rehaussé somptueusement de plaques d’or, d’argent et de palladium, exalte le rythme souverain qui parcourt ces panneaux, composition à la fois tumultueuse et majestueusement ordonnancée sur fond de voilures enchevêtrées et de grands navires. Chevaux marins, tritons et dauphins, maîtrisés par de sculpturales déités, caracolent sur une mer d’écailles; il y règne une sorte de jubilation d’âge d’or qui est comme le rêve, enfin totalement materialise, de Dupas.’; Jacqueline du Pasquier, Bordeaux Arts déco, Paris, 1997, p.89.
8.
Barbier, op.cit., pp.429-430.
No.51 Paul Nash 1.
Andrew Causey, ‘The Art of Paul Nash’, in London, Tate Gallery, op.cit., 1975, pp.11-12.
2.
Ibid., 1975, p.32.
3.
Paul Nash, Dorset Shell Guide, London, 1935, p.10.
4.
Lance Sieveking, The Eye of the Beholder, London, 1957, p.81.
5.
Letter of 27 September 1943; quoted in Ibid., p.80.
6.
Sale (‘The Property of the Paul Nash Trust’), London, Sotheby’s, 12 November 1986, lot 91 (unsold); Causey, op.cit., 1980, p.462, no.1157 (with incorrect dimensions), not illustrated. The drawing measures 280 x 380 mm.
7.
Hill Architecture, 1935. The drawing measures 285 x 395 mm.
8.
Maiden Castle, 1937; Andrew Causey, Paul Nash: Landscape and the Life of Objects, Farnham, 2013, illustrated in colour p.118, fig.104. The drawing measures 545 x 762 mm..
9.
E. H. Ramsden, ‘Paul Nash as Landscape Painter’, in Eates, ed., op.cit., 1943, p.23.
No.52 Raoul Dufy 1.
‘Quel plaisir c’est pour moi de recevoir ici ta maman. Elle m’apporte un peu de Paris et toutes sortes de souvenirs qui sont les bienvenus dans ma retraite roussillonaise.’; Letter of 17 November 1946 from Raoul Dufy to Gérard Oury, quoted in Paris, Artcurial, Collection Gérard Oury, 20 April 2009, pp.13 and 126.
2.
‘Je sais que quatre, cinq fois par nuit, elle se lève, va contempler ses Dufy et les yeux pleins de régates mauves, de champs de blé, de champs de courses où paradent des élegantes parmi lesquelles peut-être elle si trouve, Maman se rendort enfin, la tête pleine d’images éclantantes.’; Gérard Oury, Mémoires d’éléphant, Paris, 1988, p.282.
3.
Paris, Artcurial, Collection Gérard Oury, 20 April 2009, pp.10-11, fig.3.
4.
‘…tableaux face aux murs, empilés les uns contre les autres, cartons à dessins aux rotondités de femme enceinte, bourrés d’aquarelles…Raoul Dufy déchire, efface impitoyablement aquarelles et peintures. Rarement satisfait, il recule, jauge, se juge: “Pas mal!...” Superlatif maximum. Et si quelqu’un s’extasie: “Mais vous avez mis dix minutes pour faire ça!” il répond: “Non monsieur, cinquante ans!”’; Oury, op.cit., p.23.
5.
Guillon-Laffaille, op.cit., p.140, no.1445. The watercolour, which is dated the 1st of January 1945, measures 320 x 500 mm. A third variant, without the coffee pot and dated 1944, appeared at auction in Paris in 1974 (Anonymous sale, Paris, Palais Galliéra, 21 March 1974, lot 10; Guillon-Laffaille, op.cit., p.139, no.1442).
No.53 Henri Matisse 1.
Claude Duthuit, Henri Matisse: Catalogue raisonné des ouvrages illustrés, Paris, 1988, pp.370-373, no.84.
2.
Ibid., p.390, no.108.
3.
Duthuit, op.cit., p.370, no.84.
4.
Michel Anthonioz, Verve: The Ultimate Review of Art and Literature (1937-1960), New York, 1988, p.197.
5.
Ibid., p.197.
6.
Quoted in translation in Anthonioz, op.cit., p.199.
7.
Quoted in translation in Anthonioz, op.cit., p.199.
8.
Alex and Odile Leowy sale, Paris, Sotheby’s, 24 March 2010, lot 10. The drawing is dedicated ‘à Max Pellequer’.
9.
Inv. B.96.3a-kk. The book is dedicated ‘Hommage / à Max Pellequer / Henri Matisse’.
10. Jack Cowart et al., Henri Matisse: Paper Cut-Outs, exhibition catalogue, Washington, DC and elsewhere, 1977-1978, p.152, no.92. 11. Ibid., pp.152-153, no.93; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 4 April 1990, lot 173. 12. Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Ader], 4 April 2011, lot 19.
No.54 Ben Nicholson 1.
Peter Khoroche, Ben Nicholson: drawings and painted reliefs, Aldershot, 2002, pp.61-62.
2.
Two drawings of Ninfa, both dated June 1954, are illustrated in Sir Herbert Read, Ben Nicholson: work since 1947, London, 1956, unpaginated, nos.41 and 81.
3.
Felicitas Vogler, in Maurice de Sausmarez, ed., Ben Nicholson; a Studio International Special, London and New York, 1969, p.21.
4.
London, Tate Gallery, Ben Nicholson, exhibition catalogue, 1969, no.84, illustrated p.41; Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and elsewhere, Ben Nicholson: Fifty Years of his Art, exhibition catalogue, 1978-1979, p.103, no.58; Rupert Otten, Ben Nicholson 1894-1902: Defining Structure and Space by Line, exhibition catalogue, Walterstone, 2102, p.7, no.15, illustrated p.10. The drawing, in oil and pencil on paper, measures 580 x 390 mm.
No.55 Pablo Picasso 1.
Marie-Laure Bernadac, ‘Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model’ in London, Tate Gallery, Late Picasso, exhibition catalogue, 1988, p.49.
2.
Karen L. Kleinfelder, The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze: Picasso’s Pursuit of the Model, Chicago, 1993, p.4.
3.
The other drawing executed on the same day, also depicting an artist and model, is illustrated in colour in Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, op.cit., no.94, illustrated p.56. See also Zervos, op.cit., no.179; The Picasso Project, op.cit, p.62, no.70-210. The drawing is in the same technique as the present sheet, and measures 218 x 282 mm.
4.
The drawing is illustrated in colour in Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, op.cit., no.95, illustrated p.57. See also Zervos, op.cit., no.178; The Picasso Project, op.cit, p.63, no.70-211, and Gary Tinterow, Master Drawings by Picasso, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge and elsewhere, 1981, pp.226-227, no.98. The drawing, which measures 268 x 338 mm., was with the Perls Galleries in New York in 1981.
5.
Tinterow, ibid., p.226, under no.98.
6.
Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, op.cit., nos.102-109, illustrated pp.60-61; Zervos, op.cit., nos.187-194; London, Tate Gallery, op.cit., p.250253, nos.87-94; Brigitte Léal et al, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, p.462, nos.1135-1142; The Picasso Project, op.cit, pp.64-66, nos.70-218-70-225.
No.56 Bridget Riley 1.
This drawing was part of the impressive collection of 20th century drawings assembled by the television producer Douglas Cramer (b.1931). As he commented in an interview published in 1994, ‘I’ve always felt that a drawing is the soul of an artist, and that if you want to know who they are and what they’re about, you need to look at, to study their drawings. That they open the door to what their paintings are all about. It’s very, very rare that I will ever buy a painting of an artist whose drawings I don’t have and have lived with first…’ (Barbaralee Diamonstein, ed., Inside the Art World: Conversations with Barbaralee Diamonstein, New York, 1994, p.66).
2.
‘Bridget Riley in Conversation with Lynne Cooke’, in Paris, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Bridget Riley: Rétrospective, exhibition catalogue, 2008, p.139.
3.
Paul Moorhouse, ‘A Dialogue with Sensation: The Art of Bridget Riley’, in Paul Moorhouse, ed., Bridget Riley, exhibition catalogue, London, Tate Britain, 2003, pp.20-21.
4.
‘Into Colour: in conservation with Robert Kudielka [1978]’, in Robert Kudielka, ed., The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley: Collected Writings 19651999, London, 1999, p.99.
5.
‘Bridget Riley in conversation with Michael Harrison’, in Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard, Bridget Riley: colours, stripes, planes and curves, exhibition catalogue, 2011, p.8.
6.
Karsten Schubert, Lynn MacRitchie and Craig Hartley, Bridget Riley; Complete Prints, [3rd ed.], London, 2010, nos.22-24. Each of these three screenprints, measuring approximately 980 x 492 mm., was published in an edition of 100 plus 20 artist’s proofs.
No.57 Judy Chicago 1.
Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage, Garden City, NY, 1979, illustrated in colour between pp.96 and 97; Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, New York, 1996, unpaginated (p.180). The plate and its runner are also illustrated in Judy Chicago, Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework, Garden City, NY, 1980, pp.112-117 and between pp.104 and 105.
2.
Ibid., 1979, p.71.
3.
Kathleen Schneider later recalled that, ‘In working on Saint Bridget’s runner, we ran into a disagreement about translating a Celtic cross on the back. My feelings were in favour of a pierced and carved wooden cross – using this medium would make a place for all those intense religious feelings I’d had inside me all those years. Twelve years of Catholic schooling and my heavy religious childhood had almost been submerged until that day when, looking at symbols for the saints, it all came back. The wooden cross symbolized so much for me. After working on it the entire day, I was upset when Judy decided to change it because another woman said she could knit a cross instead. I felt that it was partly my design as well as Judy’s, and I didn’t want to give up easily; my artistic pride came to the surface. But in such cases Judy had the final say, and I conceded – although not without letting my feelings be known. (Eventually, however, we used the wooden cross.)’; Schneider in Chicago, op.cit., 1979, p.234.
4.
Schneider in Chicago, op.cit., 1979, p.232.
No.58 Claudio Bravo 1.
Edward J. Sullivan, Claudio Bravo: Painter and Draftsman, exhibition catalogue, Madison and elsewhere, 1987-1988, p.4.
2.
‘The Artist Speaks: an interview with Claudio Bravo’, in Sullivan, ibid., pp.27-28.
3.
Paul Bowles and Mario Vargas Llosa, Claudio Bravo: Paintings and Drawings, New York, 1997, pp.23-25.
4.
London, Marlborough Fine Art, Claudio Bravo: Recent Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1983, no.17; Sullivan, op.cit., no.43, illustrated p.85 (lent by Oscar Maren).
5.
Sullivan, op.cit., no.59, illustrated p.95 (lent by the artist).
No.59 Donald Sultan 1.
Barbara Rose, Sultan: An Interview with Donald Sultan by Barbara Rose, New York, 1988, pp.77-78; quoted in Michelle Meyers, Sean Scully/Donald Sultan: Abstraction/Representation: Paintings, Drawings and Prints from the Anderson Collection, exhibition catalogue, Stanford University Art Gallery, 1990, p.14.
2.
Roger Bevan, ‘Introduction’, in London, Runkel-Hue-Williams Ltd., Donald Sultan: Works on Paper, exhibition catalogue, 1989, p.5.
3.
Barry Walker, Donald Sultan: A Print Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Coral Gables and elsewhere, 1992-1994, unpaginated, nos.5658.
4.
Ibid., p.9.
5.
Walker, op.cit., pp.11-12.
No.60 Sam Szafran 1.
James Lord, ‘Seeing Szafran’, in New York, Claude Bernard Gallery, Sam Szafran: Recent Works, exhibition catalogue, 1987, pp.7-9.
2.
Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 11 April 2013, lot 33 (sold for €115,500).
INDEX OF ARTISTS
ALBERTI, Cherubino; no.3 BASTIEN-LEPAGE, Jules; no.29 BLOEMAERT, Abraham; no.8 BRAVO, Claudio; no.58 CALVAERT, Denys; no.2 CAMPENDONK, Heinrich; no.49 CHICAGO, Judy; no.57 CHIRAT, Benoit; no.22 CHRISTY, Howard Chandler; no.36 COROT, Jean-Baptiste-Camille; no.19 DAMIANI, Felice; no.5 DEGAS, Edgar; no.33 DUFY, Raoul; no.52 DULAC, Edmund; no.39 DUPAS, Jean; no.50 FOUJITA, Tsuguharu; no.44 FRESNAYE, Roger de La; no.45 GATTI, Bernardino; no.1 GEMITO, Vincenzo; no.31 GONZÁLEZ, Julio; no.40 GUERCINO, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri; nos.10-11 HAUSCHILD, Max; no.24 HERBIN, Auguste; no.42 HIREMY-HIRSCH, Adolf; no.37 HUET, Nicolas; no.18 KUPKA, František; no.48 LA FRESNAYE, Roger de; no.45 LAWRENCE, Thomas; no.17 LEWIS, John Frederick; no.20 LOUTHERBOURG, Philippe-Jacques de; no.14
MATISSE, Henri; no.53 MILLET, Jean-Franรงois; no.25 MORTIMER, John Hamilton; no.15 NASH, Paul; no.51 NICHOLSON, Ben; no.54 NOLDE, Emil; no.47 PETITJEAN, Hippolyte; no.41 PICASSO, Pablo; nos.43 & 55 PIOLA, Domenico; no.12 PROCACCINI, Giulio Cesare; no.7 RAVIER, Franรงois-Auguste; no.23 RICHARDSON, Thomas Miles, Junior; no.28 RILEY, Bridget; no.56 RYLAND, Henry; no.32 SAUVAGE, Piat-Joseph; no.16 SCHIELE, Egon; no.46 SICKERT, Walter Richard; no.34 SIGNORINI, Giuseppe; no.30 STRANG, William; no.35 SULTAN, Donald; no.59 SWANEVELT, Herman van; no.9 SZAFRAN, Sam; No.60 TEMPESTA, Antonio; no.6 TIEPOLO, Giovanni Battista; no.13 TURNER, Joseph Mallord William; no.21 VANNI, Francesco; no.4 VON STUCK, Franz; no.38 WEEKS, Edwin Lord; no.27 WYLD, William; no.26
Heinrich Campendonk (1889-1957) The Horse in the Port (Das Pferd am Hafen) No.49
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John Hamilton Mortimer (1740-1779) Cupid No.15
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