STEPHEN ONGPIN - 2017 MASTER DRAWINGS CATALOGUE

STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART

Front cover: Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682-1754) The Artist’s Son Giacomo Holding a Book No.14

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John Brett (1831-1902) Logan Bay, Cornwall No.36

MASTER DRAWINGS 2017

An exhibition at Dickinson Roundell Inc. 19 East 66th Street New York, NY 10065

18th to 28th January, 2017

STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am especially grateful to my wife Laura for her advice and support. I am also greatly indebted to Megan Corcoran for her vital assistance in all aspects of preparing this catalogue, as well as Sarah Ricks and Dean Hearn at Healeys for their patience and fortitude. 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: Kate Agius, Deborah Bates, Marco Simone Bolzoni, Judith Bronkhurst, Scott Thomas Buckle, Michelle Ongpin Callaghan, Sophie Camu, Hugo Chapman, Mathias Chivot, Glynn Clarkson, Thomas Deprez, Donato Esposito, James Faber, Louie Fasciolo, Cheryl and Gino Franchi, Julie Frouge, Florian Härb, Annabel Kishor, Lisa Kraus, Eloise Lawson, Briony Llewellyn, Victoria Sancho Lobis, Rupert Maas, Suz Massen, Stephanie Moser, Charles Nugent, Anna Ongpin, Jonathan den Otter, Tanya Paul, Guy Peppiatt, Anya Perse, Jeffrey Pilkington, Saoussan Sabeh, David Stone, Carol Tabler, Todd-White Photography, Sarah Vowles, Jack Wakefield, Joanna Watson, Harriet West, Jenny Willings and Deborah Willis.

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 at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art Ltd. 6 Mason’s Yard Duke Street St James’s London SW1Y 6BU Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 or [+44] (7710) 328-627 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com Between 15 and 31 January 2017 only: Tel. [+1] (917) 587-1183 Tel. [+1] (212) 772-8083

MASTER DRAWINGS 2017 PRESENTED BY

STEPHEN ONGPIN

1 NICCOLÒ DI GIACOMO DA BOLOGNA Bologna c.1325-c.1403 Bologna The Ascension of Christ Historiated initial P, in tempera, gold leaf and ink on vellum, cut from an illuminated antiphonary.

170 x 157 mm. (6 3/4 x 6 1/ 8 in.) at greatest dimensions.

PROVENANCE: From a choir book decorated for an unidentified Dominican convent in Bologna in the last quarter of the 14th century; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1990; Morris J. Pinto, New York; Sam Fogg, London, in 1994; Friedrich Georg Zeileis, Rauris, Austria.

LITERATURE: Gaudenz Freuler, ‘Nicolò di Giacomo da Bologna’, in New York, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1990, unpaginated, no.1; Gaudenz Freuler, Manifestatori delle cose miracolose: Arte italiana del ‘300 e del ‘400 da collezioni in Svizzera e nel Liechtenstein, exhibition catalogue, Lugano, 1991, pp.153-154, under no.55; Gaudenz Freuler, “Künder der Wunderbaren Dinge”: Frühe Italiensiche Malerei aus Sammlungen in der Schweiz und in Liechtenstein, exhibition catalogue, Lugano, 1991, p.154, under no.55; Friedrich Georg Zeileis, Più ridon le carte. Buchmalerei aus Mittelalter und Renaissance: Katalog einer Privatsammlung von illuminierten Einzelblättern, Rauris, 2006, pp.116-117, no.38; Gaudenz Freuler, Italian Miniatures from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Centuries, Cinisello Balsamo, 2013, Vol.I, pp.288 and 293, under no.24.

One of the leading manuscript illuminators of the Trecento in Italy, Niccolò (or Nicolò) di Giacomo di Nascimbene was active in Bologna over a period of more than half a century, between 1349 and 1403.

As the home of a great university, Bologna was a major centre of manuscript illumination in the 14th century. Several illuminators working in the city in this period are known by name, of which the best known and most famous today, as well as perhaps the most prolific, was Niccolò di Giacomo. One of the few Trecento Bolognese illuminators who regularly signed his works (as one scholar has noted, ‘Departing from the traditional anonymity of his predecessors and contemporaries, Nicolò made it a point to prominently sign his main miniatures’1), he is thought to have been a pupil of the anonymous illuminator known as the Master of 1346, who was the leading artist in the field in Bologna in the 1340s. Niccolò di Giacomo’s first dated work is an antiphonary of 1351 from the Bolognese monastery complex of San Michele in Bosco, now in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, and within a few years he came to dominate the production of both liturgical and secular illuminated manuscripts in and around Bologna in the second half of the 14th century. He must have supervised a large workshop, and his signature appears on a large number of works, including choir books, legal and humanistic texts, private devotional books, guild registers and communal statutes. Appointed illuminator to the city of Bologna in the 1380s, Niccolò’s reputation and success are also confirmed by the fact that he held other public offices in Bologna – notably his election, alongside the painter Simone dei Crocifissi, to the city’s consiglio dei quattrocento in 1394 – and also owned numerous properties in the city.

As has recently been noted, Niccolò di Giacomo ‘became one of the most prolific Bolognese illuminators of the second half of the Trecento, illuminating legal texts...guild registers, secular texts, and liturgical books.

Using a fairly limited palette that included vermilion, lead white, iron-gall brown ink, carbon black, azurite, and an organic pink, this book painter created some of the most engaging and lively illuminations of the era.’2 He was the founder of an extended family of artists in Bologna which spread over four generations and included some thirteen painters and two illuminators, including his nephew, Jacopo di Paolo. Mario Salmi has added that, ‘owing to his impressive productivity, Niccolò has considerable historical importance.

Apart from some minor stirrings in the regions of Emilia and around Rome, he was the dominating power and exercised a vast influence in Emilia, in the Romagna, and in the Veneto.’3

actual size

This historiated initial P was originally part of an antiphonary; a large choir book containing the sung parts – both text and music – of the Mass or Divine Office; a series of daily services performed by the clergy4. Antiphonaries were usually very large volumes that could be propped up on easels or bookstands to enable the monks in the choir to read them from a distance. Other extant cuttings from the same volume show Dominican saints, which would suggest that the antiphonary was intended for a Dominican church or convent in Bologna.

This splendid illumination, with its ‘heavily crowded, yet highly animated composition’5 of Christ hovering over his astonished disciples, was first published by Gaudenz Freuler in 1990. As he noted, ‘The dramatically rendered representation of Christ’s Ascension shows the Virgin and the Apostles gazing upwards to the figure of Christ flying across the sky. In his right hand he holds the banner of his glorious victory over death while he clasps with his left hand onto the initial P which defines the pictorial space. The peculiar motif of Christ propelling himself horizontally out of the pictorial space in the representation of the Ascension is an iconographical invention by Nicolò di Giacomo which he repeated in various occasions.’6 Comparable figures of Christ appear in Ascensions illuminated by Niccolò di Giacomo in a gradual (fig.1) in the Biblioteca Antoniana in Padua7, as well as a missal, signed and dated 1374, in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich8 and an ordinal (fig.2) in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York9. As Freuler pointed out, ‘It is to the smaller Ascension in the signed manuscript of the Morgan library (ca. 1365), that our initial shows its strongest stylistic affinities.’10 Among other comparable miniatures by Niccolò di Giacomo are examples in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire in Geneva, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Biblioteca Estense in Modena and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The present Ascension of Christ can, in particular, be identified as part of a group of nineteen related illuminations by Niccolò di Giacomo, all apparently from the same dismembered Dominican antiphonary (or set of antiphonaries), which are today divided among the collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Free Library in Philadelphia, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as well as a handful of private collections11. Although a chronology of Niccolò di Giacomo’s undated works is difficult, since his style did not seem to change very much throughout his long career, Gaudenz Freuler has posited an approximate date of c.1370-1375 for this associated series of manuscript illuminations.

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2.

2 SPANISH SCHOOL Late 16th Century The Risen Christ Appearing to the Apostles Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, on blue paper, with double framing lines in brown ink. The outlines pricked for transfer. Inscribed Barozzo in pencil on the verso.

173 x 442 mm. (6 3/4 x 17 3/ 8 in.) [image] 190 x 459 mm. (7 1/ 2 x 18 1/ 8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Probably from an album once in the library of the monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, until dispersed in the 19th century; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 1 July 1987, lot 3 (as Florentine School, late 16th Century); Private collection, Paris.

The present sheet is part of a large and interesting group of drawings by a handful of Spanish artists working at the monastery complex of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in the late 16th century. The monastery of El Escorial, fifty kilometres northwest of Madrid, had been founded by King Philip II of Spain in 1563, and the drawings of this distinctive group were executed as designs for embroidery (bordaduría) intended for the liturgical vestments of the priests – chasubles, copes, dalmatics and so forth – or as ornamental coverings for the altars. Each of the three main altars in the basilica at the Escorial had fifty sets of embroidered vestments and altar frontals, which were changed according to the religious calendar and the type of service1.

Drawn in pen and brown wash on blue, blue-green or blue-grey paper, these designs for embroidered vestments are among the most numerous and significant examples of 16th century Spanish draughtsmanship. As the French scholar Lizzie Boubli has described them, ‘This collection of drawings [is] today the most abundant and the most harmonious [known] from Renaissance Spain.’2 The drawings depict scenes from the Old Testament and the Gospels, and seem to be the product of a large workshop at the Escorial. The majority of the extant drawings from this group are still to be found in two albums kept in the Royal Library at the Escorial3. Numbering close to a hundred sheets, these highly finished drawings can in part be dated, on the basis of documentary evidence, to between 1587 and 1589.

Many of the Escorial drawings are, like the present sheet, finely and extensively pricked for transfer to an embroidery pattern. In common with almost all of the drawings in the library at the Escorial, however, the sheet does not show evidence of pouncing, which would indicate that a second, substitute cartoon was used to transfer the design to the actual fabric. This would have been done by backing the original drawings with a second sheet of paper that would serve as the substitute cartoon. The pricking of the outlines of the primary drawing would be transferred to the substitute cartoon beneath, which would then be pounced to transfer the design to the fabric, leaving the original drawings undamaged, and kept in an album for posterity4. As Mark McDonald has written of these embroidery designs, ‘most of the drawings in this group [are] executed in a carefully worked mixed technique: pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, and white heightening over light black underdrawing on blue paper. The precision and regularity of the pricking is remarkable, demonstrating the importance of transferring an accurate copy of the image for the embroidery while preserving the original sheet.’5 Indeed, this finely-pricked drawing of The Risen Christ Appearing to the Apostles is in exceptional condition.

It has been noted that there must have been several masters and their workshops, each with numerous assistants, working within the Escorial on the preparation of these cartoons for embroidery designs, or bordados. The leading artists and chief designers of this group, and the only ones documented by name in records of payment, are Miguel Barroso (c.1538-1590) – to whom the present sheet has been attributed in the past, to judge from the inscription on the verso – and Diego López de Escuriaz, who is recorded as working at the Escorial between 1587 and 1597. As has been noted, ‘King Phillip II took

great interest in the vestments that were to be used for the Escorial, and artists were well paid for their designs.’6 In September 1587, for example, López de Escuriaz received 357 silver reales in payment for eight designs for vestments, and was paid a further 297 reales for five more drawings in July 1589.

A tentative attribution to Diego López de Escuriaz may, in fact, be suggested for the present sheet on stylistic grounds, by comparison with other embroidery designs by or attributed to him at the Escorial and elsewhere. Executed with a refined touch of the pen and with a precise application of wash and white heightening, López de Escuriaz’s drawings are notable for the degree of characterization accorded the individual figures. In this drawing of The Risen Christ Appearing to the Apostles, the facial types, the way in which the hair and beards are drawn, and the manner of treating drapery all find parallels in other embroidery designs given to López de Escuriaz, such as an Adoration of the Magi in the Louvre7 and a Last Supper in the Yale University Art Gallery8.

The Italianate style and technique of these embroidery designs, and in particular the use of extensive white heightening and blue paper, would suggest that the Spanish artists working at the Escorial were influenced by the work of the Italian painters who were also active at the monastery, notably Federico Zuccaro and Pellegrino Tibaldi. They are also likely to have turned for inspiration, in terms of compositional ideas, to the extensive collection of Flemish, German and Italian prints assembled by Philip II and also kept at the Escorial. As Lisa Banner has noted, ‘More than mere documents of artisan production, the Escorial designs for embroidery reveal the impact of Northern European and Italian mannerism on Spanish art. This became the leading style of drawing at the Escorial embroidery workshop, and was later adopted by Madrid court artists.’9 Apart from those drawings still remaining in two albums in the library of the Escorial, examples of this distinctive group of Spanish embroidery designs are rare. A number of the drawings, perhaps part of the contents of one album, seem to have left the Escorial in the middle of the 19th century. These include four sheets today in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, as well as a handful of drawings in public collections outside Spain; in the British Museum, the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Louvre, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

The drawings and cartoons for embroidery produced at the Escorial, of which the present sheet is a particularly fine example, make a significant contribution to scholarly appreciation of the still relatively littleknown field of 16th century Spanish draughtsmanship. Furthermore, as Boubli has recently written, ‘These embroidery designs are indispensable for our understanding of the functioning of a specialized workshop in the unique social and cultural milieu at the Escorial, which comprised a sort of autonomous city in which a wide variety of artisans contributed to a post-Tridentine ideology...In broad terms, this rare cache of primary material of great significance...might shed light on the drawing practice of Spanish artists and clarify the impact of foreign influences – or indirect ones through prints – upon a native tradition.’10

3 CESARE ROSSETTI Rome c.1565-1644 Rome The Last Supper Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, on paper washed with a reddish tone.

Traces of a framing line in brown ink. Oval. Inscribed Mauro Oddi / La Cene / Vente Kaieman 1859 / Collection Sir J. Reynolds in pencil on the verso.

269 x 192 mm. (10 5/ 8 x 7 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Sir Joshua Reynolds, London (Lugt 2364); By descent to his niece, Mary Palmer, later Marchioness of Thomond; The posthumous Reynolds sales, London, A. C. de Poggi, 26 May 1794 onwards or London, H. Philips, 5-26 March 1798; D. Kaïeman, Brussels1; His posthumous sale, Paris, Hôtel des Commissaires-Priseurs, 26 April – 1 May 1858, lot 91 (as Girolamo Marchesi: ‘La Cène. – Dessin à la plume, fortement arrêté et lavé de bistre, sur fond bistré.’); The Abbé Thuliez (possibly Abbé Pierre-Joseph Thuliez, Cambrai), with his collector’s mark (Lugt 2395b) on the verso; Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 24 January 2001, lot 26 (as Roman School, Late 16th Century); Yvonne Tan Bunzl, London.

The Roman painter Cesare Rossetti was born around 1565 and, according to Giovanni Baglione’s Le vite de pittori, scultori ed architetti, began his artistic career during the pontificate of Sixtus V; that is, between 1585 and 1590. He is, however, first documented only in 1593, when he is recorded as a member of the Accademia di San Luca. He was an assistant of the painter Giuseppe Cesari, called Cavaliere d’Arpino, of whom he became a close friend and collaborator. (Indeed, Rossetti said of Arpino, in a trial transcript of April 1607, ‘we are friends together and we were brought up [together] from infancy’2.)

Rossetti painted monochrome scenes from the Passion for the Olgiati chapel in the Roman church of Santa Prassede, where Arpino worked on the vault frescoes in the late 1580s and early 1590s. He also painted monochrome frescoes for the Sala dei Capitani in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, as well as a cycle of scenes from the life of Saint Caesarius of Africa for the church of San Cesareo de Appia; a project supervised by Arpino but executed by Rossetti between 1600 and 1603. Rossetti also painted several works after drawings by Arpino, including two scenes of martyrdom in the Roman church of Santa Maria in Traspontina and some mosaics in the Vatican. Rossetti worked at Santa Maria in Aracoeli, San Silvestro al Quirinale and Santa Maria Prassede, and decorated the facades of a number of Roman palaces. He also painted religious and devotional easel pictures, often on a small scale.

Relatively few drawings by Cesare Rossetti have been identified, and of these very few can be connected to paintings by him. Unlike Arpino, who had a particular preference for drawing in red or black chalk, Rossetti seems to have worked mainly in pen and ink, although a number of chalk drawings are known.

Drawings by or attributed to Rossetti are today in the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Art Institute of Chicago, Christ Church in Oxford, the Louvre, the Albertina in Vienna, and elsewhere. A series of ten drawings of scenes from the Trojan War, each shaped in a distinctive way and several inscribed with the artist’s name, were on the art market in 1983 and are now dispersed among different private collections3.

An early drawing by the artist, probably datable before 1600, the present sheet can be compared stylistically with a study of Christ at the Column in the British Museum4 and a large drawing of The Crucifixion, sold at auction in 19975, as well as a drawing of The Virgin and Child in Glory with God the Father and Angels and Saints which was on the art market in Paris in 20066. Other, similar drawings include a study of Solomon Receiving the Queen of Sheba, in the Art Institute of Chicago7, and a Martyrdom of Saint Peter at Christ Church in Oxford8.

4 ANTONIO TEMPESTA Florence c.1555-1630 Rome A Battle Scene Pen and brown ink and brown wash, extensively heightened with gold, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, on paper washed brown. The sheet backed and laid at the edges onto a fictive mount.

Some areas of the sheet made up and repaired.

353 x 518 mm. (13 7/ 8 x 20 3/ 8 in.) [sheet] 393 x 557 mm. (15 1/ 2 x 22 in.) [including fictive mount] PROVENANCE: Possibly Cardinal Scipione Borghese, Rome; Part of a collection of drawings formed in Tuscany in the 18th century; Comte Eugène d’Oultremont, Château de Presles, Aiseau-Presle, Belgium, and thence by descent until 1986; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Nobleman’), London, Christie’s, 1 July 1986, lot 56; Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London, in 1988; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 8 January 1991, lot 108; Private collection, France.

LITERATURE: Eckhard Leuschner, Antonio Tempesta: Ein Bahnbrecher des römischen Barock und seine europäische Wirkung, Petersberg, 2005, pp.489-490, fig.14.19.

EXHIBITED: London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, European Drawings, 1988, no.20.

Active as a painter and frescante, as well as a draughtsman and printmaker, Antonio Tempesta was probably trained in the Florentine studio of the Flemish painter Jan van der Straet, known as Stradanus.

Like his master, Tempesta may have worked under the supervision of Giorgio Vasari on the decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio. He was also a pupil of Santi di Tito, and is listed as a member of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence in December 1576. By 1577, however, he had settled in Rome, where, apart from occasional trips to Florence, he was to work for the remainder of his long and productive career.

Tempesta was employed by Pope Gregory XIII on the fresco decoration of several rooms in the Vatican, and also received commissions for paintings and fresco decorations for various churches, palaces and villas in and around Rome. Among his important Roman commissions were a series of frescoes for the church of Santo Stefano Rotondo, painted between 1583 and 1585, and frescoes for the Lateran Baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte, completed in 1601, as well as a series of chiaroscuro paintings used to decorate Saint Peter’s for the canonization of Saint Carlo Borromeo in 1610. Further afield, Tempesta participated in the decoration of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, the Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola and the Villa Lante at Bagnaia; the latter decorated with frescoes of hunting scenes. He also painted a number of easel pictures, sometimes on copper or on pietra paesina, or coloured stone. Among his students in Rome was the young Jacques Callot, who accompanied him to Florence in 1611-1612 to illustrate the funeral book of Margherita of Austria. Although he worked in Rome for most of his career, Tempesta continued to earn significant commissions from Florentine patrons, including the Medici Grand Dukes, for whom he painted several battle scenes, as well as a Resurrection of Christ for the church of Santa Felicità in Florence. The artist remained active until at least 1627.

Antonio Tempesta’s work as a painter remains much less well known today, however, than his activity as a printmaker and draughtsman. He was a productive etcher who, as the Tempesta scholar Eckhard Leuschner has noted, ‘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 Beginning around 1589 and continuing throughout the course of his career, Tempesta created more than 1,700 prints, almost all of which were based on his own designs, rather than those of other artists. Another print scholar adds that, ‘In the course of his some thirty years of etching activity, neither his etching technique nor his drawing style developed very much. His strength as an etcher lay in his ability to design lively compositions and to execute the best of these in a relatively fluid manner of drawing.’2

Tempesta produced a large number of prints of hunting and battle scenes, as well as several etchings of battles between Christian soldiers and cavalry and infidel troops to illustrate editions of Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata. These kinds of cavalry and battle scenes are also the subject of many of the artist’s drawings, which often find echoes in his etchings. As Leuschner points out, ‘In his hunting and battle scenes, which he started to produce in the 1590s, Tempesta was the first Roman etcher to consistently reproduce his personal drawing manner.’3 Tempesta’s battle compositions are generally scenes of dramatic action but often lack a single dominant figure, nor is there usually any sustained attempt at a narrative context. The artist’s interest in depictions of military campaigns and hunting scenes are a legacy of his training with Stradanus in Florence, where he also would have seem similar battle scenes throughout the decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio.

Tempesta was a fairly prolific draughtsman – though the number of his extant drawings is not on a par with that of his countless prints – and a large number of drawings by him are today in the Louvre, while other significant groups are in the British Museum, the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, and elsewhere. The present sheet is unusual among the artist’s drawings, however, in its impressive scale and high degree of finish. While its composition is similar to such etchings by Tempesta as Alexander the Great Directing a Battle or The Roman Commander Cerialis Attacks near Trier4, as well as some of the scenes illustrating Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata5, this very large sheet – elaborated with extensive heightening in gold, and with the addition of a fictive mount border – was almost certainly intended as a finished, independent work of art.

In this context, it is interesting to note what may be a specific reference to this large drawing, or one very much like it, in the manuscript inventory of paintings belonging to the noted 17th century Roman collector Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577-1633). The inventory, which may be dated to between 1615 and 1630, lists a pair of large, framed drawings by Antonio Tempesta: ‘Two drawings in chiaroscuro on dark yellow paper with black frames, height 1 2/3, width 5 1/4, by Tempesta’ (‘Doi disegni chiari oscuri in carta gialla con cornice negra alti 1 2/3 larghi 5 1/4. Tempesta.)’6 As Eckhard Leuschner has noted, with reference to the present sheet, ‘Among the surviving documentary evidence of Scipione Borghese’s Tempesta acquisitions, the Doi disegni oscuri chiari con cornice in carta gialla negra are especially interesting. They must have been pictorial drawings by the artist executed on paper, representing, in their monochromatic composition, the antique bas-reliefs he valued. One – albeit damaged – example of Tempesta’s elaborate technique was on the art market some years ago: on brown paper (probably the above-mentioned carta gialla), one can see a line of mounted soldiers in ‘antique’ armour in the foreground, moving from a small hill towards a battle in the middle and far distance. In its composition the drawing is reminiscent of the etchings of the Alexander series, but this is not a rapid sketch but a highly elaborate drawing by Tempesta. The drawing is not only executed with brown washes and white heightening, but also has various accents in gold, which gives it the impression of something precious, which must have appealed to a collector like Scipione Borghese, who was obsessed with art treasures and kunstkammer objects.’7 While this impressive Battle Scene cannot be definitively identified as one of the two large framed drawings by Tempesta recorded in the Borghese collection, the mention of such sizeable and highly finished drawings in one of the most prominent Roman collections would suggest that the artist must have occasionally produced such elaborate works as this for sale to prominent collectors and connoisseurs. In terms of its sheer scale and degree of finish, as well as with its extensive use of gold heightening, the present sheet is undoubtedly one of the most exceptional drawings by Antonio Tempesta to have survived to this day.

5 SIR PETER PAUL RUBENS Siegen 1577-1640 Antwerp Recto: A Sheet of Anatomical Studies: A Left Forearm in Two Related Positions with Parts of the Torsi and a Head Verso: Fragment of a Drawing of the Hair and Shoulder of a Man Pen and brown ink.

269 x 187 mm. (10 5/ 8 x 7 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably acquired on his Grand Tour between 1738 and 1740 by Sir Roger Newdigate, 5th Bt., Arbury, Warwickshire; The Newdegate Settlement, London; Their sale (‘The Property of the Newdegate Settlement’), London, Christie’s, 6 July 1987, lot 65 (sold for £88,000); Bernard Quaritch Ltd., London; Hazlitt Gooden & Fox, London, in 1992; Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Rupp, New York; Their anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 23 January 2001, lot 156 (sold for $203,750); W. M. Brady and Co., New York, and Thomas Williams Fine Art Ltd., London, in 2001; Private collection, Massachusetts.

LITERATURE: Michael Jaffé, ‘Rubens’s Anatomy Book’, in London, Christie’s, Old Master Drawings, 67 July 1987, pp.58-59; Jeffrey M. Muller, ‘Rubens’ Anatomieboek / Rubens’ Anatomy Book’, in Antwerp, Rubenshuis, Rubens Cantoor: een verzameling tekeningen ontstaan in Rubens’ atelier, exhibition catalogue, 1993, p.97, no.7, illustrated in colour p.57, pl.3; Anne-Marie Logan and Michiel C. Plomp, Peter Paul Rubens: The Drawings, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2005, pp.98-100, fig.53, under no.16; AnneMarie Logan, ‘Rubens’s drawings after Julius Held’, Oud Holland, 2007, Nos.3-4, p.165; Clifford S. Ackley, ‘Master drawings from the collection of Horace Wood Brock’, The Magazine Antiques, February 2009, p.56, illustrated p.52, fig.1; Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 2009, p.13, pp.90-92, illustrated p.12; Domenico Laurenza, ‘Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy: Images from a Scientific Revolution’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Winter 2012, p.43, fig.60.

EXHIBITED: Antwerp, Rubenshuis, Rubens Cantoor: een verzameling tekeningen ontstaan in Rubens’ atelier, 1993, no.7; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.1.

This remarkable drawing is one of a group of around fourteen anatomical studies by Rubens, eleven of which, including the present sheet, were acquired by Sir Roger Newdigate (1719-1806) in the middle of the 18th century and remained in the Newdigate (or Newdegate) collection until they were dispersed at auction in London in 19871. Rubens is thought to have made these ecorché drawings to illustrate a never-published Anatomy Book, and probably also as models for prints. Indeed, a number of the drawings were engraved, in reverse, by Paulus Pontius, one of the leading engravers associated with Rubens and his workshop; these were published in Antwerp after the master’s death in 1640. In the late 1620s Rubens’s assistant Willem Panneels made several drawn copies after this small group of anatomy drawings, some of which he inscribed as being taken from the painter’s ‘annotomibock’; these are part of the so-called Rubens cantoor group of around five hundred drawings – all copies after originals

by Rubens, many by Panneels – today in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen.

The ‘annotomibock’, or ‘anatomy book’, mentioned by Panneels was dismembered after Rubens’s death, and the drawings it contained, including the present sheet, were dispersed. As Anne-Marie Logan has noted, ‘The anatomy book shows Rubens learning the motion of the human body, how muscles function under tension and how they are attached to the skeleton’2, while Jeffrey Muller adds, ‘Rubens had to get beneath the skin to see how the muscles of the hand would grasp a sword or how the muscles of the face

recto

might grimace in pain or smile in love...[the anatomy drawings] document the programmatic efforts Rubens made in Italy, from 1600 to 1608, to master the proportions, ideal forms, movements, and gestures of man’s body. As part of this program, anatomy was fundamental.’3 Rubens’s anatomical drawings have generally been dated to his time in Italy, between 1600 and 1608, and more particularly towards the earlier part of this period. The late 17th century French amateur and writer Roger de Piles, one of the artist’s earliest biographers, noted that Rubens greatly admired the anatomical studies of Leonardo da Vinci, which he is likely to have seen in Spain when he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Madrid by the Duke of Mantua. He may also have attended human dissections during his time in Italy, perhaps at the famous anatomical theatre in Padua, which was not far from Mantua, where he was court painter. However, these ecorché drawings by Rubens appear not to have been drawn from actual dissected bodies. At least some of the full-length ecorché studies appear to have been copied from a bronze sculpture of a flayed man by the Dutch sculptor Willem van Tetrode (c.1525-1580), which Rubens studied from different angles4.

A superb example of Rubens’s virtuoso penmanship, the present sheet reflects the artist’s profound and concentrated interest in anatomical study. In this drawing, Rubens represented the flayed arms of two male figures, shown in an interlocking arrangement. (It is interesting to note that Willem Panneels’s copy after the present sheet in Copenhagen5 separates the two studies of a flayed left arm and places them more or less side by side on the page, a much less dramatic composition than is seen here, in Rubens’s original drawing.) That this drawing was once half of a larger sheet of anatomical studies – and as such was almost certainly part of a notebook – is shown in the fact that the pen and ink sketch on the verso of the present sheet is a continuation of another anatomical drawing by Rubens of A Left Forearm in Two Positions and a Right Forearm (fig.1), also once part of the Newdigate group and today in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York6. Several other drawings from this group of anatomical drawings by Rubens show studies of what appears to be the same model of a flayed left arm, examined from several different points of view; one of these is a double-sided sheet today in the Art Gallery of Ontario7, and others are in private collections8.

As David Jaffé has written, ‘Examining Rubens’s ecorché studies transforms the way we read his painted figures: these ‘anatomical drawings’ were vital to the development of his Michelangelesque style of about 1610. The formidable agility and rippling musculature that gives his figures their almost superhuman qualities take their authority from these studies...The intertwined arms of the ecorché studies expose the bones of Rubens’s spatial thinking.’9

verso

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6 GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called IL GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna Lot and his Daughters Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with traces of framing lines in brown ink. Laid down on an 18th century English mount, inscribed Guercino in brown ink at the bottom. Numbered 544. in brown ink at the upper right of the mount.

180 x 235 mm. (7 1/ 8 x 8 7/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Nathaniel Hone, London (Lugt 2793); Probably his sales, London, Christie and Ansell, 4-7 April 1781 or London, Hutchins, 7-15 February 1785; Sir Joshua Reynolds, London (Lugt 2364); The posthumous Reynolds sales, London, A. C. de Poggi, 26 May 1794 onwards or London, H. Philips, 5-26 March 1798; Sir Thomas Lawrence, London (Lugt 2445), his drystamp at the lower left; Probably purchased after Lawrence’s death, together with the rest of his collection, by Samuel Woodburn, London, in 1834; The Earls of Crawford and Balcarres, Balcarres House, Colinsburgh, Fife; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Denis Mahon, Il Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, 1591-1666): Catalogo critico dei disegni, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, 1968, p.31, note 8 and p.54, under nos.21-22; Stéphane Loire, Le Guerchin en France, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1990, p.92, under no.24.

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Il Guercino, 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. His drawings – figural and compositional studies, landscapes, caricatures and genre scenes – have always been greatly admired by collectors and connoisseurs; as Pierre-Jean Mariette wrote, ‘This painter has, beyond all this, a seductive way with the pen.’

This drawing is a preparatory compositional study for one of the most significant works of Guercino’s early career; the large canvas of Lot and His Daughters (fig.1) painted in 1617 for Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, the archbishop of Bologna and later Pope Gregory XV, and today in the monastery of San Lorenzo at El Escorial, near Madrid1. This was one of three paintings commissioned from Guercino by Cardinal Ludovisi executed

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in 1617, the others being a Return of the Prodigal Son and a Susanna and the Elders2. A fourth canvas, of The Resurrection of Tabitha by Saint Peter, also commissioned from Guercino by Ludovisi, was painted the following year3. The Lot and His Daughters is recorded in inventories of the Villa Ludovisi in Rome in 1623 and 1633, but in 1664 both it and the Susanna and the Elders were presented by Prince Niccolò Ludovisi, nephew of Gregory XV, to King Phillip IV of Spain. The two paintings were placed in the Escorial, where the Lot and His Daughters remains today, while the Susanna and the Elders was transferred in 1814 to the Palacio Real in Madrid and is now in the Prado.

Painted when the artist was in his late twenties, the Lot and his Daughters is thought to have been the first of the four Ludovisi pictures to be painted by Guercino. The importance of the commission is reflected in the fact that seven preparatory drawings for the painting, including the present sheet, are known or recorded. Other extant compositional studies for the painting include drawings in the Louvre4, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (fig.2)5 and the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan6, as well as a double-sided sheet in the Szépmüvészeti Müzeum in Budapest (fig.3)7. In addition, Nicholas Turner has identified a drawing in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid as a study for the Escorial painting8, while another compositional study for the Lot and his Daughters was once among the large number of drawings by Guercino in the collection of the 18th century portrait painter Thomas Hudson and is now lost, although its appearance is recorded in a colour engraving of 17639.

The drawings for the 1617 painting of Lot and his Daughters show Guercino experimenting with two different compositional ideas; either with the figures shown side by side in a line, as in the Louvre and Hermitage drawings, or with the three figures arranged in a pyramidical composition, as seen in both sides of the Budapest drawing and the drawing in the Brera, as well as the final painting. As David Stone has noted of the present sheet, ‘Guercino conceived of a much sexier treatment for one of the daughters.

Placed on the right of the composition, she is shown from behind in an erotic, langourous pose. In the final, painted version, by contrast, she is shifted to the left, shown in profile, and given a more decorous, upright position. Whereas in the drawing she is more passive, in the painting she aggressively helps tip back Lot’s wine glass. Guercino often revised the more discursive or genre-like elements of his preparatory drawings when he got to the painting stage.’10 The present sheet, first mentioned in a footnote by Sir Denis Mahon in a 1968 exhibition catalogue, has remained very little known to scholars, and indeed does not appear to have ever been illustrated before now. The drawing has a long and distinguished English provenance dating back to the 18th century, and belonged to three prominent artist-collectors. The portrait painter Nathaniel Hone (17181784), whose collector’s mark is stamped at the lower right of the sheet, was a founder member of the Royal Academy, and a noted collector of both drawings and prints. His collection was dispersed at auction in two sales, in 1781 and 1785. The drawing also bears the collector’s mark of the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), whose collection of several thousand drawings, for the most part Italian works of the 16th and 17th centuries, was sold at two auctions in 1794 and 1798. The present sheet then entered the renowned collection of the portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), perhaps the single greatest English collector of Old Master drawings.

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7 TEODORO FILIPPO DI LIAGNO, called FILIPPO NAPOLETANO Naples or Rome 1589-1629 Rome Studies of the Skull and Skeleton of a Horse Pen and brown ink. Laid down on an 18th century English mount. Inscribed Christie 20 June 22 [...] 43. / d and Paseroti in brown ink on the reverse of the mount. Further inscribed with a shelfmark L / No 13 in brown ink on the reverse of the mount.

203 x 287 mm. (8 x 11 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Hon. John Spencer, Althorp, Northamptonshire; By descent to George John, 2nd Earl Spencer, Althorp, Northamptonshire (Lugt 1530 twice); His sale (‘A Superb Cabinet of Drawings; The Entire Collection of a Nobleman: Formed with Refined Taste and Judgement, about the Middle of the Last Century...’), London, T. Philipe, 10-18 June 1811, part of lot 346 (as Bartolomeo Passarotti: ‘Passerotto. Two – studies of Horses’ bones, and of horses’ heads – both masterly pen’), bt. Lambert for 4s.6d.; Anonymous sale (‘A small, but very select assemblage, of Prints and Drawings...’), London, Christie’s, 20 June 1822, part of lot 43 (‘Drawings by old Masters, various, 24’)1, bt. Douce (or Muswell?) for 4s.; Possibly Francis Douce, London; Iohan Quirijn van Regteren Altena, Amsterdam; By descent to his wife, Augusta Louisa Wilhelmina van Regteren Altena, née van Royen, Amsterdam, until 2001; Sale (‘Property of the Heirs of the Late Professor I. Q. van Regteren Altena’), London, Sotheby’s, 11 July 2001, lot 13 (as Sinibaldo Scorza); Kate de Rothschild and Yvonne Tan Bunzl, London.

LITERATURE: Corinna Höper, Bartolomeo Passarotti, Worms, 1987, Vol.II, p.112, no.Z 9 and p.176, under no.Z 273 (as Passarotti), not illustrated.

EXHIBITED: Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Italiaanse Tekeningen uit een Amsterdamse Particuliere Verzameling, April-June 1970, no.57 (as Bartolomeo Passarotti); London, Kate de Rothschild, Drawings and Sketches, 2003, no.1 (as Passarotti).

Teodoro Filippo di Liagno, called Filippo d’Angeli but better known as Filippo Napoletano, was a pupil of his father, an artist working in Rome, although he seems to have completed his education in Naples.

Around 1614 he returned to Rome, where he encountered the landscape paintings of Agostino Tassi, whose work is sometimes confused with his, and was also influenced by the paintings of Caravaggio and his followers, as well as the German painter Adam Elsheimer. By 1617 he was in Florence, where he was employed alongside Jacques Callot at the court of the Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici. (Indeed, Filippo Baldinucci states that Napoletano was one of Cosimo’s favourite artists). He remained in Florence until 1621 before returning to Rome, where he worked on the decoration of a number of villas and palaces, notably a group of landscape frescoes in the Palazzo Bentivoglio, completed in 1623, and a series of seascapes for the Palazzo Barberini, painted in 1631. For the remainder of his career Napoletano worked in both Rome and Naples, producing cabinet pictures of battle scenes, landscapes and marine subjects for private collectors. He also painted a large number of religious and mythological subjects in a distinctive technique of oil on different types of variegated and coloured stone, known as pietra paesina. As a draughtsman, Napoletano was much admired by contemporary collectors such as Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici, as well as later connoisseurs like Pierre-Jean Mariette in the 18th century.

Significant groups of drawings by the artist are today in the Uffizi, the Louvre and the Musée des BeauxArts in Lille.

Long attributed to the Bolognese artist Bartolomeo Passarotti (1529-1592), and more recently given to the Genoese draughtsman Sinibaldo Scorza (1589-1631), this fine drawing was independently attributed to Filippo Napoletano by both Hugo Chapman and the late Marco Chiarini. Napoletano produced a

number of prints and drawings (the latter in both pen and ink and chalk) of animal skeletons, and was recognized by his contemporaries as an expert in anatomical studies of this type. As the writer and art dealer Giulio Mancini noted of Napoletano in 1621, ‘he earned a reputation and esteem for himself particularly in small things of fires, ships and animals, and was highly regarded for certain extravagant pictures of animal skeletons.’2 Between 1620 and 1621 Napoletano executed a series of etchings of animal skeletons entitled Incisioni di diversi scheletri di animali. The only extant complete set of these etchings, numbering twenty-one prints in all, is in an album in the collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence3, although a set of modern impressions, taken from nineteen of the surviving plates, is in the Gabinetto dei Disegni e Stampe in the Uffizi4. The Incisioni di diversi scheletri di animali was the artist’s most celebrated series of prints executed during his Florentine period, and was dedicated to the German physician and scientist Johannes Faber (1574-1629), the papal doctor, anatomist and botanist whom Napoletano had met as a young artist in Rome. Faber had a strong interest in animal anatomy, and had assembled a study collection of around one hundred human and animal skeletons at his home near the Pantheon. It is thought that Faber commissioned Napoletano to produce a series of etchings of his skeletons, a project that was not begun before the artist left Rome in 1617 to settle in Florence. The work was eventually completed by August 1621, and was possibly delivered to Faber by the artist himself, who returned to Rome following the death of Cosimo II in February of that year.

As Richard Wallace has noted of Napoletano’s etchings from the Incisioni di diversi scheletri di animali series, ‘Liagno attempted to make his prints rather more than simple illustrations of various skeletons, although they are basically accurate in purely scientific terms.’5 Furthermore, in the words of Philip Hofer, ‘Here the scientific, the macabre, and a baroque sense of decoration are all happily combined.’6 Only a handful of preparatory drawings by Napoletano for the Incisioni di diversi scheletri di animali are known, however, including a drawing of the skeleton of a horse, in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence7, and a study of a mouse skeleton in the Louvre8.

This sheet of studies of the skull and part of the skeleton of a horse reflects Napoletano’s close study of Johannes Faber’s collection of animal skeletons, and may also be tentatively related to his etching of the complete skeleton of a horse from the Incisioni di diversi scheletri di animali9. Stylistically comparable pen and ink drawings of parts of animal skeletons by Napoletano are among the nearly one hundred drawings by the artist the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille, including a study of the skull of a pelican10, a drawing of the skull of a pig or boar11, and a sheet with two studies of the skull of a goat12.

The present sheet is first recorded, in the latter half of the 18th century, in the collection of the Earls Spencer at Althorp in Northamptonshire. At the Spencer sale in 1811, it was sold, together with another drawing, both as by Bartolomeo Passarotti (‘Passerotto. Two – studies of Horses’ bones, and of horses’ heads – both masterly pen’). The other drawing in the lot was probably the pen and ink study by Passarotti of a horse’s head and skull, bearing the Spencer collector’s mark, which was later in the collection of the 19th century antiquarian Francis Douce and is now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford13.

8 FRANCESCO MONTELATICI, called CECCO BRAVO Florence c.1601-1661 Innsbruck A Dream: A Male Figure Appearing to a Seated Woman Red and black chalk.

187 x 274 mm. (7 3/ 8 x 10 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably Filippo Baldinucci, Florence, and by descent to his heirs; Probably acquired from them by Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri, Florence; Probably William Kent, London, and sold by him in the early 1760s; The Earls of Crawford and Balcarres, Balcarres House, Colinsburgh, Fife; Private collection.

Among the most original and distinctive artists of the Florentine Seicento, Francesco Montelatici, known as Cecco Bravo, receives only a passing mention, as a student of Giovanni Bilivert, in Filippo Baldinucci’s account of 17th century Florentine painting. By 1629 he had established his own studio in Florence, where he worked for almost his entire career. Among his most significant public commissions were mural frescoes for the Sala degli Argenti in the Palazzo Pitti, painted in the late 1630s, while in the later years of his career he painted easel pictures, many of which are now lost. Cecco Bravo was also a gifted draughtsman, whose drawings, as the 18th century Florentine collector and art historian Niccolò Gabburri noted, ‘are sought and treasured by connoisseurs because they truly possess a spirit and wonderful expression beyond all human understanding.’1 Although a fairly large number of drawings by the artist survive2, only a few of these may be related to paintings.

The present sheet is a splendid example of Cecco Bravo’s distinctive draughtsmanship, characterized by the use of a combination of red and black chalk and a feathery, seemingly insubstantial depiction of form; an idiosyncratic technique that ‘challenged the rigor of Florentine disegno in its fine disregard for contour.’3 On stylistic grounds, it may be tentatively added to a small group of drawings by the artist, all executed in red and black chalk, which are known as the ‘Sogni’ (or ‘Dreams’). This enigmatic series of drawings, which number about thirty in total, were first referred to as ‘sogni’ by a previous owner; the Florentine scholar Niccolò Gabburri, who also noted that they had originally belonged to Filippo Baldinucci4. The precise subjects of these ‘Dream’ drawings, which are thought to date from relatively late in Cecco Bravo’s career, have long resisted identification, though Gabburri suggests that they were representations of the artist’s own nighttime visions. (The contemporary writer Giovanni Cinelli described Cecco Bravo as a man ‘of melancholy demeanour who, like all hypochondriacs, was wont to speak of the dreams he had at night as if they were the truest things that had come to pass.’5) While some religious symbolism is found in several of these ‘Dream’ drawings, they do not appear to illustrate any known ecclesiastical or literary narrative, and may simply be a product of the artist’s melancholic imagination, and done for his own pleasure6.

After passing though the collections of both Baldinucci and Gabburri, Cecco Bravo’s ‘Dreams’ – almost certainly bound into an album with many other drawings – were acquired from Gabburri’s heirs by the English art dealer William Kent. The drawings seem to have been dispersed in London in the middle of the 18th century; indeed all of the extant ‘Dream’ drawings have later English provenances. (For example, between twelve and eighteen of these drawings were included in the sale of the 18th century portrait painter George Knapton in London in 1807, where they were identified simply as ‘large dreams’ or ‘a midnight dream, &c.’ and described as ‘very fantastical’, ‘elegant’ and ‘pleasing compositions’7.) Less than half of the thirty or so drawings from this group of ‘Dreams’ by Cecco Bravo are known today, almost all of which are in museums; a total of eleven drawings are divided between the collections of the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Louvre, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen and the J. F. Willumsen Museum in Frederikssund, Denmark8.

9 HENDRICK SONNIUS The Hague c.1615-c.1688 England An Italianate Landscape with Travellers and a Donkey Pen and brown ink and brown wash on vellum. Inscribed A. v. d. Velde in brown ink near the lower left.

Inscribed (signed?) henritio zonius fl. 60 / Roma 1647 in black chalk on the verso.

346 x 485 mm. (13 5/ 8 x 19 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: George Edward Habich, Kassel (Lugt 862)1; His sale, Stuttgart, H. G. Gutekunst, 27 April 1899 onwards, lot 753 (‘Henritio Zonius. Um 1650. Landschaft bei Tivoli mit dem Sibyllentempel, im Vordergrunde rechts ein Hirtenpaar mit zwei Maultieren. L. 49 cm, H. 34 1/2 cm. Feder und sepia.

Miniaturartig ausgeführte Zeichnung auf Pergament.’), sold for 20 Marks to Meder; Anonymous sale, Frankfurt, F. A. C. Prestel, 27-29 June 1927, lot 355 [catalogue unlocated]; Iohan Quirijn van Regteren Altena, Amsterdam (his posthumous sale stamp [Lugt 4617] stamped on the verso); Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: I. Q. van Regteren Altena, ‘Vergeten Namen. I: Hendrick Sonnius’, Oud Holland, 1930, pp.165-167, fig.1; Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler, Leipzig, 1937, Vol.XXXI, p.281; Ingrid Oud, Michiel Jonker and Marijn Schapelhouman, In de ban van Italië: tekeningen uit een Amsterdamse verzameling, Amsterdam, 1995, p.39, no.15; Frédéric Elsig, L’art et ses marchés: La peinture flamande et hollandaise (XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles) au Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, Paris, 2009, pp.270-271, under no.166.

EXHIBITED: Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum, In de ban van Italië: Tekeningen uit een Amsterdamse verzameling, 1995, no.15.

A pupil of Sybrecht Moninckx in The Hague between 1634 and 1635, although his name already appears in the register of the Guild of Saint Luke in the city by 1631, Hendrick Sonnius spent some time in Rome in the 1640s, where he may have worked for the Pope. He was back in The Hague by 1649, and 1656 is recorded as one of forty-eight artists – including Jan de Bisschop, Jacob van der Does, Joris van der Hagen and Adriaen van de Venne – who founded the Confrerie Pictura, a local brotherhood of painters in The Hague. Sonnius is last recorded in The Hague in 1659, and seems to have spent the latter part of his career in England, where he is thought to have died at a very advanced age. He may perhaps be identified with the artist (Frederik?) Sonnius who worked in London as one of the chief assistants to Sir Peter Lely, and who was described in 1688 as ‘old and touchy’2. Although Hendrick Sonnius is documented as a landscape and portrait painter, only two paintings3 and two drawings by the artist are known today.

Drawn in Rome in 1647, this very large drawing on vellum by Sonnius was first published by a previous owner; the curator and art historian I. Q. van Regteren Altena. As he described the drawing: ‘On the right, in the distance, is a country house surrounded by pines and cypresses, as used to be found near Rome and in the Campagna; above the river, on the left, one thinks one can make out the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli. It appears that a particular place is not depicted here, which may be deduced from the placement of the little temple.’4 The figures in the drawing, as Van Regteren Altena points out, may have been inspired by those in paintings that Sonnius saw in Italy. As he further notes, ‘The very individuality of the technique, when rendering many different elements, still displays a fine division of shadows and light, which is concentrated primarily on the bare tree trunk in the centre, and is certainly part of the artistic baggage that [Sonnius] has brought with him from the north. For the time being, this should encourage us to give Hendrick Sonnius a place alongside Willem de Heer in the history of Dutch drawing.’5 The only other known drawing by Hendrick Sonnius is a much smaller pastoral scene drawn in graphite on vellum, signed and dated 1645, in the collection of the British Museum6.

10 ORAZIO FIDANI Florence 1610-c.1656 Florence A Young Boy with his Arm Raised Black and red chalk on blue paper. Laid down. Inscribed Di Orazio fidani in brown ink at the lower right1.

190 x 145 mm. (7 1/ 2 x 5 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 21 November 1974, lot 80; Adolphe Stein, Paris, in 1977; Schröder und Liesewitz Kunsthandel, Bremen; Private collection, Bremen.

LITERATURE: Christel Thiem, Florentiner Zeichner des Frühbarock, Munich, 1977, p.397, no.202, pl.202; Jacob Bean, 17th Century Italian Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1979, p.140, under no.178; Marina Mojana, Orazio Fidani, Milan, 1996, pp.30-31, fig.25.

Among the most talented of the many artists trained in the Florentine studio of Giovanni Bilivert, Orazio Fidani was a painter of religious, allegorical and literary subjects, although relatively few of his paintings survive today. He painted works for churches in Florence and elsewhere in Tuscany, notably a Meeting at the Golden Gate of 1643 in San Francesco in Cortona and a Miracle of San Frediano of 1645 in the parish church at Cascina, as well as several paintings and frescoes for the Certosa at Galluzzo, outside Florence. The contemporary biographer Filippo Baldinucci notes that Fidani also painted numerous canvases for Florentine collectors, and his oeuvre includes several easel pictures depicting scenes from Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido.

Only a handful of autograph drawings by Fidani are known, and just three that have been securely related to extant paintings2, to which the present sheet may now be added. Confidently drawn in red and black chalk on blue paper, this is a preparatory study for the angel at the top of Fidani’s large, late altarpiece of Tobias Healing His Father’s Blindness, painted in 16543.

Commissioned by the Galli family for the youth confraternity of the Arcangelo Raffaello (known as the Compagnia della Scala) in Florence, the painting hung for some two hundred years in the entrance hall of the confraternity, and was frequently praised by critics as one of the artist’s finest works. With the suppression of the religious confraternities in the 19th century, the painting was transferred to the Uffizi in 1853, by which time it was in poor condition4. Restored in 1984, the painting was sent on loan to NATO headquarters in Brussels in 1987.

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actual size

11 STEFANO DELLA BELLA Florence 1610-1664 Florence Study of a Moor with Arms Outstretched Black chalk, with grey and pink washes.

179 x 129 mm. (7 x 5 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Charles Rogers, London (Lugt 625)1; By descent to his brother-in-law William Cotton, Leatherhead, Surrey; His son, William Cotton the Younger; Rogers sale, London, Th. Philipe, 15-23 April 1799, part of lot 57 (‘Two- heads of moors – very fine, pen and Indian ink, with a tinge of colour’); Henry Scipio Reitlinger, London (Lugt 2274a)2, his mark on the old backing sheet; His sale, London, Sotheby’s, 9 December 1953, part of lot 28; Hans Calmann, London; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman’), New York, Christie’s, 12 January 1995, part of lot 34; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1995; John Winter, London.

LITERATURE: Anthony Blunt, The Drawings of G. B. Castiglione & Stefano della Bella in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1954, p.95, under no.31.

Stefano della Bella succeeded Jacques Callot as Medici court designer and printmaker, and the present sheet was probably intended as a costume design for one of the various pageants, masquerades and ballets of the Medici court. It may in particular be related to the performances of the Accademia degli Immobili, founded in 1648 under the patronage of Cardinal Gian Carlo de’ Medici and made up of prominent Florentine citizens and noblemen who staged one or two musical plays each year. In the late 1650s and early 1660s Della Bella was often called upon to supply costume designs for these productions. It is interesting to note that, in each of the productions of the Accademia degli Immobili, a part was written for the Moorish servant of Cardinal de’ Medici. Indeed, among a large group of fulllength costume studies by Della Bella in the British Museum – all from the same period as the drawing here exhibited – is a study of a costumed moor (fig.1), quite possibly depicting the same model3. A pendant drawing of the same moor, facing to the left (fig.2), shared the same provenance as the present sheet until 1995, and is today in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art4.

Five related bust-length studies of female moors wearing elaborate headdresses, also drawn with pale washes of colour, are in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle5, while other drawings of costumed moors by Della Bella are in the Louvre6 and the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome7.

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actual size

12 JACOB VAN DER DOES Amsterdam 1623-1673 Sloten Sheep Grazing among Classical Monuments Pen and brush and grey wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in brown ink. Laid down on an 18th century mount. Signed JV Does. in black chalk at the lower left centre. Inscribed HIC SITA EST AMYMONE MARCI OPTIMA ET PVLCHERIMA / LANIFICA . PIA. PUDICA. FRVGI CASTA DOMISEDA in grey ink at the left, and TVRCIVS / APRONIANVS / V.C / PRAEF. VRBI / CVRAVIT in grey ink at the centre. Further inscribed 1803 P 37 / 29 . N 134 in brown ink on the reverse of the old mount.

255 x 406 mm. (10 x 16 in.)

PROVENANCE: Sir Thomas Lawrence, London (Lugt 2445); Probably purchased after Lawrence’s death, together with the rest of his collection, in 1834 by Samuel Woodburn, London; Probably William Esdaile, Clapham Common, London (Lugt 2617), with part of his mark trimmed and overmounted at the lower right corner of the mount, and with his inscriptions on the reverse of the mount1; Possibly Charles Fairfax Murray, London2; Adelbert Salusbery Cockayne-Cust, 5th Baron Brownlow, Belton House, Lincolnshire; Prince Vladimir Argoutinsky-Dolgoroukoff, St. Petersburg and Paris (Lugt 2602d, stamped twice on the old backing sheet); His sale, Amsterdam, R. W. P. de Vries, 27 March 1925, lot 101 (‘Un monument avec une statue dans un paysage; près duquel trois brebis. Au fond à gauche deux hommes. Lavis d’encre de Chine. – Haut. 25.5, larg. 40,5 cm. Signé en toutes lettres.’); Iohan Quirijn van Regteren Altena, Amsterdam (his posthumous sale stamp [Lugt 4617] on the verso); Thence by descent.

A pupil of Claes Moyaert in Amsterdam, Jacob Simonsz. van der Does also studied in Leiden before completing his training in Rome, where he spent the latter half of the 1640s and was given the Bentveughels nickname ‘Tamboer’ (‘drummer boy’). The biographer Arnold Houbraken writes of him that he spent several years in Rome ‘industriously painting and drawing’ before returning to Holland, around 1650. Van der Does settled in The Hague, where he was involved in the foundation of the Confrerie Pictura in 1656, but was back in Amsterdam by 1663. His paintings were primarily of pastoral Italianate landscapes with sheep and cattle, and he also produced a handful of etchings, only one of which is signed and dated (1650). Houbraken records that the death of his wife in 1661 so traumatized the artist that he produced no paintings for four years. He eventually settled in the village of Sloten, outside Amsterdam, where he died at the age of fifty.

Only a handful of drawings by Van der Does may be securely dated to his stay in Rome in the late 1640s, and most of his extant drawings, despite their Italianate subject matter, can be dated to after his return to the Netherlands from Italy in 1650. Peter Schatborn has noted that, ‘Van der Does signed and dated some thirty of his drawings made between 1650 and 1662, whereas only a few of his paintings have a date. It would appear that he worked primarily as a draughtsman rather than as a painter.’3 Drawings by the artist are in the British Museum, the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris, and elsewhere.

The present sheet is a fine example of Jacob van der Does’s mature draughtsmanship. The Latin inscriptions on the slab at the left and on the monument in the centre are based on a funerary inscription on a Roman tomb dating from the 1st century BC, which the artist must have seen and transcribed during his stay in Italy4. As Schatborn has pointed out, ‘Van der Does was evidently an educated man with an interest in Roman inscriptions [and] was familiar with several languages.’5 Among stylistically comparable drawings by the artist is A Herdsman and Sheep by a Waterfall near a Ruin in an Italianate Landscape, signed and dated 1670, formerly in the collection of Hans van Leeuwen and sold at auction in 19926, A Shepherd and his Flock near a Classical Building, signed and dated 1666, in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem7, and a small drawing of A Peasant Family on the March, with Various Animals, also signed and dated 1666, in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle8.

13 JACQUES RIGAUD Puyloubier 1680-1754 Paris Landscape with Travellers and a Walled Town in the Distance Pen and black ink on vellum. Signed JRigaud in black ink at the lower left.

141 x 300 mm. (5 1/ 2 x 11 7/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Clifford Duits, London; Thence by descent.

The son of an apothecary, the draughtsman and engraver Jacques Rigaud was born near Aix-enProvence and began his career in Marseille, although little is known of his training and early life. At the start of his career he seems to have been under the protection and patronage of Nicolas Lamoignon, Marquis de Basville, a magistrate and governor of the Languedoc region. Rigaud’s earliest dated drawing is a large and panoramic View of Toulon During the Siege of 1707, executed when the artist was twentysix years old; the drawing, which was also reproduced as an engraving, is today in the Musée du Vieux Toulon1. Rigaud came to be best known as a printmaker, with an oeuvre of around two hundred prints.

Until 1720 he worked in Marseille and elsewhere in Provence, creating a number of engravings under the themes of Scènes de jeux et fêtes en Provence and Marines où sont représentés divers sujets des galères; the latter series was dedicated to Jean-Philippe d’Orléans, known as the Chevalier d’Orléans, who served as général des galères for his father, Philippe d’Orléans, Regent of France.

In 1720 Rigaud produced four remarkable views of Marseille during the plague of that year, but soon afterwards settled in Paris, where he worked as a draughtsman and printseller, with a shop on the rue Saint Jacques. Aptly described by the modern architectural and garden historian John Harris as ‘a most exquisite draughtsman’2, Rigaud became known in particular for his drawings of views of Paris and other French cities, châteaux and gardens, most of which were published as sets of engravings, notably Les Promenades du Luxembourg, which appeared in 1729, and the magisterial series Les Maisons Royales de France, which he began the following year. Rigaud’s most important work, and among the most celebrated prints of the 18th century in France, the series of Maisons Royales de France – numbering 138 prints in total – was eventually completed by the artist’s nephew, Jean-Baptiste Rigaud. In February 1733 Rigaud travelled to London, apparently at the invitation of the Royal Gardener, Charles Bridgeman. He worked in England for about a year and a half, mainly in London, where he produced views of the Royal residences and parks, including St. James’s Park, Hampton Court and Richmond. He also worked for a number of aristocratic and noble patrons, producing views of Stowe for Lord Cobham and the garden at Chiswick House for Lord Burlington, as well as views of Claremont for the Duke of Newcastle.

Drawn on vellum, the present sheet is an early work by Jacques Rigaud, and can be dated to his time in Provence, before his move to Paris in 1720. Among a small number of stylistically comparable drawings of this period by the artist is a View of the Town and Harbour of Toulon in the collection of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris3 and a View of the Gulf of Marseille in the Albertina in Vienna4.

14 GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIAZZETTA Venice 1682-1754 Venice The Artist’s Son Giacomo Holding a Book Black chalk, with stumping and touches of white heightening, on pale blue-grey paper, backed.

398 x 302 mm. (15 5/ 8 x 11 7/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly Armand-François-Louis de Mestral de Saint-Saphorin, Vienna; Possibly by descent to Madeleine and Marguerite de Mestral, Saint-Saphorin-sur-Morges, Switzerland; Probably Édouard de Cérenville, Lausanne; By descent to René de Cerenville, Lausanne, by 19561.

LITERATURE: Rodolfo Pallucchini, Piazzetta, Milan, 1956, fig.119.

Active as a painter, draughtsman, printmaker and book illustrator, Giambattista Piazzetta was first trained by his father, a sculptor, and later was a pupil of Antonio Molinari. A brief stay in Bologna between 1703 and 1705 introduced him to Giuseppe Maria Crespi, whose paintings, like those of Guercino and the Carracci, were to have a particular influence on Piazzetta’s early work. Back in Venice by about 1705, Piazzetta was registered in the Fraglia, the Venetian painter’s guild, by 1711. He worked in Venice for the remainder of his career, painting genre scenes, devotional representations of single saints, portraits and numerous altarpieces for local churches, as well as his only large-scale decoration; the ceiling of Saint Dominic in Glory for the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, completed in 1727. He also produced several hundred designs for book illustrations, many of which were commissioned for books issued by the publisher Giovanni Battista Albrizzi, notably an elaborate edition of Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata that appeared in 1745. By the later part of his career Piazzetta enjoyed considerable renown, both within Venice and abroad, as a draughtsman and painter. In 1754, the year of his death, he was elected principe of the Accademia dei Pittori in Venice.

As one modern scholar has noted of the artist, ‘Piazzetta established his international reputation as a brilliant draughtsman early in his career, even before 1720, and made his mark as a painter only later. No doubt he felt more at ease with chalk in hand than with a brush.’2 His drawings, many of which were made as independent works of art, were avidly collected by the 1720s, and included several studies of nudes and around 450 designs for book illustrations. Among Piazzetta’s most celebrated works, however, were a series of teste di carattere; large-scale, highly finished studies of heads drawn in black and white chalks on sizeable sheets of blue or bluish Venetian paper. These were produced as works of art in their own right, to be framed and glazed for display, and were avidly sought by collectors. As Andrew Robison has recently noted, ‘Beyond the obvious beauty of his drawings of heads, Piazzetta’s ability to endow them with so many of his distinctive qualities helps explain their enormous popularity not only with collectors but also with his most thoughtful contemporaries.’3 Indeed, as early as 1733, the Venetian critic and connoisseur Anton Maria Zanetti had noted of the teste di carattere that they were the most beautiful drawings of this type he had ever seen (‘più belle delle quali in questo genere altre son se ne sono mai vedute’).

Piazzetta seems to have produced these large, bust-length drawings of character heads as a means of earning a steady income to support himself and his family. Indeed, the 18th century French amateur Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville, writing in 1762, noted that Piazzetta claimed to have earned the sum total of 7,000 zecchini from his drawings of heads. Certainly, the fact that the artist’s reputation outside Venice was well established by the early 1720s can be credited to these teste di carattere drawings, many of which were engraved by the Venetian printmaker Marco Pitteri, whose prints served to spread their fame.

While Piazzetta seems to have often used studio assistants or members of his family as models, his teste di carattere drawings are not usually portraits as such. Although very few of these studies of heads are dated, the artist seems to have drawn them throughout his career. George Knox has dated some to the decade of the 1720s, while others may be dated to the 1730s by virtue of the fact that an inventory of the collection of Piazzetta’s patron Marshal Johann Matthias von der Schulenberg notes that the artist supplied several such drawings to him at this time. Further drawings of this type, in which Piazzetta seems to have depicted his children, may be dated to the late 1730s and 1740s; some of these were engraved by Giovanni Cattini and published in 1743 as Icones ad vivum expressae. A large group of Piazzetta’s teste di carattere drawings, numbering thirty-six sheets, once belonged to Consul Joseph Smith – who probably purchased them directly from the artist – and is now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.

The young boy depicted in this drawing may be identified as Piazzetta’s eldest son Giacomo Giusto, who was born in December 1725 and would have been about ten years old when the present sheet was drawn. Giacomo appears in a number of his father’s paintings and drawings from the 1730s onwards, notably in such finished genre drawings as Giacomo Feeding a Dog in the Art Institute of Chicago4 and a Head of a Youth with a Standard in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford5, as well as in drawings in the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and elsewhere.

Two closely related, but smaller, versions of this composition of Giacomo holding a book by Piazzetta are known; one among the large group of teste di carattere drawings by the artist in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle6, and the other (fig.1) in the collection of the British Museum7. Other, similar portraits of Giacomo of c.1735 include a drawing of a Boy with a Raised Hand (fig.2) in the Cleveland Museum of Art8 and a study of a Boy Holding a Flute, which was in a private collection in Italy in 19569.

As Catherine Whistler has recently noted of these teste di carattere drawings, ‘Expressive heads or portrait studies in black chalk or charcoal lit up with white were part of Venetian drawing practice, but Piazzetta made this genre his own, with numerous variations featuring young and old, male and female characters...As independent drawings they are poetic images evoking potential narratives, while also presenting Piazzetta’s inventiveness and virtuosity for admiration.’11

1.

2.

15 ALESSANDRO MAGNASCO Genoa 1667-1749 Genoa A Laundress at the Edge of a River Brush and brown ink and two shades of brown wash, extensively heightened with white, on paper washed a light brown.

235 x 172 mm. (9 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.)

Although born in Genoa, Alessandro Magnasco left the city at a young age and received his artistic training in Milan, where his style soon departed from the more colourful Genoese manner exemplified by the work of his father, the painter Stefano Magnasco. According to the Genoese art historian and biographer Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, the younger Magnasco, who was known by the nickname ‘Il Lissandrino’, made his early reputation as a portrait painter. He also spent much of his early career as a specialist in figure painting, charged with the depiction of staffage in the paintings of other artists, notably the landscape painters Antonio Francesco Peruzzini and Carlo Antonio Tavella, as well as the architectural painter Clemente Spera. Magnasco’s own genre paintings – ‘Ceremonies of the church, schools of maids and youths, chapters of friars, military exercises, artists’ shops, Jewish synagogues...painted with humour and delight’1, in the words of the 18th century art historian Luigi Lanzi – also proved very popular.

Together with Peruzzini, Magnasco worked at the Florentine court of the Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici between 1703 and 1709.

It was only in the 1720s, when he was in his fifties, that Magnasco began to produce his own independent landscape paintings. Painted in a distinctive manner characterized by rapid brushstrokes and dissolved, almost liquefied forms, these works were invariably crowded with figures, particularly monks, hermits and beggars. That Magnasco was drawn towards such figure types is indicative of the particular influence on him of the 17th century Dutch and Flemish genre paintings that he would have seen in the Medici collections in Florence, as well as the prints of the early 17th century Medici court artist Jacques Callot. He continued to enjoy aristocratic patronage on his return to Milan, counting among his clientele members of the Borromeo and Visconti families. In 1735 Magnasco settled in his native Genoa for good, although he never really abandoned the sombre colours and interest in dramatic light effects characteristic of the Lombard tradition. Lanzi notes that his work was, in fact, more appreciated in Lombardy than in his native Genoa: ‘His bold touch, though joined to a noble conception and to correct drawing, did not attract in Genoa, because it is far removed from the finish and union of tints which these masters followed; hence Magnasco worked little in his native country, and left no scholar there.’2 Although he is known to have painted a number of large religious works, the only surviving examples are a Supper at Emmaus for the Genoese monastery of San Francesco in Albaro and a remarkable Sacrilegious Robbery, painted in 1731 for the church of Santa Maria Assunta di Campomoro in the town of Siziano, and today in the Palazzo Arcivescovile in Milan. Despite the success he achieved in his lifetime, Magnasco’s work was largely forgotten quite soon after his death. His oeuvre was only rediscovered by scholars in the first quarter of the 20th century, when the artist became something of a cult figure.

Reflecting the course of his career as a figurista, only a few compositional drawings by Magnasco are known today. Most of his extant drawings are, like the present sheet, studies of individual figures or small groups of figures. These fluid and expressive sheets often have the appearance of autonomous works of art, and many may have been produced as such, although in other instances they seem to have been intended to be inserted into larger painted compositions. Indeed, such figure drawings seem to have served as a kind of compendium of motifs, to be used and reused in his paintings if required. As a draughtsman, Magnasco displayed a preference for the use of the brush instead of the pen, as well as, occasionally, washed or prepared paper. One of the largest groups of drawings by the artist is today in the collection of the Uffizi in Florence.

actual size

Among the most overtly pictorial of Magnasco’s drawings, the present sheet displays an especially bold use of white heightening to achieve brilliant highlights, particularly evident in the figure of the woman and the clothes she is washing, as well as the waterfall in the background. Among stylistically and technically comparable drawings are three related studies for altarpieces, all in American museum collections; a Flight into Egypt in the Cleveland Museum of Art3, a Nativity in the Philadelphia Museum of Art4 and a Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri5. All three of these drawings for altarpieces, as well as a fourth depicting The Visitation formerly in a private collection in New York6, are of similar shape and dimensions, and have been dated to c.1735. Like the present sheet, they display an extensive use of white heightening on brown paper, allowing the artist to achieve bold light effects.

The same fluid passages of white heightening are also found in two related drawings by Magnasco of Christ Crowned with Thorns, in a private collection7, and Christ Carrying the Cross, in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art8. Other stylistically similar drawings by Magnasco include two studies of a Seated Man and a Seated Woman in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan9 and a large drawing of A Concert in a Tavern Among Ruins, in the same technique as the present sheet, which was sold at auction in London in 201410. Two studies of washerwomen by Magnasco, though not as freely drawn or expressive as the present sheet, are in the Uffizi11, while a sheet of studies of five washerwomen is in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford12.

Although the present sheet is not directly related to any known work by the artist, the pose of the figure is particularly close to the laundress in the centre of a collaborative painting by Magnasco and Antonio Francesco Peruzzini (fig.1), formerly in the Italico Brass collection in Venice13, in which Magnasco painted the figures, while Peruzzini was responsible for the landscape itself. Similar washerwomen appear in a number of other collaborative landscape paintings with figures by Magnasco; examples in the collections of the City of York Art Gallery14, the Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw15 and the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio16.

1.

16 JEAN-BAPTISTE MARIE PIERRE Paris 1714-1789 Paris The Head of a Female Figure Wearing a Helmet Pastel and black chalk on blue paper. Signed Pierre in brown ink at the bottom centre.

305 x 227 mm. (12 x 8 7/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Louis Meier, London; Purchased from him in c.1955 by Ralph Holland, Newcastle.

LITERATURE: Nicolas Lesur and Olivier Aaron, Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre 1714-1789: Premier peintre du roi, Paris, 2009, p.459, no.D.437 (as location unknown); Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800 [online edition], p.2, illustrated.

Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre enjoyed a highly successful career as a painter of easel pictures, church altarpieces and large-scale decorative schemes, mostly executed between the 1740s and the 1760s. He won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1734 and studied in Rome between 1735 and 1740. Pierre made his debut at the Salon the following year, and was reçu at the Académie Royale in 1742. In 1752 he was named premier peintre to the duc d’Orléans, for whom he produced ceiling paintings for the Palais Royal in Paris. Pierre painted numerous works for Parisian churches, including altarpieces for Saint-Germaindes-Prés, Saint-Sulpice, Saint-Louis du Louvre and Saint-Roch, where he also painted the cupola of the church, as well as the cathedral of Saint-Louis in Versailles. He also provided mural and ceiling decorations for the châteaux of Fontainebleau, Versailles and Saint-Cloud. In 1770, Pierre was named premier peintre du roi and director of the Académie Royale. The 1770s and 1780s found the artist mainly engaged on administrative tasks, with a corresponding decline in his painted output.

Pierre seems to have used the medium of pastel only occasionally, and just a handful of works in pastel by him have survived, although other examples are recorded in 18th and 19th century auction catalogues. His few known pastel drawings take the form of character heads or têtes d’expression, either of young women or of old, bearded men. It has been suggested that during the last two decades of his career, as he found himself burdened with administrative duties and unable to devote much time to painting, Pierre continued to produce pastel drawings, some of which may have been intended as finished works of art in their own right. Although the present sheet has the appearance of being a study for a painting, the fact that it is signed1 would suggest that it might also have been produced as an autonomous work.

While this drawing is unrelated to any surviving painting by Pierre, a close physiognomical similarity may be noted with the head of an allegorical figure of Strength (fig.1), one of a series of red monochrome paintings executed by the artist in 1753 for the Cabinet de Conseil at Fontainebleau2. Similar heads are also found in other paintings by Pierre, such as that of Athena in two of a set of four canvases illustrating scenes from the story of Ulysses, painted around 17473.

Among stylistically comparable pastel drawings by the artist is a study of a bearded man, also on blue paper, in the Albertina in Vienna4.

1.

17 AIGNAN-THOMAS DESFRICHES Orléans 1715-1800 Orléans A View of the Pont-Royal in Orléans, with the Construction of a Pier in the Foreground Black chalk. Laid down onto a mount, with double framing lines in brown ink.

168 x 337 mm. (6 3/4 x 13 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: By descent in the family of the artist, until 20161.

LITERATURE: André Jarry, ‘Essai de catalogue de l’oeuvre peint, dessiné et gravé de Desfriches’ in Paul Ratouis de Limay, Un amateur Orléanais au XVIIIe siècle: Aignan-Thomas Desfriches (1715-1800). Sa vie, son oeuvre, ses collections, sa correspondance, Paris, 1907, p.189.

EXHIBITED: Orléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, Exposition A.-T. Desfriches (1715-1800), 19651966, no.190 (lent by Mme. Paul Ratouis de Limay).

ENGRAVED: By Pierre-Quentin Chedel.

Aignan-Thomas Desfriches studied in his native Orléans before moving in 1733 to Paris, where he completed his training with Nicolas Bertin and Charles-Joseph Natoire. He became the director of the drawing academy established under the patronage of the duc de Rohan-Chabot, but returned to Orléans at the end of the 1730s. Desfriches worked there for the remainder of his career, and founded the Ecole de Peinture, de Sculpture et d’Architecture d’Orléans in 1786. Active primarily as a landscape painter and draughtsman, he produced charming landscapes of the countryside around Orléans and the valley of the river Loire, peopled by acutely observed peasants and travellers. In the latter part of his career, Desfriches adopted the practice of drawing on a coated grey-blue paper he had invented, known as a papier-tablette, producing small landscape drawings of marvellous precision and delicacy.

Having remained with the artist’s descendants since it was drawn, the present sheet is one of a small group of drawings, dating to the 1750s, which document the construction of a new bridge over the river Loire at Orléans. The work on the bridge – first known as the Pont Royal, later as the Pont National and today known as the Pont George V – was supervised by the engineer Robert Soyer (1717-1782), a close friend of the artist. As Desfriches’s great-grandson and biographer Paul Ratouis de Limay, a previous owner of this drawing, noted, ‘the ingénieur des ponts et chaussées Soyer is charged with the construction of the Pont d’Orleans...he is celebrated and Desfriches soon counts him among his best friends...Wishing to please his new friend, Desfriches drew, between 1750 and 1760, several Views of the Construction of the Pont d’Orleans, animated by a host of little characters, which reveal a remarkable suppleness and a precision in the use of chalk.’2 A larger drawing by Desfriches of the construction of the bridge (fig.1), which shared the same provenance as the present sheet until 1963, is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans3.

1.

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

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

PROVENANCE: Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, London, in 2011; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Jane Shoaf Turner and Robert-Jan te Rijdt, ed., Home and Abroad: Dutch and Flemish Landscape Drawings from the John and Marine van Vlissingen Art Foundation, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam and Paris, 2015-2016, p.190, under no.81b (entry by Robert-Jan te Rijdt).

Active as a draughtsman and printmaker, Reinier Vinkeles was a pupil of the engraver and actor Jan Punt, in whose studio he remained as an assistant for several years. He was admitted to the Amsterdam Drawing Academy in 1762, becoming a junior director of the institution in 1765. The same year he undertook a trip to Brabant with the artists Jurriaan Andriessen and Izaak Schmidt, and five years later is recorded in Paris, studying with the engraver Jacques-Philippe Le Bas. On his return to Amsterdam in 1771, Vinkeles embarked on a lucrative and highly successful career, producing topographical views and receiving numerous commissions for book illustrations, historical subjects, portraits and reproductive engravings. Indeed, it is thought that some three thousand prints were engraved by the artist, or under his direct supervision.

The Dutch biographer and collector Adriaan van der Willigen, writing in 1817, noted of Vinkeles that ‘Among his early drawings, those in color depicting the entering and exiting of the Amsterdam Theater stand out.’1 This large sheet is one of the earliest drawings by Vinkeles of figures outside the theatre on the Keizersgracht canal in Amsterdam. One of the first theatres in the city, the Duytsche Academie was founded in 1617, and established in a wooden building on the Keizersgracht. In 1632 the architect Jacob van Campen was commissioned to design a new building for the theatre, now known as the Schouwburg, which over the succeeding years hosted performances of plays by Shakespeare, Voltaire, Corneille and Molière, as well as numerous works by Dutch playwrights. (In the present sheet, the poster on the wall by the entrance to the theatre advertises the play Le Cid by Pierre Corneille, first published in 1636 and a huge popular success.) In 1665 the theatre was rebuilt and significantly enlarged, to a design more in keeping with the Baroque manner. In 1737 Antonio Vivaldi conducted the theatre’s orchestra, and illustrious visitors included the Prince of Orange, the Czar of Russia and the King of Poland. In May 1772, twelve years after the present sheet was drawn, the theatre was completely destroyed by fire2.

Vinkeles seems have made several finished versions of a pendant pair of scenes – of various sizes and each with different staffage – of the entrance gate of the Stadsschouwburg on the Keizersgracht canal; one with figures arriving at the theatre in daylight and the other with people leaving the theatre at night.

In the drawings of figures arriving at the theatre, Vinkeles has placed the scene in summer, with the trees in full foliage and the artist looking north with the canal at the right, while the nighttime scenes are depicted in winter, with the trees bare and the canal at the left, viewed from the opposite direction3.

A pair of such views by Vinkeles, considerably smaller than the present sheet, is in the collection of the John and Marine van Vlissingen Art Foundation in the Netherlands4. A slightly later pair of views of the same scene on the Keizersgracht, dated 1762 and also smaller in dimensions, are part of a group of watercolours, drawings, prints and maps assembled by the 19th century collector Louis Splitberger and today in the Gemeente Amsterdam Stadsarchief, the municipal archives in Amsterdam5.

19 JEAN-JACQUES LAGRENÉE Paris 1739-1821 Paris A Still Life of Antique Armour and Trophies Gouache, pen and black ink. Laid down on a 19th century French mount.

168 x 365 mm. (6 5/ 8 x 14 3/ 8 in.) [sheet] 287 x 485 mm. (11 1/4 x 19 1/ 8 in.) [including mount] PROVENANCE: Private collection, New York.

A pupil of his elder brother, Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée (who was sixteen years older), Jean-Jacques Lagrenée (known as ‘Lagrenée the Younger’) studied at the Ecole des Elèves Protégés and earned second-place in the Prix de Rome competition of 1760. The same year he accompanied his brother to Saint Petersburg, where Louis had been appointed painter to the Empress Catherine the Great. The two brothers remained in Russia until 1762, when they returned to Paris. In 1765 Jean-Jacques left for Rome, where he was able to study at the Académie de France, although not officially as a pensionnaire.

It was in Rome that the young Lagrenée developed a particular love of classical art, and made an intensive study of ancient Roman wall paintings and decorations. He exhibited paintings and drawings of historical and Biblical subjects at the Salons between 1771 and 1804, and was admitted into the Académie Royale in 1775. He also painted history subjects and ceiling paintings for the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre and at the Petit Trianon at Versailles, and produced a number of etchings. Between 1785 and 1800 Lagrenée served as the artistic director of the Sèvres porcelain factory, for whom he created numerous designs, notably the Etruscan service for Marie-Antoinette’s dairy at Rambouillet. Lagrenée ended his career in relative obscurity, however, and comparatively few paintings by him are known today.

Lagrenée frequently experimented with different techniques in his work, and as a draughtsman was fond of applying highlights in gold, often on prepared paper washed brown or a deep blue. As Victor Carlson has noted, ‘One of the most delightful aspects of Lagrenée’s art is his chiaroscuro drawings on blue paper, where the support is tinted with gouache or watercolour...creating a ground against which the figures are defined with black ink and white highlights. This combination of media is used to evoke a scintillating play of light over surfaces...The fact that highly finished chiaroscuro drawings...can be found throughout Europe at this time is one aspect of the growing preference for drawings as independent works of art.’1 The present sheet may be dated to Lagrenée’s stay in Rome in the second half of the 1760s, when he produced a number of drawings and prints after antique reliefs, sculpture and classical vases. Marc Sandoz has suggested that these types of drawings, perhaps inspired by the prints of Giambattista Piranesi, were part of a group of frieze-like decorations of antique objects. In 1782 Lagrenée engraved a series of four prints of similar subjects as the Recueil de Compositions par Lagrenée le jeune en 1782, published two years later in 1784. Three similar drawings of antique trophies, datable to 1765, are in the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin2, one of which is a study for one of the plates of the Recueil de Compositions.

The present sheet is particularly close to the two other drawings in Berlin, which are both on blue paper and of rectangular format3.

Among other drawings of groups of antique objects by Lagrenée is a Decorative Frieze with Vases, Trophies, Helmets and Two Winged Victories in the Schlossmuseum in Weimar4, as well as a much larger drawing of A Vestal Virgin with Antique Trophies, with the Galerie Coatalem in Paris5. An upright drawing of a military trophy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been attributed to Lagrenée6, as has a Still Life with Antiquities in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm7, while a similar drawing depicting fragments of antique vases is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen8. As Benjamin Peronnet has noted of such drawings, Lagrenée ‘copied antiquity or rather reinterpreted it in his own way throughout his career...Lagrenée’s antiquity, like his mythological or historical scenes, is attractive and arranged in a picturesque and especially decorative way.’9

20 CHARLES PERCIER Paris 1764-1838 Paris A Design for a Jardinière, with a Relief of Venus and Apollo Watercolour, and pen and black ink. Laid down on a larger sheet, possibly an album page.

210 x 153 mm. (8 1/4 x 6 in.)

PROVENANCE: The archives of the workshop of François-Honoré-Georges Jacob-Desmalter, Paris.

LITERATURE: Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, Receuil des décorations intérieures, comprenant tout ce qui a rapport à l’ameublement, Paris, 1812, pp.34-35, pl.44 (‘Jardiniere éxecutée à Paris pour M. E**’); Henry Havard, Dictionnaire de l’ameublement et de la décoration depuis le XIIIe siècle jusqu’a nos jours, Paris, 1894, Vol.III, pp.94-95, fig.69.

After winning the Prix de Rome for architecture in 1786, Charles Percier spent the next seven years as a pensionnaire at the Académie de France in Rome. Together with Pierre Fontaine (1762-1853), a fellow student of the architect Antoine-François Peyre, Percier sketched the monuments of ancient and modern Rome. Upon their return to Paris, Percier and Fontaine embarked on a long and successful partnership, working closely as architects and designers until about 1814. Together they published a number of books on architecture, ornament and furnishings, each accompanied by their illustrations. These were collaborative efforts in which Percier drew the architectural and sculptural elements, while Fontaine was responsible for the landscapes and figures. Percier’s first significant official commission came in 1800, when he was asked by Josephine Bonaparte to take charge of the renovation and interior decoration of her villa at Malmaison. Percier and Fontaine worked extensively for Napoleon; at the Tuileries, SaintCloud, Compiègne, Fontainebleau and elsewhere, as well as designing the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor and the ceremony of his marriage to Marie-Louise of Austria. As architects they renovated parts of the Louvre, and designed the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, completed in 1807. Indeed, such was their importance as architects and designers during the Napoleonic era that Percier and Fontaine can arguably be said to have created the Empire style. Much of their influence can be traced to their seminal publication Receuil des décorations intérieures, published in 1812, which was a compendium of designs for rooms, furniture, decorations and ornament that spread the Empire style throughout Europe as well as to Russia and America. After the fall of Napoleon, the partnership of Percier and Fontaine was dissolved, although both artists continued to remain active. Percier was charged with the decoration of the cathedral in Reims for the planned coronation of King Louis XVIII, an event that never took place.

Typical of Percier’s refined and highly detailed watercolours, this design for a jardinière – commissioned by a certain Monsieur E. in Paris, who remains unidentified – can be dated to between 1801 and 1805.

The drawing reappeared in the Recueil de décorations intérieures in 1812, where it is illustrated together with a design for a small side table: ‘Tea table and jardinière, made to be isolated in the center of a room.

These two pieces of furniture are executed in mahogany and bronze. One can recognize from the refinement and perfection of the work that they are from the workshop of MM. Jacob.’1 Many years later, the art historian Henry Havard illustrated this same jardinière in his monumental Dictionnaire de l’ameublement et de la décoration, published between 1887 and 1890. As he wrote, ‘Meanwhile, on the advice of Percier, the cabinetmaker Jacob made a number of very remarkable pieces, as architecture and as ornamentation, the drawings of which have fortunately been preserved...the opulence of these pieces of furniture, the care which Percier has taken of designing so many varied models, indicates that it was around this time that the jardinière completed its adaptation to elegant interiors and to take the place in Parisian houses which it has not ceased to occupy since then.’2

actual size

21 JEAN-BAPTISTE PILLEMENT Lyon 1728-1808 Lyon River Landscape with a Ruined Tower Black and white chalk, with stumping, on canvas. Signed and dated jean Pillement 1804 in white chalk at the lower left.

308 x 393 mm. (12 1/ 8 x 15 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: With Georges Meyer, Paris (his label on the back of the frame).

‘An artist with a great deal of merit, gifted with a prodigious talent, this busy man worked in all genres (except history painting and portraiture) in oil, pastel, chalk, ink, pencil, and always with an ease, a facility, a remarkable rapidity. His touch is extremely firm, neat, precise. One never sees hesitation or indecision in his works, all of which are characterized by a great harmony, and by an abundance of spirit.’1 Thus was Jean Pillement described some twenty years after his death. Such assessments of his abilities have lasted into the present day, with one modern scholar describing the artist as ‘a versatile painter and an exquisite draughtsman’2. One of the most influential decorative and ornamental draughtsmen working in Europe in the second half of the 18th century, Pillement was also a gifted painter of pastoral landscapes, marines, flower pieces, animal subjects and chinoiseries. A precocious talent, by the age of fifteen he was working as a designer at the Gobelins tapestry factory in Paris. In 1745, aged seventeen, he left France to spend three years in Madrid; the first in a long series of travels throughout Europe over the next forty years.

After a period in Lisbon, where he was offered, and declined, the title of Painter to the King, Pillement spent the next few years working in England, between 1754 and 1763. There his pastoral scenes, seascapes and picturesque views found an appreciative audience, and he became a popular and respected member of artistic society in London. It was also in England that some of his ornamental designs were first engraved and published.

Pillement continued to travel extensively during the 1760s, receiving prestigious commissions in Vienna from the Empress Maria Theresa and the Prince of Liechtenstein, and from King Stanislas August Poniatowski of Poland, for whom he decorated rooms in the Royal Castle and the palace of Ujazdów in Warsaw. In France, Pillement was named peintre de la reine in 1778, in which role he painted three decorative canvases for Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon at Versailles; the only real instance in his long career of an official French commission. For much of the 1780s he worked in Portugal and Spain, where he produced some of his finest landscape drawings. Returning to France in 1789, he abandoned Paris during the Revolution and spent much of the 1790s working in the province of Languedoc. The last years of Pillement’s career were spent in his native Lyon, where he was employed at the Manufacture de Soie et des Indiennes and gave lessons in decoration and design.

Signed in full and dated 1804, this finished grisaille landscape – undoubtedly intended as an autonomous work of art – was drawn when Pillement was living and working in Lyon, near the end of his long career.

Landscapes such as this are typical of the artist’s approach to the depiction of nature, filtered through his study of such 17th century Dutch masters as Jan Both, Aelbert Cuyp and Nicolaes Berchem. In general, Pillement’s landscapes are not topographical views of a particular location, but rather depict bucolic scenes of man and nature in harmony. As has been pointed out, ‘Nature is approached in a purely romantic and ideal vein...All the ugly brutal truths of nature and peasant life in the Ancien Regime are transformed into a poetic world of harmony where a haze of contentment seems to envelop every scene.’3 It may be noted in passing that, like many of the artist’s river landscapes, this composition depicts a number of wooden stakes or pilings (pillements in French) set into the water’s edge; it has been suggested that this may have been intended as a sort of whimsical signature on the part of the artist.

22 PANCRACE BESSA Paris 1772-1846 Ecouen Two Apricots on a Branch Watercolour, heightened with gum arabic. Signed P. Bessa. in brown ink at the lower left, and numbered No. 4. x in brown ink at the lower right.

247 x 195 mm. (9 3/4 x 7 5/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, London.

One the leading painters of flowers and fruit in the first half of the 19th century in France, Pancrace Bessa was born in the Marais district of Paris. He was briefly a pupil of the engraver and botanical illustrator Gerard van Spaendonck, but was most influenced by the work of Pierre-Joseph Redouté, with whom he also studied; one of only a handful of men to do so, since most of Redouté’s pupils were women. Bessa probably accompanied Redouté as part of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798, and later collaborated with him on the illustrations for François-André Michaux’s Arbres forestiers de l’Amérique septentrionale, published between 1810 and 1813, and Aimé Bonpland’s Description des plantes rares cultivées à Malmaison et à Navarre, which appeared in 1813. In 1808 Bessa published his first work under his own name alone; a series of twenty-four stipple engravings entitled Fleurs et Fruits gravés et coloriés sur les peintures aquarelles faites d’après nature. He appears to have enjoyed depicting fruit, and other books he illustrated include Louis-Claude Noisette’s Le jardin fruitier, which first appeared in 1813, and Etienne Michel’s Traité du citronier, published in 1816.

Bessa’s most important commission, however, was for a series of 572 watercolours on vellum to illustrate Jean-Claude-Michel Mordant de Launay’s Herbier général de l’amateur, commissioned by Charles X, King of France and arguably the most significant French flower book of the day. Published in eight volumes, the project was begun in 1816 and the artist worked on the series until 1827. Bessa’s beautiful watercolours were superbly reproduced for the book, in the form of hand-coloured engravings by various printmakers, led by Pierre François Barrois. Bessa enjoyed the patronage and protection of the Duchesse de Berri, to whom he was appointed flower painter in 1816 and drawing master in 1820, and also worked for the Empress Joséphine Bonaparte. In 1823 he succeeded van Spaendonck as painter to the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, by whom he was commissioned to produce studies of flowers on vellum. Bessa exhibited at the Salons between 1806 and 1831, when he retired to Ecouen.

Little is known of the last decade of his life; his last published work was the Flore des Jardiniers, amateurs et manufacturiers, which appeared in 1836.

As highly regarded in his day as both van Spaendonck and Redouté, Bessa was, however, less prolific than either. Nevertheless, his works were in great demand among wealthy French, Royal and foreign collectors; as the contemporary French writer on art Charles Paul Landon noted in 1810, ‘So far as flower and fruit pieces are concerned, there seems to be a strong competition between Redouté and Bessa, being both equally talented, hard-working and successful.’1 A modern scholar adds, ‘[Bessa] stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries...his sense of floral structure and the vitality of his watercolours are no doubt due to Redouté’s teaching and influence...his sincere, straightforward approach qualifies him as an artist of considerable charm.’2 A similar drawing of two apricots was among the contents of Pancrace Bessa’s studio at the time of his death, and remained in the family of the artist before appearing at auction in Paris in 20083.

23 ANTOINE BÉRANGER Paris 1785-1867 Sèvres Children Playing a Game Pen and brown ink, heightened with white, on light brown paper, made up at the top edge. A study of several male and female figures in pen and brown ink, heightened with white, on the verso, backed.

Inscribed Antoine Béranger on the former mount.

147 x 270 mm. (5 3/4 x 10 5/ 8 in.) [image] 168 x 270 mm. (6 5/ 8 x 10 5/ 8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 24 November 1993, lot 97; Kate de Rothschild, London, in 2001; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Michael Clarke, Poussin to Seurat: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Scotland, exhibition catalogue, Edinburgh, 2010, p.16, under no.3; Paris, Marty de Cambiaire, Tableaux et Dessins / Paintings & Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 2016, pp.96 and 145, under no.34.

Antoine Béranger is perhaps best known for his work as a designer at the Manufacture de Sèvres porcelain factory, which was under the direction of Alexandre Brongniart. In July 1808, soon after Béranger began working at Sèvres, Brongniart described the young artist, in a letter to the intendant général de la maison de l’empereur, as a ‘young man little known but already possessed of talent and promising of more in the judgment of artists who have seen his work.’1 Béranger painted and decorated many pieces of porcelain for Sèvres, notably a large vase in the ‘Etruscan’ style that depicted the triumphal procession into Paris of some of Rome’s most famous antiquities, including the Laocoön group and the Apollo Belvedere, brought from Italy and destined for the Musée Napoleon. Richly decorated in gold and over a metre in height, this beautifully painted vase was made in 1813, and was described by Brongniart as one of the most beautiful works to come from the workshops at Sèvres2. As a painter of historical and genre subjects, Béranger exhibited yearly at the Salons in Paris between 1814 and 1849. The stylistic influence of LouisLéopold Boilly is evident in many of his genre paintings, such as The Consequences of the Seduction, exhibited at the Salon of 1840 and now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay and on loan to the Musée de l’Assistance Publique in Paris. Béranger was active as a lithographer, and while at Sèvres also designed stained-glass windows for the chapels of the châteaux of Compiègne, Dreux and Randan, as well as at the Grand Trianon at Versailles. His daughter and two sons were all artists.

As a draughtsman, Antoine Béranger often worked in a distinctive technique of pen and ink and white gouache on brown paper. Among other examples of drawings of genre subjects in this distinctive technique is The Conjurer (L’Escamoteur), in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh3. Drawings by Béranger are quite rare, however, and the largest extant group, numbering around twenty sheets, is today in the collection of the Musée Nationale de Céramique in Sèvres.

verso

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

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

PROVENANCE: Possibly with the Maas Gallery, London, in 1968; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 June 1997, lot 23 (as Attributed to John Frederick Lewis); Maas Gallery, London, by 1998; Acquired from them by a private collector in 1999; Private collection, Madrid.

EXHIBITED: Possibly London, The Maas Gallery, Exhibition of Victorian Paintings, Water-Colours and Drawings, 1968, no.23 (as John Frederick Lewis, ‘Study of a girl, oil on prepared paper, 15 1/2 x 12.’); London, The Maas Gallery, British Pictures 1840-1940, 1999, no.75 (as Attributed to John Frederick Lewis).

This superb oil sketch on paper would appear to depict an Englishwoman dressed in Oriental costume, rather than representing an actual portrait of a woman of Eastern origins. Despite the evidently high quality of the work, the author of the painting has remained a mystery. Although a tentative attribution to John Frederick Lewis (1804-1876) was once put forward1, this sketch is arguably more likely to be by an artist with little or no direct experience of the Near East2.

Six Early Drawings by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) Born in the Dutch province of Friesland, Laurens (later Anglicized to Lawrence) Alma-Tadema (fig.1) showed considerable talent as a draughtsman from a very early age. He enrolled in the Antwerp Academy in 1852, but left in 1857 to work as a studio assistant to the Dutch painter Louis (Lodewijk) de Taeye in Antwerp. He was encouraged by his master to study the early history of France and Belgium, and in particular the chronicles of the Merovingians and the Franks, which the young painter began to use as source material for his own work. After three years with de Taeye, Alma-Tadema was invited to join the studio of Baron Henrik Leys, then one of the leading painters in Belgium, whom he assisted on a number of significant commissions, notably a cycle of frescoes for the Town Hall in Antwerp. The young Alma-Tadema made his first trip to London in 1862, and two years later exhibited an Egyptian subject picture at the Salon in Paris, winning a gold medal. At around the same time he met the influential art dealer Ernest Gambart, who engaged the painter on a contract to supply twenty-four paintings, and, from 1864 onwards, exhibited his work each year in London. The success of these exhibitions led Gambart to engage the artist on a commission for a further forty-eight paintings. By this time AlmaTadema was painting almost entirely Greek and Roman subjects, which account for the bulk of his output as a mature artist, and which established his international reputation. In 1865 he left Antwerp to settle in Brussels, where he worked with increasing success and recognition for the next five years.

Already well-known and admired in England, Alma-Tadema moved to London in 1870, where his career continued to flourish and his paintings were exhibited at Gambart’s gallery with much success.

Naturalized in 1873 and elected an Associate of the Royal Academy three years later, he also began exhibiting at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. In 1879 Alma-Tadema became a full Royal Academician, and three years later was honoured with a large retrospective exhibition – numbering 185 paintings dated between 1840 and 1882, with many works lent by private collectors – at the Grosvenor Gallery.

After this 1882 exhibition, however, his output lessened, so that he painted around six or seven pictures a year, including a small number of portraits; this was about half of his previous yearly production. The last decade of his career, however, also found him producing a number of highly-finished drawings and watercolours. By this time a leading figure in the Victorian art world and one of the most famous artists in Europe, Alma-Tadema was the recipient of numerous honours and prizes, culminating in a knighthood in 1899 and the Order of Merit in 1905. Throughout most of his career, Alma-Tadema numbered all of his paintings sequentially with an ‘Opus number’ in Roman numerals, the last work being Opus CCCCVIII (or 408). Following his death in 1912 and burial in St. Paul’s Cathedral, a comprehensive memorial exhibition of his work was mounted at the Royal Academy in 1913.

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2.

Unusually for a Victorian artist, Alma-Tadema used figure drawings only rarely in preparing his paintings, preferring to paint directly from the live model. As the artist himself wrote in 1883, in a letter to his friend Georg Ebers, ‘in order to master oil painting I gave up everything else in 1859 and have but seldom touched a pen or pencil or water-colour.’1 Indeed, drawings by the artist remain relatively scarce today, certainly by comparison with the drawn output of many of his artistic contemporaries. As one modern scholar has noted, ‘Drawings by Alma-Tadema are rare, and tend not to be preparatory works, but records of a head or pose done for pleasure in fine pencil, after perfecting them on the canvas or panel...However, a small number of rough studies for figures and compositions survives...’2 The following group of six studies of drapery, male nudes and Egyptian costumes by Alma-Tadema, all apparently taken from an early sketchbook, have been dated to c.1857-1858, when the young artist was living and working in Antwerp as a studio assistant to Louis de Taeye. It was also at around this time that he met and became close friends with the German writer and Egyptologist Georg Moritz Ebers, who published several works on ancient Egypt and was to have a particular influence on the young artist, eventually becoming of his first biographers.

Egyptian subject pictures account for a small but significant part of Alma-Tadema’s oeuvre. Although he was not to actually visit Egypt until 1902, the artist began painting Ancient Egyptian subjects in the late 1850s, and continued throughout the 1860s and 1870s. As the Alma-Tadema scholar Vern Swanson has noted, the artist ‘produced only twenty-six Egyptian pictures during his career but because of their technical quality and novelty at the time they were much discussed. Asked by Ebers why he chose to portray Egypt, Alma-Tadema replied, ‘Where else should I have commenced when I first began to make myself familiar with the life of the ancients? The first thing the child learns of ancient time leads him into the court of the Pharaohs, to Goshen in Egypt, and when we go back to the source of the art and science of the other nations of antiquity how often we reach your Egypt!’...Apart from Sir Edward Poynter (1836-1919), no other contemporary painter attempted to render daily Egyptian life in the same manner as Alma-Tadema. Of all Alma-Tadema’s pictures, his Egyptian works convey the most emotion.’3 One of Alma-Tadema’s first Egyptian subjects was The Sad Father or The Unfavourable Oracle (Opus X), painted in 1859 and later cut into at least three sections, one of which (fig.2) is today in the Johannesburg Art Gallery in South Africa4. This was followed in 1863 by a second major Egyptian subject, Pastimes in Ancient Egypt: 3,000 Years Ago (Opus XVIII), which won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1864. Severely damaged in a fire ten years later, the painting is now in the collection of the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston5. From 1865 onwards Alma-Tadema began to concentrate on Greco-Roman subjects almost exclusively, although he occasionally returned to Egyptian subjects in the 1870s, notably in his paintings An Egyptian Widow in the Time of Diocletian (Opus XCIX) and The Death of the First-Born (Opus CIII), both completed in 1872 and today in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam6. After 1874, however, Alma-Tadema produced no Egyptian subject pictures for some thirty years, until The Finding of Moses (Opus CCCLXXVII), painted in 1904 and today in a private collection7. A painting of Cleopatra at the Temple of Isis in Philae, left unfinished at the artist’s death in 1912, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London8.

The first owner of these drawings was Alma-Tadema’s brother-in-law, the art critic and biographer Edmund Gosse (1849-1928). In 1882 Gosse, who was married to a sister of Alma-Tadema’s second wife, Laura Epps, published one of the first biographies of the artist, in which he noted that some of his paintings of Egyptian subjects ‘are to be counted among the highest expressions of Alma-Tadema’s genius.’9

25 SIR LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA, R.A., O.M. Dronrijp 1836-1912 Wiesbaden Recto: Three Studies of Drapery for The Contrary Oracle Verso: Three Studies of a Standing Male Nude Pencil and red chalk, with touches of white chalk, on buff paper. The verso in pencil. Inscribed (by the artist’s daughter Anna) with the artist’s initials LAT in pencil at the centre right, and inscribed for the Contrary Oracle in pencil at the lower left.

310 x 193 mm. (12 1/4 x 7 5/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist; The artist’s brother-in-law, Sir Edmund William Gosse, London; By descent in the Gosse family until the 1920s or 1930s; Acquired by a private collector; Thence by descent until 2015.

As the artist’s contemporary biographer Percy Cross Standing noted of Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s early paintings of Egyptian subjects in particular, ‘So careful at all times about detail, he took extraordinary care in the preparation of his preliminary sketches for these pictures.’1 Vern Swanson has suggested that this group of early drawings by Alma-Tadema may be related to two paintings of Egyptian subjects, entitled Going to the Oracle and The Contrary Oracle, that the artist seems to have planned in 1857 and 1858, but which were either never executed, or else destroyed. (During his student years Alma-Tadema often destroyed or painted over paintings which he was unhappy with; one such example was a composition of The Dying Cleopatra, begun in 1859 but later destroyed by the artist.2) A compositional pencil study for Going to the Oracle, recorded in a photograph (fig.1) in the Witt Library of the Courtauld Institute of Art, shows a pharoah and several attendants on two boats on a river, with a temple in the background; the drawing is inscribed ‘sketch for “Going to the Oracle”’. It is possible that some of the drawings exhibited here may have been for one of the standing figures in this lost painting.

The studies of male nudes on the versos of three of these drawings provide a rare insight into AlmaTadema’s working process. Such academic studies from the posed model indicate that, at least at this early stage in his career, the artist initially studied the figures in his compositions as nudes, before adding drapery.

verso

1.

26 SIR LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA, R.A., O.M. Dronrijp 1836-1912 Wiesbaden Three Drapery Studies Pencil and red chalk, with touches of white chalk, on buff paper. Inscribed (by the artist’s daughter Anna) with the artist’s initials LAT in pencil at the centre right.

275 x 341 mm. (10 7/ 8 x 13 3/ 8 in.)

27 SIR LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA, O.M., R.A. Dronrijp 1836-1912 Wiesbaden Recto: Two Studies of Drapery for The Contrary Oracle Verso: Study of a Striding Male Nude Pencil, with touches of red and white chalk, on buff paper. The verso in pencil. Inscribed (by the artist’s daughter Anna) The contrary oracle in pencil at the lower left, and with the artist’s initials LAT in pencil at the lower right.

218 x 345 mm. (8 1/ 2 x 13 5/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist; The artist’s brother-in-law, Sir Edmund William Gosse, London; By descent in the Gosse family until the 1920s or 1930s; Acquired by a private collector; Thence by descent until 2015.

A number of the drawings in this group of drapery studies are clearly inscribed as preparatory studies for a painting called The Contrary Oracle, which never seems to have progressed beyond a preliminary stage. Almost nothing is known of this now-lost painting, although two pencil sketches for the composition – a large sheet showing a group of figures within a great hall (fig.1), and another study, inscribed ‘for The contrary oracle’, depicting part of the architectural background (fig.2) – were once part of the same sketchbook and shared the same Gosse provenance as the present group of drawings1.

verso

1.

2.

28 SIR LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA, R.A., O.M. Dronrijp 1836-1912 Wiesbaden Studies of a Skirt and a Tied Scarf Pencil and red chalk, with touches of white chalk, on buff paper. Inscribed (by the artist’s daughter Anna) with the artist’s initials LAT in pencil at the bottom centre right.

293 x 268 mm. (11 1/ 2 x 10 1/ 2 in.)

29 SIR LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA, R.A., O.M. Dronrijp 1836-1912 Wiesbaden Two Studies of Drapery for The Contrary Oracle Pencil, with touches of red and white chalk, on buff paper. Inscribed (by the artist’s daughter Anna) with the artist’s initials LAT in pencil at the bottom centre, and inscribed the Contrary Oracle in pencil at the lower right.

104 x 273 mm. (4 1/ 8 x 10 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist; The artist’s brother-in-law, Sir Edmund William Gosse, London; By descent in the Gosse family until the 1920s or 1930s; Acquired by a private collector; Thence by descent until 2015.

In all of his Egyptian paintings, Alma-Tadema strove to incorporate accurate representations of the furniture, objects and clothing of the period. Several of his early Egyptian subjects contain precise depictions of objects and settings which reflect the artist’s close study of an important reference book of his era; Sir John Gardner Wilkinson’s The Manners and Customs of Ancient Egyptians, published in 1837. (The painter’s extensive library included several works on Egyptology.) Stimulated by his friendship with the German Egyptologist Georg Ebers, Alma-Tadema was also inspired by his study, on a visit to London in 1862, of the collection of Egyptian antiquities in the British Museum.

As Stephanie Moser has recently written of the artist’s Egyptian paintings, ‘Together these pictures mark a turning point in Tadema’s engagement with antiquity: although he is known primarily for portraying ancient Rome, it is in these images of Egypt that he perfected the marriage of archaeology and art. His concern to include detailed representations of domestic artefacts raised awareness of the potential of such items to inform audiences about everyday life in antiquity – to reveal a whole world of ancient material culture beyond the great monuments.’1

30 SIR LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA, O.M., R.A. Dronrijp 1836-1912 Wiesbaden Recto: Three Studies of Drapery Verso: Three Studies of a Standing Male Nude Pencil and red chalk, with touches of white chalk, on buff paper. The verso in pencil. Inscribed (by the artist’s daughter Anna) with the artist’s initials LAT in pencil at the lower right, and partially inscribed – oracle in pencil at the lower left.

304 x 380 mm. (12 x 15 in.)

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist; The artist’s brother-in-law, Sir Edmund William Gosse, London; By descent in the Gosse family, until acquired from them by a private collector in the 1920s or 1930s; Thence by descent until 2015.

Although none of this group of six early drawings from a large sketchbook can be definitively related to any surviving works by Alma-Tadema, Stephanie Moser has suggested a tentative connection with what is thought to be one of the artist’s very first Egyptian works; The Sad Father or The Unfavourable Oracle (Opus X), painted in 1859. ‘Originally a large processional picture in an architectural setting, it was later cut down to a reduced scale showing only three figures’1; this is the painting now in the Johannesburg Art Gallery2.

Another section of the large painting of The Sad Father was reworked by the artist ten years later, in 1869, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871 under the title The Grand Chamberlain to Sesostris the Great. This reworked painting by Alma-Tadema, long thought to be lost, may be that acquired in the 1920s by the American cosmetics manufacturer and art collector Carl Weeks and still today in the collection of Salisbury House and Gardens in Des Moines, Iowa, the home he built between 1923 and 1928. The Weeks painting (fig.1) closely matches written descriptions of The Grand Chamberlain to Sesostris the Great from when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 18713.

As Moser has suggested, some of the drapery studies in the present group of drawings, as well as the studies of male nudes – several of whom seem to be holding staffs – may have served for either The Grand Chamberlain to Sesostris the Great or for other parts of the composition of the now-lost large painting of The Sad Father.

verso

1.

31 ALFRED-EMILE MÉRY Paris 1824-1896 Paris Study of Rooftops Watercolour and gouache. Signed ÆMERY in grey ink at the lower right.

327 x 501 mm. (12 7/ 8 x 19 3/4 in.)

Watermarks: VIDALON-LES-ANNONAY and CAMBON & MONTGOLFIER. A painter, watercolourist and etcher of landscapes, animals, interiors, still-life subjects and portraits, Alfred-Emile Méry was a student of the military painter Jean Adolphe Beaucé. He made his Salon debut in 1848, and continued to exhibit paintings and gouaches there regularly, winning a medal in 1868.

Ruined financially after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, when his studio was plundered and destroyed, Méry exhibited at the Salon every year between 1873 and 1877. He was a member of the Société des Artistes Français, and showed mainly gouaches and watercolours at the annual Salons organized by the Société in Paris. Méry was perhaps best known for his animal subjects, and was particularly fond of depicting insects, birds (especially swallows) and fowl, as well as monkeys – a painting of a macaque was purchased by the State at the Salon of 1874 – and other animals. Edgar Degas owned two paintings by Méry, one of hens and the other of a mouse, which he acquired from the dealer Ambroise Vollard in exchange for his own drawings. Méry also produced a number of prints, notably an etching of Bees published by the Société des Aquafortistes in 1866.

Among the few works by Méry in public collections is a painting of a Wasp’s Nest, signed and dated 1865, in the Musée Ingres in Montauban1, while two paintings of Apple Boughs and Nestlings Amid the Blossoms, painted in 1866 and 1870 respectively, are in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art2. Other paintings or drawings by the artist are in the museums of Angers, Dieppe, Langres and Limoges. His two sons, Charles and Paul-Auguste, were also artists, and received their training from him.

What may be a related watercolour of Swallows Landing on a Wall and a Tiled Roof by Alfred-Émile Méry is in the collection of the Musée Bonnat-Helleu in Bayonne3.

32 ANTOINE VOLLON Lyon 1833-1900 Paris Portrait of a Man, probably a Self-Portrait Black chalk, charcoal and coloured chalks on buff paper. A study of a dress in pencil on the verso. Signed and inscribed (by the artist’s son) Je soussigné, certifie, que ce dessin / portrait de mon père par lui-même / est bien de lui. / Alexis Vollon in black ink on the old backing board.

236 x 210 mm. (8 7/ 8 x 8 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Galerie Raphaël Gerard, Paris; François Daulte, Lausanne; Private collection.

Antoine Vollon enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in his native Lyon in 1851, studying printmaking and winning a silver medal for engraving the following year. By 1859 he had settled in Paris, where he became a disciple of Théodule Ribot, François Bonvin and other painters of the Realist circle. Self-taught as a painter, Vollon studied the work of Dutch and Spanish painters of the 17th century, and first exhibited at the Salon of 1864, having been included in the so-called Salon des Refusés of the previous year, alongside Edouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour and James McNeill Whistler. He soon achieved a considerable measure of success as a painter of landscapes, interior scenes and, in particular, still life subjects. In this latter field his works were evocative of the still life paintings of Jean-Baptiste Chardin, as well as certain Dutch 17th century painters and, among his contemporaries, Manet. Vollon was particularly admired for the painterly effects and technical mastery of his canvases. His contributions to the annual Salons were widely praised by critics, and several paintings were purchased by the State. In 1879 an exhibition of Vollon’s work was held at the offices of the magazine La Vie Moderne; this was, in fact, to be the artist’s only significant exhibition in his lifetime. Despite the success he achieved in his career, culminating in his election to the Institut de France in 1897, Vollon was almost completely forgotten after his death. A retrospective exhibition of his work at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, planned shortly after his death, was never held.

Antoine Vollon seems to have preferred this three-quarter pose, with part of his face in deep shadow, in the handful of self-portraits by the artist that have survived. These include paintings of c.1860 in a private collection1 and of c.1870 in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris2, as well as a self-portrait in old age in 18893. The jaunty tilt of the hat in this drawing may also be a reference to the artist’s usual appearance.

As has been noted of Vollon, ‘before leaving Lyon he had been cautioned that once in Paris, he should try to behave like everyone else and not wear his soft cap over one ear. He claimed never to have obeyed this advice. Indeed, in an early Rembrandtesque self portrait4, Vollon, then newly arrived in Paris, portrayed himself, palette in hand, wearing his cap to one side.’5 The Vollon scholar Carol Tabler has kindly confirmed the attribution of the present sheet, but is of the opinion that, despite the attestation of the artist’s son Alexis on the old backing board, this drawing is not, in fact, a self-portrait. She has suggested instead that it may be a portrait of Vollon’s close friend and fellow artist Joseph Soumy (1831-1863), whom he met in Paris soon after his arrival there from Lyon in June 1859. Certainly the two artists looked quite similar, to judge from a self-portrait drawing by Soumy6. (It should perhaps also be noted that Alexis Vollon was born two years after the death of Soumy, and would not have known him.) An early supporter of Vollon’s work, Soumy joined the artists Hippolyte Flandrin and Charles-François Daubigny in signing a letter recommending that Vollon be granted a commission from the State. He also introduced Vollon to the painter and sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, another close friend who painted a portrait of Vollon in 18737. Suffering from a degenerative eye disease, Soumy committed suicide in 1863, and Vollon is known to have painted a commemorative portrait of his friend, exhibited as Portrait de M. S. at the Salon des Refusés of that year. Soumy painted a portrait of Vollon, in which he appears unbearded; the painting was recorded in the possession of the sitter’s son, the artist Alexis Vollon, in 19108.

33 EUGÈNE EMMANUEL VIOLLET-LE-DUC Paris 1814-1879 Lausanne The Artist Sketching While Trapped in a Crevasse Watercolour heightened with gouache. Signed E Viollet le Duc in brown ink at the lower left and indistinctly dated 11 juill. 70 in brown ink at the lower right.

229 x 133 mm. (9 x 5 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Galerie du Luxembourg, Paris.

An architect and restorer of medieval buildings, as well as a painter, watercolourist and illustrator, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc is best known for his reconstruction and renovation of Gothic buildings and churches throughout France. Although he decided at an early age to become an architect, he chose not to follow the usual path of studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, preferring instead to apprentice with the architects Jean-Jacques-Marie Huvé and François-René Leclère. He also travelled extensively around France, visiting the Auvergne, Provence, Normandy, the Pyrenées and Languedoc, as well spending several months in Italy. He taught at the Ecole de Dessin in Paris, and between 1837 and 1844 contributed some 250 illustrations for Baron Taylor, Charles Nodier and Alphonse de Cailleux’s monumental Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, published in twenty-four volumes between 1820 and 1878. In 1838 Viollet-le-Duc began working for the Conseil des Bâtiments Civils, which supervised work on buildings belonging to the State, and in particular the restoration of national monuments. Through the intervention of Prosper Merimée at the Commission des Monuments Historiques, he was commissioned to take charge of the restoration of the Romanesque abbey of SainteMarie-Madeleine at Vézelay in 1840. This was the first of several major renovation projects that Violletle-Duc was closely involved in, among the most significant being the restoration of Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame in Paris, the abbey of Saint-Denis and the cathedrals of Amiens, Reims and ClermontFerrand, as well as the walls of Carcassonne and Avignon.

Viollet-le-Duc’s close study of Gothic architecture led to an interest in stained glass production, and between 1840 and 1847 he provided designs for stained glass windows for the Sèvres porcelain factory, while also designing liturgical objects and furnishings in a Gothic Revival style for many of the churches where he worked. He was perhaps equally as important as a theorist, and his writings had a significant impact on the understanding and appreciation of medieval architecture, and were likewise an influence on the 19th century practice of architectural restoration. Much of his subsequent fame also rests on his seminal Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, published in ten volumes between 1854 and 1868 and a highly influential work among such later architects as Antoni Gaudí and Victor Horta. Other important studies authored by Viollet-le-Duc include a comprehensive study of medieval and Renaissance furniture, jewellery, armour, clothing, musical instruments and interior decoration in France, published between 1858 and 1875 as the Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français de l’epoque carolingienne à la renaissance, and the two-volume Entretiens sur l’architecture, which appeared between 1863 and 1872.

During the Second Empire Viollet-le-Duc worked extensively for the Emperor Napoleon III, decorating the interior of Notre-Dame for the baptism of the Prince Imperial in 1856 and designing a monument to Napoleon I in his birthplace of Ajaccio in Corsica, completed in 1865, as well as restoring the château of Pierrefonds in the Oise. He also designed a number of private homes in Paris, as well as several châteaux and three churches. The architect lived through the Siege of Paris – which he recorded in several drawings – during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, and the defeat of France and the events of the Paris Commune affected him greatly. An outstanding draughtsman, Viollet-le-Duc’s remarkable watercolours of buildings and interiors are some of the most beautiful examples of architectural draughtsmanship of the 19th century.

actual size

Viollet-le-Duc had a lifelong interest in the mountains and glaciers of the French and Swiss Alps. Beginning in 1868, and in particular between 1871 and 1876, he spent many weeks climbing and hiking on the Mont Blanc massif. As has been noted of the artist, ‘mountaineering counted among his greatest pleasures, a form of physical and mental exercise that grew compulsive by the late 1870s. Above all, he took refuge in the mountains to liberate himself from the claustrophobic Parisian scene.’1 Viollet-le-Duc’s studies of alpine topography and geology culminated in the publication in 1876 of his magisterial book, Le massif de Mont Blanc. He was also a highly accomplished painter of mountain scenes and produced numerous drawings and watercolours of alpine subjects. Between 1874 and 1878, while he was engaged on the restoration of the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Lausanne, Viollet-le-Duc designed and built a villa nearby, called La Vedette, with a studio whose walls he decorated with a vast painted panorama of the Alps. In his book Histoire d’un dessinateur, published in 1879, he devoted an entire chapter to a description of a sketching tour in the Alps, with a detailed description of rock formations, ice and snow.

This fascinating watercolour, which is dated ‘11 juill. 70’, would appear to record an accident that befell Viollet-le-Duc on that day, while on the Schwartzberg glacier in the canton of Valais in Switzerland, part of the Mont Blanc massif. On the morning of the 11th of July 1870, he was on a trek, accompanied by a guide, when he suddenly fell into a deep glacial crevasse. As he recalled, in an account of the incident published eight years later, ‘“Crevasse de fond”, I said to myself in the second that followed the collapse of the crust of snow, “I am lost!”. Indeed, in this brief space of time, seeing only the blue wall of ice, I could tell that I was falling into one of those transversal glacial crevices that run all the way down to the valley line or thereabout.’2 Fortunately, his fall was broken by a rope with which he was attached to his guide, Baptiste. The artist found himself dangling in mid-air two or three metres below the mouth of the crevasse: ‘The place where I was suspended was admirably beautiful; smooth walls of ice, azure and green.

I was in a sepulchre of aquamarine and sapphire whose sides plunged toward an unfathomable depth of deep blue, and then black. My first impression was that I could not have chosen a more splendid tomb. My guide was not saying a word; I just sensed the efforts he was making to bring me back to the mouth of the crevice.

‘Eh?”, I said to him, “I am a dead man!”.’3 As Baptiste’s attempt to haul the artist back to the surface were proving ineffectual, Viollet-le-Duc decided to cut the rope to free the guide, who would likely freeze to death otherwise: ‘I pull out my knife and shouted: “I am cutting the rope!”...and then I fell into the abyss along the smooth wall of the crevice. How is it possible that instead of falling vertically to the bottom of this admirable sepulchre, following the law of gravity, I obliquely slid upon a slightly undulated ice surface? I do not know. The fact is that, at a depth of approximately twelve meters, I was extremely surprised to find myself sitting legs up, American style, on a piece of ice held, thanks to a narrowing of the crevice, at approximately five metres to the left of the point I was before.’4 The artist remained in this position deep within the crevasse for three and a half hours, before Baptiste was able to return from the village of Mattmark with four strong men and a length of rope, and pull him to safety5. As Martin Bressani notes, however, Viollet-le-Duc ‘had put to good use the time spent in the bosom of the glacier, calmly making a series of drawn observations on the phenomena of the regelation and exudation of the glacier mass that he later consigned in a separate chapter of Le massif du Mont Blanc.’6 Among stylistically comparable works by Viollet-le-Duc are two watercolour and gouache drawings of Above the Grands-Mulets and An Avalanche, both of 1869, in the collection of the Musée Lambinet in Versailles7. Other, similar watercolours of alpine subjects include views of The Tré-la-Tête Glacier of 1877, in the collection of the Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine in Paris8, and an unidentifed alpine view, dated September 1879, in the Viollet-le-Duc archives in Neuilly9.

34 DÉSIRÉ-FRANÇOIS LAUGÉE Maromme 1823-1896 Paris Portrait of a Woman Charcoal, heightened with white. Laid down. Signed, inscribed and dated D. Laugée / Londres / 1872 in black chalk at the right centre.

323 x 265 mm. (12 3/4 x 10 3/ 8 in.) [image] 343 x 293 mm. (13 1/ 2 x 11 1/ 2 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Paul Magriel, New York; Robert S. Pirie, New York.

Although the painter and poet Désiré-François Laugée was very successful in his lifetime, and his work can still be found in a number of Parisian churches and elsewhere, his reputation has fallen into obscurity since his death, and he remains very little known today. Born in a village near Rouen, Laugée grew up in Saint-Quentin, where he first studied before enrolling in 1840 in the studio of François-Edouard Picot at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1845, showing a double portrait of a father and son (thought to be a self-portrait with his father), and it is as a portrait painter that he first established a reputation. A friend of Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, he painted portraits of Hugo and the historian and writer Henri Martin, and frequently sent portraits to the Salon, until 1859. He also painted religious subjects, both in the form of easel pictures which were exhibited at the Salons and as mural paintings for such Parisian churches as Sainte-Clotilde, Sainte-Trinité and SaintPierre-du-Gros-Caillou, as well as the Basilica of Saint-Quentin.

Laugée was also highly regarded as a painter of historical subjects, such as The Death of Zurbaran, which won a third-class medal at the 1851 Salon, and The Siege of Saint-Quentin, exhibited the following year. He won several prizes at the Salons, and a number of his religious and historical subject pictures were purchased by the State, including Saint Louis Washing the Feet of the Poor, which was shown at the Salon of 1863. Among the secular public commissions Laugée received were the decoration of the Hôtel Continental (now the Westin) on the Rue de Rivoli, as well as the cupola of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris; painted between 1888 and 1889, the latter frescoes have been detached and are now in the Musée Carnavalet. Later in his career, Laugée came to specialize in paintings of pastoral and rustic subjects, in a manner akin to the work of the artists of the Barbizon school, and among his pupils was the Realist genre painter Julien Dupré. Several paintings by Laugée are today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, while others are in the Louvre and the museums of Amiens, Avignon, Lille, Limoges and Troyes.

Drawn during a visit to London in 1872, this striking portrait may be grouped with a handful of similar drawings of the same date and technique. These include a closely comparable charcoal portrait of a woman (fig.1), possibly depicting the same sitter (who is identified as a ‘Mrs. Clover’), which was on the art market in London in 19811, while a similar portrait drawing of an elderly woman – signed, dated and inscribed ‘London / Jany 1871’ – is today in a private collection in London. Also alike in style and handling is a charcoal portrait drawing of Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton of Knebworth of 1872, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia2.

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

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

One of the finest British watercolourists of the 19th century, Arthur Melville was of humble origins. The son of a coachman, he was apprenticed to a grocer but, from the age of thirteen, took evening art classes and drawing lessons in Edinburgh. In 1875 his painting A Scotch Lassie was shown at the annual exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy, and within a few months he was studying at the RSA Schools and sharing a studio in Edinburgh. In 1878 Melville had a painting exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, and later the same year he moved to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. He remained in France for much of the next two years, painting at Cancale in Brittany and Granville, Honfleur and Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, before settling in the town of Grez-sur-Loing, seventy kilometres south of Paris, where there was a thriving artistic community. After a brief period back in Edinburgh, the young Melville embarked on a journey to Egypt, where he spent the latter half of 1881 and the first few weeks of 1882, before continuing his travels on to Jeddah, Aden, Karachi, Baghdad, Mosul and Constantinople, returning to England in August 1882 via Vienna, Strasbourg and Paris. This trip resulted in a number of fine watercolours of Oriental subjects, which were exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in London in 1883.

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

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

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

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

Among other extant watercolours of Granville by Melville is a Street Market, Granville, dated 1878, in the Glasgow Museums collection8, and a street scene recently on the art market in Scotland9. It was during his early years in France that, as the artist Romilly Fedden noted, ‘Melville’s work in water-colour began to reveal special qualities. He had discovered his medium. These were no tinted drawings dependent on a scaffolding of pencil work, but painting – painting so strong and virile that it could hold its own with any other medium – even with oil. The Frenchmen were astounded.’10 Fedden adds that ‘Melville may be called the great technician of water-colour...[His] job was water-colour, and he knew it so well, its ways, its difficulties, its capabilities, its limitations – he understood his medium and he mastered it. He was daring, unconventional. He tried things which no one else had tried, he followed no one, belonged to no accepted school, and in that, in his individuality, he stands apart.’11

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

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

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

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

EXHIBITED: London, St. Jude’s School House, Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibition, April 1882, no.9 (lent

by Thomas Devitt); London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Spring Exhibition, 1902, no.201 (lent by Thomas Devitt); Penzance, Penlee House Gallery and Museum, John Brett: A Pre-Raphaelite in Cornwall, 2006, no.41 (ex-catalogue).

John Brett enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools in 1854, at the relatively late age of twenty-two. A devout reader of the writings of John Ruskin, he was attracted by the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and met Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. In 1856, while travelling in the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland, he met the landscape painter John William Inchbold, whose work proved to be a significant inspiration. Soon afterwards Brett completed his first major painting, The Glacier of Rosenlaui, dated August 1856 and shown at the Royal Academy the following year; the painting is today in the collection of Tate Britain. In 1858 he exhibited a second major canvas, The Stonebreaker, at the Royal Academy; it is now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. This was followed a year later by what is arguably Brett’s masterpiece as a Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter; a remarkable view of The Val d’Aosta that was praised by Ruskin in his Academy Notes and was eventually bought by him. Not long afterwards, however, the relationship between Brett and Ruskin became somewhat strained.

From 1865 onwards, Brett painted mainly maritime scenes and coastal views in England, Scotland and Wales. After his marriage in 1870, he spent most of his summers making sketching tours, including three years in the 1880s when he and his family spent weeks onboard a yacht, sailing the coastline of Britain.

In the catalogue of an exhibition of his landscape oil sketches at the Fine Art Society in 1886, entitled Three Months on the Scottish Coast, Brett described his working method in some detail. When planning a painting of a particular view, he would make small oil sketches on the spot, completing each one in two or three hours without any subsequent retouching. Some of these oil sketches would later be worked up in his London studio, over the winter months, into full-scale exhibition canvases, often of considerable size. In 1881 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, although he never rose to the position of Academician. The last decade or so of Brett’s career were a constant struggle, as his work fell out of favour and fashion, although his sea paintings continued to be exhibited throughout Britain and even occasionally at the Paris Salon. Although he often lectured on art and published several articles, he painted little after 1897, and died in relative obscurity at the age of seventy. Nevertheless, speaking shortly after his death, the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Edward Poynter, could praise Brett as ‘one of the most original of our landscape artists’.

Brett made his first visit to Cornwall during the course of his honeymoon in September 1870, and returned there in 1872, 1873, and 1876. The rugged granite cliffs of the Cornish coast came to be a favourite motif of the artist, and he continued to make regular painting expeditions to Cornwall, with his last visit in 1899. As the artist’s great-grandson has noted, Brett ‘left over 200 known views of the coastline

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

This painting was bought from Brett by Sir Thomas Lane Devitt, Bt. (1839-1923), a friend and major patron of the artist5. Devitt’s collection included several works by Brett, and in 1882 he lent this painting, together with four other views of Cornwall by the artist, to the second Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibition, established the previous year by the vicar of a church in Whitechapel, Canon Samuel Augustus Barnett, as a free annual exhibition of contemporary art. Barnett’s stated wish was to ‘educate people so that they might realise the extent and meaning of the past, the beauty of nature, and the substance of hope’, and in the catalogue of the 1882 exhibition, in which each picture was described in terms intended for the layman, it was noted of the present canvas that ‘The water has made itself into a mirror for the rocks and sky.’6 The success of these annual exhibitions, which drew thousands of visitors, led Barnett to advocate for the establishment of a permanent exhibition space in the East End of London, and led to the founding of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1901. The following year, just a few weeks after Brett’s death, Devitt lent the same group of Cornwall paintings, again including Logan Bay, to the Spring Exhibition at the newly-established Whitechapel Art Gallery.

37 GEORGES CLAIRIN Paris 1843-1919 Belle-Îsle-en-Mer Ships at a Quayside in Venice Watercolour, heightened with gouache, over a pencil underdrawing, on buff paper. Signed, dated and dedicated à mon ami Lebrasseur / son tout dévoué et reconnaissant ami / G. Clairin / 1891 in brown ink at the lower left.

327 x 766 mm. (12 7/ 8 x 30 1/ 8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to a M. Lebrasseur in 1891 (according to the inscription at the lower left); Galerie du Luxembourg, Paris.

In 1861 Georges-Jules-Victor Clairin entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied under Isidore Pils and François-Edouard Picot. He first exhibited his work in 1866, and continued to do so throughout his career, winning a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle in 1889. In 1868 Clairin accompanied the painter Henri Regnault on a trip through Spain and Morocco, where he was particularly taken with Moorish architecture and costumes, and he also travelled in Italy in the company of Jean-Léon Gerôme. In Morocco he met the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny, and together the two artists visited Tetuan. Apart from the easel pictures and illustrations for which he was highly regarded, Clairin received several public commissions, notably the ceiling painting for the foyer of the Opéra in Paris, painted in 1874, as well as the Bourse de Commerce, the Sorbonne and the Hôtel de Ville. This was the first of several decorations that Clairin would produce for hotels, châteaux and theatres over the course of his career. In 1895 he travelled to Egypt with the composer Camille Saint-Saëns, although he was taken ill and was unable to cross the Sinai desert as he had wished.

Known to his friends by the nickname ‘Jojotte’, Clairin was a popular member of artistic society in Belle Epoque Paris, and was associated with an elegant crowd of socialites, writers, actors, artists and musicians. He was best known for his numerous paintings of the actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was a close friend and often hosted the artist at her country home. Bernhardt regarded the artist as her preferred painter, and he depicted her in a number of her stage roles as well as in more informal surroundings. Clairin exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français, the Salon des Peintres Orientalistes Français and the Societé Coloniale des Artistes Français. He was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1897, four years before a major exhibition of his work was held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. A large number of paintings, watercolours and drawings by the artist were dispersed in two sales of the contents of his studio in Paris in 1920.

Georges Clairin painted a number of paintings and watercolours set in Venice, mostly of elegant genre scenes and festival subjects. The present sheet was drawn in June 1891, when the artist was in Venice as a guest of Princess Edmond de Polignac. A similar large watercolour view of boats on a quay in Venice, dated 1892 and dedicated to Charles Garnier, the architect of the Opéra, was on the art market in France in 2004 and 20121.

1.

38 LUDOVIC ALLEAUME Angers 1859-1941 Paris Self-Portrait Oil on vellum. Oval.

182 x 177 mm. (7 1/ 8 x 7 in.)

PROVENANCE: By descent in the family of the artist until 2015.

A painter, lithographer and designer of stained glass, Ludovic Alleaume (fig.1) studied in his native Angers and, at the age of eighteen, entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where his teachers were Ernest Hebert and Luc-Olivier Merson. In 1888 he spent two months in Palestine, returning there for a year in 1890, and the studies that he made in and around Jersualem resulted in a number of Orientalist pictures. Alleaume also painted Biblical themes, mainly from the New Testament, as well as allegorical and literary subjects, landscapes, nudes and genre subjects. An excellent draughtsman, he worked in an academic style that owed little to the more avant-garde trends in contemporary French art. He exhibited regularly at the Salon des Artistes Français between 1883 and 1938, winning several prizes, and also took part in exhibitions in Angers, Nantes, Nice, Rouen and Toulouse, as well as London. In Paris he exhibited his work at the Galerie Georges Petit, and from 1894 onwards showed with the Société des PeintresLithographes, of which he was elected vice president in 1934. Among his public commissions were an allegorical ceiling painting for the Caisse d’Epargne in Laval and murals for several churches, notably a large cycle of paintings for the church Saint-Nicolas in Craon, painted between 1892 and 1899 in collaboration with the painter Ladislas Dymkowski. Alleaume was also a gifted portraitist, although this aspect of his oeuvre remains relatively little known today, and contributed illustrations to Le Monde illustré and other periodicals.

Ludovic Alleaume is perhaps best known today as a designer of stained glass decorations. Between 1893 and 1937, he divided his time between his studio in Paris and that of his elder brother, the glass painter Auguste Alleaume (1854-1940), in Laval. The younger Alleaume produced numerous drawings and full-size cartoons for stained glass which were frequently executed by Auguste, or by other glass painters working in Brussels, Lille, Paris, Rennes and Rouen. He designed numerous stained glass windows for churches in Laval and elsewhere in the départément of Mayenne; at Bourgon, Chailland, Cuillé, Désertines, Fougères and Larchamp, as well as in Saint-Cloud and Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

Almost 650 preparatory drawings and over 350 cartoons for stained glass windows by Alleaume are preserved in the Archives départementales de la Mayenne and the Musée du Vieux-Château in Laval, which also houses some paintings and drawings by the artist and two stained glass windows by the Alleaume brothers. Other works by Ludovic Alleaume are in the museums of Angers, Nantes and Rennes.

An early work by the artist, this striking Self-Portrait may be dated to c.1880-1885. Much later in date are series of eight amusing self-portrait drawings, showing him with different styles of beard or none at all, executed in 1917 and today in the Musée du VieuxChâteau in Laval1.

1.

39 HENRI-JOSEPH HARPIGNIES Valenciennes 1819-1916 Saint-Privé Wooded Landscape at Sunset Watercolour, pen and brown ink and brown wash. Laid down. Signed h. harpignies 91 in brown ink at the lower left.

214 x 275 mm. (8 3/ 8 x 10 7/ 8 in.)

Although Henri Harpignies began drawing at the age of four or five, according to an unpublished autobiographical manuscript, he came to realize his vocation as an artist at a relatively late age, and it was not until 1848, when he was in his late twenties, that he began training as an artist in the studio of the landscape painter Jean-Alexis Achard. He made his Salon debut in 1853, exhibiting views of Capri and Valenciennes, and he continued to show regularly at the Salons throughout his long and productive career. His luminous landscape paintings, depicting both rural and urban views, were inspired by his friendship with Camille Corot, whom he met in the early 1850s. In 1863 three of his entries to the Salon were rejected, and were instead shown at the Salon des Refusés. The same year Harpignies made his second visit to Italy, staying in Rome and Capri; this sojourn was to have a significant effect on his oeuvre.

From 1883 he began to sell his work through the art dealers Arnold & Tripp, earning around 70,000 francs per year, on average. Harpignies provided mural decorations for the Hôtel de Ville, the Senate and the Opéra in Paris, and also produced a group of around thirty-five etchings, most of which date from early in his career, between 1847 and 1853. He maintained an emphasis on a distinctive manner of tonal landscape, inspired by the example of Corot, in the paintings and drawings that he produced well into the early years of the 20th century. Harpignies continued to paint until a week before his death, at the age of ninety-seven.

Highly regarded as a landscape painter, Harpignies also developed a specialty of landscape drawings in watercolour, a medium which accounts for some of his finest work, and was to be the basis of his reputation, particularly outside France. (In an obituary for the artist, published in 1916, one English writer noted of his watercolours, ‘We marvel at the delicate tints his hand, accustomed to the vigorous touch of his oil painting, can produce.’1) Harpignies exhibited his first watercolour landscapes at the Salon of 1864, where they were praised by the critic Théophile Thoré, and the freshness and luminosity of his watercolours soon gained him a wide audience. In 1881 he was elected a member of the Société des Aquarellistes Français, where he showed regularly, while he also exhibited at the New Water-Colour Society in London.

In 1898 the English art critic Frederic Lees wrote that ‘Harpignies...[has] the power of producing the most powerful effects by teints unies; his sobriety of colour, breadth of treatment, firmness of touch, and precision of drawing placing him in the front rank of water-colour artists.’2 Eighteen years later, in an article published shortly after the artist’s death, the same writer opined that, ‘As a water-colour artist, Harpignies was without a rival in France. His work in this branch of art cannot be too highly praised, for whilst attaining preeminence he proved himself to be a veritable pioneer. Having worked incessantly at water-colours for fourteen years, he at last decided to exhibit them for the first time at the 1864 Salon, and although only a chosen few may have immediately recognised how beautifully fresh and limpid these little works were – how different from the weak and finicking productions of the water-colourists of the Second Empire – it was not long before others were taking their inspiration from him. As one of the forerunners, if not the founder, of the modern school of water-colour painting in France, his work was much appreciated abroad, especially in England and the United States.’3 Despite his increasing fame and success, however, Harpignies seems to have remained at heart a man of simple tastes, committed to his art. As Agnes Mongan has written, ‘Clearly, his happiness was in recording, whether in drawings, watercolor, or paint, the landscapes he saw around him…his ninety-seven years were productive of a large number of landscapes in a variety of media that have delighted and continue to delight those who enjoy their sensitive and particular artistic qualities.’4

40 EUGÈNE GRASSET Lausanne 1845-1917 Paris The Capture of Joan of Arc at Compiègne: Design for a Stained Glass Window Watercolour, pen and black ink and black wash. Signed EGrasset in black ink at the lower right. Inscribed GAUDIN peintre verrier – PARIS in white on a label pasted onto the lower left margin.

866 x 445 mm. (34 1/ 8 x 17 1/ 2 in.) [image] 970 x 575 mm. (38 1/ 8 x 22 5/ 8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Félix Gaudin, Paris; By descent to Sylvie Gaudin Blanc-Garin; Galerie du Luxembourg, Paris, in 1980.

LITERATURE: Ed. Didron, ‘Le concours de vitraux de Jeanne d’Arc pour la cathédrale d’Orléans’, Revue des Arts Décoratifs, 1893-1894, p.202; Yves Plantin and Françoise Blondel, Eugene Grasset, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1980, p.45, no.33.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Jeanne d’Arc. Exposition de projets de verrières pour la cathédrale d’Orléans, October 1893; Orléans, Salle des Fêtes, Concours pour l’exécution de verrières relatives à Jeanne d’Arc destinées à la cathédrale d’Orléans. Exposition des projets, October – November 1893; Paris, La Plume, Salon des Cent, Oeuvres d’Eugène Grasset, part of nos. 270-279 (‘Les Verrières de Jeanne d’Arc pour la Cathèdrale d’Orléans, aquarelles au 10e d’exécution.’); Paris, Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 1896, part of no.448.

Trained as an architect in his native Switzerland, Eugène Samuel Grasset settled in 1871 in Paris, where he was mainly active as a designer in the applied and decorative arts, producing designs for jewellery, furniture and stained glass. He made a close study of Gothic architecture and stained glass windows, and became friendly with Eugène Viollet-le Duc, the architect responsible for the restoration of NotreDame. These archeological studies allowed him to create accurate depictions of medieval towns, castles, weapons and objects for the beautiful illustrations that he produced for a lavish edition of the Carolingian epic Histoire des Quatre Fils Aymon, published in 1883 and an important forerunner of Art Nouveau book design in France. It was not until 1894, when he was already in his early fifties, that Grasset had his only one-man exhibition in his lifetime; a large retrospective at the Salon des Cent, a new gallery on the premises of the magazine La Plume. The exhibition included drawings and watercolours, numerous designs for furniture, stained glass, metalwork, fabric and jewellery, as well as theatrical and advertising posters, book and magazine covers, illustrations and other work as a graphic designer. Grasset published two important books on ornamental design; La plante et ses applications ornamentales, which appeared in 1898-1899, and Méthode de composition ornamental, published in 1905.

Eugène Grasset produced some of his finest and most attractive drawings as a designer of stained glass windows. As his pupil, the Art Nouveau artist and decorator Maurice Pillard Verneuil, wrote, ‘Without a doubt, artists other than Grasset have composed cartoons for [stained glass] windows, and some of these are admirable. But none of these artists are glassmakers in their soul, and do not see or translate their thoughts as would a true glassmaker. Their compositions, deeply erudite and beautiful, could as well have been cartoons for tapestry or decorative paintings. But Grasset’s cartoons for stained glass can only be stained glass and nothing else. They have been conceived as such, understood in this particular medium, and nothing need be changed for their final realization.’1 Grasset produced his first known cartoon for a stained glass decoration in 1880, and continued to produce designs – both of sacred subjects intended for churches and secular themes for domestic interiors – until the end of his life. From 1886 onwards he worked almost exclusively with the glass painter and mosaicist Félix Gaudin (1851-1930), who produced some of his finest work in collaboration with him.

Writing in The Studio in 1894, Octave Uzanne opined of Grasset that ‘Among his principal achievements, his glass ware and stained windows do him the greatest credit, and those aërial transparent paintings will secure for his name the most lasting reputation. He has at his command a fund of resource, not merely due to the religious spirit pervading his compositions, but to his care in selecting beautiful iridescent glass, shimmering, striated and rich in tone, all of which he knows how to arrange in concert with M. Gaudin, the clever executant he has selected to produce them. The cartoons and small models which he has exhibited at the Joan of Arc window competition for the Cathedral at Orleans, made an enormous impression on the artistic public who visited them last year at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. This portion of his work is assuredly the most beautiful and elevated.’2 Drawn in 1893, this very large watercolour was one of ten designs by Grasset, all depicting scenes from the life of Joan of Arc, intended for the stained glass windows of the cathedral of Sainte-Croix in Orléans, but never executed. Announced in December 1891, the competition to design the windows for the nave of the cathedral was one of the most significant ecclesiastical commissions for stained glass of the late 19th century. As Verneuil, writing a few years later, recalled of the competition: ‘Twelve large windows to furnish, retracing the whole life of Joan of Arc! What a unique opportunity for a glassmaker to create an immense work, a masterpiece! Grasset set to work with enthusiasm. And the expected masterpiece was soon born from his hands. Conceived in the style of the 15th century, his designs follow the life of the heroine, with a beauty, a style, a character that one could never admire enough…In truth, we do not know what should be placed first: the erudition, the science of composition, the ingenuity of the artist, [or] the pure and noble beauty of the draughtsmanship.’3 In October 1893 the various preparatory studies and cartoons submitted for the concours were exhibited in Paris and Orléans, and it was generally agreed by critics that Grasset’s designs, to be executed in collaboration with Gaudin, were the finest of the entries.

However, and to the surprise and disappointment of many observers, Grasset and Gaudin’s designs for the Orléans windows were rejected by the jury of the competition, and the commission given to the painter Jacques Galland and the maître-verrier Esprit Gibelin4. The decision caused a scandal. As the critic Arsène Alexandre noted at the time, ‘Those people who have not been touched by the aesthetic and technical beauty of [Grasset’s] cartoons and maquettes for the Joan of Arc competition, or who, being aware of this beauty, have moved on elsewhere, are guilty of one of the most striking denials of justice ever seen in the artistic history of our time, and shall assume a grave responsibility to our descendants.’5 Grasset’s designs for the Joan of Arc windows for the cathedral of Orléans were widely praised for their intrinsic beauty, the animation and unity of the compositions, and the exquisite interplay of light and colour. The writer Camille Lemonnier described the large drawings as ‘a pure jewel, one of the highest expressions of the art of our time...The exquisite polychromy evokes the flowery and heavenly tones, the airs of grave faces, the noble and simple attitudes of the most beautiful missals. Each window frames one of the heroine’s episodes, and these borders symbolise the virtues, the perils, the treacheries, the dominations, as a commentary on this miraculous life’6, while another critic, writing in 1900, observed that ‘[Grasset’s] cartoons for the cathedral at Orléans seem to be the enlarged drawings of fine and precious miniatures.’7 Only one of Grasset’s designs for Orléans cathedral was ever produced as a stained glass window. His drawing of The Coronation of Charles VII at Reims was later repurposed by Félix Gaudin for a window in the church of Saint-Germain in the town of La Châtre, executed between 1903 and 19058. Six of Grasset’s large drawings for the Orléans cathedral windows, of similar scale to the present sheet and sharing the same provenance, are today in the Musée d’Orsay9. As the art historian and critic Gabriel Mourey noted of these drawings, ‘The art of stained glass, after four hundred years of sleep, had just awakened, and no influence could have been more fertile than that of this work, if it had been realized…One must imagine [these designs] if they had been executed, materialized in the splendour of glass illuminated by light, these lively paintings of The Departure from Vaucouleurs, of Joan of Arc at the Assault of the Fort of Les Tourelles, of the Coronation, of The Entry into Orléans. Grasset had never gone so far in the employment of his talents: what abundance of precise and expressive gestures, what richness in these costumes, in these architectures, and what science of composition, of grouping!’10

41 CHARLES MAURIN Le Puy-en-Velay 1856-1914 Grasse The Guardian Angel Watercolour and gouache. Laid down. Signed and dated Ch. Maurin / 1894 in brown ink at the lower right.

650 x 465 mm. (21 5/ 8 x 18 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 May 1994, lot 196; Private collection, New Jersey.

Having won the art scholarship known as the Prix Crozatier in 1875, Charles Maurin entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, studying with Jules Lefèbvre and Gustave Boulanger, and with Rodolphe Julian at the Académie Julian. He first exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1882, where he showed a pair of portraits, one of which gained an honourable mention. He continued to exhibit at the Salon des Artistes Français until 1890. He participated in the Salon des Indépendants for the first time in 1887, showing a number of paintings, drawings and engravings that were admired by, among others, Edgar Degas. As an artist, he worked in a variety of styles, the most distinctive being a sort of Symbolism evident in a range of allegorical subjects that he treated.

Maurin had a lifelong interest in the depiction of the female nude, and, like Degas and Mary Cassatt, was fond of portraying women at intimate moments of their daily routine. He also produced a handful of splendid portraits, mainly in the 1880s and 1890s, of friends, patrons and fellow artists including Georges Seurat and Rupert Carabin, as well as drawings and pastels of café, theatre and street scenes. Around 1885 he took up an appointment as a professor at the Académie Julian, where he met Félix Vallotton, who became a close friend. Another good friend was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, with whom Maurin shared an exhibition in 1893 at the Galerie Boussod et Valadon in Paris. It was there that, at the urging of Degas, the collector Henry Laurent began to acquire Maurin’s work, eventually becoming his foremost patron and collector.

The 1890s found Maurin enjoying a moderately successful career, with one-man shows with Ambroise Vollard in 1895 and at Edmond Sagot in 1899. He received a commission from the State for a painting of Maternité (Motherhood); completed in 1893 and sent to the museum in his native town of Le Puy, the painting was soon regarded as one of the artist’s finest works. The previous year he took part in the inaugural Salon de la Rose + Croix, where he showed one of his largest and most important paintings; a monumental triptych entitled L’Aurore (Dawn). He also contributed works to the Salons de la Rose + Croix of 1895 and 1897. Maurin painted a series of large decorative panels of Tragedy, Dance and Music for the foyer of the municipal theatre in Le Puy in 1893, and for Sarah Bernhardt designed sets and costumes for Edmond Rostand’s La Princess Lointaine in 1895. He visited Holland, Belgium and England, and sent works to Le Libre Esthétique in Brussels in 1896 and 1897, and the Exhibition of International Art in London in 1898. A man of firm anarchist leanings, Maurin produced illustrations for the radical journal Le Temps nouveau, and published portrait prints of the French anarchists Louise Michel and François Koenigstein, known as Ravachol. In 1895 he was also commissioned to provide illustrations for the art and literary journal La Revue Blanche.

After 1900, however, Maurin’s output declined considerably, partly due to ill health, and the last years of his life were spent in Brittany and Provence, where he died in obscurity in 1914. His work was largely forgotten after his death, although a retrospective exhibition was held at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1921, while a monograph on his work by Ulysse Rouchon was published the following year.

Although a significant collection of Maurin’s work is today in the collection of the Musée Crozatier in Le Puy-en-Velay, his paintings and drawings remain little represented in museums outside France.

As a draughtsman, Maurin was equally adept in pastel, chalk and pencil, and was highly regarded by critics, collectors and fellow artists; his drawings were, for example, particularly esteemed by Degas, who compared his draughtsmanship to that of his own great hero, Ingres. An innovative artist, he invented a method of using an atomizer to spray pigment onto the surface of the paper to create what he termed ‘peintures au vaporisateur’; large, atmospheric watercolour landscapes of great subtlety and beauty.

Maurin is perhaps best known today, however, as a gifted and prolific printmaker, and played an important role in the revival of colour etching and wood engraving in the 1890s. Like his paintings, many of his prints focus on the female nude, or the theme of mothers and children, and account for some of the artist’s most striking and individual works. Maurin also developed a number of new techniques and processes, particularly with regard to printing in colour. Some of his prints were published in editions of ten or less, however, and much of his graphic work remains very rare today.

Although long forgotten or ignored after his death, Charles Maurin’s eclectic oeuvre as a painter, printmaker and draughtsman remains one of the most distinctive of any artist in France in the late 19th century. The French scholar Jacques Foucart, writing in 1979, succinctly described the artist as ‘that curious and libertarian figure, so typical of the effervescent Paris of the Belle Epoque, an engraver of social customs comparable with Louis Legrand, a perfectionist and an inventive technician, a sensitive draughtsman à la Besnard, a friend of Lautrec and Valloton. He created some of the most extravagant humanitarian and ‘socialist’ visions of the fin-de-siècle, which he treated in a flexible and decorative ‘graphisme’ in the manner of Eugène Grasset, or even of De Feure...That an artist of such intriguing qualities – even though, as engraver of nudes, he does at times become rather tiresomely vulgar and commercial – and so representative of a period that was hungry to explore everything (it is often said that all modern art was contained in the years before 1914), has been the subject of neither an exhibition, since that of 1921 at Bernheim’s, nor of a monograph, certainly sets one thinking about the vagaries of Taste and about the nature of the present fashion for the art of 1900.’1 In recent years, however, a revival of interest in Maurin’s remarkable body of work culminated in a major monographic exhibition, entitled Charles Maurin, un Symboliste du Réel, at the Musée Crozatier in the artist’s native town of Le Puy-en-Valey in 2006.

Signed and dated 1894, this large and highly finished watercolour and gouache drawing is unrelated to any painting or print by Maurin, and must have been executed as an independent work of art.

Studies of young girls appear in around fifty works by the artist – paintings, pastels, drawings and prints – and make up a distinct part of his oeuvre, but the present sheet is much more refined in handling and appearance than most of these. Instead, this impressive work may be related to a small group of highly finished religious or allegorical subjects by Maurin, dating from the first half of the 1890s. Among stylistically comparable works on paper of this type is a large Annunciation in pastel and gouache with gold, signed and dated 1893, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Quimper2, and an equally large allegorical drawing of Virtue Between Two Vices (also known as L’Amour profond), likewise executed in pastel and gouache and dated 1893, in a private collection in Paris3. Like these two works, this extraordinary watercolour of The Guardian Angel displays something of the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites on Maurin.

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

193 x 187 mm. (7 5/ 8 x 7 3/ 8 in.)

Born in the Gironde, Charles Lacoste studied at the Grand Lycée in Bordeaux, where in 1884, at the age of fourteen, he befriended the poet Francis Jammes and the future collector Gabriel Frizeau. Jammes was to be a lifelong friend and champion of the artist, while Frizeau became Lacoste’s first significant supporter and patron, in the early years of his career1. Lacoste, whose mother was of English descent, made three trips to London; in 1894, 1896 and 1897. He stayed in Chelsea with his friend, the writer Hubert Montague Crackanthorpe, and through him became associated with a literary and intellectual circle. He was also inspired by the work of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner which he studied on repeated visits to the National Gallery, and which influenced his own particular interest in exploring atmospheric effects in his landscapes. From 1894 onwards Lacoste’s works are characterized by a certain stillness, and he often painted landscapes at sunrise or sunset, at night or in moonlight, with snow, mist or fog. This is particularly true of the landscapes he painted in London, which capture something of Whistler’s Thames nocturnes of twenty years earlier.

The first exhibition in which Lacoste took part was the Salon des Cent of 1898, organized by the magazine La Plume, to which the artist had the previous year contributed an article entitled ‘La Simplicité dans la peinture’, in which he noted: ‘Les oeuvres que, toutes nous propose la nature, comme elle, doivent être simples...’ Lacoste settled in Paris in 1899, and soon came under the wing of the philanthropist and patron Arthur Fontaine, who hosted one of the leading intellectual salons in the city. It was there that Lacoste met such figures as the writers André Gide and Paul Valéry, the composers Claude Debussy and Darius Milhaud, and the artists Odilon Redon, Edouard Vuillard, Eugène Carrière and Maurice Denis.

It was Gide who, in 1904, introduced Lacoste to the gallerist Alphonse Eugène Druet, who exhibited his work yearly until 1938. Among his other supporters in Paris was the Princesse Faucigny-Lucinge de Cystria, who came to own several works by Lacoste. Between 1900 and 1914, Lacoste showed frequently at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne, as well as with the exhibitions organized by La Libre Esthetique in Brussels in 1907 and the Toison d’Or (Golden Fleece) in Moscow the following year. He had several one-man exhibitions at galleries in Paris, notably at the Galerie Druet and the Galerie Eugène Blot, as well as at the Galerie Barbazanges in 1921 and the Galerie Raphaël Gerard in 1937.

Although above all a landscape painter, Lacoste also painted around thirty portraits, mostly before 1900, and a handful of still life subjects, as well as producing cartoons for tapestries for the Gobelins factory and illustrations for books by Jammes and Gide. In 1937 a retrospective exhibition of Lacoste’s work was held at the Salon d’Automne, and two years later the artist retired to the département of PyrénéesAtlantiques in the southeastern corner of France. Several works by Lacoste are in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, while others are in the collections of museums in Beauvais, Bordeaux, Brest, Dieppe, Honfleur, Nancy, Pau, Poitiers, Roanne, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Saint-Quentin, Soissons and Toulouse, as well as in Algiers, Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

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

43 EDVARD MUNCH Ådalsbruck 1863-1944 Oslo Rocks at the Edge of the Sea at Åsgårdstrand Pastel on buff paper. Inscribed (in Norwegian?) and numbered 10 in pencil on the verso.

249 x 355 mm. (9 3/4 x 14 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s sister, Inger Marie Munch, Oslo; Given by her to Berta Folkedal, Oslo; Galleri Kaare Berntsen, Oslo; Acquired from them by a private collector in 2003; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 20 June 2006, lot 115.

Born in the municipality of Løten in the Norwegian province of Hedmark, Edvard Munch was raised in Kristiania (now Oslo). His mother died of tuberculosis when Edvard was five years old, while his elder sister Sophie died of the same disease seven years later, aged just fifteen; the illness and deaths of his mother and sister were themes he would later explore in his work as an artist. Munch trained briefly at the Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania, and in 1885 made his first trip to Paris, returning in 1889 to study with the painter Léon Bonnat. Between these two trips, he achieved both critical success and notoriety for his painting The Sick Child, shown in Kristiania in 1886. Munch remained in Paris, supported by a grant from the Norwegian state, until 1891. The following year he was invited to Berlin to mount a one-man exhibition at the Verein Berliner Künstler. The exhibition caused a scandal and was closed after only a few days, but established the artist’s reputation in Germany; the dealer Eduard Schulte sent many of the paintings to exhibitions in Cologne and Düsseldorf before they were once again shown in Berlin at the end of 1892. It was during this Berlin period that Munch began working on a project that came to be known as The Frieze of Life; a series of paintings on the themes of life, love, angst and death which was to occupy him for much of the rest of his career, and which included such seminal paintings as The Scream, Madonna, The Kiss, Melancholy and The Dance of Life. Exhibited at the Berlin Secession in 1902, the Frieze of Life paintings were to have a profound influence on German Expressionism in the early 20th century.

Munch’s time in Berlin also found him beginning to work as a printmaker, through which he would come to develop countless themes that he also explored in his paintings. His first etchings and lithographs date from 1894, and in later years he would also work with woodcuts and colour woodcuts. Among the most influential and innovative graphic artists of the early 20th century, Munch was highly prolific as a printmaker, with an oeuvre that would come to number several thousand works. Between 1902 and 1908 the artist achieved a level of international fame, dividing his time between Berlin and Paris in the winter months, and spending his summers in Norway. In October 1908, however, he suffered a nervous breakdown, and entered a psychiatric clinic in Copenhagen for a period of convalescence of several months before eventually returning to Norway for good and settling down to a more peaceful, ordered life in the coastal town of Kragerø. By now a wealthy and successful artist, and something of a celebrity in Germany and Scandinavia, Munch settled in 1916 at Ekely, a rural estate on the outskirts of Kristiania.

He would live there for the rest of his life, working in relative isolation and painting Norwegian landscapes and scenes of rural life. On his death in 1944, Munch bequeathed his artistic estate to the city of Oslo, forming the basis of the Munch Museum, which opened in 1963.

Munch drew throughout his life, and the collection of his work bequeathed to his native city included about 7,500 drawings and watercolours, of which more than half were contained in around 150 sketchbooks. As a draughtsman, Munch worked in charcoal, pencil, ink, watercolour, gouache and pastel, and many of his drawings can be related to finished paintings. (Few drawings, however, appear to have been made specifically as preparatory studies for his graphic work, for which he seems to have drawn directly onto the copper plate or lithographic stone.) On several occasions, Munch exhibited drawings alongside his paintings. Over 90% of the artist’s surviving drawings are today in the collection of the Munch Museum in Oslo.

Although he worked more frequently in watercolours, Munch produced a significant number of pastel drawings throughout his long career, including two of the four versions of The Scream1. This striking pastel study of rocks or boulders at the water’s edge is likely to have been drawn at the little village of Åsgårdstrand, south of Oslo on the western shores of the Oslofjord, where the beach was strewn with large rocks2. The Munch family had a summer house at Åsgårdstrand, and spent vacations there from 1889 onwards. Munch returned to the small fishing village, which also attracted a number of other artists and writers from the capital, almost every summer for twenty years. It was a place to which the artist remained strongly attached, and the curving shoreline and the landscape around Åsgårdstrand were to serve as a constant source of inspiration for his paintings throughout the 1890s. As Ellen Lerberg has noted of Munch, ‘The characteristic shoreline [of Åsgårdstrand] runs like a common thread through many of his pictures, including The Dance of Life and Melancholy.’3 Indeed, as Munch himself wrote, after buying a small house in Åsgårdstrand in 1897, ‘To walk around here is like walking among my pictures. I feel such an urge to paint when walking around in Åsgårdstrand.’4 Munch came to know the features of the shoreline at Åsgårdstrand so well that he could reproduce them, if necessary, in his paintings even when he was away from Norway.

Similar rocks appear in the foreground of Munch’s large painting of Summer Night (Inger on the Beach) of 1889 (fig.1) in the Kunstmuseum in Bergen5, in which the artist’s sister is posed sitting on boulders at the water’s edge (fig.1). This and several other works of the same date7 were painted during the summer of 1889 at Åsgårdstrand6. Among a number of beach scenes with similar rocks and boulders is Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones) of c.1892; a painting which was destroyed in 1900 and is known today only from a photograph7, as well as Moonlight on the Beach of 1892, in the Kunstmuseum in Bergen8, and Summer Night: Mermaid of 1893, in the Munch Museum in Oslo9. Among a handful of drawings of a similar subject by Munch is a chalk study of Stones at Åsgårdstrand (fig.2), also in the collection of the Munch Museum in Oslo10.

In an interesting text that may be linked to his Åsgårdstrand paintings, as well as perhaps to the present pastel, Munch once wrote, ‘I was walking along the shore – the moon was shining through dark clouds. The stones loomed out of the water, like mysterious inhabitants of the sea. There were large, broad heads that grinned and laughed. Some of them up on the beach, others down in the water. The dark, bluish-violet sea rose and fell – sighs in among the stones...’11 The first owner of this pastel drawing was the artist’s younger sister, Inger Munch (1868-1952). The terms of Munch’s will specified that, after his death, Inger Munch was permitted to select a certain number of works for herself from the contents of the artist’s studio, before the remainder of the estate was presented to the city of Oslo12.

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44 JEAN VANDEN EECKHOUDT Brussels 1875-1946 Bourgeois-Rixensart Interior Pastel. Signed and dated J.v.D. Eeckhoudt / 97 in pencil at the lower right.

520 x 350 mm. (21 1/ 2 x 13 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Liège.

LITERATURE: Johanna Ruyts-van Rillaer, Jean Vanden Eeckhoudt 1875-1946, Tielt, 1990, p.154, no.97-7.

Jan Vanden Eeckhoudt (known to his friends as ‘Vanden’) was the grandson of the genre painter François Verheyden and nephew of the landscape and portrait painter Isidore Verheyden. It was in his uncle’s studio that, as a youth, he met such artists as Constantin Meunier, Georges Lemmen and Théo van Rysselberghe, who was to become a close friend. Vanden Eeckhoudt’s earliest known work, a still life of crysanthemums, was painted in 1889, when he was just fourteen years old. The following year, on the advice of Meunier, he entered the studio of the painter Ernest Blanc-Garin, where he befriended the young artist Henri Evenepoel. He exhibited his work for the first time in Ghent in 1892, aged seventeen, and the following year had his first solo exhibition at a gallery in Brussels. From 1895 onwards Vanden Eeckhoudt participated in the annual exhibitions of the avant-garde artistic society La Libre Esthétique in Brussels, and in later years also showed at the Salon de Bruxelles and Salon du Cercle Pour l’Art. In 1904 Vanden Eeckhoudt first visited the South of France, which was to have a profound effect on his art. Until the 1920s he would divide his year between stays in the South of France, mainly in Menton and Roquebrune, in the winter months, and return trips to Brussels in the summer. He came to be known for his richly coloured Mediterranean landscapes, and developed a friendship with Henri Matisse.

Vanden Eeckhoudt’s early work in an Impressionist and Post-Impressionist manner was succeeded, around 1913, by a style more indebted to Fauvism, which in turn lasted until about 1920. However, much of his work of these years was lost in 1925 when, suffering from depression, he destroyed around six hundred of his early paintings, and left Brussels to settle permanently in Roquebrune, where he built a villa, named La Couala. Yet despite living and working in France for over thirty years, Vanden Eeckhoudt only had one exhibition of his work in Paris, in 1922, and indeed only infrequently exhibited in Brussels.

A somewhat morose character, he rarely socialized with other artists or visited exhibitions, and, although fond of music, almost never went to concerts or the theatre. In 1937 he returned to Belgium, having lost the sight in one eye due to cataracts. Although he was beginning to lose his vision in the other eye, he continued to paint portraits and still life subjects into his old age, sometimes exhibiting his work alongside that of his daughter, Julienne (known as ‘Zoum’) Walter, who was a gifted painter and pastellist.

Within a few weeks of Vanden Eeckhoudt’s death in 1946, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Galerie Giroux in Brussels.

Completed in 1897 at the country home of the Vanden Eeckhoudt family in Oudenburg in Western Flanders, this large, finished pastel is a rare early work by the artist, who seems to have produced relatively few works on paper during his career. The present sheet can be added to a small but distinctive group of four similar interior scenes in pastel, drawn in 1896 and 1897 either at Oudenburg or at Hoeilaert, south of Brussels, where Isidore Verheyen had a studio. The earliest of these large pastels

by Vanden Eeckhoudt is An Interior in Oudenburg, dated 1896, in a private collection in Brussels1, while also in a private collection is an Interior with Cats, signed and dated the folliowing year2. Also dating from 1897 is an Interior with Sabots, formerly in the collection of Octave Maus, the founder of La Libre Esthétique, and now in the Musée Communal d’Ixelles3, and an Interior with a Stove, which once belonged to the Belgian critic, poet and journalist Camille Lemonnier and is today in the collection of the Maison Camille Lemonnier, the museum devoted to the writer in Brussels4.

45 LOUIS-MAURICE BOUTET DE MONVEL Orléans 1850-1913 Paris Design for the Poster for the 19th Annual Exhibition of the Société des Aquarellistes Français, Paris, 1897 Watercolour, ink wash, heightened with gold and gouache, on paper laid down on canvas. Signed MB de Monvel in black ink at the centre right.

955 x 632 mm. (37 5/ 8 x 24 7/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s son, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Paris; By descent to his daughter, Sylvie Boutet de Monvel, Paris.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Manzi-Joyant, Exposition rétrospective de l’oeuvre de Maurice Boutet de Monvel, 1913, no.83.

Maurice Boutet de Monvel studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian in Paris, and exhibited for the first time at the Société des Artistes Français in 1873. In the early 1880s he began making a name for himself as an illustrator, particularly of children’s books and anthologies. Many of his drawings were originally intended for his two sons, Roger and Bernard, who were later to gain fame as a writer and artist, respectively. Boutet de Monvel’s masterpiece as an illustrator, however, was a lavish book devoted to Joan of Arc, which he both wrote and illustrated. Published in 1896 to great acclaim, Boutet de Monvel’s Jeanne d’Arc firmly established his reputation beyond France. The following year, at the fifth Vienna Secession exhibition, an entire room was devoted to his drawings, which proved to be a revelation1. His reputation also spread to America, where exhibitions of his work were mounted in Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia in 1889. A commission for six paintings of scenes from the life of Joan of Arc for the American collector William A. Clark occupied Boutet de Monvel between 1906 and 1913, and a retrospective exhibition of his work – the first to be held in Paris – was mounted in 1913 at the gallery of Michel Manzi and Maurice Joyant, in which the present sheet was included.

This large watercolour is a design for the poster (fig.1) for the 19th annual exhibition of the Société des Aquarellistes Français, held in May and June of 18972. The Société des Aquarellistes Français was founded in 1879 at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, by a group of artists that included Eugène Lami, Ferdinand Heilbuth and Gustave Doré. Boutet de Monvel joined the association in 1890 and exhibited there annually for many years. As a friend of the artist noted, in an article published in 1899, ‘In the rooms on the Rue de Sevres where the Society of Water Colorists have exhibited for so many years, and also in the Galleries of the Champs Élysées, we have tasted the most delicate artistic delights before the works of this master. Under his signature we have seen the most beautiful fantasies...’3 This composition may be dated several years earlier than the poster, however, since a close variant of it was shown, with the title Un Conte de fées (‘A Fairy Tale’), in 1891 at the Société des Aquarellistes Français, where it also appeared in the catalogue of the exhibition (fig.2)4.

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2.

46 HENRI-EDMOND CROSS Douai 1856-1910 Saint-Clair A Wrecked Boat on a Beach (L’Épave) Oil on panel. Stamped with the atelier stamp H.E.C. (Lugt 1305a) in red ink at the lower right.

Numbered 112 in black ink on a small label pasted on the reverse.

161 x 240 mm. (6 3/ 8 x 9 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, Saint-Clair; Paul Suzor, Paris1; Thence by descent until 2010; Anonymous sale (‘Ensemble de dessins et tableaux provenant de l’ancienne collection Suzor’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 8 December 2010, lot 12; Private collection, France.

LITERATURE: To be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the works of Henri-Edmond Cross, currently in preparation by Patrick Offenstadt.

Born in Douai to an English mother and a French father, Henri-Edmond Delacroix studied first in Lille and later in Paris. Early in his career he changed his surname to Cross, an Anglicized version of croix, to avoid comparisons with the famous Romantic painter and confusion with a contemporary artist named Henri Eugène Delacroix. Little is known of his work before 1884, when he first exhibited with the Société des Artistes Indépendants, of which he was a founding member. Cross did not, however, adopt the NeoImpressionist techniques of his colleagues Georges Seurat and Paul Signac until the early 1890s, shortly after Seurat’s death. One of his first paintings in the pointillist technique was a portrait of his future wife, Irma Clare, exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1891 and today in the Musée d’Orsay. In October 1891, seeking to relieve his chronic rheumatism by moving to a warmer climate, Cross left Paris for the south of France. He eventually settled in the village of Saint-Clair, near Le Lavandou in the Var region. Apart from two trips to Italy, in 1903 and 1908, he lived and worked there for the rest of his life. The Mediterranean landscape of the Côte d’Azur was to become his preferred subject matter for the remainder of his career, although he also painted idyllic scenes of bathers and mythological figures.

From 1892 onwards Cross took part in all the exhibitions devoted to the Neo-Impressionist movement, in galleries in France and Germany, and also showed at Le Libre Esthétique in Brussels. His style became less severe as his career progressed, however, with his paintings gradually adopting a greater freedom of brushwork than the more rigidly pointillist scenes of Seurat. As he wrote to his close friend Signac in 1895, ‘I have too much of a tendency to shut myself up within the confines of a seductive theory. One has to be able to play with it.’2 As one scholar has noted, ‘Little by little, Cross and Signac rejected the notion of pointillism, replacing the excessively mechanical dot with more lively, dynamic brushstrokes, sometimes applied in a regular mosaic, sometimes elongated, sometimes overlapping.’3 By the latter half of the 1890s, Cross had begun working in a more spirited manner, often leaving small spaces of exposed canvas between his now larger and broader brushstrokes, and developing a brighter palette. The colours of his paintings came to reflect his fascination with the light of the South; as the painter Maurice Denis, a friend of the artist, noted in 1907, ‘Cross has resolved to represent the sun, not by bleaching his colours, but by exalting them, and by the boldness of his colour contrasts...The sun is not for him a phenomenon which makes everything white, but is a source of harmony which hots up nature’s colours, authorizes the most heightened colour-scale, and provides the subject for all sorts of colour fantasies.’4 Paul Signac, who assembled a large personal collection of Cross’s paintings and watercolours, wrote of him that, ‘One…feels in him the joy of painting, the love for delicate harmonies, something undefinably hesitant and mysterious and unexpected.’5 Towards the end of his career, Cross had largely stopped painting out of doors, preferring to make small oil sketches or watercolours from nature, which were then developed into finished paintings in the studio. He was, however, never very productive as a painter, largely due to a combination of failing eyesight and poor health, and from 1900 onwards he painted relatively little. His first one-man exhibition, numbering thirty paintings and the same number of watercolours, was held at the Galerie Druet in Paris in 1905, and was a great success. This was followed two years later by a retrospective exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, organized by his friend Félix Fénéon, which included thirty-eight paintings and fifty-one watercolours. Cross’s late work influenced such Fauve artists as Henri Matisse (who became a good friend and owned at least one painting by Cross), André Derain, Louis Valtat, Charles Camoin and Henri Manguin, all of whom visited his studio in the Midi in the 1890s and early 1900s. As the scholar Robert L. Herbert has written of Cross, ‘By the time of his death, his work stood as a hymn to color and sunlight, and helped form the vision of the Mediterranean coast which is commonplace today.’6 This small, dynamic oil sketch on panel is a preparatory study for a large canvas known as L’Épave (The Wreck), signed and dated 1899, which is today in a private collection7. The finished painting, probably painted on the coast at Saint-Clair, may be compared with another painting of a boat of the same date, entitled La barque bleue, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon8. The finished painting of L’Épave was exhibited at the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1902 and at the Galerie Druet exhibition three years later, and soon afterwards entered the collection of the scholar and critic Félix Fénéon, a champion of the Neo-Impressionists who came to own a large number of paintings and watercolours by Cross.

(Following the artist’s death from cancer in 1910, Fénéon assisted Cross’s widow and Signac with making an inventory of the contents of the artist’s studio.) The large painting of L’Épave was included in posthumous exhibitions of Cross’s work in Paris in 1927 and 1937.

Like Paul Signac, Cross usually prepared his paintings with oil sketches (although he began to work more in watercolours around the turn of the century), and the present work displays the new freedom of handling that had begun to appear in his landscapes in the second half of the 1890s. As one scholar has written, ‘By the dawn of the 20th century, Cross had achieved [a] complete mastery of technique and colour...[with] zones of pure colour applied in broad, rectangular, thick brushstrokes...’9

47 SIR WILLIAM ROTHENSTEIN Bradford 1872-1945 Far Oakridge, Gloucestershire Landscape with Trees in Blossom Pastel on buff paper. Signed with initials and dated W.R. 1902 in pencil at the lower right.

235 x 343 mm. (9 1/4 x 13 1/ 2 in.) [sight] PROVENANCE: Julius Stern, Berlin; His posthumous sale, Berlin, Galerie Paul Cassirer, 22 May 1916, lot 157 (‘Landschaft mit blühenden Bäumen’).

William Rothenstein entered the Slade School of Art in London in 1888 at the age of sixteen, studying there with Alphonse Legros. The following year he enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he remained for four years. His time in Paris found the young Rothenstein befriending such artists as James McNeill Whistler, who was to be a dominant influence for several years, as well as Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro. Rothenstein’s growing status as a portrait draughtsman led to a commission for a set of twenty-four portraits of Oxford academics, and on his return to England he continued to develop a reputation and market for his portraits. Indeed, throughout his career, portraiture – in the form of drawings, paintings or lithographs – formed by far the largest part of his output. With the outbreak of the First World War, Rothenstein chose not to change his surname when the rest of his family (including his brother Albert, also a painter) elected to adopt the less Germanic name of Rutherston. He was posted to Cambrai on the Western Front for a few months in 1917, where he produced a number of landscapes and portraits, and returned there just after the war, in the company of Eric Kennington.

Rothenstein later served as Principal of the Royal College of Art between 1920 and 1935.

Dated 1902, this fine and lively pastel landscape was drawn during the artist’s visit to Germany that year.

In January 1902 an exhibition of Rothenstein’s work was held at the Eduard Schulte Gallery in Berlin.

Although well received by critics, it did not result in many sales, apart from some drawings and prints.

It was in Berlin in March that Rothenstein met the German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, who invited the artist to stay with him in Silesia, in the mountain range known as the Riesengebirge (today the Krkonoše mountains), straddling what is now the border between Poland and the Czech Republic.

As Rothenstein recalled of Hauptmann in his memoirs, ‘An immediate sympathy sprang up between us…He pressed us to come to the Riesengebirge, in Silesia, where he lived; I would find the landscape inspiring, he promised…We took train to Hirschberg, and from there drove up to Agnetendorf. It was early spring, and the orchards were in full flower, the grass bright emerald; behind were the Riesengebirge, ringed by dark pine woods. The sun was shining; it was our first sight of the snow-covered mountains, and the higher we got the higher our spirits rose too…Agnetendorf, with its beautiful little farmhouses, low, thatched, with small gay-coloured shuttered windows, each with its orchard, was ideal for a painter. What a happy change it was from Berlin!’1 The artist’s son John Rothenstein has noted that, in the early years of the 20th century, his father’s work developed ‘a sudden preoccupation with daylight, with a consequent intensification of his palette. Its chief cause was probably his increasing interest in landscape. He worked, almost always, in front of his subject rather than from studies, which at once brought him up against the problems of the representation of openair light. Another cause was the delayed influence of Impressionism, from which he had been temporarily immunized by Whistler’s advocacy of low tones. Rejection of Whistlers dandyism, I surmise, led naturally to the end of this immunity, and his eye was gradually filled by dazzling light.’2 The present sheet was one of two landscape pastels by Rothenstein, each of similar dimensions3, acquired by the Berlin banker and art collector Julius Stern (1858-1914)4. Among other extant pastels of this period by Rothenstein is a view of a street in Hildesheim, signed and dated 1902, in the collection of the Manchester City Art Galleries5.

48 PAULA RÖSLER Schlierbach 1875-1941 Wurmsdorf Recto: Wildflowers and a Grasshopper Verso: Studies of Plants Gouache, watercolour and pencil on vellum, with framing lines in green watercolour. The verso in pencil with red and green watercolour. Signed with the artist’s monogram PR in green watercolour at the upper left. Inscribed (with mounting and framing instructions?) in pencil on the verso.

422 x 350 mm. (16 5/ 8 x 13 3/4 in.)

Paula Maria Rösler seems to have received some training as an artist at home in Bad Rodach in Bavaria, before she left to study at art school in Munich in 1902. Since at this time women were not admitted to the Akadamie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, she enrolled at the ‘Ladies’ Academy’ known as the Münchner Künstlerinnen-Vereins, founded in 1882, where she may have studied alongside Gabriele Münter. Apart from a study trip to Florence, Rösler lived in Munich until 1915, working as a freelance artist. A gifted draughtsman in watercolour and pastel, as well as a fine etcher, she published Falter, a book of poems and lieder illustrated with her drawings, in 1905. It was in Munich that Rösler met the writer Waldemar Bonsels, who was later to achieve international fame for his children’s book Maya the Bee, published in 1912. Convinced of his talent, and almost certainly in love with him, she supported Bonsels financially in his early years, although this generosity was not reciprocated when Bonsels was famous and wealthy and Rösler was struggling.

In 1915 Rösler left Munich and settled in Achenmühle in the Chiemgau region of Upper Bavaria, a picturesque area of hills, forests and lakes. She began exhibiting at the Chiemgauer Künstlerbund artist’s association, and later joined a new group of artists, known as Die Welle (‘The Wave’), of which she was the only female founding member. The group was active from 1922 to 1933, and at its first exhibition in 1922, Rösler exhibited thirteen works, six of which were in the form of delicate paper cutouts known as scherenschnitte, which were much admired by visitors and critics. Rösler came to be particularly highly regarded for these silhouetted paper cutouts, which she produced in both black and white and in colours, and they account for much of her best-known work today. Her drawings and tempera paintings began to display an interest in botanical forms, and she produced drawings and paper cutouts of detailed, close-up views of plants and flowers, drawn in an Art Nouveau or Jugendstil manner, in which the influence of Japanese art is also evident. In 1926 she married Feodor von Goeschen, and was henceforth known as Paula van Goeschen-Rösler. After her husband’s death in 1931, Rösler settled in Wurmsdorf, where she died ten years later. Although memorial exhibitions of her work were held in Rosenheim and at the Kunstverein in Munich, Rösler remains today a very obscure figure.

verso

49 PABLO PICASSO Málaga 1881-1973 Mougins Nude Combing her Hair (Femme nue se coiffant) Brush and red ink and red wash on light brown paper, backed. Signed Picasso in pencil at the lower right.

Further signed Picasso in pencil on the verso and numbered 3, backed.

406 x 265 mm. (16 x 10 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Rudolf Staechelin, Basel and Schloss Ebenrein, Sissach, by 19201; The Fondation Rodolphe Staechelin, Basel, until c.1970; Private collection; Anonymous sale, Berne, Galerie Kornfeld, 17 June 1988, lot 106; Galería Theo, Madrid, in 1992; Private collection; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 9 May 2001, lot 397; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 19 June 2007, lot 137; Private collection, Europe.

LITERATURE: Pierre Daix and Georges Boudaille, Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1900-1906, Neuchâtel, 1966, p.281, no.D.XIII.3; Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Vol. XXII: Supplément aux années 1903-1906, Paris, 1970, p.150, pl.427; Denys Sutton and Paolo Lecaldano, The complete paintings of Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods, London, 1971, p.103, no.204; Victor I. Carlson, Picasso: Drawings and Watercolors, 1899-1907 in the Collection of The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1976, p.50, under no.26; Alberto Moravia and Paolo Lecaldano, L’opera completa di Picasso blu e rosa, Milan, 1979, p.103, no.204; Núria Rivero et al., Picasso 1905-1906: From the Rose Period to the Ochres of Gósol, exhibition catalogue, Barcelona and Berne, 1992, pp.316-317, no.148; Marc Fehlmann and Nicole Schweitzer, ‘Nicole Schweitzer, ‘“Alles frägt hier nach Picasso...”. Zur Rezeption. Zur Rezeption von Pablo Picasso in der Schweiz’, in Marc Fehlmann and Toni Stooss, ed., Picasso und die Schweiz, exhibition catalogue, Bern, 2001, p.25, note 34; Jèssica Jaques Pi, Picasso en Gósol, 1906: un verano para la modernidad, Boadilla del Monte, 2007, p.139; The Picasso Project, Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 18851973. The Rose Period – 1905-1906, Paris, Holland and Gôsol, San Francisco, 2012, p.159, no.1905/06045 (where dated 1905-1906); Marilyn McCully, ed., Pablo Picasso: Jeune Garçon nu à cheval, 1906, exhibition catalogue, London, 2014, illustrated p.43, fig.43.

EXHIBITED: Bern, Kunsthalle Bern, Ausstellung französischer Malerei, 1920, no.52 or 53; Basel, Kunstmuseum, Sammlung Rudolf Staechelin. Gedächtnis-Ausstellung zum 10. Todesjahr des Sammlers, 1956, no.54; Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Fondation Rodolphe Staechelin: de Corot à Picasso, 1964, no.50; Barcelona, Museu Picasso and Bern, Kunstmuseum, Picasso 1905-1906: From the Rose Period to the Ochres of Gósol, 1992, no.148; Humlebaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Picasso and the Mediterranean, 1996-1997, no.58; Rotterdam, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Picasso: Artist of the Century, 1999, no.4.

In the spring and summer of 1906, the young Pablo Picasso and his mistress Fernande Olivier spent several weeks in the remote mountain village of Gósol, in the mountains of the Spanish Pyrenees. As Fernande noted in her journal, ‘Gósol is magical...The village is up in the mountains above the clouds, where the air is incredibly pure, and the villagers – almost all of whom are smugglers – are friendly, hospitable and unselfish. We have found true happiness here.’2 During his stay in this small village of some nine hundred inhabitants, Picasso produced a substantial and varied body of work, including a number of very large canvases. Aged just twenty-four, he was more prolific during this period in the Pyrenees than at any previous time in his budding career. As John Richardson has noted, ‘During the ten weeks or so he spent in Gósol, he achieved as much as he had in the previous six months, if not more: at least seven large paintings...a dozen or so medium-sized ones, plus countless drawings, watercolors, gouaches and carvings.

He also filled two sketchbooks.’3

Dating from the final phase of the Rose Period of Picasso’s career, the present sheet is likely to have been drawn during the artist’s stay in Gósol in the summer of 1906, although it has been dated by some scholars to the previous year4. Of the works of this period, Gary Tinterow has written, ‘In the remote Catalan village of Gosol, in the Pyrenees, Picasso achieved an almost schematic rendering of form by stripping his images of both narrative content and ornament. As always he concentrated on the human figure, but in Gosol the majority of paintings and drawings were of nudes – adolescent boys, young children, and his lover Fernande – unselfconscious in their nudity and closely related to their elemental settings.’5 The theme of a woman combing or arranging her hair was one that Picasso began to consider in 1905, and which he developed in several paintings and drawings over the next year6. His lover Fernande Olivier had long auburn hair and Picasso became engrossed in watching her daily ritual of arranging her coiffure; an allure that soon found its way into his art. As Josep Palau i Fabre has written, ‘Then there is another theme, which had been in Picasso’s mind for over a year, and which he had already been developing in Paris before going to Gósol: that of women’s hair, dressed or being dressed. The sensual quality of a woman’s hair, falling loosely or held up by a hand, continued to fascinate him.’7 The raised arms of the model in this drawing is another motif common to several works of this date. As another scholar has observed, ‘The hand raised to the hair is a convention that Picasso explored repeatedly in 1906...It is a gesture common to the toilette or coiffure motif and to classical subjects like the Venus Anadyomene, where an idealized nude wrings her hair as she emerges from the sea.’8 Fernande’s voluptuous figure, facial features and red hair may be perceived in this striking drawing, which employs the reddish tonality that is such a characteristic feature of Picasso’s works of the late Rose period.

In several of his drawings and paintings of these years, Picasso may also be seen to have derived inspiration from a painting by one of the great masters of the 19th century, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose work was to be a lifelong touchstone for the artist. Ingres’s celebrated painting Le Bain Turc, painted in 1862 and now in the Louvre9, had been recently been shown in a retrospective exhibition of the master’s work, held at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in the autumn of 1905. Both Picasso and Matisse visited the exhibition, and both artists were enthralled with Ingres’s linear drawings and with the figures in his paintings, and in particular with the nude women of Le Bain Turc. Picasso may well have had Ingres’s painting, with its languid nudes shown both seated and standing, in mind when making his own studies of female nudes in 1905 and 1906.

This drawing may be associated with a number of the large canvases Picasso produced at Gósol, notably the large painting La Toilette (fig.1), now in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York9. One of the masterpieces of the Rose Period, La Toilette was prepared by a number of drawings of a nude young woman arranging her long hair. A similar motif of a woman brushing her hair is also found in other paintings of this Gósol period, such as The Harem in the Cleveland Museum of Art11 – a painting certainly indebted to Ingres’s Le Bain Turc – and the Woman with a Child and Goat in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia12, as well as a slightly later painting of a Woman Combing her Hair, completed in Paris in the autumn of 1906 and today in a private collection13.

Picasso’s use of a reddish ink and delicate red washes, applied with the brush, in this drawing is found in several other figure studies of this period. The simple brown paper used for the present sheet is perhaps an indication of the artist’s limited supplies of paper during his stay in Gósol. In July of 1906, Picasso wrote to his friend, the Catalan sculptor Enric Casanovas, ‘I want you to buy or send me by mail a roll of twenty sheets of papier Ingres and as quickly as you can because I have finished the small stock of paper I bought in Barcelona...’14

Nude Combing her Hair (Femme nue se coiffant) may be grouped with two other, closely related studies, showing the model in the same pose but seated, which are today in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art15. Jean Sutherland Boggs’s comments about one of one of these drawings, executed in an identical technique of brush and red ink (fig.2), may equally be applied to the present sheet: ‘Picasso made the contours of the fleshy body so energetic, the sanguine of the ink so warm, the expression of her face so gentle and her gesture so natural that the drawing has a human and visual richness to which the adjective ‘opulent’ might legitimately apply.’16 Like the two drawings in Baltimore, the present sheet may be further associated with a gouache drawing of a Seated Nude with Her Hair Pulled Back, formerly in the collection of Gertrude Stein17.

A closely related study of a woman arranging her hair, drawn in the same technique and almost certainly at the same time as the present sheet, shows what appears to be the same model seen from behind18.

The drawing, which shares the same provenance from the Staechelin collection, was exhibited alongside this drawing in Switzerland in 1920 and also appeared at auction in London in 2007. Likewise drawn in the same technique of brush and red ink is another stylistically comparable drawing by Picasso of a standing female nude, in the Baltimore Museum of Art19.

A fine example of Picasso’s confident draughtsmanship at the height of his Rose Period, Nude Combing her Hair (Femme nue se coiffant) evinces the artist’s new interest in a more sculptural conception of the female form – inspired by the curvaceous body of his lover and model Fernande Olivier – after the more lean, angular figures of his earlier Blue Period; this would be a trend that would be developed more fully in the coming months. In the words of one recent scholar, writing of this period, ‘The many drawings and paintings that [Picasso] did of Fernande reveal that having her so close and focusing on her as a model helped him develop his approach to the representation of the body. In Gósol the pink and reddish tones of the palette he used to paint Fernande, principally nude, began to infiltrate every aspect of the space and objects surrounding the figure.’20 And, as Fernande Olivier herself wrote of Picasso during the couple’s brief stay in Gósol in the summer of 1906, ‘The atmosphere of his own country seems to inspire him, and there is much stronger emotion and sensitivity in these drawings than anything he has done in Paris.’21

1.

2.

50 EDOUARD VUILLARD Cuiseaux 1868-1940 La Baule Landscape with a Little Girl, a Dog and a Goat: Study for a Decorative Panel Pencil and pastel, on a page from a small sketchbook.

156 x 105 mm. (6 1/ 8 x 4 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s studio, Paris (Lugt 909c), and thence by descent in the family of the artist.

In the 1890s, Edouard Vuillard began to receive commissions for wall panels intended to decorate the rooms of private houses. This was a genre in which he was to become very successful, and he painted a number of these large-scale panneaux décoratifs, almost all the result of commissions from a small group of mutual friends and enlightened collectors. Vuillard’s work of this type remained largely unknown to the public at large until several panels were exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. Although his work as a peintre-décorateur was largely confined to private homes, he also undertook a handful of public commissions, notably the decoration of the foyer of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in 1912.

The present sheet is closely related to large painting of a Landscape with a Little Girl, Dog and Goat (fig.1), last recorded on the art market in Switzerland in the 1970s1. Mathias Chivot has recently suggested that the present sheet may also represent a first idea for one of the decorative mural panels commissioned from Vuillard by his art dealers, the brothers Josse and Gaston Bernheim, to decorate Bois-Lurette, their summer villa at Villers-sur-Mer, a seaside resort on the Normandy coast. This series of thirteen large murals was painted over a period of three successive summers, between 1911 and 1913. The first panels to be painted, in August and September of 1911, were depictions of the garden at Les Pavillons, the villa at Cricqueboeuf in Normandy rented for the summer by Vuillard’s close friends Jos and Lucy Hessel. Two of these panels show Lucy Hessel accompanied by Denise Natanson, the young daughter of Vuillard’s friends and patrons Alfred and Marthe Natanson, playing in the garden with a small dog2, and it may have been while the artist was working out the compositions for this pair of upright panels that this little sketchbook page was drawn.

As has been noted of the Bois-Lurette paintings, ‘The initial commission for these panels appears to date from August 10, 1911, when Vuillard lunched with the Bernheims at their villa while he was vacationing at Cricqueboeuf. Within days he was at work on the first group of paintings...Vuillard kept to his now standard practice of undertaking a rigorous preparation, producing small sketches in charcoal and pastel prior to attacking the large-scale work in distemper.’3 The paintings for Bois-Lurette, for which Vuillard was paid 15,000 francs, were fitted into the wood panelling of the ground floor rooms of the villa, where they remained until the property was sold by the Bernheims in 1933. The paintings were removed from the walls of the villa in 1933 and reworked by Vuillard the following year, before eventually being dispersed.

1.

actual size

51 JOHAN BRIEDÉ Rotterdam 1885-1980 Amsterdam Forest with Deer Gouache. Signed with monogram and dated JB / 1914 in brown ink at the lower left.

1010 x 520 mm. (39 3/4 x 20 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Holland.

Johan (Johannus) Briedé1 was a painter, draughtsman, graphic designer, lithographer, illustrator and typographer. He was a student of the painter Willem Adriaan van Konijnenburg, the artist and designer Chris Lebeau and the graphic designers and bookbinders G. A. Brender à Brandis and L. W. R. Wenckebach. From 1910 onwards Briedé established a career as a freelance artist for various magazine and book publishers, as well for as the architect H. P. Berlage, working in Amsterdam, Haarlem, The Hague, Leiden, Rijswijk, Rotterdam and Scheveningen. In 1915 Briedé provided 130 elaborate pen drawings of buildings to illustrate the book Oude Huizen van Rotterdam (Old Houses of Rotterdam); a valuable record of the city before much of it was destroyed during the Second World War. In 1916 he settled in Laren, where he worked for over forty years.

Between 1910 and 1928, Briedé kept a notebook in which he listed a complete and detailed record of his output, whether in the form of paintings, drawings or watercolours, as well as designs for posters, bookplates (for which he became especially known), bookbindings, advertising images, calendars, and so forth2. Throughout the 1920s he designed, illustrated and wrote articles for Ons Eigen Tijdschrift (Our Own Magazine), a periodical published by the Van Houten chocolate factory in Weesp, for whom he also created some chocolate boxes. Among the many books illustrated by Briéde were H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Food of the Gods3. In the 1910s and early 1920s, Briedé painted landscapes in a pointillist style, but by the 1930s and 1940s was working in a more conventional Post-Impressionist manner. He travelled to Germany, Spain and Sweden, where he painted a number of beach and coastal scenes. By 1959 Briedé had settled in Amsterdam, where he continued to work until his death at the age of ninety-five. Works by the artist are today in the Stedelijk Museum and the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam, as well as in museums in Assen, The Hague, Hilversum, Laren, Leiden, Rotterdam and Weesp.

Briedé was apparently quite shy and somewhat averse to publicity, and perhaps as a result only a few exhibitions of his work were mounted in his lifetime; notably in Laren in 1932 and in Amsterdam in 1974. There were also relatively few critical or scholarly studies of his work during his long career. In one of the very few contemporary accounts of the artist’s work in English, published in The Studio in 1923, it was noted that ‘Johan Briedé is the art director of an iron foundry, the designer of many posters and advertisements and an illustrator of tales of imagination, those of Edgar Allan Poe having a special fascination for him. A lover of great towns and of quiet nature, familiar with the practical side of life, he is yet ever and anon fleeing from it in his dreams and queer fancies. His talent has a sharpness and a coolness which makes one think of steel pens and microscopes; his imagination seems to move with the preciseness of clockwork and the glitter of subtle machinery; and yet it makes one dream, it breathes the poetry of unreal and wonderful worlds and always shows in some way or other a love of nature.’4 As a youth, before he settled on a career as an artist, Briedé had considered becoming a botanist or zoologist, and this interest in plants and animals is found in much of his later work as a draughtsman. He produced numerous drawings and watercolours of plants and nature studies; a posthumous exhibition of such studies was held at the Gemeentemuseum in Weesp in 1992. Briedé’s lifelong love of nature is readily evident in this large Forest with Deer, dated 1914, which also evokes an interest in the Art Nouveau manner typical of the period.

52 ERIC KENNINGTON, R.A. London 1888-1960 Reading Portrait of a Soldier Coloured chalks and charcoal on faded blue-grey paper. Signed E. KENNINGTON in pencil at the lower left.

380 x 305 mm. (11 x 12 in.) [image] 467 x 381 mm. (18 3/ 8 x 15 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Siegfried Sassoon, London; Thence by descent; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 June 2007, lot 105.

The son of a portrait and genre painter, Eric Henri Kennington studied at the Lambeth School of Art and at the City and Guilds School, and first came to public notice for his paintings of East End costermongers.

With the outbreak of the First World War, Kennington immediately volunteered for duty, and served as a private in the ‘Kensingtons’; a battalion of part-time soldiers of the London Regiment. He served in France in the winter of 1914, eventually returning to England and receiving a medical discharge after being shot in the foot and losing a toe. His first significant war painting, The Kensingtons at Laventie: Winter 1914, was exhibited to much acclaim at the Goupil Gallery in the spring and summer of 1916.

The painting brought Kennington to the attention of the artist William Rothenstein, who became a close friend and colleague. It was Rothenstein who campaigned for Kennington to be appointed an Official War Artist. As he described the younger artist to one correspondent: ‘No-one has so marked a gift as he for drawing and understanding the magnificence of the Tommy.’1 On his own, Kennington made a return trip to the Somme in December 1916, and some thirty portrait drawings of British and French soldiers that he made during this journey were eventually shown at the Goupil Gallery in March 1917. Partly as a result of this exhibition, he was appointed an Official War Artist, and in August 1917 returned to the Western Front, with a specific brief to make drawings of British infantrymen, or ‘tommies’. As a former tommy himself, he was able to produce convincing and realistic depictions of the soldiers he encountered; indeed, as the scholar and British Museum curator Campbell Dodgson noted, Kennington was ‘a born painter of the nameless heroes of the rank and file.’2 Commissioned to produce several drawn portraits during his time in France – as the artist wrote in a letter to an official at the Department of Information in London, ‘a portrait draughtsman is welcomed out here, everybody wanting to be drawn from Generals to Privates and, consequently, I am treated magnificently’3 – he also produced landscapes of the trenches and their shattered surroundings. In December 1917 Rothenstein joined Kennington in France, and the two artists produced a number of portrait drawings of soldiers, which Rothenstein hoped might eventually be published as a book by the Ministry of Information, although the project never came to fruition.

Kennington eventually returned to England after more than seven months on the Western Front, and a selection of the work he had produced was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in the summer of 1918. The exhibition, entitled The British Soldier, was accompanied by a catalogue with an essay written by the poet Robert Graves. Later that year, however, Kennington resigned his commission as a War Artist, over a disgreement with the price offered by the government to acquire his work for the collection of the recently founded Imperial War Museum. Towards the end of the war Kennington was commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Scheme to accompany the soldiers of a Canadian infantry unit as it marched into a defeated Germany. Another highly successful exhibition of his war drawings was held at the Alpine Club Gallery in London in 1920.

Soon after his return to London Kennington moved into a new studio, and in the early 1920s began to take up stone carving, mentored by Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill; among his first public commissions as a sculptor was a memorial to the 24th Infantry Division in Battersea Park, completed in 1924. From this time onwards Kennington would describe himself as primarily a sculptor, though he continued to accept portrait commissions. Throughout the 1920s, art critics favourably compared Kennington’s skill as a portrait draughtsman to such contemporaries as William Orpen, Augustus John and John Singer Sargent.

He contributed a number of portrait drawings as illustrations for an edition of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, first published in 1922, and also gave lectures at the Royal College of Art (whose Principal was Rothenstein), while continuing to work as a sculptor. Among his notable public sculptures is an effigy of his friend Lawrence for a monument in St. Martin’s Church in Wareham in Dorset, on which he worked between 1937 and 1939. In 1939 Kennington was appointed an Official War Artist for the second time. He was attached to the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force between 1939 and 1942, and spent the later years of the war working for the War Office as a portraitist. Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1951 and a full Academician eight years later, Kennington spent much of the last years of his career creating tomb monuments for Anglican churches.

In the preface to the catalogue of the exhibition of Kennington’s war drawings, held at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1918, Robert Graves wrote of the artist that ‘he is a soldier, and at home in trench and shell hole, knows what is happening, what to see, where and how to see it; more important still, he has the trench point of view, and cannot forget how in the dark days of 1914 he gulped his rum and tea, fried his bacon, filled his sand-bag, ducked under his first bullet, stared into black night across the parapet and endured terror and misery as a private in the infantry. The British soldier, as Mr. Kennington has known and portrayed him, is a changeless type, wherever he fights, however he is armed, equipped, organised...in the middle of horror, frozen, stunned, bleeding, thirsty, tired nearly to death, choking with gas, the British soldier frowns and sweats and shows with what majesty he can fight.’4 Similarly, in one of a series of books about Official War Artists, Campbell Dodgson wrote that, ‘The resolute, weather-beaten faces of soldiers, hardened by endurance, nerved to deeds of daring in the coming raid, or pathetically altered by suffering as they lie in hospital, gassed or blinded, unconscious or bearing acute pain with stoicism – these are Mr. Kennington’s principal themes. Many of his drawings are unspeakably sad; how could they be otherwise, being manly and serious portraits of men who act or suffer in this most terrible of wars?’5 Kennington himself, in a letter of June 1918, noted of his drawings that he tried to ‘get as much as possible of the magnificence of the men, all their fine qualities and varied characters and appearances.’6 The present sheet once belonged to Kennington’s friend, the war poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), who met the artist, through Robert Graves, in 1918. He later helped Kennington to find a new studio on the Brompton Road after the artist’s final return from the battlefields of France in 1919. Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, published in 1930, has been described as ‘probably the classic personal account of the First World War in English.’7 In a letter written in July 1918, probably after seeing the Leicester Galleries exhibition that summer, Sassoon stated that he thought that Kennington’s ‘soldier drawings [were] excellent.’8

53 HERMANN WÖHLER Hanover 1897-1961 Hanover Landschaft der Giftigen Gitter (Landscape of Poisonous Grids) Pen and black ink, with a fictive frame drawn in pen and black ink. Signed with the artist’s monogram HW in black ink at the lower right. Titled Landschaft der Giftigen Gitter. in black ink at the upper right.

404 x 315 mm. (15 7/ 8 x 12 3/ 8 in.) [sheet] A German painter and graphic artist, Hermann Wöhler studied in his native Hanover, as well as in Dresden and Berlin. He was a pupil of the Symbolist artist and illustrator Hugo Hoeppener, known as Fidus, whose work combined mysticism, eroticism and allegory, and was a direct influence on the psychedelic art of the 1960s. Wöhler, like Fidus, took his subjects from mythology and literature, creating striking works characterized by bizarre imagery and imaginative compositions. At the beginning of his career Wöhler worked primarily in black and white, producing elaborate large-scale drawings in pen and ink. In 1918 he produced a portfolio of seven large ink compositions, plus a title page, under the title Zwielicht: Sieben Sinnbilder / Erste Geschichte des Erwachenden Schicksals vor dem Licht (Twilight: Seven Symbols / The First History of the Awakening Fate of Light), and he continued to create several series of sizeable ink drawings throughout the 1920s, as well as a few lithographs. A deeply intellectual man, Wöhler was well-versed in history and art history, philosophy and classical literature, as well as in Oriental and Eastern religions, Gnosticism and the Kabbalah.

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

From 1934 until his death in 1961, Wöhler served as a Professor of art education at the Pädagogischen Kunsthochschule in Hanover. His long career as an art teacher seems to have largely precluded him from selling or exhibiting his own work, however, and his oeuvre was almost completely unknown to the public at large in his lifetime. It was not until 1987, more than a quarter of a century after his death, that the first exhibition of Wöhler’s work was mounted, at a museum in Hanover. Within a few years of this exhibition, a handful of works by the artist began to appear on the market. Between January 2015 and May 2016, a major exhibition of sixty of Wöhler’s tempera paintings, entitled ‘Hermann Wöhler – Zauberhafte Märchenbilder’ (‘Hermann Wöhler: Magic Fairytale Pictures’) was held at the Deutsches Märchen- und Wesersagenmuseum (the German Fairytale Museum) in Bad Oeynhausen, commemorating the recent acquisition by the museum, from his heirs, of over two hundred works by the artist.

Eleven stylistically comparable pen and ink drawings by Hermann Wöhler are today in the Jack Daulton Collection in California. These include five large drawings from a 1925 series - each with the same distinctive border as the present sheet - which are entitled Abraxas, Narrenlandschaft (‘Fool’s Landscape’), Wer überwindet... (‘Who overcomes...’), Auferstehung (‘Resurrection’), and Amen1. Of identical size to these works, this striking Landschaft der Giftigen Gitter (Landscape of Poisonous Grids) is likely to have been a part of this 1925 series of drawings.

54 PAUL SIGNAC Paris 1863-1935 Paris The Bay of Ajaccio, Corsica Pencil and watercolour. Laid down. Stamped with the estate stamp P. Signac (Lugt 2285b) in black ink at the lower right.

279 x 434 mm. (11 x 17 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Paris; Thence by descent.

A painter, draughtsman, writer and collector, Paul Signac was a close friend of Georges Seurat, and the two painters formed the nucleus of the group of artists that came to be known as the NeoImpressionists. Signac would spend the winter working in his Parisian studio, while the summer months were spent painting at a coastal resort, and he eventually settled in Saint-Tropez in 1892. He painted around six hundred canvases as well as a significant body of works on paper, mainly watercolours. Signac began seriously working in the medium of watercolour in 1892, and the following year exhibited his first watercolours (described as ‘notations a l’aquarelle’) at the Société des Artistes Indépendants. In 1894 he chose a group of forty watercolours for his first solo exhibition, held under the auspices of the collector Antoine de la Rochefoucauld at a rented gallery in Paris. Within a few years watercolour had taken over from oils whenever the artist was working outdoors from the motif, with oil painting on a larger scale reserved for the studio.

By the turn of the century watercolour had become one of Signac’s principal modes of artistic expression.

As the Signac scholar Marina Ferretti Bocquillon has noted, ‘Signac was the neo-impressionist who practiced watercolor most consistently…For him, watercolor was a seductive alternative to the demanding labor of studio painting, a zone of freedom that suited his restless temperament and love of the outdoors. It gradually took over from his work in oil...’1 And, as she has written elsewhere, ‘Signac’s earliest watercolors indicate that he quickly showed an amazing aptitude for the medium and was immediately capable of exploiting its possibilities…Signac had found a new means of expression, which he was able to take to a high level of perfection and which was to occupy a major place in his work. He began systematically to exhibit his watercolors alongside his oil paintings and his drawings; indeed he often insisted that his works on paper be shown alongside his paintings on canvas.’2 Between 1929 and 1931 Signac worked on a project that he had long been considering; a series of watercolours depicting the ports and harbours of France, and many of his later watercolours can be related to this project.

This large watercolour would appear to depict the bay of Ajaccio, on the west coast of the island of Corsica. Signac made only two trips to Corsica, both in the last year of his life, having earlier written to his wife Berthe that ‘I should like to go and see this island and work there before I die...It would renew my repertoire of pictures, and I could use it.’3 In February 1935 he visited the towns of Calvi, Ajaccio, Propriano, Bonifacio and Bastia. He returned in May and June, travelling south along the east coast of the island from Saint-Florent and L’Île-Rousse towards Calvi, Ajaccio and Propriano4. As Ferretti Bocquillon has written of this trip to Corsica, which was to be the final journey of Signac’s career, ‘Travelling from one harbor to the next with the energy of a young man, he made his last Mediterranean notes. Only two months before his death on August 15 he had been working without respite on a dazzling series of watercolors.’5 Two stylistically comparable watercolours of boats in the bay of Ajaccio, of similar dimensions to the present sheet, are in the Louvre6, while another watercolour of a boat on the quay at Ajaccio, also of similar dimensions, is part of the collection of drawings and watercolours by Signac assembled by James T. Dyke7. As the artist’s granddaughter Françoise Cachin has written, ‘a month before his death [Signac] painted in Corsica a series of solid and colorful watercolors that appear in his work as a farewell to the sea, to boats, to color, all things he had loved passionately right through his life.’8

55 PABLO PICASSO Málaga 1881-1973 Mougins The Picador (Le cheval de picador cabré) Pen and grey and black ink and black wash. Signed and dated 7.12.53. / Picasso in grey and black ink at the upper right. A label from the Galerie Simon (Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler), inscribed 1953 / Picasso / Le cheval de Picador cabré / 50 x 65, with the gallery stock number 13846 and photograph number 52484, attached to the verso of the sheet.

505 x 654 mm. (19 3/4 x 25 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Galerie Louise Leiris (Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, formerly Galerie Simon), Paris, in 1953; The Lefevre Gallery, London, in 1954; Sir Alexander Korda, London; By descent to his widow, Alexandra (Alexa) Korda, later Mrs. David Metcalfe, London; Sale (‘The Property of the Trustees of the late Mrs. A. Metcalfe’), London, Sotheby’s, 5 December 1990, lot 375 (unsold); Thence by descent in the Metcalfe family until 2016.

LITERATURE: The Picasso Project. Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 1885-1973. The Fifties I, San Francisco, 2000, p.146, no.53-096(a), as Corrida.

EXHIBITED: London, The Lefevre Gallery, Picasso 1938-1953, May 1954, no.21 (as Le cheval de picador cabre).

The theme of bullfighting played an important and lifelong role in Pablo Picasso’s art, from his early childhood through to the 1960s. As a young child, he often accompanied his father to the weekly bullfights in his hometown of Málaga, and was once taken to meet a matador, an experience he often recalled years later. Bullfight scenes appear in Picasso’s first sketchbooks, and one of his very first paintings was a depiction of a picador on horseback confronting a bull, painted in 1889-1890, when the artist was nine years old. Like his father, Picasso became a true aficionado of the bullfight and its rituals. He continued to make drawings and sketches of bullfights in Barcelona and Madrid between 1894 and 1898, some of which he would try to sell in order to buy tickets to the corrida. After settling in France, Picasso continued to visit bullfights on trips back to Spain. The last of these visits, in 1934, resulted in several works focusing on the theme of dying bulls, or the struggle between bulls and horses in the arena. (As Patrick Elliott has noted, ‘Picasso was particularly interested in the relationship between the bull and the horse, which he refigured as a metaphorical battle between the male and female. In his own private mythology, the bull and the horse, the painter and the model, the man and the woman, were locked together in a struggle.’1) Following the Spanish Civil War, the artist chose to remain in exile in France, and never again visited the country of his birth.

Nevertheless, Picasso’s attachment to the corrida continued to be all-powerful, made even more so by the fact that he was now unable to see bullfights in his own country. After the Second World War the artist began living in the South of France, and the revival of the bullfighting tradition in this part of the country is partly due to his advocacy and support. Picasso often attended bullfights at Arles, Béziers, Fréjus, Nîmes and, in particular, Vallauris, where in 1951 he became the patron of the annual summer corrida organized by his friend, the impresario Paco Munõz. As his friend and future biographer John Richardson, writing in 1964, noted of the artist, ‘The corrida has become more and more of a ritual for Picasso, so much so that on those Sundays when he cannot see a bull-fight he feels impelled to recreate one for himself on paper.’2 In the 1950s and 1960s, bullfight subjects also came to dominate Picasso’s ceramic works and graphic output, notably in a series of aquatints entitled Tauromaquia, intended as illustrations for a deluxe illustrated edition of an 18th century bullfighting manual, and completed in four days in 1957. The artist also counted a number of bullfighters among his friends, notably the great Luis-Miguel Dominguin, who in 1961 published an essay to accompany a book of Picasso’s bullfight drawings.

Like the great Spanish artist Francisco Goya before him, Picasso found endless opportunities to express himself artistically through the theme of the bullfight. Indeed, as has been noted, ‘Francisco Goya and Pablo Picasso are among the few artists who have had the ability to transfer the experience of the dynamic and volatile bullfight spectacle to the demands of another art form...To isolate the subject of the bullfight helps uncover a path to Picasso’s Spanish soul. The bullfight appears throughout his career in all media, as naturalistic representation and as metaphor. The bullfight as spectacle is especially important in his work after World War II.’3 Similarly, as Georges Boudaille has perceptively written of Picasso, ‘In his drawings one shares the artist’s passion for bullfighting; one communes with him in the enthusiasm of a great public spectacle and fiesta; one feels that one has suddenly understood what Picasso sees, feels, gets out of it...it would be difficult to affirm beyond doubt whether Picasso’s hero is the man or the beast, and with which of the two he sympathizes most.’4 Drawn in Vallauris in the autumn of 1953, the present sheet is one of Picasso’s largest drawings of a bullfight theme. Shown here is the picador, mounted on horseback, thrusting his pica (a lance or pike) into the neck of a charging bull. One of a pair of horsemen who appear in the first part of a bullfight, known as the tercio de varas, the picador is tasked with weakening the bull sufficiently for the next stage of the bullfight. By striking his lance into the muscles at the top of the bull’s neck, he also forces the bull to lower his head when charging, which will help the matador perform the passes with a cape later in the bullfight, and to eventually kill the bull with a sword thrust. In the very early days of bullfighting, the picador was the central attraction of a bullfight, celebrated for his skill at weakening the bull while protecting his mount from the bull’s horns, but eventually that role fell to the single matador on foot.

Interestingly, in the majority of his bullfight drawings, Picasso chose to depict not the torero or matador, but the picador mounted on horseback, armed with his lance. As his close friend and secretary Jaime Sabartés noted of Picasso, ‘for him, at least, the picador is the most important element of the fight...The picador’s profession is a very hard one. To keep the bull at bay with the pike requires great physical strength as well as a profound knowledge of bulls...Such is the picador as I find him in Picasso’s drawings. He is a man at war with himself, with the bull, with the ‘aficion’, with his family, and with life – and without caring for any other things.’5 The art historian Jean Leymarie adds that, ‘The role of the heavily armed picador, with his quasi-sexual and sanguinary onslaught during the ‘suerte de picas’, is more pictorially rewarding than that of the matador. That is why the artist portrayed the picador first and foremost.’6 Picadors also appear in some of Picasso’s first attempts at bullfight subjects in his printmaking and ceramic production.

Among closely-related drawings by Picasso is a large pen and ink wash drawing of a picador lancing a bull – of similar dimensions to the present sheet and dated two years earlier, on March 5th, 1951 – which shared the same provenance as the present sheet until 19907. The earlier drawing differs from the present sheet, however, in its somewhat more simplistic, childlike rendering of the protagonists.

Compositionally similar studies of a mounted picador with his lance appear as early as 1940, in several pages of a sketchbook of that year, today in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris8. The same compositional arrangement of the picador with a pike, horse and bull also appears in later works, such as some linocuts made by Picasso in Vallauris in 19599.

This large and impressive drawing of The Picador (Le cheval de picador cabré), which has remained in the same private collection since the year after it was drawn, is among the most powerful and potent studies of the bullfight to be found in Picasso’s later work. The sheer ferocity of the bull is given particular emphasis in the frenzied lines of ink and wash at the lower centre of the sheet, which are contrasted with the more schematic rendering of the picador and his mount. As Jaime Sabartés has aptly written, ‘No one has seen a bull exactly as Picasso sees him, as he displays him. His bulls are real bulls; bulls, not oxen; wild creatures, vibrant with life and with incalculable strength; proud, courageous animals with ferocious impulses – the true image of a bull, translated from the artist’s memories of all the bullfights that he has witnessed.’10

.

NOTES TO THE CATALOGUE No.1 Niccolò di Giacomo da Bologna 1.

Patrick M. de Winter, ‘Bolognese Miniatures at the Cleveland Museum’, The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, October 1983, p.332.

2.

Stella Panayotova, ed., Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, 2016, p.285, under no.79 (entry

by Stella Panayotova and Nancy Turner).

3.

Mario Salmi, Italian Miniatures, London, 1957, p.22.

4.

This letter P is part of a line of text from the Acts of the Apostles 1:3, for the Feast of the Ascension: ‘P[ost passionem suam in multis argumentis, per dies] quadr[aginta apparens eis et loquens ea, quae sunt de regno Dei.]’ (‘To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days, and speaking of the kingdom of God.’).

5.

Freuler, op.cit., 2013, p.293, under no.24.

6.

Freuler, op.cit., 1990, unpaginated, under no.1.

7.

Inv. L.VII, Bach, RR 19, fol.75; illustrated in ibid., under no.1.

8.

Inv. Clm.10072, fol.162r.

9.

Inv. MS M.0800, fol.27r; illustrated at http://corsair.themorgan.org/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=253569.

10. Freuler, op.cit., 1990, unpaginated, under no.1. Freuler added that ‘the present initial probably stood at the beginning of the series of Ascensions of this particular type...Its comparatively quiet and monumental figures, which betray a familiarity not only with the Bolognese painter Vitale da Bologna but also with Tuscan miniature painting, differ considerably from Nicolò’s more exaggerated expressive mannerisms of his later oeuvre. This might indicate that our initial belongs among Nicolò di Giacomo’s earlier works and could date from around 1360.’ More recently, however, Freuler has revised his dating for this illumination to c.1370-1375.

11. A complete list of this series of cuttings, with illustrations of five of them, is found in Freuler, op.cit., 2013, pp.284-293, under no.24.

No.2 Spanish School, Late 16th Century 1.

Many of the embroidered vestments and altar linens for which these drawings were produced survive today at the monastery; several are illustrated in Paulina Junquera de Vega, ‘El obrador de bordados de El Escorial’, El Escorial 1563-1963, Madrid, 1963, Vol.II, pp.560-568 and pp.571-572.

2.

‘Cet ensemble de dessins, aujourd’hui le plus abondant et le plus cohérent pour l’Espagne de la Renaissance...’; Lizzie Boubli, Le dessin en Espagne à la Renaissance, Turnhout, 2015, p.231.

3.

Diego Angulo and Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, A Corpus of Spanish Drawings. Vol.1: Spanish Drawings 1400-1600, London, 1975, pp.20-21, nos.1526, pls. VI-VIII, pp.48-51, nos.182-201, pls.LIV-LVI, and pp.67-76, nos.309-385, pls.LXXX-LXXXVII. Nine of these are illustrated in colour in Boubli, ibid., pp.244-246 and 250, figs.44-52.

4.

A third album in the Escorial library contains ninety-four substitute cartoons that are pricked copies of the primary drawings for the embroidered vestments. A concordance of the substitute cartoons in the album and the extant drawings from which they were made is found in Carmen C. Bambach, Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop. Theory and Practice, 1300-1600, Cambridge, 1999, pp.368-371.

5.

Mark P. McDonald, Renaissance to Goya: Prints and Drawings from Spain, exhibition catalogue, London, 2012-2013, p.74.

6.

Lisa A. Banner, ‘A Selection of Spanish Drawings from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’, Master Drawings, Winter 1999, p.396.

7.

Inv. RF 42750; Alfonso Emilio Pérez Sánchez and Lizzie Boubli, Dessins espagnols: Maîtres des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1991, pp.60-63, no.12 (as Diego López de Escuriaz(?)), illustrated in colour; Lizzie Boubli, Musée du Louvre, Départément des arts graphiques. Inventaire général des dessins: École espagnole XVIe-XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 2002, p.51, no.32 (as Diego López de Escuriaz(?).

8.

Inv. 2004.82.1; Suzanne Boorsch and John Marciari, Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery, exhibition catalogue, 2006-2007, pp.9697, no.23 (as Diego López de Escuriaz).

9.

Banner, op.cit., p.396.

10. Lizzie Boubli, ‘The State of Scholarship of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Drawings’, Master Drawings, Winter 1999, pp.355-356.

No.3 Cesare Rossetti 1.

D. Kaïeman (1796-1857), a councillor at the court of appeal in Brussels, assembled a collection of 1,371 drawings that was dispersed at auction in Paris in 1858.

2.

‘siamo amici insieme e ci siamo allevati da piccoli’; Quoted in translation in Suzanne Folds McCullagh, ed., Capturing the Sublime: Italian Drawings of the Renaissance and Baroque, exhibition catalogue, Chicago, 2012, p.247, under no.A17 (entry by Herwarth Röttgen).

3.

London, Colnaghi, Old Master Drawings, 1983, nos.13-22, with five examples illustrated. Two others are illustrated in Marco Simone Bolzoni, ‘Cesare Rossetti, “amico” del Cavalier d’Arpino: un nuovo dipinto e alcune note sull’opera grafica’, Storia dell’arte, No.36, 2013, pp.52-53, figs.6-7. These drawings may have been studies for small paintings to be set into a decorative scheme.

4.

Inv. 1982-7-24-2; ‘Appendix I: Drawings by artists working in Rome in the sixteenth century (supplement to Pouncey and Gere, 1962, and Gere and Pouncey, 1983)’, in Nicholas Turner, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Roman Baroque Drawings c.1620-c.1700, London, 1999, Vol. I, p.229, no.363, Vol.II, pl.363 (as Attributed to Cesare Rossetti); Bolzoni, ibid., illustrated in colour p.46, fig.1 (as Rossetti). The drawing, in pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, on brown paper, measures 427 x 286 mm.

5.

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 2 July 1997, lot 105 (as Roman School, c.1600); Bolzoni, op.cit., p.58, fig.16 (as Rossetti).

6.

Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 23 March 2006, lot 203 (as Attributed to Cesare Rossetti); Bolzoni, op.cit., p.57, fig.14 (as Rossetti).

7.

Inv. 1922.11; Suzanne Folds McCullagh and Laura M. Giles, Italian Drawings before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Collection, Chicago, 1997, p.292, no.388 (as Roman School, late 16th Century).

8.

Inv. 1365; James Byam Shaw, Drawings by Old Masters at Christ Church, Oxford, Oxford, 1976, Vol.I, p.164, no.583, Vol.II, pl.317 (as Ascribed to Cavaliere d’Arpino); Bolzoni, op.cit., p.58, fig.17 (as Rossetti). The close relationship between this drawing and the Christ at the Column in the British Museum (see note 3 above), the Crucifixion sold at Sotheby’s in 1997 (see note 4 above), and the Solomon Receiving the Queen of Sheba in Chicago (see note 6 above) was first recognized by Hugo Chapman in his review of McCullagh and Giles, op.cit., in The Burlington Magazine, July 1998, p.486.

No.4 Antonio Tempesta 1.

Eckhard Leuschner, The Illustrated Bartsch. Vol.35 - Commentary Part 1: Antonio Tempesta, New York, 2004, p.vii.

2.

Sue Welsh Reed, in Sue Welsh Reed and Richard Wallace, Italian Etchers of the Renaissance and Baroque, exhibition catalogue, Boston and elsewhere, 1989, p.217.

3.

Leuschner, op.cit., p.2.

4.

Sebastian Buffa, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch. Vol.35 - Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Century: Antonio Tempesta, New York, 1984, p.277, no.549 (143) and p.313, no.584 (145), respectively.

5.

Such as that illustrating Canto V; Sebastian Buffa, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch. Vol.37 – Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Century: Antonio Tempesta, New York, 1984, p.116, no.1232 (177).

6.

Leuschner, op.cit., 2005, p.603, no.58.

7.

‘Unter den dokumentarisch überlieferten Tempesta-Erwerbungen Scipione Borgheses sind Doi disegni chiari oscuri in carta gialla con cornice negra besonders interessant. Dabei muss es sich um bildmäßige Zeichnungen des Künstlers auf Papier gehandelt haben, deren monochrome Gestaltung sie dem Eindruck der von ihm so geschätzten antiken Basreliefs annäherte. Ein – wenn auch beschädigtes – Beispiel dieser von Tempesta gepflegten Technik befand sich vor einigen Jahren im Kunsthandel: Auf braunen Papier (also wohl auf besagter carta gialla) ist dort im Vordergrund ein Zug berittener Soldaten in ‘antiker’ Rüstung zu sehen, die sich von einer Anhöhe hinab in die Mittel- und Hintergrund tobende Schlacht bewegen. Das in der Komposition an Radierungen der Alexander-serie erinnernde Blatt gehört nicht zu den schnellen Skizzen, sondern den hochgradig ausgearbeiteten Zeichnungen Tempestas. Es ist nicht nur braun laviert und weiss gehöht, sondern sogar mit einzelnen Akzenten in Goldfarbe versehen, womit es jenen Eindruck von Kostbarkeit vermittelt, der Sammler wie den auf Preziosen und Kunstkammerstücke versessenen Scipione Borghese besonders ansprechen musste.’; Leuschner, op.cit., 2005, p.490.

No.5 Peter Paul Rubens 1.

A handful of other anatomical studies by Rubens, not part of the Newdigate group, are in the Albertina in Vienna and the Devonshire Collection at Chatsworth, as well as formerly in the Martin Bodmer Foundation in Geneva.

2.

Logan, op.cit., 2007, p.165.

3.

Muller, op.cit., p.78.

4.

David Jaffé et al, Rubens: A Master in the Making, exhibition catalogue, London, 2005-2006, pp.102ff, nos.33-34.

5.

Inv. 14229; London, Christie’s, Old Master Drawings, 6-7 July 1987, p.78, fig.65a; Muller, op.cit., p.97, no.6.

6.

Inv. 1996.75; Muller, op.cit., p.95, no.2, illustrated in colour p.56, pl.1; Logan and Plomp, op.cit., pp.98-100, no.16; Anne-Marie Logan, ‘Rubens’s drawings after Julius Held’, Oud Holland, 2007, p.164, fig.2; Laurenza, op.cit., p.42, fig.59. The drawing measures 278 x 186 mm. An illustration showing the verso of the present sheet and the Metropolitan Museum drawing joined together as part of the same page is found in Logan and Plomp, op.cit., p.98, fig.53.

7.

D. Jaffé et al, op.cit., pp.102-103, no.36; Laurenza, op.cit., p.43, fig.63.

8.

London, Christie’s, Old Master Drawings, 6-7 July 1987, pp.74-83, lots 63-67; Laurenza, op.cit., p.43, figs.61-62.

9.

D. Jaffé et al, op.cit., pp.107 and 110.

No.6 Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino 1.

Luigi Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino, Rome, 1988, p.114, no.32; David M. Stone, Guercino: catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence, 1991, pp.5253, no.33; Sir Denis Mahon, ed., Giovanni Francesco Barbieri Il Guercino 1651-1666, exhibition catalogue, Bologna and Cento, 1991, pp.74-75, no.22 (illustrated in reverse); Sir Denis Mahon, Guercino: Master Painter of the Baroque, exhibition catalogue, Washington, DC., 1992, pp.162163, no.11.

2.

The Susanna and the Elders is today in the Prado in Madrid (Salerno, ibid., p.115, no.34; Stone, ibid., p.54, no.34; Mahon, ed., ibid., 1991, pp.7677, no.23; Mahon, ibid., 1992, pp.164-165, no.12), while the Return of the Prodigal Son, heavily restored and overpainted, is in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin (Salerno, op.cit., p.114, no.33; Stone, op.cit., p.51, no.32).

3.

The Resurrection of Tabitha is today in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence (Salerno, op.cit., p.124, no.45; Stone, op.cit., pp.6263, no.42).

4.

Inv. 6864; Mahon, op.cit., 1968, pp.53-54, no.22, pl.22; Loire, op.cit., p.92, no.24; Catherine Loisel, Musée du Louvre: Département des arts graphiques. Inventaire général des dessins italiens X: Dessins bolonais du XVIIe siècle, pt.II, Paris and Milan, 2013, p.340, no.539. The drawing measures 179 x 250 mm.

5.

Inv. 3758: Mahon, op.cit., 1968, p.53, no.21, pl.21; Mikhail Dobroklonsky, Risunski italianski skolü XVII-XVIII. vekov. Katalog [The Hermitage: The Italian Drawings of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Catalogue], Leningrad, 1961, p.55, no.216, illustrated pl.XXVIII. The drawing measures 135 x 205 mm.

6.

Inv. 137; Andrea Emiliani, Mostra di disegni del seicento Emiliano nella Pinacoteca di Brera, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 1959, p.51, no.67; Bologna, San Giorgio in Poggiale, Disegni emiliani dei secoli XVII-XVIII della Pinacoteca di Brera, exhibition catalogue, 1995, pp.86-87, no.12 (entry by Prisco Bagni). The drawing measures 210 x 269 mm.

7.

Inv. 2322; Andrea Czére, Disegni di artisti bolognesi nel Museo delle Belle Arti di Budapest, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, 1989, pp.76-77, no.34; Andrea Czére, L’eredità Esterházy: Disegni italiani del Seicento dal Museo delle Belle Arti di Budapest, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 2002, pp.7273, no.24; Andrea Czére, 17th-Century Italian Drawings in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. A Complete Catalogue, Budapest, 2004, pp.178179, no.170. The dimensions of the drawing are 215 x 254 mm.

8.

Inv. 7663; Manuela B. Mena Marques, Dibujos Italianos de los siglos XVII y XVIII en la Biblioteca Nacional, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 1984, pp.8485, no.69 (as Giovanni Lanfranco). The attribution of this drawing to Guercino was suggested by Nicholas Turner in his review of the Madrid exhibition catalogue in Apollo, December 1984, p.440.

9.

Charles Rogers, A Collection of Prints in Imitation of Drawings, London, 1778, Vol.II. The engraving is by W. W. Ryland.

10. E-mail correspondence, 22 November 2016. He adds that, ‘The rather open disposition of figures in the present sheet has been carefully rechoreographed in the Escorial painting to form a tight triangle – in fact, the heads form a triangle within the overall triangular design. Especially brilliant is the idea of a pinwheel like movement that expresses, as a design conceit, Lot’s drunkenness.’

No.7 Filippo Napoletano 1.

According to an inscription on the reverse of the mount.

2.

‘...nelle cose piccole in particolare e di fuochi, navigli et animali si fece reputare e stimare; et in certe stravaganze di scheleti d’animali fu molto osservato...’; Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura, c.1617-1621, pub. Rome 1956, Vol.I, p.255; Quoted in translation in Theron Bowcutt Butler, Giulio Mancini’s ‘Considerations on Painting’, unpublished Ph.D thesis, Case Western Reserve University, 1972, Vol.I, p.393.

3.

Marco Chiarini, Teodoro Filippo di Liagno detto Filippo Napoletano 1589-1629: Vite e opere, Florence, 2007, pp.476-484, nos.415-435.

4.

Marco Chiarini, Filippo Napoletano alle corte di Cosimo II de’Medici 1617-1621, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 2007-2008, pp.62-63, no.79.

5.

Sue Welsh Reed and Richard Wallace, Italian Etchers of the Renaissance and Baroque, exhibition catalogue, Boston and elsewhere, 1989, p.277, under nos.144-146.

6.

Philip Hofer, ‘Some Little-Known Italian Illustrations of Comparative Anatomy, 1600-1626’, in Millard Meiss, ed., De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, New York, 1961, Vol.I, p.234.

7.

Inv. NA 1444; Chiarini, op.cit, 2007, p.367, no.156; Chiarini, op.cit., 2007-2008, p.61, no.78.

8.

Chiarini, op.cit., 2007, p.434, no.324.

9.

Chiarini, op.cit., 2007, p.478, no.418.

10. Inv. W 2276; Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, Catalogue des dessins italiens: Collections du palais des beaux-arts de Lille, Lille, 1997, pp.120-121, no.316; Chiarini, op.cit., 2007, p.392, no.211.

11. Inv. W 2298; Brejon de Lavergnée, ibid., pp.124-125, no.332; Chiarini, op.cit., 2007, pp.396-397, no.228.

12. Inv. W 2313; Marco Chiarini and Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, Bellezze di Firenze: Disegni fiorentini del Seicento e del Settecento dal Museo di Belle Arte di Lille, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1991, pp.130-131, no.59; Brejon de Lavergnée, op.cit., pp.126-127, no.344; Chiarini, op.cit., 2007, p.400, no.239. The collection of drawings by Filippo Napoletano in Lille also includes several other drawings of human and animal skeletons, drawn in red chalk, pen and ink, or pen and wash.

13. Inv. 1863.662; K. T. Parker, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum; Volume II: Italian Schools, Oxford, 1972, pp.227228, no.456 (not illustrated); Höper, op.cit., p.176, no.Z 273 (not illustrated); Angela Ghirardi, Bartolomeo Passerotti, Rimini, 1990, p.156, fig.6a.

The drawing measures 301 x 243 mm.

No.8 Francesco Montelatici, called Cecco Bravo 1.

Quoted in translation by Miles Chappell in Suzanne Folds McCullagh, ed., Capturing the Sublime: Italian Drawings of the Renaissance and Baroque, exhibition catalogue, Chicago, 2012, p.166, under no.91.

2.

Significant groups of drawings by Cecco Bravo are today in the Uffizi (which houses over 250 sheets by the artist), as well as in the Louvre, the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence, the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Biblioteca Olivieriana in Pesaro, the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, and elsewhere.

3.

Laura Giles, in Laura Giles, Lia Markey and Claire van Cleave, Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, 2014, p.172, under no.71.

4.

As Gabburri writes, in his 1739 biography of Cecco Bravo, ‘Nella collezione del celebre Filippo Baldinucci scrittore delle vite dei Pittori, si ritrovano giá circa 30 disegni istoriati, a lapis rosso e nero, nei quali erano espressi vari sogni del medesimo Cecco Bravo, cosa, a dir vero, molto singolare, che fa vedere non tanto la stravaganza di quell’ umore bizzarro, quanto eziandio, il brio e l’intelligenza di quel grand’uomo.’

5.

Quoted in translation in Nicholas Turner, European Master Drawings from Portuguese Collections, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, 2000, p.118, under no.50.

6.

Nevertheless, as Julian Brooks has noted, ‘While it is tempting to believe that these sheets simply represent dreams had by the artist, their quantity, substantial sizes and finish suggest that they more likely relate to a large-scale, almost public, exposition of a theme.’; Julian Brooks, Graceful and True: Drawing in Florence c.1600, exhibition catalogue, Oxford and elsewhere, 2003-2004, p.68, under no.19.

7.

As the Knapton sale catalogue described Cecco Bravo, the author of these drawings: ‘He was an Artist of very prolific genius in the representation of fantastic subjects, which by the Amateurs, are called his Dreams: they are usually executed in red and black chalk, with infinite spirit, and certainly possess great merit.’; London, T. Philipe, Catalogue of the Entire Cabinet of Capital Drawings By the Greatest Masters, Collected by George Knapton, Esq., 25 May – 5 June 1807, p.27. Four more ‘Dream’ drawings by Cecco Bravo were once in the possession of the artist Paul Sandby, and were dispersed at the sale of his collection in March 1812.

8.

Christel Thiem, Florentiner Zeichner des Frühbarock, Munich, 1977, pp.394-395, nos.194-198, pls.195-198; Anna Barsanti and Roberto Contini, Cecco Bravo: pittore senza regola, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1999, illustrated pp.42-43, and p.111, no.40; Chris Fischer, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings, Statens Museum for Kunst: Central Italian Drawings – Schools of Florence, Siena, the Marches and Umbria, Copenhagen, 2001, pp.161-162, no.100.

No.9 Hendrick Sonnius 1.

Born in Cassel (now Kassel) in Germany, the collector George Edward Habich (1818-1901) emigrated first to Paris and then to Boston in America, where he established a successful business as a brewer. He began to collect drawings around 1878, following his retirement and return to Kassel. His collection, which was especially strong in Netherlandish works, was dispersed at auction twenty years later.

2.

Ellis Waterhouse, The Dictionary of 16th & 17th Century British Painters, Woodbridge, 1988, p.252. It has also been suggested, however, that Frederik Sonnius may have been the son of Hendrick Sonnius.

3.

A signed Italianate Landscape in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva (Inv. 1839-6; Elsig, op.cit., pp.270-272, no.166) and an Italianate Landscape with Peasants among Ruins, signed and dated 1645, which appeared on the art market in 2005 (Anonymous sales, Brussels, Servaerts Beaux-Arts, 26 April 2005, lot 21, and 30 November 2005, lot 487).

4.

‘Rechts, in het verschiet, ligt een landhuis, omgeven door dennen en cypressen, zooals er nauwelijks elders bij Rome en in de Campagna te vinden zijn; boven de rivier, links, meent men zelfs de Sybille-tempel van Tivoli te ontwaren. Een bepaalde plek schijnt – dat mag men uit de plaatsing van het tempeltje afleiden – niet afgebeeld te zijn.’; Van Regteren Altena, op.cit., p.166.

5.

‘Het zeer eigene van de techniek, die, bij het ingaan op vele onderdeelen, toch de pakkende verdeeling van schaduwen en licht in de eerste plaats op den kalen boonstam in het midden geconcentreerd behoudt, behoort dan stellig tot de artistieke bagage, die hij uit het Noorden meebracht. Voorloopig zal deze wel aanleiding zijn om aan Hendrick Sonnius in de geschiedenis der Hollandsche teekenkunst een plaats naast Guilliam de Heer aan te wijzen.’; Van Regteren Altena, op.cit., pp.166-167.

6.

Inv. SL,5237.89; Arthur M. Hind, Catalogue of Drawings by Dutch and Flemish Artists Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Vol.IV: Dutch Drawings of the XVII Century (N-Z and Anonymous), London, 1931, p.61 (not illustrated); Elsig, op.cit., p.272, fig.5.

The drawing measures 187 x 288 mm. A pen and ink drawing of a castle on a river, formerly in the F. C. Butôt Collection and today in the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam (Inv. RP-T-1993-49), was long attributed to Sonnius, but is in fact by Hendrick Hondius the Elder (Laurens J. Bol, George S. Keyes and F. C. Butôt, Netherlandish Paintings and Drawings from the Collection of F. C. Butôt, London, 1981, pp.152-153, no.59 (as Sonnius); ‘Keuze uit de aanwinsten’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 1994, no.4, p.365, fig.8 (as Hondius)).

No.10 Orazio Fidani 1.

An identical pen inscription ‘Di Orazio fidani’ appears on a study by Fidani of the head of a youth – also drawn in black and red chalk on blue paper – in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Inv. 1974.270; Thiem, op.cit., p.397, no.203, pl.203; Bean, op.cit., p.140, no.178; Mojana, op.cit., illustrated p.76, under no.21). The Metropolitan Museum drawing is a preparatory study, in reverse, for the head of a kneeling soldier saint in an altarpiece datable to c.1645-1647, in the church of SS. Ippolito e Donato in Bibbiena (Mojana, op.cit., pp.76-77, no.21).

2.

Two of these are in the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence (which also houses three other drawings by the artist), and another is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (see note 1 above). Other drawings by Fidani are in the Uffizi and the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome.

3.

Mojana, op.cit., pp.122-123, no.51; Konrad Eisenbichler, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411-1785, Toronto, 1998, illustrated between pp.188-189, pl.8. The dimensions of the painting are 360 x 195 cm.

4.

A photograph of the seriously damaged painting taken before its conservation is illustrated in La città degli Uffizi, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1982, p.229, fig.8, while a photograph of the lower half of the painting, also before conservation, is illustrated in Giuseppe Cantelli, Repertorio della Pittura Fiorentina del Seicento, Florence, 1983, no.365.

No.11 Stefano della Bella 1.

Charles Rogers (1711-1784), a member of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, was an art historian as well as a collector of prints and drawings. After his death his collection passed to his brother-in-law, William Cotton, and thence to his son, also called William Cotton, on the death of the elder Cotton in 1791. The bulk of the Rogers collection was dispersed at auction in two sales held over thirty days in 1799, while the remainder, inherited by the third William Cotton, was presented by him in 1850 to the Public Library at Plymouth and is now in the Museum there.

2.

The collector and connoisseur Henry Scipio Reitlinger (1882-1950) published Old Master Drawings: A Handbook for Amateurs and Collectors in 1922. One of the first guides to the collecting of drawings, the book was illustrated with examples from the author’s own extensive collection.

3.

Inv. 1887,0502.5; Phyllis Dearborn Massar, ‘Costume Drawings by Stefano della Bella for the Florentine Theater’, Master Drawings, Autumn 1970, pp.249 and 259, pl.1. The drawing is inscribed ‘In Monello della Commedia del Po - / desta di Colognole’.

4.

Inv. 1995.264; London and New York, Colnaghi, Old Master and 19th Century Drawings, 1995-1996, no.12.

5.

Inv. 4607, 4686, 4687, 4688 and 4690; Blunt, op.cit., p.95, nos.27-31, plates 8-10.

6.

Inv. 318-5; Françoise Viatte, Musée du Louvre: Cabinet des dessins. Inventaire général des dessins italiens II: Dessins de Stefano della Bella, Paris, 1974, pp.180-181, no.280, fig.280.

7.

Inv. FC 126028 and FC 126044; Maria Catelli Isola, Disegni di Stefano della Bella dalle collezioni del Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 1976, p.33, nos. 60 and 61.

No.12 Jacob van der Does 1.

The large collection of drawings assembled by the banker William Esdaile (1758-1837) included at least three other drawings by Van der Does, but the present sheet cannot be identified in the catalogues of the various auctions held between March 1838 and June 1840, in which the collection was dispersed after his death.

2.

According to a photograph of this drawing in the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute in London.

3.

Peter Schatborn, Drawn to Warmth: 17th-century Dutch artists in Italy, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, 2001, p.136.

4.

The original funerary epitaph reads: ‘Hic sita est Amymone, matrona Marci, optima et pulcherrima, lanifica pia pudica frugi casta domiseda.’ (‘Here lies Amymone, wife of Marcus, best and most beautiful, a worker in wool, devoted, modest, frugal, chaste, one who stayed at home.’)

5.

Schatborn, op.cit., p.136.

6.

The Hans van Leeuwen Collection. Part I: 16th and 17th Century Dutch and Flemish Master Drawings, Amsterdam, Christie’s, 24 November 1992, lot 53. The drawing, which measures 168 x 201 mm., is signed in the same way as the present sheet and is dated 1670.

7.

Inv. Q* 80; Michiel C. Plomp, The Dutch Drawings in the Teyler Museum. Vol.II: Artists Born Between 1575 and 1630, Haarlem/Ghent/Doornspijk, 1997, p.126, no.109.

8.

Christopher White and Charlotte Crawley, The Dutch and Flemish Drawings of the Fifteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge, 1994, p.230, no.348. The drawing measures 152 x 93 mm., and is signed and dated ‘Jvander Does / M.DCLXVI. / mens: Sept.’.

No.13 Jacques Rigaud 1.

Inv. D 985 11 154; Jean Penent et al, Le dessin baroque en Languedoc et en Provence, exhibition catalogue, Toulouse, Musée Paul Dupuy, 1992, p.165, no.125.

2.

John Harris, The Palladian Revival: Lord Burlington, His Villa and Garden at Chiswick, New Haven and London, 1994, p.267.

3.

Inv. Mas.1187; Penent at al, op.cit., p.166, no.126.

4.

Inv. F.1075; Heinz Widauer, Die französischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Vom Barock bis zum beginnenden Rokoko, Vienna, 2004, p.227, no.

F.1075.

No.14 Giovanni Battista Piazzetta 1.

This drawing was at one time in the collection of the writer, tutor and art and music critic René de Cérenville (1875-1968). At his death in 1968 he left much of his collection, part of which was inherited from his father Édouard de Cérenville (1843-1915), to the Musée Jenisch in Vevey.

The de Cérenville collection included numerous works by both Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo, many of which in turn came from the collection assembled by the Swiss-born Danish diplomat and connoisseur Armand-François-Louis de Mestral de Saint-Saphorin (1738-1805).

2.

Alice Binion, ‘The Piazzetta Paradox’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and New York, 1994-1995, p.144.

3.

Andrew Robison, La poesie della luce: Disegni veneziani dalla National Gallery of Art di Washington / The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2014-2015, p.173, under no.60.

4.

Harold Joachim and Suzanne Folds McCullagh, Italian Drawings in the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago and London, 1979, p.72, no.102, pl.111; Alessandro Bettagno et al, G. B. Piazzetta: disegni – incisioni – libri - manoscritti, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1982, pp.32-33, no.44, fig.44; George Knox, Piazzetta: A Tercentenary Exhibition of Drawings, Prints, and Books, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 1983-1984, pp.100-101, no.33, illustrated in colour p.6.

5.

Pallucchini, op.cit., 1956, fig.126; Bettagno et al, ibid., p.36, no.55, fig.55; Catherine Whistler, Drawing in Venice: Titian to Canaletto, exhibition catalogue, Oxford, 2015, p.181, no.92.

6.

Inv. 0774; Pallucchini, op.cit., 1956, fig.120; Anthony Blunt and Edward Croft-Murray, Venetian Drawings of the XVII & XVIII Centuries in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1957, p.28, no.30 (not illustrated). The drawing, on blue paper faded to brown, measures 372 x 274 mm.

7.

Inv. 1875-8-14-1184. The drawing measures 385 x 293 mm.

8.

Inv. 1931.57; Leona E. Prasse, ‘Five Portrait Drawings by Piazzetta’, The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, April 1931, illustrated p.79; Rodolfo Pallucchini, L’arte di Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Bologna, 1934, fig.68; Knox, op.cit., pp.98-99, no.32. The drawing measures 404 x 318 mm.

9.

Pallucchini, op.cit., 1956, fig.122 (as in the Miari collection, Padua).

10. Whistler, op.cit., p.181, under no.92.

No.15 Alessandro Magnasco 1.

Luigi Lanzi, The History of Painting in Italy, from the Period of the Revival of the Fine Arts to the End of the Eighteenth Century, trans. Thomas Roscoe, Vol.V, London, 1828, p.442.

2.

Ibid., p.443.

3.

Inv. 48.13; Benno Geiger, I disegni del Magnasco, Padua, 1945, p.LVII, illustrated pl.LVI; Fausta Franchini Guelfi, ‘Le “Macchiette” e i “Pensieri” di Alessandro Magnasco’, in Disegni genovesi dal Cinquecento al Settecento: Giornate di Studio (9-10 Maggio 1989), Florence, 1992, p.252, fig.7; Laura Muti and Daniele de Sarno Prignano, Alessandro Magnasco, Faenza, 1994, p.92, fig.100; Milan, Palazzo Reale, Alessandro Magnasco 1667-1749, exhibition catalogue, 1996, pp.276-277, no.88; Fausta Franchini Guelfi, Alessandro Magnasco: i disegni, Genoa, 1999, pp.142-143, no.35, fig.107.

4.

Inv. 50.4.11; Muti and de Sarno Prignano, ibid., p.92, fig.101; Roger Ward, Dürer to Matisse: Master Drawings from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, exhibition catalogue, Tulsa and elsewhere, 1996-1997, pp.120-122, no.34; Franchini Guelfi, ibid., 1999, pp.140-141, no.34, fig.106.

5.

Inv. 47.93; Muti and de Sarno Prignano, op.cit., p.17, fig.8; Franchini Guelfi, op.cit., 1999, pp.144-145, no.36, fig.108.

6.

Geiger, op.cit., p.LVII, illustrated pl.LV; Muti and de Sarno Prignano, op.cit., p.16, fig.7.

7.

Muti and de Sarno Prignano, op.cit., p.83, fig.86; Milan, Palazzo Reale, op.cit., pp.278-279, no.89; Franchini Guelfi, op.cit., 1999, pp.146-147, no.37, fig.109.

8.

Inv. 49.31/1; Franchini Guelfi, op.cit., 1992, p.253, fig.8; Muti and de Sarno Prignano, op.cit., p.76, fig.76; Ward, op.cit., pp.123-124, no.35; Franchini Guelfi, op.cit., 1999, pp.148-149, no.38, fig.110.

9.

Inv. 360 and 361; Geiger, op.cit., p.LIX, illustrated pls.31-32.

10. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 9 July 2014, lot 87 (sold for £74,500).

11. Inv. 7084 S and 7067 S; Geiger, op.cit., pp.XLVI and XLVIII, illustrated pls.18-19; Milan, Palazzo Reale, op.cit., pp.292-293, no.96 and illustrated p.292, respectively.

12. Inv. P.II 1025; K. T. Parker, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum; Volume II: Italian Schools, Oxford, 1956, pp.514-515, no.1025, illustrated pl.CCXXI; Franchini Guelfi, op.cit., 1992, p.249, fig.3; Muti and de Sarno Prignano, op.cit., p.70, fig.69; Franchini Guelfi, op.cit., 1999, p.107, no.15, illustrated pp.110-111, fig.85.

13. Muti and de Sarno Prignano, op.cit., p.259, no.345, illustrated p.438, fig.231 (by Magnasco and Antonio Francesco Peruzzini).

14. Muti and de Sarno Prignano, op.cit., p.268, no.394, illustrated p.406, fig.198 (by Magnasco and Antonio Francesco Peruzzini).

15. Muti and de Sarno Prignano, op.cit., p.209, no.53, illustrated p.527, fig.320 and pp.180-181, pls.XL and XLI (as by Magnasco and an unknown collaborator).

16. Muti and de Sarno Prignano, op.cit., p.244, no.260, illustrated p.412, fig.204 (by Magnasco and Antonio Francesco Peruzzini).

No.16 Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre 1.

An identical signature is found on several other drawings by Pierre, such as a red chalk study of a female nude in a private collection in New York; Perrin Stein and Mary Tavener Holmes, Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in New York Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999, pp.84-86, no.36.

2.

Lesur and Aaron, op.cit., p.272, no.P.158, illustrated in colour p.96.

3.

Lesur and Aaron, op.cit., pp.244-245, nos.P.87 and P.88, one illustrated in colour p.167. The two paintings are today in a private collection in Turin and the Konstmuseum in Gothenberg, respectively.

4.

Inv. 12251; Lesur and Aaron, op.cit., p.376, no.D.182, illustrated in colour p.44. The drawing, which seems to be a study for a painting of c.1744, measures 390 x 299 mm.

No.17 Aignan-Thomas Desfriches 1.

The present sheet has remained with Desfriches’s descendants until recently, having belonged to the artist’s wife, née Marie Madeleine Bufferau, and his daughter, Félicité-Perpétue Desfriches (1745-1834), the wife of Jean Cadet de Limay. It then passed to her granddaughter, Marie-Clotilde Cadet de Limay, who married Alexis Ratouis, and thence to their sons, Henri Ratouis de Limay (1863-1951) and Paul Ratouis de Limay (18811963).

2.

‘Mais voici que l’ingénieur des Ponts et Chaussées Soyer est chargé de la conduite des travaux du pont d’Orléans...on lui fait fête et Desfriches le compte bientôt parmi ses meilleurs amis...Désireux de faire plaisir à son nouvel ami, Desfriches dessina, entre 1750 et 1760, plusieurs Vues des travaux du pont d’Orléans, animées d’une foule de petits personnages, qui décèlent une souplesse et une précision du crayon fort remarquables.’; Ratouis de Limay, op.cit., pp.8-9.

3.

Inv. MO/63.1383; Orléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, op.cit., p.41, no.189. The drawing, which is signed and dated 1755, measures 302 x 514 mm.. A handful of other drawings by Desfriches of the bridge at Orléans under construction are in private collections; Orléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, op.cit., pp.41-42, nos.185, 186 and 191. One of these is illustrated in Ratouis de Limay, op.cit., p.XVI.

No.18 Reinier Vinkeles 1.

‘Onder dergelijke Teekeningen van zijnen vroegen tijd muntten die met kleuren, verbeeldende het aan- en uitgaan van den Amsterdamschen Schouwburg, uit.’; Roeland van Eijnden and Adriaan van der Willigen, Geschiedenis der Vaderlandsche Schilderkunst, 1816-1840, 1979 ed., Vol.II, p.318; Quoted in translation in Hans Verbeek and Robert-Jan te Rijdt, Travels through Town and Country: Dutch and Flemish Landscape Drawings 1550-1830, exhibition catalogue, Haarlem, Teylers Museum, 2000, p.160, under nos.75-76.

2.

The site was acquired by the Old and Poor People’s Office, a charitable foundation of the Catholic church, which retained possession of the building until 1998. It is now a luxury boutique hotel, whose Michelin-starred restaurant is named The Vinkeles, in honour of the artist.

3.

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

4.

Verbeek and te Rijdt, ibid., pp.160-161, nos.75-76; Turner and te Rijdt, ed., op.cit., pp.188-191, nos.81a and 81b. This pair of watercolours by Vinkeles, each measuring 185 x 250 mm., are signed and dated 1760 (the night scene, with the same composition as the present sheet) and 1761 (the daylight scene). Both sheets are inscribed ‘Gezigt van de Keyzers graft & Amsteldamsche Schouberg 1760’.

5.

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

No.19 Jean-Jacques Lagrenée 1.

Richard J. Campbell and Victor Carlson, Visions of Antiquity: Neoclassical Figure Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles and elsewhere, 19931994, p.164, under no.25.

2.

Inv. Hdz 3615, Hdz 3594 and Hdz 6619; Ekhart Berckenhagen, Die Französischen Zeichnungen der Kunstbibliothek Berlin, Berlin, 1970, pp.366367, nos. Hdz 3615, Hdz 3594 and Hdz 6619; Marc Sandoz, Les Lagrenée. Vol.II: Jean-Jacques Lagrenée (le jeune), Paris, 1988, p.170, no.7A, all illustrated pl.XX. The first of these (Inv. Hdz 3615) is also illustrated in Rome, Villa Medici, and elsewhere, Piranèse et les français 1740-1790, exhibition catalogue, 1976, pp.160-161, no.79.

3.

Inv. Hdz 3594 and Hdz 6619.

4.

Inv. KK 9341; David Mandrella et al, From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar, exhibition catalogue, Weimar, New York and Paris, 2005-2006, pp.240-241, no.91 (entry by Benjamin Peronnet).

5.

The drawing, in black ink and blue wash heightened with orange gouache, measures 193 x 457 mm.

6.

Inv. 1971.513.35; Portsmouth, Portsmouth College of Art and Design, Fantastic and Ornamental Drawings: A Selection of Drawings from the Kaufman Collection, exhibition catalogue, 1969, unpaginated, no.12, fig.12 (as Studio of Rubens, after Polidoro da Caravaggio). The drawing, in pen and black ink, brush and brown wash with yellow gouache, measures 278 x 208 mm.

7.

Inv. NM 153/1969; Per Bjurström, Drawings in Swedish Public Collections 4. French Drawings: Eighteenth Century, Stockholm, 1982, unpaginated, no.1039 (as Etienne de Lavallée-Poussin). The attribution of this drawing, which measures 216 x 298 mm., to Lagrenée is found in Peronnet in Mandrella et al, op.cit., p.240, under no.91.

8.

Inv. AG.1975.4.1341; Diederik Bakhuÿs, ed., Trésors de l’ombre: Chefs-d’oeuvre du dessin français du XVIIIe siècle. Collections de la Ville de Rouen, exhibition catalogue, Rouen, 2013, pp.154-155, no.62. The drawing measures 244 x 321 mm.

9.

Mandrella et al, op.cit., p.240, under no.91.

No.20 Charles Percier 1.

‘Table à thé et jardinière, faites pour être isolées au centre d’une piece. Ces deux meubles sont exécutées en acajou et en bronze. On peut reconnaitre au fini et à la perfection du travail qu’ils sont de la fabrique de MM. Jacob.’; Percier and Fontaine, op.cit., pp.34-35.

2.

‘Entre temps, sur les indications de Percier, l’ébéniste Jacob en confectionna un certain nombre de très remarquables, comme architecture et comme ornamentation, dont les dessins nous ont été heureusement conservés. Nous en reproduisons deux ici, et la richesse de ces meubles, le soin que Percier a pris d’en dessiner tant de modèles variés, montrent que c’est vers cette époque que la jardinière acheva de s’acclimater dans les intérieurs élégants et de prendre dans les habitations parisiennes la place qu’elle n’a pas cessé d’occuper depuis lors.’; Havard, op.cit., pp.94-95.

No.21 Jean-Baptiste Pillement 1.

‘Artiste de beaucoup de merité, doué d’un talent prodigieux, cet homme actif a traité tous les genres (excepté l’histoire et le portrait) à huile, au pastel, au crayon, à la plume, à la pointe, et toujours avec un adresse, une facilité, une prestesse remarquable. Sa touche est extrêmement ferme, nette, précise. On n’aperçoit jamais de tâtonnement, d’indécision dans ses ouvrages, tous remarquables par une grande harmonie, et par infiniment d’esprit.’; Anon., ‘Note sur Jean Pillement’, MS., 7 July 1828, Lyon, Bibliothèque du Musée des Arts Décoratifs, no.13870; quoted in Laurent Félix, ‘Jean Pillement: De la nature au paysage’, in Béziers, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Jean Pillement; Paysagiste du XVIIIe siècle (1728-1808), exhibition catalogue, 2003, p.11.

2.

Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie, London, 1961, p.94.

3.

Peter Mitchell, ‘Jean Pillement Revalued’, Apollo, January 1983, p.49.

No.22 Pancrace Bessa 1.

Quoted in translation in Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, The Pupils of Redouté, Leigh-on-Sea, 1981, p.34.

2.

Ibid., p.22.

3.

Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 16 November 2008, lot 446.

No.23 Antoine Béranger 1.

Quoted in translation in Tamara Préaud et al, The Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory: Alexandre Brongniart and the Triumph of Art and Industry, 18001847, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1997-1998, p.205, under no.34.

2.

‘l’un des plus beaux qui soit sorti des ateliers de la manufacture’. After the abdication of Napoleon in 1814 and the return of the Bourbons to power, Brongniart saved the vase from destruction.

3.

Inv. D 5522; London, Day & Faber, European Drawings 1570-1870, exhibition catalogue, pp.40-41, no.17; Clarke, op.cit., pp.16-17, no.3. The drawing, which measures 212 x 287 mm., once belonged to Georges Haumont, a curator at the Sèvres museum.

No.24 British School 1.

Referring to the present work in a letter of 1997, Michael Lewis noted that, while the technique of oil on paper is not found elsewhere in the oeuvre of John Frederick Lewis, the draughtsmanship has some affinities with other works by him, and he advanced a somewhat hesitant attribution to the artist. However, Briony Llewellyn has recently confirmed that the present work is not by J. F. Lewis.

2.

An attribution to the little-known English painter Francis John Wyburd (1826-1909) has been suggested. Active between 1845 and 1893, Wyburd was a portraitist and painter of genre, historical and literary subjects. He made a particular specialty of paintings of young woman in languid poses, often in an Eastern setting, and exhibited a number of paintings of such subjects as women lounging in a harem at the Royal Academy, the Society of British Artists and the British Institution. One contemporary critic noted of the artist that ‘The characteristics of Mr. Wyburd’s art are, principally, a perfect realisation of female beauty, an attractive manner in setting out his figures, and a refinement of finish which is sometimes carried almost to excess.’; James Dafforne, ‘The Works of Francis John Wyburd’, The Art Journal, June 1877, p.164.

Six Early Drawings by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1.

Letter of 27 December 1883; Quoted in R. J. Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, London and New York, 2001, p.109.

2.

Julian Treuherz, ‘Introduction to Alma-Tadema’, in Elizabeth Prettejohn et al, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam and Liverpool, 1996-1997, p.17.

3.

Vern G. Swanson, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema: The painter of the Victorian vision of the Ancient world, London, 1977, p.13.

4.

Swanson, ibid., illustrated p.11; Vern G. Swanson, The Biography and Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, London, 1990, p.126, no.40, illustrated p.288; Barrow, op.cit., p.23, pl.13.

5.

Swanson, op.cit.., 1977, illustrated p.13; Swanson, op.cit.., 1990, pp.131-132, no.56, illustrated p.293; Teio Meedendorp and Luuk Pijl, ‘AlmaTadema’s artistic training: Critics on the continent 1852-1870’, in Prettejohn et al, op.cit., p.24, fig.13; Barrow, op.cit., p.24, pl.14; Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘The Beginning of a Journey: Dronryp to Brussels, 1836-1870’, in Elizabeth Prettejohn and Peter Trippi, ed., Lawrence Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity, exhibition catalogue, Leeuwarden, Vienna and London, 2016-2017, p.20, fig.4.

6.

Swanson, op.cit., 1990, pp.165-167, nos.141 and 145, illustrated pp.338 and 341; Prettejohn et al, op.cit., pp.170-173, nos.27-28; Barrow, op.cit., pp.64-65, pls.55-56; Stephanie Moser, ‘Highlight: Archaeology and Ancient Egypt’, in Prettejohn and Trippi, ed., ibid., pp.52-53, figs.4445 and p.194, fig.239.

7.

Barrow, op.cit., pp.182-183, pl.183; Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Celebrity at Home and Abroad, 1886-1912’, in Prettejohn and Trippi, ed., op.cit., p.129, fig.166 and pp.169-169.

8.

Prettejohn, ‘Celebrity at Home and Abroad, 1886-1912’, in Prettejohn and Trippi, ed., op.cit., p.128, fig.165.

9.

Edmund W. Gosse, ‘Lawrence Alma-Tadema. R.A.’, in François Guillaume Dumas, ed., Illustrated Biographies of Modern Artists, London and Paris, 1882, p.78.

No.25 Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1.

Percy Cross Standing, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema O.M., R.A., London, 1905, pp.33-34.

2.

An old photograph records the composition of this lost picture; Vern G. Swanson, The Biography and Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, London, 1990, pp.125-126, no.39, illustrated p.288.

Nos.26-27 Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1.

Anonymous sale (‘Drawings by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, from a Private Collection’), London, Christie’s South Kensington, 9 December 2015, part of lot 254. The first of these drawings (fig.1) measures 216 x 297 mm., and the second (fig.2) measures 304 x 165 mm.

Nos.28-29 Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1.

Stephanie Moser, ‘Highlight: Archaeology and Ancient Egypt’, in Elizabeth Prettejohn and Peter Trippi, ed., Lawrence Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity, exhibition catalogue, Leeuwarden, Vienna and London, 2016-2017, p.53.

No.30 Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1.

R. J. Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, London and New York, 2001, p.23.

2.

Vern G. Swanson, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema: The painter of the Victorian vision of the Ancient world, London, 1977, illustrated p.11; Vern G. Swanson, The Biography and Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, London, 1990, p.126, no.40, illustrated p.288; Barrow, ibid., p.23, pl.13.

3.

As Stephanie Moser has written, ‘In a report on the Royal Academy exhibition, the Athenaeum initially reported that the painting represented ‘at half-length, the dusky figure of the wise-looking servant of the king, bearing a richly decorated staff of office in his hands.’ Painted in strong sunlight, the central subject is said to have a ‘noble face’ and to be ‘nobly expressive, grave and thoughtful’; more generally the work is described as ‘magnificently modelled, and intensely rich in colour’. Two years later, when the painting was in a private collection, the Athenaeum offered a much fuller description of the work stating that, it ‘represents a bare-breasted Nubian, past the middle period of life, his skin of dark brown hue showing to great advantage beside the deep blue-green of the painted wall behind, which, receiving a full and brilliant light, serves as the background to the whole picture.’ Again, the expression of the figure is highlighted: ‘He has a grave and highly-intellectual face, with much earnestness, and a good deal of sadness of expression. He holds up the ensign staff of his office, as if he were in waiting on his master.’; Stephanie Moser, e-mail correspondence, 15 October 2016.

No.31 Alfred-Emile Méry 1.

Inv. MI.899.5.9; Daniel Ternois, Inventaire des collections publiques françaises; Montauban – Musée Ingres. Peintures: Ingres et son temps (Artistes nés entre 1740 et 1830), Paris, 1965, unpaginated, no.202.

2.

Inv. 1996.45.197 and 1996.45.198, respectively.

3.

Inv. 2325.

No.32 Antoine Vollon 1.

New York, Wildenstein & Co., Antoine Vollon (1833-1900): “A Painter’s Painter”, exhibition catalogue, 2004-2005, p.116, no.30, illustrated as frontispiece.

2.

Inv. RF 2696; Charles Sterling and Hélène Adhémar, Musée National du Louvre. Peintures: École française XIXe siècle, Paris, 1961, Vol.IV, p.40, no.1988, pl.772; Isabelle Compjn et al, Musée d’Orsay, Catalogue sommaire illustré des peintures. M-Z, Paris, 1990, p.474, no.RF 2696.

3.

Gabriel P. Weisberg, ‘Antoine Vollon: Arousing the Senses’, in New York, Wildenstein & Co., op.cit., p.8.

4.

See note 1 above.

5.

Carol Forman Tabler, ‘Antoine Vollon, Master Painter’, in New York, Wildenstein & Co., op.cit., p.10.

6.

Philippe Auquier and Jean-Baptiste Astier, La vie et l’oeuvre de Joseph Soumy, graveur et peintre, Paris, 1910, illustrated as frontispiece.

7.

Carol Forman Tabler, ‘Antoine Vollon in Dieppe’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, May-June 1989, p.227, fig.1. The painting is now in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

8.

Auquier and Astier op.cit., illustrated between pp.64 and 65.

No.33 Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc 1.

Martin Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814-1879, Farnham, 2014, p.481.

2.

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, ‘Causeries de dimanche. Une aventure de voyage’, Le bien public, 15 and 22 April 1878, pp.131-132; quoted in translation in Bressani, ibid., p.484.

3.

Viollet-le-Duc in Bressani, op.cit., p.484.

4.

Viollet-le-Duc in Bressani, op.cit., p.484.

5.

As the architect’s great-granddaughter, the writer Geneviève Viollet-le-Duc, later recounted, ‘A gourd of alcohol has doubtless allowed the unfortunate prisoner of the ice not to die of cold after having failed to die from the fall. Almost dead but not wounded, he arrived at the village of Mattmark, where he learned of the imminence of war.’ (‘Une gourde d’alcool a sans doute permis au malheureux prisonnier des glaces de nes pas mourir de froid, après avoir manqué de mourir fracassé. Assez meurti mais non blessé, il arrivé au village de Mattmark, où il apprend l’imminence de la guerre.’); Geneviève Viollet-le-Duc in Paris, Grand Palais, Viollet-le-Duc, exhibition catalogue, 1980, p.361. The Franco–Prussian war began a few days later, on the 19th of July.

6.

Bressani, op.cit., p.485.

7.

Pierre A. Frey and Lise Grenier, Viollet-le-Duc et la montagne, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1993, p.124, fig.58; Françoise Bercé, Viollet-le Duc, Paris, 2013, pp.168-169, figs.174-175.

8.

Bercé, ibid., p.170, fig.176; Bressani, op.cit., pp.488-489, fig.14.17. The watercolour is dated ‘31 Juill. 1877’.

9.

Frey and Grenier, op.cit., p.124, fig.58.

No.34 Desiré-François Laugée 1.

London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, Nineteenth Century French Drawings, 1981, no.45, pl.30. The drawing, which measured 340 x 245 mm., was signed and dated 1872 and inscribed Londres, while the old backing board bore the inscription ‘Portrait of Mrs. Clover by Monsieur D. Laugée care of F. Dicey Esqre 76 Fulham Road’.

2.

Inv. P. 168.9-1. A photograph of this drawing is in the Witt Library of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

No.35 Arthur Melville 1.

Agnes Ethel Mackay, Arthur Melville, Scottish Impressionist (1855-1904), Leigh-on-Sea, 1951, p.117.

2.

Ibid., pp.117-118.

3.

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

4.

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

5.

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

6.

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

7.

London, Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours, The Exhibition of the Collected Works of Arthur Melville, R.W.S., A.R.S.A., January-February 1906, no.151 (A French Market Place (Granville), as signed ‘A. Melville, Market, Granville’, with no dimensions given). Lent to the exhibition by Robert Strathern, an early patron of Arthur Melville who was an Edinburgh solicitor and a collector of contemporary Scottish art, the watercolour may possibly be identified with that now in Glasgow (see note 9 below).

8.

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

9.

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

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

11. Ibid., pp.45-46.

No.36 John Brett 1.

Charles Brett, ‘John Brett in Cornwall’, in Charles Brett, Michael Hickox and Christiana Payne, John Brett: A Pre-Raphaelite in Cornwall, exhibition catalogue, Penzance, 2006, p.55.

2.

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

3.

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

4.

For more on Brett’s use of Dolman frames, see Ann Sumner, ‘A Note on the Framing of John Brett’s Welsh Seascapes’, in Cardiff, National Museum of Wales, John Brett: a Pre-Raphaelite on the Shores of Wales, exhibition catalogue, 2001, pp.116-117, and Lynn Roberts, ‘John Brett’s Picture Frames’, in Payne and Brett, op.cit., pp.187-188.

5.

Devitt was a shipping magnate and the chairman of Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, and in 1924 was given a Baronetcy in honour of his services to shipping and nautical charities. Apart from several works by Brett, including the painting Echoes of a Far-Off Storm, which he presented to the Guildhall Art Gallery in London in 1918, Devitt owned paintings by Constable, Gainsborough, Landseer, Lawrence and Waterhouse. He had his portrait painted by John Singer Sargent in 1904, and also commissioned works from Frank Brangwyn.

6.

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

No.37 Georges Clairin 1.

Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Piasa], 18 June 2004, lot 99, and Anonymous sale, Saint-Germain-en-Laye [Schmitz-Laurent], 25 March 2012, lot 117. The dimensions of the watercolour are 455 x 555 mm.

No.38 Ludovic Alleaume 1.

Lucie Boissières, Ludovic Alleaume (1859-1941): Peintre et dessinateur de vitraux, exhibition catalogue, Laval, 2014-2015, pp.16-17, fig.11.

No.39 Henri-Joseph Harpignies 1.

H. V. S., ‘Henri-Joseph Harpignies’, The Burlington Magazine, October 1916, p.268.

2.

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

3.

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

4.

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

No.40 Eugène Grasset 1.

‘Sans doute, d’autres artistes que Grasset ont composé des cartons de verrières, et certains de ceux-ci sont estimables. Mais aucun de ces artistes n’est verrier dans l’âme, ne voit ni ne traduit sa pensée en verrier véritable. Leurs compositions, fort savantes et fort belles, auraient fait tout aussi bien des cartons de tapisserie ou des peintures décoratives. Mais les cartons de vitraux de Grasset ne peuvent être que des vitraux et rien autre. Ils ont été conçus ainsi, pensés en la matière même, et rien ne saurait être changé à leur réalisation définitive.’; M. P. Verneuil, ‘Les Vitraux de Grasset’, Art et Décoration, January-June 1908, p.110.

2.

Octave Uzanne, ‘Eugene Grasset and Decorative Art in France’, The Studio, November 1894, p.44.

3.

‘Douze grandes fenêtres à meubler, retraçant toute la vie de Jeanne d’Arc! Quelle occasion unique pour un verrier de faire une oeuvre considérable, un chef-d’oeuvre! Grasset se mit à l’ouvrage avec enthousiasme. Et le chef-d’oeuvre attendu sortit bientôt de ses mains. Conçues dans le style du XVe siècle, ses maquettes suivent toute la vie de l’héroine, avec une beauté, une tenue, un caractère que l’on ne saurait assez admirer...On ne sait, en vérité, ce qu’il convient de placer en première ligne: l’érudition, la science de composition, l’ingéniosité de l’artiste, la beauté noble et pure du dessin.’; Verneuil, op.cit., pp.120-122.

4.

It is thought that the jury may have been swayed by the intervention of the composer Charles Gounod, who was the grandfather of Galland’s wife.

5.

‘Ceux qui n’ont pas senti la beauté et technique des cartons et maquettes pour le concours de Jeanne d’Arc, ou qui, sentant cette beaute, ont passé outre, sont coupables d’un des plus criants dénis de justice qu’on puisse citer dans l’histoire artistique de ce temps, et assument une grave responsabilité vis-à-vis de nos successeurs.’

6.

Camille Lemonnier, in Gil Blas, 3 April 1897; Quoted in translation in Victor Arwas, Berthon & Grasset, London, 1978, p.18.

7.

Albert Thomas, ‘Le vitrail à l’Exposition Universelle’, L’art décoratif, August 1900; Quoted in translation in Arwas, ibid., p.18.

8.

Jean-François Luneau, Félix Gaudin: Peintre-verrier et mosaïste (1851-1930), 2006, illustrated in colour p.571.

9.

Inv. ARO 1993 40 1-5 and ARO 1993 40 8. Two of these, depicting The Siege of Orléans and Joan of Arc at the Stake, are illustrated in colour in Catherine Lepdor, ed., Eugène Grasset, 1845-1917. L’art et l’ornement, exhibition catalogue, Lausanne, 2011, pp.76-77, figs.89-90. The drawing for Joan of Arc at the Stake is also illustrated in Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Jeanne d’Arc: Les tableaux de l’Histoire, exhibition catalogue, 2003, p.145, no.79.

10. ‘L’art du vitrail, après quatre cents ans de sommeil, venait de se réveiller, et nulle influence n’aurait pu être plus féconde que celle de cette oeuvre, si elle avait été réalisée...Imaginez exécutés, matérialisés dans la splendeur des verres qu’allume la lumière, ces tableaux si vivants du Départ de Vaucouleurs, de Jeanne d’Arc à l’assaut du fort des Tourelles, du Sacre, de l’Entrée à Orléans. Jamais Grasset n’avait été aussi loin dans le déploiement de ses facultés: quelle abondance de gestes précis et expressifs, quelle richesse dans ces costumes, dans ces architectures, et quelle science de composition, de groupement!’; Gabriel Mourey, ‘Eugène Grasset’, Art et Décoration, January-June 1903, pp.16-18.

No.41 Charles Maurin 1.

Jacques Foucart, ‘Five nineteenth-century exhibitions, held in France in 1978’, The Burlington Magazine, March 1979, p.200.

2.

Paris, Grand Palais, Autour de Lévy-Dhurmer: Visionnaires et Intimistes en 1900, exhibition catalogue, 1973, pp.68-69, no.106; Gilles Grandjean, ed., Charles Maurin, un Symboliste du Réel, exhibition catalogue, Le Puy-en-Velay, 2006, no.30, illustrated in colour p.140. The drawing measures 500 x 650 mm.

3.

Ibid., no.31, illustrated in colour p.141 and on the cover. The pastel, which measures 500 x 650 mm, is in the collection of Raoul Laurent, Paris.

No.42 Charles Lacoste 1.

Apart from several works by Lacoste, Frizeau also came to own Gauguin’s famous frieze-like painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, as well as works by André Derain, Odilon Redon, Andre Lhote, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and many other artists.

2.

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

3.

Ibid., p.97, no.16, illustrated p.52 (dated February 1895) and pp.98-99, nos.19-20, illustrated pp.51 and 53 (both dated September 1895); Frédéric Chappey, ‘Charles Lacoste entre symbolisme et naturalisme’, L’Oeil, November 1985, p.46, fig.4.

No.43 Edvard Munch 1.

An interesting stylistic comparison may be made between the present sheet and the pastel sky in the background of the 1893 version of The Scream in the Munch Museum in Oslo (Magne Bruteig and Ute Kuhlemann Falck, ed., Edvard Munch: Works on Paper, exhibition catalogue, Oslo, 20132014, p.135, no.119, with a detail of the sky reproduced on the cover of the catalogue). A testament to the artist’s lifelong use of the pastel medium is seen in what is thought to be his last self-portrait; a very large drawing in coloured chalks on canvas, in the Munch Museum in Oslo.

Drawn in 1943 at the age of nearly eighty, Munch depicted himself before a drawing board and holding a stick of pastel in his hand (Ragna Stang, Edvard Munch: The man and the artist, London, 1979, pp.278-279, pl.357; Sidsel Helliesen, ‘Technical aspects of Munch’s prints and drawings’, in Bruteig and Falck, ed., ibid., p.56, fig.56).

2.

A photograph of the rocky shoreline at Åsgårdstrand is illustrated in Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, New Haven and London, 2005, fig.77.

3.

Marianne Yvenes and Ellen Lerberg, ed., Edvard Munch in the National Museum, Oslo, 2008, p.11.

4.

Quoted in translation in Yvenes and Lerberg, ibid., p.60.

5.

Stang, op.cit., pp.70-71, pl.82; Gerd Woll, Edvard Munch: Complete Paintings. Catalogue raisonné, Vol.I 1880-1897, London, 2009, pp.188-189, no.182; Oslo, Nasjonalgalleriet and Munch-museet, Edvard Munch 1863-1944, exhibition catalogue, 2013, illustrated pp.41-43, pl.18. The painting measures 126.5 x 161.5 cm.

6.

See, for example, two paintings of rocks on a beach, both in private collections; Woll, op.cit., Vol.I, pp.184-185, nos.177 (Beach Landscape from Åsgårdstrand) and 178 (Beach).

7.

Woll, op.cit., Vol.I, p.265, no.283. Later variants of this composition were painted by Munch in 1905 and 1935.

8.

Oslo, Nasjonalgalleriet and Munch-museet, op.cit., illustrated p.63, pl.29.

9.

Woll, op.cit., Vol.I, p.299, no.318; Oslo, Nasjonalgalleriet and Munch-museet, op.cit., illustrated p.73, pl.39.

10. Inv. M 2382; Stang, op.cit., pp.162-163, fig.209. The drawing, which may be dated to after 1912, measures 290 x 420 mm.

11. Quoted in translation in Yvenes and Lerberg, op.cit., p.26.

12. Together with several other works on paper by Edvard Munch, this pastel drawing was later given by Inger Munch as a gift to a close friend, Berta Folkedal (b.1889).

No.44 Jean Vanden Eeckhoudt 1.

Ruyts-van Rillaer, op.cit., p.153, no.96-1. The work measures 450 x 330 mm.

2.

Ruyts-van Rillaer, op.cit., p.153, no.97-4. The pastel measures 500 x 450 mm.

3.

Inv. 181; Ruyts-van Rillaer, op.cit., p.153, no.97-5. The pastel, which measures 550 x 430 mm., is signed and dated 1897.

4.

Ruyts-van Rillaer, op.cit., p.154, no.97-7. The pastel measures 550 x 430 mm., and is signed and dated 1897.

No.45 Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel 1.

As a Viennese critic recalled of Maurice Boutet de Monvel some years later, ‘This man has become indispensable in Vienna, where he has played a vital role over the past few years...He and [Eugène] Grasset have practically shaped our young illustrators; yet he has remained completely unknown in central Europe; only a few Viennese painters who are ‘in the know’ possess his books, almost as though they were a well-kept secret.’; Ludwig Hevesi, Acht Jahre Secession, Vienna, 1906, p.200; Quoted in translation in Stéphane-Jacques Addade, Bernard Boutet de Monvel: At the Origins of Art Deco, Paris, 2016, p.39.

2.

An example of the poster, which measured 1004 x 676 mm. and was printed by Imprimerie F. Champenois, is in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris (Inv. AFF1642).

3.

Anon., ‘Boutet de Monvel’, Brush and Pencil, February 1899, p.266.

4.

Société d’Aquarellistes Français. Treizième exposition: Catalogue, Paris, 1891, unpaginated, under Boutet de Monvel, no.33.

No.46 Henri-Edmond Cross 1.

This oil sketch once belonged to the Parisian collector Paul Suzor who, with his brother Léon, owned a large number of drawings. While many of the works in the Suzor collection were dispersed at auction in the 1960s, the present painting remained with Paul Suzor’s descendants until 2010.

2.

Quoted in translation in Françoise Baligand, ‘À la recherche d’harmonie / In search of harmony’, in Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Cross et la néo-impressionnisme: De Seurat à Matisse / Cross and Neo-Impressionism: From Seurat to Matisse, exhibition catalogue, 2011-2012, p.77.

3.

Ibid., p.77.

4.

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

5.

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

6.

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

7.

Isabelle Compin, H. E. Cross, Paris, 1964, p.164, no.73 (L’épave), not illustrated; Anonymous sale, Paris, Palais Galliera, 12 December 1973, lot 50; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 8 May 1989, lot 27 (sold for $467,500); Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 7 November 2007, lot 67 (unsold). The painting measures 59.5 x 81 cm.

8.

Compin, ibid., p.165, no.74; Françoise Baligand et al, Henri Edmond Cross 1856-1910, exhibition catalogue, Douai, 1998-1999, no.15, illustrated in colour p.62. The painting is signed and dated 1899.

9.

Baligand, op.cit., 2011-2012, p.84.

No.47 William Rothenstein 1.

William Rothenstein, Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein, 1900-1922, London, 1932, pp.23-24.

2.

John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters, Vol.I, 1952 (1984 ed.), p.108.

3.

The other pastel, measuring 225 x 335 mm., depicted a landscape with a mountainous background (‘Landschaft mit Gebirgshintergrund’); Julius Stern sale, Berlin, Galerie Paul Cassirer, 22 May 1916, lot 156.

4.

Dispersed at auction in 1916, Stern’s collection included paintings, drawings and prints by such artists as Maurice Denis, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Max Liebermann, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde, among others.

5.

Inv. 1925.431. The pastel measures 399 x 279 mm.

No.49 Pablo Picasso 1.

The first known owner of this drawing was the eminent Swiss collector Rudolf Staechelin (1881-1946), one of the pioneering collectors of modern art in Europe, in whose possession it is recorded by 1920. This drawing was one of two paintings and four drawings by Picasso lent by Staechelin to the Ausstellung französischer Malerei, an exhibition of French painting held at the Kunsthalle in Bern in November 1920.

2.

Fernande Olivier, Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier, New York, 2001, pp.182-183.

3.

John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Vol.I, New York, 1991, p.441.

4.

Christian Zervos dates this drawing to the Gósol period in 1906, as do Núria Rivero and Teresa Llorens. Pierre Daix prefers to date the sheet to Paris in 1905. Jèssica Jaques Pi believes that, on stylistic grounds, this drawing is not from the Gósol period.

5.

Gary Tinterow, Master Drawings by Picasso, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge and elsewhere, 1981, p.68, under no.19.

6.

The pose of the woman in the present sheet is, however, already found in an earlier drawing of 1904; a pen and watercolour study of a seated nude man and a standing nude woman in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, which dates from the time of the artist’s transition from the Blue to the Rose period. The drawing, known as The Couple or Saltimbanques, is signed and dated 1904; Rivero et al., op.cit., pp.131-133, no.16; Evelyn Weiss and Maria Teresa Ocaña, ed., Picasso: The Ludwig Collection, exhibition catalogue, Barcelona and elsewhere, 1992-1993, unpaginated, no.6.

7.

Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso: The Early Years 1881-1907, Barcelona, 1985, p.472.

8.

Margaret Werth, ‘Representing the Body in 1906’, in Marilyn McCully, ed., Picasso: The Early Years, 1892-1906, exhibition catalogue, Washington and Boston, 1997-1998, pp.279-280.

9.

Vincent Pomarède et al., Ingres 1780-1867, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2006, pp.378-379, no.178.

10. Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Vol. I (Oeuvres de 1893 a 1906), Paris, 1932, pl.150, no.325; Daix and Boudaille, op.cit., p.301, no.XV.34, illustrated in colour p.91; William Rubin, ed., Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1980, illustrated in colour p.70; Palau i Fabre, op.cit., p.449, fig.1248; Carsten-Peter Warncke and Ingo F. Walther, Pablo Picasso 1881-1973, Vol.I, Cologne, 2007, illustrated in colour p.140.

11. Zervos, ibid., pl.147, no.321; Daix and Boudaille, op.cit., p.303, no.XV.40; Rubin, ed., ibid., illustrated p.71; Palau i Fabre, op.cit., p.453, fig.1266; Rivero et al., op.cit., p.320-321, no.152; Warncke and Walther, ibid., illustrated in colour p.139.

12. Zervos, op.cit., Vol.I, no.249 (where dated 1906); Daix and Boudaille, op.cit., p.301, no.XV.35; Palau i Fabre, op.cit., p.452, fig.1260.

13. Zervos, op,cit., Vol.I, pl.158, no.336; Daix and Boudaille, op.cit., p.320, no.XVI.7; Rubin, ed., op.cit., illustrated in colour p.75; Palau i Fabre, op.cit., p.473, fig.1363; Warncke and Walther, op.cit., illustrated in colour p.150.

14. Quoted in translation in Richardson, op.cit., p.444.

15. Daix and Boudaille, op.cit., p.281, nos.D.XIII.1 and D.XIII.2 (where both dated 1905); Carlson, op.cit., pp.50-53, nos.26-27 (where both dated 1906).

16. Jean Sutherland Boggs, Picasso and Man, exhibition catalogue, Toronto and Montreal, 1964, p.46, no.30.

17. Zervos, op.cit., Vol.I, pl.113, no.259 (where dated 1906); Daix and Boudaille, op.cit., p.275, no.XIII.5 (where dated 1905); Palau i Fabre, op.cit., p.420, fig.1141 (where dated 1905); Robert McD. Parker, ‘Catalogue of the Stein Collections’, in Janet Bishop, Cécile Debray and Rebecca Rabinow, ed., The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, exhibition catalogue, San Francisco, Paris and New York, 20112012, p.440, no.323 (not illustrated).

18. Daix and Boudaille, op.cit., p.312, no.D.XV.13; Zervos, op.cit., Vol. XXII, 1970, p.150, pl.428; Rivero et al., op.cit., p.318, no.149; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 19 June 2007, lot 138. The drawing measures 407 x 267 mm.

19. Carlson, op.cit., pp.54-55, no.28 (where dated 1906).

20. Marilyn McCully, Picasso in Paris 1900-1907: Eating Fire, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam and Barcelona, 2011, p.198.

21. Olivier, op.cit., p.184.

No.50 Edouard Vuillard 1.

Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Vuillard: The Inexhaustible Glance. Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, Milan, 2003, Vol.II, p.1012, no.VIII405 (as location unknown), where dated 1912. The painting measures 138.5 x 62 cm. and bears the Vuillard studio stamp.

2.

Ibid., pp.1098-109q`9, nos.IX-159.1 (At Les Pavillons, Cricqueboeuf: The Grounds) and IX-159.1 (At Les Pavillons, Cricqueboeuf: In Front of the House). Both of these panels, which each measure 212 x 80 cm., are today in private collections.

3.

Guy Cogeval et al, Édouard Vuillard, exhibition catalogue, Washington and elsewhere, 2003-2004, p.317, under nos.274-275 (entry by MaryAnne Stevens and Kimberly Jones).

No.51 Johan Briedé 1.

Briedé sometimes signed his work under the pseudonym ‘J. B. de Chateauroux’, a name derived from family tradition that the Briedés were originally from the area of Chateauroux in central France.

2.

During this eighteen-year period, according to these records, Briedé produced around three thousand drawings and a hundred paintings.

3.

Wells and Briedé became friends, with the author praising Briedé as ‘A brilliant young artist from Holland’, and noting of his illustrations for The War of the Worlds: ‘Now comes Mr. Briedé...to probe the Martian mystery, ‘The War of the Worlds’. His Martians are much more vegetable than those of any previous reconstructor, and his Martian machines like living things.’

4.

‘G’, ‘Studio-Talk’, The Studio, March 1923, pp.173-174.

No.52 Eric Kennington 1.

In a letter to John Buchan of 19 August 1917; Quoted in Jonathan Black, ‘Eric Kennington and William Rothenstein and the landscape of the Western Front, 1917-19’, in London, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, William Rothenstein and his Circle, exhibition catalogue, 2016, p.58.

2.

Campbell Dodgson, ‘The Artist’, in Campbell Dodgson and C. E. Montague, British Artists at the Front. IV: Eric Kennington, London, 1918, unpaginated.

3.

Letter to Charles Masterman of 29 September 1917; Quoted in Jonathan Black, ‘‘A Heroic Truth’: The War Art of Eric Kennington’, in Jonathan Black, The Graphic Art of Eric Kennington, exhibition catalogue, London, 2001, p.4.

4.

Robert Graves, ‘The British Soldier’, in London, Ernest Brown & Phillips (The Leicester Galleries), “The British Soldier”: An Exhibition of Pictures

by Eric H. Kennington (An Official Artist on the Western Front), exhibition catalogue, June-July 1918, pp.3 and 6.

5.

Dodgson and Montague, op.cit., unpaginated.

6.

Letter to Alfred Yockney of 6 June 1918; Quoted in Black, op.cit., 2001, p.8.

7.

By the poet George Fraser; Quoted in David Daiches, ‘Introduction’, in Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, New York, 1981, p.ix.

8.

Letter to Hamo Thornycoft of 4 July 1918; Quoted in Jonathan Black, ‘Neither Beasts, nor Gods, but Men’: Constructions of Masculinity and the Image of the Ordinary British Soldier or ‘Tommy’ in the First World War Art of: C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946), Eric Henri Kennington (1888-1960) and Charles Sargeant Jagger (1885-1934), unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University College London, 2003, p.203, note 293.

No.53 Hermann Wöhler 1.

The five drawings, each measuring approximately 404 x 317 mm., are illustrated at http://www.symbolismus.com/hermannw246hler3.html.

No.54 Paul Signac 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.133.

2.

Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, ‘Signac: Drawings and Watercolors’, in Marina Ferretti Bocquillon et al, Signac 1863-1935, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Amsterdam and New York, 2001, pp.25-26.

3.

‘Chronology’, in Ferretti Bocquillon et al, op,cit., 2001, p.322.

4.

A small late sketchbook by Signac in the Louvre (Inv. RF 50857) contains a number of rapid pencil and watercolour sketches of coastal towns in Corsica, including views of Calvi, Saint-Florent and L’Île-Rousse.

5.

Ferretti Bocquillon, op,cit., 2001, p.32.

6.

Inv. RF 31432 and RF 40193. The former, dated May 1935 and measuring 280 x 430 mm., is illustrated in Ferretti Bocquillon, op.cit., 2001, p.294, no.182. The latter, also dated May 1935 and measuring 290 x 435 mm., is illustrated in Françoise Cachin, Paul Signac, Greenwich, 1971, p.130, fig.121.

7.

Little Rock, Arkansas Arts Center, Paul Signac: A Collection of Watercolors and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 2000, p.124, no.132.

8.

Cachin, op.cit., p.131. The artist produced no finished paintings of any Corsican views.

No.55 Pablo PIcasso 1.

Patrick Elliott, Picasso on Paper, exhibition catalogue, Edinburgh, 2007, p.68, under no.35.

2.

John Richardson, Pablo Picasso: Watercolours and gouaches, London, 1964, p.80, under no.33.

3.

Verna Posever Curtis, ‘Picasso and the Bullfight’, in Verna Posever Curtis and Selma Reuben Holo, La Tauromaquia: Goya, Picasso and the Bullfight, exhibition catalogue, Milwaukee and elsewhere, 1986-1987, p.69.

4.

Luis Miguel Dominguin and Georges Boudaille, Pablo Picasso: Toros y Toreros, London, 1961, p.24.

5.

Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: Toreros, Monte Carlo, 1961, pp.56, 124 and 147.

6.

Jean Leymarie, Picasso: Métamorphose et Unité, Geneva, 1971, p.152; Quoted in translation in Evelyn Weiss and Maria Teresa Ocaña, ed., Picasso: The Ludwig Collection, exhibition catalogue, Barcelona and elsewhere, 1992-1993, unpaginated, under no.70.

7.

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Vol.XV: Oeuvres de 1946 a 1953, Paris, 1965, p.106, no.180; London, The Lefevre Gallery, op.cit., no.19; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.44, no.51-022; Sale (‘The Property of the Trustees of the late Mrs. A. Metcalfe’), London, Sotheby’s, 5 December 1990, lot 374 (sold for £63,800); Sale (‘The Collection of A. Alfred Taubman: Modern and Contemporary Art’), New York, Sotheby’s, 5 November 2015, lot 107T (sold for $274,000). The drawing measures 504 x 660 mm.

8.

Inv. MP 1879; Brigitte Léal, Musée Picasso. Carnets: catalogue des dessins, Vol.2, Paris, 1996, p.281, nos.50 Ro to 55 Vo. The sketchbook was used between 10 January and 26 May 1940.

9.

A linocut of a similar composition, executed on 13th October 1959, is illustrated in Elliott, op.cit., pp.126-127, no.79.

10. Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: Toreros, Monte Carlo, 1961, pp.52-54.

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INDEX OF ARTISTS

ALLEAUME, Ludovic; No.38 ALMA-TADEMA, Sir Lawrence; Nos.25-30 BARBIERI, Giovanni Francesco, called il Guercino; No.6 BÉRANGER, Antoine; No.23 BESSA, Pancrace; No.22 BOUTET DE MONVEL, Maurice; No.45 BRETT, John; No.36 BRIEDÉ, Johan; No.51 BRITISH SCHOOL, c.1850; No.24 CECCO BRAVO, Francesco Montelatici, called; No.8 CLAIRIN, Georges; No.37 CROSS, Henri-Edmond; No.46 DELLA BELLA, Stefano; No.11 DESFRICHES, Aignan-Thomas; No.17 FIDANI, Orazio; No.10 GRASSET, Eugène; No.40 GUERCINO; Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called; No.6 HARPIGNIES, Henri-Joseph; No.39 KENNINGTON, Eric; No.52 LACOSTE, Charles; No.42 LAGRENÉE, Jean-Jacques; No.19 LAUGÉE, Désiré-François; No.34 MAGNASCO, Alessandro; No.15 MAURIN, Charles; No.41 MELVILLE, Arthur; No.35 MÉRY, Alfred-Emile; No.31 MONTELATICI, Francesco, called Cecco Bravo; No.8 MUNCH, Edvard; No.43

NAPOLETANO, Filippo di Liagno; No.7 NICCOLÒ DI GIACOMO; No.1 PERCIER, Charles; No.20 PIAZZETTA, Giovanni Battista; No.14 PICASSO, Pablo; Nos.49 & 55 PIERRE, Jean-Baptiste-Marie; No.16 PILLEMENT, Jean-Baptiste; No.21 RIGAUD, Jacques; No.12 ROSSETTI, Cesare; No.3 RÖSLER, Paula; No.48 ROTHENSTEIN, Sir William; No.47 RUBENS, Sir Peter Paul; No.5 SIGNAC, Paul; No.54 SONNIUS, Hendrick; No.9 SPANISH SCHOOL, late 16th Century; No.2 TEMPESTA, Antonio; No.4 VANDEN EECKHOUDT, Jean; No.44 VAN DER DOES, Jacob; No.12 VINKELES, Reinier; No.18 VIOLLET-LE-DUC, Eugène Emmanuel; No.33 VOLLON, Antoine; No.32 VUILLARD, Édouard; No.50 WÖHLER, Hermann; No.53

Alfred-Emile Méry (1824-1896) Study of Rooftops No.31

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Back cover: Ludovic Alleaume (1859-1941) Self-Portrait No.38

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