Stephen Ongpin - Master Drawings 2016

STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART

Front cover: Emil Nolde (1867-1956) Head of a South Sea Island Woman No.45

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Claudio Bravo (1936-2011) The Guardian’s Son No.55

STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART

MASTER DRAWINGS 2016 An exhibition at Dickinson Roundell Inc. 19 East 66th Street New York, NY 10065

20th to 30th January, 2016

A selection of the drawings in this catalogue will also be exhibited at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) Maastricht

11th to 20th March, 2016 and The Salon du Dessin Paris

30th March to 4th April, 2016

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am most grateful to my wife Laura for her advice, forbearance and constant support, and to my sons Sebastian and Benjamin for letting me spend much less time with them in the playground than they would have wished. I am also greatly indebted to my assistant Julie Frouge 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: Deborah Bates, Adrienne Baxter Bell, Julian Brooks, Glynn Clarkson, Andrew Clayton-Payne, Joanne Cooper, Ambroise Duchemin, Fergus Duff, Donato Esposito, Ted Few, Gino Franchi, Aprile Gallant, Kate Ganz, Catherine Monbeig Goguel, Meg Grasselli, Colin Harrison, Neil Jeffares, Rachel Kaminsky, Lisa Kraus, Jerome Ladden, Louise Laplante, Thomas Le Claire, Briony Llewellyn, Penny Mellis, William Mitchell, James Mundy, Guy Peppiatt, Michael Peppiatt, Marine Sangis, Todd-White Photography, Sarah Vowles, Joanna Watson, Harriet West and Jenny Willings.

Stephen Ongpin

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

Unless otherwise noted, paper is white or whitish.

Please note that drawings are sold mounted but not framed.

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

All enquiries should be addressed to Stephen Ongpin 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 Fax [+44] (20) 7839-1504 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com Between 18 January and 2 February 2016 only: Tel. [+1] (917) 587-1183 Tel. [+1] (212) 772-8083 Fax [+1] (212) 772-8186

MASTER DRAWINGS 2016 PRESENTED BY

STEPHEN ONGPIN

1 Attributed to CRISTOFORO RONCALLI, called IL POMARANCIO Pomarance 1552-1626 Rome Cupid Black and red chalk. Laid down. Inscribed (by Benjamin West?) Colln of Richardson (the father) / His palette stamp (per Reveley) and Colln of J. Richardson / BW in brown ink on the old backing sheet.

278 x 196 mm. (10 7/ 8 x 7 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Jonathan Richardson Senior, London (Lugt 2183); Probably his sale, London, Christopher Cock, 22 January to 8 February 1747; Possibly Sir Joshua Reynolds, London (according to the 1957 Sotheby’s catalogue); Possibly the posthumous Reynolds sales, London, A. C. de Poggi, 26 May 1794 onwards or London, H. Philips, 5-26 March 1798; Benjamin West, London (according to the Colnaghi catalogue); E. Granger; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 10 April 1957, lot 37 (as Hendrick Goltzius: ‘Goltzius; Cupid, black and red chalk 10 7/8 in. by 7 5/8 in., From the Collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds.’), bt. Colnaghi for £34); P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1957 (as Bronzino); Purchased from them by Regina Slatkin, on 30 May 1957, for £81; Marjorie Bronfman, Montreal; Thence by descent until 2013.

EXHIBITED: London, P. & D. Colnaghi, Exhibition of Old Master Drawings, 1957, no.9 (as Agnolo Bronzino: ‘A carefully finished drawing of very high quality, probably made for presentation, like some of Michelangelo’s’).

Known as Il Pomarancio after his birthplace of Pomarance, near Volterra, Cristoforo Roncalli spent most of his career in Rome. Little is known of his artistic training, and he is first documented working in Siena for about two years between 1576 and 1578. During this period he painted an altarpiece for the Duomo and collaborated on the decoration of a family palazzo, and also received a commission for an altarpiece intended for the church of Santi Apostoli in Florence. Roncalli then settled in Rome, where he is recorded by 1582, and was active there for the remainder of his career. He was associated with a circle of artists working in the city that included his compatriot Niccolò Circignani (confusingly also known as Il Pomarancio), as well as Cesare Nebbia, Paris Nogari and the young Cavaliere d’Arpino. Roncalli received numerous public and private commissions, and was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca in 1588. He earned a reputation as an ecclesiastic mural painter of the first rank, gaining the patronage of such Roman families as the Crescenzi, Mattei and Giustiniani, and working in the churches of Santa Maria in Vallicella, Santa Maria in Aracoeli, San Giovanni Decollato and San Silvestro in Capite in Rome.

Between 1599 and 1604 Roncalli supervised the decoration of the Cappella Clementina in St. Peter’s for Pope Clement VIII, and also worked for the Pope on the decoration of the transept of San Giovanni in Laterano for the Jubilee year of 1600. Around 1607 Roncalli was named a Cavaliere di Cristo by Pope Paul V, shortly after receiving the most significant commission of his career; the fresco decoration of the sacristy and cupola of the Basilica of the Santa Casa at Loreto, on which he worked between 1605 and 1615. (The Loreto frescoes were unfortunately largely destroyed, as a result of water damage, at the end of the 19th century.) On his return to Rome from Loreto, Roncalli spent the last decade of his career working on more modest commissions.

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

Previously attributed to artists as varied as Hendrick Goltzius (1588-1617) and Agnolo Bronzino (15031572), this superb drawing, which also shows something of the influence of the draughtsmanship of Federico Zuccaro (1543-1609), seems closest in style to the early work of Cristoforo Roncalli. Indeed, among stylistically comparable drawings by the artist is his first securely datable sheet; a highly finished study of Apollo in the Uffizi1, drawn in black chalk with touches of red chalk, which can be dated to his time in Siena, between the end of 1576 and his departure for Rome in early 1579. Chandler Kirwin’s comments on Roncalli’s draughtsmanship at this early stage in his career, as exemplified by the Apollo drawing, are also pertinent for the present sheet: ‘in the effortless sculptural modulations of form, in the skillful control of chalks, and in the assured handling of the nude in a convincing space – in all this Roncalli demonstrates that his drawing talents are indeed sophisticated.’2 This large and highly finished drawing cannot be related to any surviving work by Roncalli, and it is quite possible that - given its scale and the presence of a landscape background, as well as its overall unity as a composition - it was intended as an autonomous work of art. Among other drawings by Roncalli that are similar in technique and handling to the present sheet are two drawings in the Uffizi; a study of Christ at the Column3, preparatory for a fresco of c.1586 in Santa Maria in Aracoeli, and a drawing of Lucrezia4.

The facial type of the cupid seen here is akin to the heads of three children on a sheet of studies in red chalk in the Uffizi4, while similar winged putti are also found in several paintings and drawings by the artist, typified by four drawings – two in black chalk and two in red chalk – in the Uffizi5, which are studies for the mosaic pendentives below the cupola of St. Peter’s in Rome, executed around 1600. Similar putti are also found in a highly finished red chalk drawing of a design for an elaborate table fountain, formerly in the collections of Robert Udny and the Earls of Warwick and sold at auction in 19976.

The earliest known owner of this drawing was the English portrait painter, author and connoisseur Jonathan Richardson, Senior (1667-1745), whose distinctive collector’s mark is found at the lower right corner of the sheet. Richardson owned a remarkable collection of nearly five thousand drawings, mainly Italian works of the 16th and 17th centuries, most of which was dispersed at auction in London in 1747. The drawing is thought to have later belonged to the 18th century painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), although it does not bear his distinctive collector’s mark. Reynolds assembled one of the largest collections of paintings, drawings and prints of his day, and his collection of several thousand drawings, for the most part Italian works of the 16th and 17th centuries, was dispersed at two auctions in 1794 and 1798. The present sheet is also thought to have been in the collection of the history painter Benjamin West (1738-1820), although it bears no trace of the drystamp that he used as a collector’s mark. West succeeded Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy and was, like him, an avid collector of drawings.

2 GHERARDO CIBO Genoa or Rome 1512-1600 Rocca Contrada (Arcevia) A Rocky Outcrop with Young Trees Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with touches of white heightening and red wash, on blue paper.

210 x 285 mm. (8 1/4 x 11 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: From the so-called A. Bruce Thompson album of landscape drawings by Gherardo Cibo, with provenance as follows: Possibly Daniel Gardner, London; A. Bruce Thompson; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman’), London, Sotheby’s, 27 April 1960, part of lots 1-12 [possibly lot 8] (all as Italo-Flemish School, XVIth Century); Werner and Helene Muensterberger, New York, in 1969; Richard L. Feigen and Co., New York.

LITERATURE: Jaap Bolten, ‘Messer Ulisse Severino da Cingoli, A Bypath in the History of Art’, Master Drawings, 1969, no.2, p.143, no.117 (not illustrated); Giorgio Mangani and Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, ed., Gherardo Cibo: Dilettante di botanica e pittore di ‘paesi’. Arte, scienza e illustrazione botanica nel XVI secolo, Ancona, 2013, p.203, no.350 (not illustrated).

A page from a sketchbook, this drawing may be included among a large group of landscape studies, each drawn in a distinctive hand and many bearing dates in the second half of the 16th century, which were first assembled by Jaap Bolten in 1969 under the name of ‘Messer Ulisse Severino da Cingoli’; the name inscribed on one of three albums of landscape drawings by this artist in the Biblioteca Comunale in Jesi1. Twenty years later, however, the artist was firmly identified by Arnold Nesselrath as one Gherardo Cibo, an artist of noble Genoese origins who was an accomplished botanist as well as a composer of lute music.

The grandson of Pope Innocent VIII, and also related to the Della Rovere dukes of Urbino, Cibo was born into the Genoese nobility. He studied in Rome and Bologna (the latter probably with the famous botanist Luca Ghini), receiving a fine humanist education, and showed a talent for drawing from an early age. He seems to have briefly studied for the priesthood, later becoming a soldier and diplomat attached to the papal court in Rome. In 1540, aged just twenty-eight, Cibo appears to have retired from his papal duties and settled in the small town of Rocca Contrada (today called Arcevia), in the Apennines.

As Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi has written, ‘In this peaceful haven he passed the remainder of his life, free to concentrate on his botanical and artistic pursuits: the painting of plants, trees and landscapes; the colouring and decoration of the images in important printed botanical texts; short excursions with friends into the neighboring countryside on collecting expeditions; and the preparation of medicaments based on herbs.’2 Cibo dedicated the rest of his life to the study, collection and illustration of the plants and flowers of the Marchigian region, and became one of the foremost botanists of his day. He travelled extensively around the Marches, and corresponded with fellow botanists throughout Italy. A gifted artist, despite his lack of any formal training, he produced a large number of colourful and scientifically accurate botanical illustrations, and it is from the landscape backgrounds in some of these studies that Nesselrath was able to correctly attribute the landscape drawings to the artist. Among the botanical works illustrated by Cibo is an illuminated herbal in the British Library in London, the pages of which depict plants, painted in tempera, set in expansive landscape backgrounds that correspond closely to the artist’s autonomous landscape drawings.

As an amateur landscape draughtsman, Cibo worked mainly in the region of the Marches; in the provinces of Ancona, Pesaro, Macerata and Perugia. As Arnold Nesselrath has noted, ‘Partly because he

was an engaging person, partly because he was intrigued by nature, Gherardo would perhaps never have called himself an artist...In his lively sketchbooks he spontaneously recorded views and landscapes, alternating these with rocks, plants, seeds, or pigment tests.’3 Cibo’s landscape drawings can be divided into two distinct types; views of actual sites in the Marches on the one hand and purely imaginary landscapes on the other. The landscape drawings made on the spot are often inscribed with the location depicted and with astrological symbols to denote specific day of the week. His drawings also show a distinct influence of the Northern landscape tradition; qualities that may be ascribed to the fact that Cibo travelled to France and Germany in the late 1530s and to Flanders in the 1540s. He also seems to have derived a number of motifs in some of his drawings from landscape prints by Netherlandish artists.

While Cibo sent some of his drawings to family members and fellow botanists, most seem to have been done for his own pleasure. That the artist must have assembled his landscape drawings into albums, as he did with his botanical studies, is seen in an extract from a handwritten diary, written from 1553 onwards and now lost: ‘The cavalier Geronimo Ardoino came here to Rocca Contrada...and asked me if he could borrow my large volume of landscapes in pen and ink, which I lent him, having first removed certain sketches on bits of paper that were inside.’4 Having lived most of his life in the relative isolation of Rocca Contrada, happily engaged in botanical studies purely for his own pleasure and enjoyment, Cibo died there in 1600, at the age of eighty-eight.

Around 150 independent landscape drawings by Gherardo Cibo are known today, some bearing dates between 1560 and 1593. Apart from the three albums in Jesi, significant groups of landscape sketches by the artist are in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Szépmüvészeti Müzeum in Budapest, the Uffizi in Florence, the Biblioteca Civica ‘Passionei’ in Fossombrone, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Albertina in Vienna and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Weimar. Smaller groups of drawings by the artist are in the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin, the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden, the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome, and elsewhere. A sketchbook of landscape drawings by Cibo, numbering twenty-two sheets, appeared at auction in London in 1989 and is today in a private collection in France.5 The present sheet, in exceptional condition, was once part of an album of drawings by Gherardo Cibo, all on a deep blue paper, which was sold at auction in London in 1960. Other drawings from the album, now known as the A. Bruce Thompson or San Quirico album, are today in the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Museum in London, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Princeton University Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as well as in several private collections.

Among stylistically comparable drawings on blue paper by Cibo, all from the same album as the present sheet, is a landscape in the Princeton University Art Museum6 and a Hilly Landscape with Ships in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.7 Another drawing from the A. Bruce Thompson album, dated November 1564, shared the same provenance as the present sheet until it was sold at auction in 20158.

As a recent scholar has noted, ‘That Cibo would eventually be regarded as one of the most delightful and original Italian landscapists of the sixteenth century is an unexpected reward for this gentil’ huomo who never received classical training as an artist and who may well have regarded his activities as a landscape draftsman as little more than a pleasurable distraction.’9 The Cibo scholar Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi adds, ‘Profound artistic sensibility, scientific knowledge and technical skill characterise the work of this notable sixteenthcentury artist...Gherardo Cibo could also be considered as the very embodiment of that fascinating Renaissance ideal – the ‘artist-scientist-dilettante’. He was a precocious interpreter of the new and highly successful formula which was to unite the Italian and Flemish pictorial traditions.’10

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

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

PROVENANCE: An unidentified [d’Este or Gonzaga?] armorial collector’s mark with an eagle (possibly the Gonzaga emblem) partially stamped in black ink near the lower left corner; Maria Teresa CyboMalaspina, Duchess of Massa and Crown Princess of Modena, Villa di San Michele, nr. Novellara, in 1770; An unidentified collector’s mark TB (Lugt 416a) [possibly Thomas Blayds, Castle Hill, Englefield Green] stamped in black ink at the lower right; Sir Joshua Reynolds, London (Lugt 2364); By descent to his niece, Mary Palmer, later Marchioness of Thomond; Probably the posthumous Reynolds sales, London, A. C. de Poggi, 26 May 1794 onwards or London, H. Philips, 5-26 March 1798; Probably Lewis Loyd, Lord Overstone, Overstone Park; Probably by descent to his daughter Harriet Loyd, later Lady Wantage; Robert Lindsay, Lord Wantage, and Lady Wantage, Lockinge House, Wantage, Berkshire, until c.1920; By descent to Arthur Thomas Loyd, Lockinge House, Wantage; His posthumous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 28 November 1945, lot 35 (‘LELIO ORSI. Man on horseback with an eagle, pen and ink with wash, 10 in by 9 in. From the Sir Joshua Reynolds Collection.’), bt. Gernsheim for £64; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 10 July 2001, lot 26; Flavia Ormond, London, in 2002; Private collection.

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

‘Lelio Urso in architectura magno, in pictura majori, et in Delineamentis optimo’, reads the epitaph on the tomb of Lelio Orsi, a provincial painter of considerable talent about whom relatively little is known today.

He is not mentioned by Vasari or by any other early sources, and most of his paintings are now lost, save for a few easel pictures and some fresco fragments. The son of a minor painter, Orsi is first recorded in 1536 in Reggio Emilia, where he worked on the design of a triumphal arch to celebrate the entry of Ercole d’Este into the city. He continued to work extensively in Reggio Emilia, decorating the façade of the Torre dell’ Orologio there in 1544. By 1546 Orsi was working for the Gonzaga of Novellara, a minor branch of the Mantuan family, who remained his most important patrons throughout his career.

While he may have made a first visit to Rome some time in the late 1540s, he was definitively in the city from 1554 to 1555, and it was here that the influence of Michelangelo was added to the dominant early influence of Correggio, effecting a profound change in Orsi’s style. Throughout the 1560s he continued to work for the Gonzaga of Novellara, decorating their villa at Bagnolo and providing frescoes for the villas of the Casino di Sotto and the Casino di Sopra, as well as the Rocca di Novellara.

Unfortunately, very little survives of any of these large-scale decorative projects. In 1563 Alfonso Gonzaga decreed that all the houses in Novellara should be decorated with facade frescoes, and Orsi was given the responsibility of designing and executing several of these, including for his own home. Several drawings by Orsi for such facade and wall decorations are known, although for the most part the frescoes themselves do not. As only fragments of his mural paintings survive, Orsi’s style as a painter is best seen

in a small number of cabinet pictures of mythological and religious subjects that he produced; works which show the continued influence of Michelangelo, Correggio and the studio of Raphael. Little is known of Orsi’s activity in the last fifteen years of his career, which are thought to have been spent working in Reggio Emilia before his death in Novellara at the age of seventy-six.

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

This highly finished drawing is a splendid example of Orsi’s fine technique as a draughtsman, typical both in the manner in which the highlights are applied and the distinctive facial types. The drawing is almost certainly a study for a lost fresco which once decorated the facade of a house in Novellara that belonged to the Gentili family in the 17th century, and which was destroyed towards the end of the 18th century1.

The fresco was described in an anonymous account of Lelio Orsi’s paintings in Novellara, written around the middle of the 17th century, as depicting Ganymede on a horse; an unusual and quite innovative treatment of the subject: ‘Above another house of the Gentili family, he painted a Ganymede on horseback, that is still preserved there, and is esteemed by all those who see it.’2 The 19th century Novellara historian Vincenzo Davolio also mentions the lost fresco: ‘and we have seen, destroyed not many years ago, the last remnants of some shields depicting naval battles, the war of the Giants, a Ganymede on horseback, painted by Lelio on the facade of the old Gentili house.’3 A number of drawings by Orsi of the subject of Ganymede are recorded in old inventories, and these may relate either to the lost Gentili facade fresco, which showed Ganymede on a horse, or to the octagonal ceiling fresco of the Rape of Ganymede, formerly in a room of the Rocca di Novellara and now in the Galleria Estense in Modena4, in which the subject is treated more conventionally.

The present sheet is first recorded - valued at 2 zecchini - in a 1770 inventory of drawings for sale from the Casino di Sotto, part of the Villa di San Michele, near Novellara5; the property of Maria Teresa CyboMalaspina (1725-1790), Duchess of Massa, Princess of Carrara and Crown Princess of Modena. In his biography of Lelio Orsi, published in 1892, Celestino Malagoli notes what must be the present sheet among the numerous drawings by the artist formerly in the Gonzaga collections in Novellara: ‘In the Gallery of the Gonzaga Princes there were...One hundred drawings in one hundred sheets of carta reale, partly in watercolour, partly in black chalk, and partly in pen, ornamented with carved and gilded frames, and partly in [frames of] ebony with crystal...One can admire in these drawings...Ganymede on a horse abducted by the eagle, in watercolour...’6 A very similar rearing horse is found in a large pen and ink drawing by Orsi of The Conversion of Saint Paul in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford7, which was inspired by Michelangelo’s fresco of the subject in the Cappella Paolina in the Vatican. Other, similarly sturdy horses are found throughout Orsi’s oeuvre, such as in a painting of Saint George and the Dragon in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples8, as well as in such drawings by Orsi as Apollo on his Chariot at Windsor9, The Rape of the Sabine Women in the Courtauld Institute Galleries in London10, The Conversion of Saint Paul in the Louvre11 and A Battle Between Men and Lions in a private collection12.

A very free copy of the present sheet by the English artist William Lock (1767-1847), dated 1808, was recently sold at auction in London13.

4 ANDREA BOSCOLI Florence c.1560-1608 Florence Sacra Conversazione with Saints Jerome, Romuald and other Hermit Saints, after Girolamo Muziano Pen and brown ink and brown wash. Laid down on a 17th century (Resta) mount. A very faint study or offset of a composition with the Virgin(?) with figures and putti in black chalk on the on the reverse of the mount. Inscribed Muziano in S. Pietro in brown ink at the lower left. Inscribed (by Resta) Andrea Boscoli da MUTIANO in S. Pietro ridotto à suo stile. in brown ink in the lower margin. Part of an inscription in brown ink cut off at the bottom of the mount. Further inscribed S. Maria degli Angeli a Roma in pencil on the reverse of the old mount.

267 x 175 mm. (10 1/ 2 x 6 7/ 8 in.) [sheet] 292 x 203 mm. (11 1/ 2 x 8 in.) [including mount] PROVENANCE: Padre Sebastiano Resta, Rome (Lugt 2992 and 2992a), with his inscriptions on the mount; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 8 December 1972, lot 32 (bt. J. V. Woollan); Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 8 December 1976, lot 2; Private collection, New York.

LITERATURE: Julian Brooks, The Drawings of Andrea Boscoli (c.1560-1608), unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Oxford, 1999, Vol.I, p.199 and p.355.

A pupil of Santi di Tito in Florence, Andrea Boscoli was admitted into the Accademia del Disegno there in 1584. He visited Rome in the early 1580s and between 1582 and 1600 worked mainly in Florence, with brief stays in Siena and Pisa. His earliest known painting is the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, painted in 1587 for the Florentine church of San Pier Maggiore. In 1592 he completed a fresco cycle for the Villa di Corliano at San Giuliano Terme, near Pisa, and the following year painted an altarpiece of The Annunciation for the Chiesa del Carmine in Pisa. In 1597 Boscoli painted a Visitation for the Florentine church of Sant’ Ambrogio, followed two years later by a Crucifixion for Santi Apostoli, now lost, and an altarpiece of The Preaching of Saint John the Baptist in the church of San Giovanni Battista in Rimini, signed and dated 1599. Between 1600 and 1605 Boscoli worked mainly in the Marches, painting frescoes and altarpieces for patrons and churches in Fano, Fabriano, Macerata, Fermo and elsewhere, while the last years of his career were spent between Florence and Rome.

Relatively few paintings by Boscoli survive today, and it is as a draughtsman that he is best known. His drawings were highly praised by his biographer Filippo Baldinucci (who wrote of Boscoli that ‘he drew so well...without lacking a boldness and an extraordinarily skillful touch’1) and were avidly collected, notably

by Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici. Some six hundred drawings by Boscoli are known, with significant groups in the Uffizi in Florence, the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome and the Louvre in Paris.

A large number of Andrea Boscoli’s surviving drawings, amounting to almost a third of the total, are copies after the work of other artists; indeed, more drawings of this type by him survive than by any other draughtsman of the period. Like his older contemporary Federico Zuccaro, Boscoli made numerous drawn copies after paintings and frescoes by earlier artists – including Filippino Lippi, Masaccio, Benozzo Gozzoli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giulio Romano, Polidoro, Titian, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto and Baccio Bandinelli – as well as after antique sculpture and the works of Albrecht Dürer. Also in common with Zuccaro, Boscoli travelled extensively to make his copy drawings, visiting Venice, Parma, Modena and Bologna; these study trips were a means of seeing important works by other artists and learning from them. He also copied the work of a number of contemporary Florentine painters, including his teacher Santi di Tito, as well as Jacopo da Pontormo, Ludovico Cigoli, Domenico Passignano and Bernardino Poccetti. Always drawn in his own distinctive style, Boscoli’s copies are usually quite free in their interpretation of the original figure or composition. Furthermore, as Julian Brooks has pointed out,

Boscoli ‘did not simply copy when he was young in order to learn and practise draughtsmanship, but he also made drawn copies late in his life, when he was an accomplished and well-paid artist.’2 This drawing may be dated to Boscoli’s final stay in Rome, between 1606 and 1608. It is a copy after an altarpiece (fig.1) by Girolamo Muziano (1532-1592), painted for St. Peter’s in Rome. Commissioned from Muziano in 1582, the large canvas depicting six hermit saints was left unfinished at the artist’s death ten years later, and was eventually completed by Cesare Nebbia (c.1536-c.1622). The painting was later transferred to the Roman church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where it remains today3.

The present sheet is a fine and typical example of Andrea Boscoli’s draughtsmanship near the end of his career. As Brooks has noted, ‘A distinctive style is apparent in Boscoli’s late copies...Typically they are of a relatively small scale, and are drawn in a broad dark brown wash over a few ink lines, sometimes over red chalk underdrawing; they reduce the composition to a pattern of light and shade, and introduce a dramatic chiaroscuro where there was often none before.’4 Another, somewhat weaker version of this composition

by Boscoli, which appears to have been reworked by another hand, is in the Uffizi in Florence5.

Among a number of stylistically comparable drawings by Boscoli of this late Roman period are three other copies after late 16th century paintings in churches in Rome. A drawing in the Uffizi6 is a copy after an altarpiece by Cigoli of Saint Peter Raising the Leper of 1604-1605 in the basilica of St. Peter’s, while a drawing in the collection of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest7 is a free copy of an Adoration of the Shepherds by Andrea Lilio in Santa Maria Maggiore. A drawing in a private collection in Stockholm8 finds Boscoli copying Federico Zuccaro’s The Way to Calvary in the Roman church of Santa Prassede.

The inscription on the mount of this drawing is in the distinctive hand of the Oratorian priest Padre Sebastiano Resta (1635-1714). One of the leading collectors of drawings in Italy in the 17th century, Resta assembled a large group of some 3,500 sheets, gathered into about thirty albums. The 18th century English architect and antiquary John Talman saw some of the Resta albums in Italy in 1709, and described them in a letter to a colleague in England: ‘I have lately seen a collection of Drawings, without doubt, the finest in Europe, for the method and number of rare designs...They were at first collected by the famous Father Resta, a Milanese, of the oratory of Philippo Neri at Rome; a person so well known in Rome, and all over Italy, for his skill in drawings, that it would be needless to say any more of him, than that these collections were made by him, and that through the whole work, he has an abundance of observations (gathered by the application and experience of fifty years), no where else to be seen; every book filled being with Notes on each drawing...’9

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5 JACOB ADRIAENSZ. BACKER Harlingen 1608-1651 Amsterdam A Young Boy in a Plumed Cap Black chalk, with traces of red chalk, and framing lines in brown ink. Signed Backer. in brown ink at the lower right.

168 x 182 mm. (6 5/ 8 x 7 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably by descent to the artists’s brother, Tjerk Adriaensz. Backer, Amsterdam1; Iohan Quirijn van Regteren Altena, Amsterdam (his posthumous sale stamp [Lugt 4617] on the backing sheet); Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Werner Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, Vol.I, New York, 1979, pp.20-21, no.3 (where dated to the mid-1630s), and also pp.46-47, under nos.16x and 17x, p.52, under no.19x and p.54, under no.20x; Werner Sumowksi, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, Landau/Pfalz, 1983, Vol.I, p.203, under no.72; Peter van den Brink, ‘Uitmuntend Schilder in het Groot: De schilder en tekenaar Jacob Adriansz. Backer’, in Peter van den Brink and Jaap van der Veen, Jacob Backer (1608/9-1651), exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam and Aachen, 2008-2009, p.77, fig.89.

Among the most successful portrait painters working in Amsterdam in the 1630s and 1640s, Jacob Backer studied in Leeuwarden with Lambert Jacobsz., where among his fellow pupils was Govert Flinck.

In 1632 he settled in Amsterdam, and his earliest painting is dated to that year. It was in Amsterdam that he came under the influence of Rembrandt, although he may never have actually studied with him.

Backer’s oeuvre as a painter includes allegorical and mythological scenes, portraits and group portraits, and religious subjects. Paintings of children were also a particular speciality of his studio. Around eighty drawings by Backer have survived to this day, most of which are studies in black and white chalk of single figures, both nude and clothed, drawn on blue paper. Relatively few of his drawings are dated or datable, however. That Backer’s drawings remained popular with collectors long after his death is noted in his biography by the late 17th century writer Arnold Houbraken: ‘I had almost forgotten to mention (and this would have damaged his fame by omission) his excellent manner of drawing...One can almost see from the zeal of paper art lovers when his drawings come up for sale just what regard they have for them.’2 This drawing is a preparatory study for the pointing child at the left of Backer’s Family Portrait with Christ Blessing the Children (fig.1), a large painting datable to c.1633-16343. It is drawn with a vivacity and a freedom in the application of the chalk that is stylistically indebted to Rembrandt’s drawings of the same period4. While drawings in black chalk alone are rare in Backer’s oeuvre, the present sheet may be compared a signed and dated Self-Portrait in black chalk of 1638, in the Albertina in Vienna5, as well as a study of A Man in a Turban in the Boijmans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam6.

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6 FERDINAND BOL Dordrecht 1616-1680 Amsterdam The Departure of the Young Tobias Pen and brown ink and brown wash. Framing lines in brown ink. Inscribed l b f in red chalk on the verso.

200 x 303 mm. (7 7/ 8 x 11 7/ 8 in.)

Watermark: Eagle?

PROVENANCE: With Edward Speelman, London; Wilhelm R. Valentiner, Detroit and Raleigh, North Carolina1; Bequeathed by him to the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, in 1963 (Inv. G.65.10.8); Their sale (‘Property of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Sold to Benefit the Acquisitions Fund’), New York, Sotheby’s, 27 January 1999, lot 69; Spink-Leger, London; Eric Martin Wunsch, New York.

LITERATURE: ‘Old Master Drawings’, Wadsworth Atheneum Bulletin, November 1950, p.2; W. R. Valentiner, ‘Notes on Old and Modern Drawings: Drawings by Bol’, The Art Quarterly, 1957, pp.59, illustrated p.62, fig.17; ‘Accessions of American and Canadian Museums January – March 1963’, The Art Quarterly, Summer 1963, p.275, illustrated p.258; North Carolina Museum of Art Bulletin. Biennial Report Issue, 1963-1965, p.80, illustrated p.56, fig.15; Charlotte Vestal Brown, A Catalogue of Drawings and Watercolors: North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Raleigh, 1969, p.6, no.9; Thérèse [Teréz] Gerszi , ‘Études sur les dessins des élèves de Rembrandt’, Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts, 1971, pp.104 and 106; Gianni Carlo Sciolla, ‘Disegni rembrandtiani a Torino’, Critica d’Arte, NovemberDecember 1972, p.64; Wolfgang Wegner, Kataloge der Staatlichen Graphischen Sammlung München: Die Niederländischen Handzeichnungen des 15.-18. Jahrhunderts, Munich, 1973, Vol.I, p.178, under no.1217; D.M. Tsurutani, The Etchings of Ferdinand Bol, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Oberlin College, 1974, p.3; Hanne Weskott, Die Darstellung der Tobiasgeschichte in der bildenden Kunst West-Europas, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Berlin, 1974, p.103; Werner Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, Vol.I, New York, 1979, pp.554-555, no.265x (where dated to the second half of the 1640s), also p.524, under no.250x and pp.558-560, under nos.267x and 268x.

EXHIBITED: Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum, Old Master Drawings, 1950-1951 [on loan]; Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art, Rembrandt and his Pupils, 1956, no.9 (as The Departure of the Prodigal Son, lent by Valentiner).

Ferdinand Bol was trained in his native Dordrecht, probably in the studio of Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp, before moving to Amsterdam around 1536 and entering the workshop of Rembrandt. He remained in the Rembrandt studio until 1640, when he began working as an independent painter; it is from this year that his first dated painting is known. Like his master, Bol painted Biblical, mythological and allegorical subjects, as well as undertaking portrait commissions, and his style remained close to that of Rembrandt throughout the 1640s. He became a citizen of Amsterdam in 1652, at the same time as Govert Flinck.

The 1650s and 1660s found the artist engaged on a number of significant commissions for public works, such as the decoration of the Amsterdam City Hall and the Admiralty, as well as painting large group portraits of members of various guilds. Following his second marriage to a wealthy widow in 1669, however, Bol seems to have largely given up painting. Slightly less than two hundred paintings by the artist are known, as well as a handful of etchings.

As a draughtsman, Bol was both gifted and prolific, with a manner at times so close to Rembrandt, particularly in the 1630s and early 1640s, that the drawings of the two artists have long been confused.

(As Wilhelm Valentiner has written, Bol ‘is perhaps the most brilliant of all the followers of the master...He

was also an excellent and fertile draughtsman, and here also the dividing line between his works and Rembrandt’s originals is a difficult problem.’2) Both artists often treated the same subjects in their drawings, and Bol was not averse to taking a compositional idea or motif of Rembrandt’s and making significant changes to create a wholly new image of his own. As Valentiner also noted of Bol, ‘He is one of the finest draughtsmen among the Rembrandt pupils. This applies, however, only to the time when he was with the master or worked under his influence. His style in drawing changed in later years; the clarity of the pen lines disappears and an over-all soft sepia wash takes its place...The forties are the most successful period of Bol in his Rembrandtesque epoch.’3 Ferdinand Bol’s oeuvre as a draughtsman includes composition studies for paintings and etchings, studies for portraits, figure studies, and the occasional landscape. In 1979, Werner Sumoswki was the first scholar to assemble a coherent group of about thirty-five drawings that could be securely attributed to Bol, to which another forty-odd drawings may be added, by virtue of their close stylistic relationship to the works of this core group.

Sumowksi dated the present sheet to the second half of the 1640s, and compared it stylistically with Bol’s drawings of Abraham Bowing Before the Lord and an Angel in the Victoria and Albert Museum4 and Abraham and the Angels in the Boijmans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam5. As Felice Staempfle has noted of Ferdinand Bol’s drawings, the composition of his history subjects often ‘adheres to a formula...with bold, highly abstract forms on the outer edges of the sheet, often drawn in reed pen, and more carefully rendered and detailed figures at the center, executed with a thinner pen.’6 Bol treated episodes from the book of Tobit in a handful of finished compositional drawings, of which this is one of the finest.

In his seminal 1957 study of the drawings of Fedinand Bol, Valentiner compared the present sheet in particular with a drawing of The Departure of the Prodigal Son, formerly in the Julius Weitzner collection in New York7. As Valentiner pointed out, with reference to both the present sheet and the Weitzner drawing, ‘The young Tobias can be compared in pose to the prodigal son, while the expression of the woman comes as near to Rembrandt as only Bol could achieve. Characteristic of him are the angel and the two women in the doorway; the background with the restless curves in the left corner and the many divergent hatchings to the right and also the baroque forms of the building itself, with the shadows washed in bistre, recall the treatment of the drawing of The Prodigal Son. Both drawings belong to the best we know of Bol.’8

7 GOVERT FLINCK Kleve 1615-1660 Amsterdam Portrait of a Painter, possibly a Self-Portrait Pen and brown ink, with brown ink framing lines. A (Biblical?) scene, with three or four figures, faintly sketched in black chalk on the verso.

166 x 136 mm. (6 1/ 2 x 5 in.)

PROVENANCE: Vicomte Bernard d’Hendecourt, Paris; His sale (‘The Very Choice and Valuable Collections of the Vicomte Bernard d’Hendecourt’), London, Sotheby’s, 8-10 May 1929, lot 248 (as School of Rembrandt), bt. Beets for £20; Iohan Quirijn van Regteren Altena, Amsterdam (his posthumous sale stamp [Lugt 4617] on the verso), by 1933; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Frits Lugt, Musée du Louvre: Inventaire général des dessins des écoles du Nord. École Hollandaise, Vol.III; Rembrandt, ses élèves, ses imitateurs, ses copistes, Paris, 1933, p.60, under no.1314 (as a self-portrait); H. van Hall, Portretten van Nederlandse beeldende kunstenaars: Portraits of Dutch painters and other artists of the Low Countries. Specimen of an Iconography, Amsterdam, 1963, p.100, Flinck no.14 (as a self-portrait); Joachim Wolfgang von Moltke, Govaert Flinck 1615-1660, Amsterdam, 1965, p.201, no.D147 (where dated to the second half of the 1650s); Werner Sumowski, ‘Eine frühe Federzeichnung von Govaert Flinck’, Pantheon, October 1967, p.340, notes 2 and 8; Jeroen Giltaij, Le cabinet d’un amateur: Dessins flamands et hollandais des XVIe et XVIIe siècles d’une collection privée d’Amsterdam, exhibition catalogue, Rotterdam and elsewhere, 1976-1977, pp.30-31, no.51, illustrated pl.77 (as a self-portrait); Werner Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, Vol.IV, New York, 1981, pp.2116-2117, no.966x (where dated c.1655), also p.2076, under no.948bx, p.2114, under no.965x and p.2122, under no.969x; Thomas Döring, Aus Rembrandts Kreis: Die Zeichnungen des Braunschweiger Kupferstichkabinetts, exhibition catalogue, Braunschweig, 2006, p.54, under no.15.

EXHIBITED: Leiden, Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal, Rembrandt als Leermeester, 1956, no.127; Cleves, Städtisches Museum Haus Koekkoek, Govert Flinck, der Kleefsche Apelles 1616-1660, 1965, no.62; Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Paris, Institut Néerlandais and Brussels, Bibliothèque Albert Ier, Le cabinet d’un amateur: Dessins flamands et hollandais des XVIe et XVIIe siècles d’une collection privée d’Amsterdam, 1976-1977, no.51.

Govert (or Govaert) Flinck was a pupil of the Mennonite preacher and artist Lambert Jacobsz in Leeuwarden, alongside Jacob Backer, who was a few years older. The two young artists then travelled together to Amsterdam, where Flinck worked in the workshop of the art dealer Hendrick Uylenburgh.

It was probably there that he met Rembrandt, who also worked for Uylenburgh. Flinck spent about a year in Rembrandt’s studio, probably between 1635 and 1636, working alongside artists such as Ferdinand Bol, before becoming an independent master. While his paintings of the mid-1630s and early 1640s are much indebted to Rembrandt’s manner (indeed, several of his portraits were once attributed to the master), by the later 1640s he had begun to paint in a lighter, more classical and courtly style and had secured a reputation as one of the foremost portrait and history painters in Amsterdam. Flinck received a number of important public commissions in the 1640s, and also was much in demand as a portrait painter. By the end of the 1650s he was enjoying a reputation as arguably the leading society painter in Amsterdam, culminating in a commission for twelve history paintings to decorate the Amsterdam Town Hall. His sudden death in 1660, at the age of just forty-five, came at the very height of his highly successful and lucrative career.

As a draughtsman, Govert Flinck produced around 120 drawings; mainly individual life studies of both nude and clothed male or female figures, drawn in black and white chalk on blue paper, as well as landscapes, Biblical scenes and portraits. While most of Flinck’s extant drawings are in black chalk (and,

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occasionally, red chalk), drawings in pen and ink – both with and without wash – are relatively few in number. Almost all of Flinck’s surviving drawings can be dated to the years following his apprenticeship with Rembrandt, in the 1640s and 1650s. His earliest signed and dated drawing – a standing man in Eastern costume, drawn in 1638 – is in fact his only known dated drawing from the decade of the 1630s.

Only a handful of portrait drawings by Flinck are known. Drawn with a quick and spontaneous pen line, the present sheet may be dated to the second half of the 1650s, and shows the influence on the artist of the pen drawings of Rembrandt. Among stylistically comparable pen and ink drawings by Flinck is a half-length study of an archer (fig.1), in the collection of the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig1 and a drawing of a Woman Seated at a Table in the Louvre2. In his magisterial corpus of Flinck’s drawings, Werner Sumowksi further likens the present sheet to a signed and dated drawing of a Scholar in his Study of 1656, in the Heyblocq album amicorum in the collection of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague3, as well as to pen and ink drawings by Flinck of an Old Man Seated in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne4, a Standing Young Man with a Hat in the Louvre5 and a Young Man with a Staff in the Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo6.

The painter in this drawing is shown holding a mahlstick, paintbrush and palette, with what seems to be another palette hanging on the wall behind him. The attitude of the sitter, who looks directly at the viewer, gives the drawing the manner of a self-portrait, and indeed there is a certain physiognomical resemblance with Flinck’s self-portrait in the left background of his large canvas of The Civil Guard of Amsterdam Celebrating the Peace of Westphalia, painted in 1648 and today in the Amsterdam Museum in Amsterdam7. Similarities may also be noted with an oval portrait of Govert Flinck by Gerard Pietersz. van Zijl, which was engraved by Abraham Blooteling (fig.2)8. Although the identification of the sitter as Flinck himself was accepted by Frits Lugt, H. van Hall and Jeroen Giltaij, Werner Sumowski does not believe the present sheet is a self-portrait.

The very faint sketch in black chalk on the verso of the present sheet shows what appears to be a Biblical scene, which Sumowksi has suggested may represent Joseph’s Bloodstained Cloak Shown to Jacob or Potiphar’s Wife Accusing Joseph. If it is the former, then it may possibly be related to both a drawing of this subject, in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier9, and a painting, dated 1655, which is today in the Sinebrychoff Art Museum of the Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki10.

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

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

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

LITERATURE: Francesco Petrucci, Pier Francesco Mola (1612-1666): Matiera e colore nella pittura del ‘600, Rome, 2012, p.283, fig.B16.1.

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

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

A particularly fine and fresh example of Pier Francesco Mola’s spirited draughtsmanship in chalk, the present sheet may be an early preparatory study for a painting of this subject by the artist, though

different in composition, which was formerly in the collection of the 18th century French connoisseur Jean de Jullienne and was recently on the art market3. Datable to c.1640, the painting (fig.1) shows Erminia, wearing a similar robe as in this drawing, standing and writing Tancred’s name on a tree, but the composition is reversed from the drawing, and shows her facing to the left.

The lengthy inscription on the back of the mount of the present sheet refers to another, later painting of Erminia Writing the Name of Tancred on a Tree (fig.2), datable to the late 1650s, which was acquired

by King Louis XIV in 1685 and is now in the Louvre4. The Louvre painting is, however, quiute different in composition, with Erminia seated on the ground.

The subject of this drawing is taken from Canto VII of the 16th century writer Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata. Erminia, a Saracen princess of Antioch, has fallen in love with the Christian knight Tancred. Jealous of Tancred’s love for the warrior-maiden Clorinda, one night Erminia steals Clorinda’s armour and leaves the besieged city to find Tancred among the Christian army. Mistaken for Clorinda by some Christian soldiers and almost killed, Erminia flees into the forest, where she is rescued by a family of shepherds by the river Jordan. Disguised as a shepherdess, she carves the name of her beloved on a tree trunk. In the words of a 19th century English translation of Tasso’s poem: ‘Oft when her flocks from summer’s noontime rays / lay in cool shades o’erarched by gadding vines, / she carved on beeches and immortal bays / her Tancred’s name, and left the mossy pines / with sad inscriptions flourished, silent signs / of the unhappy flame her fancy fed; / and when again she saw her own fond lines, / as she the melancholy fragments read, / Fresh tears of grief unchecked her lovely eyes would shed.’5 The subject of Tancred and Erminia seems to have appealed to Mola, as a number of drawings of scenes from this story are found in his oeuvre, of which the present sheet is arguably one of the most beautiful.

This drawing also highlights Mola’s abilities as a landscape draughtsman.

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9 Attributed to CARL ANDREAS RUTHART Danzig c.1630-after 1703 L’Aquila A Lion, after Rubens Watercolour and gouache. Inscribed (by Arthur Feldmann) Karl Andreas Ruthart / Aufgescheuchte Lowen in pencil on the verso.

127 x 197 mm. (5 x 7 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Dr. Arthur Feldmann, Pisárky, Brno1; Looted by the Gestapo on 15 March 1939; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Collector’), London, Sotheby’s, 16 October 1946, part of lot 55 (bt.

Colnaghi for Witt for £14); Sir Robert Witt, London (Lugt 2228b), his mark stamped on the verso; Bequeathed by him to the Courtauld Institute of Art, London in 19522; Restituted to the heirs of Arthur Feldmann in 2007.

LITERATURE: London, Courtauld Institute of Art, Hand-list of the Drawings in the Witt Collection, 1956, p.155, no.3852 (as Ruthart).

Carl Borromäus Andreas Ruthart was largely self-taught as an artist, and established a reputation as a painter of wild animals and hunting scenes. Admitted to the painter’s guild in Antwerp in 1664, later that year he is documented in Regensburg. Between 1665 and 1667 Ruthart was in Vienna, working for Prince Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein. In 1672 he became a monk of the Celestine order at the monastery of Sant’ Eusebio in Rome, later transferring to Santa Maria di Collemaggio in L’Aquila, northeast of Rome, where he seems to have lived and worked for the rest of his life. He is still documented there in 1703, and is assumed to have died not long afterwards. Although best known and most successful as a painter of wild animals, Ruthart also painted a handful of religious works for the churches with which he was associated, including two altarpieces for Sant’ Eusebio and fourteen scenes from the life of the founder of the Celestine order for the church at L’Aquila. Highly esteemed in his lifetime, Ruthart’s animal paintings were found in several important European collections, including those of the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Field Marshal von der Schulenberg and Count Bruhl, as well as in the Liechtenstein, Harrach, Czernin and Esterhazy collections.

The traditional attribution of this drawing to Ruthart would seem to be worth considering in light of the artist’s penchant for leaping animals in his paintings. The lion is based, in reverse, on part of an etching of two young lions at play by Abraham Blooteling after Peter Paul Rubens3. Blooteling’s print (fig.1) is one of a set of four etchings of lions, each after designs by Rubens, published as Variae Leonum Icones in the second half of the 17th century. The draughtsman may have been derived his composition from Blooteling’s print, or a contemporary, reversed copy of it. The same lion was also used by Frans Snyders in a painting of Two Lions Pursuing a Roebuck of c.1620-1625, in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich4, and for a painting of The Lion and the Mouse of about the same date, at Chequers in Buckinghamshire5.

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10 ALLAERT VAN EVERDINGEN Alkmaar 1621-1675 Amsterdam A Wooded Landscape, with a Traveller on a Path at the Right and a Church and City in the Distance Brush and black ink and grey wash, with touches of white heightening, on grey-blue paper faded to brown, with framing lines in brown ink. Signed with initials AVE in brown ink at the lower right. Inscribed Allert van Everdingen / Landschaft in pencil and Everdingen in black ink on the verso.

96 x 217 mm. (3 3/4 x 8 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Johann Andreas Boerner, Nuremberg (Lugt 269), by 1841, with his signature and inscription J. A. Boerner / 1841 / DVO.dua in black ink on the verso1; His posthumous sale, Leipzig, Rudolph Weigel, 22 January 1863 onwards, lot 1154; Prof. Dr. F. Heimsöth, Bonn; His posthumous sale, Frankfurt, F. A. C. Prestel, 5 May 1879, lot 56, bt. Sträter for 15 Marks; August Sträter, Aachen (Lugt 787), his collector’s mark on the verso; His posthumous sale, Stuttgart, H. G. Gutekunst, 10-14 May 1898, lot 1116, bt. Meder for 42 Marks; Rudolf Philip Goldschmidt, Frankfurt and Berlin (Lugt 2926), his collector’s mark on the verso; His posthumous sale, Frankfurt, F. A. C. Prestel, 4-5 October 1917, lot 196, bt. Levy; Dr. Arthur Feldmann, Pisárky, Brno; Confiscated by the Gestapo in 1939, during the Nazi occupation of Moravia; Acquired in 1956 by the National Gallery, Prague (Inv. DK 4588), with their stamp NGGS / PRAHA (not in Lugt) stamped in blue ink on the verso; Restituted to the heirs of Arthur Feldmann in 2013.

LITERATURE: Anna Rollová, Nizozemské kresby, 16. a 17. století (Dutch Drawings, 16th and 17th Centuries), exhibition catalogue, Prague, 1993-1994, p.35, no.33, illustrated p.55; Alice I. Davies, The Drawings of Allart van Everdingen: A Complete Catalogue, Including the Studies for Reynard the Fox, Doornspijk, 2007, pp.239-239, no.185.

EXHIBITED: Prague, National Gallery, Dutch Drawings, 16th and 17th Centuries, 1993-1994, p.35, no.33.

Allaert van Everdingen was a pupil of Roelandt Savery in Utrecht and Pieter Molijn in Haarlem, where he entered the guild as an independent master in 1645. Very little is known of his life, apart from a trip to Norway and Sweden around 1644 that was to be of considerable influence on his work. His itinerary on this trip, which can be vaguely reconstructed from inscriptions on the handful of actual topographical drawings that survive, seems to have taken him along the south coast of Norway and in the area of Gothenburg and the Bothusland province of western Sweden. Although it has occasionally been suggested that Everdingen made a second trip to Scandinavia in around 1660, there is no evidence for this. Nevertheless, the artist continued to be inspired by the rugged, mountainous Nordic scenery long after his return to Haarlem. He produced a large number of landscape drawings of such scenes from memory, replete with pine forests, rustic wooden huts and waterfalls; these were to be a particular influence on the work of his younger contemporary, Jacob van Ruisdael.

Everdingen was a prolific draughtsman, and some six hundred and fifty landscape drawings by him survive. A very large number of his drawings – for the most part executed in either watercolour or in pen and brown or grey wash – were signed with the artist’s monogram and were in all likelihood intended for sale as works of art in their own right. The subjects of his drawings included river and coastal scenes, topographical views, villages and farms, as well as numerous Scandinavian scenes.

Everdingen also produced a large number of landscape etchings, many of which were also inspired by his travels in Norway and Sweden. Only one extant drawing by Everdingen is dated, however, and a precise chronology of his draughtsmanship is difficult to establish.

The present sheet belongs with a group of autonomous landscape drawings in grey ink and wash by Everdingen, of which Alice Davies lists 96 examples in her catalogue raisonné of the artist’s drawings.

actual size

11 HERMAN SAFTLEVEN Rotterdam 1609-1685 Utrecht A Sticky Nightshade or Litchi Tomato Plant (Solanum sisymbriifolium) Watercolour, gouache and gum arabic, with framing lines in black chalk. Signed with monogram and dated HS. f. 1683 den 31 octob: in brown ink at the lower centre. Inscribed (by Agneta Block) Solanum pomiferum fruitescens Africanum / spinosium, nigricans boraginis flore / foliis profunde laciniate in brown ink on the verso.

354 x 256 mm. (13 7/ 8 x 10 1/ 8 in.)

Watermark: Fragmentary Strasburg lily with the letters VR. PROVENANCE: Commissioned from the artist by Agnes Block, ‘Vijverhof’, Loenen aan de Vecht, near Amsterdam; Possibly Samuel van Huls, The Hague1; Possibly his posthumous sale, Amsterdam, Yver, 14 May 1736, part of lot 3882 (‘2 Grands Livres contenant 7 Titres & 252 Pièces en miniature; représentant des fleurs & plantes étrangères & autres, cultivées par Agnes Block à Vijverhoff, & peintes d’après nature par plusieurs maîtres fort renommés; comme Withorst, Withoos, Herm: Saftleven, Herold & autres.’); Possibly Valerius Röver, Delft2; Possibly his widow, Cornelia Röver-van der Dussen, Delft; Possibly purchased in January 1761 with the rest of the Röver collection by Hendrik de Leth, Amsterdam; Ignatius Franciscus Ellinckhuysen, Rotterdam; Sale, Amsterdam, Frederik Müller & Cie., 16 April 1879, lot 234; Charles M. Dozy, Leiden; His posthumous sale, Amsterdam, R. W. P. de Vries, 6-7 May 1902, lot 176 (‘Branche de fleurs. Annoté par l’artiste: “Solanum pomiferum frutescens africanum...” – Signé du monogramme et daté: del 31 Oct. 1683’); Iohan Quirijn van Regteren Altena, Amsterdam (his posthumous sale stamp [Lugt 4617] stamped on the verso); Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Anna G. Bienfait, Oude Hollandsche tuinen, The Hague, 1943, Vol.I, p.176, note 1; Laurens J. Bol, Bekoring van het kleine, exhibition catalogue, Dordrecht, 1959-1960, p.36, no.72, illustrated pl.12; Wolfgang Schulz, ‘Blumenzeichnungen von Herman Saftleven d. J.’ Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 1977, p.153, no.22, fig.17; Wolfgang Schulz, Herman Saftleven 1609-1685: Leben und Werke, Berlin and New York, 1982, p.487, no.1442, illustrated pl.236.

EXHIBITED: Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum, Bekoring van het kleine, 1959-1960, no.72.

Herman Saftleven was the younger brother of Cornelis Saftleven and studied with him, probably under their father, in Rotterdam. Although the two brothers briefly worked together in the 1630s, the younger Saftleven made his career in Utrecht, where he settled in 1639, becoming a citizen of the city twenty years later. Active mainly as a landscape painter, Saftleven painted a variety of Italianate landscapes, Rhineland scenes and imaginary river views, as well as wooded and mountain vistas and farmhouse genre scenes. A prolific artist, Herman Saftleven produced around three hundred paintings and some 1,200 drawings, mostly finished landscapes, as well as around forty etchings. Many of his drawings are finished, large-scale works produced for collectors, and significant groups of drawings by the artist are today in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the British Museum in London, the Albertina in Vienna, and elsewhere.

Dated the 31st of October 1683, the present sheet was one of around a hundred botanical drawings commissioned from Herman Saftleven by the amateur horticulturalist and botanist Agnes (Agneta) Block that have been described as ‘among the most impressive botanical studies in 17th-century Dutch art.’3 A wealthy widow, Agnes Block (1629-1704) was a collector of exotic plants and flowers, which she cultivated in her garden at Vijverhof, a country house on the river Vecht, several miles southeast of Amsterdam, between Breukelen and Nieuwersluis. She owned between 450 and 500 different plants and flowers, including many specimens from foreign lands, and commissioned artists to record her

specimens in watercolour. As she wrote to a fellow botanist, ‘When I have a strange or unknown plant, I have it drawn from life, so that if it dies, I have a record on paper.’4 On the verso of the drawings she had commissioned, Block inscribed the Latin names of the plants depicted, as well as further details about each one, such as when they flowered.

Block is known to have commissioned ninety-two studies of flowers and plants from Herman Saftleven, which all date from the last few years of the artist’s career, between 1680 and 1684. Other artists from whom she commissioned drawings included Otto Marsius van Schrieck, Pieter Holsteyn, Johannes Bronkhorst, Maria Sibylla Merian, Herman Henstenburgh, Willem de Heer and Matthias and Pieter Withoos. Most of the drawings commissioned by Block have long since been dispersed, and only one album of botanical drawings from her collection has survived intact, and is today in the Rijkspentenkabinet in Amsterdam.

Native to South America - mainly Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay - the sticky nightshade or litchi tomato (also known as a ‘fire-and-ice plant’ or ‘Morelle de Balbis’) is a prickly plant with small edible fruits.

Earlier in the same month that he drew the present sheet, Saftleven painted a second watercolour for Block of a different specimen of the nightshade family of plants (fig.1); dated the 10th of October 1683, it is today in the British Museum5.

Of the nearly one hundred botanical watercolours by Herman Saftleven known to have been commissioned by Agnes Block, Wolfgang Schulz catalogued twenty-seven surviving examples, including the present sheet. Drawings by Saftleven from this group are today in the collections of the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the British Museum in London and the Kunstsammlungen in Weimar, while others are in private collections, including that of George and Maida Abrams6. Another botanical watercolour by Saftleven, depicting a Hollyhock (Alcea rosea), was sold alongside the present sheet at the Ellinckhuysen sale in Rotterdam in 1879, and shares the same later provenance; that drawing has recently been acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles7.

1.

12 HERMAN HENSTENBURGH Hoorn 1667-1726 Hoorn A Sun Conure Parrot and a Yellow-Backed Oriole Gouache and watercolour on vellum. Signed H: Henstenburgh. fec in grey ink at the lower left. Inscribed N.132 - Herman Henstenburgh in brown ink on the verso.

301 x 204 mm. (11 7/ 8 x 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: An unidentified collector’s mark, with the letter U in a circle (not in Lugt), stamped in red ink on the verso.

Herman Henstenburgh (or Henstenburg) was a pupil of the natural history draughtsman Johannes Bronckhorst, whose studio in Hoorn he entered in 1683. Bronckhorst also trained the young artist in his other vocation as a pastry baker. Indeed, throughout his life Henstenburgh seems to have worked as a baker in Hoorn, a relative artistic backwater, and his watercolours, despite being greatly admired, remained something of a hobby. The influence of Bronckhorst, as well as of Pieter Holsteyn the Younger, was to be important for Henstenburgh, particularly in his choice of subjects. As a draughtsman, he specialized in depictions of flowers and fruit, insects, and birds, usually drawn on vellum. The contemporary biographer Johan van Gool noted that Henstenburgh’s earliest works were of birds and insects, and that it was not until around 1689 that he also began to produce finished watercolour drawings of fruit and flowers. Van Gool further commented that the artist was able to achieve a particular richness and intensity of colour in his drawings by experimenting with pigments to perfect a new form of watercolour technique. Through the intervention of the painter Mattheus Terwesten, Henstenburgh was introduced to a number of important local collectors, notably Pieter van den Brande. Another significant patron was the botanical collector Agnes Block, a collector of exotic plants and flowers who also commissioned natural history drawings of animals and birds from Bronckhorst, Holsteyn, Herman Saftleven and Maria Sibylla Merian, among others. Further afield, the Grand Duke Cosimo III de’Medici in Florence is known to have owned three drawings by Henstenburgh as early as 1700.

Henstenburgh was never able to make a living from his art, however, and as Van Gool relates, ‘There he sat in his native town, with all his works of art about him, as if in oblivion, for rarely did he receive a visit from an art-lover.’1 It was not until several years after his death that Henstenburgh’s gouache and watercolour drawings became especially popular with collectors, particularly in England. Van Gool notes that in 1750 he saw the Rotterdam collectors Jan and Pieter Bisschop, at an Amsterdam auction, pay 105 guilders for one of the artist’s watercolours of fruit. Henstenburgh’s son Antoni inherited his business as a pastry chef and was also an amateur draughtsman of bird and insect subjects, and sometimes copied his father’s works.

Around 120 drawings by Herman Henstenburgh are known today, of which only about five are dated.

The artist’s vibrant watercolours of birds reflect the particular influence of his teacher Bronckhorst, and indeed the two artists at times made drawings of the same colourful birds. Henstenburgh’s watercolours may be seen as a development from the more scientific approach evident in the bird drawings of Pieter Holsteyn the Younger, a Dutch draughtsman of the previous generation; the birds drawn by the younger artist are usually depicted in a much more lifelike and engaging manner than the somewhat stiff creatures of Holsteyn’s watercolours. As Anne Zaal has noted, ‘Henstenburgh’s drawn birds are always shown sitting on almost bare tree branches or shrubs, the ends of the branches marked with a few leaves. The background is not coloured, and retains the ivory tone of the medium, the vellum. When several birds are shown, they are displayed in different positions, and spread across the sheet, and thus a lively effect is achieved.’2

The remarkable freshness of the colours of the present sheet would suggest that this splendid drawing on vellum was kept in an album or portfolio for much of its life. Although the paucity of dated works by the artist make any attempt at a chronology of his oeuvre difficult, the elaborate composition of this drawing would imply that this is a mature work by the artist.

The Dutch port town of Hoorn, where Henstenburgh lived and worked, was an important home base of the Dutch East India Company, and the artist would have had ample opportunity to study live or stuffed specimens of exotic birds brought back to Holland on the ships of the Hoorn fleet. The present sheet depicts two rare South American birds, and serves as a fascinating and very early visual record of these particular species in European art. Indeed, this drawing would appear to predate, by several decades or more, the authoritative scientific descriptions of both types of birds depicted in it.

The larger of the two birds may be identified as a Sun Conure parrot (Aratinga solstitialis), a species native to areas of the north-eastern part of South America, in particular northern Brazil and Guyana. The parrot, which grows to an average of thirty centimetres in length, is described in ornithological literature from the 1730s onwards, although specimens must have been in circulation in Europe somewhat earlier.

Long popular in Europe as captive pet birds, the severe decline of its population has meant that the Sun Conure is today listed as an Endangered species. Although Henstenburgh may have been working from a preserved specimen, it is equally likely that this watercolour was based on a live bird, since Sun Conure parrots were already established in Europe as expensive pets by the end of the 17th century.

The smaller bird would appear to be a Yellow-backed Oriole (Icterus chrysater), native to Central America and northern South America. It is interesting to note that Henstenburgh has here depicted the oriole seemingly in the act of catching insects. Since the bird is indeed insectivorous, this would imply that the artist was perhaps working from a live specimen that he had studied closely. The presence of a Yellow-backed Oriole in this drawing is also unusual in that the species was not formally named and described until over a hundred years later, in the 1840s. The present sheet, therefore, not only serves as an accurate record of two rare and valuable South American birds, but may perhaps also reflect a thriving contemporary market for such exotic creatures.

Depictions of exotic birds account for only a small part of Henstenburgh’s oeuvre as a draughtsman, and just a handful of highly finished watercolour and gouache studies of birds by the artist have appeared on the art market in the past thirty years. A signed drawing of A Hermit Hummingbird, a Black-headed Caique, a Yellow-bibbed Lory and a Red-legged Honeycreeper was sold at auction in New York in 19903, while a similarly-signed study of A Roller on a Branch appeared at auction four years later4. A gouache drawing on vellum of Three Birds of Paradise, formerly in the collection of Lucien and Françoise Delplace in Brussels, appeared at auction in 19965. Most recently, a signed gouache on vellum drawing of A King Bird of Paradise and a Spiderhunter, formerly in the collection of the 18th century Dutch connoisseur Johann Goll van Franckenstein, was sold at auction in 2011 and is now in the collection of Clement C. Moore in New York6. Other gouache and watercolour drawings of exotic birds by Henstenburgh are today in the collections of the Amsterdam Museum in Amsterdam, the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig, the Palazzo Pitti and the Uffizi in Florence, the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt, and elsewhere.

We are grateful to Joanne Cooper of the Natural History Museum in London for her assistance in the cataloguing of this drawing.

13 AURELIANO MILANI Bologna 1675-1749 Bologna The Abduction of Helen Black chalk, with stumping, with grey ink and grey wash, laid down on an 18th century English mount.

Signed(?) Io Aureliano Milani F. in black chalk at the lower right. Inscribed (by Barnard) J:B No 865. / 19 1/2 by 11 1/4. / of Bologna, was a Disciple of Pasinelli born 1675 in brown ink on the reverse of the mount.

291 x 496 mm. (11 1/ 2 x 19 1/ 2 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: John Barnard, London (Lugt 1419), on his mount and with his initials J:B in brown ink at the lower right corner of the mount1; Probably his sale, London, Greenwood’s, 16-24 February 1787; W. R. Hubbard, Glasgow(?), in 1892 (according to an inscription on the reverse of the former mount)2; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s Olympia, 20 April 2004, lot 18: Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2005; Private collection, California.

LITERATURE: Angelo Mazza, ‘Gli artisti di palazzo Fava. Collezionismo e mecenatismo artistico a Bologna alle fine del Seicento’, in Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte, No.27, 2004, p.355, note 102.

Aureliano Milani spent the early part of his career in his native Bologna before settling in Rome in 1719, where he was to work for the remainder of his life. He painted altarpieces for several churches and also undertook a number of important decorative fresco projects. Both of his contemporary biographers, however, noted that Milani had a better reputation as a draughtsman than as a painter. Gianpietro Zanotti admired the artist’s animated figures (‘uomini nudi, muscolosi, e terribili’) and diversity of subject matter, while Luigi Crespi noted of Milani that ‘He made many drawings, and in truth his drawings are equal to those of any great master, for their character, for their immediacy, for their magnificence, and for the ease of execution, with which they are touched, heightened and shadowed’3. Despite the fact that his biographers noted several 18th century collections in which drawings by Milani could be found, relatively few drawings by the artist are known today. These show him to have been an important precursor of a later Bolognese tradition of draughtsmanship. As one modern scholar has noted, ‘Milani’s ideal of beauty and his painterly drawing style, which made extensive use of light playing over the surfaces of forms, foreshadow the luminous draughtsmanship of the Gandolfi family in Bologna.’4 The delicate handling of stumped black chalk in the present sheet is a typical feature of Milani’s draughtsmanship, and may be likened to that in a number of large, finished compositional drawings by the artist which exist both as studies for easel pictures as well as independent works in their own right.

Such drawings include a Samson Defeating the Philistines in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa5, The Harpies Disrupt the Meal of Aeneas and the Trojans in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna6, and An Old Man Tormented by Demons and Attended by an Angel in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York7; all are stylistically comparable to the present sheet. Also similar is a large drawing of The Bearing of the Cross in the Louvre8, which is a preparatory study for an enormous etching by the artist, executed in 1725, and a drawing of The Stoning of Saint Stephen, formerly in the Horvitz collection9.

No related painting of this subject by Milani is known, nor is one mentioned in the list of the artist’s works included in Luigi Crespi’s biography. It is likely, therefore, that the drawing was executed as an autonomous work of art, and destined for sale to a collector. This is also suggested by the full signature ‘Io Aureliano Milani F’ at the lower right corner of the sheet. An almost identical signature (‘Io Aureliano Milani F. 1726’) is found on a drawing of The Assumption of the Virgin in the Philadelphia Museum of Art10.

14 KARL WILHELM DE HAMILTON Brussels c.1668-1754 Augsburg A Golden Oriole on a Branch Watercolour on vellum. Numbered 197 in blue chalk on the backing board.

242 x 193 mm. (9 1/ 2 x 7 5/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Dillée family, Paris, and by descent to Guillaume Dillée, Paris.

The son and pupil of the Scottish still life painter James de Hamilton, who settled and worked in Brussels, Karl (or Carl) Wilhelm de Hamilton was one of a large family of artists active in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. His brothers Ferdinand Phillipp and Johann Georg were both active in Vienna, while Karl Wilhelm worked mainly in Germany, first in Baden-Baden and later in Augsburg, where he served as court painter to Bishop Alexander Sigismund von der Pfalz-Neuburg. Karl Wilhelm specialized in ‘forestfloor’ still life landscapes and, in particular, bird subjects. Among his most famous works are several versions of a landscape known as The Parliament of Birds, based on a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer written around 1380, each of which incorporates between sixty and seventy different species of birds. Paintings

by Karl Wilhelm de Hamilton are today in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Wallraf-RichartzMuseum in Cologne, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, and elsewhere.

Identified by its distinctive, bright yellow plumage, the Eurasian golden oriole (Oriolus oriolus) is found throughout Europe and Western Asia. The bird has a very large range, breeding in the northern hemisphere and spending winters in central and southern Africa.

Beautifully drawn in watercolour or gouache on fine vellum, studies of birds such as this are likely to have been produced as independent works of art for sale to collectors. When painting these highly finished studies of individual birds, Karl Wilhelm de Hamilton usually chose to depict them standing on a single bare twig or branch, and isolated against a blank background. Two comparable studies of birds on branches by the artist, depicting a finch and a tit and each also drawn on vellum, were sold at auction in London on 20011, while also very similar in style, technique and composition is a gouache drawing of a bullfinch on a gooseberry branch, which appeared at auction in Paris in 2004 and 20122.

Stylistically comparable drawings on vellum of other animal subjects by Karl Wilhelm de Hamilton, executed in the same precise technique, include a sheet of studies of a lizard, a snake and a frog, sold at auction in 19973, and a drawing of three heads of pheasants and partridges, which was also previously in the Dillée collection4.

15 JEAN-BAPTISTE OUDRY Paris 1686-1755 Beauvais The Fables of La Fontaine: The Two Pigeons Brush and black ink and grey wash, heightened with white, within a simulated mount drawn in dark blue and grey wash with pen and brown ink, on blue paper. Signed and dated JB. Oudry 17(3)1 in brown ink at the lower left. Inscribed 47. t. 2e. in brown ink on the verso.

248 x 191 mm. (9 3/4 x 7 1/ 2 in.) [image] 311 x 261 mm. (12 1/4 x 10 1/4 in.) [with fictive mount] PROVENANCE: Sold by the artist, together with all of his drawings illustrating the Fables of La Fontaine, to Jean-Louis Regnard de Montenault, in c.1751; Included in one of two albums containing all of Oudry’s drawings for the Fables of La Fontaine, with the booksellers Frères de Bure, Paris, by 1828; Jean Jacques de Bure, Paris; His sale, Paris, 1-18 December 1853, lot 344 (sold for 1,800 francs to Thibaudeau); Comte Adolphe-Narcisse Thibaudeau, Paris; Possibly given by him to the actress Mme. Eugenie Doche, and then sold by her for 2,500 francs to the bookseller Fontaine; Acquired from them for 5,000 francs

by Solar Aaron Euryale, known as Félix Solar, in 1856; His sale, Paris, Charles Pillet, 19 November – 8 December 1860, lot 627 (sold for 6,100 francs to Cléder for Baron Taylor); Baron Isidore Taylor, Paris; Émile Pereire, Paris; The booksellers Morgand et Fatout, Paris, probably in 1876; Acquired from them

by Louis Roederer, Reims; By descent to his nephew, Léon Olry-Roederer, Reims and Paris; Sold through Agnew’s, London, to Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, Philadelphia, in 1922; The Rosenbach Company, Philadelphia; Acquired from them by Raphael Esmerian, New York, in c.1946; His sale, Paris, Palais Galliera, 6 June 1973, part of lot 46 (sold for 2,000,000 francs); Art Associates Partnership (Dr. Claus Virch), Bermuda, by whom one of the two albums disbound and the drawings contained therein – including the present sheet – thence sold separately; Adrian Ward-Jackson, London; Didier Aaron Inc., New York; Private collection.

LITERATURE: 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.156, no.103, illustrated p.106.

EXHIBITED: Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Classic Taste: Drawings and Decorative Arts from the Collection of Horace Brock, March-May, 2000; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.102.

Jean-Baptiste Oudry was a prodigious draughtsman, and drawings were an integral part of his artistic practice. Although the 18th century art historian Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville wrote of him that ‘His finished drawings are all in black chalk, highlighted with white using the brush [and] his studies are also in black chalk, highlighted with white chalk’1, and while it is certainly true that black and white chalks were his favoured medium as a draughtsman, Oudry worked also in pastel, red chalk, brown ink and sepia wash. While the Oudry scholar Hal Opperman catalogued around a thousand drawings by the artist, many of these were only known through descriptions in old auction catalogues. While Oudry parted with some drawings in his lifetime, the vast majority of his output as a draughtsman – mainly studies of animals and birds, highly finished landscapes and book illustrations, carefully organized into albums – remained in his studio until his death.

Between 1729 and 1734, Oudry produced a total of 276 beautiful and highly finished drawings, including a frontispiece, which illustrated tales from the famous 17th century work by Jean de La Fontaine, the Fables choisies mises en vers (Selected Fables Rendered in Verse). Each scene was drawn with the brush with black ink and grey wash, heightened with white gouache, on sheets of blue paper, with each image surrounded with a wide border brushed on the same sheet in a darker shade of blue, acting as a fictive

mount. The drawings, all made over this five-year period (with the exception of the frontispiece, which is dated 1752), ‘form a remarkably coherent group, all closely similar in size, technique, and presentation’2, and have long been among the artist’s most famous works. Indeed, this complete set of illustrations to the Fables, as Opperman has noted, ‘have done more to establish the image of Oudry that has come across the years, than any others of his productions.’3 Nearly all of the drawings are signed and dated, and, to judge from the dates, the artist seems to have made the drawings in order, in the sequence that they appear in La Fontaine’s Fables. Oudry’s most ambitious undertaking as a draughtsman, the project to illustrate the Fables seems not to have been a commission, but instead was done on the artist’s own initiative, and his early biographer, the Abbé Louis Gougenot, notes that he worked on the drawings in the evenings.

It has been assumed that Oudry would have intended this series of drawings for the Fables to be engraved for publication, but this would have been a very expensive undertaking for the artist. Around 1751 Oudry sold the complete set of drawings to the amateur and collector Jean-Louis Regnard de Montenault, who decided to have them reproduced as prints and published as an illustrated book. Since Oudry’s drawings were thought to be too free in execution to be used as models by the engravers, Montenault commissioned Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Younger to make copies of each of Oudry’s drawings in a more linear style, and it was Cochin’s drawings that were used by the large team of engravers who worked on the project. Montenault’s celebrated edition of the Fables was published in four lavish volumes between 1755 and 1760, although Oudry himself did not live to see them. As Hal Opperman has pointed out, ‘It must be said that the confrontation of Oudry’s originals with the prints very much betrays the intermediary of Cochin. The human figures, in many cases, have benefited – but the animals have not. We state above that the La Fontaine illustrations, more than anything else, created and sustained posterity’s idea of the scope and the intrinsic qualities of Oudry’s art. But this judgment was based on the prints, not the drawings, which had almost never been seen: in fact, not one of them was even reproduced (in the modern sense) prior to the sale in 1973.’4 The original 276 drawings by Oudry for the Fables of La Fontaine were bound together in two albums of dark blue calf, which remained intact and passed through several notable private collections5 until they were sold at auction in 1973. One of the volumes, containing illustrations from Books I to VI of the Fables, was eventually acquired by the British Rail Pension Fund and was sold again at auction in 19966.

The second volume, illustrating episodes from Books VII to XII, was broken up in 1973 and the drawings dispersed. Many of these are now in public collections, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.

The fable depicted in this drawing is taken from Book IX, Fable II. Two pigeons (the birds have sometimes later been described as doves) live together in friendship, but one longs for adventure and to explore the wider world. Despite the protestations of his companion, who fears for his safety, he eventually flies off on what he believes will be a short voyage of just three days, after which he promises to return to regale his friend with tales of his grand adventures. During his travels, however, the pigeon is trapped in a rainstorm without shelter, caught in a net from which he just manages to escape, attacked by a vulture and finally is injured by a boy with a sling. The pigeon returns home ‘half dead, half crippled’ to rejoin his friend, and vows never to roam again. La Fontaine’s fable was adapted as a ballet with music, entitled Les deux pigeons, by André Messager in the late 19th century, and choreographed anew by Frederick Ashton in 1961.

As in many of Oudry’s drawings for La Fontaine’s Fables, the application of white heightening is very effective against the deep blue of the paper, and particularly in the mountains in the far distance, evocative of the wider world that the pigeon wishes to explore. In drawings such as the present sheet, Oudry’s skill as a painter of both animals and landscapes is readily evident.

16 GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO Venice 1727–1804 Venice A Standing Lion Pen and grey ink and grey wash, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in grey ink. Signed Dom.o Tiepolo f. in grey ink at the lower right.

217 x 152 mm. (8 1/ 2 x 6 in.)

PROVENANCE: Gustav Nebehay, Vienna, in 1927; Anonymous sale, Stuttgart, Stuttgarter Kunstkabinett, 24 November 1953, lot 924 (bt. Colnaghi for £23); P. & D. Colnaghi, London; Sold to Tomás Harris, London, on 24 September 1954 for £35; Sir Valentine Abdy, Paris, in 1961; Clifford Duits, London, in 1963; Francis A. Drey, London, in c.1971; Private collection.

EXHIBITED: Vienna, Kunsthandlung Gustav Nebehay, Die Zeichnung I: Italienische Handzeichnungen des XVIII. Jahrhunderts, Vienna, n.d. [1927?], unnumbered (priced at £18); London, P. & D. Colnaghi, Exhibition of Old Master Drawings, 1954, no.20 (priced at £40).

This drawing is one of a group of studies of various animals and birds that have been dated to the latter part of Domenico Tiepolo’s career, after his return from Spain in 1770, and perhaps as late as the 1790s.

James Byam Shaw has associated these drawings with the fresco decoration of the Tiepolo family villa at Zianigo, near Padua. While most of the frescoes in the rooms of this small country house were detached in 1907 and are now in the Ca’ Rezzonico in Venice, remnants of several frescoes, depicting various animals in landscape settings, remain in the villa, and some of Domenico’s animal drawings correspond exactly to these. Most of these drawings of animals incorporate a ledge or dado at the bottom, and Byam Shaw suggested that they might have been intended for a frieze running around the upper walls of one of the rooms in the villa at Zianigo. Byam Shaw further noted of these studies of animals that ‘if most of these drawings belong to the latter part of Domenico Tiepolo’s career, it is also evident that his interest in drawing animals goes back a good deal further in date...twenty, thirty, even forty years earlier perhaps; and that he collected from one source or another, at that time, certain animal patterns that he kept by him, as he kept other models, for the rest of his life. From one source or another: for the truth is that relatively few of these animals, certainly not the more exotic ones, were observed from life... Many of the individual drawings of animals, from whatever source...must have remained in Domenico’s portfolios, to be used again and again to the end of his career.’1 A number of Domenico’s studies of animals were based on prints by other artists, notably Johann Elias Ridinger and Stefano della Bella, as well as paintings by his father Giambattista Tiepolo.

Unlike dogs or horses, lions are relatively rare in Domenico Tiepolo’s oeuvre. The most significant example is a monochrome fresco depicting a pride of lions in a landscape, which was part of the decoration of the Villa Tiepolo at Zianigo2. This soppraporta, or overdoor, fresco survives in situ at the Villa, albeit in a very ruined state. The lion in this drawing, however, is unrelated to any of those in the Zianigo fresco, and indeed cannot be found in any other surviving work by Domenico. A similar (though not identical) standing lion appears, however, in his drawing of The Holy Family with the Bending Palm3, part of the so-called Large Biblical Series; a group of large and highly finished drawings executed by the artist over the same period as the animal studies.

Two drawings of reclining lions by Domenico Tiepolo from the same series of animal studies, one of which is specifically related to one of the lions in the overdoor fresco at Zianigo, were at one time in the collection of Paul Wallraf4. Among the very few other drawings of lions of this type and size, each showing a single lion on a pedestal, is a Standing Lion, Looking to the Left, formerly in the collection of Benno Geiger in Venice5 and a study of A Seated Lion, which appeared at auction in 19876. Most recently, another drawing of A Seated Lion was sold at auction in Paris7.

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17 CLAUDE-LOUIS CHATELET Paris 1753-1795 Paris Landscape with an Alpine Waterfall Pen and black ink and grey wash, heightened with white, on blue paper. Inscribed Champ du Moulin in black ink at the lower left.

212 x 263 mm. (8 3/ 8 x 10 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection; Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 22 January 2004, lot 211; Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2005; Private collection.

LITERATURE: New York, Wildenstein, The Arts of France from François Ier to Napoléon Ier: A Centennial Celebration of Wildenstein’s Presence in New York, exhibition catalogue, 2005-2006, p.294, under no.124, note 8; New York and London, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2005, no.34.

Nothing is known of the birth and artistic training of Claude-Louis Chatelet. He is not recorded as a student at the Académie Royale, never seems to have joined any official guilds, and the known facts of his career are few. Active primarily as a topographical draughtsman and book illustrator, he seems to have completed only a handful of paintings, among them views of Versailles and one or two seascapes. It is rather for his landscape drawings in watercolour or gouache that Chatelet is best known today. Like his contemporaries Louis-Gabriel Moreau and Louis Belanger, Chatelet often depicted the parks and gardens around Paris, such as Bellevue, the Petit Trianon at Versailles and the Folie Saint-James at Neuilly.

In 1776 and again between 1780 and 1781 he travelled throughout Switzerland, producing several drawings for the three volumes of Jean-Benjamin de La Borde and Baron Beat Fidel de Zurlauben’s massive publishing project, the Tableaux topographiques, pittoresques, physiques, historiques, moraux, politiques, littéraires de la Suisse.

Chatelet’s most important commission, however, came soon after his return from Switzerland, when he was asked to supply landscape illustrations for the Abbé de Saint-Non’s Voyage pittoresque, ou description historique des royaumes de Naples, et de Sicile, published in five volumes between 1781 and 1786. The artist undertook a trip to southern Italy, in the company of Louis-Jean Desprez and Dominique-Vivant Denon, to prepare drawings for the project. Indeed Chatelet was, along with Desprez, responsible for the largest number of the illustrations later engraved for the book, to which Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Hubert Robert, Jean-Pierre Houel and Saint-Non himself also contributed.

Actively involved in radical politics during the French Revolution, Chatelet was a fervent follower of Robespierre’s Montagnard faction and a member of the Jacobin Tribunal. After the fall of Robespierre in 1794, he was arrested, imprisoned, and sent to the guillotine on the 7th of May the following year.

This striking landscape may be dated to the period of Chatelet’s travels around Switzerland in 17801781, in preparation for La Borde and Zurlauben’s Tableaux topographiques, pittoresques, physiques, historiques, moraux, politiques, littéraires de la Suisse. A stylistically comparable drawing of the waterfalls at Schaffhausen, in Switzerland near the German border, and drawn on the same dark blue paper, was formerly in the collection of John Gaines in Lexington, Kentucky, and was sold at auction in 20011. The present sheet may also be compared with a drawing of The Cascade at Tivoli in the Jeffrey Horvitz collection in Massachusetts2, which is drawn in the same distinctive technique, as are two further studies of mountain views by the artist, on identical blue paper, in the same collection3.

18 FRENCH OR SWISS SCHOOL Circa 1800 A Woman Wearing a Hat Black, red and white chalks, with stumping, on brown paper. Laid down.

546 x 443 mm. (21 1/ 2 x 17 3/ 8 in.)

19 ALEXANDRE-EVARISTE FRAGONARD Grasse 1780-1850 Paris A Centurion Begging for Protection from Marc Antony during a Seditious Revolt Pen and black ink, with brush and grey and black wash, over traces of an underdrawing in pencil. Framing lines in black ink. Laid down. Signed fragonard-fils invenit in black ink at the lower left. Inscribed DU TEMS DES GUERRES DE ROME DES SOLDATS / DANS UNES SEDITION PRIRENT UN CENTURION ILS VOULOIENT LE MASSACRER IL SE JETTA / AUX PIED D’ANTOINE QUI LE PROTGEA ET REPRIMA LA FUREUR DES REVOLTE. in black ink at the lower centre.

204 x 481 mm. (8 1/4 x 18 7/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 12 June 1992, lot 58; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 26 February 1998, lot 577; W. M. Brady & Co., New York, in 1999; Private collection.

The son of the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Evariste Fragonard studied with his father before entering the studio of Jacques-Louis David at an early age. A precocious student, he made his Salon debut in 1793 at the age of only thirteen, exhibiting a drawing of Timoleon Sacrificing his Brother. A few months later he won two second prize medals at the great concours held in the Year II of the Republic. He continued to show regularly at the Salon until 1842, exhibiting drawings, scenes from Napoleonic history and, from around 1820 onwards, troubadour paintings. In 1810 he received a commission to paint a series of grisailles for the Palais Bourbon, and later won several further official commissions, including a number of historical subjects for the museum at Versailles and ceiling paintings for the Louvre. Equally adept at large-scale history scenes and intimate cabinet pictures, Fragonard was in great demand throughout his later career. He painted works for several Parisian churches, including a Martyrdom of Saint James for Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas and an Assumption of the Virgin for Saint-Geneviève, as well as a Flight into Egypt for Strasbourg Cathedral.

Fragonard was also active as a sculptor and, like his father, produced designs for lithographs and book illustrations, notably Baron Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, for which he produced some 160 illustrations. Between 1806 and 1839 he also created numerous decorative designs for Sèvres porcelain, which accounts for some of his finest drawings. Important groups of drawings by Evariste Fragonard are today in the collections of the Louvre, the Manufacture de Sèvres and the Musée Fragonard in Grasse, while other significant examples are in the Musée Magnin in Dijon, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans and elsewhere.

Given its pronounced Neoclassical flavour, the present sheet is likely to date from the first part of the artist’s career. Fragonard was fond of such long, frieze-like compositions in his drawings, which seem to have been intended to replicate sculpted bas-reliefs. As Jacques Foucart has noted of the artist, ‘in his work neo-classical features are combined with a taste for moving pictorial effects and beams of light, inherited from his father as well as from northern painters...His Neo-Classicism was all the more pronounced by the fact that Alexandre-Evariste was also a sculptor and designed many ornamental patterns for Sèvres.’1 Among comparable scenes from ancient history, treated in the manner of an antique relief, is a drawing of Two Women and a Youth Before a Seated Philosopher in the Louvre2, as well as a very large exhibition drawing of The Infant Pyrrhus at the Feet of Glaucias, signed and dated 1814 and also in the Louvre3.

Fragonard also produced a number of similar frieze-like drawings for subjects taken from more recent history, such as his designs for several bas-reliefs depicting Napoleonic victories, drawn around 1810 and intended to decorate the Palais Bourbon, but never executed4. Stylistically comparable drawings are also found in many of Fragonard’s designs for the Sèvres porcelain factory, typified by seventeen drawings of Napoleonic subjects, drawn in 18325, as well as designs for five narrative reliefs, executed in 18101811, for the decoration of a Sèvres porcelain column dedicated to Napoleon’s Polish campaigns6.

20 JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES Montauban 1780-1867 Paris Portrait of Gaspard Bonnet Pencil. Laid down. Signed and dated Ingres rome / 1812 in pencil at the lower right.

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

PROVENANCE: The sitter, Gaspard Bonnet; By descent to his granddaughter, Mme. Gizolme, née Marguerite Bonnet; By descent to her nephew, Henry Emile Louis Vincens; Sold by him on 19 January 1908 to Arnold & Tripp, Paris; Acquired from them on 29 January 1908 by Comte Alfred-Louis Lebeuf de Montgermont, Paris; His anonymous sale (‘Collection L. de M...’), Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 1619 June 1919, lot 120 (‘Portrait de Gaspard Bonnet. A mi-corps, la main gauche dans la poche du pantalon, la droite passée sous le revers de l’habit, il est représenté le visage de trois-quarts vers la gauche, le nez busqué, les cheveux rebelles. Dessin à la mine de plomb. Signé à droite, en bas: Ingres, Rome, 1812.

Haut., 21 cent.; larg., 16 cent.’), sold for 15,000 francs to Bernard Wolff for Michelin; Edouard Michelin, Clermont-Ferrand; By descent to his daughter, Mme. Jean Callies, née Marguerite Michelin; Anonymous sale, Honfleur, 18 July 1993; Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva; Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva; Acquired from them by a private European collector in 2001.

LITERATURE: Hans Naef, Die Bildniszeichnungen von J.-A.-D. Ingres, Bern, 1977, Vol.I, pp.266-267 and Vol.IV, pp.146-147, no.79; Alexander Dückers, ed., Linie, Licht und Schatten: Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 1999, illustrated p.407; Philip Rylands, ed., The Timeless Eye: Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1999, illustrated p.406; Margaret Morgan Grasselli et al., Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, exhibition catalogue, New York and Washington, 2007, p.188, under no.74 (entry by Jennifer Tonkovich); Antonio Pinelli, ‘Cinq lettres inédites de Wicar’, in Maria Teresa Caracciolo and Gennaro Toscano, ed., Jean-Baptiste Wicar et son temps, 1762-1834, Villeneuve d'Ascq, 2007, p.266, note 18.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts, David et ses élèves, April-June 1913, no.334 (‘Portrait de M. Gaspard Bonnet, directeur des Domaines. Dessin à la mine de plomb, signé: Ingres, Rome, 1812. Haut., 21 cent.; larg 15 cent. 1/2. Appartient à M. le Comte de Montgermont.’).

A student of Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres won the Prix de Rome in 1801 but, due to a lack of government funding, was unable to take up his scholarship at the Académie de France in Rome until 1806. Although his pension expired in 1810, Ingres chose to remain in Rome for a further ten years. The city was at this time ruled by the French, and Ingres received commissions for paintings to decorate the Villa Aldobrandini, the official residence of the French Lieutenant-Governor of Rome, and Napoleon’s palace at Monte Cavallo. He also found patrons among the French officials in the city, whose portraits he painted and drew, as well as members of the royal court in Naples, led by Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat and her husband Joachim, rulers of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. With the fall of Napoleon and the French withdrawal from Rome in March 1814, however, Ingres found himself bereft of official commissions, and turned to making portrait drawings of French and foreign visitors to the city. These pencil portraits, drawn with minute detail as autonomous works of art, proved very popular and served to confirm Ingres’s reputation and secure his livelihood. Around 460 portrait drawings by Ingres are known today, most of which date from before 1824, when he left Italy and returned to Paris.

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Ingres’s Roman portrait drawings can be divided into two distinct groups; commissioned, highly finished works for sale, and more casual studies of colleagues and fellow artists, which were usually presented as a gift to the sitter. He had a remarkable ability of vividly capturing, with a few strokes of a sharpened graphite pencil applied to white or cream paper, the character and personality of a sitter. (Indeed, it has been noted that it is often possible to tell which of his portrait subjects the artist found particularly sympathetic or appealing.) As one 20th century artist has written of him, ‘Ingres’ portrait-drawings are unique in the history of art in so far as their finished nature, expressed through black and white, is a composite of light, shade and tone.’1 For his drawn portraits, Ingres made use of specially prepared tablets made up of several sheets of paper wrapped around a cardboard centre, over which was stretched a sheet of fine white English paper. The smooth white paper on which he drew was therefore cushioned by the layers beneath, and, made taut by being stretched over the cardboard tablet, provided a resilient surface for the artist’s finely-executed pencil work.

A splendid example of Ingres’s informal portraiture, the present sheet was given by the artist to the sitter. It remained completely unknown until its appearance in the 1913 exhibition David et ses élèves in Paris, where it was lent from the collection of the diplomat Comte Alfred-Louis Lebeuf de Montgermont (1841-1918) and identified as a portrait of ‘M. Gaspard Bonnet, directeur des Domaines’. The drawing reappeared six years later, at the posthumous auction of Lebeuf de Montgermont’s collection in 1919, when it was acquired by the painter Bernard Wolff for a private collector, but was not seen in public again for over seventy years.

In his magisterial catalogue of Ingres’ portrait drawings, Hans Naef, who only knew the present sheet from the illustration in the 1919 Lebeuf de Montgermont sale catalogue, commented on the spontaneity of execution and the unique physiognomy of the subject. Although of illegitimate birth, Gaspard Bonnet (1779-1854) had a successful career as a civil servant for more than forty years. At the time that Ingres drew this portrait, Bonnet was serving in Rome as a Vérificateur de l’Enregistrement et des Domaines, or inspector for French Imperial buildings. Ingres must have met him at the same time as he produced drawn or painted portraits of other French officials of the Napoleonic Administration de l’Enregistrement et des Domaines in Rome – including Edme-François-Jean Bochet, Charles-Joseph-Laurent Cordier and the Director of the Department, Hippolyte-François Devillers – between 1811 and 1812. Bonnet left Rome in November 1814, following the downfall of Napoleon, and was transferred to a post in Grasse in the south of France. Over then next thirty years he continued to work for the Administration de l’Enregistrement et des Domaines in various cities throughout France, including Lyon, Toulon, Perpignan and, between 1838 and 1843, Ingres’ hometown of Montauban. Awarded the Legion d’Honneur in 1844, Bonnet died shortly before his 75th birthday, probably at Nîmes.

Two years after the present sheet was drawn, Gaspard Bonnet may have sat to another French artist in Rome.

He is thought to be the subject of a portrait drawing (fig.1) by Michel-Martin Drolling (1786-1851), dated 1814, which is today in a private collection in New York2; a suggestion based on the similarities of facial features, hairstyle and dress in both drawings.

1.

21 JEAN BERNARD Amsterdam 1765-1833 Amsterdam A Painter at an Easel (Self-Portrait?)

Black chalk, with framing lines in black chalk. Signed and dated 1819 I.B.f in pencil at the lower right.

223 x 282 mm. (8 3/4 x 11 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Iohan Quirijn van Regteren Altena, Amsterdam (his posthumous sale stamp [Lugt 4617] on the verso); Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: H. van Hall, Portretten van Nederlandse beeldende kunstenaars: Portraits of Dutch painters and other artists of the Low Countries. Specimen of an Iconography, Amsterdam, 1963, p.21, Bernard no.2 (as a self-portrait).

A pupil of the sculptor Christiaan Welmeer, Jean Bernard studied at the Stadsteekenacademie in Amsterdam. An amateur artist, he produced paintings of animals and some portraits, but was particularly known as a draughtsman and watercolourist. Friendly with a number of his fellow artists, he was a member of the Amsterdam drawing society known as Zonder Wet of Spreuk (‘Without Law or Motto’), which was active between c.1807 and c.1822. Bernard had a particular fondness for paintings and drawings of animals, and produced studies of specimens both alive and dead, drawn in black or red chalk, or sometimes a combination of both. He also copied paintings by 17th and 18th century Dutch artists, notably Paulus Potter, Nicolas Berchem, Phillips Wouwerman and Aert Schouman. Bernard was an avid art collector, and the posthumous sale of his collection in 1834 included numerous paintings, drawings, prints, curios and musical instruments.

A large collection of drawings by Jean Bernard – studies of animals, birds and fish, as well as of plants and flowers, trees, landscapes and figures – was given to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam by the artist’s descendants in 1904. Apart from this group, however, drawings by the artist are rare. Other drawings

by Bernard are today in the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, the Rijksprentenkabinet in Leiden, the KröllerMüller Museum in Otterlo and the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

The present sheet may have been intended as a form of self-portrait, although the view of the sitter from the back makes any attempt at a firm identification impossible. (The artist depicted here seems to be working on a small painting of a pastoral scene with animals; a subject typical of Bernard’s painted oeuvre.) A signed, undated self-portrait drawing by Bernard, in which he appears middle-aged, is in the Rijksmuseum1. Two other self-portrait drawings by the artist are known, both in the collection of the Rijksprentenkabinet in Leiden2.

Jean Bernard seems to have had a penchant for depicting fellow artists at work, and among stylistically comparable drawings in black chalk by him is a portrait of the painter and museum curator Gerrit Jan Michaëlis (1775-1857) seated at his easel, dated 1823, in the Rijksmuseum3. Other drawings of artists

by Bernard include a signed and dated watercolour of 1812 of the painter Jan Kobell (1778-1814), seen in his studio and seated at an easel, which appeared at auction in Amsterdam in 19124, and a drawing in red chalk, dated 1809, of the painter Wouter Johannes van Troostwijk (1782-1810), in which the subject is, like the present sheet, shown from behind and working at an easel5.

A bust-length portrait of Jean Bernard at the age of 64, painted by Gerrit Jan Michaëlis and dated November 1828, is in the Rijksmuseum6.

22 DIRK SALM Amsterdam 1803-1838 Amsterdam Three Feathers Watercolour, grey wash and pencil, heightened with gum arabic, with framing lines in pencil and black ink. Signed Dirk Salm. in brown ink at the lower right.

144 x 197 mm. (5 5/ 8 x 7 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Iohan Quirijn van Regteren Altena, Amsterdam (his posthumous sale stamp [Lugt 4617] partially stamped on the verso); Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Laurens J. Bol, Bekoring van het kleine, exhibition catalogue, Dordrecht, 1959-1960, p.37, no.74, illustrated pl.19.

EXHIBITED: The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Nederlandsche Aquarellen van 1780-1830, 1942, no.101; Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum, Bekoring van het kleine, 1959-1960, no.74.

An amateur still life painter, Dirk Salm (sometimes van Salm or Zalm) worked for the whole of his brief career in Amsterdam. Very little is known of his life, or indeed his main occupation. He exhibited still life subjects, often of seashells, in Amsterdam in 1824, 1826, 1830 and 1836, and also in The Hague in 1830. Drawings by Salm are very rare, and examples are in the collections of the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam and the Rijksmuseum Kroller-MĂźller in Otterlo.

A very similar study of five bird feathers by Salm was at one time in the collection of Jan Frederick Bianchi in Amsterdam, and was exhibited alongside the present sheet in The Hague in 19421. The ex-Bianchi drawing was signed and dated 1828, and this study of three feathers may therefore also be dated to approximately the same year. Another closely related watercolour study of three feathers by Salm is in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam2.

Among stylistically comparable drawings by the artist are several studies of sea shells. These include a pair of watercolours, dated 1827 and 1829, which were formerly in the collection of Hans van Leeuwen and were sold at auction in 19993, and a signed pen and wash study of five sea shells, at one time in the collection of Paul Brandt, which appeared at auction in Germany in 20104. A signed watercolour of six sea shells by Salm was also once with Paul Brandt in Amsterdam, and was exhibited alongside the present sheet in Dordrecht in 19595.

The depiction of bird feathers as still-life subjects is also occasionally found in the work of some of Dirk Salm’s contemporaries. A similar watercolour study of nine feathers by Josephus Augustus Knip (17771847) is in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague6, for example, while a pencil and chalk drawing of a single feather by Jean Bernard (1765-1833), dated 1825, is in the Rijksmuseum7.

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

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

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

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

LITERATURE: Michael Lewis, John Frederick Lewis, R.A. 1805-1876, Leigh-on-Sea, 1978, p.100, no.650 (‘A Turkish Lady, Brussa’); London, Christie’s, Orientalist Art, 15 June 2010, p.14, under lot 10 (entry by Briony Llewellyn); Briony Llewellyn, ‘Drawing from Life’, Cornucopia: Turkey for Connoisseurs, No.45, 2011, illustrated p.66; London, Christie’s, 19th Century European Art, 12 June 2012, p.90, under lot 70.

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

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

For the remainder of his career he painted Orientalist subjects inspired by his years in the East, and based largely on the drawings made in Cairo. These depictions of mosques, bazaars, Eastern interiors, desert encampments and imaginary harem scenes proved immensely popular with collectors. (As one scholar has noted, ‘Without doubt Lewis’s depictions of Oriental and, in particular, harem life were given greater veracity in the eyes of his European audience because of his well-publicised adoption of an elite Ottoman lifestyle.’1) In 1855 Lewis was elected President of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, although the previous year he had also begun to exhibit paintings at the Royal Academy. His growing interest in oil painting, at the expense of watercolours, led him to resign from the Old Water-Colour Society in February 1858, and for the remainder of his career Lewis’s exhibited works were mainly paintings. Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1859 and an Academician in 1864, Lewis showed there regularly until his death in 1876.

John Frederick Lewis’s paintings and watercolours of exotic Eastern subjects, executed in a meticulous and detailed manner, remained popular with collectors and connoisseurs throughout the later stages of his career. As his fellow artist and traveller Edward Lear noted, in a letter to Lewis’s wife written the year before the painter’s death, ‘There have never been, and there never will be any works depicting Oriental life – more truly beautiful and excellent – perhaps I might say - so beautiful and excellent. For, besides the exquisite and conscientious workmanship, the subjects painted by J. F. Lewis were perfect as representations of real scenes and people.’2

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

The present sheet, as shown by the signature and inscription at the lower right, was drawn during Lewis’s stay in Bursa in 1841. The fact that the woman depicted in this drawing is not veiled would indicate that she was not Muslim but rather a Christian of an Eastern denomination, probably from an Armenian merchant family in Bursa. It seems likely that, during his stay in Bursa, Lewis gained access to the home of a wealthy local Armenian family, to judge from the handful of drawings he produced of female members of the same family in the interior of what appears to be their home. The same young woman, for example, is seen at the left of a larger, finished watercolour by Lewis depicting four women in an interior (fig.1), also signed and dated ‘Brussa 1841’, which recently appeared at auction in London and is today in the Omer M. Koç collection in Istanbul4. The same model also appears in another of Lewis’s Bursa drawings of 1841; a study of two women in the Whitworth Art Gallery of the University of Manchester5, of which a second, unsigned version was recently on the art market in London6. An unsigned autograph replica or version of the present sheet is in the British Museum7.

As Briony Llewellyn has noted, chief among Lewis’s reasons for travelling to the Near East in 1840 was ‘a desire for novelty, a need to infuse his art with exotic and colourful subjects that represented a culture other than European. Surviving sketches suggest that his sole aim was to accumulate ethnographic information, but with an unprecedented accuracy and comprehensiveness...Lewis’s images are often of anonymous native men and women, in which the focus is as much on the elaborate details of their costume as on their individuality.’8 We are grateful to Briony Llewellyn for confirming the attribution of the present sheet, and for her help and advice in the preparation of this catalogue entry.

1.

24 NARCISSE VIRGILIO DIAZ DE LA PEÑA Bordeaux 1807-1876 Menton The Interior of the Forest of Fontainebleau Pen and brown ink and watercolour. Laid down. Signed N. Diaz in black ink at the lower right. Stamped with a Knoedler inventory mark and number on the verso. Inscribed Fontainebleau in black ink on the old backing board.

138 x 216 mm. (5 3/ 8 x 8 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: M. Knoedler & Co., New York; Possibly anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Piasa], 12 December 1996, lot 64 (‘Sous-bois. Encre de Chine rehaussée d’aquarelle, vernisée, sur carton marouflée sur panneau, signée en bas à droite. 14 x 23 cm.’); Private collecton, London.

The son of Spanish émigrés, Narcisse Diaz began his career as a painter of porcelain decoration, and received little fomal artistic training. He first exhibited a painting at the Salon of 1833, at the age of twenty-three, and his earliest works were of nymphs and bathers, as well as of exotic Orientalist subjects.

It is as a landscape painter, however, that he was to become best known. In the 1830s, he joined a group of artists who met at the village of Barbizon in the forest of Fontainebleau to paint closely from nature.

One of these, Théodore Rousseau, although five years younger than Diaz, was to become his mentor, and one of his closest friends. Recognized as a brilliant colourist, Diaz enjoyed a reasonably successful career. He drew somewhat less than most of his fellow Barbizon artists, however, and seems to have only seldom made drawings en plein-air. After 1859, the year of his last submission to the Salon, Diaz retired to Fontainebleau, although he continued to hold regular auctions of his work; a novel practice of marketing his work that he had begun in 1849.

Woodland and forest scenes abound in Diaz’s oeuvre, and account for some of his finest, and most admired, works. Perhaps his greatest champion was the critic Théophile Thoré, who, in a review of the Salon of 1846, noted of the artist that he ‘shows us not a tree or a figure, but the effect of sunlight on this figure or on that tree.’1 Two years earlier, Thoré had written that, ‘Monsieur Diaz has studied much in the most virginal corners of the Forest of Fontainebleau...The trees, the terrain, the shadows in his landscapes have an appearance that is strange and very poetic.’2 Similarly, a later 19th century writer noted of Diaz that, ‘there can be little doubt that it is chiefly as a painter of the forest that he will live in the future. There are still those who collect his glowing Eastern figures, and his flower pieces are equally strong, but in his forest scenes alone does he reach the level of a great master.’3 Diaz was particularly known for ‘sous-bois’ depictions of the undergrowth beneath the forest canopy. The subject of the present sheet, a small pond in the middle of a forest clearing, was another favourite motif of the artist’s, and occurs frequently in his paintings.

As a highly finished, signed landscape watercolour, the present sheet was probably intended as an autonomous work of art. Watercolours are, however, quite rare in Diaz’s oeuvre. Indeed, only fifteen small landscape watercolours were included in the estate sale of the contents of the artist’s studio, held in Paris in 1877, a few months after his death.

Among comparable watercolours by Diaz, also on a small scale, is a landscape with trees in the Cleveland Museum of Art4 and another, entitled The Edge of the Forest, in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore5.

Among the handful of other watercolour landscapes by the artist are examples in the Louvre6 and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans7, as well as in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and in the collection of Karen Cohen in New York8. A stylistically comparable watercolour of a woodland scene, formerly in the Coudray collection, appeared at auction in Paris in 19259.

25 GUSTAVE COURBET Ornans 1819-1877 La-Tour-de-Peilz Study of a Seated Man Resting Against a Table Charcoal and black chalk, with touches of white heightening, on blue-grey paper, backed. Signed with initials GC. in pencil at the lower left. Inscribed Vente F. Courbet (frere du peintre) / 21 Décembre 1882 in pencil on the verso1, backed.

244 x 226 m. (9 5/ 8 x 8 7/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: A. F. collection; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 11 March 1987, lot 58 (as Attributed to Courbet); Private collection.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Gustave Courbet was not a prolific draughtsman2. He seems to have drawn only occasionally, and indeed has been described as being somewhat averse to drawing; it is thought that his rejection of academic principles may also have led him to ignore the traditional emphasis placed on preparatory drawing, in favour of working directly in colour on the canvas. Nevertheless, he sometimes chose to exhibit selected drawings alongside his paintings at the Salons, and between 1845 and 1855 produced a number of large and highly-finished drawings, fully signed and dated, in charcoal and chalk.

Apart from three small sketchbooks in the Louvre, Courbet’s oeuvre as a draughtsman consists of a few dozen individual drawings – portraits and self-portraits, figure or genre studies, and some landscapes – drawn in charcoal, black chalk, or pencil. As Marget Stuffman has noted, ‘In his approach to drawing, Courbet was not alone in his day in preferring the more suggestive effects of charcoal and crayon over the precisely descriptive quality of pencil...Having worked as a lithographer in his early years in Besançon, Courbet as draftsman was able to deploy the structural characteristics and the opportunities the medium offered for coherent pictorial effects thanks to his confident handling of tonal values, dense layering, and emphasis on light patches in dark areas.’3 While Courbet’s drawings of the late 1840s were mostly large-scale portraits of friends, family and himself, the following decade saw the artist treat genre subjects as well. Of his genre drawings of this period, one recent scholar has noted, ‘Courbet’s drawing exemplifies a new tendency, more legitimately Realist, to show figures in their context and in the way a casual visitor or passerby (flaneur) might have observed them. Coupled with this is a tendency to place the model farther from the picture plane, thus increasing the impression of casually observing a human being rather than closely examining a specimen.’4 The act of sleeping or resting is something of a leitmotif that runs through Courbet’s oeuvre over his entire career. It occurs in several paintings and drawings, as well as in the Louvre sketchbooks. As has been noted, ‘Courbet’s fascination with scenes of sleeping and the postures that accompany dreaming is evident in many of his works...From the outset, Courbet portrayed people sleeping or taking afternoon naps, and we find them, too, drowsing over a book...’3 In the present sheet, it is also interesting to note too the possible influence of Goya’s famous etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters4 from the Los Caprichos series of 1797-1799, in which a very similarly posed figure appears, albeit in reverse.

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

203 x 262 mm. (8 x 10 3/ 8 in.) [sheet] Watermark: R D. PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, with the studio stamp (Lugt 1460; Herbert 1875A) at the lower left of the sheet1; Private collection, Europe.

Jean-François Millet was a skilled draughtsman, whose oeuvre ranged from quick sketches and more elaborate figure studies, to landscape studies in pen and watercolour, and highly finished pastel drawings that were sold as autonomous works of art, often for considerable sums of money. Indeed, for much of his career Millet earned his living from his drawings, rather than his paintings.

After his arrival in Paris in 1846, Millet produced a series of paintings and drawings in which female nudes are prominent. Perhaps inspired by the example of Watteau, Fragonard and Boucher, he painted around twenty-five small-scale paintings of female nudes in bucolic settings, typified by such works as A Woman Reclining in a Landscape of c.1846-1847, in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston2. These paintings, sometimes mildly erotic in nature, seem to have been painted with a view to having more immediate commercial appeal than the larger works he was painting for the Salons. At the same time, Millet made around fifty drawings that can be related to this same trend, although they remain a very small part of his oeuvre as a draughtsman as a whole. By the end of the 1840s, Millet had turned his attention to peasant subjects, and such depictions of female nudes largely disappeared from his oeuvre for the remainder of his career.

The present sheet may be grouped with a relatively small number of early chalk drawings of female nudes, datable to the second half of the 1840s. As Alexandra Murphy has noted, ‘For an artist seeking to establish himself in the art circles of Paris, the nude was a perfect vehicle. It bespeaks both tradition and immediacy. If we see the exploration of timelessness as one of the many recurring themes in Millet’s oeuvre, then Millet’s female nude drawings, almost always without literary references or anecdotal accoutrements, fit this mold as easily as his scenes of peasants in Barbizon.’3 Among stylistically comparable drawings of single female nudes of this date are several examples in the Louvre, including a study of a bather on blue-grey paper4 and another of a woman putting on her chemise5, as well as a Reclining Nude in a private collection6.

The bucolic setting of this drawing, and the presence of a figure playing music in the background, give the composition an air of a scene from mythology or classical literature, although Millet allows no references to a specific theme. Only a handful of complete figural compositions of this type are known from Millet’s drawn oeuvre of the late 1840s, including a signed black chalk drawing of Lot and his Daughters, which was on the art market in New York in 1999, in which a similar reclining female nude appears7, as well as an oval study of Lovers in the Art Institute of Chicago8 and a drawing of an Idyll (also known as Confidences) in the Louvre9.

27 GEORGE PRICE BOYCE, R.W.S. London 1826-1897 London Venice by Moonlight: Santa Maria della Salute from the Riva degli Schiavoni Watercolour, with touches of bodycolour, on oatmeal paper. Signed with the artist’s monogram and dated GB 54 in red ink at the lower left. Signed, dated and inscribed Venice / GB Sept. 1854 in pencil on the verso. Titled The Salute and Venice in pencil in the lower margin of the former backing sheet. Further inscribed, signed and dated from the Riva degli Schiavoni – Venice / by moonlight / George P Boyce. 1854. in pencil on the former backing sheet.

153 x 229 mm. (6 x 9 in.)

George Price Boyce was trained, and began his career, as an architect. Following a meeting with David Cox at Betws-y-Coed in Wales in 1849, however, he decided to take up landscape painting. He received lessons from Cox, whose influence can be seen in Boyce’s early watercolours. Not long afterwards he met Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was to become an intimate and lifelong friend, and, a few years later, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. These three young artists, who formed the nucleus of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848, discovered a kindred spirit in Boyce. Of independent means, he began avidly collecting their work (Boyce eventually owned more than forty works by Rossetti), while writing about them in his diaries between 1851 and 1875, which serve as an important record of the Brotherhood’s activities.

Boyce only rarely painted landscapes in oil, and most of his work is in watercolour. His landscapes, usually of views in the Thames valley, were exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1853 onwards, and frequently at the Old Water-Colour Society, of which he became an Associate in 1864 and a full member in 1877. Having once considered a career as an architect Boyce was passionately interested in old buildings and produced a large number of precise watercolour views of rural architecture; of farms, mills and manor houses. On the advice of John Ruskin, he made trips to Venice and Verona in 1854 and Switzerland in 1856; he also spent a few months in Egypt between 1861 and 1862. On his return from Egypt he began using Rossetti’s old studio in Blackfriars, on the banks of the Thames, and there became friendly with James McNeill Whistler. In 1869 he had a house built for him in Chelsea by the architect Phillip Webb, where he lived until his death in 1897.

George Price Boyce was a gifted watercolourist. As Virginia Surtees has written of him, ‘From his own water-colours he expected little, his innate modesty debarring any confidence of success...The touchstone of his whole working life was the desired excellence of execution...Faithful to a vision of simplicity and goodness he interpreted these with a serenity and unpretentious charm which were the reflection of his own character.’1 Christopher Newall has added that ‘[Boyce’s] works, although small in scale and most intimate in their means of expression, are sincere and delicately beautiful.’2 In the summer of 1854 Boyce made a visit to Venice, at the suggestion of John Ruskin. On the 14th of June, Ruskin wrote to Boyce in Venice: ‘I am vexed at thinking that I have perhaps been partly instrumental in leading you into the expense and trouble of a long journey, when there was quite enough material to employ you delightfully nearer home. But as you are at Venice, I congratulate myself, in the hope of at last seeing a piece of St. Marks done as it ought to be: It cannot be quite superogatory to point out to you the superior interest of St. Marks to all else in the city. It answers precisely to your wishes, as expressed in your note, “near subject – good architecture – colour - & light & shade”. I think the more you study it, the more you will enjoy it...I do not exactly know how far, at first sight, you may be able, for yourself, to distinguish what is really best worth your while. For my own part, it always takes me a week or two before I find out the best things, and unless you have been accustomed to the study of architecture, you may be so dazzled by the splendour of effect in Venice as not to estimate justly the value of Verona.’3

This was to be Boyce’s only visit to Venice, and during the few months that he spent there he produced detailed architectural studies and watercolours of the type encouraged by Ruskin, as well as a handful of more atmospheric and freely-drawn views of the city by night; works that would have been less likely to gain Ruskin’s approval. As Christopher Newall and Judy Egerton have written, ‘Boyce was evidently delighted by everything he saw in Venice; in the four months or so that he spent there he produced many remarkable watercolours. If his first object was to record the architectural monuments which he and Ruskin feared were in danger of destruction or insensitive restoration, on other occasions he painted hidden corners of the city and crowded side-canals. Sometimes he ignored Ruskin’s admonitions against generalised and crepuscular effects and described the vespertine or nocturnal city in semi-abstract studies in which the form of buildings and ships loom from the broadly handled areas of monochromatic tone. [Such watercolours] speak of the romantic impression that Venice made on the young artist rather than his dutiful observation of her architecture.’4 The present sheet, dated September 1854, is a particularly the fine example of Boyce’s more atmospheric Venetian views. Among stylistically comparable watercolour nocturnes of the city by the artist is San Giorgio Maggiore from the Piazzetta – Moonlight Study in a private collection5. One critic’s apt description of that watercolour, at the time of its exhibition at the Old Water Colour Society in 1868, may equally be applied to the present sheet: ‘For solemnity of effect and breadth of colour, “St. Giorgio Maggiore, Venice” – the towers and domes of the city – have no superior here. Small as it is, this shows the work of an artist and the feeling of a poet.’6 A similar Venetian watercolour by Boyce, a View from the Riva degli Schiavoni with Santa Maria della Salute and the Dogana in the Distance, drawn from approximately the same vantage point as the present sheet, appeared at auction in London in 19917. Other comparable watercolours include Near the Public Gardens, Venice, today in a private collection8 and The Rialto Bridge, sold at auction in 20139.

As Allen Staley has noted of Boyce’s work of this period, ‘A number of the Venetian watercolours are remarkably broad and atmospheric. On coarse paper...and in a murky, almost monochromatic palette, they show that Boyce still retained his liking for twilight despite Ruskin’s advice.’10 That the artist’s interest in such effects continued well after his return from Venice is seen in a number of watercolours of the Thames at night that he produced in the early 1860s, such as a view of The Thames at Night from the Adelphi, in the Tate Gallery in London11. An entry in Boyce’s diary from June 1863 notes that he had made ‘a study of moonlight effect on river from my balcony’, and in the same year his friend James McNeill Whistler made an etching of the river from the window of Boyce’s studio overlooking the Thames at Blackfriars. It has been suggested that Boyce’s watercolours of this type may have inspired Whistler’s own Thames nocturnes, which he began to paint around 1870.

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

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

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

LITERATURE: ‘Society of Painters in Water Colours [Second and Concluding Notice]’, The Illustrated London News, 8 June 1861, p.540; A. H. Palmer, Samuel Palmer: A Memoir, London, 1882, p.87; A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher, London, 1892, [1972 ed.], p.411, no.107; Raymond Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, New York, 1988, p.188, no.582 (as ‘Untraced since 1861’)1.

EXHIBITED: London, Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1861, no.216 (‘In Vintage Time’); London, Walker’s Galleries, 48th Annual Exhibition of Early English Water-Colours, 1952, no.86 (as The End of Day).

Samuel Palmer’s only artistic training came in the drawing lessons he took as a youth, and it is due largely to a number of early encounters with other artists that his style developed. In 1822 he met John Linnell and, through him, was introduced to William Blake two years later; both artists were to be formative influences on the young artist. Palmer’s devotion to landscape is evident from his earliest works, and by the second half of the 1820s he had begun to produce richly worked scenes of the countryside treated as a kind of mysterious, fruitful and dreamlike paradise. This ‘visionary’ approach to the pastoral English landscape found its fullest expression when Palmer was living in the village of Shoreham in Kent, where he had settled in 1826. The paintings and drawings of the Shoreham period, in the late 1820s and early 1830s, are regarded as the peak of Palmer’s early career. In the mid-1830s the artist began travelling further afield, to Devon, Somerset and North Wales. Following his marriage in 1837, and a two year honeymoon in Italy, his work became distinguished by a brightness and clarity inspired by the light of the Mediterranean. The landscapes that he produced over the next three decades, executed in watercolour, gouache, chalk, pencil and gum arabic, are among his most appealing works. In 1843 Palmer was elected an Associate of the Old Water-Colour Society, becoming a full member in 1854, and although he exhibited there annually, he found few patrons and worked as a drawing-master to supplement his income. In 1863, however, he received his most important commission, for a series of large watercolours illustrating Milton’s poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, from the solicitor Leonard Rowe Valpy, on which he worked until his death.

This fine watercolour, depicting a peasant family returning home at sunset with a cart laden with grapes, was exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society in 1861. It may have been intended as a pair with the following sheet of the same size, In the Chequered Shade, which was also exhibited at the OWCS that year. The format of these watercolours is what Palmer called the ‘little long’, which was his preferred size for the works of his middle and later years, as it allowed the artist to portray a panoramic landscape.

The romantic Italianate landscape and strong colours, as well as the stippled effect and the extensive pencil underdrawing, are all typical of Palmer’s mature work, as is the rich technique. As William Vaughan has noted of Palmer’s works of this period, ‘He seems to have considered new ways of extending the power and range of watercolour...He regularly added body colour and chalk to give his paints density...By these methods he was able to retain a remarkable amount of purity of tone and delicacy of detail. His concern to use the best possible materials, the most reliable of pigments, was probably necessary in order for these effects to work. All in all, Palmer’s later watercolours are remarkable for their complexity.’2

29 SAMUEL PALMER Newington 1805-1881 Redhill In the Chequered Shade Watercolour, heightened with gouache and gum arabic, over a pencil underdrawing in pencil. Indistinctly signed and dated S. PALMER / 1861 in brown ink at the lower right.

202 x 432 mm. (8 x 17 in.)

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

LITERATURE: ‘Society of Painters in Water Colors’, The Building News, 10 May 1861, p.388; A. H. Palmer, Samuel Palmer: A Memoir, London, 1882, p.87; A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher, London, 1892, [1972 ed.], p.411, no.105; Raymond Lister, Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of Samuel Palmer, New York, 1988, p.189, no.586 (as ‘Untraced since 1861’).

EXHIBITED: London, Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1861, no.133 (‘In the Chequered Shade’); London, Walker’s Galleries, 48th Annual Exhibition of Early English Water-Colours, 1952, no.85 (as Noon – Resting Time).

The title of this watercolour is taken from the 17th century English poet John Milton’s pastoral ode L’Allegro, published in 16451. Milton’s work was a constant influence on Samuel Palmer throughout his life, and his work is filled with references to images found in his poetry. (Palmer lost his mother at an early age and was raised by a nurse, who introduced him to poetry and, in particular, the works of Milton.)

In the present sheet, Palmer depicts a woman carrying an urn of water on her head at the right, while a hunting party chases a stag with attendant dogs ‘in the chequered shade’ to the left. The high viewpoint, looking down on an Italianate landscape, and the interest in effects of light and shade are typical features of Palmer’s work of the period.

Both In the Chequered Shade and In Vintage Time were among seven works sent by Palmer to the annual exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1861. As a recent biographer has noted, however, ‘At the Old Watercolour Society exhibition his works had been dismally hung. The committee excused itself by saying that his pictures were so powerful that nothing could stand against them; but the outcome was that only three of the seven works submitted had been sold. The painter was in low spirits.’2 Nevertheless, one review of the 1861 exhibition noted that ‘one of the most original and remarkable landscapists in the room is Mr. Samuel Palmer, who, besides throwing an air of poetry over the scenes he represents, peoples them with figures perfectly well drawn, and with a classic style about them which reminds one of an earlier and more learned school of landscape-art. Like the generality of the artists of our day, he is too much devoted to one peculiar aspect of atmosphere – glowing sunsets, which, however, he manages so as to produce a considerable amount of variety. “After the Storm” (183), “In Vintage Time” (216) and “Sunset in the Mountains” (226) are all examples eminently deserving the high character we have specified.’3 Another anonymous review of the OWCS exhibition made note of the present sheet in particular: ‘Mr. Samuel Palmer contributes his usual number of drawings, which still present his well-known merits; but we are happy to say on a more modified style of art. The work entitled “Distant Mountains” is not quite so good as some of the others. “The Chequered Shade” is a much more pleasing and successful production, in which the light is brilliant, broad and well distributed, fading in its vividness, and increasing in its fitfulness on the figures in the foreground.’4 Such watercolours as these not only evoke Palmer’s experiences of Italy, but also often combine elements and motifs from his travels in Shoreham, the West Country and Wales.

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

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

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

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

EXHIBITED: Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, Turner Hugo Moreau: Entdeckung der Abstraktion, 2007-2008, no.100; Lausanne, Fondation de l’Hermitage, Victor Hugo: Dessins visionnaires, 2008, no.26; Frankfurt, Städel Museum, Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst, 2012-2013, no.62; Paris, Musée d’Orsay, L’ange du bizarre: Le romantisme noir de Goya à Max Ernst, 2013, no.45.

The outstanding literary figure in 19th century France, Victor Hugo was also an accomplished and prolific draughtsman, and produced nearly three thousand drawings. Hugo began to draw seriously around 1825, but relatively little of this early work survives, and it was not until some twenty years later that he was to develop his distinctive personal graphic idiom. As a draughtsman Hugo seems to have been most productive during periods when he was writing less, as for example in 1850. Conversely, there are very few drawings from the period between 1852 and 1853, when he was engaged on a spell of intense literary activity. His drawings achieved a height of expression during the years of his long political exile from France on the Channel Islands of Jersey, where he and his family lived from 1852 to 1855, and Guernsey, where he settled in 1855 and remained until 1870. Although he often gave drawings as presents to friends and colleagues, and allowed several sheets to be reproduced as engravings, the act of drawing remained a largely private occupation for Hugo. (As he wrote in 1863, ‘these scribbles are for private use and to indulge very close friends.’) In the last ten years of Hugo’s life, however, he drew much less, a decline also mirrored in his literary output.

As a draughtsman, Hugo relied primarily on brown or black ink, with washes applied with a fluidity and transparency that allowed for striking tonal and atmospheric effects. His idiosyncratic working methods have been described by his son Charles: ‘Once paper, pen and ink-well have been brought to the table, Victor Hugo sits down and without making a preliminary sketch, without any apparent preconception, sets about drawing with an extraordinarily sure hand not the landscape as a whole but any old detail. He will begin his forest with the branch of a tree, his town with a gable, his gable with a weather vane, and, little by little, the entire composition will emerge from the blank paper with the precision and clarity of a photographic negative subjected to the chemical preparation that brings out the picture. That done, the draftsman will ask for a cup and will finish off his landscape with a light shower of black coffee. The result is an unexpected and powerful drawing that is often strange, always personal, and recalls the etchings of Rembrandt and Piranesi.’1

actual size

Another vivid description of Hugo’s working methods was provided by his grandson, Georges Hugo: ‘I sometimes saw him drawing: they were only quick little sketches, landscapes, caricatures, profiles drawn at a single stroke, which he made on any little scrap of paper. He scattered the ink haphazardly, crushing the goose quill which grated and spattered trails of ink. Then he sort of kneaded the black blot which became a castle, a forest, a deep lake or a stormy sky; he delicately wet the barb of his pen with his lips and with it burst a cloud from which rain fell down onto the wet paper; or he used it to indicate precisely the mists blurring the horizon.’2 Hugo also experimented with different techniques and media, including inkblots (taches), folded paper, stencilled cut-outs, gold leaf and impressions taken from various objects, including leaves and lace.

The present sheet was drawn during Victor Hugo’s fifteen-year period of exile in Guernsey, when he came to be fascinated by the majestic vistas of sea and sky that he saw around him. As he wrote in 1859, in a letter to a friend, ‘I need these periods of rest sometimes in my solitude, in face of the ocean, amid this sombre scenery which has a supreme attraction for me and which draws me toward the dazzling apparitions of the infinite.’ The rugged coastline and rock formations of Guernsey provided Hugo with a variety of dramatic motifs for his drawings. He would spend a considerable amount of time wandering over the island, at all times of the day and night, and took a large number of photographs of the scenery, with the intention of publishing a book of them in collaboration with his son Charles.

Hugo’s favourite subject was always the sea. As Pierre Georgel has noted of the drawings made during his stay in the Channel Islands, ‘his visual world became enriched almost to the point of obsession with the spectacle of the sea. But this grandiose, monotonous horizon never changed. As a result, the graphic work moved further and further away from the real in an attempt to catch the kaleidoscope of sea, rock and cloud, or to reflect the ebb and flow of an imaginary world in which shapes could form and dissolve in an instant.’3 Even after his return to Paris in 1870, Hugo continued to visit Guernsey, and to produce drawings inspired by its bold and dramatic landscape.

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

31 HILAIRE-GERMAIN-EDGAR DEGAS Paris 1834-1917 Paris A Striding Youth: Figure Study for The Daughter of Jephthah Pencil on buff paper. Stamped with the Degas vente stamp (Lugt 658) in red at the lower right. Inscribed with the Durand-Ruel stock number Pb 1920 in pencil on the verso. Further inscribed Ph 1920 in pencil on the verso.

317 x 244 mm. (12 1/ 2 x 9 5/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, Paris; The fourth Vente Degas, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 24 July 1919, lot 117d1 (bt. Denis); Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye; By descent to a private collection, Paris; Acquired by a private collection, Paris; Kate Ganz, New York; Acquired from her by Marcia Riklis, New York, in 2004.

LITERATURE: Annette Haudiquet et al., De Delacroix à Marquet: Donation Senn-Foulds. Dessins, 2011, pp.140-141, under no.57, illustrated fig.47; Olivier Meslay and William B. Jordan, ed., Mind’s Eye: Masterworks on Paper from David to Cézanne, exhibition catalogue, Dallas, 2014, p.104, under no.46.

On his return from Italy in 1859, Edgar Degas began work on an ambitious, large painting of The Daughter of Jephthah, a subject taken from the Old Testament, which he probably planned to show at the Salon the following year. The artist’s first large history painting, and indeed the largest and most ambitious canvas he was ever to paint, The Daughter of Jephthah (fig.1) was left incomplete in 1861 and remained in Degas’s studio until his death. Sold at the first Degas studio sale in 1918, the painting is today in the collection of the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts2.

As seen from his extensive notes on the composition and development of the painting, as recorded in several of his notebooks, Degas intended The Daughter of Jephthah to incorporate a broad range of particular influences, from the artists of the Italian Renaissance through to Delacroix. As Christopher Lloyd has noted of the composition of the painting, ‘The Daughter of Jephthah is extremely agitated and full of expression. The emotional tenor of the picture, its spirited rhythms and its intense colours reveal the impact of Delacroix on Degas, whose extensive commentary on the picture in his Notebooks...refers not only to Delacroix but also to Mantegna and Veronese. (‘Look for Mantegna’s spirit and love of Veronese’s colouring’, he writes).’3 Theodore Reff underscores in particular the significance of Delacroix in Degas’s conception of the painting: ‘the exuberant style of the picture as a whole and the turbulent, impassioned

1.

character of the drawings for it likewise reveal the Romantic artist’s influence. This “vibrant and vigorous style” derived from Delacroix is, in fact, precisely what characterizes Degas’s draftsmanship at this moment in his development.’4 There are more preparatory drawings known for The Daughter of Jephthah than for almost any other painting by the artist. These include thirteen compositional drawings, over fifty individual figure studies, six landscape sketches and a number of extensive marginal notes and colour indications in seven of the artist’s notebooks. Several composition studies for the painting are found in Degas’s notebooks, and ‘from the mêlée presented by these composition studies he isolates individual figures and clarifies their poses in the painting – a process that forces him to make final decisions.’5 The present sheet would appear to be a study for the youth holding or restraining the horse near the centre of the composition, immediately behind the (partially painted) leaping dog in the foreground.

This figure, painted all in a dark blue, is not fully realized in the painting and is therefore difficult to see, but appears to move vigorously to the left, facing the horse, and to lean against its neck and chest in order to restrain it6. The pose of the boy in the present sheet, which is hardly legible in the painting, is more clearly evident in a number of Degas’s compositional studies for the painting, and in particular in a pencil drawing (fig.2) in a New York private collection7.

A closely comparable drawing of a striding male nude (fig.3), possibly intended for the same figure in The Daughter of Jephthah, is today in the collection of Mary Ralph Lowe in Fort Worth8, and was sold together with the present sheet and two other studies at the fourth auction of works from the artist’s studio in 1918. A study for what appears to be the same figure also appears in one of Degas’s notebooks9.

The large number of drawings by Degas that are related to the painting of The Daughter of Jephthah establish the fact that, although the final canvas is unfinished, the artist must have been working on the composition for some time. As Jean Sutherland Boggs has noted of the individual figure studies for The Daughter of Jephthah, such as the present sheet, ‘They show Degas’s increasingly powerful handling of the human body in movement...A quality of haste even emerges from the movement, the hesitancy and the repetitions in the penciled lines.’10 Several of the figure drawings associated with the painting – many of which were discovered in the artist’s studio after his death – depict figures that do not appear in the final work.

A number of compositional and figure studies for The Daughter of Jephthah are today in the collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne André Malraux in Le Havre11. Three figure studies for the painting are in the Smith College Museum of Art12, and other figure drawings are in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and elsewhere.

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3.

32 ADOLPH VON MENZEL Breslau 1815-1905 Berlin The Head of a Bearded Man Gouache and pastel on brown paper, laid down on board. Signed and dated Ad. Menzel 28 Nov. / 61 in red gouache at the upper right.

434 x 314 mm. (17 1/ 8 x 12 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Among the contents of the artist’s Berlin studio at his death in 1905; By descent to the artist’s sister, Emilie Krigar-Menzel, Berlin; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 9 October 1997, lot 51 (bt. Krugier); Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva.

LITERATURE: Hugo von Tschudi, Adolph von Menzel: Abbildungen seiner Gemälde und Studien, Munich, 1905-1906, pp.276-277, no.405 (‘Kopf eines kahlköpfigen Juden mit Vollbart’); Alexander Dückers, ed., Linie, Licht und Schatten: Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne KrugierPoniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 1999, pp.210-211, no.98; Philip Rylands, ed., The Timeless Eye: Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1999, pp.242-243, no.114 (entry by Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher); Tomás Llorens, ed., Miradas sin tiempo: Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Colección Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 2000, pp.276-277, no.122; Klaus Albert Schröder and Christine Ekelhart, ed., Goya bis Picasso: Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Vienna, 2005, pp.114-115, no.43; Christiane Lange and Roger Diederen, ed., Das ewige Auge – Von Rembrandt bis Picasso: Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Munich, 2007, pp.226-227, no.105; Huon Mallalieu, ‘Beauty and the beast’, Country Life, 26 February 2014, p.103, fig.5.

EXHIBITED: Berlin, Königliche National-Galerie, Ausstellung von Werken Adolph von Menzels, 1905, no.293 (‘Kopf eines Juden’); Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Linie, Licht und Schatten: Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no.98; Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, The Timeless Eye: Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne KrugierPoniatowski Collection, 1999, no.114; Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin tiempo: Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Colección Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no.122; Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La passion du dessin: Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2002; Vienna, Albertina, Goya bis Picasso: Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no.43; Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das ewige Auge – Von Rembrandt bis Picasso: Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no.105.

Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel began his career working in his father’s lithography shop in Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) and later in Berlin, where his family moved in 1830. A brief period of study at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1833 seems to have been the sum total of his formal training, and he is thought to have taught himself how to paint. At the outset of his career he worked as an illustrator, his activity in this field perhaps best exemplified by a series of some four hundred designs for wood engravings produced to accompany Franz Kugler’s History of Frederick the Great, published in instalments between 1840 and 1842. During the late 1840s and 1850s he was occupied mainly with a cycle of history paintings illustrating the life of Frederick the Great. In 1861 he received his most important official commission, a painting of The Coronation of King William I at Königsberg, on which he worked for four years. In the following decade, his lifelong interest in scenes of contemporary life culminated in what is arguably his masterpiece as a painter; the large canvas of The Iron Rolling Mill, painted between 1872 and 1875 and immediately purchased by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

The last three decades of his career found Menzel firmly established as one of the leading artists in Germany, a prominent figure in Prussian society and the recipient of numerous honours, including elevation to the nobility in 1898. In the late 1880s he began to abandon painting in oils in favour of gouaches, although old age meant that these in turn were given up around the turn of the century. Yet he never stopped drawing in pencil and chalk, always able to find expression for his keen powers of observation. A retrospective exhibition of Menzel’s work, held at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin a few weeks after the artist’s death in 1905, included more than 6,400 drawings and almost three hundred watercolours, together with 129 paintings and 250 prints.

A supremely gifted draughtsman, Menzel was equally adept at watercolour, pastel, gouache and chalk.

(He was also able to draw with either hand, although he seems to have favoured his left.) An immensely prolific artist – over four thousand drawings by him, together with seventy-seven sketchbooks, are in the collection of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin alone – it is said that Menzel was never without a sketchbook or two in his pocket. His friend Paul Meyerheim described the artist’s appearance: ‘In his overcoat he had eight pockets, which were partially filled with sketchbooks, and he could not comprehend that there are artists who make the smallest outings without having a sketchbook in their pocket.’1 Before beginning a painting he would make many separate studies of individual figures or objects, although he only rarely produced compositional sketches. As his fellow artist Max Liebermann recalled, Menzel ‘made no cartoon, no sketch or any other preparatory work for his painting besides his drawings. Likewise, he never painted after nature in his canvas but only with the aid of his drawn studies.’2 Menzel was widely admired as a draughtsman by his contemporaries, both in Germany and abroad, and Edgar Degas, for one, is known to have owned at least one drawing by him.

Drawn on the 28th of November 1861, this fine character study of is one of a handful of Jewish subjects for which the artist found models in the Mühlendamm area of Berlin. Indeed, the present sheet may depict one of the city folk who would often wait outside Menzel’s studio for the chance to sit for the artist, in return for a small payment. ‘Before a dark background, posed erectly with his eyes looking earnestly at the viewer, the man’s head rises from a green garment with a high collar.’3 The unknown sitter of this portrait is sympathetically depicted by the artist, and is, despite a degree of informality, imbued with more than a little dignity. This large sheet is drawn in an opaque gouache; Menzel’s preferred medium from the beginning of the 1860s onwards. As has been noted of the artist’s work of this period, ‘During the 1860s Menzel developed a technique using a combination of watercolour and gouache which was increasingly important for his work. He would apply the paint in several layers, occasionally scraping out or rubbing in the colours…his work in this medium…can look deceptively like oil painting but on a very small scale.’4 The identification of the subject of this drawing as a Jewish man dates back to the period of its ownership by the artist’s sister Emilie, when it was described as such in Hugo von Tschudi’s 1905 catalogue of her collection. Character studies of bearded Jews occur infrequently in Menzel’s corpus of drawing and paintings, mainly in the 1850s, when he produced a series of portraits of elderly Jewish men. As the Menzel scholar Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher has described these works, ‘Their faces are earnest, characterized by dignity and the contemplation of old age.’5 A painting of an analogous subject, datable to 1856, is in the Städtische Kunsthalle in Mannheim6, while an oil sketch of a similar Jewish type is in the collection of the Museum Georg Schäfer in Schweinfurt7. The subject of the present sheet is, however, arguably less overtly ‘Jewish’ in appearance than these earlier works, and there is little to identify him as such.

This gouache study was among the works retained by the artist’s sister, Emilie Krigar-Menzel, when she came to sell most of her collection of works by her brother to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

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

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

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

In 1820, while studying at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paul Huet met and befriended a fellow student, the young Englishman Richard Parkes Bonington. Huet learned the English manner of watercolour technique from Bonington, and his rapid command of the medium has meant that works by the two artists have often been confused. At around the same time, Huet also came into contact with another young painter, Eugène Delacroix, who shared a studio in Paris with Bonington, and had admired Huet’s watercolours in a shop window. Another early influence were the landscape paintings of John Constable, which were a revelation to the young artist when they were first exhibited in France at the Salon of 1824. Following his own Salon debut in 1827, Huet accompanied Bonington on a sketching tour of the Normandy coast.

This was to be the first of his extensive travels throughout France, and the artist was to return often to the regions of Normandy, the Auvergne and Provence, as well as forests of Compiègne and Fontainebleau, closer to Paris. Wherever he went, Huet made numerous drawings and sketches in pencil, pastel and watercolour, all imbued with a remarkable feeling for light and colour. Much of Huet’s work remained with his family after his death in 1869, with only a part of this studio inventory dispersed at auction in Paris in 1878.

This fine watercolour may be dated to the summer of 1862, when Paul Huet made his first and only visit to England. As might be expected, given his abiding interest in the English school of landscape painting and drawing, he made a number of sketches on his travels which, apart from London and Windsor, included visits to Tunbridge Wells, Salisbury and Stonehenge. He also visited Devon and Cornwall in southwestern England, a region he particularly admired, and which reminded him of his beloved Normandy. As the artist wrote to his wife in a letter of July 1862, ‘We are in the true Cornwall, a picturesque land, the ancient Brittany that is for England what French Brittany is to Normandy...Charming details, incredible freshness, a general expression of all of England and many similarities with Normandy and the entrance to Brittany, here is what you’ll find.’1 During his visit to Cornwall Huet was based in the town of Liskeard, from which he made a number of sketching trips. His travels took him as far west as Land’s End, where he made several watercolour views of some of the distinctive sights of the surrounding area, such as the balancing Logan Rock at Treen and this view of a tall, narrow rock arch known as the Song of the Sea (‘Zawn Pyg’), cut into a sea cliff on an isolated beach at Nanjizal cove, about two kilometres from Land’s End. Huet must have visited the site, which remains inaccessible by road today, by walking along the coast path from Land’s End in the north.

A related watercolour of the same view, seen from slightly further down the beach, was exhibited in London in 19692. Among other comparable watercolours by Huet from this trip to Devon and Cornwall is a view of The Waterfall at Lydford, today in a New York private collection and a promised gift to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.3

34 CHARLES JOSHUA CHAPLIN Les Andelys 1825-1891 Paris A Young Girl: Study for L’Amour vaincu Black and white chalk, with stumping, and pastel. Signed Ch Chaplin in pencil at the lower centre.

191 x 147 mm. (7 1/ 2 x 5 3/4 in.)

Born to a French mother and an English father, Charles Chaplin worked in France for his entire career and, though he continued to retain his English citizenship until 1886, considered himself French and spoke very little English. Chaplin exhibited at the Salon from 1845 onwards, showing portraits, landscapes, genre subjects and floral still lifes. By the late 1850s he had begun to work in an elegant and graceful neoRococo manner reminiscent of such earlier artists as Boucher, Fragonard and Chardin. (As he once wrote to a friend, ‘If I would, I would lose myself in the Past. I have a particular love for the charming French school of the last century.’1) Known for elegant portraits of young women and children, as well as allegorical or mythological genre paintings, all painted with a lightness and delicacy of touch, Chaplin delighted in depicting woman and young girls in carefree moments. The paintings of this ‘Peintre des Grâces’, praised by the writers Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier and the painter Edouard Manet, were very popular throughout the Second Empire, and were sought after by collectors. As has been noted, ‘Chaplin could portray all the charms of feminine beauty to their greatest advantage, achieving a sort of innocent sensuality that, at its best, fell short of being over-sentimental, and was never vulgar.’2 Among his fervent admirers were Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie, for whom he worked. Chaplin’s studio was one of the few in Paris that welcomed women as students, and among his pupils were Louise Abbéma, Madeleine Lemaire, Eva Gonzalès and Mary Cassatt.

Apart from the annual Salons in Paris, Chaplin regularly sent paintings to the Royal Academy in London.

His reputation also spread to America, as can be seen in a brief article in an American art journal of 1879: ‘“The De Musset of painting – the painter par excellence of youth.” are terms which have been applied to Charles Chaplin, a popular French artist, who has long been before the public, and whose works are always welcome on both sides of the Atlantic...At the Chicago Exhibition, held during the summer of 1878, a fine work by Chaplin...was to be seen in the art gallery, much commended for its extreme delicacy in conception, refinement in color and grace in treatment.’3 The present sheet is related, in reverse, to a small allegorical painting by Chaplin entitled L’Amour vaincu, which depicts a young woman gazing down at three winged putti who stand or kneel before her in penitence, after spilling a basket of flowers. The composition which was reproduced as a small print (fig.1) by Boussod Valadon & Cie., as was a pendant composition, entitled L’Amour vainqueur. A pair of paintings of both compositions were sold at auction in 19814.

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actual size

35 ALOYS ZÖTL Freistadt 1803-1887 Eferding A Caspian Turtle Watercolour. Laid down. Signed and dated Alois Zötl fecit am 5 Februar 1881 in black ink at the lower right. Inscribed Amphibien Taf.17 in black ink at the lower left, and titled Die caspische Schildkröte Testudo caspica. in black ink in the bottom margin. Numbered 9 in pencil in the lower right margin.

325 x 445 mm. (11 3/4 x 17 1/ 2 in.) [image] 439 x 546 mm. (17 1/4 x 21 1/ 2 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Possibly anonymous sale (‘Zötl (Aloys) (1803-1887) (Aquarelles provenant de l’atelier)’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Maurice Rheims], 2 July 1957, part of lot 201 (as Tortue clemmys, dated 5 February 1881, measuring 32 x 44 cm.).

From 1831 until his death in 1887, the obscure Austrian dyer and amateur artist Aloys Zötl produced an extensive series of large and beautifully drawn watercolours of exotic animals, known as the Bestiarium. This massive project was to be his life’s work, although its purpose remains unknown. The watercolours of the Bestiarium, characterized by a brilliant technique and rich colouring, do not seem to have ever been reproduced in Zötl’s lifetime, either as prints or in the form of a book. While the animals are generally depicted with a high degree of accuracy, they are given added symbolism in the way in which the artist has depicted them on the page. Most of the watercolours show the animals in some form of natural habitat, although this at times seems to verge on the imaginary. It is not known if these spectacular watercolours were the result of a commission or – as is perhaps most likely, given the fact that they were part of a project that seems to have lasted for over fifty years – simply an astonishing, and lifelong, labour of love. Certainly all of the watercolours remained together after the artist’s death, after a long illness, in October 1887. His last watercolour, a study of exotic seashells, was dated only eighteen days before his death.

Aloys Zötl’s work remained completely unknown until a large group of his animal and natural history watercolours, numbering 320 sheets, was sold in two auctions in Paris in 1955 and 1956. Writing shortly after the first sale of 150 watercolours from the Bestiarium in December 19551, at which he purchased eleven works, the writer André Breton likened Zötl’s work to that of Henri Rousseau, and identified a distinct Surrealist sensibility in much of his oeuvre. As he noted, ‘Lacking any biographical details about the artist, one can only indulge one’s fantasies in imagining the reasons which might have induced this workman from Upper Austria, a dyer by profession, to undertake so zealously between 1832 and 1887 the elaboration of the most sumptuous bestiary ever seen. It would almost seem as though Zötl’s vision, trained professionally to detect the most subtle colours and tones, had endowed him with a mental prism functioning as an instrument of second-sight and revealing to him in succession, back to its most distant origins, the animal kingdom which remains such an enigmatic aspect in each of our lives and which plays such an essential role in the symbolism of the unconscious mind. ’2 Zötl does not seem to have travelled much beyond his home in the village of Eferding in Upper Austria, and it is thought that most of his watercolours must have been derived from his close study of the extensive library of published works of zoology, natural history, ethnography and travel which he owned.

The Caspian turtle, or striped-neck terrapin (Mauremys caspica), is a semiaquatic turtle found throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Five further depictions of various species of turtles, bearing dates between 1880 and 1882, were included in the first auction of watercolours from Zötl’s studio in 19553, while two others appeared in a second sale the following year4. Other large watercolours of turtles, dated 1861, 1867 and 1880 as part of the Amphibien series, are illustrated in a recent monograph on the artist5. A comparable study of a Florida Softshell Turtle, dated 31 August 1881 and, like the present sheet, showing the creature isolated from any landscape background, was acquired by Breton in 1955, and recently appeared at auction in Paris6.

36 LÉON AUGUSTIN LHERMITTE Mont-Saint-Père 1844-1925 Paris Ploughing (Le Labourage) Charcoal and pencil, with framing lines in pencil. Signed L. Lhermitte in pencil at the lower left.

393 x 295 mm. (15 1/ 2 x 11 5/ 8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: With Librarie Artistique H. Launette et Cie., Paris, in 1887; James Francis Trezza, New York, in 2001; Private collection, New York.

LITERATURE: André Theuriet, La Vie rustique, Paris, 1888 [1899 ed.], illustrated p.65; ‘Un Domino’, Le Gaulois, 7 September 1887; L’Avenir Nationale, 9 September 1887; Le Progrès de l’Aisne, 9 September 1887; La République française, 9 September 1887; M. O., Le Monde illustré, 12 September 1887; Arthur Pougin, ‘L’exposition de dessins de Léon Lhermitte’, L’Estafette, 22 September 1887; Marcel Charlot, Paysages et paysans, Paris, 1898, illustrated p.8; René Bazin, ‘Le paysan de France’, Les Annales, no.1600, p.178; Monique Le Pelley Fonteny, Leon Augustin Lhermitte (1844-1925): Catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1991, pp.458-459, no.770 (as location unknown).

EXHIBITED: Paris, Librarie Artistique H. Launette et Cie., Fusains de Léon Lhermitte, November 1887.

ENGRAVED: By Clément Bellenger for La Vie rustique.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte studied with Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran at the École Imperiale du Dessin, and exhibited for the first time at the Salon of 1864, winning a third-class medal ten years later for his painting The Harvest. It was also in 1874 that Lhermitte spent several months working in Brittany. He was to return frequently over the next five years, during which time he showed Breton subjects at the Salon. In 1882 he achieved a considerable measure of success with the exhibition of his painting The Paying of the Harvesters, which was purchased by the State. From this point onwards he began to concentrate on depictions of rural and peasant life, centred on his native town of Mont-Saint-Père, on the banks of the Marne river in Picardy. In 1887 Lhermitte signed a contract with the gallery Boussod, Valadon & Cie. which gave them the exclusive rights to his paintings and pastels, though not his drawings.

He enjoyed considerable commercial and critical success throughout his long career, and his paintings and drawings of daily life in the countryside were especially popular with British and American collectors.

As one scholar has noted, ‘Lhermitte fabricated a serene and peaceful image of rustic life that competently conveyed an idyllic vision to his highly receptive audience.’1 In 1890 he began exhibiting annually at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, where he was given the honour of a retrospective exhibition in 1924, the year before his death. Lhermitte left a thorough record of his output of paintings, watercolours, drawings and pastels in notebooks that he kept between 1863 and 1897.

As a draughtsman, Lhermitte produced mainly pastels and charcoal drawings, for which he was very highly regarded. The former were much sought-after, and were exhibited yearly at the Société des Pastellistes and sold through his dealers Boussod & Valadon. His charcoal drawings were also exhibited widely as independent works, in both France and London, and were much praised by critics. As one anonymous writer noted in a review of the third Black and White Exhibition at the Dudley Gallery in London in 1875, when nine charcoal drawings by Lhermitte were exhibited: ‘we should be disposed to put Léon Lhermitte at the head of all those who exhibit here for the most potent secrets of strength and command of effect in black and white...to such qualities in his black and white, as delicacy of draughtsmanship, exquisiteness and sweetness of effect, and refinement of expression, Lhermitte’s work makes no pretension. It assails the imagination by a rude, massive, and primitive strength akin to that which impresses us in the monuments and buildings, the life and faith, of that Brittany from which he derives most of his subjects, and in which his genius seems most at home. How eminently favourable this stern simplicity is to effect, in such materials as chalk and charcoal...It is impossible to forget Lhermitte’s work. He is at once the Millet and Jules Breton of Black and White.’2

The Lhermitte scholar Monique Le Pelley Fonteny has written of the artist that, ‘In his drawings he achieved a masterful subtlety between light and shadow , white and black, about which Théodore de Banville once remarked: “In his hands charcoal and black chalk are like magical tools.”’3 Lhermitte’s charcoal drawings, or fusains, were avidly collected in France, England and America, and were also much admired by other artists, notably Vincent Van Gogh, who noted of Lhermitte in a letter to his brother Theo, written in September 1885, ‘He’s a master of the figure. He’s able to do what he likes with it – conceiving the whole neither from the colour nor from the local tone, but rather proceeding from the light – as Rembrandt did – there’s something astonishingly masterly in everything he does – in modelling, above all things, he utterly satisfies the demands of honesty...When I think about Millet or about Lhermitte – then – I find modern art as great – as Michelangelo and Rembrandt – the old infinite, the new infinite too - the old genius, the new genius.’4 Drawn in November 1886, the present sheet is one of a series of 128 charcoal drawings5 commissioned from Lhermitte to serve as illustrations for the French poet and novelist André Theuriet’s book La Vie rustique, published in 1888, and in an English translation in 1896. Theuriet had originally conceived the work as a collaboration with the painter Jules Bastien-Lepage, and on the latter’s death in 1884, he turned to Lhermitte. La Vie rustique was a detailed description of peasant life, and also served as an elegy for the daily rituals of rustic life, which the author feared would be lost with the advent of industrialisation and modernity. As Theuriet noted in the introduction to the book, ‘We have tried religiously to collect the relics of the customs, the faces, and landscapes which are likely to disappear, and we shall be abundantly rewarded for our efforts if we have thus been able to preserve to posterity the picture of a world and a nature which they may never know.’6 The scholar John House adds that, ‘André Theuriet’s La vie rustique, published in 1888, was a lavish presentation of a way of life that he saw as disappearing. After a brief invocation of the harshness of peasant labour, Theuriet turned to a paean to the ‘charm’ and ‘picturesque qualities’ that artists and poets found in the countryside. His book was a monument to what he saw as the imminent loss of this lifestyle, already foreshadowed by the invasion of industry into the environs of Paris, ‘diminished, vulgarised, polluted by the factories’. As he presents it, though, Theuriet seems to be mourning the loss of a mythic image rather than of any social reality.’7 This study for Ploughing (Le Labourage) from La Vie rustique is a superb example of Lhermitte’s charcoal drawings from the height of his career. The composition is derived from that of another, slightly larger fusain, horizontal in orientation, that the artist had produced a year earlier to illustrate the month of March8; part of a series of twelve drawings representing the months of the year that were published in Le Monde illustré in 1885. Both the present sheet and the horizontal composition of the previous year were drawn at the farm of Ru Chailly in the village of Fossoy, near his native Mont-Saint-Père in Picardy, where Lhermitte often worked. The artist later returned to this composition, albeit in a horizontal format, some twenty-five years later, in a large painting of 1911 that was exhibited at the Salon des Beaux-Arts of that year9.

All 128 of Lhermitte’s drawings for La Vie rustique, including the present sheet, were exhibited in November 1887 at the Parisian offices of the publishers H. Launette et Cie., who retained ownership of the drawings. Only a handful of the fusains by Lhermitte for La Vie rustique have appeared on the art market in recent years, including Haymaking (Fenaison), which was sold at auction in 199210, Picking Lily of the Valley (Cueillette du muguet)11, which appeared at auction in 1996, and At the Well (À la fontaine)12, sold at auction in 2005. Perhaps the closest in style and composition to the present sheet, however, is the charcoal drawing for The Sower (Le semeur)13, which was sold at auction in New York in 2000 and again in 2008.

One of the finest of Lhermitte’s series of illustrations for La Vie rustique, the present sheet serves to underline Richard Thomson’s apposite comments on the artist: ‘His draughtsmanship has a sureness, a probity even, which gives his compositions a resolute authority...his pastels and justly celebrated fusains are handled with an impressive sensitivity to light and atmosphere.’14

37 ALBERT DUBOIS-PILLET Saint-Lô 1846-1890 Paris Landscape at La Grande Jatte (Pré en contre-bas) Oil on canvas. Signed duBois Pillet in brown ink at the lower right.

27 x 18.9 cm. (10 5/ 8 x 7 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Félix Fénéon, Paris, by 1886; Private collection, in 1967; Régine and Guy Dulon, Beauchamp.

LITERATURE: Félix Fénéon, ‘L’Impressionnisme aux Tuileries’, L’Art Moderne de Bruxelles, 19 September 1886, reprinted in Joan U. Halperin, ed., Félix Fénéon, Oeuvres plus que complètes, Geneva, 1970, Vol.I, pp.54-55; Lily Bazalgette, Albert Dubois-Pillet: sa vie et son oeuvre (1846-1890), Villejuif, 1976, p.98, pp.162-163, pp.170-171 (as Pré en contre-bas and Paysage de la Grande Jatte), not illustrated.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Pavillon de la Ville de Paris, Troisième exposition de la Société des Artistes Indépendants, March-May 1887, no.153 (as Pré en contre-bas, lent by Fénéon); Paris, Pavillon de la Ville de Paris, ‘Rétrospective Dubois-Pillet’, in Septième exposition de la Société des Artistes Indépendants, March-April 1891, no.434 (as Pré en contre-bas, lent by Fénéon); Paris, Galerie Braun et Cie., Le NéoImpressionnisme, February-March 1932, no.11 (as Paysage, lent by Fénéon); Paris, Galerie Hervé, Quelques tableaux des maîtres néo-impressionnistes, May-June 1967, no.14 (as Paysage à la Grande Jatte); Kochi, The Museum of Art, and elsewhere, Georges Seurat et le Néo-Impressionnisme 1885-1905, 202, no.32 (as Le pré en contrebas).

A career army officer and a self-taught artist, Albert Dubois (later Dubois-Pillet) was the only amateur painter among the Neo-Impressionists, and one of the oldest members of the group. After having two still life paintings accepted at the official Salons in 1877 and 1879, Dubois-Pillet found his work rejected for the next four years. In 1884, therefore, he joined the group of artists who established the Société des Artistes Indépendants, for which he drafted the constitution. He became a close friend of Georges Seurat, and was among the first artists to adopt the pointilliste manner of landscape painting. (As DuboisPillet said of the younger artist, ‘Seurat, who trained me, I owe him everything! His sense of order, of discipline, I should say, immediately made a profound impression on me.’1) He was also one of the first artists to apply pointillist principles to portraiture as well as landscape. Excluded (at the insistence of Degas) from the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, Dubois-Pillet contributed ten paintings to the Salon des Indépendants that year, and a further nine works the following year. He remained closely associated with the Artistes Indépendants, exhibiting regularly with them as well as with the Belgian avant-garde group Les XX in Brussels in 1888 and 1890.

In 1887 Dubois-Pillet left the army for a time, and was able to concentrate fully on his career as a painter.

The only one-man exhibition of his work to be held in his lifetime, including thirteen paintings and four drawings, took place at the La Revue Indépendante in 1888. In 1889 he rejoined the military and was posted to Le Puy-en-Velay as commander of the local gendarmerie, dying there of smallpox in 1890, aged just forty-three. His mature career as an artist had lasted just five years. The following year a room was devoted to a posthumous exhibition of sixty-four of his works – including the present painting – at the Salon des Indépendants. Much of the artist’s output was subsequently lost in a fire, with the result that, by comparison with his most of his Neo-Impressionist colleagues, paintings and drawings by DuboisPillet remain quite rare today.

Views along the Seine and Marne rivers were among Dubois-Pillet’s favourite subjects. The island of La Grande Jatte, just outside Paris on the Seine, between the bridges at Courbevoie and Asnières, was a fashionable spot that many Parisians visited on weekends. It was also popular with artists at the end of the 19th century, and was painted by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Vincent Van Gogh, Charles Angrand and Albert Gleizes, among others. Certainly the best-known work to be painted there, however, was Seurat’s monumental pointillist canvas A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, painted between 1884 and 1886 and today in the Art Institute of Chicago. While Seurat was working on the large painting in his studio, he showed it to only a handful of colleagues, notably DuboisPillet and Paul Signac.

This small, poetic canvas of a Landscape at the Grande Jatte by Albert Dubois-Pillet was painted shortly after Seurat exhibited the huge A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the eighth Impressionist exhibition in May 1886. The first owner of the present painting was the scholar and critic Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), a champion of the Neo-Impressionist artists, who presumably acquired it directly from the artist, either as a purchase or perhaps as a gift. Fénéon was a great admirer of Dubois-Pillet’s work. As he wrote in a review of the second Salon des Indépendants of 1886, ‘M. Dubois-Pillet shows ten paintings and we know a few more. His slightly blond vision lends to his oils an astounding pastel delicacy. A diffused, amber, lucid light imbues the landscapes with convincing sky colour and receding distances.’2 In an article published a few months later, Fénéon wrote at length about this painting: ‘In the Pré en contre-bas (July 1886) the pale and intense summer sky of M. Dubois-Pillet asserts its quality through blue speckling; within this blue are sown seedlings of light orange which transmit the sun’s rays; and this combination of colours, from which white tends to be revealed, are punctuated by a pink, a complementary colour to the Veronese [green] which crests the line of the trees. From a couple of steps away, the eye no longer perceives the brushwork: the pink, the orange and the blue are composed on the retina, coalesced in a vibrant chorus, and the sensation of the sun imposes itself: indeed, it is known – from the experiments of [James Clerk] Maxwell, the measurements of N.-O. [Ogden] Rood – that the optical mix creates luminosities that are much more intense than the blending of the pigments.’3

38 GUSTAV HOLMBOM Copenhagen(?) 1859-1946 Copenhagen(?)

Roskilde Fjord Oil on board. Signed with a monogram and dated 18. GH. 94, drawn with the end of the brush, at the lower left.

131 x 515 mm. (5 1/ 8 x 20 1/4 in.)

Very little is known of the Danish landscape artist Gustav Holmbom (or Holmboe), who painted mainly landscapes in and around Copenhagen and elsewhere in Denmark. Among his subjects were views at Amager Island in the Ă˜resund, the sound between Denmark and Sweden, as well as landcsapes at Lyngby lake and the forest park of Dyrehaven, north of Copenhagen and along the SusĂĽ river, southwest of the city, as well as at Vejle Fjord on the Jutland peninsula.

Painted in 1894, this oil sketch depicts a view of Roskilde Fjord, west of Copenhagen on the Danish island of Zealand. At the southern end of the long fjord is the town of Roskilde, the ancient capital of Denmark, a leading trading port and, until the 15th century and the rise of Copenhagen, the most important city in the kingdom. Itself a branch of the Isefjord, Roskilde Fjord is forty kilometres in length, and is dotted with several small islands. Around 1000 AD the inhabitants of Roskilde sunk several of their ships at Skuldelev, about halfway up Roskilde Fjord, to prevent Vikings from sailing down the fjord and raiding the town.

Another view of Roskilde Fjord by Holmbom, dated two years later in 1896, is today in the collection of the Bornholms Kunstmuseum in Gudhjem, on the Baltic island of Bornholm in Denmark1.

39 ITALIAN SCHOOL 1895 Carmela, A Young Girl in Anacapri Oil on panel. Inscribed and dated CARMELA / ANACAPRI / OCT 22 ‘95 in black ink at the lower centre.

An indistinct (panel- or frame-maker’s?) stamp on the reverse.

254 x 342 mm. (10 x 13 1/ 2 in.) [sight] Although the author of this charming oil sketch, dated the 22nd of October 1895, remains to be determined, it may be posited that it is the work of a member of the colony of foreign artists active in Capri at the time1. In the latter half of the 19th century, several artists worked on the island of Capri, in the Tyrrhenian Sea opposite the peninsula of Sorrento on the Italian mainland. As one scholar has noted, ‘The views around the island were favored by both European and American artists...Capri had become popular in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when rugged nature alone, rather than landscapes with ruins or landscapes with allusions to past art became, for the first time, desirable subjects for the artist’s brush...The island, though an established part of the tourist route by the 1850s, was not easily reached even a decade later...Capri also lacked the amenities desired by most tourists. It had just one hotel; the local population of 5,000 were all either farmers or fisherfolk; and for transportation around the island, a donkey was recommended.’2 One of the two towns on Capri, Anacapri is located on one of the highest points of the island, on the slopes of Monte Solaro. It is three kilometres from the port town of Capri, and for many centuries the only link between the two towns was a steep staircase of several hundred steps cut out of the rock along the mountain ridge. A road linking Capri to Anacapri was only completed in 1874, and the inhabitants of each town have long been deeply antagonistic towards each other.

Writing in 1853, a German visitor to the island noted that ‘The girls at Capri are not so much beautiful as graceful. Their features are frequently strange. The outlines of their remarkably low-browed faces are regular and often classical; their eyes are either black or glowing, or of a deep, sultry grey. The brown complexion, the black hair, the kerchief wound over the head, the coral necklaces and golden earrings give their faces an Oriental appearance. Often I saw, but especially in the deserted Ana-Capri, faces of wild strange beauty, and if such an one, with dishevelled hair and eyebrows black and sharply defined, raised its lightning-like, flashing eyes from the loom in some dusky chamber, it seemed to me as though I saw the face of a Danaïde...One must see these graceful figures grouped together, or watch them as they ascend the hill, bearing on their heads the quaintly-shaped water jugs, or baskets filled with soil or stones. Being so poor they earn a scanty pittance by carrying the heaviest loads. A Capriot girl is the veriest beast of burden on the island. You may see the loveliest girls from the ages of fourteen to twenty years, Gabriele, Costanziella, Mari Antonia, Concetta, Teresa, and countless others, whose faces are admired on many a painting far away in England, France, and Germany, carrying up from the beach on their dainty little heads burdens that appear almost too great for the strength of a powerful man.’3 Although the young girl depicted in this painting, who is identified as ‘Carmela’, may simply be a peasant girl whom the unknown artist paid to pose for him, Dr. Adrienne Baxter Bell has made the interesting, albeit very tentative, suggestion that she might be Carmela Salvia, known as ‘La Bella Carmelina’, who was a famous tarentella dancer on Capri. Carmela was born in 1880, in a small house on the slopes of on Monte Tiberio. As a young girl of fourteen, she was already well known all over Capri as the finest tarentella dancer on the island, and would regularly perform to visitors and tourists at an inn on Monte Tiberio.

40 MARY CASSATT Allegheny City (Pittsburgh) 1844-1926 Le Mesnil-Théribus The Head of a Baby with its Finger in its Mouth (Portrait of George Fiske Hammond) Pastel on blue paper.

523 x 472 mm. (20 5/ 8 x 18 5/ 8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Bequeathed by the artist to her housekeeper, Mathilde Valet, Paris and Château de Beaufresne, Le Mesnil-Théribus, in 1926; Her anonymous sale (‘Collection de Mademoiselle X...Oeuvres de Mary Cassatt et divers’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 30 March 1927, possibly lot 72 (‘Tête de bébé aux yeux noirs. Esquisse pastel. 26 x 27’), with the sale stamp (Lugt 2665a) near the lower left; Galerie Jacques Dubourg, Paris, by 1961; Charles E. Slatkin Galleries, New York, by 1966; By descent to Carole Slatkin, New York; David Tunick, New York; Acquired from him in 2005 by a private collector, New York.

LITERATURE: Adelyn Dohme Breeskin, Mary Cassatt: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Oils, Pastels, Watercolors, and Drawings, Washington, 1970, p.140, no.320 (where incorrectly dated c.1900).

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Jacques Dubourg, 1961; New York, Charles E. Slatkin Galleries, Drawings / Pastels / Watercolors, n.d. [1966], no.98; Washington, D.C., National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Mary Cassatt: Pastels and Color Prints, 1978, no.34.

Mary Cassatt’s use of the pastel medium is a characteristic of her entire career, and accounts for much of her finest work. She was extremely proficient as a pastellist, with her handling of the medium reflecting the profound influence of her friend and mentor Edgar Degas, and becoming more free and spontaneous as her career progressed. For Cassatt, as for Degas, pastel became her primary medium towards the end of her career, and her preferred means of expression. This charming pastel was drawn on what was to be Cassatt’s only extensive trip back to America after settling in France as a young student. Between January 1898 and April 1899, she visited friends and family, and undertook several pastel portrait commissions, in Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Connecticut. The fact that she took only pastels with her on this trip underscores the importance that the medium had for the artist. As Adelyn Breeskin has noted, ‘She completed many studies during that trip in 1898-99...Some of these pastels were well-finished portraits, but others were lively sketches done on the spur of the moment...This spontaneous response to a passing sight resulted in some of the artist’s most brilliant pastels.’1 Although Cassatt had depicted children throughout her career, these tended to be portraits of the younger members of her family. By the late 1890s, however, she had acquired something of a reputation as a specialist in child portraiture. Similarly, in her mother and child compositions of this period, emphasis began to be placed more and more on the child. As Cassatt’s biographer Nancy Mowll Mathews has pointed out, ‘In earlier examples it was the mother who was the focal point, as if it was motherhood that was being extolled...But as the century came to a close, the child began to receive more attention in Cassatt’s work. Her child models from this period have distinctive features and their expressions and gestures reveal more individualized personalities.’2 The subject of this charming pastel, George Fiske Hammond (1897-1982), was the son of Gardiner Greene Hammond Jr. and Esther Fiske Hammond of Boston. Born in March 1897, he would have been just under a year old when the present sheet was drawn the following year3. Cassatt painted three finished pastel portraits of the Hammond children in Boston in 1898, a commission she seems to have received through the recommendation of John Singer Sargent. She set up a temporary studio – from which the children’s parents were strictly excluded – in a room at the Hammond house at 261 Clarendon Street in Boston. As Mathews writes, ‘Portrait commissions were the reason Cassatt went to Boston after her stay in New York City. Although she also had many friends among the artists’ and collectors’

circles in that city, it is doubtful she would have included it on her itinerary if it had not been for a portrait commission she had taken on. This time the subjects were to be the three children of Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner Greene Hammond. The parents had their own portraits done by John Singer Sargent; but he declined the request to do the children, recommending Mary Cassatt instead. Surprisingly, Cassatt agreed, even though the family was not personally known to her, nor were they collectors of her work. The experience was an agreeable one; the Hammonds introduced her to a wide circle of collectors in Boston, and she added as a favor a third, uncommissioned portrait to the two she had contracted to do. She typically set up her drawing board in a temporary studio in the sitter’s house and endeavored to keep the children quiet by telling stories or having someone read to them.’4 All three finished pastel portraits of the Hammond children – the four year old Frances Lathrop Hammond, her younger brother Gardiner Greene Hammond III, and the baby George Fiske Hammond, who posed with his brother - remain today in the possession of their descendants5.

This pastel sketch is a study for Cassatt’s double portrait of George Fiske Hammond and his elder brother Gardiner Hammond (fig.1)6. Only one other sketch for the pastel portraits of the Hammond children is known; a study of the young Gardiner, preparatory for the solo portrait of the boy, in the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona7. Mathews’s comments on Cassatt’s portrait sketches in pastel, and the Phoenix sketch in particular, are also highly relevant to the present work: ‘The Head of Master Hammond is infused with the exuberance that characterized Cassatt’s first response to a sitter, and it clarifies her method of composing a work rapidly. She establishes the major lines of the composition at once, usually producing a radiating pattern with the face at the center of the configuration...The quick strokes of the pastel stick help to define figure and ground, as well as offering a preliminary color pattern. The face itself, obviously the most important part of the development of the work, is usually highly finished. The features are well defined, the direction of the gaze and the expectant expression captured early on. Finally, the creamy texture of the flesh is evoked through the thick application of very soft pigment, which is then rubbed and highlighted.’8 As has been noted of Mary Cassatt, ‘It is in her pastels that she gave vent to her liveliest impulse, and they constitute her most spirited work. Taken together, they seem to indicate that although she was seriously committed to her art, she often approached it with a light heart, delighting in spontaneous expression and vivid charm.’9 This pastel sketch remained in the artist’s studio until her death in 1926. In her will, Cassatt bequeathed a large number of her drawings and pastels – including the present sheet – to her housekeeper, maid and companion, Mathilde Valet, who had worked for her for forty-five years and managed the artist’s affairs in the last years of her life.

1.

41 PAUL-CÉSAR HELLEU Vannes 1859-1927 Paris Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Alice Helleu Black, red and white chalks on buff paper. Signed Helleu in black chalk at the lower right.

648 x 577 mm. (25 1/ 2 x 22 3/4 in.) [sheet] A gifted portraitist, Paul-César Helleu enjoyed considerable success throughout his career with his portraits of the elegant women of the beau monde of Paris, London and New York; works which were greatly admired by his contemporaries. As Edmond de Goncourt noted in a letter to the artist, written in February 1895, ‘Your work has for its inspiration that dear model who fills all your compositions with her dainty elegance. It is sort of a monograph on Woman, in all the infinite varied attitudes of her intimate home life. We see her with her head lazily resting on the back of an arm chair;...or seated in a reverie as she holds in her hand the foot crossed upon her knee; or, reading, while one lock of hair strays down her cheek, the “tip-tilted” nose assuming a questioning air, as with lips barely parted she seems to be happily interpreting what she reads; or else sleeping, her head sunk in the pillow, the line of her shoulders vaguely seen, her profile lost except for a glimpse of her pretty little nose, and her eye closed beneath its dark curved lashes.’1 Throughout his career, Helleu made many charming drawings and sketches – often in a distinctive trois crayons technique – of his wife and their three children, as well as relatives and family friends. This large drawing is a portrait of the artist’s favourite model, his wife Alice Guérin, whom he married in 1886, when she was sixteen years old. A woman of great beauty, with long auburn hair whose abundant tresses she would pin up on occasion, Alice was the embodiment of Helleu’s lifelong penchant for depicting elegant women. In his memoirs, the English artist William Rothenstein recalled Alice as ‘a beautiful young girl with delicate features, slight and slim fingered, of whom [Helleu] made some of his best dry points and drawings.’2 An elegant woman of reserved manners, Alice Helleu was always depicted by her husband dressed in stylish clothes, often wearing hats from the finest Parisian milliners.

The present sheet is a particularly fine and fresh example of Helleu’s practice of producing large-scale portrait drawings of his wife, executed in red, black and white chalks; a technique particularly suited to depicting her lustrous red hair. (Alice’s russet hair was a favourite motif of the artist, who also preferred red-headed models for other works, including a number of his nude studies. As the art critic Félix Fénéon once noted of Helleu, ‘like M. [Albert] Besnard he delights in the prestige of red hair’3.) Many of these intimate drawings depict Alice deep in thought, reading a book or asleep in a chair; she is also occasionally shown with one of her young children.

A number of large and stylistically comparable trois crayons drawings of a pensive Alice Helleu – most of which have the appearance of finished works of art, rather than preparatory studies or sketches – are today in private collections4. As one recent scholar has commented, ‘Many of Helleu’s best and most delightful productions are his portraits of his wife...These quick impressions, drawings or dry-points, are extraordinarily effective and have a much subtler appeal than the long series of commissioned portraits of fashionable ladies and celebrated beauties that helped bring him fame and fortune.’5 Indeed, Alice came to epitomize the beautiful, elegant women painted by the artist; a type that came to be characterized as ‘la femme Helleu’.

42 KARL HAGEMEISTER Werder 1848-1933 Werder A Winter Sky Reflected in a Lake Pastel on linen. Signed K. Hagemeister in pencil at the lower right.

780 x 1200 mm. (30 3/4 x 47 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Acquired by the grandfather of the previous owner.

Karl Hagemeister studied under the landscape painter Friedrich Preller at the Kunstschule in Weimar from 1871 onwards, but in 1873 met the Austrian painter Carl Schuch at the Hintersee in Bavaria, and soon became his pupil. Through Schuch, Hagemeister was introduced to the circle of artists around Wilhelm Liebl. With Schuch and Wilhelm Trübner, he travelled to the Low Countries in 1873-1874, and also spent some time in Italy between 1875 and 1876, after which he lived and worked in Ferch on the Schwielowsee. Accompanied by Schuch, he visited Paris in 1884, where he came into contact with the work of the Barbizon and Impressionist artists. As a result, his landscapes became less naturalistic and more overtly pictorial, with a looser technique, cooler tonalities and a more summary treatment of forms. As has been noted of the artist, ‘Absorbing the influence of Japanese art through the interpretations of the French Impressionists, and following trends in international Art Nouveau, Hagemeister developed an individual variant of Jugendstil. His pictures were composed in accordance with decorative rather than naturalistic principles, and became primarily ornamental.’1 From 1890 onwards Hagemeister lived in relative isolation in his native town of Werder, on the Havel river west of Potsdam. There he painted mainly oil and pastel landscapes of local views, as well as marine and coastal subjects, that reflect the influence of the Impressionists in their atmospheric treatment of light, shade and reflection. He was fond of certain motifs – trees, rocks, meadows and the banks of rivers or lakes – and to achieve the effects he wanted he often applied the paint or pastel on his canvases with his fingers rather than with a brush. Hagemeister exhibited widely and earned several honours, and in 1898 was a founder member of the Berlin Secession. In 1912 a large retrospective exhibition of his work, numbering almost ninety paintings, pastels and drawings, was held in Munich, Berlin and Hamburg, which confirmed his reputation as one of the finest landscape painters of his day. In 1916, however, he fell ill and largely gave up painting, although he was nominated a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1923. A large and comprehensive collection of paintings and drawings by Hagemeister is today in the Bröhan-Museum in Berlin, while a group of landscape sketches in pencil and pen is in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin.

In the first years of the 20th century, Karl Hagemeister worked extensively in pastel, applying the medium on canvas or linen, and creating landscapes on a very large scale. As he later recalled, ‘At this time, I had the basic idea to depict nature in its actual form and colour. However, since according to the notions of the day the ultimate goal of landscape painting was to depict a moving sentiment, that is when I began to paint solely in pastel for many years, since this was the best way to depict movement in air and light.’2 The artist further described the pastel delicacy that he was trying to achieve in his landscapes of this period in a letter; ‘I have come to realize that part of the breath of life is movement, and that this can only be achieved by the finest variations in the application of paint. If you paint everything in impasto, then you will not achieve movement, but instead, when you shade from impasto to the utmost delicacy, you can depict clear, distinct distance as well as vagueness in a landscape.’3 A slightly smaller variant of this composition, executed in coloured chalks on canvas, appeared at auction in Germany in 20114. Among stylistically comparable large-scale landscapes in pastel on canvas by Hagemeister are several examples in the collection of the Bröhan-Museum in Berlin, all of which may be dated to the beginning of the 20th century5. The subject of the present pastel is particularly close to that of an oil painting of a Winter Thaw of c.1904, also in the Bröhan-Museum6.

43 ODILON REDON Bordeaux 1840-1916 Paris Christ on the Cross Pastel and chalk on paper, laid down on board. Signed ODILON REDON in black ink at the lower right.

488 x 372 mm. (19 1/4 x 14 5/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: K. Nakagawa collection, Tokyo, by 1954; Anonymous sale (‘Property of a Private Family Collection’), New York, Christie’s, 7 November 2002, lot 118; Private collection, New York.

LITERATURE: Klaus Berger, Odilon Redon: Phantasie und Farbe, Cologne, 1964, p.208, no.354a; Klaus Berger, ‘Odilon Redon dans les collections japonaises’, L’Oeil, December 1965, p.33, fig.8 (where dated c.1900); Bijutsu Techo, January 1968, illustrated p.167; Mitsuhiko Kuroé, ‘Odilon Redon dans les collections japonaises – dessin, pastel et peinture à l’huile’, Bulletin Annuel du Musée National d’Art Occidental, No.3, Tokyo, 1969, p.12, no.11; Roseline Bacou, Musée du Louvre: La donation Arï et Suzanne Redon, Paris, 1984, p.17, under no.23; Kunio Motoé, Odilon Redon 1840-1916, exhibition catalogue, Tokyo, 1989, p.147, no.171; Alec Wildenstein, Odilon Redon: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint et dessiné. Vol.I: Portraits et figures, Paris, 1992, p.207, no.522.

EXHIBITED: Tokyo, Galerie Kyuryudo, Odilon Redon, 1954; Kyoto, Municipal Museum of Art, Exposition des chefs-d’oeuvre occidentaux, 1957; Kamakura, Kanagawa Museum of Modern Art, Exposition de Odilon Redon, 1973, no.22; Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere, Odilon Redon 18401916, 1989, no.171.

Bertrand-Jean (known to his family as Odilon) Redon was sent, at a very young age, to live with an old uncle at Peyrelebade, a vineyard and estate surrounded by an abandoned park in a barren area of the Médoc region, northwest of Bordeaux. Here the young boy, who suffered from frail health and epilepsy, was to spend much of his childhood in relative solitude. Indeed, it was not until he was eleven that he was sent to school in Bordeaux, where at fifteen he began to take drawing classes with the obscure watercolourist Stanislas Gorin. The most important influence on the young artist, however, was the draughtsman and printmaker Rodolphe Bresdin, whose studio in Bordeaux he frequented, and who was to prove decisive on his artistic development. It was from Bresdin that Redon learned the techniques of etching and lithography. Nevertheless, for most of his career Redon worked in something of an artistic vacuum, aware of the work of his contemporaries but generally preferring to follow his own path. His drawings and prints allowed him to express his lifelong penchant for imaginary subject matter, and were dominated by strange and unsettling images of fantastic creatures, disembodied heads and masks, solitary eyes, menacing spiders and other dreamlike forms. For much of the first thirty years of his career Redon worked almost exclusively in black, producing his ‘noirs’ in charcoal and chalk; the drawings he described as ‘mes ombres’, or ‘my shadows’.

It was not until 1881, when he was more than forty years old, that Redon first mounted a small exhibition of his work, to almost complete indifference on the part of critics or the public. The following year, however, a second exhibition of drawings and lithographs brought him to the attention of a number of critics. Redon’s critical reputation began to grow, and in 1884 he exhibited at the first Salon des Indépendants, which he had helped to organize. Two years later he was invited to show at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, and in the same year exhibited with Les XX, a group of avant-garde artists, writers and musicians in Brussels.

Towards the end of the 19th century Redon began to move away from working mainly in charcoal and black chalk in favour of a new emphasis on colour, chiefly using the medium of pastel but also watercolour, oil paint and distemper. Indeed, after about 1900 he seems to have almost completely

abandoned working in black and white. Like his noirs, his pastels of floral still lifes and portraits were popular with a few collectors, and several were included in exhibitions at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1900, 1903 and 1906, and in subsequent exhibitions of his work in Paris and abroad. Despite this change in direction, however, Redon’s work remained unappreciated by the public at large, and it was left to a few enlightened collectors to support the artist in his later years. In 1913, however, an entire room was devoted to Redon at the seminal Armory Show held in New York; an honour shared by Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Van Gogh.

Odilon Redon’s pastels account for some of his finest works. In an 1897 letter to his close friend Andries Bonger, the artist wrote of his use of the medium: ‘The pastel, in fact, gives me support, materially and morally, it has rejuvenated me. I work with it, without getting tired. It has led me to paint; in looking at the work that I have just done, I am not without hope of transferring to canvas certain ideas a little later.’1 As the Redon scholar Roseline Bacou has noted, ‘In but a few years, Redon had completely mastered the technical demands of pastel...Up to the end of his life, the pastel would be a particularly special means of expression for Redon.’2 The figure of Christ was a briefly recurring theme in Redon’s oeuvre between 1895 and around 1910.

As Bacou notes, ‘The pastels of 1895-1899 are dominated by the figure of Christ: the Sacred Heart with a colored flame at the center of his chest; the Christ of Silence, with a finger upon his lips; Christ with the red thorns; Christ on the Cross...The use of such religious imagery, however, was not related to a strict belief in religious doctrine on Redon’s part...In the pastels executed during this period, the intensity of the colors echoes the ardent spirituality of the themes.’3 The present sheet has remained little known to most scholars, having been in a Japanese collection since at least the early 1950s. The work was published for the first time by Klaus Berger in 1964, and again the following year in an article describing works by Redon in Japanese collections, in which he noted that ‘However strange may seem the presence of Christ in the collection of a non-Christian country, the fact confirms once more that the art of Redon was accepted by the Japanese as a link between East and West, and they, with their usual zeal, wished to know all its aspects.’4 The present pastel has never previously been exhibited outside Japan, where it was last shown in 1989. After more than fifty years in Japanese collections, The Crucified Christ was sold at auction in New York in 2002, when it entered a private collection in which it has remained ever since.

When this pastel was last exhibited in public, twenty-five years ago in Japan, the author of the catalogue entry noted of it: ‘For some reason, this Christ on the Cross is set inside a room with no exit. It is a Redon pastel which we can be proud to have in Japan...The image of Christ appears, emitting light, behind a pillar in a dark room, this dense interior contains the deep spirituality characteristic of Redon’s religious pictures.’5 In superb condition, the present work has retained all of its freshness and richness of colour, and as such presents a consummate example of Redon’s pastel technique.

Alec Wildenstein’s catalogue raisonné of Redon’s oeuvre lists a total of just fifteen depictions of the subject of Christ on the Cross, including two small paintings – one in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham6 and the other in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris7 – alongside five pastels and eight drawings in chalk, pencil or charcoal. One of the latter – a pencil drawing of the crucified Christ, now in the Louvre8 – may have been a preparatory study for the present pastel.

Among the handful of pastels of Christ on the Cross by Redon is a large example, showing just the head and upper torso of Christ, in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp9 and a Crucifixion in the E. G. Bührle Collection in Zurich10, as well as another, smaller pastel sold at auction in London in 198911.

44 FRIEDRICH WILHELM SCHWINGE Hamburg 1852-1913 Hamburg Landscape with Sand Dunes Gouache. Signed and dated Fr. Schwinge 1901 in red ink at the lower left.

376 x 697 mm. (14 3/4 x 27 5/ 8 in.)

Friedrich Wilhelm Schwinge studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf between 1878 and 1884, first with Hugo Crola and Heinrich Lauenstein, and later in the studios of Peter Janssen and Eugen Dücker.

In 1885 he settled in Hamburg, where he joined the local association of artists, the Hamburger Künstlerverein. The following year, the Kunstverein purchased a watercolour from the artist; the first of several acquisitions from his studio over the next few years. Active as a landscape and marine painter and draughtsman, Schwinge regularly exhibited his paintings, gouaches and watercolours at the Kunstverein between 1886 and 1910, sometimes in considerable numbers. In 1900, for example, he exhibited a total of twenty-two works, while the 1908 Kunstverein exhibition included thirteen pictures

by Schwinge. These were mainly views of the countryside around Hamburg, as well as landscapes in the Lüneburg Heath, scenes on the river Elbe, snow scenes and some marine subjects. The artist also produced a handful of landscapes of views in Holland, Norway, Sweden, Italy and Scotland. Among his few public works are scenes of the forest of the Hamburger Walddörfer for the town hall of Hamburg, while in 1906 he received a commission from the Hamburg-South American Steamship Company for painted murals for the ship König Friedrich August. Works by Schwinge are today in the collections of the Altona Museum, the Kunsthalle and the Archäologisches Museum in Hamburg, as well as the Stadtisches Museum in Braunschweig and the Museum Lüneburg.

The present gouache may depict the dunes on Schiermonnikoog, a small island which is one of the West Frisian Islands in the northern Netherlands, and which Friedrich Schwinge is known to have visited.

Privately owned since the 17th century, the island was acquired in 1859 by a Dutchman, John Eric Banck, who planted marram grass on the island’s sand dunes to stabilize them. In 1878 Banck sold Schiermonnikoog to a German count, Hartwig Arthur von Bernstorff-Wehningen, in whose family it remained until just after the Second World War, when it was confiscated by the Dutch government. The island, which is sixteen kilometres in length by four in width, became an independent municipality in 1949 and is today the site of the first national park in the Netherlands. Schwinge painted a view of the coastal sand dunes of Schiermonnikoog in 18981, while another painting of the interior of the island appeared at auction in Germany in 20092.

45 EMIL NOLDE Nolde 1867-1956 Seebüll Head of a South Sea Island Woman (Bildnis einer Südseeinsulanerin) Watercolour and gouache, brush and black ink, on rice straw paper. Signed Nolde. in pencil at the lower right.

522 x 371 mm. (20 1/ 2 x 14 5/ 8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Acquired by a private collector in December 1921; Thence by descent.

Born Emil Hansen, Emil Nolde took his name of his birthplace, on the border of Germany and Demmark, in 1902. He grew up and spent much of his life in the province of Schleswig-Holstein, and apart from some time spent in Berlin was never far from the sea. His first studio was a hut on the beach on the island of Alsen, where he spent summers beginning in 1903, and there he delighted in observing the sea at close hand. This obsession with the sea and its power was to remain with him throughout his career, and provided the inspiration for a large number of paintings and watercolours. He was briefly a member of the expressionist group Die Brücke in 1906-1907 and the Berlin Secession between 1908 and 1910, but eventually left both groups. He also exhibited with the Der Blauer Reiter group in 1912, although he was never a member.

Despite being a successful and highly regarded artist, Nolde found himself, at the age of seventy, crushed by the Nazi party’s official condemnation of modernism in art. In 1937 he was declared a ‘degenerate’ artist by the Nazis, and nearly fifty of his works were included in the Entartete Kunst (‘Degenerate Art’) exhibition held that year. More than a thousand of his works – more than those of any other artist - were confiscated from museums and private collections, as well as from his studio, and many of his paintings and drawings were destroyed. In 1941 he was expelled from the Reichskunstkammer (the Reich Chamber of Art), and was forbidden to paint, even in private; he was also prohibited from exhibiting or selling his work. As a result Nolde turned towards working on paper, producing a large number of small watercolours and gouaches that he referred to as his ‘unpainted pictures’.

Emil Nolde produced watercolours almost continuously from around 1908 onwards, and the medium would come to dominate his output over oil paintings. As one scholar has noted, ‘Numerically...it is the watercolours which occupy pride of place in his oeuvre: indeed, he can claim to have been one of the most prolific watercolourists of the twentieth century – one of the relatively few modern artists to devote such close attention to what seemed to many an old-fashioned medium. In his hands, watercolour revealed new possibilities...It was the medium to which he would confide his most intimate thoughts...It was also the one in which he felt most thoroughly at home.’1 This large watercolour was drawn in New Guinea in the early months of 1914. Nolde and his wife Ada visited the island – the southeastern part of which was, at the time, Germany’s main colonial territory in the Pacific – in 1913-1914 as part of a scientific expedition organized and funded by the German government. Unlike Paul Gauguin in Tahiti before him, or Max Pechstein in Palau at about the same time, Nolde seems not to have gone to German New Guinea with the romantic idea of seeking an alternative way of life, but rather for the purposes of study. As the Nolde scholar Jill Lloyd has written of this period, ‘Like most Expressionists, Nolde displayed a growing interest in the art of non-European cultures during this period...Nolde’s enthusiasm for what he imagined to be the pure and childlike qualities of ‘primitive’ peoples, and his admiration for the expressive vitality of non-European art, reached a peak in 1913 when he decided to join an ethnographic and demographic expedition to German New Guinea. His journey overland through Russia, Manchuria, Korea, Japan, China, Manila and the Palau Islands resulted in a series of lively sketches, depicting the people and situations he encountered. In New Guinea he painted large, luminous watercolours of native heads, as well as a series of oil paintings...In 1916 the German Colonial Office bought 50 of Nolde’s watercolours as a demographic record, despite their stylistic boldness and Nolde’s Romantic response to the New Guinea peoples.’2

In a letter sent while on his journey, Nolde wrote, ‘All these countries are so unique, the people, the animals, the plants, everything is so strange, not always beautiful, but always interesting.’3 The artist painted only a few oil paintings during this trip, and the bulk of his output was in the form of watercolours and drawings. Many of these were confiscated on his journey back to Germany, when war broke out, and were only recovered by the artist from a warehouse in England in 1921.

The watercolour portraits and head studies that Nolde produced in New Guinea are invariably frontal images that are direct and reflect the artist’s personal encounter with the subject; as one scholar has noted of these works, ‘The sense of confrontation suggests the challenge of dealing with one’s own otherness.’4 Nolde’s autobiographical recollections of his time in New Guinea show how closely he studied the inhabitants, and recorded their appearance: ‘The other natives put white paint onto their foreheads as a sign of mourning. At dances they covered their bodies with light-coloured dots and lines, sometimes also blue. They rubbed lime into their hair to rid it of bugs, which made it a curious brown or rather brownish-red. All that made their appearance even more interesting.’5 On his trip to New Guinea, Nolde developed a watercolour technique of translucent layers of colour over outline drawings in pen or brushed ink. The present sheet, previously unpublished, is a particularly fine example of his head studies of native subjects from this period. Among stylistically comparable head studies of South Sea islanders by the artist are a large group of watercolours, all of similar dimensions to the present sheet, in the Stiftung Seebüll Ada und Emil Nolde in Neukirchen6. Another significant group of watercolour head studies of this type by Nolde is in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin7.

As Peter Vergo has written of the artist’s trip to the South Seas, ‘Nolde’s most vivid images brought back from the Pacific remain his figure drawings and watercolours, particularly the powerful series of watercolour heads, both male and (occasionally) female. These, for the most part represented singly, are often shown wearing the characteristic headdresses and ornaments of the New Guinea tribespeople, “as colourful as parakeets, with flowers and brightly coloured feathers in their hair”, according to Ada Nolde’s recollection.’8 Jill Lloyd adds that, ‘The South Seas journey, which terminated with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, was a turning-point in Nolde’s art. Coinciding with the end of the heroic years of first-generation Expressionism, it marked the end of the artist’s engagement with modern, urban subjects. Nolde’s objections to colonialism, which he believed detrimental to the pure racial integrity and creative originality of indigenous peoples, confirmed his mistrust in the progress of modern civilization. From this time Nolde drew inspiration more exclusively from the recurrent cycles of nature, peopling his paintings with primitivist figures from the Bible, from fables, or from the wells of his imagination.’9 Dr. Manfred Reuther, director of the Stiftung Nolde, has confirmed the authenticity of this hitherto unknown watercolour, which had remained in the same private collection since 1921 (fig.1), only a few years after it was drawn.

1.

46 LESSER URY Birnbaum (Miedzychod) 1861-1931 Berlin A Road in the Tiergarten, Berlin Pastel on board. Signed L. Ury in pencil at the lower left. Inscribed Vorsicht in brush and brown ink on the backing board.

520 x 370 mm. (20 1/ 2 x 14 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Ludwig and Hedwig Wiener, Breslau and London; Thence by descent to a private collection, England.

Born into a German Jewish family in Prussia, Leo Lesser Ury studied in Düsseldorf and spent some time in Paris, Brussels, Antwerp and Stuttgart before settling to Berlin in 1887. Two years later he had his first one-man exhibition, which saw his work meet with critical disapproval but gain the support of Adolph von Menzel and earn the artist a prize from the Kunstakademie. Arguably the finest painter of Berlin’s streets at the turn of the century, Ury ‘painted Berlin as no other painter did at a time when the small Prussian royal seat was rapidly developing into the capital of the German Reich.’1 His paintings and pastels of landscapes, urban views, nocturnal street scenes and interiors, painted in a free and Impressionistic manner, proved very popular and were much in demand. As has also been noted, ‘[Ury was] a poet of light and atmosphere...He shows us the streets of Berlin and the alleys of Tiergarten in every season, in rain or sunshine (with a preference for rain), at every hour (very often at night, with subtle renderings of artificial light).’2 Initially a close friend of the other great German Impressionist painter, Max Liebermann, Ury found his relationship with the elder artist souring abruptly in the 1890s, leading to a lifelong mutual animosity. Liebermann managed to exclude Ury from the Berlin Secession for several years, and he was only eventually admitted at the recommendation of Lovis Corinth. Ury exhibited at the Berlin Secession from 1915 onwards, and most notably in 1922 when a major exhibition of his paintings and pastels, numbering 150 works, was mounted in honour of his sixtieth birthday. In 1926 Ury visited London and painted a number of views of the Thames, its bridges and the Embankment that are, in compositional terms, often reminiscent of his Berlin street scenes; the same is true of his Parisian views of 1928. A solitary and misanthropic man, Ury was something of a recluse by the 1920s, and only rarely left his studio on Berlin’s Nollendorfplatz. Within a few years of his death, much of his output had been destroyed by the Nazis in their purge of the work of Jewish artists.

Lesser Ury is perhaps best known, and most highly regarded, for his works in pastel; indeed, he may be regarded as one of the finest pastellists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Datable to 1915, the present pastel depicts a view in the Grosser Tiergarten, a large park in the centre of Berlin.

Its innovative composition is common to many of Ury’s street scenes, with the viewer placed at the level of the street; indeed, seemingly on the road itself, rather than at a window looking down onto it. A closely related lithograph (fig.1) of c.1920, of considerably smaller dimensions than this pastel, was published in an edition of thirty impressions3, while a similar but reversed composition is found in an etching of about the same date4.

The present sheet is accompanied by a certificate from Dr. Sybille Gross, dated 20 April 2014.

1.

47 OWE ZERGE Oppmanna 1894-1983 Kristianstad(?)

A Violinist Tuning his Instrument Pencil on paper, laid down on another sheet. Signed and dated Owe Zerge / 1923 in pencil at the centre right.

588 x 461 mm. (23 1/ 8 x 18 1/ 8 in.)

A painter of portraits, figure subjects, flower pieces, landscapes and nudes, John Owe Heribert Zerge was born in the parish of Oppmannasjön, near Kristianstad. Between 1914 and 1915 he studied at the Althin Målarskola (Althin’s School of Painting), set up in Stockholm by the painter Caleb Alstin, who taught drawing there. He then enrolled at the Royal Swedish Academy of Art in Stockholm, where he studied with the painters Olle Hjortzberg and Oscar Björck between 1915 and 1919. Zerge also studied briefly at the etching school established by Axel Tallberg before undertaking study trips to France in 1920 (where he is known to have studied with Andre Lhote in Paris) and Italy, which he visited a number of times in the 1920s. He exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1921, winning an honourable mention, and the following year participated in an exhibition at the Liljevalchs konsthall gallery in Stockholm. In 1923, the year of the present sheet, his work was included in the Swedish Art exhibition in Gothenburg, and he also exhibited regularly at the annual exhibitions of the Skånes konstförenings (Skåne Art Association).

By the late 1920s Zerge had returned to settle near his birthplace.

Zerge built a studio in the village of Arkelstorp, near Kristianstad, and also designed a splendid garden there which attracted numerous visitors. He was a member of the KRO (Konstnärernas riksorganisation), the Swedish national artists organisation established in 1937, as well as the Skåne Artist Club. He received a large number of portrait commissions, through which he seems to have earned his livelihood, although his other paintings, particularly the flower pieces, also sold well. Perhaps a result of his success, Zerge seems not to have needed to work with any commercial gallery. Only a few exhibitions of his work took place, one of the most significant being a large retrospective held, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, in his native Kristianstad. The city also awarded him a culture prize in 1975, and the following year hosted an exhibition of his work at the Ikaros Gallery. Zerge was productive well into his old age, and his style changed little throughout his lfe. As he himself noted, in a 1976 interview, ‘I paint so incredibly old-fashioned. But I think you should see what is represented. I cannot with the best will in the world think that it makes a person better by putting an eye on the forehead and nose on the chest.’1 Although Zerge’s works are today to be found in the museums of Gävle, Kristianstad and Tomelilla in Sweden, he remains largely forgotten in his native county.

Owe Zerge was much admired as a draughtsman in his lifetime. He was gifted with incredible technical skill, and his pencil drawings in particular are achieved with a precision and an attention to detail that is quite remarkable. This large drawing, executed while the artist was undertaking study trips in Europe, is a particularly fine example of his work.

48 PABLO PICASSO Malaga 1881-1973 Mougins The Head of a Woman in Profile Brush, pen and India ink and black wash, on pale pink paper. Framing lines in black ink.

79 x 81 mm. (3 1/ 8 x 3 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist (Inv.3196); By descent to Marina Picasso, Cannes, Geneva and New York; Acquired from her by Jan Krugier, Geneva.

LITERATURE: Werner Spies, ed., Pablo Picasso, Eine Ausstellung zum hundertsten Geburtstag: Werke aus der Sammlung Marina Picasso, exhibition catalogue, Munich and elsewhere, 1981, p.310, no.139; Venice, Centro di Cultura di Palazzo Grassi, Picasso: Opere dal 1895 al 1971 dalla Collezione Marina Picasso, exhibition catalogue, 1981, p.277, no.165; Josep Palau I Fabre, Picasso: From the Ballets to Drama (1917-1926), Cologne, 1999, p.381, no.1374 (as “Stained” Woman’s Head).

EXHIBITED: Venice, Centro di Cultura di Palazzo Grassi, Picasso: Opere dal 1895 al 1971 dalla Collezione Marina Picasso, 1981, no.165; Munich, Haus der Kunst, Cologne, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle and Museum Ludwig, Frankfurt, Städtelschen Kunstinstitut, and Zurich, Kunsthaus, Pablo Picasso, Eine Ausstellung zum hundertsten Geburtstag: Werke aus der Sammlung Marina Picasso, 1981-1982, no.139; New York, Jan Krugier Gallery, The Presence of Ingres: Important Works by Ingres, Chassériau, Degas, Picasso, Matisse and Balthus, exhibition catalogue, 1988, no.69.

The present sheet was drawn in Cap d’Antibes, on the French Riviera, in the summer of 1923, when Picasso rented a villa for himself, his wife Olga and their young son Paulo. At Antibes they were often in the company of their friends, the well-known expatriate American couple Gerald and Sara Murphy, and that summer Picasso produced a large number of drawings of his wife and, in particular, of Sara Murphy, who may have been the model for the present sheet. As John Richardson has written of her, ‘Sara was a life enhancer: beautiful, intelligent, creative, and a beguiling mother to her three children...Picasso, like many of her men friends, was attracted to her, but she was impervious to sexual advances.’1 Exhibited and published for the first time in 1981, this small pen and ink wash drawing was unknown to Christian Zervos when he published his monumental catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s work. The drawing presents a fascinating example of Picasso’s supreme confidence as a draughtsman, in the way in which a few lines and blobs of Indian ink are used to create just the outlines of the head, as well as the eyes and hair, leaving the pinkish-coloured paper untouched to form the bulk of the head, face and neck.

A similar use of pen and Indian ink is found in several other drawings by Picasso, albeit on a larger scale, dating from the summer of 1923, such as a study of a standing draped bather in the Musée Picasso in Paris2 and a drawing of a Half-Reclining Nude and a Head, in the collection of the artist’s heirs3. As Picasso’s friend, the Catalan writer and poet Josep Palau i Fabre, noted, ‘Most of the drawings from Cap d’Antibes are linear, pursuing the idea – through a profile, a face or a body – of a classical Greece to which the artist felt he had an innate right. Alongside these, others reveal two further techniques: on the one hand crosshatching, which forms a mess of varying densities; and on the other thick lines that become a kind of “stain” on the Indian ink drawings.’4 The present sheet is a rare example of this second type.

A photo-certificate from Claude Ruiz-Picasso, dated 23 June 2014, accompanies the present sheet.

actual size

49 MAINIE JELLETT Dublin 1897-1944 Dublin Waterfall Pencil and gouache on buff paper, laid down on board. Signed M. Jellett in pencil at the lower left.

302 x 191 mm. (11 7/ 8 x 7 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Bart O’Connor; Thence by descent.

A leading figure in 20th century Irish art, Mary Harriet (known from childhood as Mainie) Jellett was born into an Anglo-Irish family in 1897. She studied with William Orpen at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, and later at Westminster School in London, were she came under the tutelage and influence of Walter Sickert, and where she met her close friend Evie Hone. With Hone, Jellett travelled to Paris in 1921 to study with André Lhote, who encouraged both women to study with a somewhat reluctant Albert Gleizes. From Lhote and, in particular, Gleizes, Jellett received a grounding in the principles of Cubism, and began to produce abstract compositions. Jellett developed a style of abstract art that proved to be challenging to both critics and the public in the Ireland of the 1920s. Shortly after arriving back in Dublin from Paris in 1923, she showed her first abstract paintings at the Society of Dublin Painters. (This was, it should be noted, a decade or so before the first abstract works of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth or Henry Moore were exhibited in London.) The reviews of the exhibition ranged from a bemused incomprehension to some savage criticism, one critic going so far as to describe her work ‘subhuman’ and ‘artistic malaria’. Nevertheless, ‘From that moment on, Mainie was fighting the battle for Modernism in Ireland, exhibiting, lecturing, writing and teaching.’1 Hone and Jellett remained lifelong friends and colleagues, and both artists have been credited with helping to bring Cubism, and French Modernism in general, to Ireland. Although always committed to abtract art, Jellett painted both non-representational and figurative works throughout her career, as well as a number of religious works. Apart from the Society of Dublin Painters, she exhibited at the Irish Water-Colour Society and the Royal Hibernian Academy, and in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants and at the seminal exhibition L’Art d’Aujourd’hui of 1925. Jellett was a member of the Abstraction-Création group in France and was also associated with Modernist circles in England, exhibiting with the London Group and the Seven and Five Society. She was active as a teacher, writer and lecturer, and both she and Hone were much involved in the foundation of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943. The following year Jellett died of cancer, at the age of just forty-seven. Retrospective exhibitions of her work were held at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin in 1962, and The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 1991.

The present sheet can likely be dated to the second half of the 1930s, along with a number of gouache drawings which study the effects of flowing water. In 1935 Jellett visited an exhibition of Chinese art at the Royal Academy in London, and came away greatly inspired by the Chinese tradition of landscape painting: ‘It was a way of portraying the landscape in a semi-abstract manner...Chinese art contained elements of interest to her, especially the emphasis on pattern and rhythm developed from the forms of nature.’2 As the artist herself later recalled of the Chinese Art exhibition, ‘This made a profound impression upon me and helped to form an approach to landscape painting, which I have used in varied forms ever since.’3 Comparable gouache drawings on paper by Jellett include a Waterfall4 and two studies of Waves5, all in private collections.

As Jellett’s biographer Bruce Arnold has opined, ‘She is to be judged by her works above all else. The rich profusion of oils, gouaches, watercolours, temperas and drawings she produced, has earned her the reputation as one of the most powerful and original creative spirits in Ireland in the twentieth century.’6 Another recent writer has commented, ‘Just who is Ireland’s greatest woman painter is something to argue over; there can be little doubt as to whom was the most influential, the strongest force for change and modernity, the biggest innovator. That honour belongs to Mainie Jellett.’7

50 PIERRE BONNARD Fontenay-aux-Roses 1867-1947 Le Cannet Study of Sea and Sky Watercolour and gouache, over an underdrawing in pencil.

131 x 184 mm. (5 1/ 8 x 7 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: By descent from the artist to his nephew, Charles Terrasse, Paris; By descent to his son, Antoine Terrasse, Fontainebleau; Thence by descent until 2015.

LITERATURE: Jean Clair, ed., Pierre Bonnard, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 1988-1989, illustrated upside down on p.140 (where dated 1930); Philippe Cros, Bonnard retrouvé, exhibition catalogue, Toulouse, 1997, p.23, illustrated; Lisbon, Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, Pierre Bonnard, 2001, illustrated p.59.

EXHIBITED: Milan, Palazzo Reale, Pierre Bonnard, 1988-1989 [unnumbered]; Grenoble, Musée Hébert, Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) Aquarelles et Dessins, 1995, no.20; Toulouse, Fondation Bemberg, Bonnard retrouvé, 1997 [unnumbered]; Lisbon, Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, Pierre Bonnard, 2001 [unnumbered].

Datable to the early 1930s, this small, vibrant watercolour is likely to have been painted in the south of France, where Pierre Bonnard spent a large part of his later career. He painted yearly on the Côte d’Azur; at Saint-Tropez, Antibes, Grasse and at Le Cannet, in the hills above Cannes, where he purchased a villa in 1925. As one scholar has recently noted, ‘Le Cannet was crucial to the evolution of Bonnard’s notion of landscape or, to be more precise, of a pure Mediterranean landscape. Early in February 1935 he wrote to Matisse, ‘Right now I stroll around the countryside and try to observe it like a farmer.’ In late March of the same year he confided to Vuillard, ‘I have become a landscape painter not because I have painted landscapes – I have only painted a very few – but because I have acquired the soul of a landscape painter and have begun to get rid of the picturesque, the aesthetic, and other conventions that have poisoned me.’”1 Bonnard began working in the medium of watercolour in the 1920s, but especially so in the following decade, when his friend and patron Arthur Hahnloser gave him some watercolours while the artist was recuperating from a hospital visit in 1930. The artist seems to have found working in the transparent medium of watercolour, which needed to be applied quickly and which could not be easily corrected, somewhat antithetical to his usual slow and methodical method of working. (As he said, ‘Manet could do it. I just don’t have the gift.’2) He eventually found that it was easier to combine watercolour with gouache, which allowed him to layer colours over several sessions, and enabled him to approximate the intensity of tone that was a characteristic of his late painted landscapes.

In the catalogue of the exhibition Bonnard retrouvé, held in Toulouse in 1997, in which this watercolour was included, Philippe Cros wrote about the present sheet: ‘the watercolour entitled Sea and Sky is characteristic of Bonnard’s increasing taste for light at this stage of his life. By this means, he confessed his admiration for the paintings of the Impressionists, but it is abundantly clear that he diverged from their resolutely objective vision to endow colour with a very different role. Although still so tenuous, the colours begin to vibrate in the light, foreshadowing the explosion of colour in the years to come.’3 Among a handful of stylistically comparable watercolours by Bonnard, of similar small dimensions, is a Landscape (The Little House) of 19224 and a View of the Mouth of the River Touques at Trouville of c.19355; both are in private collections.

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

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

PROVENANCE: Hélène Drude.

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

As the eminent critic and art historian Meyer Schapiro wrote of him, ‘Sima is one of those painters, uncommon in our culture, who see the mysteriously grand, the cosmic. He discovers it not in the multiplicity or fullness of things, but in a few elements of narrow span, often a single chord. They shape a sparse silent world congenial to a mood of revery and invite a solitary communion with the distant and high. His reticent image calls one away from the habitual in our surroundings to a vast unlocalized space, without footholds or landmarks, beyond the reach of our hands. However strange this space may be, it is no domain of the fanciful and incongruous, but a transmuted reflection of nature. From an older more realistic art Sima has inherited an aesthetic of the airy and luminous and disengaged it from the ties with earthly objects and weather...I do not know of another painter who has maintained with such purity and steadfastness this contemplative attitude which is more familiar through the poets than the painters.’1 In the spring of 1933, Šíma returned to the seaside resort town of Hendaye, in the French Basque country at the southwestern tip of France. He had first visited Hendaye in 1921, and on this return visit was inspired to produce a series of works entitled Sea, ten of which he exhibited a few weeks later, at the artistic organization Umelecká beseda in Prague in May 1933. Until then, Šíma had painted landscapes and figure subjects in a more or less abstract manner, but now he began to paint the ocean, albeit still in an abstract vein. Most of Šíma’s marine compositions of this period are made up of two horizontal passages; one blue for the sky and the other green for the sea, from which emerge patterns of foaming waves, which appear as cylindrical rollers. In other works, sky and sea merge to form a continuous blue surface, divided only by the darker line of the horizon. This small watercolour may be related to three seascapes by Šíma, each painted at Hendaye in 1933, in the National Gallery of Prague2, and in particular to the largest (fig.1) of these paintings3.

1.

52 JULIO GONZÁLEZ Barcelona 1876-1942 Arcueil Visage cubiste (Cubist Face) Coloured wax crayons, India ink and pencil on paper trimmed to shape and laid down onto another sheet. Signed with initials and dated JG / 1936 in brown ink at the lower left. Inscribed visage étroit nez in blue ink (the last two words overwritten Cubiste in pencil) on the verso of the backing sheet. Further inscribed F in pencil and Raisonné in blue ink on the reverse of the backing sheet.

211 x 79 mm. (8 3/ 8 x 3 18 in.) [sheet, at greatest dimensions] 280 x 188 mm. (11 x 7 3/ 8 in.) [including backing sheet] PROVENANCE: Possibly the artist’s daughter, Roberta González, L’Hay–les-Roses; Gildas Fardel, Paris; His posthumous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Le Roux and Morel], 1 December 1999, lot 92; Galerie Fabien Boulakia, Paris; Acquired in 2001 by the Triton Collection Foundation, The Netherlands.

LITERATURE: Josette Gibert, Julio González dessins: Projets pour sculptures, figures, Paris, 1975, illustrated p.71; Sjraar van Heugten, Avant-gardes 1870 to the present: The Collection of the Triton Foundation, Brussels, 2012, illustrated p.233.

Alongside Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso, Julio González is regarded as among the most innovative and original sculptors of the 20th century. Despite his professional training as a metalworker, however, before 1928 González worked mainly as a painter. He also drew throughout his career, and his early drawings display the artist’s origins in the turn of the century style of the School of Barcelona, despite the fact that he had been living in Paris since 1900. The influence of French painting of the same period is also readily evident. In the first few years of the 20th century, Picasso and González worked closely together in Paris, but the friendship ended abruptly in 1908, for reasons that are not quite clear. It was not reestablished until the 1920s, when Picasso asked for González’s help and advice in working in metal sculpture.

The years between 1932 and 1939 were ‘probably the most creative period in González’s artistic career’1 as a sculptor, and arguably also as a draughtsman. However, by the end of the decade the German occupation of Paris meant that he was unable to use his oxyacetylene blowtorch and was hence unable to work on metal sculpture. As a result, the last two years of his life were largely devoted to drawings, which, as one scholar has noted, were ‘done for himself and dated day by day, like a kind of personal diary, [and] form one of the most moving testimonies of the resistance of the human spirit to tyranny and the sufferings of war.’2 This drawing may be grouped with a large number of studies of heads with faceted, cubistic forms, produced by González between 1936 and 19373, many of which seem to be related to sculpted heads carved in stone between about 1932 and 1936. Common to most of these drawings is a use of crayons or watercolour in three colours, according to a simple formula adopted by the artist, with yellow for light areas, green for dark or shaded zones and red for intermediate areas. Examples of drawings of this type are in the collections of Tate Modern in London, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence and the Berardo Collection Museum in Belem, Portugal.

The present sheet once belonged to the notable French collector Gildas Fardel (1906-1997), who assembled a significant group of 20th century abstract works. Fardel owned several drawings and sculptures by Julio González, including a 1941 self-portrait drawing now in Nantes, as well as some works by the artist’s daughter Roberta. In 1958 he gifted a part of his collection to the Musée des BeauxArts in Nantes, followed by further donations to the same museum in 1969, 1972 and 1989. The present sheet, however, remained in Fardel’s collection until his death.

53 ALBERTO GIACOMETTI Borgonovo 1901-1966 Chur Portrait of James Lord Pencil on paper, with framing lines in pencil. Signed and dated Alberto Giacometti ‘54 in pencil at the lower right.

451 x 323 mm. (17 3/4 x 12 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably James Lord, Paris; Private collection, Paris.

LITERATURE: James Lord, Plausible Portraits of James Lord, with commentary by the model, New York, 2003, p.95, illustrated p.93; The Alberto Giacometti Database, no.1606.

EXHIBITED: Hamburg, Bucerius Kunst Forum, Alberto Giacometti. Begegnungen, 2013, no.54.

Alberto Giacometti regarded drawing as the foundation of all of his artistic activities. As his friend and biographer James Lord – the sitter of the present drawing – recalled, ‘“What I believe,” Alberto once said, “is that whether it be a question of sculpture or of painting, it is in fact only drawing that counts. One must cling solely, exclusively to drawing. If one could master drawing, all the rest would be possible.”’1 Similarly, the art historian Michael Peppiatt has noted that ‘Throughout his career, drawing remained the most spontaneous and revealing of Giacometti’s very varied forms of expression, a constant diary he kept of the people in his life and the objects which fascinated him...Drawing served him as the most direct way of grasping reality (however evasive), of rehearsing a new concept, or attempting to solve problems which had surfaced in painting or sculpture. Drawing was the universal language, and Giacometti would refer to it as the essential source of his art, the matrix in which all forms originated.’2 The artist Francis Bacon was a particular admirer of the drawings of his friend Giacometti, of whom he wrote in 1975, ‘For me Giacometti is not only the greatest draughtsman of our time but among the greatest of all time.’3 In the 1950’s Giacometti, who had previously only made portraits of close family members, began to produce portraits of a handful of other individuals with whom he had developed a close relationship, notably several writers and critics. Jean Genet, Peter Watson, David Sylvester, James Lord and Isaku Yanaihara, as well as the photographer Ernst Scheidegger and the art dealer Marguerite Maeght, all sat for painted portraits by the artist. Many more friends and colleagues appear in Giacometti’s pencil drawings of the 1950s and 1960s, including Henri and Pierre Matisse, Aimé Maeght, Jacques Dupin, Igor Stravinsky, Donald Cooper and several others. As has been noted of such portrait drawings, ‘Many of these sheets can be counted among the most intense works Giacometti produced.’4 The subject of this drawing, the American writer James Lord (1922-2009) first met Giacometti at the Café des Deux Magots in Paris in February 1952, and was, as he recalled, ‘instantly mesmerised’ by the artist. He became friendly with Alberto and his brother Diego, as well as their circle of friends and associates, and was a frequent visitor to Giacometti’s studio on the rue Hippolyte-Maindron in the 14th arrondissement. Lord kept a journal that was to become the basis of a definitive biography of the artist, on which he worked for fifteen years; it was eventually published in 1985. He also published one of the first scholarly studies devoted to Giacometti as a draughtsman, in an essay for a catalogue accompanying an exhibition of the artist’s drawings at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1964. Lord also wrote the text for the first monograph in English dedicated to Giacometti’s drawings, which appeared in 1971.

In 1954, Giacometti drew a handful of pencil portrait drawings of Lord. Two of these are today in the Musée Picasso in Paris5 and the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny6. Another was formerly in the collection of Ernst Beyeler in Basel and was recently sold at auction in London7, while others are in private collections in Germany8, England9 and New York10. As Lord recalled of Giacometti’s drawings of him, ‘While he was working, Alberto peered at me constantly. The action of the artist’s pencil and the

concentration of his gaze could be construed virtually as a unified creative process. It was obvious that his drawing depended absolutely upon my willing submission to its priority, and on the evidence of what he did Alberto clearly saw more in his ingenuous model than I could have perceived in myself.’11 The fact that the present sheet is signed and dated would imply that it was given to the sitter, since Lord notes that it was Giacometti’s usual practice to only sign and date a drawing when it was about to leave his studio.

The present sheet is the only one of Giacometti’s drawings of James Lord to focus solely on his head, to the exclusion of the rest of the sitter’s body or his surroundings. Lord has written extensively about this drawing in his book Plausible Portraits of James Lord, published in 2003: ‘The fourth and last portrait drawing I have chosen to reproduce is an illustration of Alberto’s absolute visual veracity via the form that most preoccupied him all his life: the human head. Here we see my solitary head, isolated in space, set autonomously alone in the center of the empty sheet, which can be construed as a semblance of the cosmos.

It defies definition. After several years of semiabstract work in the early 1930s, Alberto had resumed purely representational work, especially the study of the head, and for this reason was drummed out of the silly surrealist sect by André Breton, who said, “Everybody knows what a head is,” when in fact a head is what is most puzzling and enigmatic about us all as soon as one peers beyond a commonplace configuration to contemplate its expressive mystery, its look that looks at the act of looking and its power to control the use of vision. For Alberto life was sight; seeing and being were equivalent. In this head study the model’s gaze again establishes his vitality. The essential structure of life is centered upon the eyes. This conviction was the metaphysical absolutism of Giacometti’s creative courage. It was not for nothing, he said, that the first benevolence offered to the dead is the closing of the eyes.’12 Giacometti also produced a single painted portrait of James Lord, executed over a period of eighteen days in 1964; the painting was until recently in a Swiss private collection and was recently sold at auction in New York13. In September 1964, at the time that Giacometti was painting his portrait, Lord recalled a conversation he had with the artist: ‘He looked at me for a minute before beginning to paint, then said, “You have the head of a brute.” Surprised and amused, I replied, “Do you really think so?” “And how!” he exclaimed. ‘You look like a real thug. If I could paint you as I see you and a policeman saw the picture he’d arrest you immediately!” I laughed, but he said, “Don’t laugh. I’m not supposed to make my models laugh.”’14 Giacometti’s portrait drawings are among his most compelling works as a draughtsman, and the present sheet is a particularly fine and expressive example of his confident handling of the pencil. The use of framing lines and the fact that much of the paper is left untouched, as well as the absence of any other part of the sitter’s body, serves to focus the viewer’s attention solely on Lord’s head and face. Drawn with myriad, fluent strokes of a sharpened pencil, the sitter’s head – always the crux of any portrait by Giacometti – seems almost to project from the surface of the paper. The swirling graphite lines, surrounded by empty space, give a sense of the artist’s intense focus on the head of Lord, seated in the middle of the studio, to the exclusion of everything else. Lord himself has noted that, ‘As for the drawings themselves, their plastic and technical daring and individuality is obvious. They exist with an authority that rhetoric cannot presume to enhance. The skill and the audacity with which the blank page is made to play a part as important as the drawing itself is unerring. The vibrant and coursing vitality of the line, which never at the same time is allowed to exist merely for its own sake, remains always immediate. It is enough, after all, to say that a drawing by Giacometti could not possibly be by anyone else.’15

James Lord in Giacometti’s studio, Paris, 1964.

54 DOMENICO GNOLI Rome 1933-1970 New York Babylon Pen and black ink and black wash, with watercolour, on buff paper laid down on canvas. Signed and dated D. Gnoli / 56 in black ink at the lower right.

992 x 690 mm. (39 x 27 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly Arthur Jeffress Gallery, London; Luise Rainer, London1.

EXHIBITED: Possibly London, Arthur Jeffress Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Dominic Gnoli, 1957.

A precocious artist, Domenico Gnoli took private lessons in drawing and etching from the painter and printmaker Carlo Alberto Petrucci in Rome. He exhibited for the first time, aged just seventeen, at the Galleria La Cassapanca in Rome in 1950, and the following year his work was included in the exhibition Art Graphique Italien Contemporain at the Galerie Giroux in Brussels. After briefly studying theatre design at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, Gnoli began working as a scenographer, producing designs for stage sets and costumes for a production of The Merchant of Venice at the Schauspielhaus in Zurich in 1953, while the following year he worked on designs for a staging of As You Like It at the Old Vic Theatre in London that opened in 1955. Despite the makings of a successful career as a scenographer, however, in 1956 Gnoli decided to give up theatrical work and to concentrate on drawing and painting. He lived between London, Paris and Rome before eventually settling in New York in 1956, where his friends included Leonard Bernstein, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jerome Robbins and Diana Vreeland.

One-man shows of Gnoli’s drawings and prints were held in New York in 1956, London and Rome in 1957, Rome in 1958, New York in 1959, and London in 1960. He also worked as a book illustrator, writing and illustrating Orestes or the Art of Smiling, published in London in 1960, and two years later providing illustrations for the American writer Norman Juster’s Alberic the Wise and Other Journeys. He also received commissions for illustrations for magazines as diverse as Fortune, Life, Sports Illustrated, Holiday, Show, Horizon and several others, and in 1968 was awarded a gold medal by the Society of Illustrators in New York. Gnoli is perhaps best known today for his paintings executed from 1964 onwards; large canvases in which the artist almost obsessively concentrates his attention on isolated details of clothing, hair and objects.

Gnoli continued to have exhibitions of his work in Italy, France, Germany, England and America, where in 1969 his first solo exhibition of paintings was held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. The year before, while that exhibition was being planned, Gnoli wrote to an American friend in New York: ‘I would hate you to think that I am just losing interest with all this, fooling myself with the idea that Janis will make a great painter out of me, and therefore I needn’t worry about drawings anymore. This would be mad, first because even if the show with him will do well it will only be a temporary success since the art scene is moving so fast that what is great today is shit tomorrow, second, I am, regardless of big money and glamour, a born illustrator, and will not renegade myself.’2 Gnoli died in New York in April 1970, just over two weeks before his 37th birthday.

Works by Domenico Gnoli are today in the collections of, among others, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Städel in Frankfurt, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, the Boijmans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Drawn in 1956, the present sheet is among the largest works on paper by Domenico Gnoli, and dates to the period when he had chosen to abandon working for the theatre, claiming that ‘it was distracting [him] from the essential’, in order to devote himself to drawing. A close stylistic comparison may be made with a much smaller ink drawing of an Imaginary City of 1956 (fig.1), sold at auction in 20063. Also comparable in technique and conception is an equally large pen and ink drawing, of the same year as the present sheet, entitled The Ship of Emigrants (fig.2)4, as well as a drawing entitled City of 1957 (fig.3), depicting an imaginary city resting on top of a table5.

A Times review of an exhibition of drawings by Gnoli at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in London in 1957, in which the present sheet may have been included, noted that ‘Mr. Gnoli’s drawings are complex, fantasticated, and full of busy goings-on of a mildly satirical absurdity – the general effect seems compounded of Babel and the Ship of Pools [sic]. Some of the most delightful are those in which he builds intricately crazy cities that tower up like insecure antheaps and bristle with activity...The success of imaginative excursions of this sort depends largely on the ability of the never-never land that has been created to sustain a measure of internal plausibility by which even the most extravagant oddities become, in context, the correct and acceptable thing. The world of Mr. Gnoli’s drawings may seem a largely synthetic and artificial one, but it does establish a sense of its own private logic by its exorbitant amount of quite rational detail.

The impossible boats are all firmly built: one can count the nails. And though the tenement-blocks only stand up by the grace of architectural fiction, the construction of the innumerable doors, windows, stairways, and balconies of which they are composed appears eminently sound and reasonable.’6 Another anonymous review of the same exhibition expressed the opinion that ‘Dominic Gnoli is an anachronism in draughtsmanship, a modern in paint. His drawings, more meticulous than Osbert Lancaster, more fantastic than Phiz, are full of ships and towers. The myriad Lillyputian figures of bullfighters, trippers, mariners and indeterminate crowds attendant have a sophisticated whimsy which would fit a period pantomime. Gnoli’s little people are cleverly stuffed stage props.’7 A third reviewer simply chose to describe the artist as ‘addicted to towering and preposterious erections, whether pseudo-buildings or toppling nautical superstructures.’8 The fantastic imagery, boundless wit and sheer technical virtuosity of Gnoli’s work continued to appeal to critics and collectors long after his untimely death. As Francesco Bonami has recently written, ‘Gnoli journeys across the cosmos and visits imaginary societies. He invented his own planet and traveled there like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. As an artist, Gnoli was truly an aristocrat, ruling his imagination like a kingdom. He observed his planet from both ends of the telescope: From one end he was able to see a faraway world, with many little characters on many different stages; from the other end, as if looking into a microscope, he was able to get very close, like a flea.’9

1.

2.

3.

55 CLAUDIO BRAVO Valparaiso 1936-2011 Taroudant (Morocco) The Guardian’s Son Pencil, black and red chalk. Signed and dated CLAUDIO BRAVO / MCMLXXXIV in red chalk at the lower right.

561 x 471 mm. (22 1/ 8 x 18 1/ 2 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Marlborough Gallery, New York; Acquired from them in 1985 by Edwin and Lindy Bergman, Chicago; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Paul Bowles and Mario Vargas Llosa, Claudio Bravo: Paintings and Drawings, New York, 1997, illustrated p.142 (incorrectly as oil on canvas).

EXHIBITED: Madison, Wisconsin, Elvehjem Museum of Art, and elsewhere, Claudio Bravo: Painter and Draftsman, 1987-1988, no.50 (lent by Mrs. Edwin Bergman).

Born in Valparaiso in Chile, Claudio Bravo received a Jesuit education in Santiago and there took art classes in the studio of the painter Miguel Venegas Cienfuentes, eventually deciding to become an artist himself. He had his first exhibition at the age of seventeen, and was soon much in demand as a portrait painter. In 1961, after several years living and working in Santiago and Concepción, Bravo left Chile for Europe. Settling in Madrid, he was soon established as a painter and society portraitist. In 1968 he spent six months working in the Philippines, and in 1970 had his first solo exhibition in New York. In 1972 he abandoned his busy life in Madrid for a large house and studio in Tangier in Morocco, where he began to focus on still life and landscape painting.

Dividing his year between his studio in Tangier and another in Marrakech, as well as one in the far south of Chile, Bravo enjoyed a successful career until the end of his life. As one scholar noted, at the time of an exhibition of his work which toured four American museums in 1987 and 1988, in which the present sheet was included, ‘Claudio Bravo is one of the most significant artists working in a realist mode today. A painter and draftsman with a singularly fertile imagination, Bravo draws upon a myriad of sources in the art of the past and present, combining them in a uniquely personal manner.’1 In 1994 a large exhibition of his paintings was mounted at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile. Works by Claudio Bravo are in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago and elsewhere.

Recognized as a superb draughtsman, Claudio Bravo was a master of pencil, coloured chalks and pastel, all of which he applied with precision and delicacy. Nevertheless, speaking in 1985, the year after the present sheet was drawn, the artist noted that ‘Drawing and color are the bases of my work. However, I seem to be doing fewer drawings these days – either preliminary drawings or studies for paintings. I draw directly onto the canvas and use that as the basis for my colors. I find that drawing is less and less important for me…’2 Drawn in 1984, this large drawing is a portrait of the son of Bravo’s housekeeper at his home in Tangiers, who also appears in a number of other works by the artist. The artist’s close friend Mario Vargas Llosa has written that ‘As Claudio Bravo always paints live models, in his house in Tangier it is not in the least surprising to come across the faces who posed for his christs, martyrs and anchorites, his madonnas and diviners, his bird charmers, dancers and musicians, his characters from mythology…They are in the kitchens, they are the family of the caretaker, the gardeners, the cleaning ladies, the man who looks after the pigeons.’3

NOTES TO THE CATALOGUE No.1 Cristoforo Roncalli, called Il Pomarancio 1.

Inv. 662 F; W. Chandler Kirwin, ‘The Life and Drawing Style of Cristofano Roncalli’, Paragone, January 1978, pp.27-28, pl.28; Miles L. Chappell et al, Disegni del toscani a Roma (1580-1620), exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1979, pp.21-22, no.1, fig.2; Ileana Chiappini di Sorio, Cristoforo Roncalli detto il Pomarancio, Bergamo, 1983, p.129, under no.62, illustrated p.146, fig.4; Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, Gabinetto disegno e stampe degli Uffizi: Inventario. Disegni di figura. 1, Florence, 1991, p.281, no.662 F. The drawing measures 325 x 161 mm.

2.

Kirwin, ibid., p.28.

3.

Inv. 10149 F; Chappell et al, op.cit., pp.28-29, no.8, fig.11; Chiappini di Sorio, op.cit., p.116, under no.43, illustrated in colour p.91.

4.

Inv. 663 F; Petrioli Tofani, ibid., pp.281-282, no.663 F. The drawing, in black and red chalk, measures 347 x 168 mm.

4.

Inv. 676 F; Petrioli Tofani, op.cit., p.287, no.676 F. The large double-sided drawing measures 268 x 412 mm.

5.

Inv. 677 F and 678 F (both in black chalk) and Inv. 10053 F and 10055 F (both in red chalk); Petrioli Tofani, op.cit., pp.287-288, nos.677 F and 678 F and Chappell et al, op.cit., pp.42-44, nos.18-19, pls.20-21, respectively. Three of these are also illustrated in Chiappini di Sorio, op.cit., p.164, figs.2-4.

6.

Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 30 January 1997, lot 42.

No.2 Gherardo Cibo 1.

Bolten, op.cit., pp.123-147, pls.1-21. It is now clear that ‘Messer Ulisse Severino da Cingoli’ was the recipient and owner of one of the Jesi albums, rather than the artist responsible for the drawings themselves.

2.

Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘Gherardo Cibo: visions of landscape and the botanical sciences in a sixteenth-century artist’, Journal of Garden History, 1989, p.200.

3.

Arnold Nesselrath, in Suzanne Folds McCullagh, ed., Capturing the Sublime: Italian Drawings of the Renaissance and Baroque, exhibition catalogue, Chicago, 2012, p.68, under no.28.

4.

Enrico Celani, ‘Sopra un erbario di Gherardo Cibo conservato nella R. Biblioteca Angelica di Roma’, Malpighia, 1902, p.190; quoted in translation in Tongiorgi Tomasi, op.cit., 1989, p.210.

5.

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 3 July 1989, lot 106 (as Messer UIlisse Severino da Cingoli), sold for £44,000; Caen, Musée des BeauxArts de Caen, L’Oeil et la Passion: Dessins italiens de la Renaissance dans les collections privées françaises, exhibition catalogue, 2011, pp.132-135, no.37 (entry by Arnold Nesselrath).

6.

Inv. 1966-54; Felton Gibbons, Catalogue of Italian Drawings in the Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, 1977, Vol.I, p.184, no.577, Vol.II, fig.577 (as Ulisse Severino da Cingoli); Mangani and Tongiorgi Tomasi, ed., op.cit., 2013, p.179, no.233 (not illustrated). The drawing measures 202 x 283 mm.

7.

Inv. 2010.93.13; Bolten, op.cit., p.143, no.115; Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Arthur K. Wheelock, ed., The McCrindle Gift: A Distinguished Collection of Drawings and Watercolors, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 2012, pp.32-33, no.5 (entry by Oliver Tostmann); Mangani and Tongiorgi Tomasi, ed., op.cit., 2013, p.190, no.258 (not illustrated). The drawing measures 243 x 306 mm.

8.

Bolten, op.cit., p.143, no.118, illustrated pl.3; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 28 January 2015, lot 3.

9.

Oliver Tostmann, in Grasselli and Wheelock, ed., op.cit., p.32, under no.5.

10. Tongiorgi Tomasi, op.cit., 1989, p.215.

No.3 Lelio Orsi 1.

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

2.

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

3.

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

4.

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

5.

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

6.

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

7.

Inv. 422A; Romani, ibid., illustrated p.115, fig.26; Monducci and Pirondini, ed., op.cit., pp.141-143, no.125.

8.

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

9.

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

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

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

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

13. Anonymous sale, London, Bonham’s Knightsbridge, 10 April 2013, lot 234. The pen and ink drawing, which measures 320 x 240 mm, was signed, dated and inscribed by the artist ‘W Lock pinx March 20 1808 / Memorandum of a Picture in distemper by Lelio Orsi / da Novellara’ in the lower margin.

No.4 Andrea Boscoli 1.

‘…disegnò sì bene....senza mancare di una franchezza e bravura di tocco straordinario’; Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie dei professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, Florence, 1846 ed., p.76.

2.

Brooks, op.cit., Vol.I, p.199.

3.

Ugo da Como, Girolamo Muziano 1528-1592: Note e documenti, Bergamo, 1930, illustrated p.151; Patrizia Tosini, Girolamo Muziano 1532-1592: della Maniera alla Natura, Rome, 2008, pp.432-435, no.A50, also illustrated p.230, fig.214.

4.

Brooks, op.cit., Vol.I, pp.197-198.

5.

Inv. 14041 F; Anna Forlani, ‘Andrea Boscoli’, Proporzioni, 1963, p.151, no.156 (not illustrated); Nadia Bastogi, ‘Nuove scoperte sull’attività e sulla morte di Andrea Boscoli’, Paragone, January 1994, p.7, illustrated pl.8; Nadia Bastogi, Andrea Boscoli, Florence, 2008, p.308, no.118 (not illustrated). The drawing measures 268 x 178 mm.

6.

Inv. 800 F; Brooks, op.cit., Vol.I, p.139 and p.317, Vol. II, fig.138; Bastogi, op.cit., 2008, pp.310-311, no.43, illustrated p.214, fig.248.

7.

Inv. 12539; Bastogi, ibid., 2008, p.187, p.308, no.119, illustrated p.193, fig.215.

8.

Bastogi, op.cit., 2008, pp.307-308, no.115, illustrated p.308, fig.365.

9.

Letter from John Talman in Florence to Dean Aldrich of Christ Church, Oxford; Quoted in A. E. Popham, ‘Sebastiano Resta and his Collections’, Old Master Drawings, June 1936, p.4.

No.5 Jacob Adriaensz. Backer 1.

The inventory of Tjerk Adriaensz. Backer’s estate, drawn up in 1659, lists two portfolios containing a total of eighty-four drawings by his brother Jacob.

2.

Arnold Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, Amsterdam, 1718-1721, Vol.I, p.338; quoted in translation in Peter Schatborn, Rembrandt and his Circle: Drawings in the Frits Lugt Collection, Bussum and Paris, 2010, p.102, under no.31.

3.

Werner Sumowksi, op.cit., 1983, Vol.I, p.203, no.72, illustrated p.275; Van den Brink, op.cit., p.212, no.19, illustrated in colour p.40, fig.19 (as location unknown). This large canvas, which measures 154.8 x 223.4 cm., was unknown before its first appearance at auction in London in 1974, and is today in a private collection.

4.

As Werner Sumowksi notes of the present sheet, ‘The agitated and sketchy draftsmanship of this piece is based on Rembrandt’s style of about 1632.’; Sumowski, op.cit., 1979, p.20.

5.

Inv. 9038; Sumowski, op.cit., 1979, pp.22-23, no.4; Jeroen Giltaij, The drawings by Rembrandt and his school in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1988, p.118, under no.37, fig.a; Van den Brink, op.cit., pp.178-179, no.41. The drawing, which measures 143 x 147 mm. is signed and dated ‘Jacob Backer fecit 1638. / in Vlissingen.’

6.

Inv. R70; Sumowski, op.cit., 1979, pp.52-53, no.19x; Giltaij, ibid., p.120, no.38. The drawing measures 194 x 148 mm.

No.6 Ferdinand Bol 1.

The present sheet belonged to the German scholar Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner (1880-1958), a noted art historian and curator who served as the director of the North Carolina Museum of Art from 1955 until his death. This drawing was one of several works which he bequeathed to the museum.

2.

Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art, op.cit., pp.30-31.

3.

Valentiner, op.cit., 1957, pp.50 and 59.

4.

Inv. Dyce.428; Sumowksi, pp.552-553, no.264x; Jane Shoaf Turner and Christopher White, Dutch & Flemish Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2014, Vol.I, pp.80-81, no.36.

5.

Inv. R69; Sumowski pp.494-495, no.235x; Jeroen Giltaij, The drawings by Rembrandt and his school in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1988, pp.124-125, no.42.

6.

Jane Shoaf Turner, Dutch Drawings in The Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, New York, 2006, Vol.I, p.40, under no.35 (entry by Felice Staempfle).

7.

Valentiner, op.cit., 1957, p.61, fig.15.

8.

Valentiner, op.cit., 1957, p.59.

No.7 Govert Flinck 1.

Inv. Z 2512; Sumowski, op.cit., pp.2114-2115, no.965x; Döring, op.cit., pp.54-55, no.15.

2.

Inv. RF 4.684; Lugt, op.cit., p.60, no.1314, pl.XCVI; Sumowski, op.cit., pp.2118-2119, no.967x.

3.

Inv. Hs 131 H 26, folio 153; Sumowski, op.cit., pp.1940-1941, no.889.

4.

Inv. 1278.12.2-3; Sumowski, op.cit., pp.2072-2073, no.948x; Peter Schatborn, ‘The Early, Rembrandtesque Drawings of Govert Flinck’, Master Drawings, Spring 2010, illustrated in colour p.12, fig.14.

5.

Inv. 22942; Sumowski, op.cit., pp.2096-2097, no.956x.

6.

Inv. B-15806 recto; Sumowski, op.cit., pp.2100-2101, no.958x.

7.

Inv. SA 7318; Moltke, op.cit., pp.166-167, no.476, pls.53-56; C. J. De Bruyn Kops, ‘Vergetten zelfportretten van Govert Flinck en Bartholomeus van der Helst’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 1965, No.1, pp.24-26, figs.6 and 7; Werner Sumowksi, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, Landau/Pfalz, 1983, Vol.II, p.1041, no.717, illustrated p.1149.

8.

De Bruyn Kops, ibid., p.27, fig.8; Cleves, Städtisches Museum Haus Koekkoek, op.cit., illustrated as frontispiece; Cleve, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Govert Flinck: Reflecting History, exhibition catalogue, 2015-2016, p.180, nos.52a and 52b, one also illustrated p.161.

9.

Inv. 864-2-395; Moltke, op.cit., p.171, no.D5.

10. Moltke, op.cit., p.68, no.14, pl.13; Sumowksi, op.cit., 1983, Vol.II, p.1026, no.637, illustrated in colour p.1069; Cleve, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, op.cit., p.138, no.22, illustrated in colour p.121. The painting is signed and dated 1655.

No.8 Pier Francesco Mola 1.

The present sheet cannot be identified among any of the drawings by Mola in the Paignon-Dijonval collection as catalogued in M. Bénard’s Cabinet de M. Paignon Dijonval, published in 1810. The collection of Gilbert Paignon-Dijonval (1708-1792) included some 6,000 drawings.

2.

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

3.

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

4.

Inv. 398; Cocke, ibid., p.52, no.33, pl.123 (as Erminia Guarding her Flock); Lugano, Museo Cantonale d’Arte and Rome, Musei Capitolini, Pier Francesco Mola 1612-1666, exhibition catalogue, 1989-1990, p.176, no.I.24, illustrated p.180; Petrucci, op.cit., p.350, no.B85, illustrated in colour p.186, fig.132 (where dated c.1655-1660).

5.

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

No.9 Attributed to Carl Andreas Ruthart 1.

The Czech lawyer and collector Dr. Arthur Feldmann (1877-1941). Feldmann began collecting drawings around 1922, and by 1939 owned about eight hundred sheets; mainly Central European drawings of the late 16th and 17th centuries. The collection was confiscated by the Gestapo in March 1939, and only a portion of the drawings have come to light since the Second World War. 135 drawings from the collection were acquired by the museum in Brno in 1942, and were eventually restituted to the Feldmann heirs in 2003. Five of these drawings were purchased in 2004 by the Czech government for the Moravian Gallery in Brno, and several others were dispersed at auction. In the past few years, thirty drawings from the Feldmann collection have been presented to the Albertina in Vienna by his grandson.

2.

Inv. D.1952.RW.3852.

3.

Hollstein 105 (Blooteling); Schneevoogt p.230, no.42. Impressions of two states of this etching are in the collection of the British Museum (Inv. 1981,U.383 and R,4.104).

4.

Hella Robels, Frans Snyders: Stilleben- und Tiermaler, Munich, 1989, pp.351-362, no.259; Susan Koslow, Frans Snyders: Stilleven- en Dierenschilder, Antwerp, 1995, p.228, fig.302.

5.

Robels, ibid., pp.316-317, no.210. The painting, whose subject is taken from the fable by Aesop, is known in several versions, each with varying degrees of studio participation. One such example was sold recently at auction (Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 January 2012, lot 24).

No.10 Allaert van Everdingen 1.

The first recorded owner of this drawing was the 19th century Nuremberg art dealer Johann Andreas Boerner (1785-1862), who inscribed the verso of the sheet with the date 1841, which is presumably when he acquired the drawing. The drawing later belonged successively to the noted German collectors F. Heimsoth (died 1879 or earlier) in Bonn, Dr. August Sträter (1810-1897) in Aachen, and Rudolf Philip Goldschmidt (c.18401914) in Berlin and Frankfurt, before coming into the possession of the Czech collector Arthur Feldmann (see No.9, note 1 above).

No.11 Herman Saftleven 1.

Samuel van Huls (1655-1734), burgomaster in The Hague, owned around 17,000 drawings, assembled over a period of some fifty years. His collection is known to have included two albums of botanical drawings commissioned by Agneta Block, possibly including the present sheet.

2.

According to some sources, Agnes Block’s collection was sold by her heirs to the collector Valerius Röver (1686-1739) of Delft, who owned some 1,800 Dutch drawings in total, including over a hundred sheets by Saftleven.

3.

Wolfgang Schulz, ‘Herman Saftleven II’, in Jane Turner, ed., The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, Vol.27, p.518.

4.

Jane Shoaf Turner, Dutch Drawings in The Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, New York, 2006, Vol.I, p.182, under no.276.

5.

Schulz, op.cit., 1977, p.153, no.21, fig.13; Schulz, op.cit., 1982, p.487, no.1441, illustrated pl.235.

6.

William W. Robinson, Seventeenth-Century Dutch Drawings: A Selection from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam and elsewhere, 1991-1992, pp.218-219, no.100.

7.

Schulz, op.cit., 1977, p.152, no.12, fig.16; Schulz, op.cit., 1982, p.484, no.1432, illustrated pl.230; Van Regteren Altena sale, London, Christie’s, 10 July 2014, lot 70 (sold for £86,500).

No.12 Herman Henstenburgh 1.

Johan van Gool, De Nieuwe Schouburg der Nederlansche Kunstschilders en Schilderessen, The Hague, 1750-1751, Vol.I, pp.248-256; quoted in translation in Ger Luijten and A. W. F. M. Meij, From Pisanello to Cezanne: Master Drawings from the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, exhibition catalogue, New York and elsewhere, 1990-1991, p.121, under no.42.

2.

‘Henstenburgh beelden zijn vogels altijd zittend op vrijwel kale struiken of boomtakken af, waarbij de uiteinden van de takken enkele bladeren dragen.

De achtergrond die niet is ingekleurd, behoudt de ivoorkleur van de drager, het perkament. Wanneer meerdere vogels zijn afgebeeld, worden deze in verschillende houdingen weergegeven, en verspreid over het blad, waardoor een levendig effect wordt bereikt.’; Anne M. Zaal, Herman Henstenburgh 1667-1726, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 1991, Vol.I, p.47.

3.

Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 10 January 1990, lot 193; Zaal, ibid., 1991, Vol.II, no.A 048. The drawing, which measures 356 x 282 mm., was with Elsbeth van Tets Antiques in Amsterdam, in 1990. A close variant of this composition, measuring 374 x 282 mm., was with Thomas Le Claire in Hamburg in 1992 (New York, Thomas Le Claire Kunsthandel at W. M. Brady & Co., Master Drawings 1500-1900, 1992, no.23).

4.

Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 22 January 2004, lot 202. The dimensions of the drawing are 384 x 244 mm.

5.

Delplace sale, London, Sotheby’s, 3 July 1996, lot 221. The drawing, signed with the monogram H.HB. fec., measured 291 x 347 mm.

6.

Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 January 2011, lot 626 (sold for $74,500); Anne M. Zaal, Herman Henstenburgh (1667-1726): Hoorns schilder en pasteibakker, exhibition catalogue, Hoorn, 1991, p.8, fig.7; Zaal, op.cit. [dissertation], 1991, Vol.II, no.A 036; Jane Shoaf Turner, Rembrandt’s World: Dutch Drawings from the Clement C. Moore Collection, exhibition catalogue, New York, Morgan Library and Museum, 2012, pp.200-201, no.85. The drawing measures 300 x 241 mm.

No.13 Aureliano Milani 1.

The present sheet was at one time part of the large collection of drawings and prints assembled by John Barnard (d. 1784) over a period of more than fifty years. Numbering around 1,100 sheets, the collection was one of the finest in England at the time, as noted in the preface to the catalogue of the sale of the collection in 1787: ‘It is presumed, that a more capital collection was never offered to the Public or more worthy the Attention of the learned Connoisseurs.’ (A Catalogue of that superb and well known Cabinet of Drawings of John Barnard, Esq. Late of Berkley-Square, Deceased, London, Mr. Greenwood, 16 February 1787 onwards). Barnard generally signed the drawings he owned with his initials and often added further notes, such as the dimensions of the sheet and brief biographical details about the artist, as with the present example.

2.

The former mount of this drawing was inscribed W. R. Hubbard. / 1892. and 4. Cockspur St. on the reverse.

3.

‘Ha disegnato moltissimo, e veramente i suoi disegni, possono andar del pari con quelli di qualunque gran maestro, per carattere, per la prontezza, per la grandiosità, e per la disinvoltura, con la quale sono toccati, lumeggiati, e macchiati’; Luigi Crespi, Felsina pittrice: Vite de’ pittori bolognese...che serve di supplemento all’opera del Malvasia, Rome, 1769, p.147.

4.

Andrea Czere, ‘Five New Chalk Drawings by Aureliano Milani’, Master Drawings, Summer 1988, p.136.

5.

Daniele Benati, ed., Disegni emiliani del sei-settecento: Quadri da stanza e da altare, Bologna, 1991, pp.239-241, fig. 66.1, illustrated in colour (entry by Renato Roli). The drawing is a study for a painting today in the collection of the Banca Popolare dell’Emilia in Modena.

6.

Inv. 4177; Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, Artisti italiani dal XVI al XIX secolo: Mostra di 200 disegni dalla raccolta della Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, 1976-1977, p.35, no.69, fig.69; Marzia Faietti, I grandi disegni italiani della Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, Cinisello Balsamo, 2002, unpaginated, no.51.

7.

New York, Paris and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1993, no.38.

8.

Dwight C. Miller, ‘An ‘Israelites Worshipping The Golden Calf’ by Aureliano Milani’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1974, p.333, figs. 57 (drawing) and 58 (print). The drawing measures 772 x 395 mm., while the dimensions of the etching are 762 x 1473 mm.

9.

Linda Wolk-Simon, Italian Old Master Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz, exhibition catalogue, Gainesville and elsewhere, 19911993, pp.102-105, no.25; Horvitz sale (‘The Jeffrey E. Horvitz Collection of Italian Drawings’), New York, Sotheby’s, 23 January 2008, lot 51.

10. Ann Percy, ‘Collecting Italian Drawings at Philadelphia: Two Nineteenth-Century Amateurs and a Twentieth-Century Scholar’, in Ann Percy and Mimi Cazort, Italian Master Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2004, p.65, fig.XLIX (as attributed to Aureliano Milani); Mazza, op.cit., p.373, fig.75 (as Milani). The attribution of the Philadelphia drawing to Milani is accepted without reservation in Mimi Cazort and Catherine Johnston, Bolognese Drawings in North American Collections 1500-1800, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa, 1982, p.131, under no.92.

No.14 Karl Wilhelm de Hamilton 1.

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 11 July 2001, lot 226. The two drawings measured 189 x 160 mm. and 190 x 144 mm.

2.

Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Doutrebente], 7 April 2004, lot 3; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Cornette de Saint-Cyr], 12 December 2012, lot 12.

3.

Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 30 January 1997, lot 229.

4.

Dillée sale, Paris, Sotheby’s, 19 March 2015, lot 459A.

No.15 Jean-Baptiste Oudry 1.

Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville, Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, Paris, 1762, Vol.IV, p.414; quoted in translation in Christine Giviskos, ‘Technique and Tradition in Oudry’s Animal Drawings’, in Mary Morton, ed., Oudry’s Painted Menagerie: Portraits of Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Europe, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles and elsewhere, 2007-2008, p.75.

2.

Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500-1800, exhibition catalogue, 20092010, p.114, under no.48.

3.

Hal Opperman, J. B. Oudry 1686-1755, exhibition catalogue, Fort Worth, 1983, p.146, under no.39.

4.

Ibid., p.147, under no.39.

5.

The two volumes of Oudry’s illustrations for the Fables of La Fontaine passed successively through the hands of the collectors Jean Jacques de Bure (1765-1853), Comte Adolphe-Narcisse Thibaudeau (1795-1856), Baron Isidore Taylor (1789-1879), Émile Pereire (1800-1875), Louis Roederer (1846-1880), Léon Olry-Roederer (d.1932), Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach (1876-1952) and Raphael Esmerian (1903-1976).

6.

Sale, London, Sotheby’s, 3 July 1996, lot 96 (sold for £551,500). The present location of the album is unknown.

No.16 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo 1.

James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, London, 1962, p.43 and p.45.

2.

James Byam Shaw, ‘The remaining Frescoes in the Villa Tiepolo at Zianigo’, The Burlington Magazine, November 1959, fig.34; Adriano Mariuz, Giandomenico Tiepolo, Venice, 1971, p.153, illustrated fig.346.

3.

Adelheid M. Gealt and George Knox, Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament, Bloomington, 2006, pp.184-185, no.56.

4.

Antonio Morassi, Disegni Veneti del Settecento nella collezione Paul Wallraf, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1959, nos.99-100. The first of these, which is a preparatory study for the Zianigo fresco, later appeared at auction in London in 1980 (Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 3 July 1980, lot 74).

5.

Benno Geiger, Handzeichnungen alter Meister, Vienna, 1948, p.150, no.100.

6.

Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 14 January 1987, lot 196.

7.

Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 23 June 2010, lot 101 (sold for €23,750).

No.17 Claude-Louis Chatelet 1.

Anonymous sale, Monaco, Christie’s, 20 June 1994, lot 107 (sold for 38,850 FF); Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 9 January 1996, lot 65 (sold for $10,925); New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1996, no.39; John Gaines sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 23 January 2001, lot 336 (sold for $8,040).

2.

New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1989, no.31; Alvin L. Clark, Jr., ed., Mastery & Elegance: Two Centuries of French Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, 1998, Appendix (‘List of Works in the Horvitz Collection Not Included in the Exhibition’), p.413, no.A.66 (not illustrated).

3.

Clark, Jr., ibid., p.413, nos.A.67 and A.68 (not illustrated).

No.19 Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard 1.

Paris, Grand Palais, and elsewhere, French Painting 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution, exhibition catalogue, 1974-1975, p.412.

2.

Inv. RF 3615; Jean Guiffrey and Pierre Marcel, Inventaire général des dessins du Musée du Louvre et du Musée de Versailles: Ecole Française, Vol.V, Paris, 1910, pp.100-101, no.4044; Arlette Sérullaz, Dessins français de 1750 à 1825 dans le collections du Musée du Louvre: le néo-classicisme, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1972, p.37, no.100 (not illustrated). The drawing, which measures 165 x 218 mm., is illustrated at http://artsgraphiques.louvre.fr/detail/oeuvres/6/15848-Deux-femmes-et-un-jeune-garcon-presentes-a-un-philosophe-assis-max.

3.

Inv. 26558; Guiffrey and Marcel, ibid., pp.100-101, no.4042; Sérullaz, ibid., p.37, no.99, illustrated pl.XIII. The drawing measures 665 x 1215 mm. and is illustrated at http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr/detail/oeuvres/5/212416-Pyrrhus-le-jeune-et-dautres-personnages-max.

4.

Five drawings by Fragonard for the Palais Bourbon project appeared at auction in 2003; Anonymous sale, Paris, Sotheby’s, 15 June 2003, lots 51-55.

5.

Inv. 2012.1.5799-5813 and 2012.1.5839-5840.

6.

Denise Ledoux-Lebard, ‘La Campagne de 1805 vue par la manufacture impériale de Sèvres’, La revue du Louvre et des Musées de France, 1978, No.3, p.181, figs.7 and 8. The five painted reliefs by Fragonard are today in the Sèvres archives.

No.20 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 1.

Avigdor Arikha, On Depiction: Selected Writings on Art, London, 1995, p.164.

2.

Grasselli et al, op.cit., pp.188-189, no.74 (as Presumed Portrait of Gaspard Bonnet, 1814). The drawing, which is signed and dated 1814 and measures 229 x 193 mm., gives no indication of the sitter’s name, although there are traces of an earlier inscription, which is now illegible.

No.21 Jean Bernard 1.

Inv. RP-T-FM-326. The drawing, in black chalk, measures 178 x 144 mm., and is visible at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-T-FM346.

2.

van Hall, op.cit., p.21, Bernard nos.3-4, not illustrated.

3.

Inv. RP-T-1940-63. The drawing measures 291 x 226 mm., and is visible at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-T-1940-63.

4.

Anonymous sale, Amsterdam, Frederik Muller & Cie., 11-14 June 1912, lot 322.

5.

A reproduction of this drawing, which measures 195 x 245 mm., is in the Witt Library of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

6.

Inv. SK-A-2141; van Hall, op.cit., p.21, Bernard no.1 (not illustrated). The painting measures 21 x 16.5 cm.,m and is visible at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/SK-A-2141.

No.22 Dirk Salm 1.

The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Nederlandsche Aquarellen van 1780-1830, exhibition catalogue, 1942, p.21, no.100 (‘Veertjes. Gesign.: Dirk Zalm fecit 1829. Aquarel, 14.5 x 19.3’), not illustrated; J. Fred. Bianchi sale, Amsterdam, Paul Brandt, 23-27 November 1964, lot 804 (‘Dirk Zalm.

Groupe de cinq diverse plumes d’oiseaux. Aquarelle sur fond blanc. 14.8 x 19.2 cm. Signée en toutes lettres et datée 1828 en bas à droite. Beau dessin de ce maître fort rare.’), not illustrated.

2.

Inv. RP-T-1921-188. The drawing measures 149 x 221 mm., and is visible at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-T-1921-188.

3.

van Leeuwen sale (‘The Hans van Leeuwen Collection. Part III: 19th Century Dutch Master Drawings’), Amsterdam, Christie’s, 10 November 1999, lot 215 (one illustrated).

4.

Anonymous sale, Berlin, Galerie Gerda Bassenge, 26 November 2010, lot 6486.

5.

Bol, op.cit., p.37, no.75, illustrated pl.22.

6.

Laurens J. Bol, Nederlands Kunstbezit uit openbare verzamelingen: Bekoring van het kleine, n.d., pp.30-31, no.55, pl.55.

7.

Inv. RP-T-1904-413. The drawing measures 101 x 176 mm., and is visible at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-T-1904-413.

No.23 John Frederick Lewis 1.

Christine Riding, ‘Travellers and Sitters: The Orientalist Portrait’, in Nicholas Tromans, ed., The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, exhibition catalogue, New Haven, London and Istanbul, 2008-2009, p.56.

2.

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

3.

Quoted in Lewis, op.cit., p.21.

4.

Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Lady’), London, Christie’s, 15 June 2010, lot 10 (sold for £181,250); Llewellyn, op,cit., 2011, illustrated pp.66-67. The drawing, which measures 368 x 527 mm., may be the same as that entitled ‘Armenian Ladies, Brussa, 1841’ sold at the posthumous Lewis studio sale at Christie’s in London on 4 May 1877, as lot 188.

5.

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

6.

Sale (‘An Important Group of Orientalist Paintings and Drawings from the Marc and Victoria Sursock Collection’), London, Christie’s, 19th Century European Art, 12 June 2012, lot 70.

7.

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

8.

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

No.24 Narcisse Diaz de la Peña 1.

Théophile Thoré, Salon de 1846, Paris, 1846, p.47; quoted in translation in Colta Ives and Elizabeth E. Barker, Romanticism & The School of Nature: Nineteenth-Century Drawings and Paintings from the Karen B. Cohen Collection, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2000-2001, p.122, under no.59.

2.

Théophile Thoré, Salon de 1844; quoted in translation in Ives and Barker, ibid., p.118, under no.57.

3.

David Croal Thomson, The Barbizon School of Painters, London, 1891, p.170.

4.

Inv. 2008.339; Carter E. Foster et al, French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin, exhibition catalogue, Cleveland and New York, 2001-2002, pp.92-93, no.41. The watercolour measures 150 x 228 mm.

5.

Inv. WAM 37.851; David P. Becker et al, The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas, exhibition catalogue, Baltimore and elsewhere, 2005-2006, pp.210-211, no.49 (entry by Simon Kelly).

6.

Inv. RF 5132; Arlette Sérullaz and Regis Michel, L’aquarelle en France au XIXe siècle, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1983, p.43, no.49. The drawing measures 213 x 274 mm.

7.

Alain de Leiris and Carol Hynning Smith, From Delacroix to Cezanne: French Watercolor Landscapes of the Nineteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, College Park, and elsewhere, 1977-1978, p.111, no.46

8.

Ives and Barker, op.cit., pp.124-125, no.60.

9.

Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 14 December 1925, lot 105. A photograph of this watercolour is in the files of the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

No.25 Gustave Courbet 1.

The present sheet cannot be identified in the catalogue of a sale (‘Vente Courbet et ses élèves’) held in Paris on 21 December 1882.

2.

In his 1978 catalogue raisonné of Courbet’s work, Robert Fernier lists just over sixty drawings by the artist, and relatively few sheets have been added to the corpus since then.

3.

Marget Stuffmann, ‘Courbet, Drawing’, in Klaus Herding and Max Hollein, ed., Courbet: A Dream of Modern Art, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt, 2010-2011, p.132.

4.

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, ‘Into the Modern Era: The Evolution of Realist and Naturalist Drawing’, in Gabriel P. Weisberg, The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing 1830-1900, exhibition catalogue, Cleveland and elsewhere, 1980-1982, p.29.

5.

Ségolène Le Men, ‘Courbet, Painter of Sleep and Nightmares’, in Herding and Hollein, ed., op.cit., pp.37-38.

6.

Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Julián Gállego, Goya: The Complete Etchings and Lithographs, Munich and New York, 1995, p.58, no.43.

No.26 Jean-François Millet 1.

The J.F.M. stamp at the bottom of the sheet is the studio stamp (or cachet d’atelier) applied to the unsigned drawings in Millet’s studio at the time of his death in 1875. Most of these drawings were dispersed in the Millet atelier sale held in Paris in May 1875, or at the sale of the collection of the artist’s widow in April 1894.

2.

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

3.

Alexandra R. Murphy et al, Jean-François Millet: Drawn into the Light, exhibition catalogue, Williamstown and elsewhere, 1999, p.37, under no.2.

4.

Inv. RF 11361. The drawing is visible at http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr/detail/oeuvres/1/23598-Baigneuse-nue-les-pieds-dans-leau-max.

5.

Inv. RF 4163; Murphy et al, op.cit., pp.37-38, no.2.

6.

Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, Paris, 1921, Vol.I, illustrated between pp.56 and 57, fig.33; Lucien Lepoittevin, JeanFrançois Millet, Vol.II: L’ambiguité de l’image, essai, Paris, 1973, p.62, fig.47; Robert L. Herbert, Jean-François Millet, exhibition catalogue, London, 1976, p.53, no.18.

7.

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

8.

Inv. 1927.4434; Herbert, op.cit., pp.53-55, no.19; Murphy et al, op.cit., p.39, no.5.

9.

Lepoittevin, op.cit., p.69, fig.55, where dated c.1846-1847; Herbert, op.cit., pp.50-51, no.14.

No.27 George Price Boyce 1.

Virginia Surtees, ed., The Diaries of George Price Boyce, Norfolk, 1980, p.viii.

2.

Christopher Newall, ‘Introduction’, in Christopher Newall and Judy Egerton, George Price Boyce, exhibition catalogue, London, 1987, p.31.

3.

Quoted in Surtees, ed., op.cit., p.119.

4.

Newall and Egerton, op.cit., p.16.

5.

Newall and Egerton, op.cit., p.48, no.17. The watercolour measures 187 x 280 mm.

6.

F. G. Stephens(?), in a review of the Old Water-Colour Society’s Winter exhibition of 1868-1869, in Athenaeum, 28 November 1868, p.721; quoted in Newall and Egerton, op.cit., p.48, under no.17.

7.

Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 8 February 1991, lot 7.

8.

Newall and Egerton, op.cit., p.48, no.16; Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, New Haven and London, 2001, p.142, fig.109. The watercolour measures 190 x 273 mm.

9.

Anonymous sale, London, Bonham’s Knightsbridge, 10 September 2013, lot 47.

10. Staley, op.cit., p.142.

11. Staley, op.cit., p.147, fig.116. The watercolour was drawn in c.1860-1862 and exhibited in 1866.

No.28 Samuel Palmer 1.

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

2.

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

No.29 Samuel Palmer 1.

‘Sometimes with secure delight / The upland hamlets will invite, / When the merry bells ring round, / And the jocund rebecks sound / To many a youth and many a maid, / Dancing in the chequered shade...’

2.

Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer, London, 2011, p.254. Things were to become much worse soon afterwards when, shortly after the 1861 OWCS exhibition, the artist’s eldest son Thomas More Palmer died after a long illness, at the age of nineteen.

3.

‘Society of Painters in Water Colours [Second and Concluding Notice]’, The Illustrated London News, 8 June 1861, p.540.

4.

‘Society of Painters in Water Colors’, The Building News, op.cit., p.388.

No.30 Victor Hugo 1.

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

2.

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

3.

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

No.31 Edgar Degas 1.

At the fourth and final Degas studio sale, held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in July 1919, the present sheet was sold framed together with three other studies of figures for The Daughter of Jephthah. One of these is now in a private collection in Texas (see note 8 below).

2.

Inv. 1933-9; Paul-André Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre, Paris, 1946, Vol.II, pp.48-49, no.94 (where dated 1861-1864); Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Ottawa and New York, 1988-1989, pp.85-87, no.26; Haudiquet et al, op.cit., p.127, Ill.49.

3.

Christopher Lloyd, Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels, London, 2014, p.59.

4.

Theodore Reff, Degas: The Artist’s Mind, New York, 1976, p.60.

5.

Lloyd, op.cit., p.59.

6.

A detail of this figure is illustrated in Eleanor Mitchell, ‘La Fille de Jepthé par Degas: Genèse et évolution’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, October 1937, p.178, fig.5.

7.

John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, London, 1973, illustrated p.58; Götz Adriani, Edgar Degas: Pastels, Oil Sketches, Drawings, London, 1985, pp.346-347, no.43, illustrated pl.43; Denys Sutton, Edgar Degas: Life and Work, New York, 1986, p.47, fig.31. The drawing, which measures 185 x 260 mm., is in the collection of Michel Benisovich, New York.

8.

Meslay and Jordan, ed., op.cit., pp.104-105, no.46 (entry by George Shackelford).

9.

Théodore Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar Degas, Oxford, 1976, Vol.I, p.86 [Notebook 14A, p.21], illustrated Vol.II, Nb. 14A, p. 21.

10. Jean Sutherland Boggs, Drawings by Degas, exhibition catalogue, Saint Louis and elsewhere, 1967, p.58, under nos.30-32.

11. Haudiquet et al, op.cit., pp.127-147, nos.49-62.

12. Inv. 1934:1; 1991:17 and 1998:15; Ann H. Sievers, Linda Muehlig and Nancy Rich, Master Drawings from the Smith College Museum of Art, New York, pp.141-149, nos.33-35.

No.32 Adolph von Menzel 1.

Paul Meyerheim, Adolph Menzel: Errinerungen, Berlin, 1906; translated and quoted in Adolph Menzel 1815-1905: Master Drawings from East Berlin, exhibition catalogue, New York and elsewhere, 1990-1991, p.12.

2.

Max Liebermann, Adolf Menzel: 50 Zeichnungen, Pastelle und Aquarelle aus dem Besitz der Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 1921, p.7; quoted in translation in Françoise Forster-Hahn, ‘Authenticity into Ambivalence: The Evolution of Menzel’s Drawings’, Master Drawings, Autumn 1978, p.265.

3.

Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, op.cit., p.242, under no.114.

4.

Susanne von Falkenhausen, in Cambridge, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Prints and Drawings by Adolph Menzel: A Selection from the collections of the museums of West Berlin, exhibition catalogue, 1984, p.74.

5.

Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, op.cit., p.242, under no.114.

6.

Holger Brülls, ‘Pharisäer, Börsenjuden, fromme Greise. Das Bild des orthodoxen Judentums im Werk Adolph Menzels und in den Augen des zeitgenössischen Publikums’, in Jens Christian Jensen, ed., Adolph Menzel: Gemälde, Gouachen, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen im Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt, Munich, 1998, illustrated p.55.

7.

Inv. MGS 5125; Jensen, ed., ibid., pp.132-133, no.41.

No.33 Paul Huet 1.

‘Nous sommes dans le véritable Cornwall, pays vraiment pittoresque, l’ancienne Bretagne qui est à l’Angleterre ce que la Bretagne française est à la Normandie…Des détails charmants, une fraîcheur inouïe, expression générale de toute l’Angleterre et beaucoup de rapports avec la Normandie et l’entrée de la Bretagne, voilà ce que vous trouverez.’; René Paul Huet, Paul Huet, d’après ses notes, sa correspondance, ses contemporains, Paris, 1911, p.317.

2.

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

3.

New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 2001, no.46.

No.34 Charles Chaplin 1.

In a letter to Arsène Houssaye of 1859; quoted in translation in Valerie E. Morant, ‘Charles Joshue Chaplin, An Anglo-French Artist, 1825-1891’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, October 1989, p.146.

2.

Ibid., p.146.

3.

‘Charles Chaplin’, The Aldine, 1879, p.210.

4.

Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 29 May 1981, lot 18 (as Persuasion and A Reprimand).

No.35 Aloys Zötl 1.

At the auction, the watercolours by Zötl were sold for sums between 7,000 and 190,000 francs. Nothing is known of the earlier provenance of these works, which were consigned for sale by a descendant of an Austrian family.

2.

André Breton, Sur l’atelier d’Aloys Zotl, 21 March 1956; reprinted in translation in André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, New York, 1972 [2002 ed.], pp.354-355.

3.

Sale (‘Vente des 150 Aquarelles provenant de l’atelier Aloys Zötl’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Maurice Rheims], 19 December 1955, lots 34-38. This group included watercolours described as a Tortue Matamata, a Tortue de Brenne and two watercolours of a Tortue Bleue. The first of these may be identifed with one recently sold at auction in Paris (Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Ader], 7 November 2013, lot 155, sold for €148,704).

4.

Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Maurice Rheims], 3 May 1856, lots 100 (dated 1861) and 114 (dated 1880).

5.

Victor Francès, Contrées de Aloys Zötl, Paris, 2011, illustrated on pp.70-71, pp.78-79 and pp.88-89, respectively.

6.

Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 29 March 2012, lot 181 (sold for €67,000). The work was included in the first sale of Zotl’s watercolours, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 19 December 1955, lot 37. It is illustrated in Julio Cortazar, Le bestiaire d’Aloys Zotl (1881-1887), Parma and Milan, 1976, p.131 and Giovanni Mariotti, Das Bestiarium von Aloys Zötl (1881-1887), Milan and Geneva, 1979-1980, p.17.

No.36 Léon Augustin Lhermitte 1.

Gabriel Weisberg, ‘Léon Lhermitte: Creativity in Context’, in Los Angeles, Galerie Michael and New York, Altman/Burke Fine Art, Leon Lhermitte (1844-1925), exhibition catalogue, 1989-1990, unpaginated.

2.

‘Exhibition in Black and White, Dudley Gallery’, The Graphic, 12 June 1875, p.571.

3.

Monique Le Pelley Fonteny, ‘Léon Augustin Lhermitte’, in Los Angeles, Galerie Michael and New York, Altman/Burke Fine Art, op.cit., unpaginated.

4.

Letter no.531, written on or about 2 September 1885; http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let531/letter.html.

5.

Most of the drawings are illustrated in Le Pelley Fonteny, op.cit., 1991, pp.456-474, nos.760-876.

6.

André Theuriet, Rustic Life in France, New York and Boston, 1896, p.xi.

7.

John House, ‘The French Nineteenth-century Landscape’, in Kate Flint and Howard Morphy, ed., Culture, Landscape and the Environment: The Linacre Lectures, Oxford, 2000, p.133.

8.

Le Pelley Fonteny, op.cit., 1991, p.454, no.745 (as location unknown). The drawing, which can be dated to before March 1885, measured 300 x 450 mm.

9.

Le Pelley Fonteny, op.cit., 1991, p.145, no.211 (as location unknown). The painting, which is signed and dated 1911, measured 1.03 x 1.41 metres. A pastel study of two plough horses, sold at auction in 2002, is more likely to be related to the 1911 painting (formerly in the collection of David Daniels and Stevan Beck Baloga; Their posthumous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 29 October 2002, lot 82; Le Pelley Fonteny, op.cit., 1991, p.189, no.160).

10. Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 20 February 1992, lot 23 (sold for $14,300); Le Pelley Fonteny, op.cit., 1991, p.458, no.765 (as location unknown).

11. Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 23 May 1996, lot 37 (sold for $37,375); Le Pelley Fonteny, op.cit., 1991, p.457, no.763 (as location unknown).

12. Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 20 April 2005, lot 182 (sold for $9,600); Le Pelley Fonteny, op.cit., 1991, p.457, no.764 (as location unknown).

13. Anonymous sales, New York, Christie’s, 1 May 2000, lot 284 (sold for $29,735) and New York, Sotheby’s, 18 April 2008, lot 115 (sold for $52,000); Le Pelley Fonteny, op.cit., 1991, p.459, no.771 (as location unknown).

14. Richard Thomson, ‘Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844-1925). Catalogue raisonné’ [book review], The Burlington Magazine, October 1992, p.673.

No.37 Albert Dubois-Pillet 1.

‘Seurat c’est lui qui m’a entraîné, je lui dois tout! Son sens de l’ordre, de la discipline, je devrais dire, fit sur moi tout de suite une profonde impression.’

2.

Quoted in translation in Lily Bazalgette, ‘Albert Dubois-Pillet’, in Jean Sutter, ed., The Neo-Impressionists, London, 1970, p.96.

3.

‘Dans le Pré en contre-bas (juillet 1886) ce pâle et ardent ciel estival de M. Dubois-Pillet affirme sa qualité par une tavelure de bleu; dans ce bleu tombe un semis d’orangé clair décelant l’action solaire; et ces couleurs, dont la résultante optique a une tendance au blanc, se ponctuent d’un rose, complémentaire du véronèse qui crête la ligne des arbres. A deux pas, l’œil ne perçoit plus le travail du pinceau: ce rose, cet orangé et ce bleu se composent sur la rétine, se coalisent en un vibrant chœur, et la sensation de soleil s’impose: on sait, en effett - expériences de Maxwell, mensurations de N.-O. Rood - que le mélange optique suscite des luminosités beaucoup plus intenses que le mélange des pigments.’; Félix Fénéon, ‘L’Impressionisme aux Tuileries’, L’Art Moderne de Bruxelles, 19 September 1886; reprinted in Halperin, ed., op.cit., pp.54-55.

No.38 Gustav Holmbom 1.

Inv. 400x29. The painting measures 34 x 47.5 cm.

No.39 Italian School 1.

The form of the date would suggest an English, American or possibly French artist.

2.

Diana Strazdes, in Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Lure of Italy: American Artists and The Italian Experience 1760-1914, exhibition catalogue, Boston and elsewhere, 1992-1993, p.293, under no.60 and p.295, under no.61.

3.

Ferdinand Gregorovius, The Island of Capri: A Mediterranean Idyll, London, 1896, pp.54-56.

No.40 Mary Cassatt 1.

Adelyn D. Breeskin, ‘Mary Cassatt: Pastels and Color Prints’, in Washington, D.C., National Collection of Fine Arts, op.cit., p.15.

2.

Nancy Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt, New York, 1987, p.113.

3.

The youngest of the Hammond children at the time of Cassatt’s trip to Boston, George Fiske Hammond almost died of pneumonia as a youth, and the family began spending winters in Southern California from 1908 onwards. After his parents divorced in 1910, George and his siblings settled with their mother in Santa Barbara, and later in Montecito. George Fiske Hammond graduated from the University of California in 1926, and later became a pioneering aviator.

4.

Nancy Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, New Haven and London, 1994, p.247.

5.

Breeskin, op.cit., pp.132-133, nos.292, 293 and 295.

6.

Breeskin, op.cit., p.132, no.294; Mary Costantino, Mary Cassatt, London, 1995, illustrated in colour pp.96-97. The pastel measures 510 x 620 mm.

7.

Inv. 1964.214; Breeskin, op.cit., p.132, no.292; Nancy Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt, New York, 1987, p.116, fig.102; Mathews, op.cit., 1994, p.249, fig.108.

8.

Nancy Mowll Mathews, op.cit., 1987, p.114.

9.

Breeskin in Washington, D.C., National Collection of Fine Arts, op.cit., p.17.

No.41 Paul-César Helleu 1.

Quoted in New York, Knoedler Gallery, Paul-Cesar Helleu. Glimpses of the Grace of Women: an exhibition of drypoints, exhibition catalogue, 1974, unpaginated.

2.

William Rothenstein, Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein, 1872-1900, London, 1931, p.107.

3.

Félix Fénéon, ‘Pastels. Societé des pastellistes français. 3e exposition du 3 au 20 avril 1887’, L’Émancipation Sociale, 17 April 1887; quoted in translation in Stéphane Guégan, ‘The Return to Favour’, in Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Mystery and Glitter: Pastels in the Musée d’Orsay, exhibition catalogue, 2008-2009, p.26.

4.

Several are illustrated, for example, in Anne-Marie Bergeret-Gourbin and Marie-Lucie Imhoff, Paul Helleu 1859-1927, exhibition catalogue, Honfleur, Musée Eugène Boudin, 1993; notably p.63, no.56 (measuring 635 x 540 mm.), p.84, no.57 (800 x 600 mm.) and p.87, no.67 (600 x 740 mm.). Another is illustrated in Jane Abdy, ‘Helleu, Paul-César (-François)’, in Jane Turner, ed., The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, Vol.14, p.363.

5.

J. M. Quennell, ‘Paul Helleu: A Revaluation’, Apollo, March 1983, p.116.

No.42 Karl Hagemeister 1.

Eberhard Ruhmer, ‘Hagemeister, Karl’, in Jane Turner, ed., The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, Vol.14, p.30.

2.

‘Eine andere Zeit kam jetzt, in der mein Grundgedanke der war, die Natur in ihrer Wirklichkeit zu treffen, in Form und Farbe. Da aber nach den damaligen Anschauungen das letzte Ziel der Landschaftsmalerei darin bestand, bewegte Stimmung zu geben, so fing ich an, jahrelang nur Pastelle zu malen, weil sich in diesen viel mehr Bewegung von Luft und Licht darstellen lässt.’; Quoted in Emil Thoma, ‘Erinnerungen an Karl Hagemeister’, Süddeutsche Monatshefte, 1934, p.494.

3.

‘Ich habe erkannt...dass zum atmenden Leben Bewegung gehört, und dass diese nur durch feinste Unterschiede im Farbauftrag erreicht werden kann.

Wenn man alles pastos malt, so giebt es keine Bewegung, wohl aber, wenn man vom Pastosen bis zu äusserster Zartheit und von der klaren deutlichen Ferne bis zur Verschwommenheit abstuft.’; Karl Scheffler, ‘Karl Hagemeister’, Kunst und Künstler, 1910, p.417.

4.

Anonymous sale, Hamburg, Hauswedell & Nolte, 8 June 2011, lot 249, where dated c.1910. The drawing measured 740 x 1070 mm.

5.

Margit Bröhan, Karl Hagemeister (1848-1933): Gemälde – Pastelle – Zeichnungen, exhibition catalogue, Berlin and Rügen, 1998, pp.124-125, no.65 (A Summer Morning on the Havel, c.1900), pp.130-131, no.69 (A November Day in the Marshes, c.1900), pp.136-137, no.73 (A Stream in Late Autumn, c.1900) and pp.156-157, no.84 (Winter on the Schwielowsee, c.1905).

6.

Ibid., pp.146-147, no.79 (where dated c.1904).

No.43 Odilon Redon 1.

Letter of 9 November 1897; quoted in translation in Roseline Bacou, Odilon Redon: Pastels, London, 1987, p.13.

2.

Bacou, ibid., pp.14 and 18.

3.

Bacou, op.cit., p.14.

4.

‘Aussi étrange que puisse paraître la présence du Christ dans la collection d’un pays non chrétien, le fait atteste une fois de plus que l’art de Redon a été accepté par les Japonais comme un lien entre l’Est et l’Ouest, et qu’ils veulent, avec leur habituelle ardeur, en connaître tous les aspects.’; Berger, op.cit., 1965, p.33.

5.

Motoé, op.cit., p.147.

6.

Wildenstein, op.cit., Vol.I, p.205, no.514. The figure of Christ in the Birmingham painting, which measures 46 x 27 cm., is derived from the central panel of the Crucified Christ from Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim altarpiece in Colmar.

7.

Inv. RF 1984-53; Bacou, op.cit., 1984, p.17, no.23; Wildenstein, op.cit., Vol.I, pp.205-206, no.516 (illustrated in colour p.202). The painting measures 53 x 47 cm.

8.

Inv. RF 40581; Bacou, op.cit., 1984, p.186, no.63; Wildenstein, op.cit., Vol.I, p.206, no.519. Two other drawings of the Crucifixion by Redon are in the Louvre (Inv. RF 31030 and 40582; Wildenstein, op.cit., Vol.I, p.204, no.512 and p.206, no.518, respectively). A large charcoal drawing of the subject is in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven (Inv. 1959.9.12; Wildenstein, op.cit., Vol.I, p.207, no.521).

9.

Inv. 2887; Wildenstein, op.cit., Vol.I, p.203, no.509; Margret Stuffman and Max Hollein, ed., As in a Dream: Odilon Redon, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt, 2007, p.254, pl.162. The pastel measures 650 x 490 mm.

10. Bacou, op.cit., pp.68-69, pl.14; Wildenstein, op.cit., Vol.I, pp.203-204, no.511; Stuffman and Hollein, ed., ibid., p.255, pl.163; Raphaël Bouvier et al, Odilon Redon, exhibition catalogue, Basel, Fondation Beyeler, 2014, illustrated p.99. The pastel measures 690 x 520 mm.

11. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 29 November 1989, lot 427; Wildenstein, op.cit., Vol.I, p.207, no.523. The pastel measures 325 x 258 mm.

No.44 Friedrich Wilhelm Schwinge 1.

With Kunsthandlung Heinzel, Kassel. The painting is illustrated at http://www.kunsthandlung-heinzel.de/artists/friedrich_schwinge.html.

2.

Anonymous sale, Hamburg, Auktionshaus Stahl, 20 June 2009, lot 103.

No.45 Emil Nolde 1.

Peter Vergo and Felicity Lunn, Emil Nolde, exhibition catalogue, London and Copenhagen, 1995-1996, p.170.

2.

Jill Lloyd, ‘Nolde [Hansen], Emil’, in Jane Turner, ed., The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, Vol.23, p.186.

3.

‘Es sind die Länder alle so eigentümlich, die Menschen, die Tiere, die Pflanzen, alles ist so fremdartig, nicht immer schön, aber immer interessant.’; from a letter written in December 1913; Emil Nolde, Welt und Heimat: Die Südseereise 1913-1918, 1936, published Cologne, 1965, p.50.

4.

Øystein Ustvedt, ‘In search of the authentic’, in Øystein Ustvedt et al, Emil Nolde: Jakten på det autentiske / In Search of the Authentic, exhibition catalogue, Oslo, 2012-2013, p.115.

5.

‘Die sonstigen Eingeborenen bestrichen sich als Trauerzeichen die Stirn mit weißer Farbe. Bei Tanzfesten bemalten sie sich den Körper mit hellen Punkten und Linien und auch mit Blau. Gegen Ungeziefer durchrieben sie die Haare mit Kalk, welcher nachher ein merkwürdiges Braun oder Braunrot ergab. Alles solches steigerte den Reiz ihrer Erscheinung.’; Nolde. op.cit., p.93.

6.

Some of these are illustrated in Ingried Brugger et al, Emil Nolde und die Südsee, exhibition catalogue, Vienna and Munich, 2001-2002, nos.7174, 76, 78-79, 85 and 165-166.

7.

Inv. SdZ 1, SdZ 3, SdZ 6, SdZ 7, SdZ 8, SdZ 10, SdZ 12 and SdZ 13; Karin Orchard, Emil Nolde: Reise in die Südsee 1913-1914, exhibition catalogue, Hannover, Sprengel Museum, 1992, pp.23-26, nos.5-9 and 11-12; Brugger et al, ibid., nos.167-169; Magdalena Moeller, Emil Nolde in der Südsee, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, Brücke-Museum, 2002, pp.56-65, nos.13-17.

8.

Vergo and Lunn, op.cit., p.142.

9.

Lloyd, op.cit., p.186.

No.46 Lesser Ury 1.

Chana C. Schütz, ‘Lesser Ury and the Jewish Renaissance’, Jewish Studies Quarterly, 2003, No.4, p.360.

2.

Jerusalem, Bezalel National Museum, Lesser Ury 1861-1931, exhibition catalogue, 1961, unpaginated.

3.

Lothar Brieger, Lesser Ury, Berlin, 1921, illustrated p.42; Detlev Rosenbach, Lesser Ury: Das druckgraphische Werk, Berlin, 2002, p.94, no.58 (where dated c.1920).

4.

Ibid., p.81, no.45.

No.47 Owe Zerge 1.

‘Jag målar så otroligt gammaldags. Men jag tycker att man skall se vad det föreställer. Jag kan inte med bästa vilja i världen tycka att man gör en människa bättre genom att sätta ett öga i pannan och en näsa på bröstet.’; quoted in Sune Johannesson, ‘Zerges porträttlika konst på auktion’, Kristianstadsbladet, 17 January 2007.

No.48 Pablo Picasso 1.

John Richardson, A Life of Picasso. Vol.III: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, London, 2007, pp.203 and 223.

2.

Inv. M.P. 989; Michèle Richet, Musée Picasso: Catalogue of the Collections. Vol.II: Drawings Watercolours Gouaches Pastels, London, 1988, pp.274275, no.880. The drawing measures 287 x 222 mm.

3.

Palau I Fabre, op.cit., p.380, no.1371. The drawing measures 150 x 250 mm.

4.

Ibid., p.387.

No.49 Mainie Jellett 1.

Aidan Dunne, ‘Mainie Jellett: A pioneer of Modernism’, The Sunday Trubune, 8 December 1991, p.5.

2.

Dublin, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Mainie Jellett 1897-1944, exhibition catalogue, 1991-1992, p.87.

3.

Bruce Arnold, Mainie Jellett and the Modern Movement in Ireland, New Haven and London, 1991, p.151.

4.

Dublin, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, op.cit., pp.87-89, no.124. The gouache drawing measures 590 x 215 mm.

5.

Dublin, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, op.cit., pp.87-89, nos.126 and 127. The second of these appeared at auction in 1994 (Anonymous sale, London, Phillips, 7 June 1995, lot 33).

6.

Arnold, op.cit., p.viii.

7.

Brian Fallon, ‘Thoroughly modern Mainie’, The Irish Times, 7 December 1991, p.3.

No.50 Pierre Bonnard 1.

Jörg Zutter, ‘Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature’, in Jörg Zutter, ed., Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature, exhibition catalogue, Canberra and Brisbane, 2003, p.61.

2.

Annette Vaillant et al, Bonnard, ou, le bonheur de voir, Neuchâtel, 1985, p.184; quoted in translation in Dita Amory, ‘The Presence of Objects: Still Life in Bonnard’s Late Paintings’, in Dita Amory, ed., Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2009, p.16.

3.

‘Datée de 1920, l’aquarelle intitulée Ciel et mer est caractéristique du goût de plus en plus prononcé pour la lumière que manifestait alors Bonnard.

Par là, il confesse son admiration pour la peinture des Impressionnistes, mais il est tout-à-fait évident qu’il s’éloigne de leur vision résolument objective pour conférer à la couleur un rôle très différent. Bien que de façon encore ténue, les couleurs commencent à vibrer dans la lumière, préfigurent l’explosion colorée des années à venir.’; Cros, op.cit., p.23. Philippe Cros dated the present sheet to 1920.

4.

Zutter, ed., op.cit., no.73, illustrated in colour p.175, fig.151. The watercolour measures 122 x 160 mm.

5.

Michel Terrasse, Bonnard: du dessin au tableau, Paris, 1996, illustrated p.250; Zutter, ed., op.cit., no.84, illustrated in colour p.175, fig.152. The watercolour measures 122 x 160 mm.

No.51 Josef (Joseph) Šíma 1.

Meyer Schapiro, ‘Sima’, in Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Joseph Sima, exhibition catalogue, 1968, p.9.

2.

Frantisek Smejkal, Sima, Paris, 1992, p.202, fig.203 and p.204, fig.205; Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, op.cit., p.56, figs.43-44.

3.

Smejkal, ibid., p.202, fig.203. The painting measures 65 x 90 cm.

No.52 Julio González 1.

Tomàs Llorens Serra, Julio González: Catálogo general razonado de las pinturas, esculturas y dibujos, Vol.I [1900-1918], Valencia, 2007, p.40.

2.

Ibid., p.44.

3.

Gibert, op.cit., pp.64-107.

No.53 Alberto Giacometti 1.

James Lord, ‘Alberto Giacometti and his drawings’, in New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Alberto Giacometti: Drawings, 1964, unpaginated.

2.

Michael Peppiatt, In Giacometti’s studio, New Haven and London, 2010, p.136.

3.

‘Pour moi Giacometti n’est pas seulement le plus grand dessinateur de notre époque mais parmi les plus grands de toutes de époques.’; Paris, Galerie Claude Bernard, Alberto Giacometti: Dessins, exhibition catalogue, 1975, unpaginated.

4.

Christian Klemm, Alberto Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, Zurich and New York, 2001-2002, p.206.

5.

Klemm, ibid., p.216, pl.153. The drawing is signed and dated 1954, and measures 498 x 325 mm.

6.

Casimiro Di Crescenzo, ed., Alberto Giacometti: Sculture Dipinti Disegni, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 1995, p.202, no.56. The drawing, which is unsigned and undated, measures 500 x 320 mm.

7.

Beyeler sale, London, Christie’s, 21 June 2011, lot 7 (sold for £217,250); London, Thomas Gibson Fine Art Ltd., Alberto Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, 2012, pp.16-17. The drawing is signed and dated 1954 and measures 493 x 317 mm.

8.

In the Helmut Klewan collection in Munich; Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, Alberto Giacometti: Werke und Schriften, exhibition catalogue, 1998-1999, p.103, no.77; Marilena Pasquali, ed., Alberto Giacometti: Disegni, sculture e opere grafiche, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, 1999, p.102, no.28; Agnés de la Beaumelle, ed., Alberto Giacometti: Le dessin à l’oeuvre, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2001, p.236, no.117, illustrated p.160. The drawing, which measures 502 x 324 mm., is signed and dated 1954.

9.

London, Thomas Gibson Fine Art Ltd., op.cit., pp.12-15. The drawing is on the verso of a self-portrait drawing by Giacometti. Dated 1954, it measures 490 x 317 mm.

10. London, Thomas Gibson Fine Art Ltd., op.cit., pp.18-19. Dated 1954, the drawing measures 483 x 316 mm.

11. Lord, op.cit., 2003, p.84.

12. Lord, op.cit., 2003, p.95.

13. Anonymous sale (‘Works from a Distinguished Private European Collection’), New York, Christie’s, 9 November 2015, lot 19A (sold for $20,885,000); Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: Biographie d’une oeuvre, Paris, 1991, illustrated in colour p.379, fig.353; Toni Stooss and Patrick Elliott, ed., Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, exhibition catalogue, Edinburgh and London, 1996-1997, p.190, no.234, illustrated in colour pl.77; Peppiatt, op.cit., illustrated in colour p.146; London, Thomas Gibson Fine Art Ltd., op.cit., pp.46-49; Paul Moorhouse, Giacometti: Pure Presence, exhibition catalogue, London, National Portrait Gallery, 2015-2016, pp.158-159, no.54.

14. James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait, New York, 1965, (1980 ed.), pp.6-7.

15. Lord, op.cit., 1964, unpaginated.

No.54 Domenico Gnoli 1.

The present sheet was one of two drawings by Domenico Gnoli that were in the collection of the German-born film actress Luise Rainer (19102014), who was the first person to win consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actress, in 1936 and 1937. Rainer owned two other drawings

by Gnoli; a pen and ink drawing entitled Boat IV of 1957 and a watercolour of a Landscape with a Walled City.

2.

Letter of 29 December 1968 from Gnoli to his agent Ted Riley; quoted in Walter Guadagnini, ‘Domenico Gnoli’, in Walter Guadagnini, ed., Domenico Gnoli, exhibition catalogue, Modena, 2001, p.9.

3.

Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 23 February 2006, lot 154. The drawing measures 502 x 362 mm.

4.

Annie de Garrou Gnoli, ‘Catalogo ragionato’, in Vittorio Sgarbi, L’opera grafica di Domenico Gnoli, Milan, 1985, p.157, illustrated p.54 (as La nave degli emigranti, then in the collection of Frédéric Dard in Geneva); Anonymous sale, Vienna, Dorotheum, 25 November 2010, lot 1095; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s Olympia, 21 October 2004, lot 98. Signed and dated 1956, the drawing is executed in pen and ink with watercolour, and measures 990 x 695 mm.

5.

de Garrou Gnoli, ‘Catalogo ragionato’, in Sgarbi, ibid., p.165, illustrated p.66 (as then in a private collection in Bath). The drawing measures 550 x 440 mm.

6.

‘Fantasy in Art. Mr. Dominic Gnoli’s Exhibition’, The Times, 31 January 1957, p.3.

7.

L. M. ‘Dominic Gnoli’, Art News and Review, 2 February 1957, p.9.

8.

Stephen Bone, ‘Italian Artist’s Vein of Fantasy’, The Manchester Guardian, 25 January 1957, p.7.

9.

Francesco Bonami, ‘Fleas on Mars’, in New York, Luxembourg & Dayan, Domenico Gnoli: Paintings 1964-1969, exhibition catalogue, 2012, p.12.

No.55 Claudio Bravo 1.

Edward J. Sullivan, Claudio Bravo: Painter and Draftsman, exhibition catalogue, Madison and elsewhere, 1987-1988, p.4.

2.

‘The Artist Speaks: an interview with Claudio Bravo’, in Sullivan, ibid., p.27.

3.

Bowles and Vargas Llosa, op.cit., pp.23-25.

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

No.8 Mola Fig.2 Pier Francesco Mola Erminia Writing the Name of Tancred on a Tree, 1655-1660 Paris, Musée du Louvre Inv. 398 71 x 94 cm.

Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Franck Raux.

No.23 Lewis Fig.1 John Frederick Lewis Four Women in an Interior, Brussa, 1841 Pencil and watercolour, heightened with gouache.

368 x 527 mm.

Private collection.

Copyright: © Christie’s Images Limited (2010).

No.31 Degas Fig.1 Edgar Degas The Daughter of Jephthah, 1859-1860 Oil on canvas.

195.58 x 298.45 cm.

Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts.

.

INDEX OF ARTISTS

BACKER, Jacob Adriaensz.; No.5 BERNARD, Jean; No.21 BOL, Ferdinand; No.6 BONNARD, Pierre; No.50 BOSCOLI, Andrea; No.4 BOYCE, George Price; No.27 BRAVO, Claudio; No.55 CASSATT, Mary; No.40 CHAPLIN, Charles; No.34 CHATELET, Claude-Louis; No.17 CIBO, Gherardo; No.2 COURBET, Gustave; No.25 DEGAS, Edgar; No.31 DIAZ DE LA PEÑA, Narcisse Virgilio; No.24 DUBOIS-PILLET, Albert; No.37 EVERDINGEN, Allaert van; No.10 FLINCK, Govert; No.7 FRAGONARD, Alexandre-Evariste; No.19 FRENCH or SWISS SCHOOL, c.1800; No.18 GIACOMETTI, Alberto; No.53 GNOLI, Domenico; No.54 GONZÁLEZ, Julio; No.52 HAGEMEISTER, Karl; No.42 HAMILTON, Karl Wilhelm de; No.14 HELLEU, Paul-César; No.41 HENSTENBURGH, Herman; No.12 HOLMBON, Gustav; No.38 HUET, Paul; No.33 HUGO, Victor; No.30 INGRES, Jean-Auguste-Dominique; No.20 ITALIAN SCHOOL, 1895; No.39

JELLETT, Mainie; No.49 LEWIS, John Frederick; No.23 LHERMITTE, Lﾃｩon Augustin; No.36 MENZEL, Adolph von; No.32 MILANI, Aureliano; No.13 MILLET, Jean-Franﾃｧois; No.26 MOLA, Pier Francesco; No.8 NOLDE, Emil; No.45 ORSI, Lelio; No.3 OUDRY, Jean-Baptiste; No.15 PALMER, Samuel; Nos.28-29 PICASSO, Pablo; No.48 POMARANCIO, Cristoforo Roncalli, called Il [attr.]; No.1 REDON, Odilon; No.43 RONCALLI, Cristoforo, called Il Pomarancio [attr.]; No.1 RUTHART, Carl Andreas [attr.]; No.9 SAFTLEVEN, Herman; No.11 SALM, Dirk; No.22 SCHWINGE, Friedrich Wilhelm; No.44 SIMA, Josef (Joseph); No.51 SWISS or FRENCH SCHOOL, c.1800; No.18 TIEPOLO, Giovanni Domenico; No.16 URY, Lesser; No.46 ZERGE, Owe; No.47 Zﾃ傍L, Aloys; No.35

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Karl Hagemeister (1848-1933) A Winter Sky Reflected in a Lake No.42

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Back cover:

Attributed to Cristoforo Roncalli, il Pomarancio (1552-1626) Cupid

No.1

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