Master Drawings 2023

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

Front cover:

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682-1754) A Youth with a Plumed Cap No.14

Théodore Gudin

(1802-1880)

Hunters on a Seashore No.25

MASTER DRAWINGS 2023

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am most grateful to my wife Laura for her advice, support and patience during the period that I was working on this catalogue. I am also greatly indebted to the incomparable Team SOFA – Alesa Boyle, Megan Corcoran Locke and Eilidh McClafferty – for their invaluable assistance in every aspect of preparing this catalogue and the accompanying exhibition. At Healeys printers, Sarah Ricks, Alastair Frazer and Jenny Willings have been splendid colleagues. Andrew Smith has photographed almost all of the drawings, and has also been tireless in the fundamental task of colour-proofing the catalogue images against the original artworks. In addition, I would like to thank the following people for their help and advice in the preparation of this catalogue and the drawings included herein: Deborah Bates, François Borne, Michelle Ongpin Callaghan, Pauline David, Cheryl and Gino Franchi, Laura Giles, Eric Greenleaf, Florian Härb, Laetitia Masson, Patrick Matthiesen, Rachel Mauro, Mary Newcome Schleier, Nicolas Schwed, Lucia Tantardini, Jack Wakefield and Joanna Watson.

Dimensions are given in millimetres and inches, with height before width. Unless otherwise noted, paper is white or whitish.

Please note that drawings are sold mounted but not framed.

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

All enquiries should be addressed to Stephen Ongpin at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art Ltd. 82 Park Street

London W1K 6NH Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 or [+44] (7710) 328-627 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com

Between 15th and 31st January 2023 only: Tel. [+1] (917) 587-1183 Tel. [+1] (212) 249-4987

Stephen Ongpin

MASTER DRAWINGS 2023

pRESENTED by STEphEN ONGpIN

GhERARDO CIbO

Genoa or Rome 1512-1600 Rocca Contrada (Arcevia)

A Rocky Landscape with Trees

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, on faded blue paper. A false Dürer monogram AD faintly inscribed in brown ink on the tree trunk at the bottom centre. 207 x 218 mm. (8 1/8 x 8 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s 3 July 1989, lot 296; Kate de Rothschild, London, in 1990; Martin Moeller, Hamburg, in 1991; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Arnold Nesselrath, ‘Gherardo Cibo: “qui non è cognito”, in Arnold Nesselrath, ed., Gherardo Cibo alias Ulisse Severino da Cingoli: dipinti e disegni da collezione italiane, exhibition catalogue, San Severino Marche, 1989, p.30, illustrated p.27, fig.15; 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.194, no.283 (not illustrated).

EXHIBITED: London, Yvonne Tan Bunzl and Kate de Rothschild at Didier Aaron (London) Ltd., Master Drawings, 1990, no.7; Hamburg and Mülheim an der Ruhr, Martin Moeller, Meisterzeichnungen, 1991, no.7.

This fine drawing may be included among a large group of landscape studies, 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 amateur artist who was one of the most interesting artistic personalities of the 16th century in Italy, as well as an accomplished botanist and a composer of lute music.

The great-grandson of Pope Innocent VIII, and also related to the Della Rovere dukes of Urbino, Gherardo 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 the Cibo scholar 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 field botanists of his day. He travelled extensively around the Marche region and corresponded with fellow naturalists 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 ‘Messer Ulisse Severino da Cingoli’ drawings to Cibo. 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 backgrounds that correspond closely to the artist’s autonomous landscape drawings. As 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. As a botanist he simply needed to document plants and natural phenomena with great accuracy in order to study and analyze them. In this field he was one of the most gifted draftsmen of all times and his skills were not inferior to those of trained artists…In his lively sketchbooks he spontaneously recorded views and landscapes, alternating these with rocks, plants, seeds, or pigment tests.’3

As an amateur landscape draughtsman, Cibo worked mainly in the region of the Marche; in the provinces of Ancona, Pesaro, Macerata and Perugia. His landscape drawings can be divided into two main types; views of actual sites in the Marche 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 along with astrological symbols to denote the specific day of the week. His drawings show a distinct influence of the Northern European 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 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 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 360 independent landscape drawings by Cibo are known today, some of which are dated 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 Cibo are in the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin, the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden, the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, 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 France5, while another, with thirty-one drawings, is in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York6

The present sheet was not intended as a topographically accurate view, and instead is clearly inspired by the imaginary landscape drawings and prints of contemporary Dutch, Flemish and German artists, such as those of Hieronymus Cock. Tongiorgi Tomasi has noted that ‘Sometimes the artist amused himself by constructing imaginary landscapes, skillfully re-elaborating the various formal models at his disposal while adding his own eclectic selection of cultural allusions. This visual improvisation in general affects Cibo’s many views ‘in the Flemish style’…But never does he allow himself to fall into the habit of mere passive reworking of clichés; the freshness and originality of his work reflect at one and the same time his profound sensibility to the beauties of the natural world and a clear intellectual conception of the art of landscape painting.’7 Cibo’s drawings continued to reflect an abiding interest in the Northern landscape tradition throughout his career. Tellingly, an early owner of the present sheet added a false Albrecht Durer monogram at the base of the tree in the centre of the composition, perhaps in the hope of passing off Cibo’s drawing as a work by the German master.

As another scholar has recently written, ‘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.’8

Circle of GIORGIO VASARI

Arezzo 1511-1574 Florence

The River God Arno with a Cornucopia and a Lion

Pen and brown ink, heightened with white, with traces of a framing line in brown ink, on blue paper. Inscribed (in a modern hand) FRANCO and Franco ou Farinati in pencil on the verso. 248 x 358 mm. (9 3/4 x 14 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: John Brophy, London; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 4 July 1995, lot 163 (as Circle of Giorgio Vasari); R. S. Johnson Fine Art, Chicago; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Florian Härb, The Drawings of Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), Rome, 2015, p.201, under no.56, fig.56.1 (as a copy after Vasari).

EXHIBITED: Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.115 (as Attributed to Marco Marchetti da Faenza).

This large sheet depicts the river god Arno accompanied by the Marzocco, the lion symbolic of the city of Florence, together with a view of what appears to be Florence in the distance. Although this fine drawing was attributed to Giorgio Vasari by the scholar A. E. Popham, more recently Florian Härb has pointed out that ‘the dry handling of the pen and its overall flat appearance excludes Vasari’s authorship.’1 He suggests, however, that the present sheet, which is datable to the 1540s or 1550s, may be a copy after a lost drawing by Vasari, and further notes that it is similar in type, if not in style, with a handful of drawings of river gods by Vasari – in Berlin, Liverpool and Paris2 – that are studies for the ephemeral decoration of a room in a Venetian palace intended to accompany a performance of Pietro Aretino’s play La Talanta in 1542.

Vasari’s decorative scheme for La Talanta was commissioned from the artist in December 1541, during his first visit to Venice, by a group of Venetian noblemen calling themselves the Compagnia della Calza ‘Sempiterni’, who were to perform Aretino’s play during the Carnival. Known as the Apparato dei Sempiterni, Vasari’s project consisted of wall paintings of allegorical figures of Virtues interspersed with large, monochrome landscapes of Venice and its territories, together with ceiling paintings representing the four times of day and the hours. River gods appeared in several of the wall decorations, and one of these panels depicted the river gods of the Arno, the Tiber and the Appenine together3. The present sheet, while not by Vasari himself, closely matches his written description of the Arno river god, in a letter of 1542 to his patron Ottaviano de’ Medici in Florence: ‘on the other wall there was our Arno who had a garland of corn, millet and sorghum, and a cornucopia filled with fruits, holding an open water vessel on a lion, a lily in his hand, he was resting on a lion turning his head towards the Tiber, who was also there…’4 Vasari’s letter to Ottaviano de’ Medici, composed immediately after the performance of La Talanta in Venice in February 1542, contained a detailed description of the various paintings that made up the Apparato dei Sempiterni. Since the decoration was dismantled shortly afterwards, and is no longer extant, this letter is one of the best records of the appearance of the work, alongside the dozen or so autograph drawings for the project that survive, as well as a number of copies of lost drawings by Vasari for the same commission.

As Florian Härb notes, with reference to the present sheet, ‘The Apparato included one painting dedicated to a single river god, symbolizing the river Po, the second on the right wall next to the allegory of Venice…It is not inconceivable that the former Brophy sheet reflects an early idea for the decoration, to depict the Arno instead of the Po on its own. However, given the site of the performance, such an emphasis on a Tuscan motif might not have been considered appropriate.’5

A drawing of a river god in an almost identical pose, drawn in black and white chalk on blue paper, appeared at auction in London in 1981 with an attribution to Battista Franco (c.1510-1561)6

AURELIO LUINI

Milan c.1530-1593 Milan

Study of an Angel

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Squared for transfer in black chalk. A faint study of a leg and foot in black chalk on the verso. 213 x 83 mm. (8 3/8 x 3 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Count Giacomo Durazzo, Vienna and Venice (according to the 1895 Helbing catalogue); Boguslaw Jolles, Dresden and Vienna (Lugt 381 or 381a); His sale, Munich, Hugo Helbing, 28-31 October 1895, lot 122 (as Simone Cantarini: ‘Engel nach links stehend. Sammlung Durazzo. H. 21,2, B. 8,2 cm. Prächtige Feder- und Bisterzeichnung, weiss gehöht. Quadrirt.’); Michael Berolzheimer, Untergrainau, nr. Garmisch-Partenkirchen; His (anonymous) sale (‘Buchminiaturen und Handzeichnungen aus Älterer und Neuerer Zeit: Zwei Münchener Sammlungen und Andere Beiträge’), Munich, Adolf Weinmüller, 9-10 March 1939, lot 141 (as Cantarini); Anonymous sale, Stuttgart, Ketterer, 24 November 1954, lot 388 (as Cantarini, bt. Landolt); Robert Landolt, Chur; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Giovanni Agosti and Jacopo Stoppa, Bernardino Luini e i suoi figli, exhibition catalogue, Milan, Palazzo Reale, 2014, pp.299 and 301, fig.143 (where dated to c.1570).

The youngest son of the Milanese painter Bernardino Luini, who died when he was an infant, Aurelio Luini nevertheless worked in his father’s tradition as a pupil and one of the most accomplished followers of Leonardo da Vinci. Like his father, Aurelio worked throughout his life in and around his native city of Milan, often in collaboration with other local artists. Together with his brother Giovan Pietro, he was tasked with completing some of the fresco decoration begun by their father Bernardino in the Milanese church of San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore. In this cycle of scenes from the life of Christ, his first major independent work, Aurelio’s forms retain his father’s characteristic softness and chiaroscuro. Many of the younger Luini’s commissions came from religious societies, and his work can be found in several churches in Milan, including San Simpliciano and the Duomo. He also produced numerous fresco cycles in the city and throughout Lombardy and Piedmont, notably in the church of Santa Maria di Campagna in Pallanza, on Lake Maggiore, where he worked alongside the painter Carlo Urbino. Among Luini’s final and most significant works were the now-lost frescoes of scenes from the life of Saint Ambrose for the vault of a chapel in the Tribunale di Provvisione in Milan, completed a few weeks before his death in 1593. As well as being a painter, Luini also composed music and poetry, and was himself the subject of a sonnet written by artist and theorist Giovan Paolo Lomazzo, who regarded him as the most gifted of Bernardino’s Luini’s three sons: ‘Evangelista and [Giovan] Pietro [Luini] are equal in painting, but you are more worthy, Aurelio, whose mind has higher aspirations, as one can see and admire in your work. Besides, with the lyre singing sweetly you reveal your thoughts and your drawings in ornate and worthy verses.’1

The present sheet, squared for transfer, is a preparatory study for Aurelio Luini’s altarpiece of The Baptism of Christ (fig.1), painted c.1570-1575, in the parish church of Santi Giacomo and Brigida in the town of Cassago Brianza in Lombardy2. Following tradition, the Baptism takes place in an open landscape by the river Jordan. At the centre, Christ rests his left knee on a rock while being baptised by his cousin, Saint John, who stands at the right. At the left, four angels gather to witness the event. This drawing, which also carries a light silhouette of a right leg on the verso, relates closely to the standing angel in the left foreground of the Baptism. The pose of the angel in the present sheet, resting his right foot on a stone – thus echoing the pose of Christ – holding his tunic with both hands, is virtually identical to that in the painting. Slight variations between drawing and painting, such as the tilting of the angel’s head and the height of his wing, are the result of adjustments made by the painter directly on the canvas.

Technically, this drawing displays the typical traits of Aurelio’s graphic style at its best, from the confident use of pen and ink to the carefully modulated chiaroscuro, down to signature traits, such as the flying

actual size

curls and gnarled fingers and toes. The drawing’s high level of finish, emphasised by the combined use of brown wash and white heightening, together with the presence of squaring for transfer, indicate that Aurelio was approaching the final stage of the preparatory process, just prior to the cartoon. Given the grace and refinement of this drawing, it comes as no surprise that it was preserved in the workshop for future re-use. A preliminary sketch by Luini for the figures of Christ and Saint John the Baptist in the Cassago Brianza canvas was on the art market in Paris in 19853, while another preparatory study for the same two figures appeared at auction in Milan in 19794.

Together with his brother Giovan Pietro, Aurelio Luini had previously frescoed a Baptism of Christ in the church of San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore in Milan in 15655. The painting at Cassago Brianza recalls that composition, although it depicts four angels at the left rather than three, and omits God the Father surrounded by angels at the top. Aurelio’s oeuvre of drawings includes various studies of angels – such as the two full-size cartoons of Angels Holding Curtains in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan6 – which epitomise his virtuoso skills as one of the most talented draughtsmen of the late Milanese Renaissance.

The first recorded owner of the present sheet was Count Giacomo Durazzo (1717-1794), a noted Italian diplomat and one of the most important print collectors of the 18th century, who served as both the Genoese ambassador at the court of Vienna and the Austrian ambassador in Venice. This drawing later entered the collection of Boguslaw Jolles (d.1912), who was active in Dresden and Vienna in the last quarter of the 19th century. Jolles began collecting drawings in the 1870s, and continued to do so over the next two decades. The present sheet was one of several works acquired at the 1895 sale of Jolles’s collection by the German lawyer Michael Berolzheimer (1866-1942). Berolzheimer’s collection of some eight hundred prints and drawings was confiscated by the Nazis and sold at auction in Munich in 1939, a year after the collector had emigrated to America.

We are very grateful to Dr. Lucia Tantardini for writing much of this catalogue entry, which establishes the attribution of the Cassago Brianza canvas to Aurelio, and for confirming the direct rapport between our drawing and the painting, of which she has also kindly provided a photograph.

AURELIO LUINI

Milan c.1530-1593 Milan

The Lamentation over the Body of Christ

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, on paper washed blue. Inscribed Campi in brown ink at the lower right. Further inscribed S.L. no. 88 in brown ink on the backing sheet, and S.L. no. 63. in brown ink in the lower margin of the album page to which the drawing is attached by four corner tabs.

174 x 120 mm. (6 7/8 x 4 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: From the so-called ‘Sagredo-Borghese’ collection, with associated inscriptions S.L. no. 63 and S.L. no. 88 (for ‘Scuola Lombarda’), and with provenance as follows: Zaccaria Sagredo, Venice (Lugt 2103a); By descent to his nephew, Gherardo Sagredo, Venice; His widow, Cecilia Grimani Sagredo; Thence by descent; Dispersed in a series of sales after 1743; Probably Jean-Jacques de Boissieu, Lyon; Probably dispersed with some of the Sagredo albums in Lyon in 1919; Thomas Williams Fine Art, London, in 2002; Herbert Kasper, New York; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: London, Thomas Williams Fine Art, Old Master Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 2002, unpaginated, no.2; Jordan Bear et al, Mannerism and Modernism: The Kasper Collection of Drawings and Photographs, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2011, pp.66-67, no.17 (entry by Aimee Ng).

EXHIBITED: London, Thomas Williams Fine Art Ltd., Old Master Drawings, 2002, no.2; New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, Mannerism and Modernism: The Kasper Collection of Drawings and Photographs, no.17.

Aurelio Luini was a talented draughtsman, and the only one of the three Luini brothers to have a recognizable drawing style. One contemporary source, writing two years after Aurelio’s death, noted of him that ‘Il Louino fù gran disegnatore, & acurato pittore, e versato in molte altre honorate virtù, il che universalmete era amato da tutti, e nella pittura fù vero imitatore del padre.’1 He tended to work in pen and ink, sometimes with wash on blue paper, with a confident manner. Drawings by Luini are fairly rare, and only some two hundred are known.

This finished compositional study was first attributed to Aurelio Luini by the late Mario di Giampaolo in 2002. The scene takes place on Golgotha, or Calvary, in the tenebrous aftermath of the Crucifixion. Christ’s lifeless body is supported by the Madonna, Mary Magdalene, and Saint John the Evangelist, while Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and a holy woman have gathered around them in prayer. The drawing shows Aurelio approaching the final scheme of what was certainly to be an altarpiece. The artist has already decided upon the overall arrangement and the reciprocal interactions of the figures and here sets the scene’s emotional tone. The evident similarities with Aurelio’s altarpiece of Lamentation over the Dead Christ (fig.1), painted around 1575-1580 for the church of Santi Paolo and Barnaba in Milan and still in situ there2 – in particular, the Saviour’s expanded torso, reclining head, and the pose of his right arm – might suggest that the artist made this drawing in preparation for that painting, before deciding to simplify the composition and reduce the number of figures. If so, it would have been followed by another, variant, modello, similar in nature to the present sheet. Alternatively, this study might have been made for a different painting of The Lamentation that has yet to surface.

Luini’s graphic oeuvre includes various drawings which concentrate on the iconography of the Pietà, notably a study for a Lamentation at the Foot of the Cross in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle3, and a Lamentation in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice4, both of which were probably made for the SS. Paolo and Barnaba Lamentation. Another stylistically and thematically comparable drawing of the Pietà by Luini, also on blue prepared paper, appeared at auction in 1993 and is today in the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City5; that drawing focuses on the Mater Dolorosa theme and includes only the mourning Virgin and the Dead Christ.

The present sheet is striking for its bold painterly effects. Luini achieved this by delineating his scheme in pen and ink and then superimposing subtle layers of brush and brown wash. The use of blue prepared paper, which is typical of the artist’s mature work, emphasises the atmospheric effect of the sacred event and recalls Aurelio’s penchant for Venetian art, the influence of which is very clear in the SS. Paolo and Barnaba Lamentation. Other drawings by Luini on similarly prepared blue paper are in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Accademia in Venice.

This splendid drawing by Aurelio Luini was once part of what was arguably the finest collection of drawings assembled in Venice in the early 18th century, that of Zaccaria Sagredo (1653-1729). The collection amounted to several thousand drawings contained in over fifty albums, and the present sheet retains the four corner tabs with which each drawing was attached to its album page, together with the associated numbering and inscription – in this case ‘S.L.’, for ‘Scuola Lombarda’ – that was written on every sheet in the Sagredo collection.

Although the collection had been begun by his uncle, Doge Niccolò Sagredo, in the middle of the 17th century, it was the Venetian nobleman Zaccaria Sagredo who was responsible for greatly expanding it. As Roger Rearick has noted, ‘Zaccaria was the most voracious of the Sagredo collectors, purchasing numerous drawings from every school and period, and making the Sagredo collection one of the most distinguished and certainly among the largest cabinets in Italy prior to his death in 1729.’6 Zaccaria bequeathed the collection to his nephew and heir, Gherardo Sagredo (1692-1738). At the latter’s death in 1738, an inventory of the collection noted some 8,000 drawings, as well as more than 22,000 prints. Gherardo’s widow, Cecilia Grimani Sagredo (b.1686), tried to sell the collection en bloc but was only able to dispose of parts of it, while the remainder was inherited by her two daughters. At some point in the late 18th or early 19th century some of the Sagredo drawings were acquired by a collector in Lyon, possibly the artist Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (1736-1810). The present sheet is likely to have been among the large group of drawings from the Sagredo collection that were dispersed in Lyon just after the First World War.

We are grateful to Dr. Lucia Tantardini for writing much of this catalogue entry.

LODEWIJK TOEpUT, called IL pOZZOSERRATO Mechelen c.1550-1603/5 Treviso

Landscape with the Penitent Saint Jerome

Pen and brown ink, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk. A sketch of a soldier holding a dagger above a cowering figure drawn in black chalk on the verso. Numbered L.18 in brown ink on the verso. 210 x 265 mm. (8 1/4 x 10 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably Count Gianazei, Udine; Ludwig Zatzka, Vienna (Lugt 2672); Possibly Gustav Nebehay, Vienna; Annamaria Edelstein (Succi Ltd.), London, in 1991; Wolfgang Ratjen, Munich; The Stiftung Ratjen, Vaduz, Liechtenstein, in 1992; Galerie Artesepia, Paris, in 2014; Jacques and Colette Ulmann, Nogent-sur-Marne (Lugt 3533), their stamp on the verso; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Teréz Gerszi, ‘The Draughtsmanship of Lodewijk Toeput’, Master Drawings, Winter 1992, p.369; Mario di Giampaolo, ed., Disegno italiano antico: Artisti e opere dal Quattrocento al Settecento, Milan, 1994, illustrated p.216.

Almost nothing is known of Lodewijk Toeput’s career before his arrival in Venice in the early 1570s, although he may have trained with Hans Bol in Mechelen and with Marten de Vos in Antwerp. Almost all of his career was spent in Italy, where he was known as Pozzoserrato (a literal Italian translation of his Dutch surname, which means ‘closed well’). He spent several years in Venice where, according to the 17th century biographer Carlo Ridolfi, he worked in the studio of Tintoretto, painting the landscape backgrounds in the master’s canvases. He also visited Rome in 1578 and 1581. Highly regarded in particular for his landscapes – Ridolfi described the artist as ‘eccelente ne’paesi’ – Pozzoserrato painted frescoes in several villas and palaces of the Veneto, his work combining a Flemish interest in nature with the spirited brushwork of his Venetian contemporaries. In 1582 he left Venice to settle in Treviso, becoming a citizen of the town in 1585 and providing altarpieces and paintings for churches in and around the city, such as the Monte di Pietà, as well as a number of easel pictures.

As an artist, Pozzoserrato was arguably more original, and more distinctive, in his drawings than in his paintings or frescoes. Around fifty landscape drawings by him are known, together with a much smaller number of figure studies. Difficult to date with any accuracy, the artist’s drawings are almost always in pen and ink, and display a preference for landscape or townscape subjects, perhaps reflecting his Flemish origins. This was, however, tempered with such characteristic elements of Venetian draughtsmanship as a freedom in the handling of wash and a bold, spirited penwork. Pozzoserrato executed a number of panoramic views of towns and cities, and was also fond of landscape drawings which incorporated elegant genre scenes of the Venetian nobility at leisure in the elaborate gardens and villas of the terraferma

The present sheet is a fine example of Pozzoserrato’s imaginary pen landscapes. As Teréz Gerszi has written, ‘Toeput varied his manner in the landscape drawings according to their different purposes, [and] these sheets reveal the individual mark of the artist far more than his figure studies. His landscapes and townscapes known thus far, over fifty in number, bear witness to a wide-ranging interest in natural and manmade subjects, including mountains, forests, riversides, rocky scenes, and gardens of Veneto villas.’1 While the black chalk sketch rapidly drawn on the verso cannot be definitively related to any extant painting by Pozzoserrato, it may be a first idea for the figure of the saint in his altarpiece of Saint Michael Archangel Defeating the Devil, in the church of San Leonardo in Treviso2.

This drawing was at one time part of a large group of mainly landscape studies – including numerous sheets by Pozzoserrato – belonging to the Viennese architect Ludwig Zatzka (1857-1925), who began collecting in 1885 and eventually assembled around two thousand drawings3. According to Frits Lugt, the collection was based on a nucleus of landscape drawings by Pozzoserrato assembled in the 18th century by a certain Count Gianazei in Udine and acquired by Zatzka around 1900. These drawings, which include the present sheet, were almost all studies of imaginary landscapes4

GIOVANNI bALDUCCI, called IL COSCI Florence 1560-after 1631 Naples(?)

Christ Giving the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven to Saint Peter (Traditio Clavium)

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with framing lines in brown ink, on blue paper, with an arched top. Laid down. Inscribed de Bornardino Poscoli fiorontinio and collect Ja. Thornhill Eques. & Pict. in brown ink at the bottom. Inscribed MC in black chalk and numbered No.55 in brown ink on the verso of the backing sheet. Further inscribed AD 1301-1350 Stefano il Fiorentino / Disciple of Giotto and Rugby School Art Museum / e dono Matt: H: Bloxam in brown ink on the 19th century mount. 174 x 310 mm. (6 7/8 x 12 1/4 in.) at greatest dimensions.

PROVENANCE: Sir James Thornhill, London; Matthew H. Bloxam, Rugby, Warwickshire; Presented by him to Rugby School, Rugby, Warwickshire, probably between 1879 and 1888.

LITERATURE: Mauro Vincenzo Fontana, Itinera Tridentina: Giovanni Balducci, Alfonso Gesualdo e la riforma delle arti a Napoli, Rome, 2019, pp.122-124, p.297, no.D110 (as Traditio clavium and dated 1595), illustrated p.132, fig.39 and p.298, fig.D110.

Giovanni Balducci, known as Cosci after the surname of an uncle who raised him, established a successful career, working mainly in Florence, Rome and Naples. A versatile and gifted painter, he was adept at large-scale altarpieces and frescoes, as well as smaller devotional works for private patrons. He was trained in the studio of Giovanni Battista Naldini, becoming his chief assistant and disciple. Between 1576 and 1579 Balducci worked, under the supervision of Federico Zuccaro, on the fresco decoration of the cupola of the Duomo in Florence, and he assisted Naldini on two frescoes for the church of San Marco in 1580. He also helped Alessandro Allori on the ceiling decoration of a corridor of the Uffizi.

Balducci was admitted to the Florentine Accademia del Disegno in 1582, a date which marks the start of his independent activity. Among his significant early works are five lunette frescoes as part of the extensive cycle in the Chiostro Grande of Santa Maria Novella, painted between 1582 and 1584 by several of the leading Florentine artists of the period. In the late 1580s he received an important commission from Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici for three altarpieces and nine frescoes of scenes from the life of Christ to decorate the Florentine church of the Gesù Pellegrino, a project completed by the end of the decade. In 1589 Balducci had been among the group of artists – including Andrea Boscoli, Agostino Ciampelli, Ludovico Cigoli and Jacopo Ligozzi – working on the elaborate projects for temporary decorations in Florence to celebrate the wedding of Duke Ferdinando I to Christine of Lorraine. In the same year he painted a Crucifixion of Saint Andrew for the cloister of the Oratorio di San Pierino.

The early years of the next decade found Balducci working at the cathedral in Volterra, where in 1591 he painted two large canvases of The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes and Christ Driving the Moneylenders from the Temple for the Serguidi chapel in the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta. In 1594, together with his fellow painter Agostino Ciampelli, he was summoned to Rome by Alessandro de’ Medici to contribute to the decoration of his titular church of Santa Prassede. During the next two years Balducci painted important altarpieces for the Roman churches of San Giovanni Decollato, San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, San Gregorio al Celio and San Giovanni in Laterano, as well as a ceiling for a chapel in the church of the Trinità dei Monti. He also painted an apse fresco for the cathedral of San Clemente in Velletri, commissioned from him by Cardinal Alfonso Gesualdo and completed in 1595.

Soon after this, Balducci travelled to Naples in the retinue of Cardinal Gesualdo. He arrived in Naples in the early months of 1596, and was to work there, and in the province of Calabria, for more than thirty years, until at least 1631. He established a highly successful career in Naples, receiving numerous commissions for paintings and frescoes, notably an extensive decorative cycle in the Duomo and nowlost frescoes for the Palazzo Reale. Among the local churches where he worked, apart from the

cathedral, were San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, Santissima Annunziata, Santa Maria de Monteverginella and, towards the end of his life, Santa Maria del Carmine. Balducci also designed a number of tapestries, known as the Giornata di Seminara, for the Neapolitan nobleman Vincenzo Luigi di Capua. Relatively little of his work in Naples survives today, however, and this period of his career remains little known by comparison with his work in Florence and Rome.

Balducci had a distinctive style as a draughtsman, and produced a fair number of autograph drawings. His early drawings, sometimes on prepared or coloured paper, show the particular influence of his master Naldini, while those of his later Neapolitan period are less well-studied. Relatively few drawings by the artist can be connected with finished paintings or frescoes, and establishing a firm chronology of his style as a draughtsman remains challenging. A small but interesting group of drawings by Balducci is today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille, while other examples are in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, the Uffizi and the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, the British Museum and the Courtauld Institute Gallery in London, the Biblioteca Nacional and the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, the Louvre in Paris, the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome, the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, and elsewhere.

The present sheet is a preparatory study for one of Balducci’s most significant commissions; the lunette fresco of Christ’s Charge to Peter (fig.1), painted in 1595 in the church of San Giovanni Laterano in Rome1. This was one of four lunettes of scenes from the lives of Saints Peter and Paul, together with four smaller ceiling frescoes of angels, painted by Balducci in the church. Stylistically related drawings for two other lunette frescoes in San Giovanni Laterano, depicting The Conversion of Saul and The Martyrdom of Saint Paul, are in the Louvre2

The pose of Christ in this drawing is also close to that in an earlier fresco of The Appearance of Christ to the Apostles, painted by Balducci between 1586 and 1590 for the church of the Gesù Pellegrino (also known as the Oratorio dei Pretoni) in Florence3. Among stylistically comparable drawings by the artist is a Birth of the Virgin in the Albertina in Vienna4 and a Last Supper in the Thrivent Financial Collection of Religious Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota5

As noted by the inscription at the bottom of the present sheet, the first recorded owner of this drawing was the English history painter Sir James Thornhill (1675-1734), who attributed it to the Florentine artist Bernardino Poccetti (1548-1612). The drawing later belonged to the antiquary and architectural historian Matthew Holbeche Bloxam (1805-1888), of Rugby in Warwickshire. Like his father before him, Bloxam had studied at Rugby School, of which he remained a devoted supporter throughout his life. When the school’s Art Museum opened in 1879, he began donating individual drawings from his collection to the museum on a yearly basis, often on his birthday.

GIOVANNI bATTISTA TROTTI, called IL MALOSSO Cremona 1556-1619 Parma

Christ Enthroned with the Virgin, Saint Francis Kneeling Below

Pen and brown ink and grey wash, squared for transfer in red chalk. The figure of Saint Francis indented with the stylus and outlined in black chalk on the verso. Inscribed LB (?) in brown ink on the verso. 372 x 247 mm. (14 6/8 x 9 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Rossella Gilli, Milan, in 1986; Private collection, Cremona; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s Olympia, 13 December 2001, lot 60; Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2002; Private collection, New York.

LITERATURE: Possibly Giovanni Battista Zaist, Notizie istoriche de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti cremonesi, Cremona, 1774, Vol.II, p.38 (‘un bellissimo…assai morbido e pastoso disegno’); Marco Tanzi, ‘Qualche aggiunta al Malosso e alla sua cerchia’, Prospettiva, January 1985, pp.83-84, fig.6; Gianluca Bocchi and Ulisse Bocchi, ‘Alcune novità e precisazione sul Malosso e sulla sua cerchia’, Parma per l’arte, 2017, p.180, fig.7.

EXHIBITED: Milan, Galleria Rossella Gilli, Disegni Lombardi dal XV al XVIII secolo, 1986, no.32.

Active as both a painter and an architect, Giovanni Battista Trotti, known as Il Malosso, was the foremost pupil of Bernardino Campi, whose studio he later inherited. (His nickname Malosso is reputed to have been coined by the slightly younger artist Annibale Carracci, who had competed with Trotti for the same project in Parma, and apparently referred to him as a ‘bad bone’ (‘mal osso’) that he had to chew on.) Although his early works are indebted to the manner of Campi and such Cremonese contemporaries as Bernardino Gatti, Malosso was also particularly influenced by the work of Correggio. He was especially active from 1585 onwards, painting numerous altarpieces for churches in Cremona, notably San Pietro al Po, San Domenico and Sant’Abbondio. The end of the 16th century found Malosso working extensively throughout Lombardy - in Lodi, Pavia, Piacenza, Salò and Milan – as well as elsewhere in Northern Italy, notably in Genoa and Venice. In 1604 he settled in Parma, where he was employed at the court of the Duke Ranuccio Farnese. His work as a court artist in Parma included commissions for frescoes and portrait paintings, as well as the decoration of various rooms in the Palazzo del Giardino, alongside Agostino Carracci; these frescoes are regarded as his finest works. He also supervised architectural projects, designed temporary decorations for court festivals and made designs for engravings. Although firmly established in Parma, where he also was active at the Capuchin church at Fonteviva, Malosso continued to supervise a large and busy workshop in his native Cremona, providing several designs for altarpieces and frescoes there.

Malosso was admired as a draughtsman in his lifetime, and his drawings were sought after by collectors and connoisseurs long after his death. As the later 17th century Florentine biographer Filippo Baldinucci noted of him, ‘one sees a great many drawings by his hand done in pen and touches of wash with great clarity and facility’1. The 18th century writer Giovanni Battista Zaist, in his biographical account of Cremonese artists, commented of Malosso that ‘the drawings of this renowned master, being works of consummate taste, have come to be held in the highest esteem; one therefore finds the greatest number of these in good collections not only in Cremona, Milan, and other nearby cities, but in the still more famous ones in Tuscany.’2 Among the prominent 17th century collectors of Malosso’s drawings was Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici, much of whose collection is now in the Uffizi in Florence.

Malosso took great care over the preparatory drawings for his paintings. As Mario di Giampaolo has noted of the artist, ‘his extraordinary facility in experimenting with the most varied techniques of drawing

contribute notably to the artistic statement of the master…the drawings connected with works completed at the end of the [16th] century display expert handling of the pen and wash.’3 Related to two different paintings by Malosso, the present sheet is a fine example of a work from this fertile period.

This fine drawing may be a preparatory study, with differences, for an altarpiece by Malosso, signed and dated 1598 (fig.1), in the parish church at Manerbio, near Brescia4. Malosso’s painting was later copied almost exactly by one of his pupils, Bartolomeo Bersani, in an altarpiece intended for the church of Sant’Angelo in Cremona and now in the chiesa parrochiale in the town of Solarolo Monasterolo5 Bersani’s painting, which may have been made from the same cartoon as the Manerbio altarpiece, was correctly described in 1665 by one historian as a work designed by Malosso but painted by Bersani6. Just over a hundred years later, however, a measure of confusion seems to have arisen as to the true author of the Sant’Angelo altarpiece, with some authors believing it to be by the hand of the master himself and not his pupil, Bersani. Nevertheless, as Giovanni Battista Zaist noted of the altarpiece in his Notizie istoriche de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti cremonesi, published in 1774, ‘in this painting also one can clearly discern the character of Malosso, and some, who would like to appear all-knowing, not reading in it any name, have baptized it as his true work. But it is certainly not by that very noble author…A painting like this suffers from a great hardness, even though it has been taken from a very beautiful drawing, which I have seen, very soft and mellow, and which now rests in some secret nook…’7 It has been suggested that Zaist was here referring to the present sheet by Malosso, although there remain a number of significant differences between the drawing and the two paintings mentioned above.

The present sheet also served as a preparatory study for another painting by Malosso, signed and dated 1593 (fig.2), in the church of San Clemente in the town of Bertonico, near Lodi8. In the Bertonico altarpiece, the figure of Saint John the Baptist joins Saint Francis on the lower tier of the composition.

ANDREA LILIO

Ancona c.1555-after 1635 Ascoli Piceno

An Angel Seated on a Cloud and Playing the Violin

Black chalk, with touches of red chalk, squared for transfer in black chalk, on blue paper. 158 x 114 mm. (6 1/4 x 4 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: An indistinct collector’s mark(?) stamped in red ink at the lower right; Sir Kenneth Clark, Lord Clark of Saltwood, London and Saltwood Castle, Kent; His posthumous sale (‘Paintings and Works of Art From the Collections of the Late Lord Clark of Saltwood, O.M., C.H., K.C.B.’), London, Sotheby’s, 5 July 1984, lot 168; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 4 July 1988, lot 29; Private collection, Germany; Colnaghi / Katrin Bellinger, London, in 2004; Acquired in 2006 by Herbert Kasper, New York; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Mario di Giampaolo, ed., Disegno italiano antico: Artisti e opere dal Quattrocento al Settecento, Milan, 1994, illustrated p.160; Mario di Giampaolo, ‘Per Andrea Lilio disegnatore e una precisazione per il Cantarini’, in Disegni marchigiani dal Cinquecento al Settecento: Atti del Convegno “Il Disegno antico nelle Marche e dalle Marche”, 1995, p.78, fig. 2, reprinted in Cristiana Garofalo, ed., Mario Di Giampaolo: Scritti sul disegno italiano 1971-2008, Florence, 2010, p.300, fig.1; Massimo Pulini, Andrea Lilio, Milan, 2003, pp.200-201, no.10, and p.158, under no.59 (‘un bellissimo e spedite studio’).

EXHIBITED: New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 2004, no.10.

Born in the Marchigian town of Ancona, the late Mannerist painter Andrea Lilio (sometimes Lilli) remains little recorded in contemporary documents. He is known to have been in Rome as a young man, labouring under the supervision of Cesare Nebbia on several fresco decorations commissioned by Pope Sixtus V in the 1580s. He seems to have spent much of his early career in Rome, where he also worked for Pope Clement VIII and contributed to the decoration of the Library, the Scala Santa and the apartments of Sixtus V in the Vatican. Elsewhere in Rome, Lilio painted frescoes in the nave of Santa Maria Maggiore and was active in the churches of San Giovanni in Laterano, San Francesco a Ripa, San Girolamo degli Schiavoni and the Gesù. To the early influence of the painter Ferraù Fenzoni, who was active in Rome at the same time, was added that of the Sienese artist Ventura Salimbeni and the Marchigian Antonio Viviani. In 1596 Lilio was admitted into the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, and his name appears in its records until 1601, and then again from 1613 onwards.

The artist returned several times to Ancona, where he painted a number of important works for local churches, as well as, in 1598, the temporary decorations for the entry of Pope Clement VIII into the city. Lilio was active elsewhere in the Marche, although he seems to have always maintained a studio in Rome. In 1613 he painted a Madonna of Loreto with Saints for the church of San Francesco alle Scale in Ancona. Late in his career he also created a number of designs for allegorical prints, commissioned by some of the leading noble families in Rome. Lilio’s last known dated painting is an altarpiece of The Crucifixion, painted in 1631 for the church of San Giovanni Battista in Ancona. The date of the artist’s death is unknown, although the contemporary painter and art historian Giovanni Baglione noted that he died in Ascoli Piceno while working on a project that was left unfinished; these are presumably the lunette frescoes of scenes from the life of Saint Benedict in the cloister of the church of Sant’Angelo Magno, which were executed sometime in the 1630s.

Fewer than eighty drawings by Andrea Lilio are known today, and of those only a handful have been connected with his extant paintings or frescoes. This fine, squared drawing – described by the Lilio scholar Massimo Pulini as ‘one of the most beautiful recent additions to the catalogue of [drawings by] the

artist’1 – is a preparatory study for a now-dismembered monumental altarpiece of The Virgin Crowning Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, signed and dated 1598. Painted for the church of Sant’Agostino in Ancona, the remnants of the painting are today, in four fragments, in the collection of the Pinacoteca Civica there2. One of these fragments depicts a panoramic view of Ancona from the sea3, with part of the feet of a seated figure visible in the clouds at the upper right (fig.1), which precisely match those of the angel in the present sheet. This music-making angel was therefore depicted, playing his violin in the skies above the city, in the upper part of the altarpiece. While the entire composition of The Virgin Crowning Saint Nicholas of Tolentino is difficult to determine from the few sections of the canvas that survive, the scale of these fragments – one of which depicts an angel playing a lute4 – indicates that the altarpiece must have been among the largest canvases to have been painted by the artist.

The present sheet can be compared stylistically with a squared drawing of three music-making angels by Lilio in the Louvre5. Likewise in black chalk on blue paper, the Louvre drawing is the study for the upper part of an altarpiece of Saints John the Baptist, Francis of Assisi, Bernardino of Siena and Paul Adoring the Cross, painted in the mid-1590s for the church of San Francesco in Ancona and now in the Pinacoteca Civica there6. Indeed, the pose of the angel in this drawing is similar to that of the central angel playing a violin in the Ancona painting7

Among other stylistically comparable drawings by Lilio is a study in black chalk of a Dead Christ in the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam8, which is preparatory for a Pietà with Saints, signed and dated 1596, that is today in the Pinacoteca Civica in Bagnacavallo, and a squared drawing of Saint Irene and Others Tending to the Wounds of Saint Sebastian in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles9

Likewise comparable is a drawing of Saint Peter of Alcántara Giving Communion to Saint Teresa of Avila, in black chalk on blue paper, in the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid10, and a squared study of A Seated Evangelist in the same technique, in the Teyler Museum in Haarlem11, as well as an Assumption of the Virgin, in the Museo del Prado in Madrid12, which is a compositional study for an altarpiece of 1604 in a church in the coastal town of Numana, south of Ancona.

The present sheet was once part of the collection of the art historian, museum curator, patron and cultural broadcaster Sir Kenneth Clark, later Lord Clark of Saltwood (1903-1983). Clark, who served as Director of the National Gallery and Keeper of the King’s Pictures between 1934 and 1945, and later as chairman of the Arts Council, began collecting while a student at Oxford, and eventually assembled a small but choice group of Old Master and British drawings, as well as paintings, sculptures, illuminated miniatures and works of art dating from the Renaissance to the 1940s.

DANIELE CRESpI

Busto Arsizio c.1598-1630 Milan

Studies of the Virgin and Child with a Kneeling Monk

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, over a partial underdrawing in black chalk, on buff paper. Laid down. Inscribed annibale Caracci in pencil or black chalk on the backing sheet. 140 x 184 mm. (5 1/2 x 7 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Principe Castelbarco, Milan; Hans Calmann, London, in 1958 (as attributed to Federico Barocci); Purchased from him by Robert Landolt, Chur; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Michael Matile, Zwiegespräch mit Zeichnungen: Werke des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts aus der Sammlung Robert Landolt, exhibition catalogue, Zurich, 2013-2014, pp.84-85, no.34.

EXHIBITED: Zurich, Graphische Sammlung ETH, Zwiegespräch mit Zeichnungen: Werke des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts aus der Sammlung Robert Landolt, 2013-2014, no.34.

Although he enjoyed only a relatively brief career of around ten or eleven years, Daniele Crespi was among the most significant painters working in Milan in the first quarter of the 17th century. A precocious artist, very early in his career he assisted Guglielmo Caccia, known as Moncalvo, on the frescoes of the dome of the church of San Vittore al Corpo in Milan. His first documented independent work is the decoration of a chapel in the church of Sant’ Eustorgio in Milan, and this was followed a few years later by work in the church of San Protaso ad Monachos. Between 1623 and 1627 he painted several works for the church of Santa Maria di Campagna in Piacenza, and also decorated the organ shutters in the Milanese church of Santa Maria della Passione. An altarpiece of The Martyrdom of Saint Mark for the church of San Marco in Novara was completed in 1626.

There followed commissions from two of the most important Carthusian monasteries in Lombardy which represent the culmination of Crespi’s activity as a fresco painter. An extensive series of frescoes for the Certosa of Garegnano, in the outskirts of Milan, depicting scenes from the early history of the monastery and its founder Saint Bruno, may be regarded as probably the artist’s finest works. An equally impressive cycle of frescoes for the Certosa in Pavia were left unfinished at Crespi’s death from the plague in 1630, at the age of about thirty-two.

As Rudolf Wittkower has written of the artist, ‘In his best works Daniele combined severe realism and parsimonious handling of pictorial means with a sincerity of expression fully in sympathy with the religious climate at Milan.’1 Similarly, another modern scholar has noted that ‘Crespi was a true artist: learned, original, richly diverse and devoted to his art, well able to establish his artistic standpoint amid the cultural and religious preoccupations of his time. He was also a perfectionist in technique and execution…the young Crespi early distanced himself from the Milanese academy in order to seek out new directions: mastering the rules of composition and accuracy of drawing and the absorption of ‘academic tradition’ were only foundations, to which he added a marvellous attention to form and a sincere and versatile pursuit of the ‘natural’.’2

Although Daniele Crespi was among the most gifted draughtsmen working in Milan in the 1620s, only about seventy drawings by him are known. Almost all of these appear to be preparatory studies for paintings or frescoes, and no independent, finished drawings by the artist have survived.

The attribution of this drawing to Crespi was first put forward by David Lachenmann. The composition appears to be related, albeit in reverse, to that of a large, late painting of The Virgin with Saints Francis and

Charles Borromeo (fig.1) by Crespi, in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan3. The Ambrosiana canvas, which is signed but undated, is thought to have been completed around 1628, at about the same time that Crespi was working on the fresco cycle for the Certosa di Garegnano. A somewhat earlier variant of the Ambrosiana composition, with several differences, is found in an altarpiece, variously attributed to Crespi himself or his studio, in the church of San Biagio in the Lombard town of Codogno4

A compositional pen and ink study for the Ambrosiana painting is in the collection of the Kunsthalle in Bremen5, while another related drawing, which is somewhat closer to the Codogno altarpiece than the painting in the Ambrosiana, is in the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum in Budapest6

The vigorous draughtsmanship of the present sheet, rapidly drawn in pen and ink, is a feature of many of Crespi’s preparatory studies for paintings. The nervous energy of the drawing is, however, tempered in the composition of the final painting in the Ambrosiana; as Nancy Ward Nielsen has pointed out, ‘This change from drawing to painting, from Lombard technique and emotion to the calm and considered final work is typical of Daniele.’7 Among stylistically comparable pen drawings by Crespi is a study of a figure kneeling in adoration, in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan8, and a compositional study, also in the Ambrosiana collection9, for a lunette fresco of The Resurrection of Raymond Diocrès of 1629 in the Certosa di Garegnano.

bERNARDO STROZZI

Genoa 1582-1644 Venice

Saint Paul

Black chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk, on buff paper, laid down. Inscribed dal tintoretto in brown ink at the upper left. Numbered and inscribed 3 / P.G. no 27 in brown ink on the backing sheet. 194 x 178 mm. (7 5/8 x 7 in.)

PROVENANCE: From an album in the so-called ‘Sagredo-Borghese’ collection, with provenance as follows: Zaccaria Sagredo, Venice (Lugt 2103a); By descent to his nephew, Gherardo Sagredo, Venice; His widow, Cecilia Grimani Sagredo; Thence by descent; Dispersed in a series of sales after 1743; Possibly Jean-Jacques de Boissieu, Lyon, and thence by descent to the Baron de la Chapelle, Mâcon; Anonymous sale (‘Dessins italiens d’un album ‘Sagredo-Borghese’ de la collection d’un amateur français’), Monaco, Christie’s, 2 July 1993, lot 41; W. M. Brady & Co., New York, in 1994; Acquired in March 1994 by a private collection, Switzerland.

LITERATURE: Mary Newcome, ‘Oil Sketches and Drawings by Strozzi’, Antichità Viva, 1993, p.22; Luisa Mortari, Bernardo Strozzi, Rome, 1995, p.124, under no.193, p.230, under no.31, and p.233, no.43 (‘un bellissimo disegno preparatorio…di grande qualità.’); Piero Boccardo, ‘I disegni di Bernardo Strozzi provenienti dall’album Sagredo’, in Ezia Gavazza, Giovanna Nepi Sciré and Giovanna Rotondi Terminiello, ed., Bernardo Strozzi, exhibition catalogue, Genoa, Palazzo Ducale, 1995, p.324; Nathalie Strasser, Dessins italiens de la Renaissance au siècle des lumières: Collection Jean Bonna, Geneva, 2010, p.206, under no.90; London, Christie’s, Old Master and British Drawings and Watercolours, Including Works from the Collection of Jean Bonna, 2 July 2019, p.43, under lot 40; Margherita Priarone, ‘I disegni di Bernardo Strozzi: fortuna critica e problemi aperti’, in Anna Orlando and Daniele Sanguineti, ed., Bernardo Strozzi 1582-1644: La conquista del colore, exhibition catalogue, Genoa, 2019-2020, p.368, fig.14.

Born Bernardo Pizzorno to humble parents, Bernardo Strozzi did not have a traditional apprenticeship as an artist, and studied only briefly with the minor Genoese painter Cesare Corte and the Sienese artist Pietro Sorri. He was ordained as a Capuchin monk about 1598, at the age of seventeen, and painted devotional pictures and altarpieces for his monastic community and others. After his father’s death around 1608, he received permission to leave the order to look after his mother and unmarried sister, although he retained the nickname ‘Il Cappuccino’ throughout his life. It was also around this time that he adopted the surname ‘Strozzi’. In 1610-1611 he undertook a trip to Milan, where he studied the work of Lombard artists, while other influences on the young painter were the Sienese Barroccesque painters Ventura Salimbeni and Francesco Vanni, as well as Anthony Van Dyck, who worked in Genoa at various times between 1621 and 1627. Strozzi developed a highly personal style as a painter, producing altarpieces, portraits and genre scenes. Among his important patrons were the collectors Marcantonio and Giovan Carlo Doria, from whom he received several significant commissions, notably the interior decoration of the Palazzo Doria in Genoa in 1618. Another Doria commission was for a ceiling fresco of The Vision of Saint Dominic for the Genoese church of San Domenico, executed between 1620 and 1622 and now destroyed. From 1623 to 1625, Strozzi worked concurrently on the fresco decoration of the Palazzo Nicolosio Lomellino in Genoa and at the Villa Centurione at Samperdarena.

After about two decades in Genoa, Strozzi spent the last part of his career in Venice, where he settled around 1633, and where he was known as ‘Il prete Genovese’ (‘the Genoese priest’). In Venice he gained fame as a painter of religious subjects and, in particular, as a portraitist. Among his important commissions were paintings for the church of San Niccolò da Tolentino and the Biblioteca Marciana. He also painted a ceiling fresco for the Venetian church of the Ospedale degli Incurabili in 1635. An exuberant colourist, Strozzi reveled in the application of paint, often applied with a thick impasto, and his bold handling was to influence later generations of Venetian painters.

Strozzi’s idiosyncratic manner is as readily evident in his drawings as in his paintings. The majority of the artist’s surviving drawings, which number less than a hundred sheets, are studies of heads, limbs or hands, drawn in black (and occasionally red) chalk, and often on toned paper. Most of his drawings can be related to finished paintings, and he appears not to have produced finished drawings for sale to collectors.

This fine drawing is a preparatory study for a painting of Saint Paul (fig.1) in the collection of the Museo di Palazzo Rosso in Genoa1. The present sheet has been described by the Strozzi scholar Luisa Mortari as ‘Definitely a preparatory drawing, and of great quality, for the painting of the same name in Genoa...It is brought to its ultimate fulfilment by the artist with a decisive pictorial sense, like few other single figure drawings [by Strozzi].’2 Among stylistically and thematically related drawings is a very similar study of a bearded man, also from the Sagredo collection and later that of Jean Bonna in Geneva, which was sold at auction in London in 20193, as well a drawing on the verso of a double-sided sheet, likewise from the Sagredo collection, in the Louvre4

The present sheet, like many of Strozzi’s surviving corpus of drawings, was formerly part of the Sagredo collection in Venice – aptly described by one modern scholar as ‘the most important collection of drawings in eighteenth-century Venice as well as one of the richest in Europe’5 – and bears the inscription ‘P.G.’ (for ‘Prete Genovese’), together with a number, associated with that provenance. An inventory of the Sagredo collection in 1738 recorded some 8,000 drawings, assembled into fifty-seven albums. It is thought that most, if not all, of the drawings by Strozzi marked with a ‘P.G.’ inscription and number were once part of a single album, which must have contained at least a hundred drawings, since extant sheets inscribed ‘P.G.’ bear numbers between 3 and 99. Other drawings by Strozzi with a Sagredo provenance are today in the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris, the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.

GIACOMO CAVEDONE

Sassuolo 1577-c.1660 Bologna

The Head of a Bearded Man

Charcoal, extensively heightened with white chalk, on paper washed a light brown, backed. Made up at the lower left and right and upper right corners. Numbered 18. in brown ink and inscribed Domenichino / St. Gerolamo in pencil on the reverse of the former mount. Inscribed Original sketch of the Head of St. Gerome for his picture of the / Communion, now at Rome – by Domenichino and numbered 16 in brown ink on the album page on which this drawing was formerly mounted. 271 x 203 mm. (10 5/8 x 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: From an album of miscellaneous, mostly Bolognese drawings, assembled by a certain Mr. Yeates in Italy in 1823 (according to an inscription on the first page of the album); Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s Olympia, 11 December 2002, lot 30; Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2003; Private collection.

Giacomo Cavedone entered the Carracci academy in 1591, studying initially with Annibale Carracci. After Annibale’s departure for Rome in 1595, he became one of Ludovico Carracci’s chief assistants, collaborating on such projects as the extensive decoration of San Michele in Bosco, and continued to work with him until Ludovico’s death in 1619. Cavedone’s first known independent painting is a Saint Stephen in Glory of 1601, now in the Galleria Estense in Modena. In 1609 he travelled to Rome, where he assisted Guido Reni on the decoration of the Cappella Paolina in the Quirinal Palace. The influence of this Roman sojourn, and particularly his exposure to the work of Caravaggio, is reflected in such paintings as the Baptism of Christ of c.1611-1612, in the church of San Pietro Martire in Modena. Cavedone painted several monumental altarpieces for churches in and around Bologna, and the effects of a trip to Venice between 1612 and 1613 can be seen in the painterly richness of such pictures as the large Sant’Alò altarpiece of 1614, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna. Injuries sustained as a result of a fall from scaffolding in 1623 and the loss of his wife and children to the plague in 1630 seems to have ended Cavedone’s career prematurely, and he produced very little work in the remaining thirty years before his death.

Cavedone’s drawings display a distinctive combination of Venetian and Bolognese elements, with the particular influence of the draughtsmanship of Titian on the one hand and Ludovico Carracci on the other. His drawings may be divided into three main groups - compositional sketches, figure and drapery studies, and large studies of individual heads - and approximately half of his surviving drawings may be related to extant paintings. While his composition studies were generally drawn in pen and ink wash, for figure and head studies he tended to use either a soft black chalk, usually applied on blue paper, or, as in the present sheet, charcoal heightened with white chalk on light brown (and sometimes oiled) paper. Cavedone’s drawings of this latter type were to be a strong influence on the draughtsmanship of his younger contemporary, Guercino. The largest and most important group of drawings by the artist is today in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.

Previously attributed to Domenichino, this drawing cannot be related to any surviving work by Cavedone, although the facial type and morphology are typical of the artist. A similar drawing of a bearded man, in an identical technique, was formerly in the Horvitz collection1. The present sheet may further be compared with several examples from a group of around sixty drawings of male and female heads by Cavedone at Windsor Castle2, one of which depicts the same head, albeit larger than the present sheet and showing more of the neck and head3. Other drawings of this sort are in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

hERMAN SAFTLEVEN

Rotterdam 1609-1685 Utrecht

A Mountainous River Landscape with Fishermen

Pen and brush and grey ink, with green and brown washes, over an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in brown ink. Signed with the artist’s monogram HSL in brown ink at the lower left. 264 x 325 mm. (10 3/8 x 12 3/4 in.)

Herman Saftleven was the younger brother of Cornelis Saftleven and studied with him, probably under their father, the obscure painter Herman Saftleven the Elder, in Rotterdam. Although the two brothers briefly worked together in the 1630s, notably at the palace of Huis Honselaarsdijk in 1635, the younger Saftleven made his career in Utrecht. He had settled there by 1632, becoming a citizen of the city some twenty-five years later. (He also served as an officer of the city’s artist’s guild between 1655 and 1667.)

Active mainly as a landscape painter, Saftleven painted a variety of Italianate landscapes, Rhineland scenes and imaginary river views, as well as topographical views of Utrecht and the surrounding area, wooded and mountain vistas and farmhouse genre scenes. While his early manner as a topographical artist is indebted to the example of such artists as Jan van Goyen (with whom he may have studied) and Pieter Molijn, by the 1640s he was working in a more Italianate manner, inspired by the example of Jan Both and Cornelis van Poelenburch. Saftleven had achieved his mature style by around 1650, creating expansive landscape paintings and drawings - typified by the present sheet - inspired by his travels along the Rhine and Moselle rivers and their tributaries.

A prolific artist, Saftleven produced around three hundred paintings and over 1,400 drawings, almost all of which were finished landscapes, together with around forty etchings. Many of his drawings are signed and dated, large-scale sheets intended as independent works for collectors, as well as for such publications as the Amsterdam collector Laurens van der Hem’s fifty-volume Atlas Maior or Atlas Blaeu-van der Hem. Writing around 1660, the Dutch poet and playwright Joost van der Vondel, who was a friend of Saftleven’s, noted in verse that, whomsoever owned an album of the artist’s landscape drawings, could ‘Catch some air, if he wants, / While staying home, safe and quiet: / He can quietly travel up the Rhine, / from Utrecht, and its Cathedral; / Between banks and streams, / Between vineyards, woods, and trees, / To amuse himself, / Canals, cities and farmland, / Herds, cattle, villages and hamlets, / Fields, and townships, and fences, / To behold Springs and waterfalls, / In his room, when he turns / To these works on paper, / So full of life, so full of elegance.’1 In the last few years of his career, between 1680 and 1684, Saftleven drew nearly a hundred botanical drawings of flowers and plants, in watercolour and gouache, that were commissioned from him by the amateur horticulturalist and botanist Agnes (Agneta) Block, although less than thirty of these works survive today. Significant groups of landscape drawings by Saftleven are in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the British Museum in London and the Albertina in Vienna.

The present sheet may be dated to the later part of Saftleven’s career, from the late 1640s onwards, when he was ‘painting panoramic and Rhenish river landscapes enlivened with anecdotal details that he based on sketches he made during travels along the Moselle and through the Rhineland.’2 Many of these large, sometimes imaginary Rhineland views may be counted among the artist’s most appealing drawings. Stylistically comparable works include a Landscape with Castle on a Steep Rock in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow3, a Mountain Landscape of c.1650 in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem4, and a drawing of An Extensive Rocky River Landscape, signed and dated 1648, sold at auction in 20105. Also comparable is a Rocky Landscape with Figures, dated 1648, in the British Museum6, and a Rocky Bay with Fishermen, dated 1650, in a private collection7

GREGORIO DE FERRARI

Porto Maurizio 1647-1726 Genoa

The Madonna of Loreto Appearing to Saints Augustine and Paul

Pen and brown ink and blue-grey wash, extensively heightened with white over some traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, and with framing lines in brown ink, on faded blue paper.

320 x 213 mm. (12 5/8 x 8 3/8 in.) [image]

325 x 236 mm. (12 3/4 x 9 1/4 in.) [sheet]

Watermark: An anchor in a circle with a six-pointed star above.

PROVENANCE: Ian Woodner, New York, by 1973; The posthumous Woodner sale, London, Christie’s, 2 July 1991, lot 113; Emmanuel Moatti, Paris, in 1992; Acquired from him in 1994 by John O’Brien, Charles Town, West Virginia (Lugt 4230).

LITERATURE: Mary Newcome, ‘Notes on Gregorio de Ferrari and the Genoese Baroque’, Pantheon, 1979, p.149, no.27; Gerhard Gruitrooy, Gregorio de Ferrari (1647-1726) mit einem kritischen Werkverzeichnis, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Freien Universität, Berlin, 1987, pp.466-467, no.66 (not illustrated); Mario di Giampaolo, ed., Disegno italiano antico: Artisti e opere dal Quattrocento al Settecento, Milan, 1994, illustrated p.129; Mary Newcome Schleier, Gregorio de Farrari, Turin, 1998, p.118, under no.93, pp.179-180, no.D85.

EXHIBITED: New York, William H. Schab Gallery, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum, and Indianapolis, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Woodner Collection II: Old Master Drawings from the XV to the XVIII century, 1973, no.61; Paris, Emmanuel Moatti, Dessins anciens, 1992, no.29.

The work of Gregorio de Ferrari, and in particular his large-scale fresco decorations, occupies an important position as one of the high points of the Genoese Baroque tradition. He trained as an artist in the studio of Domenico Fiasella in Genoa between 1664 and 1668 before going to Parma, where his exposure to the work of Correggio was to have a profound and lifelong influence on his style. Returning to Genoa around 1673, he began a long and prolific series of collaborations with Domenico Piola, then the leading painter in Genoa, whose daughter he married in 1674. The two artists worked together on a number of decorative projects in Genoa and its outskirts, notably in the Palazzo Rosso and the churches of San Siro and San Giovanni Battista in Sampierdarena. Both painters were particularly busy with large-scale interior decorations in numerous palaces in Genoa following the bombardment of the city by French naval forces in May 1684. Much of De Ferrari’s career was taken up with fresco decorations and altarpieces for churches and palaces in Genoa and the surrounding area, although he also produced a number of easel pictures.

As has been noted of the artist, ‘Whether in a drawing, fresco or canvas, De Ferrari’s style is unmistakable – free flowing, exploratory, and such an anticipation of the rococo that one critic deemed him “a grander Fragonard”.’1 Among his most significant works in Genoa are frescoes in the Villa Balbi allo Zerbino, the Palazzo Brignole and the Palazzo Rosso, as well as the vast Assumption of the Virgin on the nave vault of the Dominican church of Santi Giacomo e Filippo, completed around 1690 and destroyed during the Second World War. His reputation as one of the finest fresco painters of the day also spread outside Liguria, and in 1685 he was commissioned by Vittorio Amedeo of Savoy to fresco several rooms in the Palazzo Reale in Turin, while in 1692 he is recorded as working for the French nobleman Jacques de Noailles in Marseille, although nothing of his work there survives. Around 1700 he painted a monumental altarpiece of The Death of Saint Scholastica for the church of Santo Stefano that is regarded as one of his finest religious pictures. De Ferrari’s last public commission was the decoration of the cupola of the Genoese church of Santa Croce e San Camillo, a project eventually completed by his son Lorenzo de Ferrari.

Gregorio de Ferrari is relatively rare as a draughtsman, and the largest surviving group of his drawings is today in the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa. As Jonathan Bober has noted, ‘On the one hand, Gregorio was the most idiosyncratic and palpably willful draftsman of the era. On the other, of all Genoese, including even the extraordinarily prolific Domenico Piola, he appears to have been the most complete. A relatively small number of his drawings survives – perhaps one hundred, most in the collection of the Palazzo Rosso. That they represent every possible mode, stage, technique, and function only proves there has been tremendous attrition.’2 Typical of De Ferrari’s draughtsmanship is a preference for prepared coloured paper, as well as a liberal use of white heightening. Unlike many of his Genoese contemporaries, he does not seem to have produced many drawings as independent works of art, while at the same time only a handful of his surviving drawings can be specifically connected with known works.

The dynamic composition of this bold and spirited drawing, which can be dated to the early years of the 18th century, is very close to that of a recently rediscovered altarpiece by Gregorio de Ferrari of The Virgin and Child with Saints (fig.1) in the parish church at Pieve di Teco, north of Imperia3. Painted for the high altar of the church of the Augustinians in the town, the large painting was only discovered, rolled up in a storeroom, in 2015. Although the subject of the altarpiece is not the same as that of this drawing, and it includes more figures, the main elements of the canvas, notably the poses of the Virgin and Child and the saints below, closely match the present sheet.

Mary Newcome Schleier has suggested that the composition of this drawing may also have provided the inspiration for a late painting of The Madonna of Lepanto, a collaborative work by Gregorio and Lorenzo de Ferrari, which is in a private collection4. The pose of the Madonna in the present sheet is repeated in a drawing of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anthony and a Holy Martyr in the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa5.

The subject of the present sheet is the Miracle of the Santa Casa of Loreto. The Santa Casa was the house in Nazareth where the Virgin Mary lived, and where she received the Angel of the Annunciation, and was a place of pilgrimage from the earliest days of Christianity. According to legend, when Nazareth was threatened by Saracen armies in 1291, the entire house was miraculously raised from its foundations and transported by angels, first to Dalmatia, and then across the Adriatic to the town of Loreto, south of Ancona. In this drawing, De Ferrari placed the Santa Casa in the background, allowing him to create a strong vertical rhythm within the composition, from the saints below gazing upwards at the Virgin and Child at the apex of what Newcome Schleier has aptly described as ‘a spiral column of figures’6 .

GIOVANNI bATTISTA pIAZZETTA

Venice 1682-1754 Venice

A Youth with a Plumed Cap

Black chalk, with stumping and touches of white chalk, on buff paper, backed. 400 x 310 mm. (15 3/4 x 12 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Hélie de Talleyrand-Périgord, 7th Duc de Talleyrand, Pavilion Colombe, Saint-Bricesous-Forêt, by 1958; Probably by descent to his nephew, Manuel Gonzalez de Andia y TalleyrandPérigord, 2nd Marquis de Villahermosa and 8th Duc de Dino; Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London, in 1993; Private collection, London.

LITERATURE: Antonio Morassi, Dessins Vénitiens du Dix-huitième Siècle de la Collection du Duc de Talleyrand, Milan, 1958, p.14, no.2, pl.2; London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, Eighteenth Century Venetian Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1993-1994, unpaginated, no.1.

EXHIBITED: London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, Eighteenth Century Venetian Drawings, 1993-1994, no.1.

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

As a painter, Piazzetta worked very slowly, and therefore many more drawings than paintings by the artist are known today. As one modern scholar has written of the artist, ‘Piazzetta established his international reputation as a brilliant draughtsman early in his career, even before 1720, and made his mark as a painter only later. No doubt he felt more at ease with chalk in hand than with a brush.’1 His drawings, some of which were made as independent works of art, were already being avidly collected by the early 1720s. The artist’s drawn oeuvre includes drawings of nudes, preparatory studies for paintings (although only a very few of these are known), formal portrait drawings, and over 450 designs for book illustrations.

Piazzetta’s most celebrated works as a draughtsman, however, were a series of teste di carattere or ‘character heads’; large-scale, highly finished studies of heads drawn in black and white chalks on sizeable sheets of blue or buff Venetian paper. These were produced as works of art in their own right, intended to be framed and glazed for display, and were avidly sought by contemporary collectors. As Catherine Whistler has noted of the teste di carattere drawings, ‘Expressive heads or portrait studies in black chalk or charcoal lit up with white were part of Venetian drawing practice, but Piazzetta made this genre his own, with numerous variations featuring young and old, male and female characters...As independent drawings they are poetic images evoking potential narratives, while also presenting Piazzetta’s inventiveness and virtuosity for admiration.’2

Andrew Robison has observed that, ‘Beyond the obvious beauty of his drawings of heads, Piazzetta’s ability to endow them with so many of his distinctive qualities helps explain their enormous popularity not only with collectors but also with his most thoughtful contemporaries.’3 Certainly, as early as 1733, the Venetian critic and connoisseur Anton Maria Zanetti the Younger had noted of the teste di carattere that they were the most beautiful drawings of this type he had ever seen (‘più belle delle quali in questo genere altre son se ne sono mai vedute’). Piazzetta seems to have produced these large, bust-length drawings of character heads as a means of earning a steady income to support himself and his family. Indeed, the 18th century French amateur Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville, writing in 1762, noted that Piazzetta claimed to have earned the sum total of 7,000 zecchini from his drawings of heads.

Certainly, the fact that the artist’s reputation outside Venice was well established by the early 1720s can be credited to his teste di carattere drawings, many of which were engraved by the Venetian printmaker Marco Pitteri, whose prints served to spread their fame. As Ugo Ruggeri has written of these drawings, ‘Because they are so fully worked out, they are almost substitutes for paintings and give the impression that the artist was trying to reach, in a complex drawing, the absolute perfection of finish that is characteristic of his paintings...As an artist, he also had a marked preference for the faces of children and young people, and probably based his drawings of these on his own children or prentice boys working in his studio.’4 A large group of such teste di carattere drawings, amounting to thirty-six sheets, is now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle; these once belonged to Joseph Smith, the British Consul in Venice, who probably purchased them directly from the artist.

While Piazzetta may have used studio assistants or members of his family as models, his teste di carattere are not usually portraits as such. Although almost none of these character studies of heads are dated, the artist seems to have drawn them throughout his career. The scholar George Knox has dated some to the decade of the 1720s, while others may be dated to the 1730s, since an inventory of the collection of Piazzetta’s patron Marshal Johann Matthias von der Schulenberg notes that the artist supplied several such drawings to him at this time. Further drawings of this type, in which Piazzetta seems to have depicted his children, may be dated to the late 1730s and 1740s; some of these were engraved by Giovanni Cattini and published as Icones ad vivum expressae in 1743.

The present sheet is a particularly large and attractive example of Piazzetta’s independent drawings of heads. As Antonio Morassi has described this drawing, ‘The young man is represented here as a page, with a feathered beret and a white ruff. He holds his left hand to his heart as if he were bowing.’5 Alice Binion has further noted of such teste di carattere as this that, ‘In most of these drawings, made from life, Piazzetta dispensed with shadows. The extraordinary tactility of the figures was obtained by his singular technique of modelling by smudging the chalk instead of using hatching.’6

The model for this drawing may be tentatively identified as Piazzetta’s eldest son Giacomo Giusto, who was born in December 1725. Giacomo appears in a number of his father’s paintings and drawings from the 1730s onwards, notably in such finished genre drawings as Giacomo Feeding a Dog in the Art Institute of Chicago7 and a Head of a Youth with a Standard in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford8, as well as in drawings in the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and elsewhere.

The present sheet was part of the superb collection of 18th century Venetian drawings assembled by Hélie de Talleyrand-Périgord, 7th Duc de Talleyrand and Duc de Dino (1882-1968). The collection, catalogued and published by the scholar Antonio Morassi in 1958, included four other drawings by Piazzetta, apart from the present sheet, as well as numerous studies by Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo and Francesco Guardi, together with drawings by Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto, Francesco Fontebasso, Pietro Antonio Novelli, Giambattista Piranesi, Francesco Zuccarelli and Giuseppe Zais.

JOhANN WOLFGANG bAUMGARTNER

Ebbs 1702-1761 Augsburg

A Guardian Angel and a Child

Pen and black ink and grey wash, heightened with white, on blue paper. Inscribed Joh: Wolfgang Baumgärtner 1712-1761. / /Kufstein./ and B in black ink on the album page to which the present sheet was formerly attached. 139 x 87 mm. (5 1/2 x 3 3/8 in.)

Born near Kufstein in the Tyrol, Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner became one of the leading artists of the Rococo in Southern Germany. He began his career in Salzburg as a hinterglasmalerei; painting decorative compositions on the reverse of glass panels. Although they were highly prized, very few of these precious works have survived. After travelling in Italy, Austria, Hungary and Bohemia, Baumgartner settled in 1731 in Augsburg, and was able to establish himself as an independent artist there from 1733 onwards. At first, however, he was only permitted to work as a hinterglasmaler, although as he was the sole artist in the Swabian imperial city working in this technique, he achieved some renown.

It was not until 1745, when Baumgartner became a citizen of Augsburg and joined the local guild of painters, that he began working in both oil painting and fresco. His earliest known fresco dates from 1754, when he decorated the ceiling of the church of St. Jakobus in Gersthofen, for which he also painted several altarpieces. Soon established as one of the leading artists in Augsburg, Baumgartner painted numerous ceilings and frescoes for churches in Southern Germany, notably at Egenhausen, Bergen and Baitenhausen. He also worked for the Prince-Bishop Cardinal Franz Konrad von Rodt in the garden pavilion of the Neue Residenz at Meersburg, on Lake Constance, although further work there was left unfinished by his death from tuberculosis in September 1761.

Baumgartner is best known today as a draughtsman and designer of prints – ‘one of the most gifted designers for the print trade that Augsburg produced in a fertile period of graphic invention’1, according to one modern scholar – although unusually he does not seem to have worked as a printmaker himself. Some 220 drawings by the artist have survived, most of which served as designs for prints, book illustrations or calendars for the three leading publishing houses in Augsburg of Klauber, Engelbrecht and Kilian. The artist collaborated particularly closely with the brothers Johann Baptist and Joseph Sebastian Klauber, printmakers and publishers who etched many of his designs. Baumgartner’s model drawings for engravings include allegorical, mythological and religious subjects, genre scenes, hunting themes and elegant pastoral subjects, as well as designs for Thesenblätter, or thesis frontispieces. (Interestingly, many of Baumgartner’s preparatory designs for prints were in the form of oil sketches on canvas, often much larger in scale than the final engraving; this was probably a legacy of his work as a glass painter.) Among his significant commissions as a book illustrator, Baumgartner provided some three hundred designs for Joseph Giulini’s devotional work Tägliche Erbauung eines wahren Christen (Daily Devotions of a True Christian); a calendar illustrating each of the days of the year with an engraving of a different saint.

Like many of Baumgartner’s drawings, the composition of the present sheet is enlivened by an ornamental rocaille drawn border. As has been noted, ‘Like no other Augsburg artist, Baumgartner made rocaille decor central to his message. Along with [Gottfried Bernhard] Götz and Johann Evangelist Holzer, to whom he is particularly indebted, he relied on ornament to give structure to his picture[s].’2 Similarly, another scholar has pointed out that ‘Baumgartner’s designs play with Rococo ornamentation in a highly distinctive manner. He did not merely surround scenes as cartouches but rather gave a Rocaille quality to nature, buildings, forms, the figures and the whole image.’3

actual size

ANTON RAphAEL MENGS

Aussig 1728-1779 Rome

Study for the Head of Mary Magdalene

Oil on paper, laid down on board. 386 x 305 mm. (15 1/4 x 12 in.) [image] 422 x 337 mm. (16 5/8 x 13 1/4 in.) [board]

PROVENANCE: The artist’s son-in-law, Manuel Salvador Carmona, Madrid; Acquired from him by Tomás de Veri y Togores, Palma de Mallorca, Mallorca; The Marqués de Ariany y de la Cenia, Mallorca; Thence by descent to the Cotoner collection, Marattxí, Mallorca, by 1920.

LITERATURE: Antonio Ponz, Viage de España, Madrid, 1788, Vol.XIV, p.53, no.11; Tomás de Veri, Caudros notables de Mallorca. Principales colecciones de pinturas que existen en la Isla de Mallorca, Madrid, 1920, pl.XVI; Dieter Honisch, Anton Raphael Mengs und die Bildform des Frühklassizismus, Recklinghausen, 1965, p.131, no.304 and p.153, no.443; Steffi Roettgen, Anton Raphael Mengs 17281779 and his British Patrons, exhibition catalogue, London, 1993, p.108, under no.30; Steffi Roettgen, Anton Raphael Mengs 1729-1779, Munich, 1999, Vol.I (Das malerische und zeichnerische Werk), p.110, under no.66, and p.111, no.67.

Born in Bohemia, Anton Raphael Mengs was the son and pupil of the Danish painter Ismael Mengs, the court painter at Dresden, and moved with the rest of his family to Rome in 1741, when he was twelve years old. He was to spend most of the rest of his life in Italy, converting to Catholicism and becoming a leading figure in the artistic community in Rome. Mengs received several important portrait commissions and also worked on a number of significant public projects. Alongside Anton von Maron, he painted the ceiling fresco on the nave of the church of Sant’ Eusebio between 1757 and 1758, while his best-known work is the Parnassus ceiling in the Villa Albani, completed in 1761. That same year he travelled to Madrid, where he had been appointed pintor de camára to the Spanish King Charles III, and he remained in Spain for most of the next decade. Mengs was back in Rome by 1771 and the following year was elected principe of the Accademia di San Luca. After painting an altarpiece for Saint Peter’s and decorating the Stanza dei Papiri in the Vatican Library for Pope Clement XIV, he returned to Madrid in 1774. Two years later, on the grounds of poor health, the artist left the Spanish court for good and retired to Italy. Mengs was also an important writer and theorist on art, as well as an occasional art dealer, and by the time of his death was arguably the most celebrated painter in Europe. As the 18th century Italian writer and antiquarian G. L. Bianconi wrote of the artist, a year after his death, ‘There has never been a painter in all the world more sought after by rulers than Mengs; it seemed that they could not talk to him without losing their hearts to him, and conferring commissions.’1

This fine oil sketch on paper is a study for the head of the Magdalene in one of Mengs’s most significant late works; the large panel painting Noli me tangere (fig.1) of 1771, in the collection of All Souls College in Oxford and currently on loan to the National Gallery in London2. Intended for their chapel, the altarpiece was commissioned from Mengs in 1769 by All Souls College, for the sum of 600 Roman scudi3. The artist left Spain for Italy not long afterwards, and work on the painting was only begun after he had arrived back in Rome in the spring of 1771. Mengs painted the large panel in a rented studio at the Villa Medici, where it was exhibited after its completion in September 1771, having earlier been shown to the Pope. As an English correspondent in Rome wrote, in a letter to the Warden of All Souls College, ‘The Picture is finish’d and I really think among the very best that ever I saw of his painting. In the Christ there is a great dignity and meekness, in the Magdalena the remains of Grief with a mixture of surprize and joy, is wonderfully express’d. The disposition of the Figures is very agreeable, the colouring strong and clear, but very harmonious and true…Those who have seen it admired it much.’4 A modern scholar has noted that ‘The painting is a very revealing example of Mengs’s eclectic approach, with borrowings from classical antiquity (the figure of Christ is deeply indebted to the Apollo Belvedere), and – in the loose and luminous landscape and in the general sweetness of expression – to Titian and Correggio.’5

Although Mengs completed the actual painting of the altarpiece in around six weeks, he must have produced a number of preparatory studies and sketches for the picture beforehand. Preliminary chalk drawings for the figure and head of the Magdalene in the Noli me tangere altarpiece are today in the Prado in Madrid6, the Albertina in Vienna7 and in a private collection in Malta8. A similar oil sketch of this type (fig.2), preparatory for the head of Christ in the painting, is in the Library at All Souls College in Oxford9. As the Mengs scholar Steffi Roettgen has described that oil sketch, in terms equally applicable to this newly-rediscovered study for the head of the Magdalene in the same painting, ‘The fact that so carefully executed a head study was made to the same size as the picture throws a revealing light on the artist’s method of working. Mengs must have made an incredible number of drawings and oil studies for all his larger compositions...The study of the head differs only slightly from the finished painting. However, in expression, brushwork and liveliness it is superior.’10

The head of the Magdalene in the All Souls Noli me tangere was much admired by some contemporary writers. As one young German scholar, on a visit to All Souls College in 1782, noted, ‘the chapel is particularly beautiful…over the altar here [is] a fine painting of Mengs…The painting represented Mary Magdalene when she first suddenly sees Jesus standing before her, and falls at His feet. And in her countenance pain, joy, grief, in short almost all of the strongest of our passions, are expressed in so masterly a manner, that no man of true taste was ever tired of contemplating it; the longer it is looked at the more it is admired.’11

The first owner of this oil sketch was Meng’s son-in-law, the Spanish engraver Manuel Salvador Carmona (1734-1820), who married the painter’s daughter Anna Maria in 1778. This sketch is noted as being in Carmona’s collection some ten years later, when it is mentioned by the 18th century Spanish painter Antonio Ponz in his magisterial book Viage de España, en que se da noticia de las cosas mas apreciables, y dignas de saberse, que hay en ella, published in eighteen volumes between 1772 and 1794. The Viage de España was based on a trip Ponz made throughout Spain in 1771, during which he recorded all the notable works of art he saw. As the present sheet is noted: ‘Don Manuel Salvador Carmona, Engraver of the Privy Chamber of His Majesty and son-in-law of Don Antonio Mengs, has different works of his. The paintings are a profile portrait of himself, a Head of the Magdalen... and some other small-scale paintings...’12

GAETANO GANDOLFI

San Matteo della Decima 1734-1802 Bologna

Pan with Young Satyrs, a Putto and a Nymph

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Inscribed Drawn by Gaetano Gandolfi Bolognese painter in black ink on the former mount. 159 x 121 mm. (6 1/4 x 4 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: F[rederic?] Maclellan Adami, Esq.; His sale, London, Christie’s, 29 June 1971, lot 124; Private collection; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 7 July 1999, lot 49; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 2000; James Freeman, Kyoto; Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, in 2007; Private collection, New York.

LITERATURE: Donatella Biagi Maino, Gaetano Gandolfi, Turin, 1995, p.57, fig.XIX, p.75.

EXHIBITED: New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 2000, no.28.

As a student at the Accademia Clementina, where he is documented from 1751, Gaetano Gandolfi won two medals for sculpture and four medals for his drawings. A brief period of study in Venice in 1760, together with his elder brother Ubaldo, was of great importance to Gandolfi, and is reflected in the dynamic brushwork and rich colours of his paintings. Aside from the trip to Venice and another to Paris and London in 1788, Gandolfi seems to have worked almost exclusively in his native Bologna, where he established a successful and prosperous career. He received numerous commissions for altarpieces for churches throughout Emilia and elsewhere, and also worked extensively as a fresco painter. One of his first important decorative projects was a ceiling fresco of the Four Elements, painted for the Palazzo Odorici in Bologna in collaboration with the quadraturista Serafino Barozzi. This was followed by work in several other Bolognese palaces, including the Palazzo Guidotti, the Palazzo Centurione and the Palazzo Montanari.

In 1776 Gandolfi painted a massive canvas of The Marriage at Cana for the refectory of the Lateran convent of San Salvatore, which is now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna. Another prominent commission was for the decoration of the cupola of the church of Santa Maria della Vita, painted between 1776 and 1779 with frescoes of The Virgin in Glory and The Sacrifice of Manoah. In the later years of his career Gandolfi also produced easel pictures of historical and mythological subjects, while a six-month stay in London and Paris in 1787 added a Neoclassical tinge to his paintings. Throughout his life he remained actively involved in the affairs of the Accademia Clementina, where he taught a class in life drawing. In the last few years of his career, Gandolfi produced a number of large, highly finished black chalk drawings of religious, classical and mythological subjects, which bear dates from the late 1790s to 1802, the year of his death.

This engaging little drawing is a splendid example of Gaetano Gandolfi’s lively and spirited use of pen and wash. The Gandolfi scholar Donatella Biagi Maino has noted certain analogies between the present sheet (which she describes as ‘di qualità superba’1) and one of Gaetano’s finest works as a fresco painter; the mythological scenes painted on the ceilings of the palazzetto of Conte Massimiliano Gini in Bologna, executed in 1772 with quadratura decoration by Barozzi2. In particular, the lunette scenes of satyrs and putti frescoed on the lower walls of an alcove3 in the Casa Gini compare favourably, in their sensuousness and vivacity, with drawings such as the present sheet, as well as a study of a Satyr Chasing a Nymph (Pan and Syrinx) in red chalk, in the Biblioteca National in Rio de Janeiro4

A close stylistic comparison may be made with such drawings of mythological subjects by Gaetano Gandolfi as two studies for a painting of The Triumph of Venus - one in a French private collection5 and the other in the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey6 - or a Judgement of Paris in a private collection7.

GAETANO GANDOLFI

San Matteo della Decima 1734-1802 Bologna

The Heads of a Young Man and a Bearded Old Man in Profile

Pen and brown ink. 151 x 185 mm. (5 7/8 x 7 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Paris; Jean-François Baroni, Paris, in 2003; Private collection, London.

Gaetano Gandolfi was a gifted draughtsman, and his drawings were highly prized by contemporary collectors. The present sheet may be included among a number of elaborate pen and ink drawings of studies of heads - of young women, boys, old men and children, and often with several heads on one sheet – that are among the artist’s most appealing works. As James Byam Shaw has noted, ‘these groups of heads, closely juxtaposed, evidently had a great vogue in Bologna and elsewhere in North Italy’1, and had earlier been seen in the drawings of such artists as Donato Creti. The present sheet may in particular have been intended as a representation of youth and old age.

Characterized by Donatella Biago Maino as works ‘of inventive verve and confidence of handling’2, these beautiful and highly finished drawings of heads by Gandolfi, some of which are signed, were probably made as autonomous works of art for sale to collectors. At the same time, however, the precise nature of the artist’s penwork made them particularly suitable for reproduction as prints, and indeed several of Gandolfi’s drawings of this sort were engraved in the 1780s by his pupil Luigi Tadolini, and published with the title Raccolta di teste pittoriche inventate e disegnate a penna dal Sig. G. Gandolfi accademico clementino ed incise in rame da Luigi Tadolini. It may be noted that Gaetano was already producing finished capricci drawings by the 1770s - to judge from a drawing of four heads, dated 1777, in the collection of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan - and he continued to do so until at least the late 1790s. Gaetano’s son Mauro Gandolfi (1764-1834) also produced several drawings of this type.

Biago Maino has suggested of these capricci drawings that they may have their origins in 18th century scientific studies of physiognomy as a means of comprehending emotional states. As she writes, ‘The classification of the expression of emotions through facial expression continued to be the subject of intense debate in the 1770s, when Gaetano produced one of his first securely dated capricci…Gandolfi’s character studies do not, of course, make any claims to offer new interpretative categories – or indeed to be anything other than elegant refined variations on a theme – but they were conceived along the general lines of these tendencies, and to satisfy a taste and fashion that were to some extent produced by these debates.’3 Similar capricci drawings of heads by Gaetano Gandolfi are today in the collections of the Uffizi in Florence, the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, the Albertina in Vienna, and elsewhere.

pIETRO ANTONIO

NOVELLI

Venice 1729-1804 Venice

A Lion at Rest

Pen and brown ink and brown wash. 293 x 421 mm. (11 1/2 x 16 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Florence, Sotheby Parke Bernet Italia, 14 November 1978, lot 486; Anna Bozza, Venice; Cristiano Barozzi, Barozzi Antichità, Venice; Purchased from him in May 1990 by Wallace Bradway, New Haven, Connecticut; Thence by descent.

The outlines of Pietro Antonio Novelli’s long career are known through his posthumously published memoirs, which appeared thirty years after his death. Trained in the studio of Giambattista Pittoni, he also came under the influence of Gaspare Diziani and Francesco Guardi, while his earliest paintings – a Saint Joseph in the Venetian church of Santa Fosca and a Presentation in the Temple in the church of San Francesco in Rovigo, both painted in 1759 – show the influence of Jacopo Amigoni. Among other early documented works are a set of illustrations for an edition of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, published in 1760, and several plates for the complete edition of Carlo Goldoni’s Commedie, published in 1761 and 1788. In 1768 Novelli was accepted as a member of the Accademia in Venice, submitting an Allegory of the Arts as a reception piece.

Novelli painted frescoes in several Venetian palaces, including that of the Corniani-Tivan, Mangilli, Mocenigo and Sangiatoffetti families, and also painted altarpieces and decorative frescoes throughout Northern Italy; in Udine, Padua and Bologna, as well as in Venice. Indeed, ‘Novelli was one of the most active participants in the great wave of decorative painting that swept Venice and the Veneto in the last thirty years of the Venetian republic.’1 Among the artist’s patrons was Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, for whom in 1772 he painted a mythological composition as a pendant to a work by Pompeo Batoni. By 1779 Novelli had settled in Rome, where he spent most of the next twenty years, coming under the influence of Neoclassicism and such artists as Batoni and Anton Raphael Mengs. During his years in Rome he completed a ceiling painting of Cupid and Psyche for the Villa Borghese and received commissions for decorative work in several Roman palaces. The last years of his career were spent in his native Venice. His son Francesco Novelli followed in his father’s footsteps as an engraver and designer of prints and book illustrations.

Best known today for his drawings, Novelli was an inventive and versatile draughtsman. His many and varied drawings - executed in pen and ink, watercolour, or red chalk - include studies for paintings and altarpieces, as well as a significant number of designs for book illustrations, prints and frontispieces. As Catherine Whistler has written of Novelli, ‘He was an extremely versatile artist, drawing on Venetian, Bolognese and Roman traditions in his altarpieces and frescoes. However, Novelli is at his most impressive as a draughtsman, whether working economically with the pen…or delicately brushing on complementary shades of wash…With his multifarious talents, Novelli could well be regarded as the Palma Giovane of his time - both artists worked in Rome and Venice and attempted to combine the virtues of academic classicism with Venetian painterliness; Palma and Novelli were prolific draughtsmen, and both had to live with the achievements of far greater artists in view.’2

Large groups of Pietro Antonio Novelli’s lively and colourful drawings are in the collections of the Museo Correr in Venice, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Albertina in Vienna.

ThÉODORE CARUELLE D’ALIGNy

Chaumes 1798-1871 Lyon

A View of the Monastery and Sanctuary of La Verna, Tuscany

Pen and brown ink and light brown wash, heightened with white chalk, over an underdrawing in pencil. 400 x 599 mm. (15 3/4 x 23 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Geneva, Hôtel de Ventes de Genève, 10 March 2010, lot 1137 [catalogue untraced].

Described by the poet, novelist and art critic Théophile Gautier as ‘the Ingres of landscape painting’, Claude-Félix-Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny enjoyed a career that lasted some fifty years, and developed a particular reputation as a painter of the paysage historique. He studied with Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Jean-Victor Bertin and Louis-Etienne Watelet before travelling to Italy in 1822, the same year that he first exhibited at the Salon, with a painting of Daphnis and Chloe. His five years in Italy, during which he met and befriended the artist Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and François-Edouard Bertin, were vital to his career as a landscape painter. Corot was only two years older than Aligny, and the two artists spent much time together sketching in Rome and the surrounding Campagna. On their return to France –Aligny in 1827 and Corot the following year – the two friends continued to work closely together, often painting alongside each other in the forest of Fontainebleau. At the Salon of 1830 Aligny won a second-class medal at the Salon for his painting of The Persecution of the Druids under the Emperor Claudius. Both Aligny and Corot returned to Italy in 1834, with the former remaining there for about a year. (Corot came to own many drawings by Aligny, which were included in the posthumous sale of the contents of the former’s studio in 1875.)

The later 1830s found Aligny achieving some notable successes at the Salons, particularly in 1837, when two paintings of Biblical subjects were each awarded a first-class medal and another, Prometheus Chained to the Caucasus, was acquired by the State for the Musée de Luxembourg. He continued to send numerous historical landscape paintings to the Salon, and in 1842 his painting of Hercules and the Hydra earned the artist admission to the Légion d’honneur. Likewise in 1842, Aligny was commissioned by the city of Paris to decorate a chapel in the church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, and the following year he received a government grant to travel to Greece to make drawings and etchings of the most celebrated sites of antiquity. This voyage resulted in the publication of a volume of his prints which became some of the artist’s best-known works. Aligny received another public commission from the city of Paris in 1858, for two landscapes of Biblical scenes for the church of Sant-Etienne-du-Mont. In 1861 he was appointed the director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, where he was to spend the last decade of his career. Taken up with the responsibilities of his role as both teacher and administrator, he painted and drew relatively little before his death ten years later. A posthumous sale of paintings and drawings from the artist’s studio was held in Paris in May 1874, and the largest collections of his drawings are today in the museums of Lille and Clamecy, while a travel sketchbook is in the Louvre.

This large and impressive sheet is likely to date from Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny’s second visit to Italy in 1834, when his drawings became grander in scale and more expansive in composition, with a preference for pen and brown ink instead of the fine pencil characteristic of his earlier Italian drawings. As Michael Clarke has noted of the artist’s second Italian tour, ‘Aligny’s drawings from this trip have an assured quality in what had become his characteristic manner, developed over the preceding decade, in which form and construction are achieved by mainly linear means and shading is boldly indicated in a schematic manner. Horizons are raised and…the artist exhibits a particular fascination with large rocks set into the landscape, through whose depiction he is able to achieve a purity of form. Indeed, his highly original drawing style remains of considerably greater interest than the often insipid quality achieved in his finished paintings.’1

Similarly, another modern scholar has written of Aligny’s draughtsmanship that ‘He was especially attracted to sunny, spacious vistas which he studied in plein air, creating drawings of far greater intricacy, monumentality, and assurance than his relatively timid paintings. Early and continued contact with Corot undoubtedly aided Aligny’s development of spatial clarity.’2 Views of landscapes in Tuscany such as the present large sheet are, however, quite rare among the Italian drawings of Aligny, who mainly worked further south, around Rome and Naples.

Long associated with Saint Francis of Assisi, the Sanctuary of La Verna lies at the summit of the chalky cliffs of the Monte della Verna, at the edge of the Casentino forest in Tuscany. In 1213 Count Orlando Cattani of Chiusi della Verna gave the mountain and the surrounding land to Saint Francis and the Franciscan order, as a place suitable for contemplation and prayer. In the succeeding years the first hermitage was built, with a number of small cells around the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. It was at La Verna that Saint Francis retreated in prayer and meditation, and where, in September 1224, he received the stigmata. A larger church, the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, was built between the 14th and 16th centuries, and today houses several relics of the Saint.

As has been noted of the period in which Aligny was working in Italy, ‘the beauty of the Italian landscape was celebrated in a growing body of travel literature, which guided visitors to the most famous sites.’3 One early 19th century English visitor to the area wrote, ‘La Verna has a most curious appearance from whatever point it is viewed. Imagine a barren mountain crowned with a circle of rocks, for the greater part rising perpendicularly, and to the height, in some instances, of two or three hundred feet, – according to my conjecture, although books talk of double that height. It would bear a resemblance to the ruins of a gigantic castle, were it not that the tongue of land (as the Italians call it) upon the rocks is covered with a thick and lofty wood…Few places can be more romantic and picturesque than La Verna. Owing to the inequalities of the ground, and its being thickly covered with wood, the smallness of its extent is concealed, so that in many parts it is difficult not to imagine oneself in the depths of a wide forest. Then the sudden and abrupt heights, the chasms, the rocks torn and splintered into such various shapes, all add to the enchantment. Trees flourish there remarkably well, and the banks are beautiful with wild flowers.’4

Writing in June 1844, another traveller noted that ‘La Verna is, in fact, a Hospice, on the summit of a pass leading from Bibiena, Chitignano, and Pieve San Stefano, directly over the Apennines. On the side of the mountain we found the heat of the sun very great; but on arriving at the Convent, we were shown into a room with massive walls, quite shaded from the sun, so that it felt very chilly, and we accepted with delight the offer of a fire, which we soon saw blazing up the capacious chimney. We could scarcely have anticipated enjoying a fire-side in the middle of the day on the 7th of June, in Italy…We then visited the various shrines and spots of particular sanctity in the immediate neighbourhood of the Convent. One of the brethren, and two of the country people, accompanied us. At every altar they knelt in prayer; and in the cave in which Saint Francis, the founder of the Convent, had made his bed – a dark cave now dripping audibly with water – the silence was broken only by their subdued voices, and the sound of the dropping…The position of La Verna is very commanding, giving it somewhat the appearance of a fortress or strong-hold. Its wood scenery is beautifully diversified with rock, affording the greatest landscape studies both in outline and colour; and all about the Convent you catch most picturesque figures of the monks, or of the country-people, in attitudes of adoration before the various shrines and altars.’5

JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES

Montauban 1780-1867 Paris

Study of the Hands of the Virgin in Prayer

Pencil. A made-up section at the lower right corner. 233 x 144 mm. (9 1/8 x 5 5/8 in.)

A student of Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres won the Prix de Rome in 1801, though due to a lack of state funding he was unable to take up his scholarship at the Académie de France in Rome until 1806. Although his pension expired in 1810, he remained 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 both the Villa Aldobrandini, the official residence of the French Lieutenant-Governor of Rome, and Napoleon’s palace on Monte Cavallo. He also found patrons among the French officials in the city, whose portraits he painted, 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 French withdrawal from Rome in March 1814 and the fall of Napoleon, however, Ingres found himself bereft of official commissions, and he 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 allowed him to survive his difficult, penurious years in Rome. He continued to send paintings to the Paris salons, and in 1817 began an altarpiece of Christ Delivering the Keys to Saint Peter for the French church in Rome, Santa Trinità dei Monti, which was completed three years later.

In 1820 Ingres received a commission for a large canvas of The Vow of Louis XIII, intended for the cathedral of Notre-Dame in his native Montauban. Painted in Florence and sent to Paris to be exhibited at the Salon of 1824, accompanied by the artist, the altarpiece earned Ingres considerable praise as well as membership in the Académie. He spent a period of ten years in Paris, where he consolidated his reputation as a history painter and received important portrait commissions, while at the same time establishing a teaching studio that confirmed him as the heir to David as the most influential teacher of his day. In 1827 Ingres painted an Apotheosis of Homer for a newly decorated room in the Louvre and received a commission for a painting of The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien for the cathedral of Autun, on which he worked for nearly a decade. In 1834 he was appointed the director of the Académie de France in Rome, remaining in the post until his final return to France in 1842. The last fifteen years of his career saw Ingres established as one of the foremost artists in France, an influential professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and a highly respected figure in artistic circles. In 1855 he received the singular honour of a retrospective exhibition at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. One of the most celebrated artists of his day, Ingres died of pneumonia in January 1867, at the age of eighty-seven. The contents of his studio at his death, including several paintings and over four thousand drawings, were bequeathed to his birthplace of Montauban, forming the nucleus of the present-day Musée Ingres.

Drawing was the foundation of Ingres’s artistic practice, and indeed he is famously said to have declared that a ‘thing well drawn is always a thing well painted.’ A committed draughtsman, he produced numerous (indeed, sometimes hundreds) of preparatory drawings for each of his major oil paintings, from initial compositional sketches to detailed studies of poses from the nude model, followed by individual and repeated studies of limbs, hands, drapery and costume, before the final clothed figure was transferred to canvas. As has been noted of Ingres, ‘he treated drawing chiefly as a way, not just of composing oil paintings, but of somehow refining them. It is a hard process to describe although the scrupulous mechanics of it are obvious…You can well imagine Ingres feeling able to be dogmatic: “As for this arm,” he once said, when working on the figure of Antiochus, “I am sure that it is better now than it has ever been. I have definite proof of this, since I have drawn all the others.” The catch is that this stubborn, ascetic attachment to drawing is much more than it seems…in the preparatory drawings the process becomes a mysterious end in itself.’1

The present sheet is a study for the hands of the Virgin in Ingres’s devotional painting of The Virgin Adoring the Host (fig.1), commissioned by the future Russian Czar Alexander II on a visit to Rome, while

the artist was serving as director of the French Academy there. Completed in 1841, the painting is today in the collection of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow2. Ingres seems to have been very pleased with the finished painting, since he made sure that it was briefly exhibited in Paris in 1842, before being sent to Russia. Perhaps because the painting was intended for a foreign destination, and was unlikely to be seen in France again, Ingres painted several later variants of this appealing Raphaelesque composition. These include a small canvas, dated 1852, which was painted for the artist’s friend Louise Marcotte and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York3, and a circular composition (fig.2), commissioned by the State in 1851 and completed three years later, which is today in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris4

Similar hands appear in a finished watercolour version by Ingres of The Virgin Adoring the Host, in the Prat collection in Paris5, and in a large oil sketch of The Virgin Adoring the Christ Child in a private collection in New York6, which has been dated to c.1839 and regarded as a première pensée for the Pushkin painting. Another pencil study related to The Virgin Adoring the Host, in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa7, likewise includes praying hands akin to those in this drawing.

It can further be noted that these hands are also close to those of the standing Virgin in a preparatory chalk study, today in the Musée Ingres in Montauban7, for Ingres’s 1824 altarpiece of The Vow of Louis XIII, painted for the cathedral in Montauban. A nude figure drawing of the praying Virgin with similar hands, which has also been related to The Vow of Louis XIII, is in the collection of the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva9. In the final painted version of The Vow of Louis XIII, however, the Virgin is no longer shown in prayer, but instead holds the Christ Child.

Ingres may have also used this drawing, or a similar one, between 1822 and 1827, when he painted an oval Virgin with a Blue Veil for the Marquis Amédée de Pastoret; the painting, in which the hands are very close to those in this drawing, is today in the Museu de Arte de São Paulo in Brazil10. A pencil tracing of the praying hands in the São Paulo painting, of similar dimensions to the present sheet, is among the very large cache of drawings by the artist in the Musée Ingres in Montauban11

The careful depiction of hands was an essential part of Ingres’s paintings, and in particular his portraits. Furthermore, as has been noted, ‘It was only natural that Ingres characterized his models so well through their hands, for he himself was often described in terms of his own.’12 Apparently, when in conversation, the artist himself tended to use his hands in a most expressive manner, particularly when agitated or upset.

pETER DE WINT OWS

Hanley 1784-1849 London

Wooded Hills and a Valley near Lowther, Westmoreland

Watercolour over traces of an underdrawing in pencil. Inscribed Lowther 433 on the verso, backed. 457 x 572 mm. (18 x 22 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s studio sale, London, Christie’s, 22-28 May 1850, lot 433 (as ‘Lowther’, bt. Smith for £5,15.6); John F. Laycock; Unidentified auction, London, c.1971 (bt. Fry for £1,050); Cyril and Shirley Fry, London and Snape, Suffolk.

LITERATURE: Andrew Wilton and Anne Lyles, The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880, exhibition catalogue, 1993, p.224, no.121, illustrated pl.238 (where dated c.1840-1845).

EXHIBITED: London, Fry Gallery and Brighton, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, Peter de Wint (1784–1849): Bicentenary Loan Exhibition, 1984-1985, no.33; London, Royal Academy and Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880, 1993, no.121.

The son of a Staffordshire physician, Peter De Wint was trained in the London studio of the portrait painter and engraver John Raphael Smith. Released from his apprenticeship in 1806, he studied briefly with John Varley but in general seems to have begun his independent career without further training. De Wint exhibited landscape paintings and watercolours at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, the Associated Artists in Water Colours and, in particular, the Old Water Colour Society, where he showed almost yearly between 1810 and his death. His work found favour with critics, and he began to enjoy regular sales to a large number of devoted patrons and collectors. De Wint undertook sketching tours throughout England and Wales, with a particular fondness for Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire and the Lake District. (He never seems to have had much desire to travel abroad, however, and his only foreign tour was a brief visit to Normandy in 1828.) Among his favourite subjects were rivers and streams, harvest scenes and pastoral views. The artist died in 1849, at the age of sixty-six. Writing some seventy years later, a fellow watercolourist noted that ‘No artist ever came nearer to painting a perfect picture than did Peter DeWint. His sense of colour was more brilliant, his choice of subject matter more apt, and his judgment as to the exact time when a picture should be left, better than any of his contemporaries.’1

Datable to the late 1830s or early 1840s, this exceptionally large watercolour depicts a view near Lowther Castle in Cumbria, the seat of one of De Wint’s foremost patrons, the MP and collector William Lowther, 2nd Earl of Lonsdale. The Earl, who inherited Lowther Castle in 1802, was a keen supporter of artists and writers, including William Wordsworth. De Wint produced numerous views of the Lowther estate between 1834 and 1843, and the posthumous sale of the contents of his studio in 1850 included sixteen views of Lowther Castle and the surrounding park. As the artist’s widow (and first biographer) noted, ‘His love for nature was excessive, and his study from nature constant and unwearied. He never tired of sketching, which was his great delight…He preferred the North of England, and spent much time in Yorkshire, Cumberland and Westmorland. He was frequently at Lowther Castle, where, through the kindness of the then Earl of Lonsdale and his family, he was enabled to visit the most remote and picturesque spots in that wild and beautiful district.’2

As Andrew Wilton has written of the artist, ‘De Wint’s work is characterised by a warm range of browns and greens…later, he varied this with touches of unmixed red or blue. But he did not make the study of climate a priority. His chief concern remained the creation of subtle and beautifully articulated compositions based on stretches of open or wooded country, often in the broad Wolds of his own Lincolnshire…When well preserved, his watercolours often display fine atmospheric effects.’3

VICTOR hUGO

Besançon 1802-1885 Paris

Landscape with a Castle

Pen, brush and brown ink and brown wash. Signed with initials and dated V. H. 20 7bre 1842 in brown ink at the lower right. 92 x 188 mm. (3 5/8 x 7 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Louis Barthou, Paris; His sale (‘Bibliothèque de M. Louis Barthou de l’Académie Française’), Paris, Galerie Jean Charpentier, 4-6 November 1935, lot 1045; Anonymous sale, Paris, Sotheby’s, 21 June 2012, lot 102; Gérard Lhéritier (Aristophil), Nice.

LITERATURE: Louis Barthou, ‘Victor Hugo: carnets et dessins inédits’, Revue des deux mondes, December 1918, illustrated p.727 (as Les bords du Rhin).

Arguably the most significant literary figure in 19th century France, with a career that lasted more than sixty years, Victor Marie Hugo was also an accomplished and prolific draughtsman. He produced nearly three thousand drawings, the principal groups of which are today in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris. Although he began to draw seriously around 1825, 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. His drawings achieved a height of expression during the years of his 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 October 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 was a largely private occupation for Hugo. (As he wrote to his friend Paul Meurice in 1863, ‘these scribbles are for private use and to indulge very close friends.’1) For much of his life Hugo’s drawings were known, outside of his family, only to a handful of writers and connoisseurs. Writing in 1859, the poet Charles Baudelaire praised ‘the magnificent imagination that flows from the drawings of Victor Hugo like the mystery of the heavens. I speak of his drawings in Indian ink, because it is too obvious that in poetry our poet is the king of landscape.’2 In the last ten years of his life Hugo drew much less, a decline mirrored in his literary output. The first public exhibition of his drawings was held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1888, three years after his death, when over 150 sheets were shown. Since that time his drawings have remained popular with both enlightened collectors and artists; indeed, Picasso is known to have owned several drawings by Hugo.

As a draughtsman, Hugo relied primarily on brown or black ink, with washes applied with a fluidity and transparency that allowed for remarkable tonal and atmospheric effects. He also experimented with different techniques and media, including inkblots (taches), folded paper, stencilled cut-outs, gold leaf and impressions taken from various objects. Hugo’s 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...The result is an unexpected and powerful drawing that is often strange, always personal, and recalls the etchings of Rembrandt and Piranesi.’3

Another vivid description of Hugo as a draughtsman was provided by his grandson Georges: ‘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.’4

The present sheet may be associated with drawings made in Hugo’s notebooks during his travels along the Rhine in 1838, 1839 and 1840, in the company of his lover Juliette Drouet. On these journeys he was particularly captivated by the imposing mountaintop castles, or burgs, which appeared in towns here and there along the course of the majestic river. He made pencil sketches of many of the picturesque sites in his travel diaries and notebooks, as well as in letters sent to his family and relatives. This voyage inspired Hugo’s great book Le Rhin: Lettres à un ami, published in three volumes between 1842 and 1845; this was a sort of travel guide in which he included reflections, anecdotes and Rhine legends, along with descriptive passages of the places he visited.

After travelling through France and Belgium to reach the Rhine, Hugo’s book takes the reader along the course of the great river, from Cologne to the cataract of the Rhine Falls in Switzerland. In Le Rhin, the writer, referring to himself, noted that ‘The encounter with this great river produced in him what no incident of his journey had inspired in him until that moment; a will to see and observe with a determined aim fixed the wandering course of his ideas, gave a precise meaning to his at first capricious excursion, gave a centre to his studies, in a word, made him pass from reverie to thought. The Rhine is the river of which all the world speaks and which no one studies, that everyone visits and no one knows, which one notices as one passes by and which one quickly forgets, which every glance touches and which no one penetrates spiritually. Yet its ruins occupy lofty imaginations, its destiny occupies serious minds; and this admirable river, through its transparent waves, allows the eye of the poet as well as that of the publicist to see the past and future of Europe.’5

Hugo’s voyage along the Rhine in 1840, the longest of his journeys on the great river, was spent partly on board a steamship, and allowed him ample time to record his observations. As his friend and contemporary biographer Alfred Barbou noted of this period, ‘About this time he wrote “Le Rhin”, a work that exhibits another side of his genius. This consists of a series of letters, supposed to be written to a friend, giving a humorous account of an archaeological tour. The style is racy, but affords the author every opportunity of illustrating his wide erudition. Under the character of a goodnatured savant he carries his readers from Aix-la-Chapelle to Cologne, thence to Mayence and Frankfort, visiting the numerous monuments on his way, relating the various legends connected with town, village, or castle, digressing into philosophy and politics, and introducing a number of graphic stories full of interest and amusement. He sketches as he goes, and his drawings manifest his unbounded admiration of the scenery of the river and the old “burgs” upon its banks…His descriptions and his illustrations are equally admirable; the painter and the poet go hand-in-hand.’6

It is after his trips along the Rhine that Hugo’s pen and ink drawings take on a more visionary aspect, inspired by the poetic sights he saw, and in particular the sequence of over thirty ruined castles –‘forteresses à demi écroulées’, in Hugo’s words – on the high ground overlooking the river between Koblenz and Mainz. As the modern scholar Pierre Georgel has noted, with his book Le Rhin Hugo ‘finally passed from a picturesque manner to the contemplative vision in which his genius was to find mature expression. At the same time, the draughtsman’s most obsessive themes began to crystallize around the memorable image of the burg…After the journey of 1840, which, for several weeks, concentrated Hugo’s imagination on the dark outlines of the Rhenish Burgs, dreams of a more obscure kind poured out into his drawings. A whole world began to be formed around signs recollected from memory – ruined castles, outlines of towns by the waterside.’7 Sketches and descriptions of castles or burgs occur frequently in Hugo’s drawings, notebooks and letters, and indeed castles play a significant role in much of his published work.

The first owner of this small drawing was the lawyer, journalist, politician and bibliophile Jean Louis Barthou (1862-1934), who briefly served as prime minister of France in 1913, and who published a number of books and articles about Victor Hugo. A stylistically comparable drawing of a Rhine landscape by Hugo of the same date, also at one time in the Barthou collection, is today in the Louvre8

CARL

MARIA NICOLAUS hUMMEL

Weimar 1821-1907 Weimar

View over the South Coast of Capri, Looking towards Monte Solaro

Watercolour, laid down on board. Signed C Hummel in brown ink at the lower left. 426 x 336 mm. (16 3/4 x 13 1/4 in.)

The son of the Austrian composer and conductor Johann Nepomuk Hummel and the opera singer Elisabeth Röckel, Carl (or Karl) Hummel studied under Friedrich Preller the Elder at the Royal Free Drawing School in Weimar, from the age of twelve until he turned twenty. A gifted landscape painter, Hummel spent several years making sketching tours of England, Holland, Norway, the Tyrol and the island of Rügen in the North Sea; he sometimes went on these excursions with Preller, and the two artists remained lifelong friends. Between 1842 and 1844 Hummel was in Italy, spending long periods in Rome, Capri and Sicily. After his marriage in 1845 he returned to Italy and Switzerland, but by the following year had settled in his native city of Weimar. He was appointed a professor of landscape painting at the newly-established Grand-Ducal Saxon Art School (the Großherzoglich-Sächsische Kunstschule Weimar) in 1859, and from this time onwards travelled mainly in Germany. Most of Hummel’s extant paintings are of Tyrolean and Italian views, mainly done in his studio and based on drawings and photographs made on the spot. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Castle Museum in Weimar in 1905, two years before his death. Much of the contents of Hummel’s studio remained with the artist’s descendants in Weimar until 1993.

Datable to between 1842 and 1846, this splendid watercolour depicts part of the southern coast of the island of Capri. In the foreground is a rocky outcrop with the castle-like Villa Castiglione at its summit, while behind rises Monte Solaro, the highest point on the island at 589 metres above sea level. In the valley between the mountains can be seen the winding paved footpath known as the Via Krupp, leading down to the small fishing village of Marina Piccola.

At the time of Hummel’s visit to Capri, set in the Tyrrhenian Sea, the island was beginning to be discovered by foreign artists. As one modern scholar has noted, ‘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.’1 By the last quarter of the 19th century, however, there was a thriving community of European and American artists living and working on the island.

The appeal of Capri to artists is evident in a description of the island’s scenery by another German visitor, writing in c.1853: ‘Nature here guards against monotonous bareness by beauty of line and form; against deadness, by warmth of color; against dryness, by scattered greenness and the ornament of flowering plants. And so she combines all these peculiar features, - bare wastes, ruins, sharp peaks, all forms of monotony and nakedness in miniature, - and of the whole forms an enchanting picture…Mountains, cliffs, and valleys affect the mind as if by a secret charm; they form, as it were, the cell of a recluse, through the lattice of which is seen the most beautiful bay in the world; and this is again held embraced by silent, dreamy shores, and so it is, in truth, a magic ring by which you are encircled.’2

A large pencil drawing by Hummel of a view near the town of Anacapri on Capri, signed and dated 1876, appeared at auction in Germany in 20133.

ThÉODORE GUDIN

Paris 1802-1880 Boulogne-Billancourt

Hunters on a Seashore

Watercolour and gouache. Signed and dated T. Gudin. 1849 in brown ink at the lower right. 248 x 347 mm. (9 3/4 x 13 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Jacques and Colette Ulmann, Nogent-sur-Marne; Thence by descent.

The most celebrated marine painter of the first half of the 19th century, Théodore Gudin went to naval school and served with the young United States Navy for several years before deciding to become an artist. (As he later recalled in his posthumously published memoirs, ‘I had been a sailor, I was a marine painter. I think that marine painting is a very distinct genre that requires special studies. To paint the sea, you have to have sailed. It is only after having lived the life of a seafarer that a marine painter learns his art.’1) He became a student of Anne-Louis Girodet and Antoine-Jean Gros at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and began exhibiting at the Paris Salons in 1822, winning a first-class medal two years later. In March 1823 he and his elder brother Jean-Louis, who was also an artist, were involved in a sailing accident on the river Seine. While Théodore survived, his brother drowned, and the memory of this event led Gudin, many years later, in 1865, to help establish the Société centrale de sauvetage des naufragés

Gudin achieved his first successes as a painter of seascapes and naval subjects, and his painting of The Fire on the Indiaman ‘Kent’ received much praise at the Salon of 1827 and earned the artist the Legion of Honour from King Charles X. He observed part of the French military campaign in Algeria, and in 1830 was one of the first two artists named to the post of official peintre de la Marine at the court of King Louis-Philippe. Among Gudin’s significant commissions was a series of paintings of views of French ports for the Palace of Versailles, a project first begun by Claude-Joseph Vernet, as well as a series of nearly one hundred large paintings depicting victories of the French Navy, also for Versailles, several of which were exhibited at the Paris Salon between 1839 and 1848. He produced a number of etchings and lithographs, and contributed illustrations for such books as Eugène Sue’s Histoire de la marine française, published in 1835. Famous throughout Europe as a marine painter, Gudin was ennobled as a Baron by Louis-Philippe, and in 1844 married the King’s goddaughter Margaret Hay, daughter of General Sir James Hay and granddaughter of the 7th Marquess of Tweedale.

Gudin painted numerous views of the Channel coast and the Mediterranean, and also travelled to Italy, Holland, Poland, Russia and Turkey. He spent much time in Scotland, where his wife’s family was from, and was often a guest of his father-in-law at his home of Seaton House in Aberdeenshire. From there he would send paintings to be exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution in London, while other works were shown in Paris, including such genre paintings as A Scottish Hunting Party, exhibited at the Salon of 1849. Apart from Charles X and Louis-Philippe, his other patrons included the Duc d’Orléans, Czar Nicholas I (who invited the artist to St. Petersburg in 1841) and the Emperor Napoleon III, whom the artist accompanied as painter on an official visit to Algeria in 1865. Gudin retired to Scotland after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, apparently adopting the surname ‘Gordon’, although he continued to send paintings to the Paris Salons until his death.

Théodore Gudin’s drawings in sepia wash or watercolour were much admired for their atmospheric depictions of stormy seas, placid waters, sunsets and harbour scenes by moonlight, and were avidly acquired by collectors and connoisseurs throughout Europe. Drawings and finished watercolours by the artist are today in the collections of the Louvre, the British Museum, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and elsewhere.

LUDWIG ThIERSCh

Munich 1825-1909 Munich

A Grove of Olive Trees near Tivoli

Black chalk, with touches of white heightening, on blue paper. Signed, dated and inscribed Tivoli, L. Th. 1851. in pencil at the lower left. Further signed(?) and inscribed Ludwig Thiersch / (a.e. Nachlass(?) konvolut [?] des Bauerin(?)) / [?] [?] in pencil on the verso. 326 x 480 mm. (12 7/8 x 18 7/8 in.) [sheet]

The 19th century Bavarian artist Ludwig Thiersch studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he was initially trained as a sculptor but later turned to painting, and was taught by, among others, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. After a brief stay in Rome, he travelled to Greece in 1852 with his father, the classicist and noted philhellene Friedrich Thiersch. He developed an interest in Byzantine art, and began teaching at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where his students included Nikolaos Gyzis. Greece and its artistic tradition were to be of great importance to Thiersch for the rest of his career, and he even came to be known in Greece as Ludovicos Thirsios. Highly regarded as a painter of mythological and religious subjects, he also produced genre scenes and portraits. In Athens in the early 1850s Thiersch painted frescoes in a number of Greek churches, notably the Byzantine church of Saint Nikodimos, seeking to blend the concepts of ancient Christian Greek art with more naturalistic elements of modern Western art. As one scholar has noted, Thiersch ‘established himself as the leader of the neo-Byzantine movement. His works, which spread throughout Europe in a few decades, helped to rehabilitate Byzantine art and Empire, and to thereby stress the importance of this secular culture preserved by his Greek contemporaries… The Bavarian painter sought to inscribe his works within the tradition of Byzantine practices.’1

Thiersch became well known, and highly respected, as an ecclesiastical painter. His work for churches throughout Europe was often the result of commissions from the wealthy Greek diaspora. In Vienna he painted frescoes in the neo-Byzantine Greek orthodox Holy Trinity church at the Fleischmarkt between 1856 and 1858, while in 1860 in Saint Petersburg he worked in the Protestant church of Saint Catherine, and later painted several works for churches in Germany and icons for Greek Orthodox churches in London and Paris. He also produced easel pictures for private patrons, notably the Greek-Austrian philanthropist Simon von Sina and the Ottoman-born banker Demetrius Stefanovich Schilizzi.

The present sheet, dated 1851, is an early work drawn during Thiersch’s stay in Rome, following his graduation from the Academy in Munich. Of the same date, and on the same blue paper, is a large drawing of The Falls at Tivoli and the Villa of Maecenas (fig.1), in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.2 Drawings by Thiersch are quite rare, although around a hundred drawings and oil sketches by the artist are in the collection of the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen, which mounted an exhibition of them in 1979. A small number of Thiersch’s travel sketchbooks are in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, while several sketches for ecclesiastical projects are in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich.

hENRI-JOSEph hARpIGNIES

Valenciennes 1819-1916 Saint-Privé

Wooded Landscape at Sunset

Watercolour, pen and brown ink and brown wash, and red chalk, over a pencil underdrawing. Signed hÿharpignies. in brown ink at the lower left. 552 x 756 mm. (21 3/4 x 29 3/4 in.)

Henri-Joseph Harpignies came to realize his vocation as an artist at a relatively late age, and it was not until he was in his late twenties that he began training with the landscape painter Jean-Alexis Achard. He made his Salon debut the following year, exhibiting views of Capri and Valenciennes, and he continued to show regularly at the Salons throughout his long and productive career. As a painter, Harpignies produced luminous landscapes, of both rural and urban views, as well as mural decorations for the Hôtel de Ville, the Senate and the Opéra in Paris. He also developed a speciality of landscape drawings in watercolour, which he first exhibited at the Salon of 1864. The freshness and luminosity of his watercolours soon gained him a wide audience, and were to be the basis of his reputation, especially outside France. As one English critic, writing in 1905, noted, ‘one ventures to prophesy that the day will come, if it has not already arrived, when the water-colours of M. Harpignies will be prized even more dearly than his paintings in oils. As an aquarellist M. Harpignies is practically without a living rival in his own country...’1 In the words of another contemporary English writer, ‘We marvel at the delicate tints his hand, accustomed to the vigorous touch of his oil painting, can produce.’2. Harpignies exhibited at the Royal Institute and the New Water-Colour Society in London, and in 1881 was elected a member of the Société des Aquarellistes Français.

In an article published shortly after the artist’s death, the English art critic Frederic Lees opined that ‘As a water-colour artist, Harpignies was without a rival in France. His work in this branch of art cannot be too highly praised, for whilst attaining pre-eminence he proved himself to be a veritable pioneer. Having worked incessantly at water-colours for fourteen years, he at last decided to exhibit them for the first time at the 1864 Salon, and although only a chosen few may have immediately recognised how beautifully fresh and limpid these little works were – how different from the weak and finicking productions of the water-colourists of the Second Empire – it was not long before others were taking their inspiration from him. As one of the forerunners, if not the founder, of the modern school of water-colour painting in France, his work was much appreciated abroad, especially in England and the United States.’3

GUSTAVE DORÉ

Strasbourg 1832-1883 Paris

Shipwrecks Beneath the Sea (Au fond de la mer)

Watercolour and pen and brown ink, heightened with touches of white, over an underdrawing in pencil, within fictive mount lines in brown wash. Stamped with the Doré studio stamp (Lugt 681a) in red ink and numbered 257 in black chalk on a piece of canvas now attached to the reverse of the frame.

394 x 489 mm. (15 1/2 x 19 1/4 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, Paris (Lugt 681a); The second vente Doré, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Chevallier], 14-15 April 1885, lot 257 (‘Au fond de la mer. Aquarelle. Haut., 38 cent.; larg., 48 cent.’); Pierre Miquel, Paris(?); His posthumous sale (‘Collection Pierre Miquel’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Rossini], 31 March 2004, lot 338; Private collection, Paris.

LITERATURE: Henri Leblanc, Catalogue de l’oeuvre complet de Gustave Doré, Paris, 1931, p.479, no.257; Pierre Miquel, Eugène Isabey 1803-1886. La Marine au XIXe siècle, Maurs-la-Jolie, 1980, vol.X, p.59, fig.52 (where dated c.1875-1880).

Arguably the most widely-known French artist of the 19th century, Gustave Doré was immensely prolific as a draughtsman, printmaker, watercolourist and illustrator. Born in Alsace, he was a precocious artist, and drew from a very early age. He produced his first lithograph at the age of eleven and his first album of lithographs, Les Travaux d’Hercule, appeared four years later. It was also at the age of fifteen that Doré settled in Paris, having gained employment as a cartoonist for the newly-founded Journal pour Rire, while at the same time continuing his studies at the Lycée Charlemagne. He made his debut at the Paris Salon of 1848, where he exhibited two drawings, and two years later showed his first painting. He also began producing albums of his lithographs. By the middle of the 1850s Doré was working extensively as an illustrator, producing highly inventive and original wood engravings to accompany editions of such novels as François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and Honoré de Balzacs Contes drolatiques, as well as La Légende de juif errant, which appeared in 1856. His fame as an illustrator was well established by 1860, and later projects found him producing illustrations for works by Dante, Cervantes, Perrault, La Fontaine, Chateaubriand, Milton and Tennyson, as well as the Bible.

Despite his renown as a book illustrator, which brought him considerable wealth, Doré always wanted to be recognized as a painter. He was a regular exhibitor at the Salons, although his paintings never achieved much critical success, at least in France. (He received an honourable mention for a battle scene in 1857, while in 1865 one of his paintings was purchased by the State.) In England, however, where he began to establish close ties in the 1860s, his work as a painter was much more highly regarded, and among the collectors of his work was Queen Victoria. Several of the artist’s large Biblical paintings were exhibited in London, mainly at the Doré Gallery on New Bond Street, which opened in 1868 and was devoted to his work. (The Doré Gallery continued to show the artist’s work to the paying public in London until 1892, long after his death.) In 1872 he published the illustrated London: A Pilgrimage, in collaboration with the journalist William Blanchard Jerrold, based on some 250 drawings made while exploring the sprawling city between 1869 and 1870. Doré served in the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris, and produced a number of works with patriotic themes. He was also active as a sculptor, most notably with a statue of the writer Alexandre Dumas, completed in 1881, but it is for his accomplishments as a book artist – with an oeuvre of nearly ten thousand illustrations – that he remains best known and most admired today.

In April 1873 Doré visited Scotland, ostensibly to go salmon fishing with his close friend Col. Christopher Teesdale, an equerry to the Prince of Wales, although the artist soon abandoned fishing in favour of sketching. On his return to Paris, he wrote of his trip to an English critic: ‘I took a good many notes and jottings in water colour – the first time I have tried that medium. I have employed it solely in obtaining

qualities of intention or impression.’1 It is from this year onwards that Doré began to work extensively in watercolours, and he first exhibited his work in this medium at the Exposition de L’Union Artistique in Paris in 1877, and later at the Société d’Aquarellistes Français in 1879, 1880 and 1882. His oeuvre as a watercolourist was certainly much admired in his day, and one contemporary biographer described these works as ‘the most perfect achievements of any water-colour painter since the Renaissance. In this branch of art Gustave Doré had few rivals, and may unhesitatingly claim unlimited praise. Critic and connoisseur may pick flaws here and there in Doré the illustrator, Doré the oil-painter, Doré the etcher, Doré the sculptor; but no one in justice can deny the ripe perfection of Doré the aquarellist.’2

This striking watercolour, executed in shades of blue and green, is among the most highly original compositions in all of Doré’s oeuvre as a watercolourist. A masterpiece of Romantic imagination, it is likely to be related to his illustrations for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s long poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, published, at the artist’s own expense, in London in 1876, and in America the following year. Doré often depicted marine subjects, with a particular predilection for storms and shipwrecks, and his illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are some of his most powerful images of the sea and ships. As an obituary of the artist, published in the American journal Harper’s Weekly a few days after his death at the age of fifty-one, noted, ‘Coleridge’s weird and fantastic poem presented a magnificent field for the display of Doré’s best qualities. Here was everything to excite and nothing to trammel his imagination. The excellence and beauty of his illustrations were at once acknowledged.’3 Of these same images, a modern biographer has opined that ‘Doré revels in the storm at sea, the overpowering waves, the polar regions, the water-snakes, the solitary ship on the seemingly boundless moonlit ocean. They inspired some memorable illustrations.’4

Dore’s illustrations for the book took the form of line drawings for wood engravings, not atmospheric watercolours such as the present sheet, and indeed this unusual composition does not appear among the images in the published text. Nevertheless, a similar underwater subject, depicting the sea underneath the Mariner’s ship littered with wrecks and sea creatures, is included in the book (fig.1), illustrating the lines: ‘Under the keel nine fathom deep / From the land of mist and snow / The Spirit slid: and it was he / That made the ship to go.’ It has been suggested that the present sheet may also have been inspired by Jules Verne’s novel Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas), published in instalments in the French journal Magasin d’éducation et de récréation between 1869 and 1870, and as a book in 1871, five years before Doré created his illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

It is interesting to note, in passing, that Doré himself seems to have regarded the sea as a place of danger, at least according to an account given by his friend Col. Teesdale of the artist’s trip to Scotland in 1873. Writing ten years later, in a letter to Doré’s friend and biographer Blanchard Jerrold, Teesdale recalled: ‘When I prevailed upon him to come to Scotland with me, we travelled from Paris to London together; and in the first days of April 1873 left by steamer for Aberdeen. I had not, until then, had an idea that my friend had such a horror of the sea, la grande vague, as he used to call it. Our passage was good enough, but for some four-andtwenty hours poor Doré remained in his berth and would not be comforted.’5

SIR EDWARD COLEy bURNE-JONES, bT. ARA RWS Birmingham 1833-1898 London

The Head of a Woman in Profile: Study for The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon Pencil. Signed and dated E.B.J. / 1885 in pencil at the lower left. 241 x 149 mm. (9 1/2 x 5 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Major Charles Sydney Goldman, Trefusis House, Falmouth, and Yaverland Manor, Yaverland, Isle of Wight; By descent to his sons, Commander Victor Robert Penryn Monck and John Goldman Monck, London; Their sale, London, Christie’s, 26 April 1963, part of lot 87; H. Shickman Gallery, New York, in 1969; Robert and Helen Mandelbaum, New York; Thence by descent to a private collection, New York.

EXHIBITED: Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University, Davison Art Center, and South Hadley, MA, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, British Art from the collection of Robert and Helen Mandelbaum, 1978, no.5.

The leading member of the second generation of Pre-Raphaelite painters, Edward Burne-Jones –almost uniquely for a 19th century artist of his stature – never attended an art school, nor did he receive any formal artistic training. From early in his career he enjoyed a measure of success, particularly as a designer of stained-glass panels. He made his public debut at the Old Water-Colour Society in 1864 and continued to exhibit there until 1870. Apart from showing one painting at the Dudley Gallery in 1873, however, Burne-Jones did not exhibit his work again for another seven years, although he did continue to sell paintings from his studio directly to a growing number of collectors. In 1877, at the inaugural exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, established as a more radical alternative to the Royal Academy, Burne-Jones showed a total of eight paintings. The success of these works, and his continued participation in the annual Grosvenor exhibitions, confirmed him as a leader of the Aesthetic Movement. His paintings, with subjects taken from medieval legends or classical myths, proved very popular with the public, reaching a climax with the Briar Rose series, painted between 1885 and 1890.

A passionate and prolific draughtsman, Burne-Jones produced countless preparatory studies and cartoons for his paintings and decorations, together with drawings made as independent works of art in their own right; in chalk, pencil, pen and watercolour. His drawings were, indeed, of perhaps greater significance to him than his finished paintings. As the late John Christian has noted, Burne-Jones ‘was always a draughtsman first and a painter second…the design of a picture was everything, the essential hallmark of his authorship, while the execution, though obviously important, was of secondary interest.’1 Although he occasionally gave drawings away as presents, and sometimes exhibited them, BurneJones seems to have kept most of his drawings in his studio. The year after his death, a large memorial exhibition of his drawings was held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in London.

Contemporary artists, writers and critics were particularly taken with Burne-Jones’s drawings. His friend Graham Robertson wrote of him that ‘He was pre-eminently a draughtsman, and one of the greatest in the whole history of Art…as a master of line he was always unequalled; to draw was his natural mode of expression – line flowed from him almost without volition.’2 Among the most admired of his drawings were studies of the heads of women. As the art historian and critic Julia Cartwright Ady noted in 1896, ‘These fair women, with the mysterious smile on their lips and the look of infinite sadness in their eyes, these faces, so alike in their type of beauty, so unlike in their endless variety of expression, have all the spiritual refinement of Lionardo’s art. Their wistful and sorrowful loveliness lingers in the mind like some old melody, and haunts us long afterwards with its pathetic music.’3

Drawn in 1885, probably in one of the artist’s sketchbooks, this fine drawing was used as a study for one of Burne-Jones’s most significant late works, The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (fig.1), painted between 1881 and 1898 and today in the collection of the Ponce Museum of Art in Ponce, Puerto

Rico4. Originally commissioned in 1881 by the artist’s close friend and patron George Howard, later 9th Earl of Carlisle, and intended for the library at Naworth Castle in Cumbria, the monumental canvas of a scene from Arthurian legend measures nearly three metres by six and a half metres, and is by far the largest painting ever attempted by the artist. Burne-Jones first began working on the picture in 1881 and continued to do so until his death seventeen years later, using a very large studio specially rented for it. Indeed, he is known to have been working on the canvas the day before his death. The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon was regarded by the artist as a summing-up of his career and his magnum opus, and as early as 1882 he wrote, ‘The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon is my chief dream now, and I think I can put into it all I most care for.’5 Eventually the scale of the work outgrew the original commission for Naworth, and, realizing its importance to the artist, Howard gave up the commission and allowed Burne-Jones to keep the canvas.

As Burne-Jones’s wife later recalled of The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, ‘the idea of it lay deep in Edward’s mind and the scope of it grew until it ceased to suit its original purpose, and Mr. George Howard resigned his claim upon it. Then it became Edward’s own cherished design, and he regarded it as a task of love to which he put no limit of time or labour.’6 Following the artist’s death the huge canvas was shown in the Burne-Jones Memorial Exhibition of 1898, after which it was acquired by the collector Charles Sydney Goldman. The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon was not seen again in public until it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1916, during the height of the First World War. Offered on long-term loan by Goldman to the Tate Gallery in 1929, it was shown in an exhibition there four years later, after which it was again nearly forgotten, rolled up and stored in a large box. Sold at auction in London in 1963, the massive painting was bought by the Puerto Rican industrialist and collector Luis Antonio Ferré. The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon has since remained in Puerto Rico for almost sixty years, apart from being briefly exhibited in London in 2008.

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon depicts the sleeping figure of King Arthur surrounded by musicians and attendants. The present sheet is a study for the head of the attendant playing a stringed instrument, seated at Arthur’s feet. The model for this figure was the Anglo-Greek artist Maria Spartari Stillman (1844-1927), a cousin of Burne-Jones’s model and sometime lover Maria Zambaco. A talented painter in her own right, Stillman was never a professional model, and only posed occasionally, as a favour, for fellow artists such as Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron7. She also posed for one other figure in The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, namely the standing Watcher holding a long horn, fourth from the left. A closely comparable drawing for the head of this figure, drawn at the same time as the present sheet and sharing the same provenance until 1963, is now in an English private collection8.

The first owner of this drawing, Major Charles Sydney Goldman (1868-1958), was a businessman, MP and journalist who assembled a number of important paintings, drawings and tapestries by BurneJones. Goldman acquired the monumental canvas of The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, as well as several drawings related to it, from Burne-Jones’s heirs shortly after the artist’s death.

ANDRÉ EDOUARD MARTy

Paris 1882-1974 Paris

The Dinner in the Garden of Paul Poiret: L’Oasis

Pen and black ink and watercolour. Signed and dated A.E. MARTY / Juin 1914 in black ink at the lower right.

137 x 600 mm. (5 3/8 x 23 5/8 in.) [image]

160 x 650 mm. (6 1/4 x 25 5/8 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist, Nogent-sur-Marne; Galerie du Luxembourg, Paris, in 1975.

LITERATURE: Henry Bidou, ‘Le Dîner de la Gazette du Bon Ton’, Gazette du Bon Ton, July 1914, pp.226-227.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Les années 25: Art déco / Bauhaus / Stijl / Esprit nouveau, 1966, part of no.141 (lent by the artist); Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, Poiret le magnifique, 1974, part of no.255 (lent by the artist); Paris, Galerie du Luxembourg, Andre E. Marty 1882-1974, 19751976, part of no.6.

André Edouard Marty studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he met the artists Georges Lepape, Charles Martin and Pierre Brissaud, all of whom, like him, were to work as fashion illustrators. He also came under the influence of the illustrator Maurice Boutet de Monvel, which is reflected in the refined and elegantly stylized figures in his own work as an illustrator. Marty’s earliest published illustrations appeared in 1909, and between 1913 and 1925 he was chiefly occupied with producing fashion illustrations for the Gazette du Bon Ton, a monthly illustrated magazine devoted to fashion, elegance and art, as well as illustrations for Vogue, Femina, L’Illustration des Modes, Monsieur, Harper’s Bazaar, Le Sourire and House and Garden, among others. He also illustrated around fifty books, notably Henri de Regnier’s Scènes Mythologiques, published in 1924. As one contemporary writer noted of Marty’s work as an illustrator, ‘The very simplicity of his technique brought out the full wealth of Marty’s ideas, graphically expressed with delicacy of colour and arrangement.’1 In collaboration with the architect Louis Süe and the decorator André Mare, Marty contributed to the decoration of the Pavillon Fontaine at the seminal Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925. At the Exposition Internationale of 1937, Marty again worked alongside Süe on the decoration of the jardin d’hiver of the Pavillon de la Société des Artistes Décorateurs. Exhibitions of Marty’s work were held in Paris at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1912 and the Galerie Levesques in 1913, and at the Galerie Lucien Vogel and the Galerie Devambez in the 1920s.

This and the following drawing served to illustrate an article entitled ‘Le Dîner de la Gazette du Bon Ton’ by Henry Bidou, published in the Gazette du Bon Ton in July 1914. The article, with accompanying illustrations by Marty, was an account of an elegant dinner given for the writers, artists and couturiers associated with the magazine Gazette du Bon Ton and held ‘dans l’admirable jardin d’un vieil hôtel habité aujourd’hui par un des couturiers les plus célèbres de Paris.’ Although the host of the party and its location are unnamed in the article, it was held in the vast gardens of the couturier Paul Poiret’s splendid Hôtel d’Antin in Paris in June 1914. Poiret was famous for the lavish parties and dinners he organized. As he later recalled, ‘I wanted to find means for keeping my friends near me, and creating a centre that should be the capital of all Parisian taste and intelligence. I succeeded: when I gave a party, no one failed to answer my summons, no previous engagement could avail against my invitation.’2 After the First World War, Poiret hosted regular summer evening parties in the garden of the Hôtel d’Antin, which he named ‘L’Oasis’, and which he later also used as an outdoor theatre.

A watercolour by Marty of a later incarnation of ‘L’Oasis’ at the Hôtel d’Antin was illustrated in the Gazette du Bon Ton in 19213, while a smaller variant of the present composition by the artist was exhibited in Paris and London between 1975 and 19774.

ANDRÉ EDOUARD MARTy

Paris 1882-1974 Paris

The Dinner in the Garden of Paul Poiret: L’Hôtel d’Antin illuminé

Pen and black ink and watercolour. Signed and dated A.E. MARTY / Juin 1914 in black ink at the lower left.

194 x 486 mm. (7 5/8 x 19 1/8 in.) [image]

213 x 533 mm. (8 3/8 x 21 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist, Nogent-sur-Marne; Galerie du Luxembourg, Paris, in 1975.

LITERATURE: Henry Bidou, ‘Le Dîner de la Gazette du Bon Ton’, Gazette du Bon Ton, July 1914, p.225.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Les années 25: Art déco / Bauhaus / Stijl / Esprit nouveau, 1966, part of no.141 (lent by the artist); Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, Poiret le magnifique, 1974, part of no.255 (lent by the artist); Paris, Galerie du Luxembourg, Andre E. Marty 1882-1974, 19751976, part of no.6.

Like No.30, this drawing was used to illustrate Henry Bidou’s article ‘Le Dîner de la Gazette du Bon Ton’, which appeared in the magazine Gazette du Bon Ton in July 1914 and described an elegant dinner hosted the previous month by the couturier Paul Poiret at the Hôtel d’Antin in Paris.

The late 18th century Hôtel d’Antin had been acquired by Poiret in 1909. As he recounts in his memoirs, ‘It was on a day in Mid-Lent that, wandering on foot in the fine quartier around the Champs Elysées, the Rue d’Artois, and the Avenue d’Antin…I stopped in front of a waste piece of land closed in by a railing. It was a deserted property beneath vast and probably 100-year-old trees, the grass grew wild, chickens pecked about in every corner, and through the railings one could see all the cats of the quarter wandering in search of prey…I persuaded the concierge to talk: The house had been abandoned for fifteen years. It had to be taken as a whole, and it was too big for a tradesman, while no private person wanted to repair these ruins, these fallen cornices, this roof that threatened to collapse. Two days later I signed my lease. I undertook repairing works that lasted three months – they seemed interminable. I had the garden made like those I had seen at Versailles, and in the great châteaux of France. By the first of October the house was transformed: I had respected its august character, one would have thought it the residence of a grand seigneur of another day. An embroidered parterre spread out like a tapestry in the midst of the alleys: there was a lawn bristling with multicoloured crocuses; there was a grassy amphitheatre leading to an airy room; there was a flight of three steps eighteen yards long, at whose extremity were two brazen hinds, light and leaping, two marvels I had brought back from Herculanum. All those who lived an hour in this enchanted setting will be touched by these evocative details. One entered the house by ten doors giving upon the steps, and on summer days all the reception rooms could be opened like a gallery on to the garden.’1

Poiret established his atelier in the Hôtel d’Antin, showing his collections in three salons on the ground floor, and had the garden façade drawn in a roundel by Georges Lepape that was used as a logo on his delivery boxes. The Hôtel d’Antin remained the centre of Poiret’s business and creative activities until his move to new premises at the end of 1924.

MAThURIN MÉhEUT

Lamballe 1882-1958 Paris

Fishermen at Sea

Watercolour and gouache, on blue-grey paper. Inscribed Mathurin / Meheut in blue ink on a small label pasted onto the old backing board. 332 x 510 mm. (13 1/8 x 20 1/8 in.) [sheet]

A Breton painter, Mathurin Méheut studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Rennes. He then completed his studies at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, with the designer and decorator Eugène Grasset, while at the same time contributing drawings to the magazine Art et Décoration to help finance his studies. In 1904 he provided illustrations for the book Fantôme de Terre-Neuve by Léon Berthaut, the first of several books he worked on during his career, and in 1906 began exhibiting regularly at the Salon des Artistes Français. Although Méheut settled in Paris and established his career there, he returned frequently to Brittany, working at Douarnenez, Paimpol, Quimper and elsewhere. Between 1910 and 1912 he was employed at the marine biology station in Roscoff, and his illustrations of sea creatures resulted in the publication of a book, Etude de la mer, flore et faune de la Manche et de l’Océan, accompanied by an exhibition of around 450 drawings at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1913. The artist also travelled extensively outside France; visiting Turkey, Crete, Egypt and Syria, and even further afield, to New York and also to Hawaii and Japan, a trip cut short by the outbreak of the First World War. After serving in the army Meheut returned to Brittany, and in 1921 a second large exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs included several scenes of military life, as well as views of Brittany and Japan.

A member of the Académie de la Marine, Méheut was appointed official painter to the Marine Department in 1921. In 1924 he began to decorate commercial passenger ships and ocean liners, and in the same year painted murals for the Villa Miramar on the Côte d’Azur for the banker Albert Kahn. Another important exhibition of his work was held at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris in 1928. Méheut spent three months in America in 1930, painting a mural on the theme of the discovery of the New World for the Heinz residence in Pittsburgh. In 1934 he participated in the decoration of the luxurious French ocean liner, the SS Normandie. Méheut was active as a decorative mural painter, book illustrator, tapestry and textile designer, stained glass designer and ceramic painter. Later in his career he completed a series of celebrated illustrations for Florian Le Roy’s book Vieux métiers bretons. The largest extant collection of the artist’s oeuvre is today in the Musée Mathurin Méheut in Lamballe in Brittany, established with works donated by the painter’s daughter.

This large sheet is closely related to the drawing Sardiniers sous le vent (fig.1), which appeared in one of the first articles about Méheut, published in Art et Décoration in 19131. That drawing was in turn apparently a maquette for the left half of an unpublished book illustration. A similar composition is found in a gouache sketch, Departure for the Open Sea, Douarnenez, in the Musée Mathurin Méheut2.

AUSTIN OSMAN SpARE

London 1886-1956 London

Self Portrait

Pencil with touches of red, green and white chalk, on paper washed a pale brown. Signed with initials and dated AOS / 35 in pencil at the lower left. 204 x 133 mm. (8 x 5 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Maas Gallery, London, in 2002; Private collection.

LITERATURE: William Wallace, The Catalpa Monographs: A Critical Survey of the Art and Writings of Austin Osman Spare, London, 2015, illustrated pl.45.

EXHIBITED: Possibly London, 56-58 Walworth Road, Austin Osman Spare: Exhibition of Paintings, Autumn 1938, no.171 (‘Self (1935)’).

One of the most gifted draughtsmen of Edwardian London, Austin Osman Spare drew constantly from a very early age, and by the end of his life had produced over two thousand drawings, watercolours and pastels. Largely self-taught, the seventeen-year-old Spare had a drawing accepted at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1904, becoming one of the youngest exhibitors ever. Recommended for a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, Spare found the institution unsuited to his style and temperament, and left the school in 1905. The same year his self-published Earth: Inferno, a book of drawings and mystical texts, appeared, followed two years later by a second volume of drawings, entitled A Book of Satyrs. Spare had his first proper exhibition at the Bruton Gallery in London in 1907, which resulted in a number of reviews, most of which commented equally on the sheer technical proficiency of the works and their weird and disturbing subject matter. As one reviewer noted, the exhibition ‘will probably be the talk of the London studios for many a day to come. In speaking of his pen and ink work it is difficult to avoid superlatives. His craftsmanship is superb; his management of line has not been equalled since the days of Aubrey Beardsley; his inventive faculty is stupendous and terrifying in its creative flow of impossible horrors.’1 It was at the Bruton Gallery that Spare met the occultist Aleister Crowley, who joined a small but growing band of patrons and collectors of the young artist’s work. Spare, who had a lifelong interest in the occult, provided a number of illustrations for Crowley’s journal The Equinox

Although Spare was producing some of his best drawings by the end of the 1920s, exhibitions of his work were commercial and critical failures. In 1936 he moved to a large but spartan studio space near the Elephant and Castle in London, but in May 1941 the studio was completely destroyed by a German bomb, resulting in the loss of everything he owned, including several hundred of his works. Soon living in a tiny basement room in Brixton in abject poverty, Spare nevertheless continued to fill sketchbooks with drawings. A gallery exhibition in 1947 was a modest success, and from 1949 onwards he began to hold exhibitions in a series of South London pubs. He remained quite impecunious, however, largely due to his refusal to accept portrait commissions. Spare continued to be intensely prolific, and his last gallery exhibition in 1955 included over 220 works. The following year, he died from peritonitis following a burst appendix, at the age of sixty-nine. That evening, a newspaper noted that ‘A strange and gentle genius died in a London hospital this afternoon. You have probably never heard of Austin Osman Spare. But his should have been a famous name.’2 Another obituary, in The Times, noted that ‘Mr. Austin Spare, an artist of unusual gifts and attainments and even more unusual personality, died yesterday in hospital in London…Of his technical mastery there can be no manner of doubt. The collection of his drawings may yet become a cult.’3

This striking self-portrait study is typical of many of Spare’s portraits in its unsettling intensity. It may be closely compared to a slightly larger self-portrait drawing, also dated 1935 and likewise on tinted paper, in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London4.

LUCIAN FREUD OM Ch Berlin 1922-2011 London

An Illustrated Letter from the Artist to Caroline Blackwood

Pen and black ink. 202 x 127 mm. (8 x 5 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to Lady Caroline Blackwood, London; Given by her to a friend, and thence by descent to his daughter; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s Olympia, 21 March 2002, lot 527; Acquired at the sale by a private collector, London.

LITERATURE: David Dawson and Martin Gayford, Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud 1939-1954, London, 2022, pp.339-340.

The letter reads: My dearest Caroline here is the bill I am feeling heavy with sadness this morning I can hardly move. I miss you so much I have quite forgotten what you are like. Do please write to mee and tell me anything at all

Please ask me to paint you a picture of something that you would like. Mrs Mac. keeps on talking about the poetry of Robert Luis Stephenson and how very similar his mind is to that of A.A. Milne. What can I answer? L.

Datable to the spring or summer of 1952, this is the only known extant letter from Lucian Freud to his lover and future wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, and was written at the height of his obsession with her. It is especially compelling since the text of the letter surrounds a pen portrait that the artist drew of himself in an embrace with his lover. The portrait of Caroline in this letter captures her unmistakable features; her large, startled eyes and blonde, sweeping hairstyle. Three of Freud’s most compelling painted portraits of Caroline Blackwood, all today in private collections, were executed in 1952, at around the same time as this letter; Girl in Bed1 and Girl with a Starfish Necklace2, as well as a small oil on copper entitled Girl Reading3. As has been noted, ‘Lucian Freud’s paintings of Caroline are among the most tender and lyrical portraits he has ever executed.’4

Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (1931-1996) first briefly met Freud in 1949 at a party given by the socialite Ann Rothermere. The wife of the press magnate Lord Rothermere, Ann (who would go on to marry her lover, the novelist Ian Fleming, in 1952), was famous for her parties at her homes at Warwick House, near Green Park in London, and at White Cliffs, on St. Margaret’s Bay in Kent, and it was at one of these parties that Freud and Blackwood met again in late 1951. As the artist later recalled, in conversation with Geordie Greig, ‘[Ann Rothermere] asked me to one of those

actual size

marvellous parties, semi-royal, quite a lot of them were there, and she said, “I hope you find someone you’d like to dance with”, and that sort of thing. And suddenly there was this one person and that was Caroline… She was just exciting in every way and was someone who had taken absolutely no trouble with herself…I went up to her and I danced and danced and I danced and danced...I don’t really think of myself in a dramatic romantic way. I just thought of what I wanted to do, you know, take her home alone, that sort of thing. That night I went home and started painting her.’5

In an interview published in 1995, when she was sixty-three, Caroline Blackwood recalled that ‘“Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way…I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did.”’6

Freud promptly fell deeply in love. Despite the fact that he was married to Kitty Garman and the father of a new baby girl, he pursued Caroline with a passion that bordered on obsession. As Grieg has noted, ‘Ignoring what everyone else thought, as he nearly always did, he was utterly bewitched by Caroline… Lucian adored Caroline’s careless abandon which merged into self-centredness. As an artist, he understood selfishness. In some ways, with Caroline he had met his match.’7 And, as Blackwood’s biographer has written, ‘At eighteen Caroline was fair-haired, dishevelled, slender, athletic, intense, puckish, and shy. She no doubt satisfied Lucian’s aesthetic sense, but she also possessed intelligence and courage. And, perhaps equally important, she was an aristocrat and a Guinness heiress.’8

Despite the severe disapproval of her mother, the Dowager Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, Caroline eloped with Freud to Paris in 1952. Something of the intensity of the couple’s relationship is captured in a letter from the writer and biographer James Pope-Hennessy to his friend Nolwen de Janzé, written from London at the end of September 1953: ‘Lucian and Caroline turned up here unexpectedly this morning, had baths and breakfast and wandered away again…They were sweet, but like somnambulists and wrapped in that impenetrable unawareness of people in love – do you know what I mean? – entirely unaware of the outside world, and rather expecting everybody else to do things for them. People in love are rather like royalty, I think. I can’t see any sense whatever in their marrying; but this, in Paris, they propose to do.’9 Freud and Blackwood were married in London a few weeks later, on December 9th, 1953, a day after the artist’s thirty-first birthday.

By 1956, however, the marriage was in difficulties, with Caroline increasingly discontented. That year she had left him and fled to Rome, eventually filing for divorce in 1957. By most accounts, Freud was devastated by Caroline’s decision to abandon the marriage, and was left deeply unhappy. (Both the artist Michael Andrews and the art critic David Sylvester later recalled that this was the only time they had ever seen Freud weeping.) As the artist’s biographer has noted, ‘Freud felt injured as well as distraught. Not so much because it was she who had left but because, ultimately, she had gone even further than he in nullifying the marriage. “Things could have been better for her with different behaviour on my part...”’10 The writer and diarist Joan Wyndham, who had had a brief affair with Freud in 1945, later opined that ‘Caroline was the great love of Lucian’s life…With Caroline he behaved terribly well. Very unusual. He didn’t love any of us, really…he must have known that she loved him, which was a great thing.’11 This period also seems to have led to a change in the way the artist depicted women in his paintings, with much less of the tenderness found in the earlier portraits. As Caroline herself noted, ‘Lucian’s painting changed violently after I left him…Lucian painted me in a different way to how he’s painting other people. There’s much more lyricism in these early works.’12

Following the divorce, Caroline – who never seems to have spoken badly of Freud throughout the rest of her life – became a gifted writer, and in later years was married to two equally brilliant men; the composer Israel Citkowitz and the poet Robert Lowell. In January 1996, when she had been diagnosed with an inoperable cancer and had checked into the Mayfair Hotel in New York to spend her final weeks, Freud phoned her from London and they had a long conversation. Caroline’s daughter Ivana Lowell, listening to her mother speaking on the telephone to Freud, some forty years after the end of their relationship, recalls being struck by how youthful and girlish her mother’s voice became as she spoke to the artist for the last time.

The genesis of the pen and ink drawing that dominates the present sheet is found in Freud’s close friendship with his fellow artist Francis Bacon. For much of their relationship, Lucian and Caroline spent a considerable amount of time with Bacon, and after their wedding and their move to a house in Dean Street in Soho, they saw him almost daily. (As Caroline was later to recall, ‘I had dinner with [Bacon] nearly every night for more or less the whole of my marriage to Lucian.’13) Caroline remained friendly with Bacon long after the breakup of her marriage to Freud.

This letter dates from the early months of the couple’s courtship. It was, in fact, during a weekend spent with Bacon and his lover Peter Lacy, possibly at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, that this tender image of the two lovers embracing had its origins. As Freud told the previous owner of this illustrated letter, he was with Caroline in Bacon’s studio when Francis pulled out a camera he had just bought, pointed it at them and called out to Lucian to ‘kiss her’. Freud further recalled that he had recently received the photograph from Bacon in the mail, and it was sitting on his desk when he wrote this letter to Caroline. As David Dawson and Martin Gayford have noted of the present sheet, in their recently published catalogue of Freud’s early letters, ‘It is therefore an example of an initiative from Bacon leading Freud into attempting a subject out of his normal range.’14

Some fifty years later, seeing the letter for the first time since he had written it, Freud remarked that it was a very good likeness of her (‘wide-eyed and perhaps a little startled by the impromptu photo shoot’15), but that he found his own demeanour somewhat awkward. Perhaps this reaction was due to the uncharacteristic display of vulnerability evident in the image of the artist kissing his lover while he is lost in the moment, his eyes firmly closed. The letter itself underscores the intense nature of this early stage of their relationship. Caroline and Lucian were separated for lengthy stretches during this time, partly due to the machinations of her scheming mother, thus necessitating written correspondence. This letter serves as a testament to the fact that Caroline Blackwood was one of Freud’s great loves, the subject of an all-consuming passion at the time it was written. Seeing it again, half a century later, Freud may also have regarded it as an uncomfortable reminder that Caroline was the only woman who had ever left him.

It has been suggested that the ‘Mrs. Mac’ referred to in this letter may be Jean Howard MacGibbon, a children’s book author and wife of the publisher James MacGibbon. The MacGibbons were neighbours of Freud and his first wife Kitty Garman at Clifton Hill in St. John’s Wood, where they had moved in 1948. That same year, James and Jean MacGibbon, together with their friend Robert Kee, set up the publishing firm of MacGibbon and Kee, and a few months later Freud was commissioned by them to provide illustrations for Rex Warner’s book Men and Gods. Freud’s illustrations were, however, rejected by James MacGibbon, and were never used. As Dawson and Gayford point out, as an author of children’s books, Jean MacGibbon was ‘therefore a person likely to hold views on A. A. Milne (which Lucian obviously regarded as too ridiculous for comment).’16 They further note of this letter that ‘One can only guess what the bill that he enclosed with his tender love letter, apparently as an afterthought, was for. But there is evidence that at the beginning of 1952 Lucian was (as so often) seriously short of money. At this point, he had a family to support, a new aristocratic lover, a position in high society to maintain, and a gambling habit.’17

Caroline Blackwood and Lucian Freud, Paris, c.1952.

DOMENICO GNOLI

Rome 1933-1970 New York

The Village Bullfight: Picador I

Pen and black ink and watercolour. Titled Picador n.1 in black ink in a cartouche at the upper left. Signed and dated D. Gnoli / 56 in black ink and numbered 18 in brown ink on the old backing board. Illegibly inscribed in pencil on the verso. 495 x 349 mm. (19 1/2 x 13 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Arthur Jeffress Gallery, London, in 1957; Purchased from them by Helen Melville Russell-Cooke; Bequeathed by her to Anthony and Marietta Coleridge, London.

LITERATURE: Annie de Garrou Gnoli, ‘Catalogo ragionato’, in Vittorio Sgarbi, L’opera grafica di Domenico Gnoli, Milan, 1985, p.156 (not illustrated); Carlo Barbatti and Giulia Lotti, ‘A Life in Pictures and Documents: 1933-70’, in Germano Celant et al, Domenico Gnoli, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 2021-2022, p.72.

EXHIBITED: London, Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Dominic Gnoli, 1957, no.18.

Domenico Gnoli was a precocious artist, and exhibited for the first time, aged just seventeen, at a gallery in Rome in 1950. After briefly studying theatre design at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, he began working as a scenographer, producing designs for stage sets and costumes for theatres in Zurich and London in 1953 and 1954. Despite the makings of a successful career as a scenographer, Gnoli decided to give up theatrical work in 1956 - claiming that ‘it was distracting [him] from the essential’ - in order to concentrate on drawing and painting. He had lived between London, Paris and Rome before eventually settling in 1956 in New York, where his friends included Leonard Bernstein, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jerome Robbins and Diana Vreeland. Between 1956 and 1960, exhibitions of Gnoli’s drawings and prints were held in New York, London and Rome. He also worked as a book illustrator and received commissions for illustrations for magazines as diverse as Fortune, Horizon, Life and Sports Illustrated. His work in this field earned him a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators in New York in 1968.

Throughout the 1960s Gnoli continued to have exhibitions of his work in Italy, France, Germany, England and America, where in 1969 his first solo show of paintings was held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. The artist seems to have hoped that his paintings would establish him in the public eye as more than just a fine and gifted draughtsman, though, as he wrote to a friend, ‘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.’1 Nonetheless, the artist 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 died of cancer in April 1970, just over two weeks before his 37th birthday.

The fantastic imagery, wit and sheer technical virtuosity of Gnoli’s work has 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.’2

DOMENICO GNOLI

Rome 1933-1970 New York

The Village Bullfight: Picador II

Pen and black ink and watercolour. Numbered 2 in black ink at the upper right. Signed and dated D. Gnoli / 56 in black ink and numbered 19 in brown ink on the old backing board. Illegibly inscribed in pencil on the verso. 499 x 350 mm. (19 5/8 x 13 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Arthur Jeffress Gallery, London, in 1957; Purchased from them by Helen Melville Russell-Cooke; Bequeathed by her to Anthony and Marietta Coleridge, London.

LITERATURE: Annie de Garrou Gnoli, ‘Catalogo ragionato’, in Vittorio Sgarbi, L’opera grafica di Domenico Gnoli, Milan, 1985, p.156 (not illustrated); Carlo Barbatti and Giulia Lotti, ‘A Life in Pictures and Documents: 1933-70’, in Germano Celant et al, Domenico Gnoli, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 2021-2022, p.72.

EXHIBITED: London, Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Dominic Gnoli, 1957, no.19.

As a Times review of the inaugural exhibition in London of Domenico Gnoli’s drawings in 1957, in which the present sheet was included, noted, ‘Mr. Gnoli’s drawings are complex, fantasticated, and full of busy goings-on of a mildly satirical absurdity...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.’1 Another anonymous review of the same exhibition expressed the opinion that ‘Dominic Gnoli is an anachronism in draughtsmanship, a modern in paint...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.’2

These two drawings are part of a series of bullfighting scenes executed in 1956, during the first of Gnoli’s many visits to the Balearic island of Mallorca, that were published under the title ‘The Village Bullfight’ in the American magazine Holiday the following year. The seven ink drawings for ‘The Village Bullfight’ were exhibited at the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in London in 1957, and included, apart from the present Picador I and Picador II, five other drawings entitled Two Picadors, Behind the Barrera, Inside and Outside, Picador Riding In and Picador Riding Out. One of these drawings, depicting a mounted picador observed by several other figures, is today in a private collection3. Gnoli was to live and work in Mallorca for a number of years, and in 1966 he wrote a brief account of a Mallorcan corrida entitled ‘An Afternoon at the Bulls’, which was to appear in the magazine Sports Illustrated but was never published.

The first owner of this pair of drawings was Helen Melville Russell-Cooke, née Smith (1898-1973), whose father was Captain Edward Smith of the Titanic

JOhN MINTON

Great Shelford 1917-1957 London

Study of a Young Man Asleep

Pencil on buff paper. 283 x 384 mm. (11 1/8 x 15 1/8 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: New Grafton Gallery, London, in 1973; Colin Clark, London.

Although he had only a relatively brief career before his death at the age of thirty-nine, John Minton was enormously prolific and achieved a great deal of success in his lifetime. Between 1945 and 1956 he had eight one-man shows, mainly at the Lefevre Gallery in London, and took part in a number of group shows and at the Royal Academy Summer exhibitions. Alongside his extensive output as a painter and draughtsman, he produced numerous illustrations for books, book jackets, magazines and advertisements, and also designed posters, wallpaper and stage sets. Of independent means, he was able to support the work of several of his fellow artists, such as Lucian Freud, from whom he commissioned a portrait in 1952. Minton devoted much of his later career to teaching, in particular at the Royal College of Art, where he was a popular and inspirational figure among his students. As his biographer Frances Spalding has noted, ‘Minton’s virtuoso performances with pencil or pen and ink commended him as a teacher.’1

Although he enjoyed considerable early success, by the 1950s Minton’s work was becoming overshadowed by other artists in his circle, notably Freud and Francis Bacon. As a friend later recalled, ‘He saw himself as overtaken by fashions in art – abstract expressionism among others – for which he had no liking. While others of his contemporaries – Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan – held their ground and came through, Minton saw himself as obsolete, as eccentric and old-fashioned as Edward Lear. He could not come to terms with new developments and he lost faith in his own talent…He was, I suppose, one of those kingfisher-like specimens whose bright plumage briefly glinted then was gone. It might, perhaps, have been different in other circumstances; a little more patience and he could have survived the disorienting shifts in taste.’2 Suffering from intense melancholy and alcoholism, Minton died, by his own hand, in January 1957.

Minton was a gifted portraitist, and his portrait studies in pencil - ‘superb examples at their best of unforced draughtsmanship’, in the words of one friend and critic3 - are among the finest of his drawings. As one recent scholar has noted, the artist produced ‘sensitive portraits of friends, students and lovers... These are not ‘heroic’ portraits concerned with conveying the outward masculinity of the sitters, but instead possess a quietness and intimacy which convey the sense of an inner reverie.’4

A pen and ink study of a similar subject, depicting the artist’s friend and lover Kevin Maybury asleep, was sold at auction in London in 20115, while another drawing of the same sitter, also asleep, was in the John Constable collection and recently appeared on the London art market6. The intimacy evident in the present sheet suggests that it may likewise depict Maybury, whom Minton met when he was designing stage sets at the Royal Court Theatre in the summer of 1956. An Australian carpenter, Maybury worked in the scenery department at the theatre, and eventually moved in with Minton at his home in Apollo Place in Chelsea. (It was Maybury who discovered the artist’s body after his suicide.) As Spalding has written, ‘[Maybury] seemed rather amazed to be taken up by this famous painter who drew him into a more exciting social world than he had previously experienced. To some of Minton’s friends it seemed that Kevin was his white hope, the person who was going to keep him off the bottle… The presbyterian streak in Kevin Maybury’s nature aroused in Minton bemused affection.’7 Minton made several late drawings of Kevin Maybury, as well as a finished portrait in oils, which is now in the Tate8

CLAUDIO bRAVO

Valparaiso 1936-2011 Taroudant (Morocco)

Untitled (Stones)

Pastel on blue-grey paper. Signed CLAUDIO BRAVO in red chalk at the lower left and dated MCMLXXI in red chalk at the lower right.

640 x 488 mm. (25 1/4 x 19 1/8 in.) [image]

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

PROVENANCE: Galería Egam, Madrid, in 1971; Acquired from them by a private collection, Europe; Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 20 November 2007, lot 197; Private collection, New England.

EXHIBITED: Probably Madrid, Galería Egam, Claudio Bravo, 1971.

The Chilean artist Claudio Bravo had his first exhibition at the age of seventeen, and was soon much in demand as a portrait painter. In 1961 he left Chile for Madrid, where he became established as a society portraitist. He spent six months working in the Philippines in 1968, and two years later 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. Bravo enjoyed a highly successful career. As was noted at the time of an exhibition of his work which toured four American museums in 1987 and 1988, ‘Claudio Bravo is one of the most significant artists working in a realist mode today. A painter and draftsman with a singularly fertile imagination, Bravo draws upon a myriad of sources in the art of the past and present, combining them in a uniquely personal manner.’1

The artist’s friend, the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, has written of Claudio Bravo that ‘His true masters are the great classical masters, particularly Spanish 17th century, the Golden Age of Baroque… who revolutionized the treatment of the object, conferring on their still lifes – through a scrupulous study of details and the play of light – a dignity and intensity which appear to emancipate them from the inert and humanize them. Claudio Bravo has updated this old school with his oil paintings, pastels and drawings of flowers, fruit, vegetables, jugs, tablecloths, mortars, cruets, cooking pots, ostrich eggs, rugs, glasses, stones, and hampers which it would be unfair to call “still life”, since that label immediately suggests the inanimate, the decorative…these images shimmer like precious jewels, they become giant-like heroes whose outstanding presence has desolated their surroundings.’2 A superb draughtsman, Bravo was a master of pencil, coloured chalks and pastel, applied with precision and delicacy.

This large pastel, drawn in 1971, can be grouped with a number of paintings, watercolours and pastels of stones executed in the early 1970s, while the artist was living and working in Madrid. As Edward Sullivan has noted of these works, ‘In another series of still lifes one can find…references to Dada and Surrealist art. In the numerous paintings of stones on which Bravo worked in the early 1970’s, there are reminiscences of Jean Arp’s chance arrangements of objects as well as an even stronger visual relationship to many works by Yves Tanguy. This is true not only in so far as the objects themselves are concerned (the stones resemble the ectoplasmic blobs painted by many of the Surrealists) but also of the vague, amorphous desert-like space in which they rest. Another source for the stone paintings is Zen philosophy in which the artist was intensely interested throughout the 1970’s. In his readings in the processes of Zen meditation, Bravo was struck by passages describing meditation on stones thrown at random onto a surface. Each time they are thrown, they will take on a different configuration. They will also look completely different in their patterns when thrown by different people.’3 As the artist himself was later to recall, ‘I experimented with Zen ideas in my own work then and did a group of paintings of stones thrown at random on a table.’4

Watermark: CAMBON & MONTGOLFIER VIDALON-LES-ANNONAY

DRAWINGS by hORST JANSSEN

Born in Hamburg, the German draughtsman, illustrator and printmaker Horst Janssen was raised in the city of Oldenburg by his mother and grandparents, and never knew his father. Between 1946 and 1951 he studied at the Landeskunstschule in Hamburg, where his teacher and mentor was the painter, illustrator and engraver Alfred Mahlau. As he later recalled of this period, ‘Mahlau introduced all, but all of us, to the discipline of learning to see, he literally opened all of our eyes…Mahlau sent us, for example, into town with the apparently easy task of drawing, or painting a water-colour, of something that to the best of our knowledge had never been painted or drawn before. That means of course, that we had never seen, drawn or painted.’1 (Some twenty years later, Janssen himself was later offered a professorship at the Hamburg academy, but turned down the opportunity.) In 1948 he published a children’s book, and in the early 1950s began developing his skills as a printer and lithographer.

Hugely prolific, Janssen produced a large number of drawings, etchings, lithographs, posters, woodcuts and wood engravings characterized by dreamlike and often erotic imagery, creating a distinctive body of work – landscapes, still lifes and portraits, often incorporating literary references and texts – that was quite unusual within the context of post-war European art. In the early part of his career Janssen rarely exhibited his work outside Hamburg, and if he sold a print or drawing it was usually for a relatively modest amount – between 50 and 100 Marks for a print and between 200 and 850 Marks for a drawing – to a small coterie of collectors. As he said at around this time, ‘I want to know who has my pictures. Out of vanity. Besides, I love them.’

The artist’s first retrospective exhibition of almost 180 drawings and prints was held in 1965 at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover, leading the director of that institution, Wieland Schmied, to describe the artist as ‘the greatest draughtsman apart from Picasso. But Picasso is a different generation.’2 (This was an assessment with which Janssen seems to have agreed, stating that ‘At the moment there is no one better than me…I can’t help it, I just have talent.’3) The exhibition later travelled to several major cities in Germany, and also to Basel in Switzerland, and led to Janssen’s work becoming much more widely known outside Hamburg.

Although he suffered from alcoholism, manic depression and panic attacks, Janssen’s output never slackened, and his intensely personal vision continued to find new avenues of expression. He often created drawings and prints inspired by foreign works of art, and in 1972 published an appreciation of the printed landscapes of the 19th century Japanese artist Hokusai. He won several important prizes and awards, including the first prize for graphic art at the Venice Biennale of 1968, and his work was widely exhibited throughout Europe, as well as in America, Russia and Japan. He published several portfolios of his prints and drawings, often centred around a particular theme. Significant exhibitions of his work were held in Mannheim in 1976, at Documenta VI in Kassel the following year, at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1980 and the Albertina in Vienna in 1982.

Janssen’s corpus of drawings include portraits, self-portraits, still life subjects, landscapes, imaginary portraits of figures from the past, copies after the Old Masters and erotic subjects, all characterized by sheer technical brilliance and an inexhaustible imagination. The intensity of his gaze is perhaps most evident in the artist’s self-portrait drawings in particular, but can often be seen in other favourite subjects. As a friend of the artist, and an avid collector of his work, has aptly noted, ‘In his numerous self-portraits Janssen features not as a kind of Narcissus who, intoxicated with himself, sinks into the mirror and drowns, but rather like Proteus, who approaches himself anew in every reflection of his ego. A glance in the mirror, at the work-table very early in the morning: an enquiry as to how he feels, his mood, the overall state of his health. However, this regularly repeated question might also result in the drawing of a landscape or in a picture of flowers expiring in a slow process of dessication.’4

In 1990 Janssen was seriously injured in the collapse of a balcony in his house, and suffered acid burns that threatened blindness. Nevertheless, important exhibitions of his work continued to be held; in Dresden, Leipzig and Oldenburg, and in Japan and Norway. Following a stroke, the artist died in Hamburg in 1995, at the age of sixty-five. Five years later the Horst Janssen Museum in his hometown of Oldenburg, dedicated to the artist’s work, was inaugurated. Another significant group of drawings and prints is today in the collection of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg.

Horst Janssen’s vast corpus of drawings, etchings, engravings, woodcuts and lithographs, as well as illustrated letters – a body of work aptly described by one writer as ‘technically superb, intellectually rich, supremely self-conscious’5 – has continued to define the artist as one the most significant draughtsmen and graphic artists of post-war Germany.

hORST JANSSEN Hamburg 1929-1995 Hamburg

Self Portrait

Pencil, with touches of brown chalk. Inscribed 5.40, and signed and dated 16 11 71 Janssen in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed 96 / Fest in pencil on the verso. 261 x 382 mm. (10 1/4 x 15 in.)

PROVENANCE: Joachim Fest, Kronberg; Anonymous sale, Berlin, Villa Grisebach, 31 May 2012, lot 48; Bernd Schultz, Berlin.

Horst Janssen obsessively drew self-portraits throughout his career, often showing his distorted full face from unusual angles and in extreme close-up. As has recently been noted, ‘Like Rembrandt, whom Janssen portrayed in watercolour and etching multiple times and whose self-portraits he intertwined in his own…, Janssen obviously examines himself in the mirror. He comes so close to it that the magnification is accompanied by a hyperreal exaggeration and distortion. The surface structure of the skin, its wrinkles and blemishes are precisely defined, nearly ugly, relentlessly real and, at the same time, completely unreal… Whereas viewers of a Janssen self-portrait are at first inclined to return the gaze of the artist, they soon notice that the images are not at all intended in this way. The close-up perspective seems perversely intimate – you are that close only to yourself.’1

Drawn on the 16th of November 1971, this large sheet may be likened to a self-portrait drawing of about the same date (fig.1), in a private collection in London, which was the artist’s design for the poster for an exhibition of his prints at the Galerie Kornfeld in Zurich in November 1971. Also comparable is a self-portrait drawing, dated 10 March 1972 and including the head of the artist’s then-lover Gesche Tietjens (fig.2), in a private collection in Hamburg2

As Janssen wrote, in the introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of his work in 1970, ‘Well – I was born, I played, I was filled with wisdom and now I sit here and draw; drawings for the market, drawings for presents, self portrait-drawings and drawings of every kind…I achieve the greatest effect however in the drawings of the third category – the self portraits. Partly because this discipline is hardly cultivated at all these days, partly because a comedian-like gift puts me in the position of being able to make my face appear quite convincingly, according to requirements, sometimes gay and young, sometimes melancholic, sometimes wild, and at other times bloated to the point of being destroyed, yet directly stimulating. My drawing ability in portraying the actual mirror image in a very exact manner, but with the very unusual yet important understatement, thus created the impression of that honesty so much desired by the public.’3

The present sheet once belonged to Janssen’s close friend, the German historian, editor and critic Joachim Fest (1926-2006), who knew the artist for over twenty-five years and assembled a significant collection of his graphic work. Fest published two books on the artist; Horst Janssen: Selbstbildnis von fremder Hand appeared in 2001 and was followed five years later by Die schreckliche Lust des Auges: Erinnerungen an Horst Janssen, a memoir of their long friendship.

hORST JANSSEN

Hamburg 1929-1995 Hamburg

Still Life with a Sprig of Juniper(?) in a Glass: ‘Liebe Tante, ich bin im Moment etwas nervös…’

Pen and brown ink and grey wash. Dated 19/6/74 in pencil at the upper left, and extensively inscribed Liebe Tante / ich bin im Moment / etwas nervös / nicht sehr – aber doch / verzeih also bitte / dies + das / – wenn / danke. in pencil at the lower centre. Laid down. 197 x 162 mm. (7 3/4 x 6 3/8 in.)

The text accompanying this little still life may be translated as:

‘Dear Aunt I am currently a little nervous not very – but still so please forgive me for this + that - if thank you.’

The ‘Liebe Tante’ referred to in this note is likely to be the artist’s aunt Anna Janssen (1895-1967), his mother’s younger sister, who lived in Hamburg and adopted the young Horst in 1944, a year after the death of his mother. The artist remained close to her until her death in 1967.

In the 1970s Janssen produced a number of still life drawings of flowers placed in glasses or bottles. As he noted, however, in the text accompanying a book of his still life drawings and prints, ‘“My” stilllife very rarely fits the historical sense of the term. In other words, the cut edge of a table, the triangularcornered tablecloth or brocade cover, on it the deer skull with the purple beads in its nose, or a corresponding pheasant, next to it a bowl of grapes and peaches, then the sumptuous bouquet of flowers and on it the cutest butterfly and perhaps also a robin that is just…etc. etc. A 17th-century Dutch still-life. That is not “my” still-life…I recall the clever term used by those clever wordsmiths the French: “Nature Morte.” For all the examples assembled here, whether Baroque painting, bourgeois flower bouquet or dead moth without “background or backdrop” are covered by this “Nature Morte.” In case of doubt, it could even be a selfportrait. Title: Frightened to death.’1

hORST JANSSEN

Hamburg 1929-1995 Hamburg

Letter to Viola Rackow, with a Still Life of a Champagne Cork and a Cigarette Butt

Pencil and coloured chalks on buff paper; the sheet torn at the lower right corner. Dated and inscribed 14 / 7 / 77 730 / Lieb Vriederich / du hast mich immer noch nicht begriffen: / das einzige was du mir zu sagen hast, / während du mit deinem Schlüssel in der / Hand mich aus dem wenigsten schlaf reisst, / ist: “die Kinder sind so enttäuscht – ich tu / das nicht wieder”. / das ist so widerlich egozentrisch / + so unfair – es Könnte von mir sein. / Runge. in pencil at the bottom half of the sheet. 261 x 241 mm. (10 1/4 x 9 1/2 in.) at greatest dimensions

PROVENANCE: Viola Rackow, Hamburg; By descent to Nicolaus Rackow, Eppendorf, Hamburg.

LITERATURE: Horst Janssen, Vriederich: Briefe an Viola, Hamburg, 1986, illustrated p.21.

The text of this letter to the artist’s friend and lover Viola Rackow may be loosely translated as follows: ‘Dear Vriedrich,

You still haven’t understood me: The only thing that you have to say to me, with your keys in your hand while you snatch me out of my meagre sleep, is “the children are so disappointed – I will not do this again”. That is so disgustingly egocentric and so unfair – it could be from me Runge.’

Horst Janssen’s love affair with Viola Rackow (b.1941) resulted in a long friendship and correspondence, with the artist sending her numerous illustrated letters. In many of these letters, such as the present sheet, the artist addresses Viola as ‘Vriederich’ or ‘Vriedrich’ and signs himself as ‘Runge’. This stems from the fact that Janssen often went to see the important group of paintings by the German Romantic artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich in the collection of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. His obsession with these works resulted in Viola’s once jokingly referring to him as ‘Runge’, to which Janssen responded by calling her ‘Vriederich’ (with a V for Viola instead of an F), and it seems that both nicknames stuck.

As Jutta Siegmund-Schultze has written of the artist’s extensive correspondence with Viola Rackow, ‘As can be learned from the letters, Horst Janssen loved Viola – ‘your agility, your verve, your serenity + nimbleness’ or, as it says in a beautiful folk-song-like passage: ‘...I love you / I love your little face / I love you / I love your sweet little face / I love you / I love your body / excessively. / YES’. But the other side of the coin is: ‘You are still too young for me in your development. You do not yet have a relationship with the painfulness of life…’ [or] ‘I love you and it is hopeless for my longing.’ Conclusion: ‘You’re a pretty tough cookie, and I love you very much.’ In this relationship, in which Janssen, perhaps for the first time, not only has a loving, tender woman, but also a worthy opponent, it goes without saying that sometimes the sparks fly, that fights are called for, that jealousy and misunderstandings accumulate, which cannot be avoided given the equally distributed temperament of the two. But it’s also touching to read how Janssen keeps trying to understand and educate Viola, to clear up these damned misunderstandings and put things in order, especially with himself, and to find the serenity that he so desperately needs and which means the truth to him. These letters to Viola are not only the very personal testimony of a love between two extraordinary people, they also provide an insight into the life of one of the greatest artists of our time, into his struggles against himself and his ailing body, into his longings and fears, which always revolve around creativity and the end of everything, death, and for which, just as much as for his joy on a beautiful morning, he needs his beloved to listen and to be ‘at peace’ with everything.’1

hORST JANSSEN

Hamburg 1929-1995 Hamburg

Nicobus 1. Versuch (Portrait of Nicolaus Rackow)

Pencil and coloured pencil, with two small stamps of skull and crossbones in black ink. Inscribed, dated and signed with monogram Nicobus 1. Versuch am 15.4. / 77 / JH in pencil at the lower right. Further inscribed Für Jürgen Rackow in pencil at the lower centre. 400 x 296 mm. (15 3/4 x 11 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Viola Rackow, Hamburg; By descent to Nicolaus Rackow, Eppendorf, Hamburg.

LITERATURE: Horst Janssen, Vriederich: Briefe an Viola, Hamburg, 1986, illustrated p.106. Horst Janssen was a superb portrait draughtsman. He produced numerous drawings of lovers, friends and family members, as well as portraits of writers, artists, musicians and other contemporaries, and a series of imaginary portraits of historical figures. As one German scholar has noted, ‘Janssen made graphical techniques and in particular drawing popular in Germany (again). His astonishing ability to capture the characteristics of a person in just a few glances and portray them with just a few strokes, to make the person recognisable while at the same time documenting his own style in every stroke, delights one time and again.’1

Another writer has opined that ‘Janssen drew and breathed new life into a whole range of people – the intellectual heroes of bygone epochs, friends past and present, himself and others – because he is first and foremost and always has been the darling of himself. In other words, he was able to love (and hate) others deeply because he loved (and hated) himself deeply…Anyone who met Janssen, will be able to testify to this. He was always extreme in his desire for love, and equally extreme in his desire to wound, to destroy love, those who loved, those whom he loved most.’2

Janssen met Viola Rackow through his friend, the printmaker Hartmut Frielinghaus, in the summer of 1976. Although their love affair was a brief one, beginning early in 1977 and ending in the summer of the following year, they nevertheless remained friends for many years afterwards. The artist sent her numerous illustrated letters, most of which were collected and published as a book in 1986. He also produced several independent drawings of Viola Rackow (fig.1), some of which are overtly erotic in tone3

The present sheet is a portrait of Nicolaus Rackow (born c.1969), who was known by the nickname ‘Nicobus’, and was the younger of Viola Rackow’s two sons.

hORST JANSSEN Hamburg 1929-1995 Hamburg

Portrait of Christian Rackow

Pencil, coloured pencil and collage. The paper torn and reassembled, and laid down on a backing board, with a pressed leaf (a four-leaf clover?) at the lower left. Signed with monogram, dated and inscribed 15/4/77 / JH / Rackow. in pencil at the lower right. Further dated and inscribed 1.10.77 / glaubst du / Vriederich / mir jetzt meine liebe zum Tagebuch?!. in pencil at the bottom of the backing board. Inscribed Viola in pencil on the reverse of the backing board.

270 x 211 mm. (10 5/8 x 8 1/4 in.) [sheet]

325 x 249 mm. (12 3/4 x 9 3/4 in.) [backing board]

PROVENANCE: Viola Rackow, Hamburg; By descent to Nicolaus Rackow, Eppendorf, Hamburg.

LITERATURE: Horst Janssen, Vriederich: Briefe an Viola, Hamburg, 1986, illustrated p.106.

Dated 15 April 1977, this drawing is a portrait of Christian Rackow (born c.1965), the elder of Viola Rackow’s sons. The artist’s inscription at the bottom of the backing board on which the drawing has been pasted, written some five and half months later, may be approximately translated as ‘do you, Vriederich, now trust my love for the diary?!.’

The torn and reassembled paper of the drawing, as well as the introduction of a pressed leaf at the lower right of the sheet, is characteristic of the artist’s approach to his drawings. As Reinhold Heller has noted, ‘Janssen accented the material presence of the paper on which he worked. Foxed, torn, weathered, and aged, the sheets of varied papers attained a reality that exists in visual counterpoint to the image; tactile, material existence provides a foil for the shadows of illusions. The physical impact of the work’s totality thus becomes augmented to the point of saturation and creates an artistic dialectic on several levels...The aged paper suggests the paper of old master drawings, an allusion supported by the quality of Janssen’s graphic technique. It also recalls modernism’s practice of collage with its fascination for discarded, discolored, decaying bits of paper through which the art object gains the presence of a relic having survived past abuse and activity. Such a dialogue between elements of history attains the distinction of being a hallmark of Janssen’s attitudes and testifies to the distinct intellectualism of the work.’1

hORST JANSSEN

Hamburg 1929-1995 Hamburg

Self Portrait: ‘4:00 es ist noch Dunkel…’

Pen and brown ink and grey wash. Laid down. Inscribed 4.00 du liebling es ist noch dünkel, bald / ist es hell, ich werd versuchen, dich / nachher aufzuwecken [?] / sowie [?] / KLA2.7A in brown ink at the lower right.

204 x 154 mm. (8 x 6 in.)

In 1988 Horst Janssen wrote: ‘…I am no portraitist. But people will surely ask: “and the self-portraits? The self-portraits??” Indeed, I have repeatedly claimed that these reflections are [more like] still lives! Still lives when I am tired of another nature morte. Or I am playing the thing to such a degree that it becomes the purest grimace of an acting performance…When I hit on my own face as a “subject” it is very seldom just individual, momentary physiognomic conditions – no, when it happens, then delight in my own grotesque face keeps me going for days, nights and weeks…If I were to spend hours preoccupying myself – with the intensity to which I am accustomed – with someone else’s face – I would be sure to feel a sense of shock, be it shock at the “alien” or about the beauty.’1

Several years earlier, the artist had described the process of making a self-portrait drawing: ‘So I sit down in the morning under the lamp when it is still dark and look across at myself for a moment: the right side of my face in reflection is shadowed. A light-hearted mischievousness does not make me see the most intense darkness a little to the right of the right extremity of the reflection of my face, where the most intense darkness actually is, but in the middle of the same to the right next to the nose, and the top and bottom lips running into the nick of the chin. The left eye strikes me as being quiet, soft and large because its gaze is not fixed on any one object. From this moment on I have to be careful not to destroy this completely ‘Nazarene’ expression, by not looking at my reflection too penetratingly or by not making it grin by remembering a joke. This can only happen as a form of recovery after the fixing of a momentary image. Once this has happened, the two of us can allow ourselves a coffee, a cigarette and a short chat to recover, which affords us considerable pleasure since we have the same needs and pleasures in everything. In the ensuing period the already determined concept is filled in quasi-automatically. From time to time I glance across at him seeking correction or merely confirmation and he glances back to me, showing a sympathetic understanding for my intentions. Thus this tender portrait comes to an end by itself, in this corresponding hour of the morning. I also put a crude signature underneath just of figures indicating the time – like a concluding farewell as an emphatic ending to a successful and clarifying discussion. And then a few seconds afterwards, when I am alone, I laugh out loud: Duped. And the day can begin.’2

The text at the bottom of this drawing may be approximately translated as ‘4.00 am. You darling, it is still dark, soon it will be light, I will try to wake you up later…’

LUCIAN FREUD OM Ch

Berlin 1922-2011 London

Drawing after Large Interior W11 (after Watteau)

Pen and black ink. 240 x 333 mm. (9 1/2 x 13 1/8 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: Probably James Kirkman, London; Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York; Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York; Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; Acquired from them in 1994 by a private collection, New York.

EXHIBITED: Possibly London, Thos. Agnew and Sons, Lucian Freud, 1983; New York, Acquavella Galleries, Drawings, Watercolors and Gouaches from Toulouse-Lautrec to Freud, 2007, no.28 (illustration reversed).

The present sheet is related to one of Lucian Freud’s most important and ambitious paintings, Large Interior W11 (after Watteau), formerly in the collection of the late Paul Allen and recently sold at auction1. Freud worked on the sizeable canvas between 1981 and 1983 in his spacious studio in Holland Park in West London, to which he had moved in 1977, and which allowed him to work on a larger scale than before. This group portrait, painted on a canvas measuring over six feet square (fig.1), depicts four adult figures well known to the artist; from left to right, Freud’s lover, the painter Celia Paul, his daughter Bella playing the mandolin, the artist’s stepson Kai Boyt (a replacement for his son Ali Boyt), and Kai and Ali’s mother Suzy Boyt. Lying on the floor is a child named Star, the little sister of Ali Boyt’s girlfriend, who was a replacement for the artist’s granddaughter May, whose mother Annie had refused to let her pose. As Freud said, ‘I took a while setting it up. It took quite a lot of staging. I’d been making drawings with the idea of doing a group painting, which I’d never done…It’s the nearest thing I have ever come to casting people rather than painting them, but they’re still portraits, really. They are also characters. A slight bit of role playing they are doing, but I didn’t try to forget who they were. In the end they are just there.’2 Upon its completion, the large painting was purchased by the artist’s dealer and agent James Kirkman, and was shown at Agnew’s gallery in London in November 1983, alongside several related drawings. Offered unsuccessfully by Kirkman to the Tate Gallery for £250,000, Large Interior W11 (after Watteau) then remained in his personal collection until it was sold by him at auction in New York in 19983, when it was acquired by Paul Allen, underbid by the National Gallery of Australia.

The composition of Large Interior W11 (after Watteau) was inspired by a small painting entitled Pierrot Content (fig.2) by the 18th century French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau. Datable to c.1712, the fête galante painting belonged to Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza and is today in the ThyssenBornemisza Museum in Madrid4. Freud had a reproduction of Watteau’s painting pinned to the wall of his studio, and drew a large-scale pastel copy after Pierrot Content, now in a private collection5, in which he retained the poses and costumes of Watteau’s figures but altered their faces. He likewise placed a reproduction of the picture in the background of his portrait of Baron Thyssen, painted between 1981 and 1982 and also now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum6. As the artist recalled of the Watteau image, ‘Thyssen gave me his catalogue and got me a photograph and I got someone to blow it up; I didn’t see the picture till years later; it’s a lovely little picture.’7

As the Freud scholar and biographer William Feaver has written of Large Interior W11 (after Watteau), ‘The most elaborate test of the [new] studio…was a re-enactment there, on a hugely enlarged scale, of a Watteau, Pierrot Content, owned by Thyssen. Freud knew the picture only from a reproduction but that was enough to spark his interest in the idea of translating a frenchified commedia dell’arte tableau set in a dark glade into a contemporary gathering set at rooftop level. He began thinking that, having had trouble raising his left arm – his painting arm – above shoulder height, this was likely to be his last chance of producing a really large picture. Those he involved in Large Interior W11 (after Watteau)… were, he said, “people I knew (and would sit), and I liked working from.” He brought together a mother and

son, a daughter, a girlfriend and fellow painter…and the sulky substitute for a grandchild he had wanted to include…Posed under the skylight in summer clothing, hands arranged, feet slightly choreographed, grouped in front of tangled verbena plants, they were required to be simply themselves à la Watteau. The only sound was to be a running tap, in lieu of Watteau’s sprinkling fountain.’8

Catherine Lampert has noted of the painting that, ‘As Freud was arranging the five people, he did so in a way which exposed his influence over them, from the costumes they put on to the fact of sitting closely together on a bed and ‘sharing’ their relationship with the artist standing a few paces away…The proscenium effect of the floorboards contributes to the mirage-like effect, credible and vulnerable, whereas the plain functionality of the setting makes the costumes seem more like those from an attic trunk and an acknowledgement that the gathering was not an enchanted interlude. Indeed, insecurity spreads over the whole of Large Interior, from the people to the running water and the empty space.’9

The present sheet is one of several drawings by Freud – executed in pen and ink, pastel or charcoal – that appear to be inspired by the finished painting of Large Interior W11 (after Watteau), rather than preparatory studies for it. Some of these drawings, including this one, depict the painting on an easel; one particularly finished and colourful example, which incorporates a view of the studio itself, is today in the Katrin Bellinger collection in London10

As Sebastian Smee has noted, ‘Of the extant drawings on paper since Freud resumed etching, the most fascinating examples are those he did in connection with his most ambitious painting of the 1980s, Large Interior W11 (after Watteau), 1981-3. Intriguingly, most of these were made after the painting was finished or as it neared completion; they were not preparatory studies. They explored aspects of the painting from different angles and different degrees of proximity…The cumulative effect of the After Watteau drawings is odd. It’s almost as if, as Freud came closer to finishing the large painting, he became increasingly beguiled by it – not so much by its technical side, as by the dizzying game it plays with fiction and truth. The original Watteau functions for Freud as a kind of scaffolding in Large Interior W11. His treatment of it – reducing its rich load of historical meaning and delicate emotion to a mere bit of frippery in which no one, not even the actors, believes – encourages this scaffolding to fall away in the viewer’s imagination. The result, paradoxically, is that the sitters – monumentalised, their bodies expressing nothing beyond the bedrock reality of holding a pose in the artist’s studio – are freed from any constructed fiction, and graced with a new depth of human freedom…Augmenting the painting, the associated drawings add to the beguilement of artifice and reality; they possess something of the magic of dress rehearsals on the eve of opening night.’11

With particular reference to Large Interior W11 (after Watteau), another scholar has written that ‘Freud does not work from preliminary studies: instead, he draws his composition with charcoal directly on the canvas, effacing it as the painting proceeds. Freud executed a number of impressive drawings based on elements of this work, yet they were all done after the painting was completed. It is fascinating that Freud reverses the traditional artistic method of working from studies to a finished whole. He completes the work, then takes fragments out of the composition to be used in drawings that stand alone as independent works of art.’12 Other drawings related to Large Interior W11 (after Watteau) – some of which may have come from the same sketchbook as the present sheet – are in a number of private collections13

NOTES

TO THE CATALOGUE

No.1 Gherardo Cibo

1. Jaap Bolten, ‘Messer Ulisse Severino da Cingoli, A Bypath in the History of Art’, Master Drawings, 1969, 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. 1969.16. The pages of the album are visible online at https://www.themorgan.org/collection/gherardo-cibo/sketchbook [accessed 17 November 2022].

7. Tongiorgi Tomasi, op.cit., 1989, p.212.

8. Oliver Tostmann, in Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Arthur K. Wheelock, ed., The McCrindle Gift: A Distinguished Collection of Drawings and Watercolors, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 2012, p.32, under no.5.

No.2 Circle of Giorgio Vasari

1. Härb, op.cit., p.201, under no.56.

2. Inv. KdZ 15260 (Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin), Inv. WAG 1995.342 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and Inv. 2168 (Louvre); Härb, op.cit., pp.200202, nos.55-57. The Liverpool drawing is illustrated in colour in Xanthe Brooke, Mantegna to Rubens: The Weld-Blundell Drawings Collection, exhibition catalogue, Liverpool and London, 1998-1999, pp.117-118, no.62. The Louvre drawing is illustrated in colour in Anna Bisceglia et al, Pietro Aretino e l’arte del Rinascimento, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 2019-2020, no.3.25, p.115.

3. Vasari’s compositional sketch for this part of the wall decoration, showing the Arno, Tiber and Appenine river gods together, is one of two related drawings for La Talanta in the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Lyon (Inv. 5387a; Lyon, Musée Historique des Tissus, Dessins du XVIe au XIXe siècle de la collection du Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Lyon, exhibition catalogue, 1984-1985, p.30, no.5; Härb, op.cit., p.198, no.53.)

4. Karl Frey, Giorgio Vasari: Der literarische Nachlass, Vol.I, Munich, 1923, p.115; Quoted in translation in Härb, op.cit., p.198, under no.53.

5. Härb, op.cit., p.201, under no.56.

6. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 7 July 1981, lot 12. The drawing measures 198 x 335 mm.

No.3 Aurelio Luini

1. ‘Evangelista e Pietro sone uguali / nel pinger; ma più vali / tu Aurelio, la cui mente più alto aspira, / Come per l’opre tui si vede e mira. / Oltre ch’in dolce lira / Dolce canti i pensier ne i tuoi disegni, / Dispiegandogli in versi ornati e degni.’; Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Rime, Milan, 1587, p.100.

2. Agosti and Stoppa, op.cit., p.299 (as after Aurelio Luini, not illustrated).

3. Paris, Paul Prouté S.A., Catalogue Bresdin. Dessins originaux anciens et modernes. Estampes anciennes du XVe au XVIIIe Siècle. Estampes Originales, 1985, no.3 (as attributed to Aurelio Luini).

4. Anonymous sale, Milan, Finarte, 29 May 1979, lot 23 (as Felice Brusasorci). The drawing was subsequently with the Milanese gallery La Portantina di Mattia Jona, in 2009 (as attributed to Aurelio Luini).

5. Sandrina Bandera and Maria Teresa Fiorio, ed., Bernardino Luini e la pittura del Rinascimento a Milano. Gli affreschi di San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore, Milan, 2000, pp.85-87 and pp.282-83, fig.38.

6. Inv. 976; Giuseppe Cirillo and Giovanni Godi, ‘Ancora a Milano e a Torre Pallavicina – I contatti con Parma’, in Giuseppe Cirillo and Giovanni Godi, Contributi ad Antonio Campi Annali della Biblioteca Statate e Libreria Civica di Cremona, 1975 [1982], p.28.

No.4

Aurelio Luini

1. Paolo Morigia, La nobiltà di Milano, Milan, 1595, p.278.

2. Manuela Kahn-Rossi and Francesco Porzio, ed., Rabisch: Il grottesco nell›arte del Cinquecento. L’Accademia della Val di Blenio, Lomazzo e l’ambiente Milanese, exhibition catalogue, Lugano, 1998, p.295, no.110, and p.340; Giovanni Agosti and Jacopo Stoppa, Bernardino Luini e i suoi figli, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 2014, pp.332-334, no.85.

3. Inv. 5074 (RCIN 905074); A. E. Popham and Johannes Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle, London, 1949, p.242, no.409 (not illustrated). The drawing, which measures 404 x 285 mm., is visible online at https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/4/collection/905074/the-lamentation-at-the-foot-of-the-cross [accessed 24 November 2022].

4. Inv. 548; Ugo Ruggeri, Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia: Disegni lombardi, Milan, 1982, pp.66-67, no.51; Agosti and Stoppa, op.cit., pp.330331, no.84 (entry by Claudio Gulli).

5. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 July 1993, lot 17; Alfonso Miranda Márquez, Seis Siglos de Arte: Cien Grandes Maestros, exhibition catalogue, Mexico City, 2005, p.89, no.66.

6. W. R. Rearick, ‘More Veronese Drawings from the Sagredo Collection’, Master Drawings, Summer 1995, p.132.

No.5

Lodewijk Toeput, called Il pozzoserrato

1. Gerszi, op.cit., p.373.

2. Giorgio Fossaluzza, ‘Per il Pozzoserrato: opera sacre’, in Stefania Mason Rinaldi and Domenico Luciani, ed., Toeput a Treviso: Ludovico Pozzoserrato, Lodewijk Toeput, pittore neerlandese nella civiltà veneta del tardo Cinquecento. Atti del Seminario, Treviso, 6-7 Novembere 1987, Asolo, 1988, p.51, fig.15.

3. Some drawings from the Zatzka collection are illustrated in Leo Planiscig, ‘Handzeichnungen Alter Meister aus der Sammlung des Herrn Stadtrat Ludwig Zatzka – Wien’, Der Cicerone, September 1916, pp.343-354.

4. Eight landscape drawings by Pozzoserrato with the same Gianazei-Zatzka provenance, many of which are stylistically similar to the present sheet, were in the Hugo Sonnenschein collection in Chicago and appeared at auction in London in 1971 (Sonnenschein sale, London, Sotheby’s, 23 March 1971, lots 21 to 27). Drawings by Pozzoserrato with a Zatka provenance are today in the collections of the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, the Fondation Custodia (Lugt Collection) in Paris, the Albertina in Vienna, and elsewhere.

No.6

Giovanni balducci, called Il Cosci

1. Mauro Vincenzo Fontana, ‘Le due teste del papa. Clemente VIII, Alessandro de’ Medici e la renovatio del ciborio lateranense’, Storia dell’arte, 2017, p.58, fig.2; Fontana, op.cit., 2019, p.234, no.A54a, illustrated p.128, fig.32 and p.299, fig.A54a.

2. Inv. 11507 and Inv. 9619, respectively; Fontana, ibid., 2017, pp.62-63, figs.10-11; Fontana, op.cit., 2019, p.296, nos.D108 and D109, the latter illustrated p.297, fig.D109.

3. Douglas N. Dow, Apostolic Iconography and Florentine Confraternities in the Age of Reform, Farnham, 2014, illustrated pl.2 and on the cover; Fontana, op.cit., 2019, p.229, no.A26g (not illustrated).

4. Inv. 589; Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Generalverzeichnis, Vol.I, Vienna, 1992, p.321, Inv. 589; Fontana, op.cit., 2019, p.284, no.D65 (where dated 1585-1590), not illustrated.

5. Inv. 89-13; Edward Olszewski, A Corpus of Drawings in Midwestern Collections: Sixteenth-Century Italian Drawings, Vol.I, Turnhout, 2008, p.14, no.11; Fontana, op.cit., 2019, p.130, no.D130 (where dated 1602-1604), not illustrated.

No.7

Giovanni battista Trotti, called Il Malosso

1. Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie dei professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, Florence, 1845-1847 ed., Vol.II, p.639; quoted in translation in Montreal, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Dessins italiens du XVIIe siècle du Musée des Offices de Florence / Italian XVIIth-Century Drawings from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, exhibition catalogue, 1986, p.38, under no.6.

2. Giovanni Battista Zaist, Notizie istoriche dei pittori, scultori ed architetti cremonesi, Cremona, 1774, Vol.II, p.44; quoted in translation in Montreal, ibid., p.38, under no.6.

3. Mario di Giampaolo, ‘A Drawing by Malosso at Oxford and Some Additions to his Oeuvre’, Master Drawings, Spring 1977, p.28.

4. Gaetano Panazza and Camillo Boselli, Pitture in Brescia dal Duecento all’ Ottocento, exhibition catalogue, Brescia, 1946, pp.150-151, no.149 (not illustrated); Luciano Anelli, Le chiese di Manerbio, Brescia, 1983, pp.92-95.

5. Tanzi, op.cit., p.84, fig.5.

6. Nostro Signore con la sua santissima Madre sedenti sopra un altare in due bellissime sedie, a’ piedi de’ quali vedesi il padre San Francesco genuflesso

con il cielo aperto e chori d’angeli che sonano e cantano, dove il santo padre riceve da Nostro Signore l’ordine del’indulgenza plenaria per il secondo giorno d’agosto, il cui disegno è dell’istesso Malosso ma il colorito è di Bartolomeo Bresiano detto il Manzino suo allievo...’; Giuseppe Bresciani, La virtù ravvivata de’ Cremonesi insigni nella pittura, architettura, scultura ed mathematiche, MS, 1665, Cremona, Biblioteca Statale; ed. R. Barbisotti, Bergamo, 1976, p.41.

7. ‘…in questo quadro pur anco vi si scorge chiaro il carattere del Malosso, e da certi, che far vogliono da Saccenti, non leggendovisi verun nome, è battezzato per vera Dipintura di esso. Ma al certo ei non è di tal nobilissimo Autore…Un tale dipinto patisce di gran durezza, ancorché sia tolto da un bellissimo, da me veduto, assai morbido e pastoso disegno, che sta ora riposto in un segreto cantuccio…’; Zaist, op.cit., p.38.

8. Salvatore Spinelli, La Ca’ Granda 1456-1956, Milan, 1958, pp.36-37; Milan, Galleria Rossella Gilli, op.cit., under no.32; Bocchi and Bocchi, op.cit., illustrated in colour fig.6.

No.8

Andrea Lilio

1. ‘Questo foglio è una delle più belle aggiunte recenti al catalogo del’artista…’; Pulini, op.cit., p.200, under no.10.

2. Ancona, Pinacoteca Civica Francesco Podesti, Andrea Lilli nella pittura delle Marche tra Cinquecento e Seicento, exhibition catalogue, 1985, pp.64-65, no.6, figs.6a-6d; Pulini, op.cit., pp.158-159, no.59. figs.59a-59d, and illustrated in colour pp.84-85. The painting is signed and dated IO[HANNES] AND[REAS] LILIUS ANCONIT[ANUS] 159(8), although the last digit has also been read as a 7

3. Ancona, ibid., fig.6d; Pulini, op.cit., p.159, fig.59d, and illustrated in colour pp.84-85.

4. Pulini, op.cit., pp.158-159, no.59a. fig.59a, and illustrated in colour p.83.

5. Inv. RF 44312; Catherine Monbeig Goguel, ‘Alphabet pour Roseline: Dessins italiens peu connus ou redécouverts (XVe – XVIIIe siècles)’, in Maria Teresa Caracciolo, ed., Hommage au Dessin: Mélanges offerts à Roseline Bacou, Rimini, 1996, p.112, fig.10, illustrated pp.98 and 132, and also in colour in the cover; Pulini, op.cit., pp.200-201, no.13, fig.13, and illustrated in colour p.92.

6. Ancona, op.cit., pp.65-66, no.7, and also illustrated in colour in the cover; Pulini, op.cit., pp.162-164, no.71, fig.71, and illustrated in colour p.93.

7. Di Giampaolo reprinted in Garofalo, ed., op.cit., p.301, fig.2.

8. Inv. 1-188; Ger Luitjen and A. W. F. M. Meij, From Pisanello to Cézanne: Master Drawings from the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, exhibition catalogue, New York, Fort Worth and Cleveland, 1990-1991, pp.193-195, no.70; Nancy Ward Neilson, ‘By and about Andrea Lilli’, in Gianni Carlo Sciolla, ed., Nuove ricerche in margina alla mostra: Da Leonardo a Rembrandt, Disegni della Biblioteca Reale di Torino. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Moncalieri, 1991, p.191, figs.3-4; Pulini, op.cit., pp.197-199, no.7, fig.7, and illustrated in colour p.80.

9. Inv. 99.GB.50; London, Yvonne Tan Bunzl, Old Master Drawings, 1984, no.13; Luitjen and Meij, ibid., p.195, under no.70, fig.d; Di Giampaolo reprinted in Garofalo, ed., op.cit., p.301, fig.3; Munich, Katrin Bellinger Kunsthandel, Italian Drawings 1500-1800, 1999, unpaginated, no.11; Pulini, op.cit., pp.203-205, no.17, fig.17, and illustrated in colour p.82; Katrin Bellinger, Master Drawings 1985-2005, London, 2005, pp.52-53, no.23.

10. Pulini, op.cit., pp.211-212, no.32, fig.32; Benito Navarrete Prieto and Gonzalo Redín Michaus, ed., Disegni spagnoli e italiani del Cinquecento della Biblioteca Nacional de España, Rome, 2020, pp.286-287, no.85.

11. Inv. I 22; Bert W. Meijer, The Famous Italian Drawings at the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, Cinisello Balsamo, 1984, unpaginated, no.44; Ancona, op.cit., p.96, no.29; Pulini, op.cit., pp.200-201, no.9, fig.9.

12. Inv. FD 1575; Ancona, op.cit., pp.93-94, no.27; Pulini, op.cit., pp.204-205, no.20, fig.20.

No.9 Daniele Crespi

1. Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750, Part III: Late Baroque and Rococo 1675-1750, New Haven and London, 1958, [1999 ed.], p.69.

2. Clario di Fabio, ‘Daniele Crespi’ [book review], The Burlington Magazine, November 1999, pp.687-688.

3. Inv. 218; Milan, Palazzo Reale, Il Seicento Lombardo: Catalogo dei dipinti e delle sculture, exhibition catalogue, 1973, p.52, no.130, pl.146; Nancy Ward Nielson, Daniele Crespi, Soncino, 1996, p.35, no.16, p.176, fig.49; Andrea Czére. ‘Two Newly Identified Drawings by Daniele Crespi’, in Zsuzsanna Dobos, ed., Ex Fumo Lucem: Baroque Studies in Honor of Klára Garas, Budapest, 1999, p.135, fig.4; Andrea Spiriti, ‘Daniele Crespi: la conquista del classicismo’, in Andrea Spiriti, ed., Daniele Crespi: un grande pittore del Seicento lombardo, exhibition catalogue, Busto Arsizio, 2006, p.46, fig.32.

4. Ward Nielson, ibid., p.67, no.A2, p.231, fig.86c (as studio of Crespi); Czére, ibid., p.137, fig.8; Andrea Czére, 17th Century Italian Drawings in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts: A Complete Catalogue, Budapest, 2004, p.139, fig.130/a; Spiriti, ed., ibid., pp.204-205, no.7 (as Crespi), where dated 1621.

5. Inv. 50/162 (as Palma Giovane); Czére, op.cit., 1999, p.134, fig.3. The dimensions of the drawing are 317 x 214 mm.

6. Inv. 1892; Ward Nielson, op.cit., p.80, no.D4, p.212, figs.70a-b; Czére, op.cit., 1999, p.137, figs.6-7; Czére, op.cit., 2004, pp.139-140, no.130; Spiriti, ed., op.cit., pp.206-207, no.8 (entry by Andrea Czére).

7. Nancy Ward Nielson, ‘Some Drawings by Daniele Crespi’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1973, p.385.

8. Inv. F 253 inf. n.1127; Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Il Seicento Lombardo: Catalogo dei disegni, libri, stampe, exhibition catalogue, 1973, p.29, no.109, p.115, pl.109; Marco Valsecchi, The Famous Italian Drawings of the Lombard 17th Century in the Ambrosiana, Milan, 1975, p.86, no. XXXIII, illustrated p.47, fig.XXXIII.

9. Inv. F 271 inf. n.103; Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, ibid., p.30, no.112, fig.112; Valsecchi, ibid., unpaginated, no.52.

No.10

bernardo Strozzi

1. Inv. P.R.75; Mortari, op.cit., pp.123-124, no.193, fig.193; Anna Orlando, ‘Genio ed estro. Quadri “da stanza”, nature morte e ritratti di Bernardo Strozzi per la committenza privata’, in Orlando and Sanguineti, ed., op.cit., p.127, fig.47. The dimensions of the painting, which is recorded in the Sala dell’Estate of the Palazzo Rosso in the middle of the 19th century, are 55 x 42 cm.

2. ‘Sicuramente un disegno preparatorio, e di grande qualità, per il dipinto omonimo a Genova…Viene condotto dall’artista al suo massimo compimento con un determinante senso pittorico, come pochi altri disegni di figura singola.’; Mortari, op.cit., p.233, under no.43.

3. Newcome, op.cit., p.21; Mortari, op.cit., pp.230-231, no.31, fig.31; Strasser, op.cit., pp.206-207, no.90; Orlando in Orlando and Sanguineti, ed., op.cit., p.127, fig.46; Sale, London, Christie’s, 2 July 2019, lot 40.

4. Inv. RF 38822; Newcome, op.cit., p.21; Gavazza, Nepi Sciré and Rotondi Terminiello, ed., op.cit., pp.314-315, no.108; Massimo Favilla et al, Le dessin en Italie dans les collections publiques françaises. Venise – l’art de la Serenissima: Dessins des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, exhibition catalogue, Montpellier, 2006-2007, pp.60-63, no.22.

5. Alice Binion, ‘Algarotti’s Sagredo Inventory’, Master Drawings, Winter 1983, p.392.

No.11

Giacomo Cavedone

1. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 1 July 1986, lot 83; Linda Wolk-Simon, Italian Old Master Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz, exhibition catalogue, Gainesville and elsewhere, 1991-1993, pp.72-75, no.18; Horvitz sale (‘The Jeffrey E. Horvitz Collection of Italian Drawings’), New York, Sotheby’s, 23 January 2008, lot 57 (unsold); Anonymous sale, Vienna, Dorotheum, 4 November 2011, lot 65. The drawing is a study for the head of Saint Joseph in Cavedone’s altarpiece of The Adoration of the Magi of 1614, in the Bolognese church of San Paolo Maggiore.

2. See, for example, Inv. nos. 0834, 5248, 5291 and 5268; Otto Kurz, Bolognese Drawings of the XVII & XVIII Centuries in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1955, pp.90-93, nos.95, 119, 124 and 126, pl.18, figs.19 and 20, and pl.22, respectively. The drawing measures 387 x 252 mm. The Windsor drawings were assembled in an album, described in a late 18th century inventory of King George III’s collection as ‘Teste di Cavedone. Although slight yet drawn with great fire and spirit, most as large as life.’

3. Inv. 5278 (RCIN 905278); Kurz, ibid., p.90, no.78 (not illustrated). An image of the drawing, which measures 389 x 252 mm., is visible at https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/37/collection/905278/the-head-of-st-peter [accessed 18 November 2022].

No.12

herman Saftleven

1. J. F. M. Sterck et al, De werken van Wondel, Amsterdam, 1927-1940; Quoted in translation in Jane Shoaf Turner and Robert-Jan te Rijdt, ed., Home and Abroad: Dutch and Flemish Landscape Drawings from the John and Marine van Vlissingen Art Foundation, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam and Paris, 2015-2016, p.90, under no.35a-c.

2. Carolyn Logan, ‘Recording the News: Herman Saftleven’s View of Delft Ater the Explosion of the Gunpowder Arsenal in 1654’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 1996, p.203.

3. Inv. 4726; Wolfgang Schulz, Herman Saftleven 1609-1685: Leben und Werke, Berlin and New York, 1982, p.333, no.775 (not illustrated); Vadim Sadkov, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts: Netherlandish, Flemish and Dutch Drawings of the XVI-XVIII Centuries, Belgian and Dutch Drawings of the XIX-XX Centuries, Amsterdam, 2010, p.229, no.359 (where dated to the late 1640s or 1650s).

4. Inv. P.049; Schulz, ibid., p.330, no.759 (not illustrated). The drawing is visible online at https://www.teylersmuseum.nl/en/collection/art/p-049berglandschap [accessed 13 July 2022].

5. Sale (‘A Channel Island Treasure House: Paintings, Drawings & Watercolours from the Collection of the late John Appleby’), London, Christie’s, 4 November 2010, lot 55

6. Inv. 1836,0911.489; Schulz, op.cit., p.332, no.770 (not illustrated); The drawing is also visible online at https://www.britishmuseum.org/ collection/object/P_1836-0811-489 [accessed 14 November 2022].

7. Visible online at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/216050) [accessed 14 November 2022].

No.13

Gregorio de Ferrari

1. Piero Boccardo and Franco Boggero, ‘Patronage and Artistic Production from Rubens to Magnasco’, in Jonathan Bober, Piero Boccardo and Franco Boggero, A Superb Baroque: Art in Genoa 1600-1750, exhibition catalogue, Washington and Rome, 2020-2021, p.39.

2. Ibid., p.254, under nos.82-84.

3. Franco Boggero, ‘Una pala di Gregorio de Ferrari per la chiesa degli Agostiniani a Pieve di Teco’, Bollettino d’arte, 2007. The painting was included in the recent exhibition Onde barocche: Capolavori diocesani tra 1600 e 1750, held at the Museo Diocesano in Albenga and the Oratorio della Ripa in Pieve di Teco between April 2022 and January 2023.

4. Newcome Schleier, op.cit., p.118, no.93.

5. Inv. 2120; Ezia Gavazza, ‘Contributo a Gregorio de Ferrari’, Arte antica e moderna, 1963, p.328, fig.132a; Gruitrooy, op.cit., p.427, no.25 (not illustrated); Newcome Schleier, op.cit., pp.178-179, no.D84 (as a studio work).

6. Newcome Schleier, op.cit., p.118, under no.93.

No.14 Giovanni battista piazzetta

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

2. Catherine Whistler, Drawing in Venice: Titian to Canaletto, exhibition catalogue, Oxford, 2015, p.181, under no.92.

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

4. Ugo Ruggeri, ‘The Drawings of Giambattista Piazzetta’, in Giandomenico Romanelli et al, Masterpieces of Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawing, London, 1983, p.73.

5. ‘Le jeune homme est représenté ici sous l’aspect d’un page, avec un beret garni de plumes et une collerette blanche. Il port la main gauche à son cœur comme s’il esquissait une révérence.’; Morassi, op.cit., p.14, under no.2.

6. Binion, op.cit., p.148.

7. Harold Joachim and Suzanne Folds McCullagh, Italian Drawings in the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago and London, 1979, p.72, no.102, pl.111; Alessandro Bettagno et al, G. B. Piazzetta: disegni – incisioni – libri - manoscritti, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1982, pp.32-33, no.44, fig.44; George Knox, Piazzetta: A Tercentenary Exhibition of Drawings, Prints, and Books, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 1983-1984, pp.100101, no.33, illustrated in colour p.6.

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

No.15 Johann Wolfgang baumgartner

1. Antony Griffiths, ‘Johann Wilhelm Baumgartner’ [book review], Print Quarterly, 2014, p.185.

2. Peter Prange, Andrew Robison and Hinrich Sieveking, German Master Drawings from the Wolfgang Ratjen Collection 1580-1900, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 2010, p.95, under no.21.

3. Gode Krämer, ‘Baumgartner, Johann Wolfgang’, in Jane Turner, ed., The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, Vol.3, p.413.

No.16

Anton

Raphael Mengs

1. Giovanni Ludovico Bianconi, Elogio storico del cavaliere Anton Raphael Mengs, con un Catalogo delle opera da esso fatte, Milan, 1780, p.61; Quoted in translation in William Breazeale and Anke Frölich-Schauseil, The Splendor of Germany: Eighteenth-century Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, 2020, p.50, under no.4.

2. Inv. L767; John Sparrow, ‘An Oxford Altar-piece’, The Burlington Magazine, January 1960, p.2, fig.1; Roettgen, op.cit., 1993, p.31, fig.22; Roettgen, op.cit., pp.105-111, no.65, illustrated in colour pl.III. The dimensions of the painting are 300 x 180 cm.

3. As recorded in the College records, on 7 April 1769 it was decided ‘that a Picture, representing the appearance of our Saviour to Mary in the Garden after his resurrection, be procured from the Hands of Mengs, a celebrated Painter now at Madrid, to be put up over the Altar in the Chapel.’; Sparrow, ibid., p.4.

4. Letter from James Byres to the Rev. D. Price, dated 21 September 1771; quoted in Roettgen, ibid. p.106, no.2.

5. Thomas Pelzel, ‘Anton Raphael Mengs and his British Critics’, Studies in Romanticism, Summer 1976, p.415.

6. Inv. 697; Roettgen, op.cit., 1999, pp.108-109, no.65 VZ 2, fig.65 VZ 2.

7. Inv. 4646; Roettgen, op.cit., 1999, p.109, no.65 VZ 4 (not illustrated).

8. Roettgen, op.cit., 1999, p.109, no.65 VZ 3 (not illustrated).

9. Sparrow, op.cit., p.8, fig.6; Roettgen, op.cit., 1993, pp.108-109, no.30; Alex Potts, ‘London, Anton Raphael Mengs’ [exhibition review], The Burlington Magazine, August 1993, p.576, fig.48; Roettgen, op.cit., 1999, p.110, no.66, fig.66.

10. Roettgen, op.cit., 1993, p.108, under no.30.

11. Karl Philipp Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen in England in Jahre 1782; Translated as C. P. Moritz, Travels in England in 1782, 1924 ed., p.155.

12. ‘Don Manuel Salvador Carmona, Grabador de Cámara de S. M. y yerno de Don Antonio Mengs, tiene diferentes obras suyas. Las pintadas son un retrato de perfil del mismo, una Cabeza de la Magdalena…y algunos otros quadritos en pequeño…’; Ponz, op.cit., p.53.

No.17 Gaetano Gandolfi

1. Biagi Maino, op.cit., p.75.

2. Prisco Bagni, I Gandolfi: affreschi dipinti bozzetti disegni, Bologna, 1992, p.674, no.650; Biagi Maino, op.cit., pp.359-360, nos.57 and 59, figs.6772, pl.LXI-LXIV.

3. Biagi Maino, op.cit., pp.359-360, no.59, figs.67-68, pl.LXIV.

4. Anna Maria Ambrosini Massari et al, Disegni Italiani della Biblioteca Nazionale di Rio di Janeiro: La Collezione Costa e Silva, Pesaro, 1995, pp.219220, no.163.

5. Mimi Cazort, Bella Pittura: The Art of the Gandolfi, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa and Little Rock, 1993, p.85, no.67 (where dated c.1768-1770).

6. Inv. 1976-64; Bagni, op.cit., p.261, no.242; Biagi Maino, op.cit., p.58, pl.XXII; Laura Giles, Lia Markey and Claire van Cleave, Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, 2014, p.241, no.44 (where dated c.1768-1769). A related oil sketch of the same composition is in the National Trust collection at Osterley Park in Isleworth, West London.

7. Biagi Maino, op.cit., p.65, pl.XXXVIII.

No.18 Gaetano Gandolfi

1. James Byam Shaw, The Italian Drawings of the Frits Lugt Collection, Paris, 1983, Vol.I, pp.373-374, under no.379.

2. Donatella Biagi Maino, ‘Gaetano Gandolfi’s ‘capricci’ of heads: drawings and engravings’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1994, p.378.

3. Ibid., p.379.

No.19 pietro Antonio Novelli

1. James Byam Shaw and George Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection, Vol.VI: Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, p.74.

2. Catherine Whistler, ‘Domenico Tiepolo & his Contemporaries’, in Jane Martineau and Andrew Robison, ed., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, London and Washington, D.C., 1994-1995, p.357.

No.20

Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny

1. Michael Clarke, Poussin to Seurat: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Scotland, exhibition catalogue, Edinburgh, 2010, p.12, under no.1.

2. 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.56, under no.27.

3. David P. Becker et al, The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas, exhibition catalogue, Baltimore and elsewhere, 2005-2006, p.142, under no.24 (entry by Victor Carlson).

4. ‘B’ [Charles Armitage Brown], ‘Vallombrosa, Camaldoli, and La Verna’, The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, July-December 1825, pp.349-350.

5. Robert Snow, Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, London, 1845, pp.114-116.

No.21

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

1. Christopher Neve, ‘An End in Itself. The Paradox of Ingres’ Drawings’, Country Life, 7 February 1980, pp.354-355.

2. Inv. 276; Vincent Pomarède et al, Ingres 1780-1867, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2006, p.329, no.139.

3. Inv. 2005.186; ‘Recent Acquisitions. A Selection: 2005-2006’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Fall 2006, p.48 (entry by Gary Tinterow); Gary Tinterow et al, Masterpieces of European Painting, 1800-1920, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2007, p.13, no.11.

4. Inv. 20.088; Paris, Petit Palais, Ingres, exhibition catalogue, 1967-1968, pp.320-321, no.249; Patricia Condon et al, Ingres. In Pursuit of Perfection: The Art of J.-A.-D. Ingres, exhibition catalogue, Louisville and Fort Worth, 1983-1984, p.137, fig.4, detail illustrated p.131; Pomarède et al, op.cit., p.330, no.140.

5. Pomarède et al, op.cit., p.228, no.78.

6. Pomarède et al, op.cit., pp.328-329, no.138.

7. Inv. 6144; Louis-Antoine Prat, Le dessin français au XIXe siècle, Paris, 2011, p.190, fig.430 (where dated c.1850).

8. Inv. 867.2512; Paris, Petit Palais, op.cit., pp.192-193, no.132; Georges Vigne, Dessins d’Ingres: Catalogue raisonné des dessins du musée de Montauban, Paris, 1995, pp.86-87, no.407, illustrated in colour pl.407.

9. Inv. 1971-45; Dominique Radrizzani, Dessins français: Collection du Cabinet des dessins du Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, exhibition catalogue, Geneva, 2004-2005, pp.86-87, no.50.

10. Inv. MASP.00059; Condon et al, op.cit., p.206, no.55; Pomarède et al, op.cit., p.326, no.136.

11. inv. 867.2377; Vigne, op.cit., pp.58-59, no.245. The dimensions of the drawing are 231 x 185 mm.

12. Marjorie B. Cohn and Susan L. Siegfried, Ingres: Works by J.-A.-D. Ingres in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge (MA), 1980, p.122, under no.43.

No.22 peter De Wint

1. Alfred W. Rich, Water Colour Painting, London, 1918 [1950 ed.], p.196.

2. Harriet De Wint, A Short Memoir of the Life of Peter DeWint and William Hilton RA, privately published c.1912; Reprinted in John Lord, ed., Peter DeWint 1784-1849: ‘For the common observer of life and nature’, exhibition catalogue, Lincoln, 2007, pp.84-85.

3. Wilton and Lyles, op.cit., p.224.

No.23 Victor hugo

1. ‘ces griffonages sont pour l’intimité et l’indulgence des amis tout proches’; Hugo in a letter to Paul Meurice, dated 6 March 1863.

2. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Lettre à M. le Directeur de la Revue Française sur le Salon de 1859’, Revue Française, 1859, p.524; Quoted in translation in Kevin Salatino, ‘Ego Hugo’, Master Drawings, Winter 2019, p.534.

3. 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.

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

5. ‘La rencontre de ce grand fleuve produisit en lui ce qu’aucun incident de son voyage ne lui avait inspiré jusqu’à ce moment; Le Rhin est le fleuve dont tout le monde parle et que personne n’étudie, que tout le monde visite et que personne ne connaît, qu’on voit en passant et qu’on oublie en courant, que tout regard effleure et qu’aucun esprit n’approfondit. Pourtant ses ruines occupent les imaginations élevées, sa destinée occupe les intelligences sérieuses; et cet admirable fleuve laisse entrevoir à l›œil du poëte comme à l›œil du publiciste, sous la transparence de ses flots, le passé et l›avenir de l›Europe.’; Victor Hugo, Le Rhin: Lettres à un ami, Brussels, 1842.

6. Alfred Barbou, Victor Hugo and his Time, London, 1882, pp.201-202.

7. Pierre Georgel, Drawings by Victor Hugo, exhibition catalogue, London, 1974, unpaginated.

8. Inv. 36043 (Musée Victor Hugo, Villequier Inv. 1694); Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo, Le Rhin: Le voyage de Victor Hugo en 1840, exhibition catalogue, 1985, p.107, no.84. An image of the drawing is also visible online at https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl020037215 [accessed 12 November 2022].

No.24 Carl hummel

1. 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.

2. Ferdinand Gregorovius, The Island of Capri, Boston and New York, 1879, pp.20-21.

3. Anonymous sale, Berlin, Villa Grisebach Auktionen, 29 May 2013, lot 165.

No.25

Théodore Gudin

1. ‘J’avais été marin, j’étais peintre de marine. J’estime que la peinture de marines forme un genre très distinct qui nécessite des études spéciales. Pour peindre la mer, il faut avoir navigué. Ce n’est qu’après avoir mené la vie des gens de mer qu’un peintre de marine apprend son art.’; Théodore Gudin, Souvenirs du baron Gudin, peintre de la Marine (1820-1870), Paris, 1921, pp.33-34.

No.26 Ludwig Thiersch

1. Camille Martin, ‘Sacred Neo-Byzantine Decorative Arts and European Philhellenism during the nineteenth century, regarding the work of Ludwig Thiersch’, Encyclopédie d’histoire numérique de l’Europe [online], 22 June 2020; https://ehne.fr/en/node/12252 [accessed 26 November 2022].

2. Inv. 2015.54.1; Frankfurt, H. W. Fichter Kunsthandel, Gezeichnete Kunst: Im Klang der Linie, 2014, pp.60-61. The drawing, which measures 435 x 325 mm, is also visible online at https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.169188.html#inscription [accessed 26 November 2022].

No.27

henri-Joseph harpignies

1. Frank Rutter, ‘Henri Harpignies’, in London, Leicester Galleries, Catalogue of an Exhibition of 85 Water-Colour Drawings by Henri Harpignies, 1905, p.8.

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

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

No.28

Gustave Doré

1. Amelia B. Edwards, ‘Gustave Doré: Personal Recollections of the Artist and his Works’, The Art Journal, November 1883, p.339.

2. Blanche Roosevelt, Life and Reminiscences of Gustave Doré, London, 1885, p.416.

3. ‘Paul Gustave Doré’, Harper’s Weekly, 3 February 1883, p.68.

4. Joanna Richardson, Gustave Doré: A Biography, London, 1980, p.128.

5. Blanchard Jerrold, Life of Gustave Doré, London, 1891, pp.337-338.

No.29

Sir Edward burne-Jones

1. John Christian, ‘The Compulsive Draughtsman’, in John Christian, Elisa Korb and Tessa Sidey, Hidden Burne-Jones: Works on paper by Edward Burne-Jones from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, exhibition catalogue, 2007, p.7.

2. W. Graham Robertson, Time Was, London, 1931, pp.83-84.

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

4. Inv. 63.0369; Christopher Wood, Burne-Jones. The Life and Works of Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1883-1898), London, 1998, illustrated p.127; Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Burne-Jones: Intellectual, Designer, People’s Man’, in Alison Smith, ed., Edward Burne-Jones, exhibition catalogue, London, 2018-2019, p.20, fig.6.

5. G. B.-J. [Georgiana Burne-Jones], Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, London, 1904, Vol.II, p.125.

6. Ibid., p.116.

7. Maria Spartali Stillman also posed for the figure of Danaë in Burne-Jones’s painting Danaë and the Tower of Brass of 1888, now in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, and for an unfinished oil portrait of 1880. A similar drawing of Spartari Stillman, preparatory for Danaë and the Tower of Brass, is in the Glasgow Art Gallery (Martin Harrison and Bill Waters, Burne-Jones, London, 1973, p.146, fig.218).

8. Anonymous sale, London, Bonham’s, 14 November 2006, lot 205 (sold for £25,200). The drawing is today in the collection of Jeffrey Gruder KC.

No.30

André Edouard Marty

1. Jean Dulac, Les artistes du livre, Paris, 1930; quoted in translation in London, Julian Hartnoll, Andre E. Marty 1882-1974, exhibition catalogue, 1977, unpaginated.

2. Paul Poiret, My First Fifty Years, London, 1931, p.183.

3. André Marty, ‘A L’Oasis, ou La Voute Pneumatique’, Gazette de Bon Ton, 1921, pl.53; Palmer White, Poiret, London, 1973, illustrated p.148; Yvonne Deslandres, Poiret: Paul Poiret 1879-1944, London, 1987, illustrated p.192. Marty’s watercolour depicts the marquee that was used to shelter the garden from the elements.

4. Paris, Galerie du Luxembourg, op.cit., no.7 (not illustrated); London, Julian Hartnoll, op.cit., no.4 (not illustrated). The dimensions of the signed watercolour are 105 x 270 mm.

No.31

André Edouard Marty

1. Paul Poiret, My First Fifty Years, London, 1931, pp.109-110.

No.32

Mathurin Meheut

1. Gustave Geffroy, ‘Mathurin Méheut’, Art et Décoration, July - December 1913, illustrated p.155.

2. Inv. C 15 41; Morlaix, Musée de Morlaix, and elsewhere, Hommage à Mathurin Meheut, exhibition catalogue, 1982-1983, no.73, illustrated on the cover; Patrick Le Tiec and Anne de Stoop, La Bretagne de Mathurin Meheut, Paris, 2000, illustrated p.21 and on the cover. The dimensions of the work are 319 x 408 mm.

No.33

Austin Osman Spare

1. The World, 29 October 1907; Quoted in Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist, London, 2011, p.47.

2. Evening News, 15 May 1956; Quoted in Baker, ibid., p.257.

3. ‘Obituary. Mr. Austin O. Spare. A Fine Figure Draughtsman’, The Times, 16 May 1956, p.15.

4. Inv. E.32-1997. An image of the drawing, which measures 267 x 205 mm, can be viewed online at https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O79290/ self-portrait-drawing-spare-austin-osman/ [accessed 2 October 2022]. The appearance of the artist at around this time is also recorded in a painted self-portrait of 1935 (Robert Ansell, ed., The Exhibition Catalogues of Austin O. Spare, London, 2012, illustrated in colour p.233, fig.81).

No.34

Lucian Freud

1. Private collection, on loan to the National Portrait Gallery in London; William Feaver, Lucian Freud, exhibition catalogue, London, Barcelona and Los Angeles, 2002-2003, no.38; William Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York, 2007, pl.77; Sarah Howgate, Lucian Freud Portraits, exhibition catalogue, London and Fort Worth, 2012, p.76, pl.16; Martin Gayford, Lucian Freud, London, 2018 [2022 ed.], illustrated p.199; Daniel F. Herrmann et al, Lucian Freud: New Perspectives, exhibition catalogue, London, 2022-2023, illustrated p.69, no.19.

2. Gayford, ibid., illustrated p.198.

3. Feaver, op.cit., 2002-2003, no.37; Feaver, op.cit., 2007, pl.76.

4. Nancy Schoenberger, Dangerous Muse: A Life of Caroline Blackwood, London, 2001, p.3.

5. Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist, London, 2013, pp.105-106.

6. Michael Kimmelman, ‘Titled Bohemian: Caroline Blackwood’, The New York Times Magazine, 2 April 1995, p.32.

7. Greig, op.cit., pp.108-109.

8. Schoenberger, op.cit., p.73.

9. Peter Quennell, ed., A Lonely Business: A Self-Portrait of James Pope-Hennessy, London, 1981, pp.88-89.

10. William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud. Vol.I: Youth 1922-68, London, 2019, p.458.

11. Schoenberger, op.cit., p.94.

12. Martin Filler, ‘The Naked and the Id’, Vanity Fair, November 1993, p.167.

13. Steven M. L. Aronson, ‘Sophisticated Lady’, Town & Country, September 1993, p.147.

14. Dawson and Gayford, op.cit., p.339.

15. Dawson and Gayford, op.cit., p.340. 16. Dawson and Gayford, op.cit., p.340.

17. Dawson and Gayford, op.cit., p.340.

No.35

Domenico Gnoli

1. 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.

2. Francesco Bonami, ‘Fleas on Mars’, in New York, Luxembourg & Dayan, Domenico Gnoli: Paintings 1964-1969, exhibition catalogue, 2012, p.12.

No.36

Domenico Gnoli

1. ‘Fantasy in Art. Mr. Dominic Gnoli’s Exhibition’, The Times, 31 January 1957, p.3.

2. L. M. ‘Dominic Gnoli’, Art News and Review, 2 February 1957, p.9.

3. Walter Guadagnini, ‘Domenico Gnoli’, in Walter Guadagnini, ed., Domenico Gnoli, exhibition catalogue, Modena, 2001, illustrated p.10; Barbatti and Lotti, op.cit., p.65, fig.212.

No.37

John Minton

1. Frances Spalding, John Minton: Dance till the Stars Come Down, Aldershot, 1991 [2005 ed.], p.93.

2. Alan Ross, in London, Michael Parkin Gallery, John Minton and Friends, exhibition leaflet, 1997, unpaginated.

3. Michael Middleton, in London, Arts Council Gallery, and elsewhere, John Minton 1917-1957: An Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Illustrations, exhibition catalogue, 1958-1959, p.7.

4. Simon Martin, ‘‘An Expression of Self’: Minton’s Portraits and Objects of Desire’, in Simon Martin and Frances Spalding, John Minton: A Centenary, exhibition catalogue, Chichester, 2017, pp.69 and 75.

5. Anonymous sale, London, Bonham’s, 16 November 2011, lot 13.

6. With Zuleika Gallery, London. An image of the drawing is visible online at https://zuleikagallery.com/artists/371-john-minton/works/3937-johnminton-portrait-of-a-young-man-kevin-maybury/ [accessed 11 August 2022].

7. Spalding, op.cit., pp.219-220.

8. Inv. TO5770; Spalding, op.cit., pl.XXII; Martin and Spalding, op.cit., p.86, fig.89.

No.38

Claudio bravo

1. Edward J. Sullivan, Claudio Bravo: Painter and Draftsman, exhibition catalogue, Madison and elsewhere, 1987-1988, p.4.

2. Paul Bowles and Vargas Llosa, Claudio Bravo: Paintings and Drawings, New York, 1997, p.19.

3. Edward J. Sullivan, Claudio Bravo, New York, 1985, p.42.

4. Ibid., p.89.

Six Drawings by horst Janssen

1. Quoted in Gerhard Schack, in Horst Janssen, Retrospektive. Rückblick auf ein halbes Jahrhundert: Zeichnungen und Druckgraphik von 1945 bis 1995 / Retrospective. Review of half a century: Drawings and Graphics from 1945 to 1995, Hamburg, 2000, p.8.

2. ‘…der größte Zeichner außer Picasso. Aber Picasso ist eine andere Generation.’.

3. ‘Es gibt im Augenblick keinen Besseren als mich…Ich kann nichts dafür, ich habe nur Talent.’; ‘Janssen: Zwei Zentner Talent’, Der Spiegel, 22 December 1965.

4. Schack, in Janssen, op.cit., 2000, p.9.

5. Reinhold Heller, ‘Introduction’, in Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere, Horst Janssen: Drawings 1979-1983, Etchings 1970-1983, exhibition catalogue, 1983-1985, unpaginated.

No.39 horst Janssen

1. Stephanie Buck and Jürgen Müller, ed., Rembrandt’s Mark, exhibition catalogue, Dresden, 2019, p.122 (entry by Mailena Mallach).

2. Horst Janssen, Ergo, Hamburg, 1979-1980, illustrated p.70; Walter Koschatzky, ed., Horst Janssen: Zeichnungen, Munich, 1986, unpaginated, no.9; Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Horst Janssen: The Portrait, exhibition catalogue, 1998-1999, unpaginated, no.57; Claudia Breitkopf-Weinmann et al, Egon Schiele – Horst Janssen: Selbstinszenierung, Eros und Tod, exhibition catalogue, Vienna and Oldenburg, 20042005, p.107, no.8; Ewald Gässler et al, “Mich haben die Götter ungemein mit meinem Gaben.”. Horst Janssen: Die Retrospektive zum 80. Geburtstag, exhibition catalogue, Oldenburg and Regensburg, 2009-2010, p.128, no.39. The dimensions of the drawing are 390 x 520 mm.

3. Horst Janssen, ‘Hamburg 17.2.70’, in London, Marlborough Fine Art, Horst Janssen: Drawings, exhibition catalogue, November 1970, unpaginated.

No.40

Horst Janssen

1. Horst Janssen, Retrospektive. Rückblick auf ein halbes Jahrhundert: Zeichnungen und Druckgraphik von 1945 bis 1995 / Retrospective. Review of half a century: Drawings and Graphics from 1945 to 1995, Hamburg, 2000, p.82.

No.41

Horst Janssen

1. ‘So hat Horst Janssen, wie aus den Briefen zu erfahren ist, Viola geliebt – ‘deine Agilität, deine Verve, deine Heiterkeit + Beweglichkeit’ oder, wie es in einer wunderschönen volksliedhaften Passage heisst: ‘...ich liebe dich / ich liebe dien kleines Gesicht / ich liebe dich / ich liebe dein süsses kleines Gesicht / ich liebe dich / ich liebe deinen Körper /masslos. / JA’ Aber die Kehrseite der Medaille heisst: ‘Du bist in deiner Entwicklung zu jung für mich. Du hast noch kein Verhältnis zu der Schmerzhaftigkeit des Lebens...’ oder…‘Ich liebe dich und es ist für meine Sehnsucht hoffnungslos.’ Fazit: ‘Du bist ein ziemlich harter brocken, den ich sehr lieb habe.’ Dass in dieser Beziehung, in der Janssen, vielleicht zum ersten Mal, nicht nur eine liebende, zärtliche Frau, sondern auch eine würdige Gegenspielerin hat, manchmal natürlich auch die Fetzen fliegen, dass Kampf angesagt ist, Eifersucht und Missverständnisse sich häufen, kann bei dem gleichverteilten Temperament der beiden nicht ausbleiben. Aber es ist auch rührend zu lesen, wie Janssen sich immer wieder bemüht, Viola zu verstehen und zu erziehen, um diese verdammten Missverständnisse auszuräumen und Ordnung zu schaffen, vor allem mit sich selbst, und zu der Heiterkeit zu finden, die er so dringend braucht und die für ihn die Wahrheit bedeutet. Diese Briefe an Viola sind aber nicht nur das ganz persönliche Zeugnis einer Liebe zwischen zwei ausserordentilichen Menschen, sie geben auch Einblick in das Leben eines der grössten Küstler unserer Zeit, in seine Kämpfe gegen sich selbst und seinen maroden Körper, in seine Sehnsüchte und Ängste, die immer wieder um die Kreativität kreisen und das Ende von allem, den Tod, und für die er ebenso wie für seine Freude an einem schönen Morgen die Geliebte braucht zum Zuhören und um gegen alles ‘in Frieden’ zu sein.’; Jutta Siegmund-Schultze, in Janssen, op.cit., p.111.

No.42 Horst Janssen

1. G. Ulrich Grossmann, ‘Horst Janssen – Portraits’, in Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Horst Janssen: The Portrait. A Selection from 1945 to 1994, exhibition catalogue, 1998-1999, unpaginated.

2. Manfred Osten, ‘Horst Janssen: “The Portrait” – or the drawn ego’, in ibid., unpaginated.

3. Two portraits of Viola Rackow are illustrated in Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, op.cit., unpaginated, nos.162-163, and two others in Horst Janssen, Retrospektive. Rückblick auf ein halbes Jahrhundert: Zeichnungen und Druckgraphik von 1945 bis 1995 / Retrospective. Review of half a century: Drawings and Graphics from 1945 to 1995, Hamburg, 2000, pp.106-107, nos.96-97.

No.43

Horst Janssen

1. Reinhold Heller, ‘Introduction’, in Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere, Horst Janssen: Drawings 1979-1983, Etchings 1970-1983, exhibition catalogue, 1983-1985, unpaginated.

No.44 Horst Janssen

1. Horst Janssen, Frauenbildnisse 1947-1988, Hamburg, 1988; Quoted in translation in Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Horst Janssen: The Portrait, exhibition catalogue, 1998-1999, unpaginated.

2. Horst Janssen, ‘Hamburg 17.2.70’, in London, Marlborough Fine Art, Horst Janssen: Drawings, exhibition catalogue, November 1970, unpaginated.

No.45

Lucian Freud

1. Catherine Lampert, Lucian Freud: recent work, exhibition catalogue, London, New York and Madrid, 1993-1994, pl.12; William Feaver, Lucian Freud, exhibition catalogue, London, Barcelona and Los Angeles, 2002-2003, no.95; William Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York, 2007, pl.197; Sarah Howgate, Lucian Freud Portraits, exhibition catalogue, London and Fort Worth, 2012, pp.130-131, pl.62; Martin Gayford, Lucian Freud, London, 2018 [2022 ed.], illustrated pp.362-363; Daniel F. Herrmann et al, Lucian Freud: New Perspectives, exhibition catalogue, London, 2022-2023, pp.160-161, no.59; New York, Christie’s, Visionary: the Paul G. Allen Collection, 9 November 2022, pp.488-493, lot 34 (sold for $86,265,000). The dimensions of the painting are 186 x 198 cm.

2. William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud. Vol.II: Fame 1968-2011, London, 2020, pp.152-153.

3. Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 14 May 1998, lot 33 (sold for $5,832,500).

4. Inv. 432 (1977.75); Marianne Roland Michel, Watteau: An Artist of the Eighteenth Century, London, 1984, p.178, fig.174; Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Pierre Rosenberg, Watteau 1684-1721, exhibition catalogue, Washington, Paris and Berlin, 1984-1985, pp.274-277, no.13; Sarah Howgate, ‘People in Rooms’, in Howgate, op.cit., p.30, fig.21. The painting measures 35 x 31 cm.

5. Grasselli and Rosenberg, ibid., p.276, fig.6; Gayford, op.cit., illustrated p.361 (where dated 1980). The dimensions of the sheet, at 558 x 762 mm., are much larger than those of the original painting by Watteau.

6. Inv. 551 (1982.21); Feaver, op.cit., 2007, pl.195; Gayford, op.cit., illustrated p.359; Herrmann et al, op.cit., p.134, no.48.

7. Feaver, op.cit., 2020, p.149.

8. Feaver, op.cit., 2007, p.28.

9. Lampert, op.cit., p.20.

10. Inv. 2002-020; Lucian Freud, Sebastian Smee and Richard Calvocoressi, Lucian Freud on paper, London, 2008, no.138; William Feaver, ed., Lucian Freud Drawings, exhibition catalogue, London and New York, 2012, no.100. The dimensions of the sheet, which is executed in pen, crayon and ink wash, are 178 x 254 mm.

11. Sebastian Smee, ‘Introduction’, in Freud, Smee and Calvocoressi, ibid., p.15.

12. Nicholas Penny and Robert Flynn Johnson, Lucian Freud: Works on Paper, London, 1988, p.23.

13. Penny and Johnson, ibid., pls.54-56; Freud, Smee and Calvocoressi, op.cit., nos.134-138; Feaver, ed., op.cit., 2012, nos.100-101; Sarah Howgate and Martin Gayford, Lucian Freud’s Sketchbooks, London, 2016, pl.53 (where it is noted that the drawing is from Sketchbook 21). Three other drawings related to Large Interior W11 (after Watteau), of similar dimensions to the present sheet and possibly from the same sketchbook, have appeared at auction in recent years: Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 March 1999, lot 94 (sold for £3,450); Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 24 June 2004, lot 241 (sold for £13,200) and Anonymous sale, New York, Bonham’s, 23 July 2021, lot 45 (sold for $19,062.50).

INDEX OF ARTISTS

BAUMGARTNER, Johann Wolfgang; No.15

BALDUCCI, Giovanni, called Cosci; No.6 BRAVO, Claudio; No.38 BURNE-JONES, Edward; No.29

CARUELLE D’ALIGNY, Théodore; No.20 CAVEDONE, Giacomo; No.11 CIBO, Gherardo; No.1 COSCI, Giovanni Balducci, called; No.6 CRESPI, Daniele; No. 9

DE FERRARI, Gregorio; No.13 DE WINT, Peter; No.22 DORÉ, Gustave; No.28

FREUD, Lucian; Nos.34, 45

GANDOLFI, Gaetano; Nos.17-18 GNOLI, Domenico; Nos.35-36 GUDIN, Théodore; No.25

HARPIGNIES, Henri-Joseph; No.27 HUGO, Victor; No.23 HUMMEL, Carl; No.24

INGRES, Jean-Auguste-Dominique; No.21

JANSSEN, Horst; Nos.39-44

LILIO, Andrea; No.8 LUINI, Aurelio; Nos.3-4

MALOSSO, Giovanni Battista Trorri, called; No.7 MARTY, André Edouard; Nos.30-31 MÉHEUT, Mathurin; No.32 MENGS, Anton Raphael; No.16 MINTON, John; No.37

NOVELLI, Pietro Antonio; No.19

PIAZZETTA, Giovanni Battista; No.14 POZZOSERRATO, Lodewijk Toeput, called; No.5

SAFTLEVEN, Herman; No.12 SPARE, Austin Osman; No.33 STROZZI, Bernardo; No.10

THIERSCH, Ludwig; No.26 TOEPUT Lodewijk, called Pozzoserrato; No.5 TROTTI, Giovani Battista, called Malosso; No.7

VASARI, Giorgio (circle); No.2

Ludwig Thiersch (1825-1909) A Grove of Olive Trees near Tivoli

Back cover: Carl Maria Nicolaus Hummel (1821-1907) View over the South Coast of Capri, Looking towards Monte Solaro No.24

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