Stephen Ongpin Fine Art - Summer 2018 Catalogue

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

Cover: Hubert Robert (1733-1808) The ‘Temple of Jupiter Serapis’ at Pozzuoli No. 17

Franรงois-Auguste Ravier (1814-1895) Landscape with Part of the Aurelian Walls of Rome No. 47

WATTEAU TO GAUGUIN A SELECTION OF 18TH AND 19TH CENTURY FRENCH DRAWINGS

2018

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Three years ago, I produced a catalogue of Italian drawings ranging in date from the beginning of the 16th century to the early 20th century. I am now pleased to present a selection of French drawings of the 18th and 19th centuries, drawn both from the stock of the gallery and from a number of private collections. As is true of many of my catalogues, this is something of an eclectic mix of drawings, with works by a number of celebrated artists alongside many by others less well-known, including several artists familiar mainly to scholars and connoisseurs.

This catalogue includes only a selection of some of the French drawings that we have available, and many others can be found on the gallery’s website.

I am, as ever, especially grateful to my wife Laura for her help, advice, patience and constant support. I am also greatly indebted to my assistant Megan Corcoran for her invaluable assistance in all aspects of preparing this catalogue and exhibition, as well as Alesa Boyle and Pauline David. John Bye, Jamie Parker, Sarah Ricks and Jenny Willings at Healeys printers, together with Andrew Smith, have been stalwart colleagues, particularly with the vital task of colour proofing the images for the catalogue. I would also like to thank the following people for their help and advice in the preparation of this catalogue and the drawings included in it: Kate Agius, Paolo Antonacci, André Bancel, Deborah Bates, Emily Beeny, Julian Brooks, Woody Brock, Camille Brunaux, Francesco Buccella, Glynn Clarkson, Katie Clifford, Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Frank Dabell, Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey, Mark Evans, Cheryl and Gino Franchi, Julie Frouge, Carina Fryklund, Stephen Geiger, Joseph Goldyne, Emeric Hahn, Dean Hearn, Neil Jeffares, Alastair Laing, Olivier Lefeuvre, Laurence Lhinares, Christopher Lloyd, Ottavia Marchitelli, Suz Massen, Laetitia Masson, Chantal Maudit, Emmanuel Moatti, Hal Opperman, Flavia Ormond, Jonathan den Otter, Guy Peppiatt, Benjamin Peronnet, Claude Piening, Louis-Antoine Prat, Sophie Richard, Gregory Rubinstein, Britany Salsbury, Catherine Sawinski, Gerald Stiebel, Todd-White Photography, Hannah Vernon and Joanna Watson.

Stephen Ongpin

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

Unless otherwise noted, paper is white or whitish.

Please note that drawings are sold mounted but not framed.

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

All enquiries should be addressed to Stephen Ongpin or Megan Corcoran at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art Ltd. 6 Mason’s Yard Duke Street St James’s London SW1Y 6BU Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 or [+44] (7710) 328-627 Fax [+44] (20) 7839-1504 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com website: www.stephenongpin.com

WATTEAU TO GAUGUIN FRENCH DRAWINGS 1700 - 1900

PRESENTED BY

STEPHEN ONGPIN

2018

1 LOUIS CHÉRON Paris 1660-1725 London Tobias and the Angel Pen and brown ink and two shades of brown wash, extensively heightened with white, over an underdrawing in black chalk, on blue paper, backed. Framing lines in brown ink.

458 x 584 mm. (18 x 23 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably bequeathed by the artist, together with the rest of the contents of his studio, to Isaac Grassineau; Probably the Chéron studio sale, London, Covent Garden, 26 February – 2 March 1726; Private collection, England; Emmanuel Moatti, Paris and New York, in 2001; Private collection.

EXHIBITED: New York, Emmanuel Moatti, Master Drawings 1600-1900, 2001, no.6.

Born into a Protestant Huguenot family of artists in France, Louis Chéron studied with his father, the enamel painter, miniaturist and engraver Henri Chéron, before entering the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. A student of Charles Le Brun, Chéron won the Prix de Rome twice, in 1676 and 1678, and spent several years at the newly-established Académie de France in Rome. In Rome, he was particularly inspired by the work of Raphael; so much so that he often referred to himself, in later years, as a pupil of Raphael, according to the 18th century collector, connoisseur and biographer Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville. In 1680, Chéron won a first prize at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome with a finished drawing of The Judgement of Solomon. After spending some time in Venice, where he painted a work for the church of San Pantaleone, Chéron returned to France in 1686. There he enjoyed some immediate success, painting two large votive ‘May’ pictures for the cathedral of NotreDame in Paris in 1687 and 1690. He also received a commission for paintings to decorate the salon of the townhouse of his sister, the well-known poet and painter Elisabeth-Sophie Chéron Le Hay, and provided etched illustrations for her Les Psaumes nouvellement mis en vers, published in 1693.

By the early 1690s, however, Chéron had settled in London, escaping the persecution of Protestants that followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685. He may have been encouraged to emigrate to England by one of his patrons, Ralph Montagu, 1st Earl and later 1st Duke of Montagu, who had been the British ambassador to France and was a leading patron of Huguenot artists. By 1693 Chéron was listed as a worshipper in the French Huguenot congregation in the Savoy Chapel in London, and in 1710 he became a British citizen, living and working in Covent Garden until the end of his life.

Some of Chéron’s most significant English commissions were the result of Montagu patronage, notably for ceiling paintings at Boughton House in Northamptonshire and other works at Montagu House in London and Ditton Park in Buckinghamshire. He also produced decorative ceiling paintings for Burghley House in Lincolnshire and Chatsworth in Derbyshire.

In 1709 Chéron was one of five artists asked to submit designs for the decoration of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London; a commission eventually won by James Thornhill. He produced a significant number of cabinet pictures, and also worked extensively as a book illustrator, producing around 130 drawings for illustrations, mainly after 1710. In 1718 Chéron and John Vanderbank, who had both been teachers at Sir Godfrey Kneller’s Great Queen Street Academy, left to establish their own art school, the St. Martin’s Lane Academy. One of the first schools in Europe to employ female as well as male models, the Academy closed in 1724 when Vanderbank was forced to leave the country to avoid his debts. Chéron died the following year in London.

Louis Chéron’s drawings were highly esteemed by his contemporaries. His bold draughtsmanship, rooted in the French academic style, was to prove influential on the younger English artists that he met

and taught in London. As the English antiquary and writer George Vertue noted of Chéron, his work was ‘much immitated by the Young people. & indeed on that account by all other lovers of Art much esteem’d & from thence rais’d his reputation.’ Hundreds of the artist’s drawings were dispersed in two auctions of the contents of his studio after his death, and the sale catalogues divide these into five categories; academic studies, copies after Renaissance masters, drawings in black chalk and grey wash, designs for book illustrations in pen and ink wash, and highly finished studies in pen, ink and gouache, of which the present sheet is a fine example.

A significant number of Chéron’s drawings were purchased at the posthumous sales of his studio by the 10th Earl of Derby, who came to own a large group of them. All but twenty of these are today in the British Museum, which holds the largest extant group of drawings by the artist, amounting to some 125 sheets. Other drawings by Chéron are today in the collections of the Harvard University Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Louvre in Paris, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and in several private collections.

One of Chéron’s finest drawings, this large sheet may be counted among a group of ‘extremely accomplished finished composition sheets or modelli [that] are the most plentiful type of drawing found in his extant oeuvre.’1 As Alvin Clark has noted of such drawings, ‘In all of these sheets on dark tan or blue paper, Chéron uses strong but fluid and rhythmic contours in pen and ink that are amply supplemented with two tones of brown wash and generously heightened with white gouache…The lucidity of these finished studies is indebted to artists like [Charles] Le Brun and those in his circle at the French academies in Paris and Rome, but Chéron’s refinement and color also look forward to such eighteenth-century artists as François Le Moyne and Charles-Antoine Coypel. These are the kinds of drawings that engendered such high praise from Dezallier d’Argenville, who claimed that Chéron had a facility of invention and a level of taste rarely seen among his contemporaries.’2 While the present sheet cannot be related to any surviving painting by the artist, it may be noted that the catalogue of the first of two posthumous auctions of Chéron’s estate in 1726 lists three paintings of this subject3.

2 JEAN-BAPTISTE OUDRY Paris 1686-1755 Beauvais The Annunciation Pen and brown ink and brown wash, extensively heightened with white and yellow gouache, on buff paper. Framing lines in brown ink. Numbered and inscribed 2810 / 313. / Oudrÿ in brown and black ink on the verso.

208 x 160 mm. (8 1/ 8 x 6 1/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Gabriel Huquier, Paris; His sale (‘Catalogue d’un magnifique Cabinet de desseins…Par un fameux Connoisseur & Amateur, Monsieur ***’), Amsterdam, Pierre Yver, 14-26 September 1761, part of lot 2810 (‘Une Anonciation, dessinée de même [Jean-Baptiste Oudry] & par le même.’, bt. Gool for 1 fl.,10 s.); Anonymous sale (‘Collection de Monsieur X…’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Tilorier], 1-2 March 1983, lot 151; Yvonne Tan Bunzl, London; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Hal N. Opperman, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Chicago, 1972; published New York and London, 1977, Vol.I, p.32, note 1, p.243; Vol.II, p.662, no.D166 (as present whereabouts unknown); Hal Opperman, J.-B. Oudry 1686-1755, exhibition catalogue, Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, 1983, p.95, under no.4; Louis-Antoine Prat, Le dessin français au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 2017, p.357.

EXHIBITED: London, Yvonne Tan Bunzl, Old Master Drawings, 1984, no.42; London, Yvonne Tan Bunzl, Master Drawings, 1994, no.33.

‘Jean-Baptiste Oudry is one of the most prolific artists – and without question the most versatile – of the French eighteenth century. Once established he was also one of the most successful of his time.’1 Such is the Oudry scholar Hal Opperman’s succinct description of the artist, who enjoyed a successful career of more than forty years. A pupil of Michel Serre and Nicolas de Largillière, Oudry took classes in drawing at both the Académie Royale and at the Académie de Saint-Luc of the Parisian painter’s guild, where he also later taught. The early part of his career found the artist painting mainly still life subjects and portraits. Admitted into the Académie Royale in 1719, by the following decade Oudry had come close to supplanting Alexandre-François Desportes as the leading painter of animals and hunting scenes.

He began receiving significant royal commissions for paintings of hunts, and in 1725 was granted lodgings in the Tuileries palace. The following year, at the request of Louis XV, he exhibited twenty-six of his paintings – the entire contents of his studio – in the Grands Appartements at Versailles.

In 1726 Oudry was engaged as a designer at the Royal tapestry works at Beauvais, where his masterpiece was a series of huge painted cartoons for the Chasses royales de Louis XV tapestries, eventually woven at the Gobelins, for which he was paid some 52,000 livres over a twelve-year period.

In 1734 he was named director of the Beauvais factory, where he in turn soon employed the young François Boucher as a designer. The last fifteen years of his career saw Oudry paint numerous easel pictures of hunting scenes, dogs, game pieces and still life subjects, many of which were shown at the Salons. In 1743 he was appointed a professor at the Académie, where he had taught since 1739, although he did not seem to have been an inspirational teacher, and his only real pupil of any note was his son, Jacques-Charles Oudry. Apart from the King, Oudry counted among his most significant patrons the Swedish ambassador, Count Carl Gustaf Tessin, and the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

Oudry was a prodigious draughtsman, and drawings were an integral part of his artistic practice. Although the 18th century art historian Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville wrote of him that ‘His finished drawings are all in black chalk, highlighted with white using the brush [and] his studies are also in black chalk, highlighted with white chalk’2, and while it is certainly true that black and white chalks were his favoured medium as a draughtsman, Oudry worked also in pastel, red chalk, brown ink and sepia wash.

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Hal Opperman estimates that the artist produced over three thousand drawings, though many are only known today through descriptions in old auction catalogues. Oudry parted with only a few drawings in his lifetime, and the vast majority of his output as a draughtsman – mainly studies of animals and birds, highly finished landscapes, and book illustrations, all carefully organized into albums – remained in his studio until his death.

An early drawing by the artist, the present sheet is very likely to have come from Oudry’s so-called livre de raison; two albums of wash drawings, begun by the artist in June 1713, which recorded the compositions of all of his finished paintings, as well as many ideas for unexecuted works, over the next five or six years, until around 1718 or 1719. An indispensable record of Oudry’s activity during his earliest years as an independent artist, before his admittance into the Académie, the livre de raison as it survives today is, unfortunately, largely incomplete. More than half of the contents of the two albums, including the present sheet, were removed and sold by the printmaker and publisher Gabriel Huquier, who owned the livre de raison albums after Oudry’s death, long before the remainder were eventually acquired by the Louvre in 1957.

The wash drawings of the livre de raison are characterized by a free and colouristic draughtsmanship, with a wide ink border and an extensive inscription by the artist in the lower margin identifying the subject or sitter, date and size of the related painting. (Many of the loose drawings thought to have come from the two livre de raison albums, however, have had their inscriptions and borders trimmed away.) Oudry is known to have painted only a handful of paintings of religious subjects, all in the earliest years of his career, and almost none of these survives. The present sheet may therefore record a lost, or perhaps never-executed, painting by the artist.

Two stylistically comparable early drawings of religious subjects by Oudry, both also from the livre de raison, are an Adoration of the Magi (fig.1) in the collection of the Courtauld Gallery in London3, which is a study for an altarpiece of c.1717 in the church of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, near Paris, and a drawing of The Judgement of Solomon in the Louvre4, for which no related painting is known. The Courtauld and Louvre drawings, as well as the present sheet, were among just seven drawings of religious subjects, out of a total of some eighty sheets, that were removed by Huquier from Oudry’s livre de raison albums within a few years of the artist’s death and were sold at auction in 1761.

A formidable connoisseur of drawings and prints, the eminent 18th century French printmaker, publisher, art dealer and collector Gabriel Huquier (1695-1772) assembled one of the largest collections of Oudry’s drawings and published several series of prints after them.

1.

3 JEAN-ANTOINE WATTEAU Valenciennes 1684-1721 Nogent-sur-Marne Studies of a Woman Spurning a Man’s Advances and a Woman Leaning Back Black chalk, graphite and red chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk, and traces of grey wash, on buff paper.

160 x 143 mm. (6 1/ 4 x 5 5/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Contat-Desfontaines collection, Paris; Raoul Dastrac, Paris, by 19571; Mme. Roland Lacroix, née Hélène Ryaux; Private collection, France; Anonymous sale (‘Six Drawings by Antoine Watteau from a French Private Collection’), London, Christie’s, 6 July 1999, lot 165; Katrin Bellinger, Munich and London; Acquired from her in 2007 by Saretta Barnet, New York.

LITERATURE: K. T. Parker and Jacques Mathey, Antoine Watteau: Catalogue complet de son oeuvre dessiné, Paris, 1957, Vol. II, p.310, no.553, fig.553; Gérard Bauer, Dessins français du dix-huitième siècle: La figure humaine, Paris, 1959, pl.14; Marianne Roland Michel, Watteau: An Artist of the Eighteenth Century, London, 1984, p.136, illustrated in colour p.143, pl.XXIX; Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, Antoine Watteau: Catalogue raisonné des dessins, Milan, 1996, Vol.II, pp.924-925, no.546; ‘Six Drawings by Antoine Watteau from a French Private Collection (Lots 165-170). Watteau and his Collectors’, in London, Christie’s, Old Master Drawings, 6 July 1999, p.159; Katherine Baetjer, ed., Watteau, Music, and Theater, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2009, pp.76-77, no.27 (entry by Perrin Stein).

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Cailleux, Le dessin français de Watteau à Prudhon, 1951, no.163; Paris, Galerie Cailleux, Watteau et sa génération, 1968, no.58; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Watteau, Music, and Theater, 2009, no.27.

Born in the northern French city of Valenciennes, Jean-Antoine Watteau arrived in Paris around 1702, and there studied with Claude Gillot and, later, Claude III Audran. Gillot’s particular influence is seen in some of Watteau’s earliest works, which depicted scenes from the commedia dell’arte; a popular feature of street life in Paris. In 1709, at the age of twenty-five, he won a second prize in the Prix de Rome competition at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Perhaps disappointed with losing the chance to study in Italy, Watteau returned to his native Valenciennes for a year. After his return to Paris, accompanied by his pupil Jean-Baptiste Pater, he was provisionally received (agrée) into the Académie in 1712, and was invited to submit a painting as his reception piece. This morceau de réception, however, was not presented to the Academy for another five years, with the result that Watteau was only admitted (reçu) as a full Academician in 1717, with his painting The Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera. He was, in fact, admitted as a painter of fêtes galantes; a genre created by the Académie especially for him. By this time Watteau was already quite successful, and counted among his patrons and supporters Count Carl Gustaf Tessin and the Duc d’Arenberg, as well as Pierre Crozat, whose superb collection of Old Master drawings he was able to study at length. In 1719 he spent a year in England, where he painted two works for the physician and collector Richard Mead, and on his return to France in 1720 lived for some time with the art dealer Edmé-François Gersaint. Already in poor health after his return from London, he died the following year.

Despite having a relatively brief career as an independent artist before his death at the age of thirty-seven, Watteau was an immensely prolific and gifted draughtsman; indeed, perhaps the greatest of his generation. His friend and executor Gersaint claimed that Watteau preferred drawing to painting, and the artist filled albums and sketchbooks with figure studies, landscapes and copies after old masters, to be kept for later reference and used in painted compositions. As such it is often difficult to date Watteau’s figure drawings, which were often reused over several years for different paintings. He seems only rarely to have produced drawings specifically as studies for paintings, however. It has been suggested

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that Watteau produced somewhere between two and four thousand drawings during his brief career, of which slightly less than seven hundred sheets have survived to this day.

In an oft-quoted extract from his early account of the life and practice of artist, Watteau’s friend the Comte de Caylus said of him that ‘The exercise of drawing had infinite charms for him and although sometimes the figure on which he happened to be at work was not a study undertaken with any particular purpose in view, he had the greatest imaginable difficulty in tearing himself away from it. I must insist that in general he drew without a purpose. For he never made an oil sketch or noted down an idea, however slight or summary, for any of his pictures. It was his habit to do his drawings in a bound book, so that he always had a large number of them that were readily available. He possessed cavalier’s and comedian’s costumes in which he dressed up such persons as he could find, of either sex, who were capable of posing adequately, and whom he drew in such attitudes as nature dictated and with a ready preference for those that were the most simple. When he took his fancy to paint a picture, he resorted to his collection of studies, choosing such figures as suited him for the moment. These he usually grouped so as to accord with such a landscape background that he had already conceived or prepared. He rarely used them in any other way.’2 Watteau worked primarily in red chalk and, for more complex figure or head studies, in a distinctive technique aux trois crayons; using red, black and white chalks to achieve superb chromatic effects. As the 18th century Parisian amateur and collector Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville noted of Watteau, ‘there are many drawings in black or red chalk or lead or sanguine which he used for heads, hands and flesh; sometimes all three chalks were used together; or else he used pastel, oil colours, gouache; in fact, he combined all the techniques necessary except pen to achieve the effect he wanted.’3 As has been noted, Watteau appears to have kept almost all of his drawings in albums, referring to them constantly in the course of composing his paintings, and allowing only a handful to leave his studio during his lifetime. Within a decade or two of his death, however, his drawings were to become as highly regarded among collectors and connoisseurs as his paintings, if not more so. Dezallier d’Argenville, whose collection included more than twenty drawings by the artist, noted that ‘the freedom of the hand, the lightness of touch, a subtlety in the profiles of heads and the drawing of hair, the expressiveness of the figures and compositions, the pervasive feeling of these drawings, are in collectors’ eyes unmistakably characteristic of Watteau.’4 Watteau’s fame and influence as a draughtsman was further enhanced by the publication, a few years after his death, of over three hundred of his drawings, which were reproduced as prints for the Figures de différents caractères, de paysages et d’études dessinées d’aprés nature, par Antoine Watteau…tirées des plus beaux cabinets de Paris, published by the amateur Jean de Jullienne in two volumes between 1726 and 1728. As Gersaint, writing in 1744, noted of Watteau, ‘In the drawings of his best period...there is nothing superior to them in their kind; subtlety, grace, lightness, correctness, facility, expression, there is no quality that one might wish for which they lack, and he will always be considered as one of the greatest and best draughtsmen that France has ever produced.’5 Although none of the three figures in this drawing can be related to any known painting by Watteau, it nevertheless stands as a supreme example of the artist’s draughtsmanship at its very best. The artist’s masterful use of the distinctive trois crayons technique of black, red and white chalk, together with graphite, is here applied in different combinations in each of the figures, resulting in remarkable effects.

Moreover, the rapidly sketched, sinuous figure of the man, drawn in red chalk, must rank among the most striking characters to be found in all of Watteau’s oeuvre as a draughtsman. As Perrin Stein, on the occasion of this drawing’s inclusion in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2009, noted, ‘The intuitive mastery of red, black, and white chalk that Watteau had achieved by about 1715 is fully evident in this lively sheet of studies. The woman on the left is drawn almost entirely in red chalk, with quick additions and revisions in black. The artist focused on the silky sheen of her skirt and the volume conveyed by the crisp folds. The man seeking to embrace her is drawn in extraordinary shorthand. He appears almost as a ghost, details of costume suppressed in favour of fluid contours expressing movement.

The figure of the woman to the right exploits the painterly potential of the chalk in a completely different way.

Her clothing is drawn mostly in black chalk, her head and hands in red. Touches of white pull out highlights on her collar and sleeve, while stripes on her hem are added in red.’6

With the figures seen slightly from below, it has been suggested that this drawing may represent commedia dell’arte actors on a stage. The dresses are akin to those worn by actors and dancers of the day, and the woman at right appears to be executing a ballet movement. As Margaret Morgan Grasselli has pointed out, ‘The theater was a prime source of inspiration for Watteau throughout his career...he sometimes painted scenes from known plays, but more often he blurred the line between the stage and his painted “real” world by including easily recognizable stage characters…in scenes of love and wooing that resemble in many ways his fêtes galantes.’7 This drawing has been dated to c.1718 by Grasselli and Marianne Roland Michel, while Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat prefer a slightly earlier date of around 1717. In their 1996 catalogue raisonné of Watteau’s drawings, Rosenberg and Prat noted in particular of the present sheet ‘the extraordinary freedom of the silhouette of the gallant embracing the woman at the left. This figure is entirely drawn in red chalk, with a repetition of her bodice in black chalk, as an overdrawing, while the other young woman is treated in roughly the opposite manner. The beauty of the mise en page, and the balance between the figures, is quite remarkable.’8 Rosenberg and Prat further relate the present sheet stylistically to a study of three women in red chalk (fig.1) in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin9, which they suggest may have been drawn at the same time and perhaps even during the same session.

As Martin Eidelberg has justly noted of Watteau’s figure drawings, ‘Beyond the elegance of posture and costumes are the deeper emotions of his figures. However we interpret their mood, as happy or nostalgic, it must be said they are intensely alive, physically and spiritually. One is attracted by their wit and vivacity, by the sense of the fleeting moment of their existence.’10 And, as Stein has written of the present sheet, ‘Like many of Watteau’s figure studies, the emphasis here is on neither anatomy nor costume but on the shades of social nuance present in the gestures and body language. The two halves of the sheet do not share a unified space but create a mise-en-page of simultaneous balance and tension. Although the figures were not used in any known painting, their expressiveness, with sparkling execution and palpable sense of movement, evokes the amorous mood and elegance of a fête galante.’11

1.

4 NICOLAS DELOBEL Paris 1693-1763 Paris A View of the Tiber Island and the Pons Cestius, with the Church of San Bartolomeo all’Isola, Rome Pen and brown ink and brown and grey wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk, extensively heightened with white, on blue paper. Inscribed, dated and signed faite le 30 Septembre 1729 (5 or 7?) / vue de la pointe del[‘ile?] d’ / que [?] pont [?] delobel(?) in brown ink and black chalk at the lower left.

241 x 391 mm. (9 1/2 x 15v 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Marquis Philippe de Chennevières, Paris and Bellesme (Lugt 2073); Probably his posthumous sale (‘Collection de Feu le marquis de Chennevières’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 4-7 April 1900; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Ader Picard Tajan], 7 June 1989, lot 93 (as Etienne Jeaurat); Katrin Bellinger Kunsthandel, Munich, in 1990; Flavia Ormond, London, in 2001; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Louis-Antoine Prat and Laurence Lhinares, La collection Chennevières: Quatre siècles de dessins français, Paris, 2007, pp.608-609, no.336 (as Etienne Jeaurat, location unknown); Louis-Antoine Prat, Le dessin français au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 2017, p.400 (incorrectly as Etienne Jeaurat).

EXHIBITED: London, Katrin Bellinger Kunsthandel at Harari and Johns, Meisterzeichnungen / Master Drawings 1500-1900, 1990, no.34 (as Etienne Jeaurat); New York, Flavia Ormond Fine Arts at Adelson Galleries, Master Drawings 1550-1890, 2001, no.15.

A history painter, portraitist and genre painter, Nicolas Delobel was a pupil of Louis de Boullongne, and won the second prize in the Prix de Rome competition in 1717. In 1723 he was selected, alongside Charles-Joseph Natoire and Edme Bouchardon, to be a pensionnaire at the Académie de France in Rome, then under the direction of Nicolas Vlueghels, who was to be a particular influence on the young artist. Among his fellow pupils were François Boucher and Etienne Jeaurat, as well as Bouchardon and Natoire. While in Rome, Delobel produced copies after Italian masters and a group of splendid landscape drawings of views of Rome and the surrounding countryside, probably inspired by Vlueghels, who once described himself, in a letter sent from Rome, as ‘amoureux des belles veües de ce pays’. Vlueghels made landscape studies and sketches en plein-air and encouraged his pupils to do the same; indeed, both Natoire and Jeaurat produced similar landscape drawings while studying in Rome.

Delobel returned to France in 1730 and was agrée at the Académie Royale two years later, becoming a full Academician in 1734. He exhibited at the Salons between 1737 and 1753, making his debut with a sketch for a Royal commission, an allegorical painting of The Reunion of Lorraine and France. Named a peintre ordinaire du roi, he also worked at Versailles. However, only a handful of paintings by Delobel are known today. Many of the works sent by him to the annual Salons have been lost, as has the painting of Hercules Between Virtue and Vice which served as the artist’s morceau de réception to the Académie in 1734. An altarpiece of The Marriage of Saint Cecilia is in the Parisian church of Saint-Eustache, while other paintings of religious subjects are in churches in Beauvais, Dammartin-en-Goële and Montreuil.

Mythological and allegorical paintings by Delobel are today in the Musée Malraux in Le Havre and the Musée Lorrain in Nancy, as well as the Pavillon de Aurore in the Parc de Sceaux.

Indistinctly signed by the artist and dated 1729 (although the date can also be read as 1725 or 1727), the present sheet is among the earliest views of Rome by a pensionnaire at the Académie de France. The drawing depicts the small boat-shaped island in middle of the Tiber river, dominated by the 17th century church of San Bartolomeo all’Isola, seen from downstream. In the centre is the 12th century bell tower of the church and, just to the right, the fortified Torre Caetani, dating from the 10th century. At the left of the composition is the Pons Cestius, the ancient stone bridge linking the Tiber Island to Trastevere in

the western part of the city; the bridge was reconstructed and widened in the late 19th century. The large tower in the foreground at the upper right of the composition, which no longer exists today, sat above an old water mill on the right bank of the Tiber.

Delobel also made a drawing of the opposite view, looking downstream from the southern end of the Tiber Island towards the Temple of Hercules Victor and the campanile of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Dated 1728 and inscribed ‘Vüe dedans le cloîstre de St. Barthelemy’, the drawing (fig.1) is today in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam1. A stylistically similar drawing on blue paper depicting houses on the banks of the Tiber opposite the church of San Bartolomeo all’Isola, which appeared at auction in 2010 with an attribution to Etienne Jeaurat, may also in fact be by Delobel2.

(The present sheet was, until recently, similarly misattributed to Jeaurat.)

Other Italianate landscape drawings by Delobel include a View of the Domus Augustiana on the Palatine, Rome, dated 1724, formerly in the collection of Pierre-Jean Mariette and today in the Louvre3, an undated View of the Ruins of the Ancient Baths in Rome in the Horvitz Collection in Boston4, and a View of Houses and Temples on a Hill in Rome, formerly in the collections of John Barnard and Denys Sutton and sold at auction in New York in 20055. A drawing in watercolour and gouache of The Falls at Tivoli, formerly in the Paul Oppé collection, was recently sold at auction in London and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York6.

Although only a handful of landscape drawings by Nicolas Delobel are known today, he must have produced a significant number of such works. This is further evidenced by the fact that a group of around thirty-four drawings by Delobel of views in Rome, Tivoli and Caprarola were in the collection of the 18th century sculptor Philippe Cayeux and were dispersed at auction in Paris in 1769.

The present sheet was once part of the remarkable collection of over 3,600 French drawings, dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries, assembled by the art historian Charles-Philippe, Marquis de Chennevières-Pointel (1820-1899), who served as a curator at the Louvre between 1846 and 1870, and later as director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

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5 JEAN-BAPTISTE PATER Valenciennes 1695-1736 Paris A Reclining Man, Seen from Behind Red chalk. Made up at the upper right corner. Numbered 204 [partly cut off] in brown ink at the lower left. A French customs stamp on the reverse of the old mount. A printed label of the Parisian framer and mounter Maurice Hauet on the old backing board.

107 x 173 mm. (4 1/ 4 x 6 3/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Part of an album of drawings, mostly by Jean-Baptiste Pater, possibly the same as that sold anonymously in Douai, 7 July 1772, lot 32 (‘Desseins reliés. 500 Desseins au Crayon rouge en 157. feuilles, par Watteau et Pater’); Camille Groult, Paris; By descent to his son, Jean Groult, Paris; Emmanuel Alfred Beurdeley, Paris (Lugt 421); His sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 13-15 March 1905, part of lot 277 (as Watteau: ‘Études de Mezzetins…L’un presque couché, vu de dos, accoudé à terre, une main appuyée sur le genou droit. L’autre, assis, vu de dos, la tête retournée de profil à gauche, un bras tendu.

Deux dessins à la sanguine. Haut., 11 cent.; larg., l’un 17 cent, l’autre 19 cent. Cadre en bois sculpté.’); Anonymous sale, Paris, Galerie Charpentier, 1-2 April 1954, lot 7; Jacques Bacri, Paris; Thence by descent until 2017.

LITERATURE: ‘Liste des catalogues de ventes consultés où figurent des dessins de Watteau (XVIIIe-XXe siècles)’, in Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, Antoine Watteau: Catalogue raisonné des dessins, Milan, 1996, Vol.II, p.1459.

A native of Valenciennes, like Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Pater spent a brief period as a youthful apprentice in Watteau’s studio in Paris. He apparently found the master’s temperament too difficult, however, and eventually decided to return to Valenciennes. Pater was back in Paris in 1718, and there enjoyed a modestly successful career as a painter of fête galantes of the type made popular by Watteau, with elegant figures in gardens or pastoral settings. He was reconciled with Watteau in 1721, shortly before the elder artist’s death, and spent the last month of the master’s life working closely with him; a brief period which, Pater later claimed, taught him all that he knew. After Watteau’s death, Pater is thought to have been tasked with completing some of his unfinished paintings. He also inherited commissions from several of Watteau’s major patrons, notably Jean de Jullienne, Jean-Baptiste Glucq and Frederick the Great, King of Prussia. Continuing the tradition of the fête galante, Pater was agrée at the Académie Royale in 1725 and reçu as a peintre des sujets modernes three years later, in 1728, with a painting of Soldiers Merrymaking now in the Louvre; one of only three dated canvases by the artist.

Although he painted a few portraits and several military scenes, most of his work was in the form of fêtes galantes; indeed, during his lifetime Pater was sometimes regarded as the equal of Watteau in this genre.

He was granted one Royal commission, in 1736, for a painting for Versailles. Like Watteau, Pater had only a brief career before his death at the age of forty-one.

Eleven years younger than Watteau, Pater was his only documented pupil, and his familiarity with the master’s drawings is readily evident in his own draughtsmanship. Although his style is indebted to that of Watteau, unlike him Pater drew almost exclusively in red chalk, sometimes with added touches of white heightening. Perrin Stein has noted that ‘In contrast to Watteau’s differentiated textures and sensitivity to underlying form, Pater’s drawings cultivate the decorative potential of the chalk stroke, using a shorthand of short, jabbing marks and wiggly lines to exaggerate effects of vibration and shimmer. Like Watteau, he appears to have had little use for the compositional sketch. Pater’s surviving drawings are almost invariably red chalk studies of single figures – drawings that were apparently retained and reused, judging from the frequent recurrence of certain figures and poses in Pater’s painted oeuvre.’1 As Margaret Morgan Grasselli has pointed out, however, ‘Like Watteau, Pater often made drawings with no particular composition in mind, but kept them for possible use in later works. Many of them appear not to have been used in his extant corpus of paintings.’2

actual size

The present sheet can be identified as a study for the reclining male figure that appears at the centre right foreground of one of Pater’s finest works, the large painting The Dance (fig.1) of c.17253. The painting was one of a group of fête galante canvases acquired by Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, for his palace of Sanssoucci at Potsdam, near Berlin, where it remains today as part of the Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten4. A smaller variant of The Dance by Pater, which includes the same figure near the right edge of the composition, is in the Worcester Art Museum5.

The number 204 at the bottom left of the present sheet indicates that it was once part of an album of over five hundred drawings – the majority by Pater, but also including drawings by Watteau and Claude III Audran – assembled in the second half of the 18th century. It became known as the ‘Groult Album’ after it entered the collection of the industrialist Camille Groult (1837-1908), whose impressive collection of paintings, drawings and tapestries then passed to his son, Jean Groult (1868-1951). A portion of the contents of the Groult Album, amounting to around a hundred sheets, were acquired by the Louvre in 1998.

This drawing by Pater, however, appears to have been removed fom the Groult Album much earlier, since it is recorded in the exceptional collection of 18th and 19th century French prints and drawings belonging to the Parisian antiquaire Alfred II Beurdeley (1847-1919). The present sheet was part of a group of over three hundred 18th century French drawings – including significant works by François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Nicolas Lancret, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Hubert Robert, Augustin and Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Louis-Roland Trinquesse and Antoine Watteau – which were sold from the Beurdeley collection at auction in Paris in 1905.

At the time of the 1905 Beurdeley sale, the present sheet was thought to be by Watteau, and was sold together with a related red chalk drawing of a reclining man6, also at the time attributed to Watteau but in fact by Pater. Stylistically akin to the present sheet, this second drawing from the Beurdeley collection7 is a study for a figure in a painting by Pater of c.1720-1725 at Sanssoucci. A similar red chalk drawing of a reclining man seen from behind, which appeared at auction in 19718, has been tentatively related to the Worcester version of The Dance. Among other comparable drawings by Pater is a red chalk study of two seated men, also at one time part of the Groult Album, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen9.

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6 JEAN-BAPTISTE OUDRY Paris 1686-1755 Beauvais Belphegor, A Tale by Machiavelli: Roderic and Honnesta Brush and black ink and grey wash, heightened with white, within a simulated mount drawn in blue and grey wash with pen and brown ink, on blue paper. Signed and dated JB. Oudry / 1734 in brown ink at the lower left. Inscribed 133. tom.2 in brown ink on the verso.

239 x 188 mm. (9 3/ 8 x 7 3/ 8 in.) [image] 307 x 259 mm. (12 1/ 8 x 10 1/ 4 in.) [with fictive mount] PROVENANCE: Sold by the artist, together with all of his drawings illustrating the Fables of La Fontaine, to Jean-Louis Regnard de Montenault, in c.1751; Included in one of two albums containing all of Oudry’s drawings for the Fables of La Fontaine, with the booksellers Jean-Jacques and Marie-Jacques de Bure (Frères de Bure), Paris, by 1828; Jean-Jacques de Bure, Paris; His sale, Paris, 1-18 December 1853, lot 344 (bt. Thibaudeau for 1,800 francs); Comte Adolphe-Narcisse Thibaudeau, Paris; Possibly given by him to the actress Mme. Eugénie Doche, and then sold by her for 2,500 francs to the bookseller Auguste Fontaine, Paris; Acquired from them for 5,000 francs in 1856 by Solar Aaron Euryale, known as Félix Solar, Bordeaux; His sale, Paris, Charles Pillet, 19 November – 8 December 1860, lot 627 (sold for 6,100 francs to Cléder for Baron Taylor); Baron Isidore Taylor, Paris; Émile Pereire, Paris; The booksellers Damascène Morgand and Charles Fatout (Morgand et Fatout), Paris, probably by 1876; Acquired from them for 30,000 francs by Louis Roederer, Reims, by 1877; By descent to his nephew, Léon Olry-Roederer, Reims and Paris; Sold through Thomas Agnew and Sons, London, to Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, Philadelphia, in 1922; The Rosenbach Company, Philadelphia; Acquired from them by Raphael Esmerian, New York, in c.1946; His sale, Paris, Palais Galliera [Ader Picard Tajan], 6 June 1973, part of lot 46 (two albums sold for 2,000,000 francs); One album with Art Associates Partnership (Dr. Claus Virch), New York and Bermuda, by whom the album disbound and the drawings contained therein – including the present drawings – thence sold separately; Private collection, Geneva; Adrian Ward-Jackson, London; Kate de Rothschild, London, and Didier Aaron Inc., New York, in 1993; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Louis Gougenot, ‘Jean-Baptiste Oudry’, Mémoires inédits sur les artistes français, 1854, Vol.II, pp.379-380; Baron Roger Portalis, Les dessinateurs d’illustrations au dix-huitième siècle, Paris, 1877, Vol.II, pp.483-489; Bulletin de la Librarie Morgand et Fatout, Vol.I, 1876-1878, no.2904; Jean Locquin, ‘Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre de Jean-Baptiste Oudry, peintre du roi (1686–1755)’, Archives de l’art français, 1912, pp.152-173, nos.933-1209 (these drawings p.173, nos.1206-1208); Marquis de Girardin, ‘L’édition des fables dite d’Oudry de La Fontaine’, Bulletin du bibliophile et du bibliothécaire, 1913, pp.330-332; Roger Gaucheron, ‘La preparation et le lancement d’un livre de luxe au XVIIIe siècle.

Les Fables de La Fontaine, dites d’Oudry’, Arts et métiers graphiques, December 1927, pp.77-82; Hal N. Opperman, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Ph.D dissertation, University of Chicago, 1972 (pub. New York and London, 1977), Vol.II, p.710, nos.D492-D494.

EXHIBITED: New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, Fables from Aesop to Thurber, 1965 (as part of an album); New York, Paris and London, Kate de Rothschild and Didier Aaron at Didier Aaron, Inc., Master Drawings, 1993, part of no.15.

ENGRAVED: By Louis-Simon Lempereur for Jean de La Fontaine, Fables choisies, mises en vers, Vol.IV, Paris, 1759.

Between 1729 and 1734, Jean-Baptiste Oudry produced a total of 276 superb, highly finished drawings, including a frontispiece, which illustrated 245 tales from the famous 17th century work by Jean de La Fontaine, the Fables choisies mises en vers (Selected Fables Rendered in Verse). Each scene was drawn with the brush with black ink and grey wash, heightened with white gouache, on sheets of blue paper, with each image surrounded with a wide border brushed on the same sheet in a darker shade of blue, acting

as a fictive mount. The drawings, all made over this five-year period (with the exception of the frontispiece, which is dated 1752), ‘form a remarkably coherent group, all closely similar in size, technique, and presentation’1, and have long been among the artist’s most famous works. Indeed, this complete set of illustrations to the Fables, as the Oudry scholar Hal Opperman has noted, ‘have done more to establish the image of Oudry that has come across the years, than any others of his productions.’2 Nearly all of the drawings are signed and dated, and, to judge from the dates on them, the artist seems to have made the drawings in order, in the sequence that they appear in La Fontaine’s Fables.

The present sheet is one of four illustrations by Oudry depicting the story of Belphegor, presented as the 27th fable of Book XII of La Fontaine’s Fables. (The tale is derived from the 16th century novella Belfagor arcidiavolo by Niccolò Macchiavelli, written between 1518 and 1527 and published in 1549.)

As Opperman has noted, ‘This is a rather complex tale, not easy to illustrate in all its twists and turns. While the first and fourth drawings conform to events in a conventional narrative way, the middle two are of necessity less straightforward. Oudry did the best he could…The first scene sets the stage. At his court in Hell, Satan conducts a sort of poll of the damned, asking what it was that brought about their doom. A great majority assign the blame to their spouses. Hoping to capitalize on this finding to steer an even greater number of future souls to Hell, Satan and his council designate one of their number, the fallen angel Belphegor, as an envoy to the world, where he is charged to find a spouse, gain direct experience of matrimony, and bring back an explanation of why it is such an effective channel to perdition. This is the moment depicted in the first drawing.’3 The initial drawing by Oudry in the sequence of four Belphegor episodes (fig.1), which shared the same provenance as the present group of three drawings until 2002, is today in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles4.

The present sheet, the second in the sequence, continues the story. As Opperman writes, ‘The second scene characterizes the first phase of Belphegor’s embassy without directly depicting any particular event in La Fontaine’s poem. Belphegor, in the guise of a wealthy gentleman named Roderic, has settled in Florence where he is taken up in society and soon becomes a sought-after candidate for marriage. Above all the other eligible maidens he courts Honnesta, who plays hard to get and whose wily father exacts a munificent bride price. His manipulative, quarrelsome, newly-won bride and her family reduce him quickly to abject misery. The second drawing shows the domineering Honnesta and the hapless, rueful Roderic.’5

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7 JEAN-BAPTISTE OUDRY Paris 1686-1755 Beauvais Belphegor, A Tale by Machiavelli: Roderic and Matheo Brush and black ink and grey wash, heightened with white, within a simulated mount drawn in dark blue and grey wash with pen and brown ink, on blue paper. Signed and dated JB. Oudry / 1734 in brown ink at the lower right. Inscribed 134. tom.2 in brown ink on the verso.

242 x 189 mm. (9 1/ 2 x 7 3/ 8 in.) [image] 313 x 259 mm. (11 7/ 8 x 10 1/ 4 in.) [with fictive mount] PROVENANCE, LITERATURE, EXHIBITED: as No.6.

ENGRAVED: By Louis-Simon Lempereur for Jean de La Fontaine, Fables choisies, mises en vers, Vol.IV, Paris, 1759.

The present sheet – the third in the sequence – continues the story of the demon Belphegor, as described by Opperman: ‘Bankrupt, Roderic takes flight into the countryside, with his wife’s family and his creditors close behind. He manages to elude his pursuers long enough to convince Matheo, a farmer he encounters, to help him escape into hiding. Roderic’s negotiations with Matheo are the subject of the third drawing. In fulfillment of the bargain they reach, the spirit of Belphegor quits the body of Roderic (who now disappears from the tale) and takes possession of three young women in succession. Each time, Matheo appears, exorcises the evil spirit (the compliant Belphegor), and receives substantial rewards from the fathers.

Three times was the agreed-to limit. However, Belphegor’s ten-year assignment has not expired, and he opts to take refuge in the body of a fourth young woman – the daughter of the King of Naples – and bide the remainder of his term there.’1 Oudry’s most ambitious undertaking as a draughtsman, the project to illustrate the Fables of La Fontaine seems not to have been a commission, but instead was done on the artist’s own initiative. (His early biographer, the Abbé Louis Gougenot, noted that he worked on the drawings in the evenings.) It has been assumed that Oudry would have intended this series of drawings for the Fables to be engraved for publication, but this would have been a very expensive undertaking. Perhaps for this reason, around 1751 Oudry sold the complete set of his drawings for La Fontaine’s Fables to the amateur and collector Jean-Louis Regnard de Montenault, who decided to have them reproduced as prints and published as an illustrated book. Since Oudry’s drawings were thought to be too free in execution to be used as models by the engravers, Montenault commissioned Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Younger to make copies of each of Oudry’s drawings in a more linear style, and it was Cochin’s drawings that were used by the large team of engravers who worked on the project. Montenault’s celebrated edition of the Fables was published in four lavish volumes between 1755 and 1760. Although Oudry lived to see the first volume of Montenault’s Fables published in February 1755, he died two months later, and never saw the completed work.

As Hal Opperman has pointed out, ‘It must be said that the confrontation of Oudry’s originals with the prints very much betrays the intermediary of Cochin…the La Fontaine illustrations, more than anything else, created and sustained posterity’s idea of the scope and the intrinsic qualities of Oudry’s art. But this judgment was based on the prints, not the drawings, which had almost never been seen: in fact, not one of them was even reproduced (in the modern sense) prior to the sale [of the two albums of drawings] in 1973.’2

8 JEAN-BAPTISTE OUDRY Paris 1686-1755 Beauvais Belphegor, A Tale by Machiavelli: Matheo Before the King of Naples Brush and black ink and grey wash, heightened with white, within a simulated mount drawn in blue and grey wash with pen and brown ink, on blue paper. Signed and dated JB. Oudry / 1734 in brown ink at the lower left. Inscribed 135. tom.2 in brown ink on the verso.

239 x 187 mm. (9 3/ 8 x 7 3/ 8 in.) [image] 309 x 255 mm. (12 1/ 8 x 10 in.) [with fictive mount] PROVENANCE, LITERATURE, EXHIBITED: as No.6.

ENGRAVED: By Bênoit-Louis Prevost for Jean de La Fontaine, Fables choisies, mises en vers, Vol.IV, Paris, 1759.

This final drawing of the Belphegor story sees the charlatan Matheo attempting to drive out the demon Belphegor from the possessed body of the daughter of the King of Naples. As Hal Opperman describes the scene, ‘By now Matheo has gained notoriety for his success as an exorcist of evil spirits. The king summons him and offers bags of money to drive out the demon from his daughter. Matheo, knowing that his powers are no longer effective without the complicity of Belphegor, tries to beg off, but the king gives him no way out: free his daughter from possession, or face the gibbet. Matheo makes a show of calling out the demon, but fails. As the king orders him seized and led off to his fate, Matheo requests a drumbeat accompaniment. The drum resounds, Belphegor’s spirit is terrified. Matheo recounts to the demon that Honnesta has found him, and the drumming is the sound of her arrival to claim him back. Filled with apprehension at the prospect, Belphegor flees the body of the young woman and returns directly to his infinitely preferable existence in Hell. In his fourth drawing, Oudry effectively captures the crux of the resolution of the tale.’1 The 275 original drawings by Jean-Baptiste Oudry for the Fables of La Fontaine, together with a later frontispiece, were bound together in two albums of dark blue calf, which remained intact and passed through several notable private collections – successively those of Jean-Jacques de Bure (1765-1853), Comte Adolphe-Narcisse Thibaudeau (1795-1856), Félix Solar (1811-1870), Baron Isidore Taylor (1789-1879), Émile Pereire (1800-1875), Louis Roederer (1846-1880), Léon Olry-Roederer (d.1932), Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach (1876-1952) and Raphael Esmerian (1903-1976) – until they were sold at auction in 1973. One of the volumes, containing illustrations from Books I to VI of the Fables, was eventually acquired by the British Rail Pension Fund and was sold again at auction in 19962. The second volume, illustrating episodes from Books VII to XII, was broken up in 1973 and the drawings it contained, including these three sheets, were dispersed. Several of the drawings from this second album are now in public collections, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.

Oudry’s skill as a draughtsman is readily evident in many of the drawings for the Fables, which display a very effective use of white heightening against the deep blue of the paper. Having remained in albums for over two hundred years, these three drawings by Oudry for the Fables of La Fontaine have remained in remarkable condition.

9 JACQUES DUMONT, called DUMONT LE ROMAIN Paris 1701-1781 Paris Studies of the Head of a Bearded Man and a Helmet Red chalk.

406 x 260 mm. (16 x 10 1/ 4 in.)

The son of a sculptor and the brother of an architect, Jacques (or Jean) Dumont first studied with the landscape painter Antoine Lebel. He seems to have received his nickname of ‘Dumont le Romain’ from the fact that, as a young art student, he is said to have walked from Paris to Rome, where he completed his studies over the next few years. During his five years in Rome he made drawings after the Antique as well as copies of paintings by such Italian artists as Benedetto Luti. Three years after his return to France in 1725, Dumont was received into the Académie Royale, having submitted as his reception piece a painting of Hercules and Omphale that is today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours. He exhibited at the Salons between 1737 and 1761, and taught at the Académie for many years, serving as professor and rector before eventually being named honorary director of the institution in 1768.

Apparently a man of somewhat difficult temperament, Dumont was also briefly the first governor of the Ecole des Elèves Protégés in 1748, before being replaced after a few months by Carle Vanloo.

Dumont worked as a history painter of Biblical subjects and mythological scenes, and also painted genre subjects and portraits. Among his significant public commissions were a painting of The Meeting of Saint Francis de Paul and Louis IX at the Château of Plessis-les-Tours for the church of the Pères Minimes in Paris in 1730, and a large allegorical canvas of The Signing of the Peace Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, painted in 1761 for the Hôtel de Ville in Paris and today in the Musée Carnavalet. In 1748 Dumont painted a series of overdoors of allegorical subjects for the Château de la Muette, today in the Louvre, and in 1752 he designed a set of tapestries on the theme of Samson for the Gobelins manufactory; a project that was eventually abandoned, although at least two preparatory drawings survive. Dumont only rarely exhibited his work, however. Several years after the artist’s death, the engraver, collector and biographer J.-B.-D. Lempereur wrote somewhat disparagingly of him that ‘This artist was lacking in imagination; he could only compose with the help of prints…His drawing was mannered although fairly correct; he had some skill with the brush and a sort of colour. In spite of that, his paintings are affected by his lack of facility, and by the aversion that he felt all his life for work.’1 Perhaps partly as a result of such criticism, Dumont’s relatively small oeuvre as a painter and draughtsman remains little studied today, by comparison with many of his contemporaries.

As a draughtsman, Dumont displayed a distinct preference for red chalk, and produced several drawn copies after the work of Italian masters, as well as nude academies, studies of heads, and a handful of decorative designs. Drawings by the artist are in the collections of the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Louvre in Paris, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Goethe-Nationalmuseum in Weimar, and elsewhere.

While this fine drawing cannot be definitively related to any surviving painting by Dumont le Romain, it may be noted that the soldier’s helmet at the bottom of the sheet is similar to a feathered helmet, also depicted from underneath and on its side, in the foregound of the artist’s large painting of Mucius Scaevola before Porsena of 1747, today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie in Besançon2. Chantal Maudit has also pointed out that the way in which the head is drawn in the present sheet, and in particular the tufts of hair at the top and front of the head, is characteristic of Dumont, and is also seen for example in the head of Hercules in a large red chalk drawing in the Horvitz Collection in Boston3.

10a JACQUES DUMONT, called DUMONT LE ROMAIN Paris 1701-1781 Paris Design for a Trophy: La Marine Red chalk, with framing lines in brown ink. All four corners of the sheet cut.

328 x 122 mm. (12 7/ 8 x 4 3/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly Edward C. Moore, New York; His(?) sale, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hôtel des Ventes [Aguttes], 12 December 2005, part of lot 17; W. M. Brady and Co., New York; Private collection.

ENGRAVED: In reverse by Jacques-François Blondel for the Livre de nouveaux trophées inventez par J. Dumont le Romain, Paris, c.1736.

This and the following drawing (No.10b) are preparatory studies by Jacques Dumont le Romain for engravings included as part of a set of seven plates and a title page, illustrating a total of twelve models for trophies, published by Gabriel Huquier under the title Livre de nouveaux trophées inventez par J. Dumont le Romain peintre ordinaire du Roi in c.1736. All the plates were engraved by Jacques-François Blondel after designs in red chalk by Dumont, apart from the title page, which was drawn by Gilles-Marie Oppenord. The present sheet is a preparatory study for the left-hand image on plate 6 (fig.1) of the Livre de nouveaux trophées inventez par J. Dumont le Romain.

As Peter Fuhring has noted of these designs for trophies, ‘Dumont le Romain adopted the thematic choices of Renaissance engravers such as Enea Vico, who were influenced by the rediscovery of the trophies of Antiquity. He successively represented motifs taken from the fine arts, music, the religious domain, Roman antiquity, navigation, Ottoman art, arms and armour – thus proposing a great variety of models which became very fashionable at that time.’1 Four other preparatory drawings by Dumont le Romain for this set of engravings are known, all in red chalk and closely comparable to this pair of drawings. A red chalk design for a trophy of musical instruments, signed and dated 1736 (fig.2), is in the collection of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris2, while another similar drawing of a trophy with attributes of the arts, also signed and dated 1736, is in the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin3. Two further drawings of trophies by Dumont for the Livre de nouveaux trophées, formerly in the Beurdeley collection, are today in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg4.

1.

2.

10b JACQUES DUMONT, called DUMONT LE ROMAIN Paris 1701-1781 Paris Design for a Trophy: Les Arms Ottomans Red chalk, with framing lines in brown ink. All four corners of the sheet cut.

327 x 122 mm. (12 7/ 8 x 4 3/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly Edward C. Moore, New York1; His(?) sale, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hôtel des Ventes [Aguttes], 12 December 2005, part of lot 17; W. M. Brady and Co., New York; Private collection.

ENGRAVED: In reverse by Jacques-François Blondel for the Livre de nouveaux trophées inventez par J. Dumont le Romain, Paris, c.1736, pl.6.

This drawing is a preparatory study for the right-hand image on plate 6 (fig.1) of the Livre de nouveaux trophées inventez par J. Dumont le Romain.

Dumont le Romain’s designs for trophies and decorations represents a still little-studied aspect of his drawn oeuvre. Nevertheless, as the scholar Peter Fuhring has recently pointed out, ‘Dumont shows himself more inventive in his projects for trophies, which are rare and little known today.’2 Fuhring further notes that the first half of the 18th century in France saw several artists create designs for trophies, including the sculptor François-Antoine Vassé, the painter and decorator Christophe Huet and the decorator and ornamental designer Alexis Peyrotte. Apart from the series of trophy designs by Dumont le Romain of c.1736, the printmaker and publisher Gabriel Huquier also issued two other sets of engravings of trophy designs the same year, based on designs by the sculptor René Charpentier.

The present pair of drawings for trophies by Dumont le Romain are each very likely to have originally been signed and dated by the artist in red chalk at the lower left and right corners, as is seen in the related drawings in Paris and Berlin, but these would have been lost when the corners of the sheets were cut.

A copy of the present sheet by an anonymous 18th century artist appears on the verso of a pen and ink drawing of a design for an altar, formerly in the Lodewijk Houthakker collection in Amsterdam3.

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11 FRANÇOIS BOUCHER Paris 1703-1770 Paris Autumn: Three Putti with a Basket of Grapes Red chalk. Inscribed Boucher in pencil on the verso. Further inscribed for W.P.A 31/3 50. M Dund(?) 35 in brown ink on the verso.

174 x 234 mm. (6 7/ 8 x 9n 1/ 4 in.)

Watermark: Pro Patria.

PROVENANCE: Gabriel Huquier, Paris; His sale, Paris, rue des Mathurins [Joullain], 9 November – 4 December 1772, part of lot 374 (‘Les quatres Saisons, idem; elles ont aussi été gravées par la Ruë & portent 6 pouc. 10 lig. de haut sur 9 pouc. 3 lig. de large.’, bt. Chariot for 94 livres, 1 sou); Madame R. Blay; Her sale (‘Collection de Mme R. Blay’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Lair Dubreuil], 4 July 1929, lot 14 (as School of Boucher); Private collection.

LITERATURE: L. Soullié and Ch. Masson, ‘Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint et dessiné de François Boucher’, in André Michel, François Boucher, Paris, 1906, p.55, no.1004.

ENGRAVED: In reverse by Louis-Félix de La Rue. A pupil of the painter François Lemoyne and the engraver Jean-François Cars, François Boucher won the Prix de Rome in 1723, but was unable to take up the scholarship in Italy due to a lack of space at the Académie de France in Rome. Obliged to remain in Paris, he received his first significant commission from the tapestry manufacturer and collector Jean de Jullienne in the early 1720s, when he was tasked with producing engravings after numerous drawings by Antoine Watteau for Jullienne’s illustrated compendium of the master’s works, the Figures de differents caractères…par Antoine Watteau. The considerable and lifelong influence of Watteau’s drawings on the young Boucher, who was to engrave around a third of the 351 plates of drawings in the Figures de differents caractères between 1723 and 1727, has led one scholar to note that ‘Watteau, after his death, became Boucher’s most important teacher.’1 Indeed, it has been suggested that Boucher may have assisted Watteau’s pupil Jean-Baptiste Pater in completing some of the master’s unfinished paintings.

Boucher eventually went to Rome at his own expense in 1728, lodging at the Académie de France and returning to Paris around 1731. Received into the Académie Royale in 1734, he soon earned a number of significant commissions. The favourite painter of Louis XV’s mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour, Boucher painted decorations for Versailles, Fontainebleau, Marly and elsewhere, as well as several private homes in Paris. He painted numerous easel pictures – pastoral landscapes, religious and mythological subjects, genre scenes, chinoiseries and portraits – and designed cartoons for the Gobelins tapestry manufactory, where he succeeded Jean-Baptiste Oudry as surinspector. He also provided designs for Sèvres porcelain and produced a large number of drawings for prints. In 1765 he was named premier peintre du roi, or First Painter to the King, and also succeeded Carle Vanloo as director of the Académie. By the end of his career, however, Boucher’s style had become somewhat obsolete, and had largely fallen out of favour. Among his pupils were Jean-Baptiste Deshays and Pierre-Antoine Baudouin – both of whom became his sons-in-law – as well as Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Nicolas-Guy Brenet and Gabriel de Saint-Aubin.

A gifted draughtsman, François Boucher was as prolific as he was talented, and claimed to have produced ten thousand drawings over a career of some fifty years. His drawings were greatly admired in his lifetime, and while many were preparatory studies for his paintings, many others were produced as

finished works of art, to be sold to collectors or reproduced by engravers. Indeed, Boucher’s popularity as a draughtsman owes much to the fact that a considerable number of his drawings were reproduced and widely distributed in the form of prints.

A fine and fresh example of Boucher’s draughtsmanship, the present sheet treats a favourite theme found throughout the artist’s oeuvre as a painter. As the Boucher scholar Regina Slatkin has written, ‘Babies and children are ever present in Boucher’s work, as they undoubtedly were in his real life, for he had three children of his own, and several young apprentices. He drew and painted them innumerable times – babies asleep and awake, playful, shy, sulking, tumbling about or nestling against their mothers. They were the winged cherubs in his Adorations, the amoretti in his mythologies, the genii in his allegories…Boucher’s sujets d’enfants proved so popular that no less than five Livres des groups d’enfants were engraved.’2 This charming red chalk drawing is preparatory study by Boucher for Autumn (fig.1)3, one of a series of etchings of the Four Seasons by Louis Félix de La Rue, all after drawings by Boucher, that were published

by Gabriel Huquier, a leading print publisher and collector in Paris in the 18th century. Datable to after 1745, the four etchings are among a series of various prints of putti after designs by Boucher, issued by Huquier in the form of cahiers, or sets. The preparatory drawings by Boucher for these prints, including the present sheet, all belonged to Huquier and were sold at auction following his death in 1772.

The present sheet appears to be the only extant preparatory drawing for the Four Seasons. A stylistically comparable red chalk drawing of Two Putti with Doves by Boucher was formerly in the collection of Max Loeb in Paris4, while a counterproof of the Loeb drawing appears on the verso of a similar drawing of Two Putti in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva5. The seated putto in the foreground of this drawing is repeated in reverse – and thus likely based on the related etching of Autumn – in an overdoor painting of An Allegory of Autumn (fig.2) by Boucher and his workshop, signed and dated 1753, formerly in the Edmond de Rothschild collection in Geneva and today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York6.

As Margaret Morgan Grasselli has noted, ‘No other eighteenth-century artist…depicted children so frequently and to such varying effect: to parody adult activities; to allegorize the seasons, the time of day, the four elements, and the arts; to enliven, observe, attend, and comment on mythological or historical events; or simply to show them being children.’7

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12 FRANÇOIS BOUCHER Paris 1703-1770 Paris Neptune Rescuing Amymone Black chalk, with stumping, and white chalk on blue paper faded to buff, with framing lines in brown ink.

Oval. Laid down on an 18th century French mount, with the blind stamp of the mountmaker JeanBaptiste Glomy (Lugt 1085, showing his full surname) applied twice, once near the lower right corner of the mount and again in the centre, just below the bottom of the oval composition. Inscribed F. Boucher in brown ink near the lower right corner of the mount.

278 x 375 mm. (11 x 14 3/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Abel-François Poisson de Vandières, Marquis de Marigny et de Menars, Paris; His posthumous sale, Paris, Place des Victoires, Hôtel de Menars [Basan & Joullain], 18 March 1782 onwards, part of lot 289 (‘L’Aurore & Céphale, & la Colere de Neptune. Ces deux morceaux sont aux crayons noir & blanc, sur papier bleu.’, both sold framed for 91,2 livres); Veil-Picard collection, Paris; Anonymous sale, Paris, Artcurial, 19 June 2007, part of lot 21; Wildenstein, New York.

LITERATURE: L. Soullié and Ch. Masson, ‘Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint et dessiné de François Boucher’, in André Michel, François Boucher, Paris, 1906, p.31, no.533 (as Neptune, Colère de); Alexandre Ananoff, L’oeuvre dessiné de François Boucher (1703-1770), Paris, 1966, Vol.I, p.239, no.920 (as La Colère de Neptune); Alexandre Ananoff and Daniel Wildenstein, François Boucher, Lausanne and Paris, 1976, Vol.II, p.161, no.483/1, fig.1363; Alexandre Ananoff and Daniel Wildenstein, L’opera completa di François Boucher, Milan, 1980, p.127, under no.509; Edith Appleton Standen, European PostMedieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985, Vol.I, pp.393-394, under no.57.

‘Boucher is the artist par excellence of the French Rococo, in which a perceptive wit, a sense of elegance and a conscious feeling for style were combined with a fluent imagination; this was art designed for a sophisticated audience, for an urban and country society.’1 One of the leading painters in France between the 1730s and the 1760s, François Boucher was also one the most prolific French draughtsmen of the eighteenth century. As one modern scholar has noted of the artist, ‘Every medium served him: pen, pencil, watercolor, chalk, especially his favorite trois crayons, bistre wash, india ink, grisaille, and often a combination of several of these. No subject was too lofty or too humble to engage his attention. Whether he drew from life or from his fertile imagination…Boucher’s masterly touch is always present, always unmistakeable.’2 The artist’s drawn oeuvre includes all manner of subjects, including pastoral scenes, nudes, religious, historical and mythological subjects, book illustrations, chinoiseries, landscapes, nudes, genre scenes, studies of children and heads, as well as designs for tapestries, porcelain and fountains. He produced many finished drawings as independent works, often adapting and elaborating a head or figure from one of his paintings. A large number of Boucher’s drawings were finished works for collectors and the art market, and many were engraved and reproduced in considerable numbers – often making use of new printmaking techniques that allowed chalk drawings to be reproduced with a high degree of verisimilitude – by such printmakers as Louis-Marin Bonnet, Gilles Demarteau or Gabriel Huquier.

The present sheet is closely related to a painting by Boucher of Neptune Rescuing Amymone (fig.1), signed and dated 1764 and today in the collection of the Château of Versailles3. The Versailles painting was one of a set of four large oval canvases painted by Boucher in 1763 and 1764, as models for tapestries. Two upright oval paintings – depicting Aurora and Cephalus, signed and dated 1763, and Vertumnus and Pomona, dated the following year – are today in the Louvre, while a pair of transverse or horizontal oval compositions – of Venus at the Forge of Vulcan and Neptune Rescuing Amymone, the latter dated 1764 – are at Versailles4.

These four paintings by Boucher were in turn used for the central medallions of a set of tapestries ordered in 1763 from the Gobelins manufactory by George William, 6th Earl of Coventry, for a room in his country seat at Croome Court in Worcestershire. Commissioned by the Earl of Coventry from the master weaver Jacques Neilson, the head of the Gobelins workshop, these tapestries depicted simulated paintings of subjects from Ovid’s Metamorphoses hung upon imitation crimson damask grounds. The tapestries, symbolizing the four Elements, comprised two upright ovals of Aurora and Cephalus and Vertumnus and Pomona, representing allegories of Air and Earth, respectively, and a pair of transverse or horizontal ovals depicting Venus Visiting Vulcan (Fire) and Neptune Rescuing Amymone (Water).

Boucher’s oval compositions were inserted into the tapestry designs as central medallions with fictive frames, to which were added elaborate decorative borders (alentours) designed by Maurice Jacques. As Alastair Laing has pointed out, ‘[Boucher’s] oval compositions, both upright and transverse, were only commissioned once the end of the Seven Years war, and the visit [to Paris] of the 6th Earl of Coventry, enabled Jacques Neilson, using Boucher and Maurice Jacques, to put into effect his plans for a set of tapestries with simulated framed paintings on simulated damask grounds with ornamental borders, that he had been proposing since 1758.’5 Woven between 1764 and 1771 for Croome Court, this first set of the so-called Tentures de Boucher today adorns a room from that house in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York6.

Boucher kept a studio at the Gobelins tapestry factory from 1749, and between 1755 and 1765 served as surinspecteur at the manufactory. He produced a number of paintings to be copied as tapestries at the Gobelins7, the most significant of which to survive are the Tentures de Boucher. As Laing has noted, ‘Right up to the end of his life Boucher was producing paintings – not always of mythological subjects – for successive sets of the Tentures de Boucher, almost all of which were commissioned by grand foreign – and particularly English – clients; and this was continued after his death, based upon paintings that he had left behind. They were amongst the most successful sets of tapestries ever woven at the Gobelins.’8 Related to the central medallion of the tapestry of Neptune Rescuing Amymone (fig.2)9, the present sheet, which may be dated to 1764, depicts the sea god Neptune, armed with his trident, leaping from his horsedrawn chariot to save Amymone from the ravages of a satyr.

Boucher had earlier treated the theme of Neptune and Amymone in a tapestry design for the Beauvais manufactory of 175010, although this was different in composition to the present sheet and the version of the subject in the Tentures de Boucher. The painting which served as the model for the 1750 tapestry is lost, although a preparatory drawing, with considerable differences from the tapestry, is in the Louvre11.

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13 FRANÇOIS BOUCHER Paris 1703-1770 Paris Aurora and Cephalus Black chalk, with stumping, and white chalk on blue paper faded to buff, with framing lines in brown ink.

Oval. Laid down on an 18th century French mount, with the blind stamp of the mountmaker JeanBaptiste Glomy (Lugt 1085, showing his full surname) applied twice, once below the bottom of the oval composition and again near the lower right corner of the mount. Inscribed F. Boucher in brown ink near the lower right corner of the mount.

279 x 375 mm. (11 x 14 3/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Abel-François Poisson de Vandières, Marquis de Marigny et de Menars, Paris; His posthumous sale, Paris, Place des Victoires, Hôtel de Menars, [Basan & Joullain], 18 March 1782 onwards, part of lot 289 (‘L’Aurore & Céphale, & la Colere de Neptune. Ces deux morceaux sont aux crayons noir & blanc, sur papier bleu.’, both sold framed for 91,2 livres); Veil-Picard collection, Paris; Anonymous sale, Paris, Artcurial, 19 June 2007, part of lot 21; Wildenstein, New York.

LITERATURE: L. Soullié and Ch. Masson, ‘Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint et dessiné de François Boucher’, in André Michel, François Boucher, Paris, 1906, p.27, no.454; Alexandre Ananoff, L’oeuvre dessiné de François Boucher (1703-1770), Paris, 1966, Vol.I, p.239, under no.920; Alexandre Ananoff and Daniel Wildenstein, François Boucher, Lausanne and Paris, 1976, Vol.II, p.295, no.670/1, fig.1750 (as Venus and Endymion); Edith Appleton Standen, European Post-Medieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985, Vol.I, p.394, under no.57.

The story of Aurora and Cephalus occurs in Book VII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The young and beautiful hunter Cephalus had recently been married to Procris, daughter of the King of Athens, but was abducted

by Aurora, goddess of the dawn, who had fallen in love with him. The goddess soon tired of him, however, since he could only speak of his beloved Procris, and eventually released him, but not before planting a seed of doubt in his mind about the faithfulness of Procris which would eventually lead to her accidental death.

As has been recently noted, ‘Mythological subjects were Boucher’s forte from very early in his career, and over the course of four decades he produced a host of richly pictorial works that center on the stories, loves, foibles, and attributes of the Olympian gods.’1 Boucher must have found the subject of Aurora and Cephalus quite appealing, since he treated the theme several times during his long career, notably in one of his finest early paintings, a large canvas of 1733 today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy2. The same subject is also found in a painting of 1736-1739, commissioned by the Prince de Rohan as an overdoor for a bedroom in the Hôtel de Soubise and today in the Archives Nationales in Paris3, and in a late vertical painting of Aurora and Cephalus, signed and dated 1769, in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles4. Other paintings of Aurora and Cephalus by Boucher include a large canvas of c.1745 in a New York private collection5 and an upright oval painting, signed and dated 1764, in the Louvre6, which was the model for one of the Tentures de Boucher tapestries.

Unlike the previous drawing of Neptune and Amymone (No. 12), the present sheet cannot be definitively related to Boucher’s paintings of 1763-1764 for the Tentures de Boucher. While the subject of Aurora and Cephalus does appear in the Tentures de Boucher tapestries, it is as an oval composition of upright, vertical format. Alastair Laing has suggested that ‘at some point, [Jacques] Neilson – or a client – must have wanted a transverse oval version of the Aurora & Cephalus’7, but no such horizontal composition ever seems to have been woven, at the Gobelins or elsewhere.

The present pair of oval drawings by Boucher once belonged to one of the most significant figures in the Parisian art world in the 18th century. Abel-François Poisson, Marquis de Marigny (1727-1781), was the brother and heir of the Marquise de Pompadour, King Louis XV’s official mistress between 1745 and her death in 1764. He served as directeur general des bâtiments, jardins, arts, académies, et manufactures de roi between 1751 and 1773. Marigny amassed a significant collection of paintings and works of art that, as one modern scholar has written, ‘was broad in scope, progressive in taste, exceptional in quality, and extraordinary in provenance.’8 Both this and the previous drawing (No. 12) may be dated to the 1760s. However, as Alastair Laing has noted, ‘It seems most likely that that of Neptune & Amymone was done in 1764, but that that of Aurora and Cephalus was done at a slightly different time – whenever it was that a transverse oval version of the upright oval version of it was painted by Boucher or contemplated…there are differences between the two [drawings] in the colour both of the papers and of the chalks used on them. This would further suggest that they were genuinely designs for the paintings that served as models for the tapestries, and that they were submitted at different times…to the marquis de Marigny for his approval, who then held onto them. This is particularly likely to have been so, since – unlike in the case of some other designs for tapestries by Boucher – there is no evidence of there ever having been any oil sketches for them or for any of the other compositions used in the Tentures de Boucher...Were they to have been drawn from the paintings, just as gifts for Marigny, in gratitude for the commission, one would have expected the two [drawings] to have been treated in exactly the same way.’9 Both of these oval drawings are on their original 18th century mounts, each twice stamped by the eminent Parisian dealer, expert and mountmaker Jean-Baptiste Glomy (c.1720-1786). From the middle of the 1740s onwards, Glomy established a successful business as a mounter and framer of drawings and prints. He counted among his clients both artists and collectors, the latter including Madame de Pompadour and her brother, the Marquis de Marigny, as well as such prominent figures as PierreJacques-Onésyme Bergeret de Grancourt, the Chevalier de Damery, Laurent Grimod de la Reyniére, Gilbert Paignon-Dijonval, Pierre Paul Louis Randon de Boisset, the Abbé de Saint-Non and the Duc de Tallard. Among artists, Glomy’s best client was arguably François Boucher, many of whose finest drawings he was given to mount. According to Glomy’s account book, Boucher was charged a special rate of one and a half livres per drawing, which was half the price paid by private collectors.

An autograph but somewhat simpler and less finished variant of this composition, of similar size but drawn in black chalk alone (fig.1), was formerly in a private collection in Florence, and was recently offered for sale at auction in London10. Alastair Laing has suggested that the drawing may have been a preparatory sketch for the present sheet. He further notes that it is on a Glomy mount identical to those on the present pair of drawings, and has plausibly suggested that all three drawings (as well as, presumably, a now-lost sketch for the related oval composition of Neptune and Amymone), may have been given by Boucher to Glomy to mount, with the more highly finished pair of oval drawings on blue paper, here exhibited, then presented to Marigny, the surintendent des bâtiments.

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14 CHARLES-NICOLAS COCHIN, THE YOUNGER Paris 1715-1790 Paris Design for a Fireworks Display Pen and black ink and grey wash, with framing lines in brown ink, laid down on an 18th or 19th century mount. Signed C. N. Cochin filius delin. in brown ink in the lower left margin. Titled Dessein d’un Feu d’Artifice pour la Prise d’une Ville. in brown ink in the bottom margin.

171 x 107 mm. (6 3/ 4 x 4 1/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably Charles-Antoine Jombert, Paris1; Probably the vente Jombert, Paris, 15 April 1776; Galerie Cailleux, Paris; Rosenberg & Stiebel, New York; Private collection.

ENGRAVED: By Martin Marvie for pl.XIII of Amedée-François Frézier, Traité des feux d’artifice pour le spectacle, Paris, 1747.

The son of an engraver of the same name, Charles-Nicolas Cochin fils followed in his father’s footsteps as a printmaker. From 1735 onwards he was employed at the Menus-plaisirs du Roi, producing drawings and engravings of all the major events, festivals and ceremonies of the Royal court. Among his most admired works of this type were engravings depicting the firework display and illuminations in celebration of the marriage of Princess Louise-Elisabeth of France and the Infant Don Philip of Spain in 1739 and another series of prints documenting the ceremony of the marriage of the Dauphin with the Infanta of Spain in 1745. He also produced portrait drawings of some of the leading men and women of 18th century France, and enjoyed a parallel career as a book illustrator, contributing illustrations and vignettes to more than two hundred books. The leading engraver in France for much of the 18th century, Cochin earned numerous official commissions for prints. His position was further strengthened by the lifelong friendship and protection of the Marquis de Marigny, the brother of Madame de Pompadour and director of the Bâtiments du Roi from 1751 onwards. Cochin and Marigny spent two years travelling in Italy together, between 1749 and 1751, and on their return to France Cochin was received into the Académie Royale. With the support of Marigny, Cochin rose to a position of considerable power and influence at the Bâtiments du Roi, of which he was given charge of the administration, a position he retained until 1770. He also published a number of theoretical and critical writings on art, notably the Lettres à un jeune artiste peintre, which appeared in c.1774.

The present sheet is a preparatory study by Cochin for an engraved illustration, in reverse2, that appeared in a new and revised edition of the French military engineer and explorer Amedée-François Frézier’s book Traité des feux d’artifice pour le spectacle, published by Jombert in 1747. First published in 1707, Frézier’s book was a comprehensive treatise on fireworks, rockets and pyrotechnics for ceremonial, recreational and military use, and also described the science, background and manufacture of decorative fireworks.

The printed caption of Cochin’s illustration in Frézier’s book provides a description of the structure here depicted: ‘The Theatre of Fireworks (Théatre d’Artifice) illustrated on this plate relates to some military expedition, such as a successful battle, the capture of a city, etc. The body of the edifice is a fortress, whose main entrance is announced by two entry boxes on both sides of the door, to house sentries, and at the same time to serve as a base for the military trophies placed above. On the top of the walls one can see on one side the figure of Victory, who plants the flag of the victor, and on the other side, the figure of Fame sets forth to announce the news to the whole world. This structure is completed by a keep or a very tall belfry, the top of which is reached by a spiral ramp that runs along the outside of this keep. This decoration is in the style of the Théatre d’Artifice that was erected in Paris in front of the Hôtel de Ville in celebration of the taking of the city of Ypres by His Majesty on 27 June 1744.’3

actual size

15 AUGUSTIN PAJOU Paris 1730-1809 Paris Study of a Sleeping Youth, Seen from Behind Pen and brown ink and grey wash, with touches of watercolour. Inscribed by the artist nature in brown ink at the lower centre.

137 x 195 mm. (5 3/ 8 x 7 5/ 8 in.)

Watermark: An anchor in a circle, below a six-pointed star (similar to Heawood nos.5-6; The Hague c.1750, London 1711).

PROVENANCE: From an album of drawings by Augustin Pajou, assembled by the artist, which was probably one of three albums which passed to his son, Jacques-Augustin Catherine Pajou, Paris; Probably his estate sale, Paris, 12-13 January 1829, lot 110; E. Parsons and Sons, London, by whom the album was broken up and dispersed; Sale, London, Christie’s, 15 February 1919 [catalogue untraced], bt.

Oppé for £3.10s; A. Paul Oppé, London; Thence by descent until 2006; Oppé sale (‘Master Drawings from the Oppé Collection’), London, Christie’s, 5 December 2006, lot 83 (bt. Prouté); Galerie Paul Prouté, Paris, in 2008; Private collection, France.

EXHIBITED: London, The Matthiesen Gallery, French Master Drawings of the 18th Century, 1950, no.58 (lent by Oppé); London, Royal Academy of Arts, The Paul Oppé Collection, 1958, no.424 (‘Lazzarone’); Paris, Galerie Paul Prouté, Catalogue Kauffman, 2008, no.15.

Born into a family of sculptors in wood, Augustin Pajou entered the studio of the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne at the age of fourteen. He won the Prix de Rome in 1748, spending a few years at the Ecole des Elèves Protegés before taking up his place at the French Academy in Rome in 1752. Agrée at the Académie Royale in 1759 and reçu the following year, at the age of thirty, Pajou produced portrait busts, religious sculptures and funerary monuments, as well as small-scale terracotta statuettes and reliefs for collectors. Among his public commissions were decorative reliefs for the Palais-Royal in Paris and the Royal opera house at Versailles, as well as sculptures and reliefs for the Parisian church of Saint-Roch and the cathedral of Sainte-Croix in Orléans. A gifted teacher, he was appointed an assistant professor of sculpture at the Académie Royale in 1762 and a full professor in 1766. From 1744 Pajou earned a significant number of Royal commissions from the Comte d’Angiviller, director of the Bâtiments du Roi under Louis XVI. He was named garde des antiques du roi in 1777, but with the Revolution lost his lodgings at the Louvre. He spent the early 1790s in Montpellier and worked very little in the last decade or so of his life.

Pajou was an exceptional draughtsman and produced highly refined drawings in red chalk for his sculptural works, as well as a number of finished composition drawings intended for collectors. In addition, during his period of study as a pensionnaire at the Académie de France in Rome between 1752 and 1756, he made numerous pen and ink drawings after Greek and Roman antiquities in both Rome and Naples, as well copies after works by Renaissance and Baroque masters. Two albums of such drawings by Pajou, numbering over 280 sheets, are in the collection of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, while a third is in the Princeton University Art Museum1. These three albums, as well as another, also dating from the artist’s Italian period, which was with the Galerie Cailleux in Paris in 1995, account for a large proportion of the artist’s extant output as a draughtsman.

While in Italy, Pajou also made a handful of drawings of scenes of everyday life, of which the present sheet is a particularly fine and charming example.

16 JEAN-HONORÉ FRAGONARD Grasse 1732-1806 Paris A Statue in a Garden Pen, brush and brown ink and brown and grey wash, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in brown ink. Inscribed frago in brown ink at the lower left.

173 x 233 mm. (6 3/ 4 x 9 1/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Galerie Cailleux, Paris, by 1981; Juan (Johnny) de Beistegui, Château de Groussay, Montfort-l’Amaury, by 1987; His sale (‘Château de Groussay’), Montfort-l’Amaury, Poulain Le Fur and Sotheby’s, 2 June 1999, lot 64; Pandora Old Masters, New York, in 2004; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Pinkney L. Near, Three Masters of Landscape: Fragonard, Robert, and Boucher, exhibition catalogue, Richmond, 1981, p.23, no.10; Emmanuelle Brugerolles, ed., Suite française: Dessins de la collection Jean Bonna, exhibition catalogue, Paris and Geneva, 2006-2007, p.203, under no.47 (entry

by Diederik Bakhuÿs).

EXHIBITED: Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Three Masters of Landscape: Fragonard, Robert, and Boucher, 1981, no.10; Paris, Galerie Cailleux, Rome 1760-1770: Fragonard, Hubert Robert et leurs Amis, 1983, no.22; Paris, Galerie Cailleux, Aspects de Fragonard: Peintures – Dessins – Estampes, 1987, no.44.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Chardin and François Boucher, whose studio he entered around 1749. Although he only remained in Boucher’s studio for about a year, he continued to assist the elder artist on large-scale works for some time thereafter. After winning the Prix de Rome in 1752, Fragonard studied under Carle Vanloo at the Ecole Royale des Elèves Protégés before arriving in Rome in 1756. While a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome, he made numerous drawings after ancient sculpture and paintings by Italian artists, as well as a series of superb landscape drawings, encouraged by Charles-Joseph Natoire, the director of the French Academy. On his return to France in 1761, Fragonard was accepted (agrée) at the Académie Royale with a large history painting of Coresus and Callirhoe, but he was never appointed a full Academician. Rejecting the practice of history painting, he turned his attention instead to genre and landscape painting, choosing not to exhibit at the official Salons. Among his finest works were a series of large mural paintings of The Progress of Love, painted between 1770 and 1773 for Madame du Barry at Louveciennes and today in the Frick Collection in New York. Following the completion of the series, Fragonard made a second trip to Italy, in the company of the financier Pierre-Jacques Bergeret de Grancourt. In the late 1770s, to compensate for a lack of painting commissions brought about by a change in taste, in favour of Neoclassicism, Fragonard began to turn his considerable talents towards book illustration. From the 1790s onwards, he painted very little, although he continued to draw. His only pupils were his son, Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard, and his sister-in-law, Marguerite Gerard.

Fragonard was among the most gifted draughtsmen of the 18th century in France. He drew in a variety of media, using pen and ink, red or black chalk or brush and wash with equal freedom and complete assurance. It is often difficult to securely date his drawings, as few are dated and only rarely can they be specifically connected with his paintings.

In the summer of 1760, the painter, engraver and amateur Jean-Claude Richard, Abbé de Saint-Non, invited the young Fragonard, then a student at the French Academy in Rome, to join him for several weeks in July and August at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli. ‘During these months of brilliant summer sun, amid the picturesque overgrown gardens of the villa which had been uninhabited and was for sale at the time’1, Fragonard was inspired to make a number of superb red chalk drawings of the extensive gardens of the Villa, as well as views of the town of Tivoli and its famous waterfalls. Natoire, writing from Rome to the

Marquis de Marigny, director of the Bâtiments du Roi, at the end of August 1760, noted that ‘M. l’abbé de St Nom [sic] has been at Tivoli with the painter Pensioner Flagonard [sic] for a month and a half. This amateur is keeping himself greatly amused and much occupied. Our young artist is making some very fine studies that will serve him well and do him much honour. He has a very lively taste for this kind of Landscape in which he introduces rustic subjects with great success.’2 Drawn with incredible freedom in brush and wash, this atmospheric landscape is likely to have been made during or shortly after Fragonard’s summer at Tivoli in 1760. As one scholar has described the drawing, ‘The shadowy, diffuse figures in the foreground seem to be worshipping, or at least contemplating, the statue of a female figure set on a pedestal in a niche or grotto. The latter is placed at the end of a vaguely defined structure, natural or man-made, which compounds the enigmatic quality of the scene.’3 The present sheet may be included among a handful of small-scale, early landscape drawings in pen, brush and wash by the artist, all datable to around 1760, which ‘represent some of Fragonard’s earliest independent experiments with wash techniques, in which he is a draftsman still devoted to line, but at the same time he is discovering a natural and instinctive expression through atmosphere and color.’4 Among stylistically comparable small landscape drawings by Fragonard of c.1760 is A Temple in a Garden in the collection of the Peabody Institute, on loan to the Baltimore Museum of Art5, a Scene in a Park (fig.1) in the Cleveland Museum of Art6 and a Garden in an Italian Villa in the collection of Jean Bonna in Geneva7. Two further drawings from this group are A Wooded Landscape with Figures on a Bluff, formerly in the collection of Dr. and Mrs. Francis Springell and sold at auction in 19868, and A Couple in a Park, at one time in the collections of Camille Groult and Jacques Bacri and recently sold at auction in Paris9. A somewhat more sketchy Italianate landscape drawing in pen and wash of the same period was on the art market in 198610. Executed during the first of Fragonard’s two stays in Rome, these drawings all share a similarly confident application of ink and wash over a black chalk underdrawing.

As Eunice Williams has written of the Baltimore and Cleveland drawings noted above, in terms that apply equally to the present sheet and others from of this group of small pen and wash landscapes, ‘The scale and decorative concept [of these drawings] may seem far removed from Fragonard’s great sanguine landscapes made in 1760 during his stay at the Villa d’Este; but these works, regardless of size, share related ideas of compositional structure. The unifying principles are surprisingly classical in their emphasis on formal balance and deliberate contrasts and on clearly defined space. Depth is usually limited or blocked, and lateral space is contained by framing devices such as trees or architectural features. Staffage provides a sense of scale and animation. The sanguine series made at the Villa d’Este records identifiable sites, while the group of small, early wash drawings…may depend more on the artist’s invention. It is significant that they both reflect traditional principles of composition which Fragonard had learned in his academic training from Vanloo and Natoire, and from his own study of artists of the past.’11

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17 HUBERT ROBERT Paris 1733-1808 Paris The Ruins of the Macellum (‘Temple of Jupiter Serapis’) at Pozzuoli Red chalk.

336 x 450 mm. (13 1/ 4 x 17 3/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Lucien Guiraud, Paris; Anonymous sale, Paris, Galerie Charpentier [Ader], 8 December 1953, lot 22 (as ‘Le Temple en rotonde…Appartenant à M. L. G....’); Anonymous sale, Bern, Klipstein & Kornfeld, 7 June 1961, lot 181; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 July 1999, lot 186; Kate de Rothschild, London, in 2001; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Gianni Carlo Sciolla, ed., Da Leonardo a Rembrandt: Disegni della Biblioteca Reale di Torino, exhibition catalogue, Turin, 1989, p.340, under no.139 (entry by Catherine Boulot); Gianni Carlo Sciolla, ed., From Leonardo to Rembrandt: Drawings from the Royal Library of Turin, exhibition catalogue, Turin, 1990, p.340, under no.139 (entry by Catherine Boulot); Petra Lamers, Il Viaggio nel Sud dell’Abbé de Saint-Non: Il “Voyage pittoresque à Naples et en Sicile”: la genesi, I disegni preparatory, le incisoni, Naples, 1995, p.354, no.407D; Kate de Rothschild, Kate de Rothschild: Master Drawings. A Celebration, 35 Years in the Art World 1972-2007, n.d. (2008), unpaginated, no.28 (illustrated in reverse).

EXHIBITED: London, Kate de Rothschild at Didier Aaron London Ltd., Master Drawings, 2001, no.15.

In 1754 the young Hubert Robert travelled to Rome in the retinue of the new French ambassador to the Vatican, the future Duc de Choiseul. Although he was not officially a pensionnaire at the Académie de France in Rome, Robert was able to study there for several years. Described by the director of the Académie, Charles-Joseph Natoire, as a young man ‘who has a penchant for painting architecture’, Robert spent a total of eleven years in Italy, mostly in Rome. He fell under the influence of Giovanni Paolo Panini, the leading Italian painter of architectural views, who taught perspective at the Académie de France. Both in composition and technique, Robert’s earliest paintings and drawings are greatly indebted to the example of Panini. At the French Academy Robert befriended Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and together they made sketching tours of the countryside around Rome. Both artists were also engaged

by Jean-Pierre Richard, the Abbé de Saint-Non, to provide landscape illustrations for his projected Voyage pittoresque, ou description historique des royaumes de Naples, et de Sicile, eventually published between 1781 and 1786.

Robert returned to Paris in 1765, and the following year was admitted into the Académie Royale as a ‘peintre des ruines’, rather unusually being both reçu and agrée in the same year. He made his debut at the Salon in 1767, exhibiting picturesque landscapes and capricci, and soon developed such a reputation for paintings of real and imagined Roman views, often incorporating ancient ruins, that he was given the sobriquet ‘Robert des Ruines’. A versatile artist, Robert often repeated and developed favourite views or compositions in several different formats, including chalk drawings, finished watercolours, small cabinet pictures and large-scale wall paintings. Appointed dessinateur des jardins de roi in 1778, he was also able to incorporate his artistic ideas into his landscape designs for gardens at Versalles and elsewhere. In 1784 Robert was appointed garde des peintures du roi and played a key role in the establishment of the Louvre. Among his significant patrons was the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, as well as several members of the Russian court. Despite being imprisoned during the Revolution, he remained a significant figure in the artistic scene in Paris until the end of the century.

Robert was a prolific and gifted draughtsman. As Margaret Morgan Grasselli has noted, ‘Over the course of his long career, he turned out thousands of works on paper, ranging from the slightest chalk sketches to fully completed sanguines, from swift pen and ink jottings to highly resolved watercolors. These works show

Robert at his most versatile, spontaneous, and experimental, and constitute a significant part of his entire oeuvre, complementing and augmenting what he achieved in his paintings…Drawing was, in fact, the soul of Robert’s art, and he remained a dedicated draftsman until the end of his life.’1 The 18th century collector and connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette noted of Robert’s drawings that they were very popular and sought-after, and the artist often produced chalk drawings and watercolours as independent works of art for sale.

Excavated in 1750, the so-called Temple of Jupiter Serapis at Pozzuoli, near Naples, was long thought to have been a temple to the ancient god Serapis, due to the discovery of a statue of the Greco-Egyptian god at the site. It is now known, however, to have been the macellum, or public marketplace, of Pozzuoli. The building was in the form of a square courtyard bordered by an arcade made up of thirtyfour columns and decorated with statues. In the centre of the courtyard was a tholos; a circular building standing on a podium, with sixteen columns supporting a domed vault. By the 18th century, however, all that remained at the site was a row of three tall marble columns.

This large and impressive sheet dates from 1760, when Robert and the Abbé de Saint-Non travelled together to Naples to prepare the illustrations for the Voyage pittoresque, ou description historique des royaumes de Naples, et de Sicile. Like other drawings of the ruins at Pozzuoli by Robert, the artist has here partially reconstructed the Serapeum ‘temple’ to create an imaginary view of the site. Nevertheless, this is something of an idealized reconstruction, as there was no way all the elements in this drawing could have been seen from a single viewpoint2. The print of this view engraved by Louis Germain and Jean-Baptiste Liénard3 for the second volume of Saint-Non’s Voyage pittoresque depicts the scene from a different angle than the present sheet, and would appear to be based on a red chalk drawing by Robert sold at auction in London in 19724. The same drawing also served as the basis for a large finished watercolour (fig.1) now in the Biblioteca Reale in Turin5.

Robert made at least three other drawings of the Serapeum at Pozzuoli, from different angles. These include a large sheet in red chalk (fig.2) in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston6 and another in a private collection7, of which a variant is in the Albertina in Vienna8. In all of these drawings of the macellum at Pozzuoli, as Catherine Boulot has noted of a related watercolour, Robert ‘has shown a classical building tumbling into ruin, with walls crowned in plants which add a decorative quality. His vision is indeed far more than of a painter than an architect…These drawings, paintings and prints reveal the importance Robert must have attached to this reconstruction of the Serapeum.’9

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2.

18 JEAN-BAPTISTE DESHAYS Rouen 1729-1765 Paris The Raising of Lazarus Oil on paper, laid down on board.

379 x 466 mm. (15 x 18 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, The Netherlands; Anonymous sale, Amsterdam, Christie’s, 3 September 2002, lot 28 (as French School, 18th Century); Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2004; Private collection.

LITERATURE: André Bancel, Jean-Baptiste Deshays, Paris, 2008, p.161, no.P.124 (as location unknown), and p.162, under no.P.126; Alvin L. Clark, Jr., ed., Tradition & Transition: Eighteenth-Century French Art from The Horvitz Collection, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2017, pp.446-447, under no.172 (entry by Alastair Laing).

EXHIBITED: New York and London, Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2004, no.41.

Born in Rouen, Jean-Baptiste Deshays received his initial artistic training with Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont and Jean Restout before entering the studio of François Boucher. After winning the Prix de Rome in 1751, he studied for three years at the Ecole des Elèves Protégés in Paris before spending a further four years at the Académie de France in Rome. Agrée at the Académie Royale in 1758, Deshays was reçu the following year with a painting of Hector Laid on the Banks of the Scamander, which was exhibited at the Salon. (He exhibited a further two times at the Salon before his untimely death at the age of just thirty-five, and once again posthumously in 1765.) Deshays made a speciality of paintings of religious subjects and received important commissions for work in such churches as Saint-Roch in Paris, Saint-Pierre in Douai and Saint-André in Rouen, for which he painted three major altarpieces between 1758 and 1761. He also designed two sets of tapestry cartoons of mythological subjects for the manufactory at Beauvais, in 1761 and 1763.

As a painter, Deshays employed a loose and fluid manner that owed much to the example of the Baroque artists he had studied in Italy, as well as Boucher (whose daughter he married in 1758) and JeanHonoré Fragonard. Writing of the Salon of 1761, Denis Diderot praised his work, noting that ‘This painter, in my opinion, is the nation’s foremost painter; he has more warmth and genius than Vien; he rivals Van Loo in drawing and color...There is strength and austerity in his palette; he conceives [the most] striking subjects.’1 Deshays achieved considerable success during his brief career, which lasted only about six years before his death in 1765, from an illness thought to be tuberculosis. His last, posthumous contribution to the Salon was in 1765, and elicited an elegy from Diderot: ‘This painter is no more – he who had fire, imagination, and verve; he who knew how to set a tragic scene; he was truly a poet.’2 This large oil sketch is a preparatory study for one of Deshays’ last major works; a painting of The Raising of Lazarus (fig.1), exhibited at the Salon of 1763 and long thought to be lost. The painting has only recently been rediscovered and is today in the Horvitz collection in Boston3. Although not listed in the livret of the 1763 Salon, The Raising of Lazarus was praised by Diderot and mentioned by other critics in reviews of the exhibition that year. It was described as a horizontal composition measuring three by four pieds; a description in keeping with the Horvitz picture4.

Two further treatments of the subject of The Raising of Lazarus by or attributed to Deshays are known, both vertical in format. A pen and wash drawing in the Louvre, with an arched top, has generally been thought to be a study or first idea for the Horvitz painting5, while an oil sketch formerly in the collection of Andrew Ciechanowiecki, also with an arched top, has likewise been related to the 1763 Salon

picture6. While they are quite different in composition, the Louvre drawing and the ex-Ciechanowiecki sketch share a number of motifs with both the present sheet and the Horvitz picture. As such, they may represent Deshays’ first ideas for the painting as a planned vertical composition, which he later abandoned in favour of the horizontal format seen in the present sketch and the final picture. In all four works, prominence is given to the praying figure of Lazarus, seen at the lower right of the composition, while in all but the final painting there is an equally prominent figure of a man holding a torch or candle.

All four works share a prominent diagonal axis and an interest in dramatic lighting effects – a characteristic feature of much of Deshays’ work – though this is perhaps more marked in the two oil sketches.

This large sheet, with its freedom of execution and vigorous handling of the brush, is a fine and characteristic example of Deshays’ oil sketches. As one recent scholar has commented, ‘Deshays had a predilection for the sketch made with the brush as a preparation technique. The dynamic quality of the sketch accords well with his often dramatic subject matter, and he produced a great number relative to his overall output. They are...loose and energetic in their brushwork, yet with a fine sense of proportion and volume often absent in vigorous sketches.’7 In handling and technique, as well as in the summary treatment of faces, drapery and hands, this Raising of Lazarus may be compared with a number of oil sketches by the artist. These include such studies for altarpieces as a Punishment of Saint Andrew in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg8 and a Marriage of the Virgin in the Musée de la Chartreuse in Douai9, both of which are on canvas, as well as an oil sketch on paper of Aeolus and Mars in a private collection10. In his catalogue raisonné of the works of Deshays, André Bancel noted that the tonality of the present oil sketch is very close to that of the Douai Marriage of the Virgin, which is of about the same date.

Margaret Morgan Grasselli’s comments on a stylistically similar oil sketch by Deshays in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, are equally relevant to the present work: ‘Although unfinished in the sense that it lacks polish and detail, this kind of sketch was highly regarded in the eighteenth century for the brilliance and immediacy of its execution and for the swift, unstudied way it expresses a moment of inspiration.’11 It is arguably in oil sketches such as the present sheet, rather than in his relatively few surviving finished paintings, that Deshays’ abilities can be seen to their best advantage.

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19 GABRIEL-JACQUES DE SAINT-AUBIN Paris 1724-1780 Paris Recto: Sheet of Studies of Several Women, One Nursing a Baby, with an Artist Drawing Verso: Three Women in a Landscape Graphite and stumping, pen and brown ink and grey and brown wash, with touches of watercolour. The verso in pen and grey ink and grey wash, with touches of watercolour.

101 x 134 mm. (4 x 5 1/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: From an album of 116 drawings by Gabriel and Augustin de Saint-Aubin in the collection of Auguste Delaherche, Beauvais (according to Goncourt); Hippolyte Destailleur, Paris; His sale (‘Catalogue de dessins originaux réunis en recueils, oeuvres importantes des Saint-Aubin, composant la collection de M. Hippolyte Destailleur, architecte du gouvernement’) Paris, Hôtel des CommissairesPriseurs [Morgand], 26-27 May 1893, part of lot 112 (‘Recueil de dessins de Gabriel et de Augustin de Saint-Aubin’), as no.39 (‘Réunion de six têtes d’hommes, de femmes, d’enfants, au milieu desquels se trouve une femme qui allaite son enfant…Au vo de ce croquis qui a la grâce et l’aspect d’un dessin de Watteau, un groupe de femmes dans un parc; très-curieuse aquarelle.’), the album unsold at 29,000 francs; Destailleur sale (‘Catalogue de dessins et tableaux provenant de la collection de feu M. H. Destailleur’), Paris, Hôtel des Commissaires-Priseurs [Morgand], 19-23 May 1896, lot 861 (‘Réunion de six têtes d’hommes, de femmes, d’enfants, au milieu desquels se trouve une femme qui allaite son enfant. A la pierre d’Italie avec reprises à l’aquarelle et à l’encre de Chine. Charmant croquis. Au vo: Groupe de femmes dans un parc, à l’aquarelle et à la plume. H. 0.100. L. 0.135.’, sold for 460 francs); Anonymous sale (‘Collection de dessins anciens par G. de St. Aubin, Boucher, Gillot, Greuze, Hubert Robert, Huet, etc.’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Michel Rostand], 26 November 1969, lot 21; Galerie Cailleux, Paris; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, L’art du dix-huitième siècle, Paris, 1880, p.435 (‘Réunion de six têtes d’hommes, de femmes, d’enfants, au milieu desquels se trouve une femme qui allaite son enfant.

Le dessin (H. 10 c., L. 14 c.), execute à la pierre d’Italie, avec des parties reprises à l’aquarelle, et où les frais roses, les doux incarnats gouaches du petit maître se mélent et se confondent avec des roux et des verdâtres harmonieux, a malheureusement la tête de la mère nourrice et d’une autre femme coupée au milieu de la figure. (Collection Delaherche.)’); Émile Dacier, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin: Peintre, dessinateur et graveur (1724-1780), Vol.II: Catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1931, pp.50-51, no.312 (‘Études de femmes, d’hommes et d’enfants’, not illustrated).

‘Of all the great eighteenth-century French artists, Saint-Aubin is still the most underrated, one of the least famous, one of the least understood.’1 Such was Pierre Rosenberg’s recent, and still quite apt, description of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, a Parisian artist whose entire career, by and large, was devoted to drawing.

Only a relative handful of paintings and etchings by him exist, and it is as a draughtsman that he is best known, and on which his modern reputation rests. Trained at the Académie Royale by Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont and Etienne Jeaurat, he also spent time in the studio of François Boucher. Saint-Aubin is first recorded in 1747 as a teacher of figure drawing in the Ecole des Arts established in Paris by the architect Jacques-François Blondel. He had ambitions as a history painter, however, and competed for the Prix de Rome three times, between 1752 and 1754, without success. He also failed to gain admittance to the Ecole Royale des Elèves Protégés in 1753, before eventually turning to the Académie de Saint-Luc. By the end of the 1750s, however, Saint-Aubin had largely abandoned painting (indeed, only about a dozen paintings by him are known today) in favour of an almost obsessive focus on drawing.

Saint-Aubin was a gifted draughtsman, working with equal facility and verve in graphite, chalk, pen, wash and watercolour. As his elder brother noted of him after his death, ‘he drew all the time and everywhere’2, while another posthumous account recorded that ‘He was the most prolific draughtsman that we have,

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perhaps, ever seen. One never met him without a pencil in his hand.’3 Always armed with a sketchbook, he produced countless scenes, usually on a small and intimate scale, of 18th century Parisian daily life, society, theatrical performances and public events. Indeed, Saint-Aubin seems never to have left Paris, and it was as a chronicler of the life of the city that he produced much of his finest work. He also recorded, in the form of thumbnail sketches in the margins of exhibition and auction catalogues, the appearance of thousands of works of art exhibited at the annual Salons or sent for sale in Parisian auctions. Some one hundred such annotated catalogues are listed in the inventory of the artist’s estate after his death, along with several thousand drawings.

Probably once part of a small sketchbook, this double-sided sheet is likely to date from the decade of the 1760s. As Suzanne McCullagh has noted, the artist ‘created a number of study sheets in the 1760s that reflect either the methods of Watteau or the time-honored use of drawings to prepare for paintings. A number of Saint-Aubin’s most charming and informal sketchbook pages juxtaposing various figurative studies – occasionally different views of the same figure – can be dated to this period. Usually executed in black chalk, occasionally heightened with other media, such miscellaneous sketches imitate Watteau’s unusual practice of artfully arranging intimate chalk studies of figures across a sheet of paper. It is rare that SaintAubin’s seemingly random observations can be linked to a finished composition.’4 Several drawings of this type appear in a sketchbook, known as the Groult album, used by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin between 1759 and 1778 and today in the Louvre5.

Furthermore, as the Saint-Aubin scholar Kim de Beaumont adds, ‘Gabriel’s composite drawings, combining disparate images and inscriptions into enigmatically cohesive entities, are among the most distinctive in his oeuvre…Yet they present extraordinary challenges for scholars. Identifying each element of the drawings is, in itself, an ambitious, often not entirely feasible, undertaking, particularly with regard to fragmentary details depicted out of context…Understanding why the artist chose to bring these particular elements together, assuming it is possible to discern a pattern of selection, is a still more daunting task.’6 A particularly interesting feature of the various studies on the recto of the present sheet is the portrait of what appears to be an artist in the act of drawing, seen at the lower right. Could this be Gabriel’s younger brother, Augustin de Saint-Aubin (1736-1807), or his nephew Germain-Auguste de SaintAubin, the son of his brother Charles-Germain? As Mary Tavener Holmes has noted, ‘Although portraits form a relatively small percentage of Saint-Aubin’s enormous output, those we have, both drawn and etched, are very affecting, with an emotional transparency and engaging blend of genre and portrait. The sitters were often participants in the world of art and theater or members of his large family.’7 According to Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the present sheet was part of an album of 116 drawings by both Gabriel and Augustin de Saint-Aubin – numbering 97 studies by the former and 19 by the latter – at one time in the collection of the ceramicist Auguste Delaherche (1857-1940). When the album appeared at the 1893 sale of the collection of Hippolyte Destailleur (1822-1893), the present sheet was described as ‘a grouping of six heads of men, women, [and] children, among whom is a woman who is nursing her child...On the verso of this sketch, which has the grace and appearance of a drawing by Watteau, [is] a group of women in a park; [a] very curious watercolor.’8 The album remained unsold, however, and was reoffered for sale again three years later, when it was broken up and the drawings sold individually; the present sheet, described in the sale catalogue as a ‘charmant croquis’, fetched 460 francs.

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

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

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

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

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

This drawing is a preparatory study by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin for an engraving used to illustrate ÉtienneAndré Philippe de Prétot’s monumental history of ancient Rome, the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine, depuis la fondation de Rome, jusqu’à la prise de Constantinople par Mahomet II, l’an de J.C. 1453, published in 1776 and 1777. The drawing appears, in reverse, as the second plate in the book; reproduced in an engraving (fig.1) by the printmaker Pierre Aveline1. Philippe de Prétot commissioned Saint-Aubin to provide drawings or painted designs for twenty-nine of the forty-four illustrations for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine, with the remainder of the scenes designed by Charles Eisen, Hubert François Gravelot and other artists. Given by far the largest share of the commission, Saint-Aubin worked on the project for much of the 1760s; between 1759 and 1768. His illustrations were engraved by Aveline and, among others, Pierre-François Tardieu, Pierre Chenu and the artist’s younger brother, Augustin de Saint-Aubin.

A noted cartographer and professor of history and geography, Étienne-André Philippe de Prétot (c.17081787) first announced a plan to publish a lavish illustrated history of Rome in April 1762. It was not until 1776, however, that the first volume, illustrated with a set of twenty reproductive engravings of scenes from ancient Roman history, including one after the present sheet, was published. A further twenty prints – devoted to Roman battles, military triumphs, ceremonies, public games and so forth – were issued with the second volume the following year2. Plans to publish a third set of engravings were abandoned with the death of Philippe de Prétot in 1787, and only seven of the engravings were finished.

The complete set of engravings was then acquired by the publisher Nyon and used to illustrate a similar book by the Abbé Claude-François-Xavier Millot, the Abrégé de l’histoire romaine, which appeared in Paris in 1789.

As the Saint-Aubin scholar Émile Dacier has written of the artist’s drawings for this project, ‘Excellent when he observes, insignificant as soon as he invents, Saint-Aubin shows himself at his most advantageous when he can enrich a detail taken from life with the product of his imagination. Nowhere is this better seen than in a series of illustrations – the largest he produced, the most important in his eyes and the one on which he worked on the longest – which one would not think, at first glance, would offer the means of arriving at such a confirmation: I mean the compositions destined for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine.’2

actual size

Certainly, the commission from Philippe de Prétot was the most significant project undertaken by SaintAubin by this stage of his career, and he lavished a great deal of time and effort on the drawings. As has been noted by a recent scholar, ‘Judging from the virtual disappearance of Philippe’s Roman history, its long postponed publication ended in commercial failure. Back in 1759, though, Gabriel had no way of anticipating this disappointing outcome. At the time he can only have felt very fortunate to be included at the inception of such an expansive project, promising years of employment and possibly the sort of public notice that had eluded him so far. As the work progressed steadily into the 1760’s, he would have had every reason to believe that his most favorable expectations were being fulfilled.’3 Two earlier preparatory studies by Saint-Aubin for the illustration of The Rape of the Sabine Women are known. A first idea for the composition, rapidly drawn in chalk, pen and wash, appeared on the art market in Paris in 19844, while a more advanced stage in the development of the composition is seen in a drawing formerly in the collection of Jean Gigoux and today in the Musée départemental d’art ancien et contemporain in Épinal5. Much sketchier and with many significant differences, the Épinal drawing must predate the present sheet, which represents the definitive model for the engraving6.

Saint-Aubin appears to have sold his drawings for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine individually, over a period of time, to Philippe de Prétot, who had commissioned them7. All of the final preparatory drawings for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine remained together in a private collection until being dispersed in 2004. The two largest drawings executed by Saint-Aubin for the project – a pair of highly-finished and coloured works illustrating The Triumph of Pompey and The Roman Victory over the Carthaginians at the Battle of Cape Ecnomus – were intended as double-page illustrations for the second volume of the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine and were sold at auction in Paris in March 2004; the drawings are today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles8. The remaining twenty-eight drawings for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine, including the present sheet, as well as an unpublished design for a frontispiece, appeared together at auction in Paris three months later9. Of these drawings by Saint-Aubin, one has recently been acquired by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and another by the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal.

Stylistically, the series of drawings for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine may be compared with the illustrations designed by Saint-Aubin for Jean-Bernard Bossu’s Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes occidentales, published in 1768, as well as the same author’s Nouveaux Voyages dans l’Amérique septentrionale, published in 177710. It was during this period that Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s achievements as an illustrator, of which his work for the Spectacle de l’histoire romaine may be regarded as the culmination, resulted in some of his finest works. This was also perhaps the closest he came to his youthful ambitions as a history painter. As Kim de Beaumont has noted, ‘Gabriel’s astonishing production of the 1760’s and 1770’s, prolific and rich in memorable works of every description, testifies to his ultimate success in expressing his native genius.’11

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21 JEAN-BAPTISTE HUET Paris 1745-1811 Paris Winter Landscape with Two Children Charcoal and black chalk, extensively heightened with white chalk, on buff paper. Signed and dated j. huet. 1767. in brown ink at the lower right.

272 x 412 mm. (10 3/ 4 x 16 1/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Didier Aaron Inc., Paris and New York, in 2001; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Laure Hug, Recherches sur le peintre Jean-Baptiste Huet (1745-1811), unpublished MA dissertation, Université de Paris IV – Sorbonne, 1995-1996, Vol.II, Catalogue of Drawings, no.2; Benjamin Couilleaux, Jean-Baptiste Huet: Le plaisir de la nature, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2016, p.84, under no.34.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Didier Aaron, Histoires Naturelles…: Deux Siècles de Peinture de Chasse et de Paysage, 2001, no.24.

Born into a family of artists, Jean-Baptiste Huet was the son and pupil of the animalier painter Nicolas Huet the Elder. He also studied with another animal painter, Charles Dagomer, before entering the studio of Jean-Baptiste Le Prince. In 1769 he was accepted into the Académie Royale as a ‘peintre d’animaux and the following year made his debut at the Salon, where his paintings of animals, indebted to the example of Jean-Baptiste Oudry, were much admired by critics. Huet regularly exhibited drawings of animals at the Salons until 1787, and again between 1800 and 1802. He also had a particular fondness for pastoral and bucolic genre subjects, with shepherds or herders, in which the influence of François Boucher is readily evident, while he also found inspiration in the work of the Dutch genre painters of the 17th century. In 1794 he was appointed peintre du roi, and in addition produced designs for the Gobelins and Beauvais tapestry factories and for printed textiles at the Manufacture Oberkampf in Jouy-en-Josas.

Huet was an extremely accomplished draughtsman, and many of his drawings were reproduced as engravings. He also produced a large number of book illustrations. Huet assembled a personal collection of drawings by artists such as his teacher Le Prince, as well as works by Boucher, Hubert Robert and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, alongside prints by Northern artists such as Nicolas Berchem, Paulus Potter and Philips Wouwerman; all of whom had an influence on his own work. His son and pupil, Nicolas Huet the Younger, enjoyed a successful career as a natural history draughtsman and engraver.

Dated 1767, this refined landscape drawing is one of Huet’s earliest known works in this genre. A comparable drawing of the same size and date, depicting a Landscape with a Shepherd by a Lake (fig.1), is in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Valenciennes1.

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22 JEAN-BAPTISTE LE PRINCE Metz 1734-1781 Saint-Denis-du-Port A Russian Peasant Family in an Interior Pen and grey ink and grey wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in brown ink.

Laid down on a 19th century mount. Signed and dated Le Prince 1767 in black ink at the lower left.

182 x 239 mm. (7 1/ 8 x 9 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly the posthumous vente Le Prince, Paris, Hôtel de Lubert, 28 November 1781 onwards; Galerie de Bayser Paris; Steibel, Ltd., New York; Private collection.

Born in northern France, Jean-Baptiste Le Prince studied in Paris with François Boucher, who was then at the height of his career, before making a brief visit to Italy in 1754. Not long afterwards, in 1758, he travelled to Russia. Despite the fact that he arrived in the country almost unknown as an artist, within a few weeks he was engaged on the painted ceiling decoration of a room in the newly-built Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. Le Prince was to remain in Russia for five years, working mainly at the Winter Palace, although most of his work there was later destroyed by fire. He also travelled extensively throughout the country, venturing as far east as Siberia, and produced a large number of studies of Russian life, costumes, scenery, events and customs. These drawings served as the basis for much of the artist’s later work, both as studies for paintings and as designs for engravings, following his return to France in 1762 or 1763.

In December 1764, Le Prince announced the publication of a series of thirty-six prints made from his drawings of Russian subjects, followed by a further group of etchings issued the year after, and others in 1767 and 1768. (Other printmakers, such as Gilles Demarteau and Louis-Marin Bonnet, also produced engravings of Russian subjects after his drawings.) Elected to the Académie Royale in 1765, Le Prince exhibited fifteen paintings of Russian subjects at the Salon of that year. At around the same time he provided thirty-two drawings to illustrate the Abbé Jean Chappe d’Auteroche’s Voyage en Sibérie, published in 1768. In the preface to the book, Chappe wrote, ‘The drawings which accompany the descriptions of local customs are by Monsieur Le Prince, of the Academy of Painting: one sees by the beauty of his compositions, the richness of his imagination, and his rare talent for drawing costumes and nature, that he has studied in Russia.’1 Le Prince’s drawings for the Voyage en Sibérie have been described as ‘among his most significant works…Highly finished and minutely detailed, the exotic images in the Voyage drawings provide a vocabulary for virtually all of the artist’s later work.’2 Le Prince continued to produce paintings, drawings, suites of prints and tapestry cartoons of Russian subjects well into his later career, these russeries taking their place alongside the popular taste for similarly exotic chinoiserie and turquerie subjects. He regularly exhibited paintings and prints at the Salons and was one of the first artists to develop and perfect the medium of aquatint as a printing process, producing a number of what he termed ‘gravures au lavis’ between 1768 and 1774.3 Ill health led Le Prince to retire to the country in 1775, when he also began to move away from Russian subjects in favour of less exotic landscapes and pastoral scenes. At the sale of the contents of the artist’s studio in 1781, the catalogue listed numerous drawings of Russian subjects, as well as twelve sketchbooks made during his travels in the country and several Russian costumes4. Significant groups of drawings of Russian subjects by Le Prince are today in the museums of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, as well as the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen and the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, which houses an almost complete set of drawings for the Voyage en Sibérie.

Signed and dated 1767, the present sheet is a fine and charming example of the numerous genre scenes set in Russia that Le Prince produced after his return to France. As Kimerly Rorschach has written of Le Prince, ‘the artist distilled his observations of Russia into a series of images which served him throughout his working life. Repeated in paintings, drawings, prints and tapestries, Le Prince’s images brought the exotic flavour of far-away Russia into the drawing rooms of many a fashionable Frenchman.’5

23 FRANÇOIS-ANDRE VINCENT Paris 1746-1816 Paris An Ancient Egyptian Funerary Rite Pen and black ink and brown wash, with touches of white heightening, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in brown ink. Laid down on a 19th century mount. Signed and dated Vincent f. R. 1772 in brown ink at the lower left centre.

338 x 487 mm. (13 1/ 4 x 19 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Desmarest collection, Paris; Desmarest sale, Paris [Hayot], 24 April 1778, part of lot 332 (‘Deux sujets pendants, représentant des Fêtes Égyptiennes, à la pierre noire at au bistre’); The Marquis de La Coste-Messelière, Paris; Private collection, France; W. M. Brady & Co., New York, in 2001; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Jean Cailleux and Marianne Roland Michel, Rome 1760-1770: Fragonard, Hubert Robert et leurs Amis, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1983, unpaginated, under no.58; Per Bjurström, Drawings in Swedish Public Collections 5. French Drawings: Nineteenth Century, Stockholm, 1982, unpaginated, under Addenda, no.1853; Per Bjurström, The Art of Drawing in France 1400-1900: Drawings from the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1987, p.172, under no.115; Jean-Pierre Cuzin, ‘Vincent au théâtre à Rome en 1772. Quatre petits chanteurs d’opéra pour saluer l’ambassadrice d’Italie’, in Paola Bassani Pacht and Maria Teresa Caracciolo, ed., Arts d’Orient et d’Occident: Mélanges offerts à Erminia Gentile Ortona [Bulletin de l’Association des Historiens de l’Art italien], 2008 [pub. 2009], p.73; Jean-Pierre Cuzin, François-André Vincent 1746-1816 entre Fragonard et David, Paris, 2013, p.30, pp.351-352, no.55 D (as Cérémonie dans l’Égypte antique: scène d’inhumation); Louis-Antoine Prat, Le dessin français au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 2017, p.600.

EXHIBITED: New York, W. M. Brady & Co., Master Drawings 1770-1900, 2001, no.6.

The son of a Protestant painter from Geneva who had settled in Paris in 1745, François-Andre Vincent became a pupil of Joseph-Marie Vien around 1760. He studied at the Académie Royale and won the Prix de Rome in 1768, spending three years at the Ecole Royale des Elèves Protégés before travelling to Rome in 1771. He lived and worked as a pensionnaire at the Académie de France for four years, during which he accompanied Jean-Honoré Fragonard and the financier Pierre-Jacques-Onésyme Bergeret de Grancourt on a trip to Naples. He produced a large variety of drawings in Italy, including landscapes, studies of peasant types and caricatures. He returned to France in 1775 and in 1777 exhibited an important group of fifteen paintings at the Salon, including a portrait of Bergeret painted in Rome three years previously. His first great success, however, came at the Salon of 1779, where he exhibited a scene from modern French history, President Molé and the Insurgents.

By the time of his acceptance into the Académie in 1782, Vincent had established a reputation as one of the leading history painters in Paris. He participated regularly at the Salons, although many of the paintings and drawings he exhibited there have since been lost. Between 1783 and 1785 he designed a series of Gobelins tapestries depicting scenes from the life of Henry IV, while the 1790s found him painting a number of fine portraits. Vincent became a member of the Institut in 1795, and in 1800 married the portrait painter Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, although she died just three years later.

Commissioned by Napoleon in 1800 to paint an enormous canvas depicting The Battle of the Pyramids, Vincent dedicated most of his energies over the next six years to completing the project, although ill health prevented him from doing so. In the last years of his career he began losing his sight and devoted most of his time to portraits and drawings.

Vincent was a brilliant and versatile draughtsman, and produced a large number of drawings, ranging from landscapes, history subjects and copies after the antique to head studies and caricatures of his fellow

artists. His early style as a draughtsman, particularly during his years as a pensionnaire in Rome, often comes close to that of Fragonard, with whom his drawings have at times been confused, while his later drawings tend towards Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Indeed, the fact that Vincent worked in a range of disparate styles and techniques throughout his career has meant that drawings by him have often borne attributions to artists as diverse as Fragonard, Jacques-Louis David and Théodore Gericault.

Dated 1772, the present sheet was drawn in Rome at the start of Vincent’s period of study there at the Académie de France. As Jean-Pierre Cuzin has noted of this drawing, ‘This totally imaginary scene seems to represent a funeral procession, with a pyramid in the background at the right. The landscape here holds a prominent place. Note the audacity of the nocturnal representation, the energy and speed of the brush, the strong contrasts of shadow and light. The overall effect evokes some of the most beautiful achievements of Louis-Jean Desprez (1734-1804), a specialist in drawings of night effects. It should be noted, however that the Franco-Swedish artist [ie. Desprez] will not arrive in Italy until 1776, after having obtained the Grand Prix for architecture.’1 A companion drawing by Vincent of A Sacrifice to an Egyptian God (fig.1), of the same date and of similar dimensions, is in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm2. As Cuzin has noted of this pair of drawings, ‘The two very highly finished sheets, each with a large number of figures, are the most ambitious compositions from the early period of Vincent, a young pensioner in Rome. These are, of course, drawings made for themselves and not studies for painted compositions. The energetic movements of the figures, the organization of the crowds, the drawing of the draperies, and particularly that of the hands, in a contrasting chiaroscuro, recall Parisian works like the painted sketch of the Assumption executed the year before. Of note is the importance assumed by the white gouache, used more or less diluted to obtain highly pictorial effects, and not just simply reserved for highlights.’3 These drawings of Egyptian subjects by Vincent reflect not only the artist’s interest in the antique world beyond Greece and Rome, but also the taste for Egyptian subjects in France in the late 18th century, inspired by the publication of such scholarly works as the Comte de Caylus’s Receuil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises, which appeared in several volumes between 1752 and 1767.

Only a handful of other drawings by Vincent may be dated to the first year of his stay in Rome. Of the same date as the present sheet, and also of considerable dimensions, is a signed and highly finished drawing of The Arch of Constantine in Rome, in a private American collection4.

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24 PHILIPPE-JACQUES DE LOUTHERBOURG, R.A. Strasbourg 1740-1812 Chiswick, London Pastoral Scene with a Shepherd and Shepherdess Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over a pencil underdrawing. Inscribed P. Loutherbourg in pencil on the verso1.

285 x 414 mm. (11 1/ 4 x 16 1/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: An unidentified collector’s mark (in Cyrillic?), not in Lugt, stamped in black ink on the verso.

Born in Alsace, the son of an engraver and miniaturist of Swiss origins, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg arrived with his family in Paris in 1755, at the age of fifteen. Although he was to be mainly active as a landscape painter, he received a comprehensive artistic education, studying with the history painter Carle Vanloo, the battle painter Francesco Casanova and the engraver Jean-Georges Wille. He was agrée at the Académie Royale in 1763, the same year as his Salon debut, when his painting attracted the praise of the critic and writer Denis Diderot. Loutherbourg came to be much admired for his landscapes, which displayed a strong Dutch influence, and his rise to success was swift. Named a peintre du roi in 1766, the following year the artist gained full membership in the Académie, well before the usual statutory age of thirty. He continued to exhibit regularly at the Salons, where his pastoral landscapes and marine subjects, painted with fresh and vivid colours and imbued with a Romantic sensibility, proved very popular with the public. Fellow artists admired him as well; in a letter of introduction of 1768, the history painter Michel-François Dandré-Bardon described Loutherbourg as ‘one of those few geniuses that centuries only produce from time to time. All genres of painting are familiar to him and he treats them in a style so superior that even the least accomplished ones are worth the highest admiration.’2 Loutherbourg submitted a total of some eighty works to the Salons between 1763 and 1771 when, despite his success, he decided to move to England, where the second phase of his career began.

It was in England, where he remained for the rest of his career and where he was known as Philip James de Loutherbourg, that he first took up the practice of producing designs for the stage. Employed by David Garrick as the chief scene designer of the Drury Lane Theatre, Loutherbourg soon became as well known for his theatrical work as for his paintings. Elected to the Royal Academy in 1781, he exhibited views of England and Wales during much of the following decade. A failed attempt at working as a faith healer aside, Loutherbourg continued to enjoy a measure of public success in England. In 1784 one critic wrote of him that ‘We may observe in general, that this great Artist discovers in all his works a fine Imagination; that his choice of objects is made with judgment; that his colouring is harmonious; that he has a thorough knowledge of the Chiaro Obscuro, and a wonderful freedom of pencil.’3 By the 1790s he had begun to produce grandiose history pictures and battle scenes, and in 1807 was appointed historical painter to William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester. Many of Loutherbourg’s drawings were intended to be reproduced as engravings, and several of his English views were published as The Picturesque Scenery of Great Britain in 1801, followed four years later by The Picturesque and Romantic Scenery of England and Wales.

Dated by Olivier Lefeuvre to between 1772 and 1774, during the early years of Loutherbourg’s time in England, this large pastoral landscape drawing reflects the influence of Dutch 17th century painters such as Nicolaes Berchem on the artist. It is not a study for a painting, however, and was in all likelihood intended as a finished work of art in its own right. Nevertheless, the present sheet may be compared with a number of paintings of a similar theme and composition by Loutherbourg that are datable to the period just before the artist settled in England, such as a pair of pastoral subjects, each dated 1771, in the Musée des BeauxArts in Bordeaux4, and The Enterprising Shepherd, which was on the art market in Paris in 20095.

The pose of the central figure in this drawing is found, in reverse and with some variation in the angle of the head, in the figure of a sleeping shepherd in a signed and dated drawing by Loutherbourg of 17686.

25 LOUIS-ROLAND TRINQUESSE Paris c.1745-c.1800 Paris A Young Woman Seated, Holding a Letter Red chalk on buff paper.

353 x 229 mm. (13 7/ 8 x 9 in.)

PROVENANCE: Jean Masson, Amiens and Paris (Lugt 1494a); His sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 78 May 1923, lot 227 (‘La letter. Sanguine. Haut., 33 cent. 2; larg., 22 cent.’), bt. Owen for 4,300 francs; Jacques Bacri, Paris; Thence by descent until 2017.

LITERATURE: Jean Cailleux, ‘L’Art du Dix-huitième Siècle: The Drawings of Louis Roland Trinquesse’, Supplement to The Burlington Magazine, February 1974, p.viii, no.10, pl.11 (detail illustrated).

EXHIBITED: Paris, Hôtel de la Chambre Syndicale de la Curiosité et des Beaux-Arts, Exposition des petits maîtres et maîtres peu connus du XVIIIe siècle, June 1920, no.516 (lent by Masson).

Active as both a genre and portrait painter, Louis-Roland Trinquesse is thought to have come from Burgundy, and was trained at the Académie Royale in Paris between 1768 and 1770. (It had once been thought that he also spent a brief period of time in Holland, as his name appears in a list of members of the painter’s guild in The Hague in 1767, but this was in fact his father.) The career of this charming petit maître can be traced mainly through his output as a draughtsman. One of his earliest known dated drawings – a red chalk portrait of the painter Claude-Joseph Vernet – was executed in 1771, and his last in 1797. While his bucolic genre scenes and refined portraits in pencil and chalk proved popular with collectors, he twice failed in his attempts to be admitted to the Académie Royale, and chose not to apply for a third time. He therefore exhibited mainly at the alternative Salon de la Correspondance, held between 1779 and 1787, although he did take part in the Salons of 1791 and 1793, which were open to all artists. As a genre painter, Trinquesse had a particular penchant for scenes of elegantly dressed, flirtatious young figures engaged in the pursuit of love, often set in a boudoir or a garden. A fine and typical example of such a painting is An Interior with a Lady, Her Maid, and a Gentleman of 1776, today in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut1.

Although he remains among the least-studied of 18th century French artists (indeed, neither the precise dates of his birth nor his death have been established), it is as a draughtsman that Trinquesse is best known today. He made a particular speciality of drawings of elegant women dressed in fine clothes, which are generally dated between 1770 and 1780. Edmond de Goncourt, who owned a number of drawings by the artist, described Trinquesse somewhat dismissively as a ‘crayonneur à la sanguine qui a laissé un certain nombre d’etudes de femmes saisies d’après nature dans leur ajustement et leur accomodement du jour, et qui trouve ou surprend parfois de jolis mouvements mais dont le dessin est gâté par la sécheresse académique, les hachures sévères qu’il introduit dans ses croquis de mode et les fanfioles de la toilette.’2 Trinquesse also produced a number of fine portrait drawings in red chalk of male subjects, often in a circular or medallion format, in both profile and three-quarter views.

A large number of Trinquesse’s drawings of women depict one of three sitters, who have been identified as Marianne Franmery, Louise Charlotte Marini and Louise-Elisabeth Bain, although almost nothing else is known about them. These women, whose facial features seem to correspond to the artist’s ideal of beauty, appear, identified by name, in three profile portrait drawings in a medallion format by Trinquesse3.

Each of these circular drawings, including the portrait of Marianne Franmery (fig.1), are signed and dated 1780. Trinquesse’s models are depicted in his drawings standing full length in an interior, sitting at a writing table or reclining on a sofa, seemingly deep in thought or looking back coquettishly at the viewer.

As been noted of the artist’s drawings of women, ‘His assured handling of red chalk, at once hard and

lively, is easily recognizable…Executed in a fluid yet highly controlled manner, they are stylish and elegant, leading some to suggest that the drawings may have been intended as fashion plates.’4 Furthermore, another recent scholar has pointed out that Trinquesse’s highly finished drawings of this type ‘often seem to be related to figures de mode (or fashion plates), for which the models adapt their poses to show off their costumes.’5 The model for the present sheet has been identified as Marianne Franmery, who appears in perhaps more drawings by Trinquesse than any other identifiable sitter. As Jean Cailleux has described the present sheet, ‘Again, in my opinion, she [ie. Marianne Franmery] reappears in two drawings in the Masson Collection. The first, entitled La Lettre, shows her seated beside a small table on which are a teapot and a cup. Seated on a Louis XV chair she faces the spectator and wears a large bonnet with ribbons à l’alsacienne; she holds a letter in her left hand.’6 Franmery reappears in several other finished drawings in red chalk

by Trinquesse, including a sheet formerly in the Goncourt collection and now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa7 and another in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford8, as well as others in private collections, such as a drawing of Two Women in an Interior in a Parisian private collection9.

As Cara Denison has written of Trinquesse’s drawings of this type, the artist ‘was not interested in the facial expression or in the individualization of his sitters; his preoccupation was the rendering of costume in every elegant detail (the flounced skirts and bodices as well as the fancy bonnets and plumed hats). Executed in the red chalk medium and in a fluent drawing style these drawings are small masterpieces in the genre of costume design.’10 Although the industrialist Jean Masson (1856-1933) gave much of his extensive collection of ornamental drawings and prints to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, his superb collection of 18th century French drawings was dispersed at several auctions in Paris between 1923 and 1927. The present sheet was included in the first of these sales and fetched the sum of 4,300 francs. The drawing later entered the collection of the antiquaire Jacques Bacri (1911-1965), of the Parisian firm Bacri Frères.

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26 HUBERT ROBERT Paris 1733-1808 Paris Laundresses at a Fountain: Design for a Frontispiece Pen and black and brown ink and grey wash. Signed Robert. in brown ink at the lower centre. Inscribed FRAGMENTS / VENISE in brown ink, over black ink, in the centre. Numbered 133. in pencil at the upper right centre.

136 x 190 mm. (5 3/ 8 x 7 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Emmanuel Alfred Beurdeley, Paris (Lugt 421); His sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 13-15 March 1905, lot 207 (‘Un frontispiece pour le voyage de l’abbé de Saint-Nom. (4e suite Venise). Un escalier de pierre conduit à une terrasse d’où une fontaine en forme de lion jaillit dans un bassin. Plusieurs femmes et des laveuses animent la composition. Dessin au lavis de sepia. Signé à la plume. Haut., 13 cent.; larg., 19 cent.’); Marius Paulme, Paris; Georges Dormeuil, Paris (Lugt 1146a); Thence by descent.

Hubert Robert produced several drawings for title pages or frontispieces for the albums he compiled of his studies made in Italy1, as well as designing frontispieces for others, such as for the Comte de Caylus’s Receuil d’Antiquités, published between 1752 and 1767.

An earlier and slightly larger variant of the present composition, with added touches of watercolour and different lettering (fig.1), is in the Louvre2. The Louvre drawing served as the frontispiece of an album, now disbound, of thirty-nine drawings of Roman views by Robert entitled ‘Ensemble de vues variées dessinées à Rome par H. Robert 17….’, which has been dated to c.1764-1765, during the artist’s last years in Rome. The present drawing was later engraved by the Abbé de Saint-Non for the title page of the Quatrième Suite – Venise of his Fragments choisies dans les Peintures et les Tableaux les plus intéressans des Palais et Églises de l’Italie, published in 17743.

The provenance of this small sheet includes three notable French collectors of 18th century drawings.

The drawing belonged successively to the antiquaire Alfred II Beurdeley (1847-1919), the expert and auctioneer Marius Paulme (1863-1928) and the eminent collector Georges Dormeuil (1856-1939), with whose descendants it has remained until recently.

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27a GILLES-PAUL CAUVET Aix-en-Provence 1731-1788 Paris Design for a Decorative Panel with Two Sirens Holding a Vase Embellished with Dolphins and other Decorative Motifs Red chalk, with framing lines in red chalk. Laid down.

473 x 187 mm. (18 5/ 8 x 7 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Martine-Marie-Pol de Béhague, Comtesse de Béarn, Paris; Thence by descent until 1995; Béhague sale (‘Ancienne collection de la Comtesse de Béhague’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Laurin Guilleux Buffetaud Tailleur], 29 November 1995, lot 105; Kate de Rothschild, London, in 1996; Private collection.

EXHIBITED: New York, Brame & Lorenceau, Kate de Rothschild and Didier Aaron at Didier Aaron, Inc., Master Drawings, 1996, no.23.

ENGRAVED: By Simon Charles Miger for Gilles-Paul Cauvet, Receuil d’ornemens à l’usage des jeunes artistes qui se destinent à la decoration des bâtiments, 1777.

The sculptor, architect, engraver and ornamental designer Gilles-Paul Cauvet was admitted to the Académie de Saint Luc in 1762, and four years later was named Director of the institution. In 1775 he was appointed official sculptor to ‘Monsieur’, the Comte de Provence and brother of Louis XVI. Cauvet was particularly known and regarded for his interior decorations, as well as for his designs for boiseries, furniture, clocks and gilt bronze ornaments for such clients as the Queen, Marie-Antoinette. Appointed sculpteur des bâtiments du roi, Cauvet worked at the Palais-Royal, the Luxembourg Palace and the Opéra at Versailles. He often collaborated with the architects Alexandre-Théodore Brogniart and Etienne-Louis Boullée, decorating the interiors of many private hôtels particuliers in Paris, notably the hôtels de Noailles, Kinski, de Mazarin, de MaillyNesle and du Nivernais. In the 1780s he worked on the design of several public buildings in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence and in nearby Marseille. At a time, in the third quarter of the 18th century, when sculpture and relief work in wood or stucco began to dominate the field of interior decoration, where previously painted decorative schemes had prevailed, Cauvet’s distinctive style, with its use of motifs such as acanthus leaves, scrolls and so forth, was characterized by a particular lightness and elegance. In March 1789, the year after Cauvet’s death, much of the contents of his atelier were dispersed at auction1.

This drawing for an arabesque decoration is a study for the first plate (fig.1) in Cauvet’s Recueil d’ornemens à l’usage des jeunes artistes qui se destinent à la decoration des bâtiments, published in Paris in 1777 and intended to serve as a compendium of models for young artists studying interior decoration.

Cauvet published the Receuil d’ornemens himself, adding new plates to the series over the years. His drawings for the Receuil were engraved for the book by a team of printmakers, chief among them the artist’s sister-in-law, Françoise-Charlotte Liottier.

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27b GILLES-PAUL CAUVET Aix-en-Provence 1731-1788 Paris Design for a Decorative Panel with a Cherub Seated on a Globe Red chalk, with framing lines in red chalk. Laid down.

471 x 198 mm. (18 1/ 2 x 7 3/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Martine-Marie-Pol de Béhague, Comtesse de Béarn, Paris; Thence by descent until 1995; Béhague sale (‘Ancienne collection de la Comtesse de Béhague’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Laurin Guilleux Buffetaud Tailleur], 29 November 1995, part of lot 107; Didier Aaron, Inc., New York, in 1996; Private collection.

ENGRAVED: By Elise-Caroline Liottier for Gilles-Paul Cauvet, Receuil d’ornemens à l’usage des jeunes artistes qui se destinent à la decoration des bâtiments, 1777.

Gilles-Paul Cauvet’s drawings are quite rare, although important groups of ornamental drawings by the artist are in the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, whose collection includes an album of some fifty designs by the artist for fountains, arabesques, furniture and silverware. Other decorative drawings by Cauvet are in the collections of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, as well as the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille and both the CooperHewitt National Design Museum and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

Like the previous drawing (No.27a), the present sheet is a study for a print (fig.1) included in Cauvet’s Receuil d’ornemens, published in Paris in 1777 with a dedication to ‘Monsieur’, the brother of King Louis XVI. The present pair of drawings were part of a large group of over twenty designs by Cauvet, most of which were studies for the Receuil d’ornemens, formerly in the collection of Martine-Marie-Pol de Béhague, the Comtesse de Béarn (1869-1939), and dispersed at auction in Paris in 1995. A related red chalk drawing of an ornamental panel by Cauvet, depicting Cupid Gardeners (Les amours jardiniers) and also engraved for the Receuil d’ornemens, shared the same provenance as the present sheet and is now in Pierpont Morgan Library in New York1. Likewise from the Béhague collection are two similar drawings for boiserie panels – one of Venus and Cupid and the other of A Nymph with a Vase of Flowers on her Head – which appeared at auction in 1995 and 2007 and are today in a private American collection2. Among other comparable drawings by Cauvet is a similar study for a vertical panel, drawn in red and black chalk, in the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin3, and another arabesque design for a carved boiserie panel, in red chalk (fig.2), in the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York4.

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28 LOUIS-JEAN DESPREZ Auxerre 1743-1804 Stockholm The Temple of Segesta in Sicily Pen and grey ink and watercolour, with framing lines in black ink.

209 x 343 mm. (8 1/ 4 x 13 1/ 2 in.)

Watermark: A fleur-de-lis in a shield with a crown above and WR below.

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Phillips, 2 July 1990, lot 105; Nicolas Joly at Galerie Yves Mikaeloff, Paris; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Petra Lamers, Il Viaggio nel Sud dell’Abbé de Saint-Non: Il “Voyage pittoresque à Naples et en Sicile”: la genesi, I disegni preparatory, le incisoni, Naples, 1995, pp.267-268, no.264b, illustrated in colour p.66.

EXHIBITED: Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, A Revolutionary Age: Drawing in Europe 1770-1820, 2005, no.13.

ENGRAVED: By Jean Duplessis-Bertaux for the Voyage pittoresque, ou description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile, 1783.

Following an apprenticeship with Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Louis-Jean Desprez was admitted into the Académie Royale d’Architecture in Paris in 1765. He frequently entered the architectural competitions held at the Académie, submitting large, highly finished pen drawings. While he studied architecture for several years, he also took up studies in drawing and engraving, eventually being appointed a Professor of Drawing at the Ecole Royale Militaire. Desprez was to spend almost all of his independent career outside France, however. In 1776 he won the Prix de Rome in the field of architecture, although soon after his arrival in Italy he seems to have finally abandoned the study of architecture in favour of landscape drawing. This was perhaps inspired by the fact that in 1777 he was commissioned by the Abbé de SaintNon to produce illustrations for the Voyage pittoresque, ou description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile, published in five volumes between 1781 and 1786. Together with Claude-Louis Châtelet and Dominique-Vivant Denon, Desprez spent just over a year travelling throughout southern Italy, making numerous topographical drawings which, on his return to Rome in 1779, he often adapted as designs for engravings. After more than four years in Rome, Desprez was summoned to Sweden in 1784 by King Gustav III, who engaged him on the design of theatrical decorations for the new Royal Opera House in Stockholm. He worked in Sweden for the rest of his career, obtaining the position of court architect and scenographer, and producing numerous stage designs for the theatres at Drottningholm and elsewhere. Buoyed by the patronage of the King, who shared with the artist a love of the theatre, Desprez enjoyed a position of some importance in Swedish artistic circles. Following the assassination of Gustav III in 1792, however, his star faded. In the hope of finding a new patron responsive to his ambitious vision, he made several drawings for the Empress Catherine II of Russia but was unsuccessful in gaining her support. He eventually died in poverty and obscurity in Stockholm, and much of his surviving work as a draughtsman is today to be found in Swedish collections.

Desprez’s watercolour drawings, sometimes of a considerable scale, reveal an artist fascinated with the dramatic possibilities of a scene. (Indeed, it was just this ability and vision that made him such a success as a theatrical designer.) The largest extant group of drawings by Desprez is today in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, while a significant number of theatrical designs by the artist are in the collection of the Teatermuseum at Drottningholm.

This watercolour is a preparatory drawing for an engraved illustration in the Abbé de Saint-Non’s lavish Voyage pittoresque, ou description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile. Published in Paris between 1781 and 1786, the five volumes of the Voyage pittoresque must rank as one of the finest books of the 18th century. With a text by Dominique-Vivant Denon and illustrations by Desprez, Châtelet, Hubert Robert, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean-Pierre Houel and Pierre-Adrien Pâris, among others, the book was the most complete survey of the sights, customs and cultural traditions of southern Italy that had appeared up to that time. Desprez drew a total of 136 watercolour illustrations for the Voyage pittoresque and was, alongside Châtelet, the most significant artistic contributor to the volumes.

Desprez, Châtelet and Vivant Denon spent a total of six months in Sicily, between June and November 1788, and Desprez probably visited Segesta sometime in July or August of that year. The Doric temple at Segesta, near the western tip of Sicily, is thought to have been built around 417 BC, and is one of the finest surviving examples of a Hellenistic temple. Placed on a hilltop outside the ancient Elymian city of Segesta, the temple stands in splendid isolation and is visible for miles around. Although it is unusually well preserved today, the temple appears never to have been fully completed, since it lacks a roof, an altar, and any painted or sculpted ornamentation.

The engraving after the present watercolour, executed by the artist and printmaker Jean DuplessisBertaux (fig.1), appeared in the fourth volume of the Voyage pittoresque, published in 1783, with the caption ‘Petite vue Laterale du Temple de Segeste’1. A preparatory sheet by Despez of pen and ink sketches of the temple at Segesta is in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm2. The artist also produced a watercolour of the interior of the temple at Segesta for the Voyage pittoresque, which is now in the collection of the Albertina in Vienna3.

Among stylistically comparable watercolour drawings by Desprez for the Voyage pittoresque are several views of the temples at Agrigento, including The Ruins of the Temple of Juno Lacinia at Agrigento in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier4 and The Ruins of the Temple of Hercules at Agrigento in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London5, as well as two views of The Temple of Concordia at Agrigento formerly in the Stevens collection in Dover6. As Pierre Rosenberg has noted of another of Desprez’s watercolour drawings for the Voyage pittoresque, in terms equally applicable to the present sheet, ‘The humour and vivacity of his observation, and his imagination, make the drawing something more than just an exact topographical record.’7 Similarly, as Mary Tavener Holmes has recently commented, ‘Desprez, an architect with a talent for set design and an interest in classical antiquity…was a logical choice to provide drawings for the abbé de Saint-Non’s Voyage pittoresque…While Desprez may have been approached initially as an architect, it was his scenographic talents that prevailed. Far from being dry schematic renditions, his scenes are alive with action, the small figures (so reminiscent of the work of Jacques Callot, which he must surely have known) expressive and energetic.’8

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29 CLAUDE-LOUIS CHÂTELET Paris 1753-1795 Paris An Alpine Valley with a Waterfall Pen and brush and black ink and grey wash, heightened with touches of white, on blue paper, with double framing lines in brown ink. Inscribed vallée du [?] in brown ink at the lower left.

218 x 285 mm. (8 1/ 2 x 11 1/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 22 January 2004, part of lot 212; Private collection.

LITERATURE: New York, Wildenstein, The Arts of France from François Ier to Napoléon Ier: A Centennial Celebration of Wildenstein’s Presence in New York, exhibition catalogue, 2005-2006, p.294, note 8, under no.124.

Very little is known of the birth and artistic training of Claude-Louis Châtelet. He is not recorded as a student at the Académie Royale, and the known facts of his career are few. Active primarily as a topographical draughtsman and book illustrator, he seems to have completed only a handful of paintings, among them views of Versailles and one or two seascapes. It is rather for his landscape drawings in watercolour or gouache that Châtelet is best known. Like his contemporaries Louis-Gabriel Moreau and Louis Bélanger, Châtelet often depicted the parks and gardens around Paris, such as Bellevue and the Folie Saint-James at Neuilly, and also provided a series of watercolour views of the Petit Trianon at Versailles for the Queen, Marie-Antoinette. In 1776 and again between 1780 and 1781 he travelled throughout Switzerland, producing several drawings for Jean-Benjamin de La Borde and Baron Beat Fidel de Zurlauben’s massive publishing project, the Tableaux topographiques, pittoresques, physiques, historiques, moraux, politiques, littéraires de la Suisse, dedicated to the Comte d’Artois and published between 1780 and 1786.

Châtelet’s best known and most important commission, however, came soon after his return from Switzerland, when he was asked to supply landscape illustrations for the Abbé de Saint-Non’s Voyage pittoresque, ou description historique des royaumes de Naples, et de Sicile, published between 1781 and 1786. Châtelet undertook a trip to southern Italy, in the company of Louis-Jean Desprez and Dominique-Vivant Denon, to prepare drawings for the book. He was, along with Desprez, responsible for the largest number of the illustrations later engraved for this massive project, to which Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Hubert Robert, Jean-Pierre Houel and Saint-Non himself also contributed. Actively involved in radical politics, Châtelet was a fervent Revolutionary, a committed follower of Robespierre and a member of the Jacobin Tribunal. After the fall of Robespierre in 1794, however, he was himself imprisoned, and was sent to the guillotine on the 7th of May the following year.

This and the following drawing (No.30) are part of small but distinctive group of alpine landscapes drawn on a deep blue paper – possibly part of a sketchbook – that are likely to have been executed during Châtelet’s travels around Switzerland in 1780-1781, in preparation for La Borde and Zurlauben’s Tableaux topographiques, pittoresques, physiques, historiques, moraux, politiques, littéraires de la Suisse.

None of these drawings on blue paper, however, appear to have been used in the book, and instead they have the appearance of independent, finished works.

30 CLAUDE-LOUIS CHÂTELET Paris 1753-1795 Paris Swiss Mountain Landscape with a Waterfall Pen and black ink and grey wash, heightened with white, on blue paper. Inscribed Champ du Moulin in black ink at the lower left.

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

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

LITERATURE: New York, Wildenstein, The Arts of France from François Ier to Napoléon Ier: A Centennial Celebration of Wildenstein’s Presence in New York, exhibition catalogue, 2005-2006, p.294, under no.124, note 8.

This striking landscape may be likewise dated to the period of Claude-Louis Châtelet’s travels around Switzerland between 1780 and 1781, when he was working on the illustrations for the three volumes of La Borde and Zurlauben’s Tableaux topographiques, pittoresques, physiques, historiques, moraux, politiques, littéraires de la Suisse. Châtelet had also travelled around Switzerland, in the company of JeanBenjamin de La Borde, several years earlier, in 1776; a trip that may well have inspired La Borde to announce the planned publication of the Tableaux…de la Suisse to potential subscribers the same year.

Waterfalls appear in many of Châtelet’s drawing as well as in several of his rare paintings of views in Switzerland, France and Italy. A stylistically comparable drawing of the waterfalls on the Rhine at Schaffhausen, in Switzerland near the German border, and drawn on the same deep blue paper, was formerly in the collection of John Gaines in Lexington, Kentucky, and was sold at auction in 20011.

Another drawing from this group is The Cascade at Tivoli in the Horvitz Collection in Boston2, which is in the same distinctive technique, as are four further studies of mountain views by Châtelet, on identical blue paper, in the same collection3, and a Mountain Landscape with a Waterfall, recently sold at auction in New York4.

Also stylistically comparable, though much larger in scale, are two drawings of waterfalls by Châtelet; one in the collection of the Louvre5 and the other, depicting the Reichenbach falls in Switzerland, sold at auction in New York in 20006.

31 LOUIS BÉLANGER Paris 1756-1816 Stockholm The Cascades at Tivoli, with Tourists and Fishermen Watercolour and gouache. Signed and dated Belanger / 1783 in brown ink at the lower left.

522 x 393 mm. (20 1/ 2 x 15 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably Prince Repnine, Paris; Probably his sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 6 June 1907, lot 6 (‘Les Cascatelles de Tivoli. Sur les hauteurs, on aperçoit diverses habitations, puis apparait un vaste rocher qui ressemble à un large mur, et dont l’eau sort et tombe en cascades. Superbe aquarelle rehaussée de gouache. Signée: Bélanger, 1783. (H. 0.53. – L. 0.39)’); Wildenstein, New York, in 1943; Acquired from them by Denys Sutton, London: Thence by descent.

The younger brother of the architect François-Joseph Bélanger, Louis Bélanger was a landscape painter and draughtsman, with a particular speciality of views of sites in France, Italy and Switzerland. He was a pupil of his brother, who was twelve years older, as well as Francesco Casanova and Louis-Gabriel Moreau the Elder, and worked primarily in watercolour and gouache. His earliest dated works were executed in 1779, and in the 1780s he travelled throughout France, as well as to Switzerland, Italy and England. With the advent of the French Revolution, he fled France and in 1790 settled in England, where he lived for eight years and provided drawings for the print market in Paris. (Six watercolour views of London by Bélanger, each dated 1790 and possibly intended as designs for prints, are in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.) Bélanger exhibited landscapes at the Royal Academy in London in 1790 (when the catalogue described him as ‘Painter to the Duke of Orléans’) and 1797, and enjoyed the patronage of a number of English connoisseurs, some of whose London homes he decorated. After a brief visit to Switzerland in 1798, Bélanger moved to Sweden, where in 1799 he was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and appointed Painter to King Gustav IV. He lived and worked in Sweden for the last eighteen years of his career, and in 1803 published a series of prints entitled Voyage pittoresque de la Suède. A number of paintings, watercolours and gouaches by the artist are today in the collection of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.

The famous cascades at Tivoli, twenty miles from Rome, where the river Aniene drops some 330 feet, had long been a popular site for artists. As the English traveller Charlotte Waldie, writing in the early years of the 19th century, noted, ‘The beauty of Tivoli consists in its rocks and waterfalls...Amidst the dreary wilds of the Campagna you would never dream that a spot so romantic was at hand...what a prospect of unspeakable beauty bursts upon your view! Tremendous precipices of rock, down which roars a headlong torrent, – trees and bushy plants shading its foaming course, – cliffs crowned with the most picturesque ruins, and painted in tints whose beauty art can never imitate, – hills, and woods, and hanging vineyards; and Tivoli itself, which, peeping out amidst the dark cypresses at the top of these sunny banks, looks like an earthly paradise...The pencil only can describe Tivoli; and though unlike other scenes, the beauty of which is generally exaggerated in picture, no representation has done justice to it, it is yet impossible that some part of its peculiar charms should not be transferred upon the canvas. It almost seems as if nature herself had turned painter when she formed this beautiful and perfect composition.’1 Waterfalls, cascades and rapids were a favourite subject of Louis Bélanger throughout his career. A later watercolour and gouache view by the artist of the falls at Tivoli, seen from a slightly different viewpoint and dated 1792, was acquired in 1968 by the Government Art Collection of the United Kingdom and is today in the British Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia2. Another large view of the cascades at Tivoli

by Bélanger, dated 1795, appeared at auction in Switzerland in 20073. The present sheet is likely to have been part of a group of nine gouache landscapes by Bélanger from the collection of Prince Repnine and sold at auction in Paris in 19074.

32 JEAN-BAPTISTE GREUZE Tournus 1725-1805 Paris A Child Hugging a Dog Pen and brush with grey ink and grey wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Framing lines in brown ink.

205 x 241 mm. (8 1/ 8 x 9 1/ 2 in.)

Watermark: CL above an indistinct object.

PROVENANCE: Comte André-Gaspard-Parfait de Bizemont Prunelé, Orléans (Lugt 128); By descent to either his son, Adrien de Bizemont, Orléans, or his daughter, the Comtesse de Candé; Possibly Émile Louis Dominique Calando, Paris; Possibly his posthumous sale, Paris, Hôtel des CommissairesPriseurs [Oudard and Chevallier], 11-12 December 1899, lot 82 (‘Enfant caressant un chien. Superbe esquisse à l’encre de chine. (H, 0,205. – L. 0,290.)’, sold for 400 francs); Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Ader Picard Tajan], 29-30 November 1989, lot 63; Kate de Rothschild and Yvonne Tan Bunzl, London, in 1990; Private collection, since 1996.

LITERATURE: Possibly Jean Martin and Charles Masson, Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint et dessiné de Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Paris, 1908, p.65, no.1043 (‘Enfant caressant un chien. H. 0m20. L. 0m29. – Esquisse à l’encre de Chine. Vente E. Calando, 12 décembre 1899, no. 82.’); Kate de Rothschild, Kate de Rothschild: Master Drawings. A Celebration, 35 Years in the Art World 1972-2007, n.d. (2008), unpaginated, no.26.

EXHIBITED: London, Kate de Rothschild and Yvonne Tan Bunzl at Didier Aaron (London) Ltd., Master Drawings, 1990, no.30; Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, French Drawings from the Age of Greuze, 2002.

After a period of study in Lyon, Jean-Baptiste Greuze arrived in Paris around 1750 and entered the studio of Charles-Joseph Natoire. He was admitted into the Académie Royale as an associate member in 1755, in the category of peintre de genre particulier, but did not gain full membership as an Academician until 1769. His paintings of moralizing genre subjects, exhibited at the annual Salons, earned him the praise of the influential critic Denis Diderot. Among his most celebrated works in this field of ‘moral painting’, as it was defined by Diderot, was The Marriage Contract of 1761, now in the Louvre. He was also a superb portraitist, exhibiting a number of portraits at the Salon throughout the 1760s to considerable acclaim.

Immensely famous and successful at the height of his career, Greuze enjoyed the patronage of such prominent collectors as Jean de Jullienne, Ange-Laurent de Lalive de Jully, the Duc de Choiseul, the Marquis de Marigny and the Empress Catherine II of Russia, although his difficult temperament often alienated other clients. Even the artist’s first great champion Diderot, writing to the sculptor EtienneMaurice Falconet in 1767, described Greuze as ‘an excellent artist, but a very disagreeable character. One should have his drawings and his paintings, and leave the man at that.’1 In 1769, angered by the rejection of his reception piece – a history painting depicting Septimus Severus Reproaching His Son Caracalla – by the Académie Royale, who instead admitted him only as a genre painter, Greuze refused to exhibit at the Salon again for over thirty years, until 1800. Instead he exhibited and sold his paintings from his studio, with much success. However, his reputation suffered with the rise of Neoclassicism after the Revolution, although he received a royal pension from Louis XVI in 1792. Greuze died in relative obscurity at the age of eighty, in his studio at the Louvre.

A gifted, versatile and prolific draughtsman, Greuze was praised as such by Diderot, who noted, in a review of the Salon of 1763, that ‘this man draws like an angel.’ Equally adept in chalks, pastel and ink, Greuze often exhibited finished drawings alongside his paintings at the Salons. The 18th century collector,

dealer and connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette commented that Greuze’s drawings were much in demand, and that collectors habitually paid high prices for them.

This charming sheet, drawn in Greuze’s favoured medium for compositional studies of brush and greyblack wash, is a study for the little boy embracing a dog at the right edge of a large compositional drawing entitled The Family Reconciliation (La réconciliation de la famille) of c.1770 (fig.1), in the collection of the Phoenix Art Museum2. It has been suggested that the Phoenix drawing was one of a pair of very large and highly finished genre drawings executed in brush and grey wash, together with its pendant, The Angry Wife (La Femme colère), today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York3. Probably executed both as finished drawings for sale and as designs for engravings, these two large drawings are thought to have been inspired by Greuze’s somewhat tempestuous family life, and the dog depicted in this drawing may have been a family pet.

In an earlier version of the composition of The Family Reconciliation, today in the Prat collection in Paris, the dog is absent, and the child is seen standing at a table4. Another, much more sketchy compositional study for The Family Reconciliation, today in the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana5, also excludes the dog. A very similar child and dog is also found in a large, finished drawing of The Paternal Blessing, or the Departure of Basile, exhibited at the Salon of 1769 and today in the Art Institute of Chicago6. The dog in the Chicago drawing, however, faces to the left.

Dogs appear often in Greuze’s paintings and finished drawings, and the artist seems to have had a particular affection for them. Several studies of dogs were recorded in the sale of the contents of the artist’s studio in 1843, following the death of his daughter Caroline, and others are noted in Jean Martin and Charles Masson’s catalogue raisonné of Greuze’s work, published in 1908.

The first recorded owner of this drawing was Comte A. G. P. de Bizemont Prunelé (1752-1837) who, apart from being a collector of drawings, paintings and objets d’art, was also a talented amateur artist and engraver. A number of drawings from his collection were left to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans.

Although it does not bear his collector’s mark, this drawing may have later belonged to the Parisian marchand-amateur Émile Louis Dominique Calando (1840-1898), since a pen and ink drawing closely matching its description was listed in the catalogue of the posthumous sale of his collection of mainly 18th century French drawings held in December 1899, which included ten sheets by Greuze.

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33 JACQUES GAMELIN Carcassonne 1738-1803 Carcassonne or GUILLAUME GOUDIN Toulouse c.1740-c.1809 Toulouse The Burial of Ananias Black and blue wash, heightened with white, on prepared canvas.

263 x 403 mm. (10 3/ 8 x 15 7/ 8 in.) [image] 284 x 425 mm. (11 1/ 8 x 16 3/ 4 in.) [canvas] PROVENANCE: Nicolas Joly at Galerie Yves Mikaeloff, Paris; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Clifford S. Ackley, ‘The Intuitive Eye: Drawings and Paintings from the Collection of Horace Wood Brock’, in Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 2009, p.90 and p.157, no.125, illustrated p.124 (as Gamelin).

EXHIBITED: Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Classic Taste: Drawings and Decorative Arts from the Collection of Horace Brock, March-May, 2000 (as Gamelin); Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.125 (as Gamelin).

Among the gifted French painters of the latter half of the 18th century, Jacques Gamelin is unusual for his refusal to make his career in Paris, choosing instead to work mainly in the Lanquedoc and Southwestern France; in Carcassone, Narbonne, Montpellier and Toulouse. His early artistic training with Jean-Pierre Rivalz in Toulouse was followed in 1764 by a brief period in the Parisian studio of JeanBaptiste Deshays. In the same year he competed, unsuccessfully, for the Prix de Rome. Gamelin then travelled to Italy under the auspices of a patron in Toulouse, the Baron de Puymaurin, and remained there for ten years. Admitted into the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1771 as a painter of battle scenes, he also won a commission to paint a Fall of Phaeton for a ceiling in the Palazzo Rondanini. By the age of thirty-two Gamelin had become the official painter to Pope Clement XIV. On his return to France in 1775, Gamelin settled first in Toulouse, where he established a school of dissection and in 1779 published an anatomical treatise, Nouveau receuil d’ostéologie et de myologie dessiné, devoted to studies of bones and musculature. He later settled in Montpellier, where he served as director of the Ecole de Dessin de la Société des Beaux-Arts between 1780 and 1783. He produced a large body of work of considerable variety and originality, and had a particular penchant for violent or dramatic episodes from classical history. He was an avid reader of classical texts, in which he found inspiration for many of his compositions, and was often drawn to more obscure themes. Gamelin executed several paintings for churches in his native Carcassonne and was also commissioned to paint four large canvases for the church of Saint-Just in Narbonne, remaining there throughout the period of the Revolution. In 1796 he was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Ecole Centrale de l’Aude in his hometown of Carcassonne, where he ended his career. As Pierre Rosenberg has written, ‘Against the current of official painting – cold, pure colours used without intermediate tones, an increasing predilection for line and static composition – the art of Gamelin resists the centralisme parisien and reflects instead original local traditions, thus helping to modify the over-simplified image we have of painting in France during the second half of the 18th century.’1

Gamelin often worked on prepared blue paper, and was also fond of using blue washes in his drawings, creating highly finished compositions that were intended as autonomous works of art, rather than as studies for larger works. The artist’s idiosyncratic draughtsmanship is characterized by a bold technique and dramatic lighting, and such visually striking drawings appear to have been produced by Gamelin to be sold to private collectors, as a means of supplementing his income. As Victor Carlson has noted, ‘the artist often chose episodes of great complexity, which he treated in drawings with numerous figures gesticulating dramatically…The highly pitched emotional tenor of these scenes is enhanced by Gamelin’s preference for chiaroscuro effects, which he sometimes achieved by covering a sheet of paper with a grey or blue ground…his bold lighting effects, together with his bravura execution, give to these classical themes an emotional expressiveness that seems closer in spirit to the work of Henry Fuseli or James Barry than to any specifically French tradition.’2 This and the following drawing (No.34) depict the New Testament story of Ananias and Sapphira, taken from the Acts of the Apostles, 5:1-11. Members of the early Christian church in Jerusalem, Ananias and SapQhira sold their land so as to give the proceeds to the apostles. However, they secretly conspired to keep back a portion of the funds for themselves, before presenting the donation to Saint Peter: ‘Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. With his wife’s full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet.

Then Peter said, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold?

And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied just to human beings but to God.” When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard what had happened. Then some young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him.’

Drawings by Gamelin in the distinctive technique and style of this pair of drawings include Achilles Dragging the Body of Hector Around the Walls of Troy, signed and dated 1781, in the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse3, The Audacity of the Spartan Warrior Isadas in a private collection4, a pair of battle scenes depicting The Grand Condé at Rocroi, each dated 1778, in the Musée de Picardie in Amiens5, and a Battle Scene in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier6. As Carlson has noted of Gamelin’s drawings of this type, ‘the figures are rapidly and boldly set down with the brush, their contours often outlined with a fine line of white ink against the dark ground of the paper. Gamelin sometimes executed his chiaroscuro drawings on paper prepared with a dull dark blue or blue-grey wash…These drawings were then completed with brush and black ink, and with dramatic highlights in white ink’, adding that ‘Most of Gamelin’s known chiaroscuro drawings date from his return to Languedoc…There, removed from the weighty influence of the fine arts academies of Paris or Rome…Gamelin evolved his own singular, somewhat eccentric version of neoclassic draftsmanship.’7 While the present pair of drawings have long been attributed to Jacques Gamelin, an alternative attribution to a little-known contemporary of his, the Toulousain artist Guillaume Goudin (c.1740c.1809) may be posited. As Victor Carlson has pointed out, ‘During the second half of the eighteenth century, a number of other artists made chiaroscuro drawings on vivid blue paper, or on sheets tinted with ink washes…This type of finished drawing became increasingly common throughout Europe during the latter part of the eighteenth century as a market developed for drawings that could be glazed, framed, and hung on the wall.’8 The scholar Olivier Michel has recently suggested that a handful of works previously regarded as by Gamelin may instead be by Goudin. Both artists, who were similar in age, lived and worked mainly in the south of France, largely isolated from the artistic centre of Paris, and made a speciality of finished drawings of classical subjects executed in an identical technique of blue washes.

34 JACQUES GAMELIN Carcassonne 1738-1803 Carcassonne or GUILLAUME GOUDIN Toulouse c.1740-c.1809 Toulouse The Chastisement of Sapphira Black and blue wash, heightened with white, on prepared canvas. Inscribed Saphira in pencil in the lower margin.

258 x 398 mm. (10 1/ 8 x 15 5/ 8 in.) [image] 285 x 425 mm. (11 1/ 4 x 16 3/ 4 in.) [canvas] PROVENANCE: Nicolas Joly at Galerie Yves Mikaeloff, Paris; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Clifford S. Ackley, ‘The Intuitive Eye: Drawings and Paintings from the Collection of Horace Wood Brock’, in Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 2009, p.90 and p.157, no.125, illustrated p.124 (as Gamelin).

EXHIBITED: Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Classic Taste: Drawings and Decorative Arts from the Collection of Horace Brock, March-May, 2000 (as Gamelin); Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.125 (as Gamelin).

This drawing continues the story of Ananias and Saphira from Acts 5:1-11: ‘About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter asked her, “Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?” “Yes,” she said, “that is the price.” Peter said to her, “How could you conspire to test the Spirit of the Lord? Listen! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also.” At that moment she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband. Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.’

As one scholar has noted of this particular pair of drawings, ‘The Burial of Ananias and The Chastisement of Sapphira [are] a pair of morality tales on the subject of charity by Jacques Gamelin…[executed in] blue watercolor brushed over stretched canvas prepared with white gesso…The New Testament subject concerns a husband and wife who held back a portion of their possessions when the apostle Peter commanded them to sell eveything and give the proceeds to the poor. In retribution for their lack of cooperation, they were suddenly and miraculously struck dead on the spot…The images are formally austere and the figures statuary in conception, evoking the Neoclassicism of the late eighteenth century, while the nocturnal lighting suggests the dramatic illumination often associated with the emerging Romantic movement.’1 As has been noted, the possibility that this pair of drawings are the work of Guillaume Goudin must also be considered. Little is known of the life and career of Goudin. Probably born in or near Toulouse around 1740 (and thus only a few years younger than Gamelin), he is said to have studied with JosephMarie Vien in Paris. He also trained at the Académie Royale de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture de Toulouse, in whose annual Salons he exhibited as a student between 1761 and 1765. After 1765, however, there is no record of Goudin for the next fifteen years, and it is assumed that he may have spent some of these years travelling, although he is not thought to have been to Rome.

Goudin is only documented again in 1780, as an ‘associé-artist, professeur de dessin’ and one of the members of the commission of the Salon of Toulouse. He trained a large number of pupils in his studio, and in 1786 was named a professor at the Académie in Toulouse, where among his pupils was the young Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In later years he continued to teach in Toulouse, first at the Ecole Centrale and later at the Ecole Speciale des Sciences et des Arts, where he remained until his death in 1809. He seems to have been a successful and popular teacher, and some eighty artists who showed in Toulouse in the 1780s listed Goudin as their master in the Salon livrets. In 1823 a brief recollection of the artist was published in the Biographie Toulousaine: ‘Goudin had not been able to travel to Rome; sustained only by his aptitude, fighting against a host of obstacles, he did all he could do. His taste was unsure, but he drew with much correction and energy. His drawings washed in bistre on white or blue paper are sought after by collectors; his paintings have less value...[he] excelled mainly in painting battles and military camp scenes.’2 Although some eighteen paintings and more than fifty drawings by Guillaume Goudin are listed in the livrets of the Salons in Toulouse, just two paintings and around a dozen drawings that have been attributed to the artist are known today. The works he exhibited in Toulouse between 1761 and 1791, most of which are now lost3, included a number of battle scenes and religious subjects, but were predominantly scenes taken from classical history. Many of Goudin’s few extant works were formerly attributed to Gamelin; this is true, for example, of one of the very few paintings that can be confidently attributed to Goudin; a large canvas of The Death of Camilla, Queen of the Volsci that was on the Paris art market in the early 1990s4.

The present pair of drawings are very close in both style and technique to a large signed drawing by Guillaume Goudin of The Sacrifice of Polyxena (fig.1) in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours5. Also similar in style, though not drawn with blue washes, is a very large finished drawing of The Continence of Scipio (or Themistocles before Alexander) by Goudin, signed and dated 1789, in the Musée Paul-Dupuy in Toulouse6.

1.

35 ANDRÉ-JEAN LE BRUN Paris 1757-1811 Vilnius An Allegory of the Arts Vanquishing Time, Surmounted by a Medallion Portrait of King Stanislaw August of Poland as Patron of the Arts Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk.

454 x 642 mm. (17 7/ 8 x 25 1/ 4 in.)

Watermark: Fleur-de-lys in a shield, surmounted by a crown.

PROVENANCE: Baron Adalbert von Lanna, Prague (Lugt 2773), his stamp on the verso; Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 22 March 2007, part of lot 90; W. M. Brady & Co., New York, in 2008; Private collection.

LITERATURE: New York, W. M. Brady & Co., Old Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2008, unpaginated, no.24; Clifford S. Ackley, ‘The Intuitive Eye: Drawings and Paintings from the Collection of Horace Wood Brock’, in Horace Wood Brock, Martin P. Levy and Clifford S. Ackley, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 2009, p.89 and p.158, illustrated p.137 and as frontispiece on p.4; Katarzyna MikockaRachubowa, André Le Brun: “pierwszy rzezbiarz” króla Stanislawa Augusta, Warsaw, 2010, pp.446-447, no.94; Louis-Antoine Prat, Le dessin français au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 2017, p.289.

EXHIBITED: New York, W. M. Brady & Co., Old Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, 2008, no.24.

A student of the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, André Le Brun won the Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1756. He arrived in Rome in 1759 and, after his period as a pensionnaire at the Académie de France had ended, chose to remain in Italy. He achieved some success there, sculpting marble portrait busts of Pope Clement XIII and Cardinal Giuseppe Maria Ferroni, as well as a statue of Judith for the Roman church of San Marcello al Corso. Le Brun was, in fact, never to return to his native France. At the recommendation of his teacher Pigalle and the noted Parisian salonnière Mme. Geoffrin, Le Brun left Rome to enter the service of Stanislaw August Poniatowksi, King of Poland. He arrived in Warsaw in 1768 and spent several years working at the Royal Palace. Between 1775 and 1779 he was back in Rome, still working for the King of Poland and continuing his study of antique sculpture. On his return to Warsaw, Le Brun was appointed First Sculptor to the King and head of the royal sculpture workshop.

He provided sculptural decorations for the Royal Castle in Warsaw – most of which were lost in the destruction of the Castle during the Second World War, although it was later rebuilt – and other royal residences. In 1797 he accompanied Stanislaw August on his exile to Russia, and while in Saint Petersburg produced a number of sculpted portrait busts. Le Brun only left Russia in 1805, when he was appointed a professor at the University in Vilnius, a position he retained until his death there six years later.

Most of Le Brun’s extant corpus of drawings is in the museums of Warsaw, Cracow, Saint Petersburg and Budapest, and only a handful of sheets are to be found in collections in Western Europe and America. His drawings may be divided into two types; figure studies generally executed in red chalk and more complex compositions drawn in pen or brush with brown ink and a golden-brown wash, of which the present sheet is a particularly fine example. As a Russian scholar has noted of the artist’s compositional drawings of this type, ‘The originality of his pen and brush drawings permits us to place Le Brun among the outstanding French draughtsmen of the last three decades of the eighteenth century.’1 In superb, fresh condition, this large sheet may be dated to the artist’s maturity, and more specifically to his second period in PoIand, after 1780. The emphasis on the portrait medallion of King Stanislaw

August Poniatowksi at the top of the composition would suggest that this drawing was likely to have been intended as a design for a Royal commission. As has been noted of the present sheet, ‘Rendered in passages of fluid golden wash and deft, suggestive strokes of the pen, the drawing – a project for an allegorical relief sculpture to adorn one of the royal residences – shows the king’s profile portrait in an oval frame being elevated by Fame, supported from below by the Arts, and overcoming the toppled figure of Time, with his scythe and hourglass. The radiant glow of thin transparent washes brushed over reflective white paper contributes significantly to the sense of triumphant affirmation evident in the design.’2 The portrait of Stanislaw August at the top of the sheet is closely based on similar oval bust-length relief portraits of the King sculpted by Le Brun, such as one example (fig.1) in the collection of the Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw3.

Jolanta Talbierska has suggested that the present sheet may have been a design for a never-executed bas-relief for a room in one of the Royal palaces in Warsaw, perhaps for the Senatorial Antechamber in the Great Apartment of the Royal Castle4. The decorative scheme of this room has been described by one scholar: ‘In this interior the King wished to express the truth that the power and wisdom of the nation, the deep belief and the observing of the principles of justice by society were the work of both the monarchs and statesmen, priests, scholars and artists.’5 The eventual decoration of the Senatorial Antechamber, executed between 1781 and 1786, was dominated by two large allegorical sculptures by Le Brun, one representing Chronos-Saturn and the other Fame or Eternity6.

A somewhat similar sculptural ensemble designed by Le Brun, showing a portrait medallion of King Stanislaw August flanked by standing, winged allegorical figures of Peace and Justice, is found in an overdoor relief (fig.2) in the Great Hall of the Royal Castle in Warsaw, executed between 1777 and 17807.

The present sheet is one of four equally large pen and wash drawings by André Le Brun which once belonged to the noted 19th century collector of prints and drawings Baron Adalbert von Lanna (18361909) of Prague. The other three drawings by Le Brun from the von Lanna collection depicted Venus at the Forge of Vulcan, The Resurrection of Lazarus and A Sacrifice of Vestal Virgins, all of which appeared alongside the present sheet at auction in Paris in 20078. Among other stylistically comparable drawings

by Le Brun are a Martyrdom of Seven Brothers in the Schlossmuseum in Weimar9, a pair of allegorical compositions of women in antique garb flanking portrait busts in the Louvre10, and a Minerva Patronizing the Arts and Sciences in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg11.

1.

2.

36 BARON DOMINIQUE-VIVANT DENON Chalon-sur-Saone 1747-1825 Paris A Seated Woman Wearing a Feathered Hat Pen and brown ink, over a black chalk underdrawing. Inscribed Denon in pencil on the album page on which the drawing has been attached.

144 x 82 mm. (5 5/ 8 x 3 1/ 4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Part of a large group of drawings by or associated with Denon, assembled in the 19th century; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 4 July 1989, part of lot 150; W. M. Brady & Co., New York; Private collection.

The most powerful administrator of the arts in Napoleonic France, Dominique-Vivant Denon had an extraordinary life and career. A diplomat, writer, archaeologist and engraver, he was also a discerning and wide-ranging art collector and a prolific and talented draughtsman. As a law student in Paris, Denon was introduced into the circle of the collector and antiquarian, the Comte de Caylus, and eventually attracted the attention of Louis XVI himself, who named him gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre du roi. In 1772 Denon entered the diplomatic service, and six years later was sent to Naples, where he spent seven years as chargé d’affaires from 1778 to 1785. He studied the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum and was commissioned to contribute text to the Abbé de Saint-Non’s Voyages pittoresques de Naples et de Sicile. In March 1787 he was accepted into the Académie Royale as an engraver. The following year he sold his collection of Etruscan vases to the King and departed for Italy, where he spent the early years of the Revolution.

At the end of 1793 he made a sudden return to France to avoid having his properties confiscated. His presence in Paris put him at great risk, motivating him to change the spelling of his family name from the aristocratic ‘de Non’ to ‘Denon’. He owed his survival to the artist Jacques-Louis David, who issued a certificate testifying to Denon’s republican patriotism and procuring for him several etching commissions.

Denon also began to attend the trials and debates of the various revolutionary committees, where he made quick sketches, like a courtroom reporter, of many of the significant figures of the Revolution.

After the Terror, Denon was enlisted by General Bonaparte to accompany the Egyptian expedition of 1798-1799. He meticulously measured and drew many of the monuments of Egypt, and on his return to France published the first work of scientific Egyptology, the Voyages dans la haute et basse Egypte, which appeared in 1802. With the inauguration of the Musée Napoléon (later the Louvre) the same year, the recently ennobled Baron Denon was appointed its first Director, as well as directeur général des Musées Impériaux. This gave him full control over the Manufactories of Sèvres, Gobelins and Savonnerie as well as the Monnaie. He reorganized the Louvre, guided Napoleon in the selection of works to be seized from conquered nations, and presided over the official Salons until the fall of Bonaparte in 1814.

While a large number of Denon’s own drawings were included in the sale of his collection in May 1826, the accompanying catalogue does not provide enough specific information to be able to identify individual sheets. A stylistically comparable drawing of a similar size by Denon, identified by him in a caption as a portrait of the Duchesse de Vicence and her child, and sharing the same 19th century provenance as the present sheet, was on the art market in Paris in 19901.

actual size

37 JEAN-BAPTISTE PILLEMENT Lyon 1728-1808 Lyon Pastoral Landscape with Peasants and Sheep Pastel, watercolour, charcoal and black chalk on prepared canvas.

236 x 338 mm. (9 1/ 4 x 13 1/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, New York, since c.1900; Didier Aaron, Inc., New York, in 1996; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Neil Jeffares, ‘Jean-Baptiste Pillement’, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800 [online edition], no.J.592.295.

EXHIBITED: New York, Brame & Lorenceau, Kate de Rothschild and Didier Aaron at Didier Aaron, Master Drawings, 1996, part of no.32.

‘An artist with a great deal of merit, gifted with a prodigious talent, this busy man worked in all genres (except history painting and portraiture) in oil, pastel, chalk, ink, pencil, and always with an ease, a facility, a remarkable rapidity. His touch is extremely firm, neat, precise. One never sees hesitation or indecision in his works, all of which are characterized by a great harmony, and by an abundance of spirit.’1 Thus was Jean Pillement described some twenty years after his death, and such assessments of his abilities have lasted into the present day, with one modern scholar describing the artist as ‘a versatile painter and an exquisite draughtsman’2.

One of the most influential decorative and ornamental draughtsmen working in Europe in the second half of the 18th century, Pillement was an equally gifted painter of pastoral landscapes, marines, flowerpieces and chinoiseries. A precocious talent, by the age of fifteen he was working as a designer at the Gobelins tapestry factory in Paris. In 1745, aged seventeen, he left France to spend three years in Madrid. This was to be the first in a long series of travels throughout Europe over the next forty years. After a period in Lisbon, where he was offered, and declined, the title of Painter to the King, Pillement spent the next few years, between 1754 and 1763, working in London. His pastoral subjects, seascapes and picturesque views found an appreciative audience in England, and he became a popular and respected member of artistic society in London. It was also in England in the 1750s that some of his ornamental designs were first engraved and published, and where he established himself as a fashionable decorative painter.

During the 1760s, Pillement received prestigious commissions from the Empress Maria Theresa and the Prince of Liechtenstein in Vienna and King Stanislas August Poniatowski of Poland in Warsaw. In France, he was named peintre de la reine in 1778, in which role he painted three decorative canvases for Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon at Versailles; the only instance in his long career of an official French commission. For much of the 1780s he worked in Portugal and Spain, returning to France in 1789, though he abandoned Paris during the Revolution and spent much of the next decade in the small town of Pezénas in Languedoc. The last years of Pillement’s career were spent in his native Lyon, where he was employed at the Manufacture de Soie et des Indiennes and gave lessons in decoration and design.

He died in relative obscurity at the age of eighty, his output having suffered from the decline of the taste for the rococo in the aftermath of the Revolution.

This and the following pastel landscape (No.38) belong to a small group of pastoral subjects by Pillement executed in shades of blue pastel applied directly onto prepared canvases; an unusual technique that the artist occasionally adopted. Such finished landscapes are typical of Pillement’s approach to the depiction of nature, filtered through his study of 17th century Dutch landscape painters, and were undoubtedly intended as independent works of art.

38 JEAN-BAPTISTE PILLEMENT Lyon 1728-1808 Lyon Pastoral Landscape with Herdsmen and Cattle Pastel, watercolour, charcoal and black chalk on prepared canvas. Signed and dated J. Pillement 1790 in black chalk at the lower left.

233 x 336 mm. (9 1/ 8 x 13 1/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, New York, since c.1900; Didier Aaron, Inc., New York, in 1996; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Neil Jeffares, ‘Jean-Baptiste Pillement’, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800 [online edition], no.J.592.294.

EXHIBITED: New York, Brame & Lorenceau, Kate de Rothschild and Didier Aaron at Didier Aaron, Master Drawings, 1996, part of no.32.

This fine pair of pastel landscapes (see also No.37), characterized by a distinctive blue tonality that is quite rare in Pillement’s oeuvre as a draughtsman, can trace their origins to an important decorative project undertaken by the artist during his stay in Vienna between 1763 and 1765. The artist received a commission from the Empress Maria Theresa for a series of eighteen very large pastel landscapes and seascapes – all executed in blue monochrome pastel on prepared canvases – for a room known as the Blaue Pastellzimmer, or Blue Pastel Room, in her summer residence, the Blauerhof (Blue Palace) at Laxenburg, outside Vienna. Eleven of these remarkable, large-scale blue pastel scenes survive today, in the collection of the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien in Vienna1.

The present pair of landscapes are very similar in technique, subject, mood and effect to the series of Laxenburg pastels. A similar pair of blue pastel landscapes on canvas, both dated 1767, was sold at auction in France in 20112. The fact that the present sheet is dated 1790, however, indicates that the artist appears to have produced such works not just in the 1760s, but also well into his later career.

Indeed, a drawing of peasants near a farm similar in colouring and effect, signed and dated 1795 but on blue paper rather than on a prepared canvas, is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Béziers3.

Pillement’s landscapes tend to depict bucolic scenes of man and nature in harmony. As the Pillement scholar Maria Gordon-Smith noted of the artist, ‘His figures of shepherdesses, herdsmen, fishermen and washerwomen seem to rest happily or go about their innocent daily tasks in the company of their friendly cows, sheep, goats, donkeys, dogs, etc., all of which are equally as important as the masters who guard them.

Nature is usually benevolent...The total effect is an inviting Arcadian stage.’4 Furthermore, as another writer has pointed out of Pillement’s compositions, ‘Nature is approached in a purely romantic and ideal vein not seen again until the time of Bidauld, Corot and others of their generation. All the ugly brutal truths of nature and peasant life in the Ancien Regime are transformed into a poetic world of harmony where a haze of contentment seems to envelop every scene.’5

39 Attributed to HILAIRE LEDRU Oppy 1769-1840 Paris Portrait of a Young Man with a Violin Black chalk and pencil, circular. Inscribed L. David del. on the verso.

198 mm. (7 7/ 8 in.) diameter.

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 7 July 1992, lot 244 (as attributed to JacquesLouis David).

LITERATURE: Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825: Catalogue raisonné des dessins, Milan, 2003, Vol.II, illustrated p.1246 (‘Liste de catalogues de ventes consultés, où figurent des dessins de David (XVIIIe siècle-XXe siècle’).

Born into modest circumstances as the son of a carpenter, Hilaire Ledru (or Le Dru) seems to have been largely self-taught as an artist. He studied in Douai, and probably also in Antwerp in 1789, and made his Salon debut in 1795 with a portrait drawing. Although Ledru occasionally worked as a painter1, he was best known as a draughtsman. He was particularly admired for his portrait drawings, executed with a precise chalk manner known as à la manière noire (or pointillé); the practice using the newly-developed Conté crayons to achieve stippling effects akin to the contemporary English mezzotints which were much in vogue in Paris. Drawings in this technique were very fashionable at the end of the 18th century, made particularly popular by the works exhibited at the Salons by the artist Jean-Baptiste Isabey2. Like Isabey, Ledru was among the finest practitioners of this new medium. Indeed, his exhibited drawings à la manière noire were sometimes mistaken for those of the better-known Isabey. As one contemporary critic noted of Ledru, ‘As a painter, and especially as a colourist, he was unremarkable. His talent lay in drawing, and this talent was at once fine, pleasant, correct, expressive, when the situation required it, and always elegant. It was with the pencil that he produced his compositions, his portraits, and he knew how to make excellent use of it.’3 As a draughtsman, Ledru achieved a considerable measure of success with his full-length portraits of eminent military figures, such as portraits of Generals Bonaparte and Beurnonville, exhibited at the Salon of 1796, and drawings of Marshal Bernadotte and General Scherer, shown at the Salon of 1798. These highly finished portrait drawings – drawn in black chalk or graphite in a very precise, almost pointillist technique – were readily suited for reproduction as engravings, and several were later published as prints. Ledru continued to exhibit both portraits and genre scenes at the Salons until 1824, and also took part in exhibitions in Lille and Douai. The artist died in Paris in 1840, at the age of seventy-one.

Drawings by Hilaire Ledru are rare. A stylistically comparable portrait drawing of an anonymous sitter, signed by Ledru, was formerly in the collection of the late Charles Ryskamp4. Also similar is a signed portrait drawing of the chemist Pierre François Boulay, albeit somewhat more highly finished than the present sheet, in the collection of Joan Taub Ades in New York5. Likewise analogous in technique, although much larger in scale and also more finished, is a full-length drawing of Mme. Chenard (the wife of Ledru’s close friend, the singer and musician Simon Chenard) seated in an interior, which was on the art market in London in 19786.

The present sheet bears an old attribution to Jacques-Louis David, and in fact may be compared, in terms of style, medium and effect, with a signed circular portrait drawing of a young woman by David in the Louvre7, datable to c.1783. Of similar dimensions and drawn with an equally precise handling of black chalk and pencil, both drawings reveal the influence of the draughtsmanship of Charles-Nicolas Cochin, who made a speciality of drawn and engraved portraits in this medallion format.

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

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

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

EXHIBITED: New York, W. M. Brady & Co., Old Master Drawings, 1999, no.25.

The son of the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Evariste Fragonard studied with his father before entering the studio of Jacques-Louis David at an early age. A precocious student, he made his Salon debut in 1793 at the age of only thirteen, exhibiting a drawing of Timoleon Sacrificing his Brother. A few months later he won two second prize medals at the great concours held in the Year II of the Republic. He continued to show regularly at the Salons (apart from a period between 1812 and 1819) until 1842, exhibiting drawings, scenes from Napoleonic history and, from around 1820 onwards, troubadour paintings of scenes from French history. In 1810 he painted a series of grisailles for the Palais Bourbon, while further official commissions included a series of historical subjects for the museum at Versailles and ceiling paintings for the Louvre. Adept at both large-scale history scenes and intimate cabinet pictures, Fragonard painted works for several Parisian churches, including a Martyrdom of Saint James for Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas and an Assumption of the Virgin for Saint-Geneviève, as well as a Flight into Egypt for Strasbourg Cathedral.

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

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

Fragonard also produced a number of similar frieze-like drawings for subjects taken from more recent history, such as his designs for several bas-reliefs depicting Napoleonic victories, drawn around 1810 and intended to decorate the Palais Bourbon, but never executed4. Stylistically comparable drawings are also found in many of the artist’s brilliant designs for the Sèvres porcelain factory, typified by seventeen drawings of Napoleonic subjects, drawn in 18325, as well as designs for five narrative reliefs, executed in 1810-1811, for the decoration of a porcelain column dedicated to Napoleon’s Polish campaigns6.

41 JEAN-GEORGES WILLE Biebertal 1715-1808 Paris The Demolition of the Grand Châtelet, Paris Pen and black ink and grey wash, with framing lines in black ink. Signed, dated and inscribed Partie du grand Chatelet / démolie l’an X. 1802 – / Dessiné par J.G. Wille in black ink at the upper left. Stamped 0183 in black ink on the verso.

185 x 247 mm. (7 1/ 4 x 9 3/ 4 in.)

Born in the German province of Hesse, Johann Georg Wille arrived in Paris at the age of twenty-one, and soon established a reputation as an engraver. Although much of his early work in the 1740s was in the form of portrait engravings after such artists as Hyacinthe Rigaud and Louis Tocqué, by the early 1750s he had also begun producing prints of genre subjects, mainly after the work of contemporary German and Dutch artists. Known in France as Jean-Georges Wille, by 1755 he had gained French citizenship and membership in the Académie Royale. Appointed an Academician in 1761, Wille stopped producing portrait engravings soon afterward, since his failing eyesight did not allow him to work on portraits with his usual meticulous technique. Appointed graveur du roi and also named engraver to the King of Denmark and the Emperor of Germany, Wille’s reputation reached its peak in the years before the French Revolution. His studio on the Quai des Augustins in Paris was a centre of printmaking and a meeting place for artists, collectors and dealers, and he was himself active in the art trade. He was also particularly influential among the younger generation of German and Swiss artists in Paris, and among his pupils were Adrian Zingg, Jakob Matthias Schmutzer and Ferdinand Kobell. Wille’s reputation declined after the Revolution, however, and near blindness meant that he produced little in the final years of his career. His memoirs and journal, an important source of information about the Parisian art world of the 18th century, were published posthumously in 1857.

As a draughtsman, Wille is best known for his drawings in red chalk and pen and ink, although he also produced a number of charming small-scale watercolours. The largest extant group of drawings by the artist, including three albums of watercolours, is today in the Louvre.

Wille’s oeuvre of drawings includes over a hundred landscapes, most of which are signed and dated, notably several studies of ruined buildings and châteaux. As Emmanuelle Brugerolles has noted of the artist, ‘The fascination with the ruins of monuments of national history dates back to the 1760s and was partly inspired by Italianate Dutch artists of the 17th century, notably Jacob van Ruisdael or especially Laurens Vincentsz. van der Vinne...If Wille is looking for an objective description of the motif in his first drawings [of the 1760s]...he seems more sensitive in the 1770s to the degradation caused by time and nature on medieval buildings.’1 A late drawing by Wille, the present sheet depicts the early stages of the demolition of the Ancien Régime fortress and prison known as the Grand Châtelet in Paris, located on the right bank of the river Seine. Built by Louis VI in 1130, the châtelet (or ‘small castle’) initially served to defend a bridge over the river. By the early 13th century the Grand Châtelet was the headquarters and court of the prévôt de Paris, or Provost of Paris; a royal officer charged with maintaining royal justice. The Grand Châtelet was completely rebuilt in 1684 and continued to serve as both a municipal prison and courthouse until the abolition of the position of the prévôt de Paris in 1790, during the Revolution. The imposing Grand Châtelet was demolished between 1802 and 1810, and the area was rebuilt as the modern Place du Châtelet.

Among Wille’s drawings of a similar technique and subject, though several years earlier in date, is The Ruins of the Château of Monfort-l’Amaury, dated 1779, in the Schlossmuseum in Weimar2.

42 VICTOR-JEAN NICOLLE Paris 1754-1826 Paris The Portico of the Pantheon, Rome Pen and brown ink and brown wash, within a fictive mount with double framing lines in brown ink.

220 x 164 mm. (8 5/ 8 x 6 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly part of an album of 240 drawings by Nicolle, assembled around 1818 by Colnaghi’s in London, and later belonging to Jean Camille Jammes, Paris; Possibly his sale (‘Victor-Jean Nicolle: Dessins, Aquarelles, Gouaches…Provenant d’un album appartenant à Monsieur J. C. J.’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Ader], 5 November 1953, lot 87 (‘Le peristyle du Panthéon. Aquarelle. 19,5 x 13,5.’); Otto Wittmann, Montecito, California1.

Like many French artists of his day, Victor-Jean Nicolle was captivated by the sights and buildings of Rome. Nonetheless, he surpassed most of his contemporaries in devoting much of his long career to watercolour views of the Eternal City. His initial artistic training in Paris was as a student at the Ecole Royale Gratuite de Dessin, where in 1771 he won the grand prix de perspective, and he later entered the studio of the architect Louis Charles Petit-Radel. He never became a member of the Académie Royale in Paris, however. Judging by the dates on some of his drawings, Nicolle spent long periods in Italy between 1787 and 1798, and again between 1806 and 1811. His charming, picturesque drawings of Rome, while full of anecdotal detail, were also topographically accurate. They are, as such, important historical records of the appearance of the city in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Inspired by the example of Hubert Robert, Nicolle also produced a number of architectural capriccios.

Nicolle would generally make drawings sur le motif in pen and ink, which he would then finish with watercolour in his studio. Although best known for his Roman views, he also produced drawings of other cities in Italy, including Bologna, Venice, Verona, Naples and Florence, while in France he made numerous studies of Paris and its environs. (Only a handful of paintings by the artist are known.) Although he never exhibited at the Salons, his reputation as a topographical artist was such that in 1810 he received a commission from Napoleon for fifty watercolour views of the principal monuments of Paris, intended as a wedding present for the Empress Marie-Louise and now at Malmaison. Significant groups of drawings by Nicolle are today in the Louvre, the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, as well as the museums of Rouen and Lille.

Nicolle has been described as ‘a conscientious and precise draughtsman, somewhat cold but not devoid of a certain poetic power.’2 He almost never dated his drawings, so a chronology of his oeuvre as a draughtsman is difficult to establish. Nevertheless, the present sheet may be approximately dated to the artist’s second period in Rome, between 1806 and 1811. Nicolle treated the subject of the Pantheon in Rome several times, although usually with the ancient building viewed from the front, with the Piazza della Rotonda in the foreground, such as in a watercolour in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.3 and another in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen4.

As has been noted of the artist, ‘His innumerable drawings, in various techniques of which watercolour seems to have been the favourite, have a scrupulous regard for accuracy which makes them of particular value as historical documents. His line may have something of the dry precision of an architect’s tracing, but this is relieved by his feeling for the picturesque, by his precise observation of minute details, and by the sense of atmosphere which he conveys with the clear light of his transparent washes.’5 Furthermore, as Pierre Rosenberg and François Bergot have written, ‘Nicolle appears to have been sensitive to the charms of ancient ruins as to the picturesque qualities of street scenes in a Rome where the past and present are felicitously interwoven, in a calm, deserted Rome, bathed in a streak of morning light.’6

actual size

43 NICOLAS HUET THE YOUNGER Paris c.1770-1828 Paris An Indian Elephant Pen and brown ink and watercolour, with touches of gouache, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in brown ink, on vellum laid down on board. Signed and dated huet fils 1810 in brown ink at the lower right. Inscribed L’Elephant femelle, Elephas indien, / Par huet peintre du Muséum d’histoire naturelle à Paris. in brown ink on the verso.

251 x 399 mm. (9 7/ 8 x 15 3/ 4 in.) [image] 312 x 446 mm. (12 1/ 4 x 17 5/ 8 in.) [sheet] LITERATURE: Sally-Ann Héry-Simoulin, ‘Les Animaux observes par Barye au Muséum’, in Emmanuelle Brugerolles, ed., Antoine-Louis Barye, “Le Michel-Ange de la Ménagerie”, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 2013-2014, p.93, fig.XIII. Born into a family of artists, Nicolas Huet the Younger was the eldest son and pupil of Jean-Baptiste Huet and the grandson of the animalier Nicolas Huet the Elder, and like both of them he specialized in depictions of animals. The young Huet first exhibited in 1788 at the Exposition de la Jeunesse, where he showed a still life. Between 1798 and 1801 he took part in Napoleon’s scientific and artistic expedition to Egypt, and in 1802 made his Salon debut with several animal pictures. A gifted watercolourist and engraver, Huet developed a particular reputation as a natural history draughtsman. In 1804 he was appointed painter to the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle and to the Ménagerie of the Empress Joséphine, who was a collector of animal, bird and plant specimens, many of which were drawn by Huet. He was also one of six artists chosen to illustrate the zoological account of the voyage around the world undertaken by the French ships L’Uranie and La Physicienne between 1817 and 1820.

Among Huet’s most significant works were a series of 246 elaborate drawings on vellum – including studies of mammals, reptiles, birds, insects and sea life – for the library of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, which were published in 1808 as Collection de mammifères du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle.

Among other works of natural history to which he contributed illustrations were the Baron de Férussac’s Histoire naturelle des mollusques terrestres et fluviatiles, published between 1819 and 1832, and C. J. Temminck and Baron Meiffren Laugier de Chartrouse’s Nouveau recueil de planches coloriées d’oiseaux, which appeared between 1820 and 1839. From 1823 until his death Huet served as professeur d’iconographie des animaux, and he continued to exhibit at the Salons until 1827, showing mainly drawings and watercolours of animals. Apart from his official duties, Huet also made elaborate and highly finished watercolour drawings of animals, usually on vellum, for such private collectors as King Friedrich Augustus II of Saxony and the military officer André Masséna, Prince d’Essling and Duc de Rivoli.

Writing at the end of the 19th century, one art historian noted of Huet, in comparison with his older contemporary, the natural history artist Nicolas Maréchal, that ‘The works on vellum by Nicolas Huet may be the finest after those of Maréchal; sometimes he even does just as well and better than him. If he did not have the anatomical accuracy of Maréchal, he had something more precious perhaps from an artistic point of view: the gift of life; his animals, his birds, always have their familiar attitude, with which they are characterized: they live.’1 The Indian elephant (Elephas maximus indicus) is native to mainland Asia and is smaller than the African elephant. Huet made this drawing at the menagerie of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, part of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The drawing depicts Marguerite, one of a pair of elephants; a male and a female, originally from Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) and presented as a gift to the Dutch stadthouder by the East India Company. The elephants were taken from William V of Orange’s menagerie at Het Loo during the French occupation of the Netherlands in the late 1790s and brought to Paris. The male elephant was known as ‘Hans’, while the female, who had been named ‘Parkie’ by the Dutch, was renamed ‘Marguerite’ in France.

After an overland journey of several months, during which they had been kept apart and could not see each other, the two elephants arrived at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in March 1798. When they were led separately into their enclosure, one observer described the scene: ‘[Marguerite] did not immediately observe Hans who was feeding in the inner lodge; neither was he directly aware that she was near him; but the keeper having called him, he turned round, and on the instant the two elephants rushed into each other’s embraces, and sent forth cries of joy, so animated and so loud, that they shook the whole hall. They breathed also through their trunks with such violence, that the blast resembled an impetuous gust of wind.’2 Marguerite is then noted to have flapped her ears with joy, and to have tenderly caressed Hans with her trunk before placing it in his ear and leaving it there for some time. She then ‘put it tenderly into her own mouth. Hans did exactly the same…but his pleasure was more concentrated…expressed by his tears, which fell from his eyes in abundance.’3 The two elephants were thenceforth never separated and were soon among the most popular attractions of the Jardin des Plantes, and the subject of articles, books and poems. (They were also popular with artists; in 1802 the painter, draughtsman and engraver Jean-Pierre-Laurent Houel published his Histoire naturelle des deux éléphants mâle et femelle du Muséum de Paris venus de Hollande en France en l’an VI, accompanied by twenty of his illustrations of the elephants at rest and play.) When Hans died of pneumonia in 1802, at the age of twenty, both Nicolas Huet the Younger and Nicolas Maréchal were charged with making drawings of the dissection of the creature by the eminent naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier. Marguerite, the female elephant drawn here by Huet in 1810, lived for a total of thirtyfour years before her death, of unknown causes, at the Jardin des Plantes in March 1816.

Two years before the present sheet was drawn, Huet exhibited another finished drawing of Marguerite at the Paris Salon of 18084. He also produced a drawing of an elephant, again probably Marguerite, shown eating some grass with a curled trunk, for the Collection de mammifères du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, published in 18085.

This fine sheet may be grouped with a handful of highly finished drawings in watercolour and gouache on vellum by Nicolas Huet the Younger. Several examples have appeared on the art market in recent years, including an American Cougar, signed and dated 1811, which appeared at auction in London in 20046, and a Tiger, signed and dated 1812, which was sold at auction in New York in 20077. Another example is a drawing of a giraffe presented to Charles X by the Viceroy of Egypt, dated 1827 and drawn on paper rather than vellum, which is today in the collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York8. Among other watercolours of this type by Huet in public collections is a Striped Hyena, signed and dated 1806, in the Schlossmuseum in Weimar9.

44 FRANÇOIS-MARIUS GRANET Aix-en-Provence 1775-1849 Malvallat A Monk in the Doorway of a Monastery Corridor Pen and brown ink and brown wash. Laid down on a large album page. Inscribed M. Granet in pencil in the lower margin, below the image.

151 x 109 mm. (6 x 4 1/ 4 in.) [sheet] Trained in the studio of Jean-Antoine Constantin, François-Marius Granet was from his youth recognized as a gifted draughtsman. His early sketchbooks, preserved in the Musée Granet in Aix, already show an interest in architectural ruins and church interiors; motifs to which he would remain devoted throughout his career. After studying briefly in the studio of Jacques-Louis David in Paris – where his simple brown attire and ascetic personality led his fellow pupils to give him the nickname ‘the Monk’ – he eventually resolved to return to Provence. Before his departure, however, he submitted a painting depicting the cloister of a church on the rue St. Honoré to the Salon of 1799. Greatly admired at the exhibition, the painting marked the beginning of the artist’s successful career.

In 1802 Granet travelled to Rome, where he remained for much of the next twenty-two years, working extensively in the city and the surrounding Campagna. Although never a pensionnaire at the Académie de France, he was able to make a reasonable living selling views of Rome to the many French tourists who visited the city during the Napoleonic occupation. At the Salon of 1819 he exhibited a painting of The Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, widely praised by critics, which firmly established his reputation in France. Although coveted by Louis XVIII, the painting was eventually purchased by Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples. Two years after his return to France in 1824, Granet was appointed to a position as a curator at the Louvre, and in 1830 was given by King Louis-Philippe the task of establishing the Museé Historique, a museum of French history, at Versailles. From then on, he seems to have been less active as a painter, although he continued to draw, and his stay in Versailles saw him produce a series of charming watercolours of the gardens. He also contributed illustrations for Charles Nodier, Baron Justin Taylor and Alphonse de Cailleux’s monumental Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’Ancienne France, published in seventeen volumes between 1829 and 1833.

Granet’s work is characterized by an appreciation for, and understanding of, the properties of light, and he delighted in achieving atmospheric effects in his drawings and watercolours. After the artist’s death, some two hundred of his drawings and watercolours were presented to the Louvre. The remainder of his studio, numbering around three hundred paintings and some 1,500 drawings, were left to his native city of Aix; a bequest that forms the nucleus of the Musée Granet there.

Granet has been described as a ‘painter of cloisters’. In his memoirs, the artist often makes reference to the priests and monks he met in Rome, whom he particularly admired for their devotion to their chosen calling. He produced a number of finished genre drawings of monks in their cells or at prayer, which are generally unrelated to paintings and are only occasionally dated. Such works found many admirers among the artist’s clientele, and even Louis-Philippe wrote in a letter of 1826, ‘I like M. Granet’s souvenirs of Italy, those churches, those chapels, all that has a character I like, and then those ceremonies, those Italian priests or monks who delight me...All of this from the brush of M. Granet takes on a truth and vigor that carry one away...’1 Although Granet was a gifted watercolourist, while in Rome he often produced highly atmospheric drawings in monochromatic tones of brown ink and wash, of which the present sheet is a fine example.

Among comparable drawings by the artist is a study of Monks Entering a Cloister in the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas2.

actual size

45 FRANÇOIS-MARIUS GRANET Aix-en-Provence 1775-1849 Malvallat A Chapel with a Seated Cardinal and Two Priests Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with touches of watercolour.

285 x 188 mm. (11 1/ 4 x 7 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy, London, New York and Florence (with his bookplate on the old frame backing board); Probably by inheritance to Michael Mallon, Florence; Private collection, Europe.

The present sheet dates from Granet’s long stay in Italy, when he produced a large number of drawings, sketches and watercolours. He was never happier than when wandering about Rome, sketchbook in hand: ‘Young, healthy, busy, what circumstances could be finer or more desirable? And so my happiness lacked nothing. I would work the whole week through, sometimes in a square, another time in a cloister or under a palace portico… Every day I found new subjects to paint, for to know Rome well takes not six months, nor six years – no, it takes a lifetime.’1 Granet seems to have sought out quiet, unpopulated scenes away from the hustle and bustle of the city itself, and this interior scene, like many of his landscape studies, has a particular calm, atmospheric quality that exemplifies the 20th century French art historian Henri Focillon’s apt description of the artist as a ‘true poet of meditative light’ (‘vrai poète d’une lumière recueillie’).

The French military occupation of Rome by Napoleonic troops in 1809 affected Granet deeply. He had been living in the city since 1802, and as he later recalled in his memoirs, ‘The occupation of Rome

by French forces had mortified me…The noble city had changed its appearance, and all of its religious character was effaced. Men of war had replaced the prelates, the cardinals, the monks; the military drum had silenced the sound of chants and prayer. I was terribly saddened. I could no longer find my Rome of stillness; all its charms for the artist had disappeared, and my days seemed endless. I searched in vain in the monasteries for the sweet peace I had once possessed…I entered the cloister [of the Church of the Capuchins in the Piazza Barberini]: instead of monks praying and reading, now there was no one…I passed through the dormitories, the refectory; all was mute. I entered the choir: the same silence…Despite this solitude, I could still follow in my mind’s eye the movements of all the monks I used to see there.’2 As one modern scholar as noted of the artist, ‘Particularly in his wash drawings, Granet sought to capture a haunting or elegiac mood, rather than to produce an accurate representation…Perhaps…Granet sought to convey something of the awe that he, as an artist of deep religious convictions, experienced in the dim and shadowy environment of an enclosed church space.’3 This drawing was probably at one time part of a sketchbook. In his memoirs, Granet noted that he was never without a sketchbook, and he must have used a number of them while in Rome; three such sketchbooks, for example, were included in the 1893 sale of the collection of the 19th century architect and interior designer Hippolyte Destailleur.4

46 THÉODORE GERICAULT Rouen 1791-1824 Paris A Groom with Two Horses Pen and brown ink and grey wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in black chalk. Fragmentary sketches in black chalk and brown ink on the verso.

205 x 186 mm. (8 1/ 8 x 7 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Botte, Paris; Acquired from them in 1962 by Martin Bodmer, Cologny, Switzerland; The Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny; Their sale (‘Master Drawings from the Martin Bodmer Foundation’), New York, Christie’s, 23 January 2002, lot 172 (as Attributed to Géricault1); Flavia Ormond, London, in 2003; Private collection.

EXHIBITED: New York, Flavia Ormond Fine Arts at Adelson Galleries, Master Drawings 1525-1905, 2003, no.17.

When Théodore Gericault died in January 1824, at the age of thirty-three, he was best known as the painter of The Raft of the Medusa, which had caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1819. The public at large knew little or nothing of his work as a draughtsman, however, so when the contents of his studio – containing some 220 paintings and several hundred drawings and sketchbooks – were sold at auction in November 1824, the works on paper were a revelation, and were eagerly acquired by collectors. Several important collections of drawings and watercolours by Gericault were formed in France in the 19th century – by Alfred Armand, Louis Bro, Philippe de Chennevières, Alexandre Colin, L. J. A. Coutan, Horace His de la Salle and François Marcille, among others – and works by the artist have remained popular with collectors and connoisseurs ever since.

From a very early age, Gericault was fascinated by horses. An accomplished equestrian, he may well have chosen to begin his artistic training with the painter Carle Vernet because of the elder artist’s reputation as a horse painter. As a young student he made drawings of horses at the Imperial stables at Versailles, and many of his most significant works as a mature painter involved equestrian subjects. As the scholar Philippe Grunchec has noted, ‘In fact, the life and art of Théodore Géricault are both indissolubly joined under the sign of the horse. Not merely content to observe the animal from every angle, in drawing after drawing and painting after painting, Géricault would in a certain sense dedicate his entire existence to the horse, from his earliest childhood to his premature and tragic end, brought on by an accident with – a horse.’2 The attribution of this little-known drawing to Gericault was confirmed in 2001 by Lorenz Eitner, who dated the sheet to c.1814-1815. Dr. Eitner noted that ‘This composition of a (black?) groom holding two horses is, I believe, a fairly early work by Gericault. It exhibits the heavy, angular contour drawing that is characteristic of his work in pen and ink wash from around 1814/5. The drawing is not related, so far as I can tell, to any of Gericault’s known projects – certainly not to the Race of the Riderless Horses that occupied Gericault in 1816/7 and with which one might be tempted to connect its subject. It is, nevertheless, a strong and characteristic work in its energetic abbreviations, and even in its roughnesses and occasional incoherences (as in the horse’s legs).’3 Among a handful of stylistically comparable early pen and wash drawings by Gericault is a study of A Group of Cavalrymen and Officers in a private collection4 and a drawing of Louis XVIII Reviewing Troops on the Champ de Mars of c.1814-1815 in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon5, as well as a pen and ink sketch of a horse drawn on the inside front cover of the so-called Zoubaloff sketchbook of c.1814-1815 in the Louvre6. Also similar in technique is a study of two male nudes formerly in the collection of Hans Bühler and now in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles7. A horse in a nearly identical pose to that in the present sheet is found in a small painting attributed to Gericault in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Béziers8.

47 FRANÇOIS-AUGUSTE RAVIER Lyon 1814-1895 Morestel Landscape with Part of the Aurelian Walls of Rome Pen and brown ink and watercolour, over a pencil underdrawing, on blue paper, laid down on a backing sheet. Signed with the artist’s initials FAtR in brown ink at the lower left.

198 x 547 mm. (7 3/ 4 x 21 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: An unidentified collection stamp (not in Lugt), stamped in blue ink on the backing sheet; Galerie Jonas, Paris, in 1975.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Jonas, F. A. Ravier 1814-1895, November 1975, no.60 (‘La campagne romaine. Aquarelle sur papier. 20 cm. x 51 cm. Monogrammée en bas à gauche F. At. R.’).

A native of Lyon, Auguste Ravier abandoned his studies as a notary in Paris to train as an artist in the studios of Jules Coigniet and Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny. Early in his career he met Camille Corot, who was to be a lifelong influence on his work. Apart from several trips to Italy between 1840 and 1847, where he painted landscape oil sketches very similar to those of Corot, Ravier worked for his entire career around Lyon and the Dauphiné, taking his subjects from the countryside around the villages of Crémieu and Morestel. He seems to have been something of a recluse, avoiding visits to town and living a life of country solitude. Ravier was particularly adept as a watercolourist, and in the 1850s and 1860s worked in a manner indebted to that of Corot and Charles-François Daubigny, both of whom were close friends.

Ravier was especially fond of scenes at dawn and dusk, often making studies in oil or watercolour on the spot that would later be worked up into finished watercolours in his studio. As he wrote in one letter, ‘The sky contains everything…Clouds and atmosphere stir my senses. Always something new, something inexhaustible – infinity!’1 Indeed, his atmospheric landscapes in watercolour have earned comparisons with those of J. M. W. Turner, whose work he greatly admired. (As he noted in a letter of August 1874 to his friend and biographer Félix Thiollier, ‘I believe that I have made some progress in regard to the rendering of light. I want to get at Turner, with whose work I find I have more in common than with anyone else.’2) Ravier only rarely exhibited his work, and when he did so it was almost always in Lyon. Although in the mid-1880s his work was sold at the Parisian gallery of Boussod, Valadon & Cie., the artist himself hardly ever visited Paris, and it was not until 1884 that several of his watercolours were shown at the Salon. In the same year, however, he lost the sight in one eye, forcing him to give up painting, and by 1889 he had become totally blind.

That Ravier was something of a perfectionist in his watercolour technique is seen in another letter to Thiollier, written in 1876: ‘For myself I have one pre-occupation: sincerity, the expression of the scene of the moment as felt by my senses as that moment...Without doubt I sometimes get my water-colours too heavy. These I give up; I have to wash them, sponge them, rub them out. It is an effort which has not succeeded; but it is an effort, and it would be more convenient and more easy not to have made it. I try everything, for I have a thirst for the unknown, the madness of research; but that is where my value lies. It is imperfect, but it is not commonplace.’3 A splendid and luminous example of Ravier’s watercolour style, the present sheet dates from one of the artist’s visits to Italy in the 1840s. It is typical of his poetic landscapes, in which there is almost always no trace of a human presence. As Ravier noted in a letter written from Rome soon after his arrival there in 1840, his first visits to the countryside beyond the city walls made a deep impression on him: ‘Around three quarters of a mile outside the walls there begins a desert where there is nothing but wild plants and ruins. I walked for an hour without meeting anyone other than a monk who said his breviary…But

that which brings to the utmost degree the beauty and sadness of this place, are the ancient tombs in ruins which line the road on both sides at the left and right…It is the landscape which has made the greatest impression on me.’4 In the vicinity of Rome, Ravier is known to have visited Ariccia, Subiaco, Cervara, Ostia, Nemi, Anzio, Olevano and elsewhere.

As the Ravier scholar Christine Boyer-Thiollier has noted, ‘The use of watercolours certainly became familiar to the artist during his stay in Rome, for it corresponded perfectly to his aspirations…This method allowed him to rapidly transcribe the golden hues of light or the atmospheric effects of the eternal city, using colours whose dilution rendered them even more transparent…In Rome, ‘outdoor’ artists swarmed over the same old classical sites, which seem to have been ignored by Ravier, for his surviving watercolours show only desolate and lonely places of elegiac beauty. Unfortunately he had left there in the care of an indelicate friend, an entire trunkful of studies and watercolours which have disappeared into thin air. The watercolours which have survived testify to the quality of Ravier’s work.’5 This fine watercolour landscape, which may be counted among Ravier’s largest works as a draughtsman, depicts two gates in the southern part of the Aurelian Walls of Rome. The Porta Asinaria, with its two tower blocks, dominates the centre of the composition, while the Porta San Giovanni is at the left. The Porta Asinaria was built between 270 and 273 A.D., at the same time as the Wall itself, while the Porta San Giovanni dates from 1574, when it replaced the older Porta Asinaria, which had become overwhelmed by traffic. To the right of this view, although not depicted by Ravier in the present sheet, is the Basilica of San Giovanni Laterano.

A far more distant watercolour view of the Aurelian Walls is in a private collection in France6, while a stylistically comparable Roman Landscape with a View of St. Peter’s in watercolour is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Reims7. Among other drawings by Ravier of sites and monuments in and around Rome is a view of the 16th century Porta Furba and the Acqua Felice aqueduct, drawn in charcoal on blue paper, in the collection of the Maison Ravier in Morestel8.

1.

48 JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES Montauban 1780-1867 Paris The Gatteaux Family Pencil and reworked engravings, on several joined sheets of paper, cut out and laid down by the artist onto a larger sheet. The seated figures at the left and centre, as well as the upper part of the seated figure at the right, each engraved on a separate sheet and mounted by Ingres onto another, larger sheet of paper, on which the artist has drawn the background, as well as the standing woman at the right of centre and the figure in the background at the extreme left, all in pencil. Most of the lower half of the seated figure of Edouard Gatteaux, at the right, drawn and reworked by the artist in pencil. Signed, dated and dedicated Ingres à Son / Excellent ami / Gatteaux 1850 in pencil at the lower right.

442 x 609 mm. (17 3/ 8 x 24 in.)

PROVENANCE: Edouard Gatteaux, Paris, until 1881; Edouard Brame, the husband of his late niece, Paméla de Gardanne, Paris, until 1888; His son, Paul Brame, Paris, until 1908; Mme. Paul Brame, Paris; Her son, Henri Brame, Paris and Neauphle-le-Château; Galerie Hector Brame, Paris, by 1931; Galerie Paul Cassirer, Berlin, in 1931; M. Knoedler & Co., New York, in 1931; Purchased from them in 1932

by Dr. Douglas Huntly Gordon, Annapolis and Baltimore, Maryland (Lugt 1130a), his stamp on the backing sheet; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Lady’), London, Christie’s, 6 July 1987, lot 55; Masataka Tomita, by February 1988; Acquired from him by Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva.

SELECTED LITERATURE1: Albert Magimel, ed., Oeuvres de J.A. Ingres, Paris, 1851, unpaginated, pl.58 (incorrectly dated to between 1824 and 1834); Théophile Silvestre, Histoire des artistes vivants, Paris, 1856, p.36; Théophile Gautier, ‘Ingres’, L’Artiste, 5 April 1857, p.6; Jules Lecomte, Le Perron de Tortoni; indiscrétions biographiques, Paris, 1863, p.247; Olivier Merson and Emile Bellier de la Chavignerie, Ingres: sa vie et ses oeuvres, Paris, 1867, p.81; Henri Delaborde, Ingres: Sa vie, ses travaux, sa doctrine, Paris, 1870, pp.297-298, no.308; Edouard Gatteaux, ed., Collection de 120 dessins, croquis et peintures de M. Ingres, Paris, n.d. (1875?), Vol.I, illustrated pl.10; Paul Marmottan, L’école française de peinture (1789-1830), Paris, 1886, p.406; Henry Lapauze, Les dessins de J.-A.-D. Ingres du musée de Montauban, Paris, 1901, p.266; Henry Lapauze, Les portraits dessinés de J.-A.-D. Ingres, Paris, 1903, p.50, no.26, pl.26; Jérôme Doucet, Les peintres français, Paris, n.d. (1906), illustrated p.119; Henry Lapauze, Ingres: Sa vie et son oeuvre, Paris, 1911, p.286, illustrated p.429; ‘Ein neuer Naturalismus?? Eine Rundfrage des Kunstblatts’, Das Kunstblatt, September 1922, illustrated p.386; Lili Frölich-Bum, Ingres: Sein Leben und sein Stil, Vienna, 1924, illustrated pl.57; Louis Hourticq, Ingres: L’oeuvre du maitre, Paris, 1926, illustrated p.100; Morton Dauwen Zabel, ‘The Portrait Methods of Ingres’, Art and Archaeology, October 1929, pp.113 and 116; Jacques Mathey, ‘Sur quelques portraits dessinés: Par Ingres ou ses graveurs?’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de l’art français, 1932, pp.196-199; Jacques Mathey, ‘Ingres portraitiste des Gatteaux et de M. de Norvins’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, August 1933, p.118, illustrated p.121, fig.7; Walter Pach, Ingres, London, 1939, pp.251-252, illustrated p.207; James W. Lane, ‘David & Ingres View in New York. Arrival of the Springfield Show of Two Great Neo-Classicists’, The Art News, 6 January 1940, illustrated p.7; Hans Naef, ‘Ingres und Cézanne als Bildnismaler’, Werk, October 1946, illustrated p.342; Karl Scheffler, Ingres, Bern, 1947, pl.43; Claude Roger-Marx, Ingres, Lausanne, 1949, unpaginated, illustrated pl.43; Jean Alazard, Ingres et l’Ingrisme, Paris, 1950, p.107; G.R., ‘From Ingres to Gauguin’, Baltimore Museum of Art News, November 1951, illustrated p.5; Adelyn D. Breeskin, ‘From Maryland Collections: Brilliant Facets of French 19th-Century Art’, The Art Digest, 15 November 1951, p.11, illustrated; Daniel Ternois, Inventaire general des dessins des musées de province, Vol.III: Les dessins d’Ingres au Musée de Montauban.

Les portraits, Paris, 1959, unpaginated, under nos.57-59 (incorrectly as in the Louvre); Jean Sutherland Boggs, Portraits by Degas, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962, p.13, pl.26; George Levitine et al, Hommage à Baudelaire, exhibition catalogue, College Park, 1968, p.33, illustrated p.66; Hans Naef, Die Bildniszeichnungen von J.-A.-D. Ingres, Vol.II, Bern, 1978, pp.485-503 and Vol.V, Bern, 1980, p.318-321,

no.417; Agnes Mongan, ‘J.-A.-D. Ingres, Portraitist’, in Patricia Condon, Marjorie B. Cohn and Agnes Mongan, Ingres. In Pursuit of Perfection: The Art of J.-A.-D. Ingres, exhibition catalogue, Louisville and Fort Worth, 1983-1984, p.148, illustrated p.226, no.75; Jacques Foucart, ‘Notes sur les vitraux de Neauphle et les portraits de la famille Gatteaux’, Bulletin des musées et monuments lyonnais, 1986, p.65, fig.2; Georges Vigne, Dessins d’Ingres: Catalogue raisonné des dessins du musée de Montauban, Paris, 1995, p.476, illustrated; Uwe Fleckner, Abbild und Abstraktion: Die Kunst des Porträts im Werk von Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres, Mainz, 1995, pp.162-170, fig.62; Anne Baldassari, Picasso et la photographie: “À plus grande vitesse que les images”, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1995, pp.163-171, fig.136; Theodore Reff, ‘“Three Great Draftsmen”: Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier’, in Ann Dumas et al, The Private Collection of Edgar Degas, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1997, p.144; Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror, Paris, 1997, p.257, note 662; Alexander Dückers, ed., Linie, Licht und Schatten: Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 1999, pp.156-157, no.71; Patricia A. Condon, ‘Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: The Politics of Friendship’, in Deborah J. Johnson and David Ogawa, ed., Seeing and Beyond: Essays on Eighteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Art in Honor of Kermit Champa, New York, 2006, p.49; Adrien Goetz, Ingres collages: Dessins d’Ingres du musée de Montauban, exhibition catalogue, Montauban and Strasbourg, 2005-2006, pp.30-32; Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Dimitri Salmon, Ingres: Regards croisés, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2006, p.225 (as lost); Jean-Pierre Cuzin et al, Ingres et les modernes, exhibition catalogue, Quebec and Montauban, 2009, p.312; Mark Evans and Lucie Page, “Full of truth and simply arranged”: Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s Portrait of the Amsler Family’, Master Drawings, Spring 2016, pp.72-73, fig.9.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS1: Versailles, Palais de Versailles, Exposition de l’art rétrospectif, 1881, no.190; Paris, Grand Palais, Exposition centennale de l’art français (1880-1889), 1900, no.1088; Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, Exposition Ingres, 1911; Paris, Chambre Syndicale de la Curiosité et des Beaux-Arts, Exposition Ingres, 1921, no.120; Munich, Ludwigsgalerie, Romantische Malerei in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1931, no.43; Springfield, MA, Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, David and Ingres: Paintings and Drawings, 1939, no.33; New York, M. Knoedler and Co., David and Ingres: Paintings and Drawings, 1940, no.33; San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 19th Century French Drawings, 1947, no.18; Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art, From Ingres to Gauguin: French Nineteenth Century Paintings Owned in Maryland, 1951, no.7; New York, Paul Rosenberg & Co., Ingres in American Collections, 1961, no.64; Louisville, J. B. Speed Art Museum and Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, Ingres. In Pursuit of Perfection: The Art of J.-A.-D. Ingres, 1983-1984, no.75; Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, The Timeless Eye: Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, 1999, no.84; Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das ewige Auge – Von Rembrandt bis Picasso: Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no.82.

ENGRAVED: By Achille Réveil for Albert Magimel, Oeuvres de J. A. Ingres, 1851.

One of the largest and most ambitious of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s portrait groups, this drawing bears a dedication to one of the artist’s closest friends, the sculptor, medal engraver and collector Jacques Edouard Gatteaux (1788-1881). The two artists met as pensionnaires at the Académie de France in Rome and enjoyed a lifelong friendship. (An indication of the affection felt by Ingres for Gatteaux is seen in a letter written to him in the 1830s: ‘There are few true friends like you; one is so lucky to have one of your good and loyal character, I have every confidence in you, I regard you as the most sincere of all those that I know in the world.’2) Gatteaux assembled a superb collection of drawings by Ingres, numbering over one hundred sheets. Unfortunately, many of these were lost in a fire at his home in Paris, during the Commune in May 1871. In later years Gatteaux added to his collection, and at the end of his life bequeathed works to several French museums. The present sheet, however, remained in the possession of his descendants until 1931.

The Gatteaux family owned a large country house in Neauphle, near Versailles, where Ingres often stayed as a guest in the 1820s. He returned there after the death of his first wife Madeleine in 1849, and it was at this time that he produced the present drawing. The Gatteaux Family is unique in Ingres’s oeuvre, however, in being a retrospective group portrait, as well as in its method of composition. Using single portraits made at different times, with The Gatteaux Family Ingres has created a composite family group and placed the

whole in an elegant interior setting. The artist has here assembled three engraved copies after his own earlier portrait drawings; of Edouard Gatteaux, seated at the right of the composition, his father, the engraver and medallist Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux (1751-1832), seated at the left, and his mother Louise-Rosalie Gatteaux, née Anfrye (1761-1847), in the centre. Printed on thin paper, these three prints were carefully silhouetted and laid down by Ingres onto a much larger sheet, which he then overdrew in pencil in such a way that the seams between the different sheets of paper are hardly visible to the naked eye.

Only the upper part of the figure of Edouard Gatteaux in this large sheet, however, is in the form of an engraving. To this bust-length print, Ingres has added the lower half of his friend’s body, drawn in fine pencil. Also added by the artist in pencil is the figure of Paméla de Gardanne (1824-1862), the orphaned granddaughter of Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux, shown standing to the left of Edouard Gatteaux. Raised in the Gatteaux household, she married the engineer Edouard Brame (1818-1888) in 1846, and the present sheet eventually descended in the Brame family. Ingres also drew the interior setting, and, in the background at the extreme left, the small figure of a woman in an adjoining room, who has been identified as Edouard Gatteaux’s cousin, a Mme. (Eugène?) Anfrye.

The original portrait drawings by Ingres of M. and Mme. Gatteaux, drawn in 1828 and 1825 respectively, as well as the bust-length portrait drawing of their son Edouard, dated 1834, all belonged to Edouard Gatteaux and were destroyed in the fire at his home in 1871. Their appearance is recorded, however, in engravings made after them by Claude-Marie-François Dien in the 1830s, as well as drawn copies of all three Ingres portraits by an unknown hand (figs.1-3), which are now in the Louvre3.

It is interesting to note that, in this large composite drawing of The Gatteaux Family, Ingres was creating an imaginary family group. In 1850, when the drawing was made, Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux had been dead for eighteen years and Louise-Rosalie Gatteaux for three, while Edouard Gatteaux, seen here as a young man, was aged sixty-two. The two drawn portraits of Paméla de Gardanne and Mme. Anfrye, however, would seem to correspond to their proper ages at the time the drawing was made.

While the upper part of Edouard Gatteaux in this group portrait is composed of the engraving after Ingres’s lost bust-length portrait drawing of 1834, the lower half of the figure, added in pencil, is an entirely new invention by the artist. (Ingres may, however, have referred to a three-quarter length portrait of Gatteaux, in a similar but not identical pose to that seen in the present sheet, which is recorded in an engraving by Achille Réveil4. Réveil’s engraving, dated 1851, shows Ingres’s friend seated at a table with his work tools before him, and may record a lost drawing by Ingres of the same approximate date as the bust-length portrait of 1834.) It appears that, for this drawing of The Gatteaux Family, Ingres combined Dien’s bust-length engraving with an entirely new conception of the lower half of Gatteaux’s body, developed from the lost three-quarter length portrait drawing engraved by Réveil.

This is further suggested by the existence of a pencil study by Ingres for the torso and costume of a seated figure of Edouard Gatteaux, similar in pose and detail to the same figure in the present sheet, in the Musée Ingres in Montauban5.

1.

2.

3.

A preparatory study by Ingres for the entire composition of The Gatteaux Family is likewise in the collection of the Musée Ingres6. Executed on several sheets of joined tracing paper, this sizeable drawing shows the seated figures full-length, a concept that Ingres abandoned in the final work. Also in the Musée Ingres is a half-length pencil study for the standing figure of Paméla de Gardanne7.

Ingres produced only three other comparably large and complex, multifigured portrait group drawings, all dated much earlier in his career: The Forestier Family of 1806 in the Louvre8, The Family of Lucien Bonaparte, dated 1815, in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts9, and The Constantin Stamaty Family of 1818 in the Louvre10. The present sheet is the last and largest of the four, and the most visually complex.

This large drawing of The Gatteaux Family was reproduced as an engraving by Achille Réveil in 1851, the year after it was made11. The engraving was included in Albert Magimel’s magisterial compendium of illustrations of Ingres’s work, the Oeuvres de J.A. Ingres, published in 1851, and it is very likely that Ingres made the present sheet with the intention of having it reproduced for this publication12. As has been recently noted, ‘This drawing, done specifically for 1850 Magimel/Réveil publication of Ingres’ collected works, documents both Ingres’s connections to the [Gatteaux] family and his experimentation with unconventional techniques in the context of a highly visible publication.’13 The present sheet has long been admired as one of Ingres’s most significant works on paper. As early as 1863 it was described as the finest drawing in the Gatteaux collection; ‘a marvelous work, the sight of which brings great pleasure.’14 The eminent scholar Walter Pach discussed this drawing at length in his book on Ingres, published in 1939: ‘For those who see no progress in the master’s work, who think that his phenomenal talent remains the same throughout his long life, I would recommend the study of the Portrait of the Gatteaux Family, of 1850…When the painter had the kind thought of creating a family group for his comrade (perhaps it was because the latter has assumed the charge of his finances, at the death of Madeleine, in 1849) he gave proof that he had gone beyond what must seem the unsurpassable perfection of the earlier group [the Family of Lucien Bonaparte of 1815]…Now, when he is seventy (just twice the age he was when he did the Bonaparte drawing) he is no less a master of line; but a comparison of the two masterpieces must convince us that the later work has added to his linear quality through form relationships, like those of a grand sculpture in low relief. And still his work is watched over by the antique genius. Its effect is less obvious, but no less certain, than in the family portrait of thirty-five years before: in these later likenesses, of people he knew so well, he is still the lover of the classics, even when he renders every detail of dress, every lock of hair as it comes out from under the lady’s lace cap or as it falls in characteristic fashion over the forehead of one of the men. We enjoy the charming glimpse of a distant room and a figure in it, but that well-marked incident cannot distract the artist from the great front plane, where the chief personages come up not merely into physical existence and nearness, but into a psychological impressiveness hardly inferior to that in one of those portrait groups where the Roman sculptor has rendered his touching homage to the companionship of a husband and wife.’15 Extensively published and widely exhibited since 1881, the present sheet was retained in the collection of Edouard Gatteaux and his descendants until 1931. The following year, The Gatteaux Family was acquired by the American bibliophile and collector Douglas H. Gordon, Jr. (1902-1986), in whose collection it remained for over fifty years16.

49 PAUL-JEAN FLANDRIN Lyon 1811-1902 Paris Double Portrait of Two Young Brothers Pencil on off-white paper. Signed, dated and inscribed à son ami Seuchère (Veustier?) / Paul Flandrin / Nîmes 22. 9bre 1851 in pencil at the lower left. Made up areas at the upper corners and near the lower right corner.

294 x 218 mm. (11 1/ 2 x 8 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Audap, Solanet, Godeau, Velliet], 17 June 1994, lot 120; Yvonne Tan Bunzl, London, in 2003.

LITERATURE: London, Yvonne Tan Bunzl, Master Drawings, 2003, no.18.

Like his better-known elder brother Hippolyte, Paul Flandrin studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon before entering the studio of Ingres in Paris in 1829. The brothers were among the first pupils taken on by Ingres and grew to be the master’s favourite students. Somewhat more shy and reserved than his brother, Paul Flandrin maintained a lifelong interest in landscape painting, and in particular the genre of the paysage historique, in which category he won a prize at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1832. The same year Hippolyte won the Prix de Rome in the category of history painting and left for Italy. Paul won the prize in the category of the paysage historique the following year and joined Hippolyte in Rome in 1834. The two brothers remained in Italy until 1838, travelling extensively around Tuscany, Southern Italy and the Veneto. On their return to France, they shared a studio in Paris, with Paul assisting his brother on the mural decoration of the church of Saint-Séverin in Paris.

Paul Flandrin made his Salon debut in 1839, showing an Italian view, and began to develop his own reputation as a landscape painter. He also continued to assist Hippolyte on a number of the latter’s commissions for mural decorations for churches in Paris and elsewhere, completing the last of these after his brother’s death in 1864. Flandrin travelled widely throughout France, and landscapes of views in Provence, the Languedoc and Normandy were to make up the bulk of his Salon entries throughout his career.

Although best known today for his landscapes, Flandrin was also greatly admired in his day as a portrait painter, and many of his commissioned portrait paintings were exhibited at the annual Salons. He also produced a great number of portrait drawings in lead pencil, in which the inspiration of his master Ingres is particularly evident, although the younger artist’s drawings are usually more austere and insightful, and he seems to have been less interested in details of costume. Flandrin’s pencil portraits, greatly admired by his contemporaries, provide a fascinating glimpse of the society of the Second Empire and the Third Republic1. His subjects included eminent figures, aristocrats, statesmen and members of elegant Parisian society, as well as members of his family and, perhaps most notably, fellow artists, including other graduates of the studio of Ingres and pensionnaires at the Académie de France in Rome2.

Apparently, he would also often produce portrait drawings of the same sitters that his brother Hippolyte was painting.

Drawn in 1851, the present sheet – a portrait of two young boys, obviously brothers – is a very fine and typical example of Paul Flandrin’s delicately executed portrait drawings. The artist produced a handful of double portraits, notably a self-portrait with his brother Hippolyte of 1835, now in the Louvre3.

50 KARL-ERNEST-RODOLPHE-HEINRICH-SALEM LEHMANN, called HENRI LEHMANN Kiel 1814-1882 Paris Study of the Head of a Bearded Man Black and red chalk. Dated 17 avril in pencil at the lower centre. Stamped with studio stamp H. LEHMANN (not in Lugt) at the lower right.

115 x 131 mm. (4 1/ 2 x 5 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Galerie de Bayser, Paris, in 1982; Laura Pecheur, Paris; Private collection, Paris.

LITERATURE: Marie-Madeleine Aubrun, Henri Lehmann 1814-1882: Portraits et décors parisiens, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée Carnavalet, 1983, p.125, under no.240; Marie-Madeleine Aubrun, Henri Lehmann 1814-1882: catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre, Nantes, 1984, Vol.I, p.227, no.D.948A, Vol.II, p.216, fig.D.948A. EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie de Bayser, Henri Lehmann 1814-1882, 1983, no.70.

Born in the German Duchy of Holstein, Henri Lehmann settled in Paris in 1832, and the following year entered the studio of Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres. He soon became one the master’s favourite pupils and assistants, alongside the brothers Paul and Hippolyte Flandrin, and at his Salon debut in 1835 won a second-class medal. Although he was not permitted to compete for the Prix de Rome, by virtue of his German citizenship, he nevertheless travelled at his own expense to Rome in 1838. On his return to France in 1842 he won a commission for mural paintings for the Parisian church of Saint-Merri, completed in 1844, and this was soon followed by other important public commissions. Lehmann became a naturalized French citizen in 1847, by which time he had established a reputation as a painter of historical and religious subjects, portraits and genre scenes. He continued to exhibit at the Salons until 1877. During the Second Empire he received significant commissions for public decorative schemes, notably a series of more than fifty allegorical paintings for the Galerie des Fêtes of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, completed in 1852 but destroyed by fire during the Commune of 1871, as well as murals for the Palais de Luxembourg in the 1850s and the Palais de Justice in the 1860s, much of which was also destroyed in 1871. Appointed a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1875, Lehmann devoted much of the last years of his career to teaching1.

This drawing is a study for the head of a kneeling figure of Widukind, the Germanic leader of the Saxons, near the centre of Lehmann’s vast hemicycle painting of France under the Reign of the Merovingians and Carolingians is Reborn in Faith and Independence (fig.1), painted between 1854 and 1856 for the domed ceiling of the throne room of the Palais du Luxembourg in Paris2. In the painting, the pagan Saxon chieftain Widukind – Charlemagne’s main opponent during the wars between the Franks and the Saxons of the 8th century – is depicted to the right of the central cross, kneeling before a Frankish priest and being baptized into the Christian faith (fig.2). The present sheet was once one of four separate drawings in red and black chalk by Lehmann – all studies for the figure of Widukind – pasted onto a single backing sheet3. A preparatory drawing in black chalk for the standing priest who baptizes Widukind is in the Musée Saint-Croix in Poitiers4, while an oil sketch modello for the entire hemicycle composition is in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris5.

1.

2.

actual size

51 JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET Gruchy 1814-1875 Barbizon The Return from the Fields Charcoal on tinted canvas. Stamped with 1894 sale stamp J. F. Millet (Lugt 1815) at the lower left.

295 x 369 mm. (11 5/ 8 x 14 1/ 2 in.) [image] 353 x 437 mm. (13 7/ 8 x 17 1/ 4 in.) [canvas] PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, and by descent to his widow, Catherine Lemaire, Mme. J.-F. Millet (Lugt 1815)1; Her estate sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Chevallier], 24-25 April 1894, lot 25 (as ‘Le Départ pour le marché’); Jean Dollfus, Paris2; His posthumous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Lair-Dubreuil and Baudoin], 4 March 1912, lot 83 (as ‘Le Retour des champs (l’Etoile du soir)’); Knoedler & Co., New York; Acquired from them in 1912 by Robert W. Paterson, Lenox, Massachusetts; By descent to his wife, Marie Louise Paterson, New York; Her estate sale, New York, Parke-Bernet Galleries, 17 March 1938, lot 83; James Kirkman, London, in 1984; Galerie Prejger, Paris; Bought from them in April 1984 by Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva.

LITERATURE: New York, Christie’s, 19th Century European Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors and Sculpture, 16 October 1991, p.76, under lot 88; Alexander Dückers, ed., Linie, Licht und Schatten: Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 1999, illustrated p.411; Philip Rylands, ed., The Timeless Eye: Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1999, illustrated p.411.

One of the founders of the Barbizon school of painting in France, Jean-François Millet studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. It was in Paris in the 1840s that he became associated with a group of landscape painters who were to become part of the Barbizon circle, including Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, Charles Jacque, Théodore Rousseau and Constant Troyon. Although Millet’s early career was dominated by portraits, by the 1850s he began to paint pastoral subjects. He established his public reputation as a painter of peasant life with three seminal paintings; The Sower, exhibited in 1850, The Gleaners, painted in 1857, and The Angelus, completed in 1859. By the 1860s he enjoyed a successful career, receiving many commissions for paintings and, from the Parisian architect and collector Emile Gavet, for a series of highly finished pastel drawings. Millet was honoured with an exhibition of his work at the Exposition Universelle in 1867, but within a few years began to suffer from poor health, dying in 1875 at the age of sixty.

Millet was a skilled draughtsman, whose work ranged from quick sketches and more elaborate figure studies, to landscape studies in pen and watercolour, as well as highly finished pastel drawings that were sold as independent works of art, often for considerable sums of money. As Robert Herbert has noted of Millet, drawings ‘were his instinctive way of creating. Almost all his paintings were chosen from among drawings that had already been completed.’4 Many of Millet’s finest drawings are studies of peasant men and women at work. This was a world he knew well, and one that he was born into. As a young boy in the small village of Gruchy in Normandy, Millet had worked alongside his father on his family’s farm – looking after the animals, tilling the soil, sowing and reaping – and remained proud of these experiences throughout his later life as an artist. It was his obvious talent as a draughtsman that persuaded the young man’s father to send him away from the farm to study with a painter, and which led him towards a different career. But Millet remained deeply attached to the idea of the French countryside, and to the people who lived and worked there, and strove to accurately and sympathetically represent their daily lives in the paintings he sent to the annual Salons. Millet’s peasant figures are often imbued with a sense of dignity, and at times even of grandeur; as Herbert points out, ‘His work joined in a complex process that resulted in the elevation of common man to the rank of history painting.’5

With a composition consciously reminiscent of the Biblical subject of the Flight into Egypt, this charcoal drawing on a prepared canvas exemplifies Millet’s approach towards expressing the dignity of peasant life by associating it with the vocabulary of religious art, thereby combining the spiritual and the secular.

Crossing a barren plain and outlined against the sky, a family returns home with three sheep at the end of the day. The woman rides on a donkey, while a man follows behind, carrying a hoe across his shoulder. Millet spent many early evening hours on the plain of Chailly, on the edge of Barbizon, and he once said that ‘It is astonishing towards the approach of night how grand everything on the plain appears, especially when we see figures silhouetted against the sky. They look like giants.’6 This charcoal sketch on canvas is a preparatory study for a painting of 1873 entitled The Return from the Fields (The Evening Star), which appeared at auction in 19917. One of Millet’s last great paintings, The Return from the Fields (fig.1) is the final treatment of a subject to which he had returned repeatedly throughout his career. Included in the artist’s studio sale in 1875, the painting was purchased at the auction for 6,050 francs by the collector Jean Dollfus, who also later owned both the present sheet and another compositional sketch for the same picture, now untraced8. A preparatory study for the donkey in the painting is last recorded with the art dealer Hector Brame in Paris in 19389. Millet had earlier drawn a very similar subject and composition in a finished conté crayon and pastel drawing entitled Twilight (Crépuscule), executed between 1859 and 1863 and today in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston10.

The present work is one of a small group of sketches by Millet which are drawn directly in charcoal on a lilac-coloured, prepared canvas, and are studies for late paintings by the artist. A stylistically comparable work of a similar subject and date, also drawn in charcoal on canvas, appeared at auction in 1988 and 201511, and is a study for a lost painting of The Return of the Shepherdess of 1874. Also part of this group is a sketch of a Winnower at Rest, recently on the art market in New York12, which is a study for a painting left unfinished at the artist’s death in 1875.

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52 THÉODORE GUDIN Paris 1802-1880 Boulogne-sur-Mer Seascape Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with touches of white heightening. Laid down on an old mount.

Signed, dated and inscribed T. Gudin Nice 1875 in brown ink at the lower right.

220 x 311 mm. (8 5/ 8 x 12 1/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, England; Emmanuel Moatti, Paris and New York, in 2001; Private collection.

EXHIBITED: New York, Emmanuel Moatti, Master Drawings 1600-1900, 2001, no.35.

The most celebrated marine painter of the first half of the 19th century, Jean-Antoine Théodore Gudin attended the naval academy in Brest and spent a few years at sea before taking up painting. He was a student of Anne-Louis Girodet and Antoine-Jean Gros at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and began exhibiting at the Salons in 1822, winning a first-class medal two years later. Gudin achieved his first success as a painter of seascapes and naval subjects, with his painting of The Fire on the ‘Kent’ receiving huge praise at the Salon of 1827. Among his significant commissions was a series of paintings of views of French ports for Versailles, a project first awarded to and begun by Claude-Joseph Vernet in 1753.

For King Louis-Philippe, Gudin painted a series of nearly a hundred large paintings depicting victories of the French Navy, also for Versailles; several of these were exhibited at the Paris Salon between 1839 and 1848. Famous throughout Europe as a marine painter, Gudin was ennobled as a Baron by LouisPhilippe, and in 1844 married the King’s goddaughter Margaret Hay, daughter of General Sir James Hay and granddaughter of the 7th Marquess of Tweedale. Among Gudin’s other patrons were the Duc d’Orléans, Czar Nicholas I and Napoleon III, by whom he was appointed official painter to the expedition to Algiers.

Gudin painted numerous views of the Channel coast and the Mediterranean, and travelled to Italy, Holland, Poland, Russia and Turkey. He also 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 Park in Aberdeenshire. From there he would send paintings to be exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution in London, while others were shown in Paris, including such genre paintings as A Scottish Hunting Party, exhibited at the Salon of 1849. The artist settled in Scotland after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, though he continued to exhibit at the Paris Salons until his death. Gudin also 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. Drawings by Gudin are today in the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Louvre, the British Museum, and elsewhere.

Drawn in 1875 in Nice, where the artist was known to have often spent the winter in his later years, the present sheet dates from near the end of the artist’s long career. Gudin’s drawings in sepia wash and 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.

53 EVA GONZALÈS Paris 1847-1883 Paris La Mariée (The Bride) Pastel on canvas. Stamped with the atelier stamp Eva Gonzalès (Lugt 4236) in black ink at the lower left.

Numbered 15 on a small label pasted onto the frame backing board.

462 x 382 mm. (18 1/ 4 x 15 in.)

PROVENANCE: Among the contents of the artist’s studio at the time of her death in 1883; The artist’s sister, Jeanne Gonzalès (later Jeanne Guérard-Gonzalès), Paris, and listed in the inventory compiled by Henri Guérard on 25 May 1897 (‘La mariée, pastel par Eva Gonzalès’); By descent to the artist’s son JeanRaymond Guérard, Paris, by 1924; Edgardo Acosta Gallery, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles; Private collection, Seattle, Washington.

LITERATURE: Octave Mirbeau, ‘Notes sur l’art: Eva Gonzalès’, La France, 17 January 1885, p.2; Robert Henard, ‘Les Expositions’, La Renaissance, 4 April 1914, p.25; Louis Hautecoeur, ‘Exposition Eva Gonzalès (Galerie Bernheim-Jeune)’, La Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité, 11 April 1914, p.115; Louis Dimier, ‘Chronique des arts’, L’Action Française, 12 April 1914, p.4; François Monod, ‘L’Impressionnisme féminin. Deux élèves de Manet: Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), Eva Gonzalès (18491883)’, Art et Décoration, May 1914, p.3; Claude Roger-Marx, Eva Gonzalès, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 1950, unpaginated (p.20); Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu and Jacques de Mons, Eva Gonzalès 1849-1883: Etude critique et catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1990, pp.212-213, no.96 (as location unknown); Belinda Thomson, ‘Eva Gonzalès 1849-1883: Etude critique et catalogue raisonné’ [book review], The Burlington Magazine, September 1992, p.605; Carol Jane Grant, Eva Gonzalès (1849-1883): An examination of the artist’s style and subject matter, unpublished Ph.D thesis, Ohio State University, 1994, p.296, illustrated p.495, pl.CLXVIII (as location unknown); Russell T. Clement, ‘Gonzalès, Jeanne’ in Jill Berk Jimenez, ed., Dictionary of Artists’ Models, London and Chicago, 2001, p.242; Rachel Holm, The Life and Work of Eva Gonzalès, unpublished MA thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2006-2007, p.24; Noëlle Châtelet, ‘The Bridal Gown’, in Ingrid Pfeiffer, ed., Painting in a Man’s World’, Ostfildern, 2008, pp.55-68; Brigid Mangano, ‘The Problem of the Woman Artist: How Eva Gonzalès was “Seen” in Late NineteenthCentury France’, Through Gendered Lenses: An Undergraduate Academic Journal of Gender Research & Scholarship, 2011, pp.37-38, fig.7; Christopher Lloyd, Impressionism: Pastels, Watercolors, Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Milwaukee, 2011, illustrated in colour p.106, pl.47.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Salons de la Vie Moderne, Eva Gonzalès, 1885, no.80 (‘Une Mariée (pastel)’); Paris, Bernheim-Jeune & Cie., Exposition Éva Gonzalès, 1914, no.18 (‘La mariée’) or no.20 (‘Mariée’); Paris, Galerie Marcel Bernheim, Éva Gonzalès, 1932, no.20 (‘La Mariée (I)’) or no.22 (‘La Mariée (II)’); Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum, Impressionism: Masterworks on Paper, 2011-2012.

Born into a cultivated Parisian family, Eva Gonzalès received her early artistic training in the studio of the society portrait painter Charles Chaplin, from whom she learned the art of pastel. In 1869, at the age of twenty-two, she was taken on as a pupil by Edouard Manet. She was, in fact, to be his only formal student, and also posed for a number of paintings and drawings by him. Although her early work reveals the distinct influence of Manet, as her independent career progressed she developed a more personal, intimate style of painting. Gonzalès achieved her earliest success at the Salon of 1870, where she exhibited two paintings and a pastel; these earned approving notices from the influential critics Philippe Burty, Jules Castagnary, Zacharie Astruc and Edmond Duranty, and one of her paintings was purchased by the State. (At the same Salon of 1870, Manet exhibited his full-length portrait of Gonzalès, today in the National Gallery in London.) As one modern scholar has noted, ‘Her talents, especially in pastel technique, attracted the attention of critics right from the start, and like [Berthe] Morisot, she was often

compared with Rosalba Carriera.’1 Further critical success accompanied the two works – a painting and a pastel – she exhibited at the Salon of 1872. The following year, however, her submitted painting was rejected by the Salon jury and was instead exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, in the catalogue of which she described herself as a pupil of both Chaplin and Manet.

Producing mainly portraits, still life subjects and contemporary genre scenes, Eva continued to show her work at the annual Salons, albeit not every year, throughout her relatively brief career. Although she is generally considered to be a member of the Impressionist movement by virtue of her painting style, like Manet she never took part in any of the seven Impressionist exhibitions, despite being invited to do so.

Her work continued to attract favourable comments from writers and critics, including Emile Zola and Jules Clarétie; the latter noted in 1874 that she was ‘an artist of rare talent, who takes the brush after having handled pastel like Rosalba.’2 In January 1879 Eva married the engraver Henri Guérard, a friend and collaborator of Manet. Apart from being shown at the Salons, her work was also included in a handful of gallery exhibitions in Paris, notably at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1883. Eva died of an embolism in May 1883 at the age of thirty-six, less than three weeks after the birth of her son Jean-Raymond, and six days after the death of her master Manet. In 1885 a large retrospective exhibition of her work, organized by her father and her husband, was held at the offices of the magazine La Vie Moderne in Paris. This was, indeed, her first solo exhibition, and included eighty-eight paintings and drawings, among them the present pastel portrait.

Pastels make up a substantial portion of Eva Gonzalès’s oeuvre, and indeed accounted for nearly a quarter of the works shown in the posthumous exhibition of 1885. The artist worked concurrently in oil and pastel throughout her career, and showed her first pastel at the Salon of 1870, eventually exhibiting a total of nine works in this medium at the Salons. As the French critic Octave Mirbeau wrote of Gonzalès’s works in pastel, at the time of an exhibition of her work at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1914, ‘It is simplicity, it is sincerity, it is serenity. Absolutely no feminine over-sentimentality, nor a desire to simply make pretty or nice, and yet what an exquisite charm.’3 Eighteen years later, another critic praised Gonzalès’s ‘marvellous pastels, drawn in the manner of the worthy Chardin, with subtle daring, broken, delicate colours, which blend in sweet harmony...with a virile draughstmanship.’4 Previously known only from old photographs and recently rediscovered, the present pastel is a portrait of Jeanne Gonzalès (1852-1924), the artist’s younger sister and favourite model, and an accomplished artist in her own right. This portrait may be dated to 1879, shortly after Eva’s marriage to Henri Guérard.

The artist often portrayed her sister in various guises, and she has here chosen to depict her dressed in Eva’s own satin wedding dress. (Jeanne was, in fact, to marry Eva’s widowed husband a few years after her sister’s death. As Belinda Thomson has noted of the present pastel, ‘Jeanne went so far as to don the artist’s bridal dress when she posed for a pastel head, La mariée...a strangely prophetic act given that nine years on, she in turn would marry the same Henri Guérard following Eva’s premature death in childbirth.’5) Eva painted a second pastel portrait of Jeanne wearing the same wedding dress, posed in profile to the right (fig.1), which is today in a private collection6. These two pastel portraits, both entitled La Mariée (The Bride), were exhibited together several times in later years.

Octave Mirbeau appears to have been one of the first to mention this particular work in print. Writing on the occasion of the posthumous retrospective exhibition of Gonzalès’s work, held at the Salons de La Vie Moderne in January 1885, he noted in particular the two La Mariée pastels: ‘I love the two studies of brides, which have a freshness and a tender spirit, delicious to see. I find there, in the softness of the shades, in the play of the light on the white fabric and the transparent cloud of veils, a particular caress.’7 Jeanne Gonzalès seems to have posed for her sister almost daily, and more than twenty works by Eva – around a third of her surviving oeuvre – may be identified either as portraits of Jeanne8, or have her as their model9. As one modern scholar has noted, ‘Eva chronicled her sister’s life, creating an intimate

biography in paint and pastel.’10 The artist’s preoccupation with using her sister as a model is all the more telling as she herself seems never to have produced a formal painted self-portrait. As the 19th century art historian and critic Claude Roger-Marx perceptively noted of the present pastel, ‘This is her dress of white satin, her bridal coiffure, which she will, on two occasions, make Jeanne wear. It is as if she has observed and imagined herself through this duplicate of herself that she loved, bullied, transformed as she pleased, so as to create twenty different sisters...’11 The subject has continued to resonate into the present day, and the theme of this portrait is the basis of a short story entitled ‘The Bridal Gown’ by Noëlle Châtelet, published in 200812.

Both La Mariée pastels were again singled out for praise in several reviews of the exhibition of Eva Gonzalès’s work held at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1914. Writing in La Chronique des Arts, the critic Louis Hautecoeur noted of the artist that, ‘She achieves a true mastery of pastel: her Bridesmaids or her Brides prove it: she works with hatched strokes that confine light and shade within the continuity of their lines; she likes the subtle shades, the nuances of pale, but colourful, grays, these scenes of quiet intimacy, and some of these pastels are excellent works.’13 Another review of the exhibition, in the magazine Art et Décoration, noted in particular the ‘small pastel portraits of women (Woman with a Red Hat, The Bride, The Bridesmaid, The Bunch of Violets)...all charming in their candour, with a very personal focus and, without seeming to be, of astonishing virtuosity in the brevity and the uniform economy of their execution.’14 Executed in 1879, this splendid pastel portrait remained in Eva Gonzalès’s studio until her death, and was included in the posthumous exhibition of her work in 1885. The painting passed to her sister Jeanne Gonzalès, the model for the present work, and is listed (as ‘La mariée, pastel par Eva Gonzalès’) in an inventory compiled by Henri Guérard on 25 May 1897. The pastel was later recorded in the possession of the artist’s son, Jean-Raymond Guérard, in 1924, and was included in an exhibition of Gonzalès’s work in a Parisian gallery in 1932. After that, however, this pastel portrait was lost until its recent discovery in an American private collection. Its reappearance confirms its status as one of the finest examples of the relatively small corpus of pastels produced during the brief career of Eva Gonzalès, as well as among the most intimate and personal of all her works.

This pastel portrait has been requested for the exhibition The Pastel: The Renewal of an Art, to be held at the Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona between October 2019 and January 2020.

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54 JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE Damvillers 1848-1884 Paris Orpheus Charcoal, with stumping, and white chalk, on light brown paper. Signed J. BASTIEN LEPAGE in brown ink at the lower left. Numbered 102 in brown ink at the upper left.

455 x 303 mm. (17 7/ 8 x 11 7/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably Dr. Joseph Liouville, Paris1; Anonymous sale (‘Rare ensemble de trente dessins par Jules Bastien-Lepage’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Liber & Castor], 26 April 1985, lot 29.

LITERATURE: Possibly Masters in Art: Bastien-Lepage, Boston, 1908, p.40 (‘He also made a drawing for the statuette which is full of remarkable and subtle qualities.’); Marie-Madeleine Aubrun, Jules BastienLepage 1848-1884: Catalogue raisonné de l’Oeuvre, Paris, 1985, p.116, no. D.130; Serge Lemoine et al, Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884), exhibition catalogue, Paris and Verdun, 2007, p.103, under no.21, note 5; Louis-Antoine Prat, Le dessin français au XIXe siècle, Paris, 2011, p.442, fig.1058 (as location unknown).

One of the foremost Realist painters of the late 19th century in France, Jules Bastien-Lepage enjoyed a brief but remarkably successful career of barely fifteen years. Born Jules Bastien in the town of Damvillers, north of Verdun in the département of the Meuse, he adopted the professional surname Bastien-Lepage very early in his career, adding his mother’s maiden name to his own. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, entering the studio of Alexandre Cabanel, and achieved his first public success at the Salon of 1874, where both paintings he exhibited were purchased by the State. It was during the mid1870s that Bastien-Lepage, who had already achieved success as a portrait painter, found himself at an artistic crossroads; torn between the demands of the Académie for important historical, religious or mythological subjects, and his abiding interest in peasant genre scenes. His failure to win the Prix de Rome in 1875 and 1876 seems to have been the catalyst which led him to abandon any pretence of a career within the official art circles of the Académie, in favour of a commitment to Realist painting characterized by a rustic naturalism. Bastien-Lepage soon established a reputation as a painter of portraits and genre scenes of peasant life, which proved very popular among collectors. He also painted the occasional historical subject, notably the very large canvas of Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices, completed in 1879. Despite Bastien-Lepage’s international fame, however, his reputation dimmed soon after his

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death of cancer at the young age of thirty-six, and his work became little more than a footnote in most early studies of French 19th century painting. It was not until the last quarter of the 20th century that his paintings were rediscovered and underwent a scholarly reappraisal, and his importance as one of the leading artists of the Realist tradition was fully recognized.

This large drawing is a preparatory study for an unfinished and now-lost painting of Orpheus by BastienLepage, painted in 1877. The artist mentions the painting in a letter written to his parents in January 1877: ‘I went back to work starting a small painting (I mean small in size). It represents Orpheus asking once again for Eurydice from the god of the underworld…Orpheus walks in front, as it was agreed; as he walks, he plays the lyre. Distracted or rather tormented by the desire to see Eurydice, we feel that he will soon turn his head, and Mercury, who does not lose sight of him, will abduct his beloved. All of this is outlined, and I hope to finish it in a short time.’2 The painting of Orpheus was, however, eventually abandoned by the artist, and no longer survives. Its composition is nevertheless recorded in a handful of preparatory oil sketches3, all of which are now lost, except for one (fig.1) in a French private collection4, as well as five drawings5 and an etching6 for the figure of Orpheus. Bastien-Lepage also produced a small sculpted teracotta statuette for the figure of Orpheus with his lyre (fig.2), formerly in a private collection and today in the Musée Jules Bastien-Lepage in Montmédy7.

This small statuette of Orpheus reappears in Bastien-Lepage’s magisterial portrait of the actress Sarah Bernhardt (fig.3), painted in 1879 and exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in London the following year; the painting, which is said to have been done over a period of forty-five sittings, is today in the collection of Ann and Gordon Getty, San Francisco8. Arguably the definitive portrait of the famous actress, BastienLepage depicts Bernhardt holding a small sculpture of Orpheus (fig.4). Bernhardt was herself an artist and had produced and exhibited a number of sculptures, and indeed had achieved some renown as a sculptress, and it might be expected that she would wish to have herself portrayed with one of her own works. The small statuette of Orpheus which she holds in the portrait, however, was in fact that executed by Bastien-Lepage two or three years earlier. As a 19th century writer has described the painting, ‘The great actress is painted in profile, sitting up in an erect attitude and and looking down apparently rapt in thought, at a small statue of Orpheus which she holds in her hand…Both as a study of colour and of expession, this picture is equally remarkable. In some strange way the artist has been able to lay hold of the dreamy spell that floats about the enchantress. We see the magic of the dropped-down eye and hear the vibrations of that voice that has thrilled us all with its passion and power.’9

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55 PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR Limoges 1841-1919 Cagnes-sur-Mer Fille au corset bleu (Une blonde aux yeux bleus, vue de trois quarts sur un fond jaune) Pastel on paper, laid down on board. Signed Renoir in blue chalk at the lower left.

610 x 444 mm. (24 x 17 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Purchased from the artist on 15 April 1902 by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris; Albert Bernier, Paris; His sale (‘Collection de M. Albert Bernier’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 23 November 1910, lot 48 (La fille au corset bleu, sold for 1,600 francs to Hessel); Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 7 November 2001, lot 409; Private collection, New York.

LITERATURE: Possibly Colin B. Bailey, Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa and elsewhere, 1997-1998, p.292, note 2, under nos.28-30; Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville, Renoir: Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, Vol.II (1882-1894), Paris, 2009, p.472, no.1438 (where dated c.1890).

Pierre Auguste Renoir was an inveterate draughtsman, equally adept in pencil, pen, chalk, charcoal, watercolour and pastel. Yet he seems to have thought little of his drawings, throwing away or destroying most of them, and is said to have even used drawings to light the kitchen stove. Apart from pastels, Renoir only rarely showed his drawings in his lifetime, and it was not until two years after his death that a significant exhibition of his drawings was mounted, at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1921. The exhibition comprised a large number of drawings, watercolours and pastels from all periods of the artist’s career, numbering almost 150 works. For many visitors, the exhibition was a revelation; as one critic wrote, ‘We make our way into the artist’s studio, he opens his portfolios for us, hides nothing from us, from the most accomplished works to the faintest of notes.’1 Many artists were equally taken with Renoir’s drawings; Henri Fantin-Latour, for one, is said to have praised ‘a virtuosity that harks back to the Italian Renaissance’2, while Paul Gauguin greatly admired the draughtsmanship of the ‘Divine Renoir, who didn’t know how to draw...With Renoir nothing is in its place; don’t look for line because it doesn’t exist. As if by magic, a beautiful colour or a caressing light say it all.’3 For much of the last two decades of his life Renoir’s hands were crippled by arthritis, so that by around 1913 his hands were so bent that he was no longer able to draw. Yet it remains true of Renoir that, as the scholar François Daulte wrote, ‘It is in his sketches and studies, rather than his large paintings, that he reveals all his originality and freshness of vision.’4 Renoir began using pastels around 1874, and he tended to prefer the medium for portraits of close family and friends. The present sheet may be included among a distinct group of pastel portraits by Renoir executed at the end of the 1870s and the beginning of the 1880s. As Daulte has written of these early pastel portraits, ‘If he frequently utilized that medium to depict those near and dear to him it was because pastel, which combines colour with line, gave him the possibility of working rapidly and catching in all their vividness the rapid flash of intelligence and the fleeting shadow of emotion. Employing an extremely sober range of colours – mostly blacks, blues and jade greens – Renoir probes his sitters to their very soul and offers them boldly to our gaze. He brings them to life and makes us feel their presence.’5 Similarly, as Christine Ekelhart has noted of Renoir as a portraitist, ‘He preferred to use pastels, consciously referring to the tradition of the eighteenth century, a time when pastels enjoyed a flowering in France, particularly in portraiture. Emphatic painterly qualities and an extreme close-up perspective lend these portraits a strong immediate presence, creating a direct relationship to the viewer.’6 While he saw his chalk drawings and watercolours as exercises towards his oil paintings, Renoir seems to have regarded his pastels as finished works of art in their own right, and they were the only drawings that the artist chose to exhibit. His first one-man show, held at the offices of Georges Charpentier’s weekly magazine La Vie

Moderne in 1879, was made up almost entirely of pastels, including a number of portraits, together with just one painting.

In their recently-published catalogue raisonné of Renoir’s work, Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville have suggested that this large pastel is a portrait of Jeanne Samary (1857-1890), a popular and successful actress at the Comédie-Française who was one of Renoir’s favourite models in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Léontine Pauline Jeanne Samary joined the Comédie-Française at the age of eighteen, and soon achieved a level of celebrity underlined by the writer and theatrical director Jules Clarétie’s description of her as ‘the muse of the Comédie…she had the smile of Marivaux, the imagination of Regnard, the wit of Molière, she was a star of contemporary art.’7 Known as ‘la petite Samary’, she was as famous in her day as Sarah Bernhardt, with whom she worked at the Comédie-Française until Bernhardt left the troupe in 1880. (Renoir told Ambroise Vollard, however, that he had rarely seen Samary on stage, as he preferred the Folies-Bergères to the Comédie-Française.) The artist seems to have met Samary through Mme. Georges Charpentier, whose portrait he was painting, and whose salon the actress was known to have regularly attended.

Jeanne Samary first sat to Renoir in 1877, and he painted her several times over the next few years. Until her marriage in 1880, she lived with her parents on the rue Frochot, just a few hundred metres from Renoir’s studio on the rue Saint-Georges, and thus was often available to pose for the artist, who disliked professional models. Samary is reported to have said of the painter, “Renoir is not the marrying kind. He marries all the women he paints, but with his brush.” Renoir came to paint around a dozen portraits of Samary, in both oil and pastel, notably a full-length oil portrait of 1878, now in the collection of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg8. She also posed for the large painting of The Luncheon of the Boating Party of 1881, today in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., where she appears in the right background. Soon after her marriage, however, Renoir seems to have largely stopped painting Samary, whose attentions were now devoted to such fashionable society painters as Carolus-Duran, Louise Abbéma and Jacques-Emile Blanche.

Samary was known in particular for playing servants, country girls and maids, and in this pastel portrait the artist may have chosen to show her in character, and thus simply dressed9. Renoir painted at least three other pastels of Jeanne Samary. A portrait of the actress holding a flower and dressed similarly to the present sheet appeared at auction in 1990 and 201310, while a three-quarter length pastel of Samary holding a fan is in the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum11. Nicholas Wadley’s comments on the latter pastel may be equally applied to the present sheet: ‘The intensity of dark eyes and…hair float out of a surface in which the scattering of informal coloured marks is subdued by a milky white overdrawing, applied almost like a glaze. It has the same eccentric coherence as his paintings, quintessentially impressionist and yet quite unlike any other impressionist images…it is as if Renoir’s eye flitted from surface to surface, invoking them with such a light touch that the dazzling likenesses of his portraits can exist without much sense of gravity or solidity.’12 A pencil portrait of the head of what may be the same sitter, formerly in the collection of Ambroise Vollard, is in the National Museum in Belgrade13.

In 1884 the journalist and art critic Octave Mirbeau noted of Renoir that ‘He is truly the painter of women, alternatively gracious and moved, knowing and simple, and always elegant, with an exquisite visual sensibility, a touch as light as a kiss, a vision as penetrating as that of Stendhal. Not only does he give a marvelous sense of the physique, the delicate relief and dazzling tones of young complexions, he also gives a sense of the form of the soul, all woman’s inward musicality and bewitching mystery…I do not understand why all women do not have their portraits painted by this exquisite artist, who is also an exquisite poet.’14 Similarly, a few years earlier, another critic wrote that ‘Renoir excels at portraits. Not only does he catch the external features, but through them he pinpoints the model’s character and inner self. I doubt whether any painter has ever interpreted woman in a more seductive manner. The deft and lively touches of Renoir’s brush are charming, supple and unrestrained, making flesh transparent and tinting the cheeks and lips with a perfect living hue. Renoir’s women are enchantresses.’15

56 JAMES (JACQUES) JOSEPH TISSOT Nantes 1836-1902 Buillon A Cloakroom: Study of Hanging Coats and Hats, with a Cello Case Pencil on buff laid paper. A made up section at the lower right corner. Signed J. Tissot in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed M. Romain(?) Flipo / Cadre noir in pencil on the verso. Numbered 57 in blue chalk and inscribed with accounts 4 planches / l’entète 300 / la lettre 300 / le cul de Lampe(?) 300 / le portrait 300, with further calculations in pencil on the verso.

338 x 428 mm. (13 1/ 4 x 16 7/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 18 March 1998, lot 307; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1999; Private collection, London.

EXHIBITED: New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1999, no.52.

Born in Nantes and trained in Paris, where he met and befriended James McNeil Whistler, Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet soon after his arrival in the city, Jacques-Joseph (although from early in his career he preferred to be known as ‘James’) Tissot made his Salon debut in 1859. His earliest paintings were religious or historical scenes, often set in the Middle Ages, but around 1864 he began to paint fashionable genre subjects of young women and modern Parisian life, as well as a number of portraits. He soon achieved a significant level of success, and by 1868 was earning around 70,000 francs a year from the sales of his paintings to collectors.

Thought to have been associated with the Paris Commune of 1871, Tissot fled the city after the fall of the Commune that year and settled in London. There he developed a distinctive and commercially successful style of painting that married French elegance with the English taste for genre subjects.

Established in a large house and studio in St. John’s Wood, Tissot earned considerable fame and made a substantial fortune from the sale of his paintings, an amount which the artist himself estimated at around 1,200,000 francs over the period of eleven years that he worked in London. He also took up the medium of etching, which he used to reproduce his paintings for a wider audience, adding to his reputation. In May 1882 Tissot had a one-man exhibition of his paintings, etchings and cloisonné enamels at the Dudley Gallery in London.

At the end of 1882, after over a decade in London, and following the death of his muse and mistress Kathleen Newton, Tissot returned to Paris. Within a few months he had organized an exhibition of over a hundred of his paintings, most of which were from his English period, at the Palais de l’Industrie.

He continued to paint elegant portraits of the ladies of Belle Epoque society in Paris, and in 1883 began work on an ambitious series of large genre paintings devoted to the theme of the modern Parisian woman, entitled La Femme à Paris. The fifteen large-scale paintings which comprised the La Femme à Paris series were exhibited at the Galerie Sedelmeyer in Paris in 1885 and at Arthur Tooth and Sons in London the following year, although both exhibitions met with little critical or commercial success. It was towards the end of this project that the artist experienced a radical and somewhat unexpected religious epiphany. He decided to devote the remainder of his artistic career to Biblical subjects, beginning with a series of 365 gouache drawings illustrating the life of Christ. After working on the drawings for a decade, including several study visits to Palestine, Tissot exhibited them to popular acclaim in Paris, London and throughout America; they were eventually published in 1896 as La Bible de James Tissot.

In all, Tissot produced around three hundred finished paintings and some ninety prints, in the form of drypoints, etchings and mezzotints.

This large drawing is a study for the left-hand section of a long, horizontal etching by Tissot of the interior of a cloakroom (fig.1), datable to around 1885 and of much smaller dimensions than the present sheet.

Only two impressions of this rare print are known today, one in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris1 and the other in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes2. (Indeed, only two examples of the etching were listed in the catalogue of the posthumous sale of the contents of Tissot’s studio in 19033.) Both this print of coats hanging in a cloakroom and a related small etching of the letter L surrounded by discarded hats and an umbrella, with coats hanging in the background4, can be associated with Tissot’s failed project to publish etchings after his series of fifteen large canvases collectively known as La Femme à Paris, painted between 1883 and 1885.

The artist’s plan was to publish reproductive etchings of the fifteen paintings of La Femme à Paris, with each image accompanied by a short story – inspired by the subject of the painting – written by a different prominent author, and with the text illustrated with vignettes and initial letters. As Charles Yriarte noted in a brochure announcing the proposed publication of the etchings of the La Femme à Paris series, this ‘triple manifestation de l’art, de la littérature et de la typographie’ would be enriched with ‘toutes de séductions et des accessoires, têtes de chapitres, lettres ornées, culs-de-lampes variés, spéciaux, appropriés à chaque sujet, tous marqués du même cachet original du Peintre de l’Aquafortiste.’ Although etchings after five of the large paintings were completed, none were ever published, and the project was eventually abandoned.

One of the paintings of the La Femme à Paris series, entitled La plus jolie femme de Paris (or The Fashionable Beauty), today in a private collection, is set in the foyer of the Paris Opéra, and the proposed etching after it was to have illustrated a story written by the novelist and playwright Ludovic Halévy.

The Tissot scholar Michael Wentworth has plausibly suggested that the two etchings noted above may have been intended to accompany Halévy’s proposed text, which was eventually published separately some years after the cancellation of the project. Certainly, the subject matter of this drawing of an image taken from modern-day Parisian life – the interior of a musician’s cloakroom – would have been entirely appropriate for a scene set at the Opéra.

The present sheet, drawn with an Ingres-like use of the pencil, is in its own way as indicative of Tissot’s interest in contemporary fashion as his numerous paintings of elegant women in stylish dresses. As Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz has noted, ‘In terms of costume painting, Tissot had much in common with Ingres, for both positively revelled in the detailed rendition of fashionable clothes.’5

1.

57 MAXIMILIEN LUCE Paris 1858-1941 Paris Study of a Nude Bather Black chalk, pastel and pencil, with framing lines in pencil. Stamped with the artist’s signature Luce (not in Lugt) in black ink at the lower right, and with the atelier stamp Luce in a circle (not in Lugt) in red ink at the lower left. Stamped with a drystamp Maximilien Luce / J. Bouin-Luce (not in Lugt) at the lower right.

Further stamped COLLECTION / JEAN-BOUIN LUCE (not in Lugt) in black ink and numbered CR 954 in pencil on the verso.

254 x 468 mm. (10 x 18 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: By descent in the family of the artist to Jean Bouin-Luce (with his collection drystamp, not in Lugt, at the lower right); Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Thierry de Maigret], 23 May 2007, lot 94; Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2008; Private collection, London.

LITERATURE: Jean Bouin-Luce and Denise Bazetoux, Maximilien Luce: catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Paris, 1986, Vol.II, p.239, no.954.

Born in Montparnasse, Maximilien Luce was trained initially as a wood-engraver, and took up landscape painting in the late 1870s. Although best known for his work as a Neo-Impressionist painter, Luce often preferred urban subjects to the landscape views produced by such colleagues as Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac. Like Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross, he continued to work in a Neo-Impressionist manner for many years after the death of Georges Seurat in 1891. In the spring of 1892 he travelled to London with Pissarro, and in the summer of the same year visited Signac at Saint-Tropez, where he painted a number of splendid pointillist canvases. At the Salon des Indépendants of that year Luce showed two views of London and a pair of landscapes painted at Saint-Tropez, as well as a Parisian night scene. His strong left-wing political convictions also found expression in much of his art, and particularly in his graphic work. A member of the French anarchist movement, he was briefly imprisoned as a political activist in 1894. From about 1895 onwards, Luce began to move away from a strict Neo-Impressionist style. He painted a number of urban views, in particular scenes of Notre-Dame, as well as depictions of men at work, rural landscapes and a handful of fine portraits of fellow artists.

This splendid, large drawing is a preparatory study for a figure at the lower right of Luce’s painting Bathers at Saint-Tropez (fig.1), painted in 1892 and today in a private collection . Two further studies by Luce for other female nudes in the same painting, each squared for transfer and much less refined in execution than the present sheet, are in private collections . A related, large oil sketch of the composition, with several differences in the arrangement of the figures, is also in a private collection .

As the contemporary scholar Adolphe Tabarant, writing in 1894, noted, ‘Luce tries to tell us about SaintTropez, Camaret and London in a score of paintings…How it all pulsates and how true it rings!’4

1.

58 PAUL GAUGUIN Paris 1848-1903 Atuona (Hiva Oa, The Marquesas) Recto: The Head of a Breton Woman Verso: Study of Legs Black chalk, charcoal and watercolour, on buff paper. The verso in pencil. Inscribed Fran 2627 and numbered 70 in pencil on the verso.

268 x 199 mm. (10 1/ 2 x 7 3/ 4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Francisco (Paco) Durrio, Paris and Spain, by 1895; Sir John Clermont Witt, London; His posthumous sale (‘Drawings, Watercolours and Paintings from the Collection of the late Sir John and Lady Witt’), London, Sotheby’s, 19 February 1987, lot 362; Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva.

LITERATURE: Denys Sutton and Ronald Pickvance, Gauguin and the Pont-Aven Group, exhibition catalogue, London, 1966, p.28, no.61; Ronald Pickvance, The Drawings of Gauguin, 1970, p.39, pl.97; Alexander Dückers, ed., Linie, Licht und Schatten: Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 1999, pp.230-231, no.108 (entry by Ulrike Nürnberger); Philip Rylands, ed., The Timeless Eye: Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1999, illustrated p.401; Tomàs Llorens, ed., Miradas sin tiempo: Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Colección Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 2000, pp.320-321, no.144 (entry by Ulrike Nürnberger); Klaus Albert Schröder and Christine Ekelhart, ed., Goya bis Picasso: Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und MarieAnne Krugier-Poniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Vienna, 2005, pp.186-187, no.76 (entry by Ulrike Nürnberger); Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Christine Ekelhart, ed., Impressionism: Pastels, Watercolours, Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Vienna, 2012, p.166, pl.78; To be included in a forthcoming volume of the Gauguin catalogue raisonné, published by the Wildenstein Institute.

EXHIBITED: Probably Basel, Kunsthalle, Paul Gauguin 1848-1903, 1928, no.168 (‘Kopf Einer Bretonin, liecht aquarelliert’, lent by Durrio); Probably Berlin, Galerie Thannhauser, Paul Gauguin 1848-1903, 1928, no.144 (‘Kopf Einer Bretonin, liecht aquarelliert’, lent by Durrio); London, The Leicester Galleries, The Durrio Collection of Works by Gauguin, May-June 1931, no.32 (‘Tête bretonne’); London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, The John Witt Collection. Part I: European Schools, 1963, no.72; London, Tate Gallery, Gauguin and the Pont-Aven Group, 1966, no.61; Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Linie, Licht und Schatten: Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no.108; Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin tiempo: Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Colección Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no.144; Vienna, Albertina, Goya bis Picasso: Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no.76; Vienna, Albertina, Impressionism: Pastels, Watercolours, Drawings, 2012, no.78.

In a relatively short but controversial career, Paul Gauguin produced paintings, drawings, prints, wooden sculptures and ceramic objects in a range of eclectic styles. Although he was a brilliant and gifted draughtsman, the practice of drawing seems to have been largely a personal and private act. In his correspondence, he frequently referred to his drawings as ‘documents’, and appears to have intended them to be kept private, rarely shown to others or exhibited. As Gauguin wrote in 1903, shortly before his death, ‘A critic at my house sees some paintings. Breathing heavily, he asks for my drawings. My drawings?

Never! They are my letters, my secrets.’1 While Gauguin gave a number of his drawings to such artist friends as Charles Laval, Maxime Maufra, Emile Schuffenecker and Vincent van Gogh, and a few others were sold to the dealer Theo van Gogh, for the most part his work as a draughtsman remained unseen by friends, critics and scholars throughout his career, and for many years thereafter. Writing in 1960, the

scholar Jean Leymarie noted of the artist, ‘Many of his drawings have been lost or destroyed; others still await discovery. But his sketchbooks, though often dismembered, the illustrations in his numerous manuscripts and on many isolated sheets – not to mention his engravings – suffice to reveal an artist whose magnitude and originality have not received full recognition.’2 Gauguin was not a prolific draughtsman, and, excluding sketchbook pages, less than a hundred independent drawings survive from a career that lasted some three decades. While a number of drawings may have been lost or destroyed, particularly towards the end of his career when he was living in French Polynesia, it seems that, on the whole, Gauguin’s working method laid less emphasis on preparatory drawings than was the case for many of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, as has been noted, ‘Drawing was fundamental to Gauguin’s artistic process, forming the basis of his work in every other medium and imparting a distinct correspondence between them. Throughout his life he continually turned to his sketchbooks, filled with summary studies in graphite, ink, crayon, and watercolor.’3 Throughout the latter half of the 1880s, Gauguin made several trips to Brittany, working mainly in the area around Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu. As he wrote to his friend Emile Schuffenecker in 1888, ‘I like Brittany. I find a certain wildness and primitiveness here. When my clogs resound on this granite soil, I hear the dull, matte, powerful tone I seek in my painting.’4 He held a particular fascination for the Breton people and painted and drew them frequently. In October 1889 he wrote to Van Gogh from Le Pouldu that, ‘I try to put into these desolate figures the savageness I see in them and that is also in me. Here in Brittany, the peasants have a medieval air about them and do not for a moment look as though they think that Paris exists and that it is 1889. Everything here is harsh, like the Breton language, and impenetrable – for all time it would seem.’5 This powerful drawing of a Breton woman may be dated to Gauguin’s fifth and final visit to Brittany in 1894, following his first trip to Tahiti. As Ronald Pickvance has noted, the present sheet ‘shows how the influence of his Tahitian stay affected Gauguin’s vision of Brittany in 1894.’6 While this head does not definitively appear in any surviving work by Gauguin, Pickvance has suggested a tentative relationship with the right-hand figure in the painting Two Breton Peasant Girls, signed and dated 1894, in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris7. Works from Gauguin’s final stay in Brittany in 1894 are relatively rare, as the artist produced very little work during the six and a half months that he was in Le Pouldu and Pont-Aven. A fight with some local sailors in the Breton port of Concarneau left him with a fractured leg. In severe pain and taking morphine daily, he was confined to his bed for two months, during which he was unable to paint. Able only to work on a small scale in his room, during this period he produced mainly woodcuts and transfer drawings in watercolour, gouache and pastel, mostly of Tahitian subjects.

The woman depicted in this drawing is wearing a Breton headdress typical of the women of Pont-Aven, also seen in a comparable pastel drawing of the heads of two Breton women of the same date, dedicated

by Gauguin to Maxime Maufra (fig.1), in the collection of the Musée de Pont-Aven8. As Gauguin wrote to Van Gogh of the Breton costume: ‘The dress is also almost symbolic, influenced by the superstitions of Catholicism. Look at the bodices, shaped like a cross at the back, and the black kerchiefs with which the women cover their heads, like so many nuns. It makes their faces look almost Asian, yellow, triangular and severe...’9 The headdress worn by the woman in this drawing would appear to be a flat Breton working cap, of the sort worn under a more elaborate white coiffe. A similar Breton cap is seen in a sheet of studies of Breton women by Gauguin, part of a sketchbook used by the artist between 1884 and 1888 and today in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.10, as well as in a pair of small etchings of a Nude Woman with her Hands Behind her Head – which may depict the same model as seen in the present sheet – by the Pont-Aven artist Armand Seguin, executed in 189211.

The model for this watercolour may be tentatively proposed as one of two Breton women who appear in earlier works by Gauguin. The facial features – in particular the high, prominent forehead and full lips – of the woman in this drawing are quite similar to those of a woman from Pont-Aven who is known

to have posed several times for Gauguin, as well as for other artists, including Paul Sérusier and Charles Laval. She appears, for example, in a small canvas Portrait of a Pont-Avennoise (perhaps Marie Louarn) by Gauguin of c.1888 (fig.2), today in a private collection12. She has been identified as a Breton woman named Marie Louarn (or Louarin), who was apparently the only woman in Pont-Aven willing to pose nude for Gauguin and other artists, although she always insisted on keeping her coiffe on her head. (As Sérusier later recalled, in a letter of 1906 to Maurice Denis, ‘she charmed the solitude of the entire PontAven school…She did not scruple to remove her slip, but showed a respectable reluctance to remove her coiffe.’13) Marie Louarn is also likely to have been the model for two gouache drawings of a semi-nude Breton woman by Gauguin, one in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the other in the collection of Jean Bonna in Geneva14, which are in turn related to the painting In the Hay (The Pigs) of November 1888. Marie Louarn is, however, said to have given up modelling and to have become a prostitute by 1892, two years before the presumed date of this watercolour. Another possibility is a Breton woman who posed for a small painting by Gauguin also painted six years earlier, in 1888; Portrait, Presumed to be Marie Lagadu15. Marie Lagadu (Marie ‘Black Eyes’) is thought to have been a serving girl at the pension Gloanec in Pont-Aven, where Gauguin stayed in 1894.

The present sheet was part of the substantial collection of paintings, drawings and prints by Gauguin belonging to expatriate Spanish sculptor and ceramicist Francesco (Paco) Durrio (1868-1940), who lived in Paris. Durrio met Gauguin in 1886 and became a devoted friend, particularly during the latter’s stay in Paris from 1893 to 1895, after his first trip to Tahiti. The two shared a workshop in Paris and had many of the same interests; Gauguin even invited Durrio to accompany him back to Tahiti, although the Spaniard declined the opportunity. Before Gauguin departed on his second journey to the South Seas in 1895, he entrusted Durrio with a large and important group of his paintings and drawings, including the present sheet, to which he added several works sent from the tropics.

After Gauguin’s death, Durrio became one of his foremost champions and disciples, lending works by the master from his collection to various exhibitions in Spain and France – notably the retrospective exhibition of Gauguin’s oeuvre at the Salon d’Automne of 1906 – and introducing his work to fellow Spaniards in Paris, including the young Pablo Picasso. Although Durrio tried to keep his collection of works by Gauguin intact, as the painter had wished, financial need forced him to sell much of the group in the 1930s16.

1. (detail)

2.

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

No.2 Oudry

No.11 Boucher

Fig.1 Jean-Baptiste Oudry The Adoration of the Magi, 1715-1717 Graphite, pen and brush and ink and bodycolour on grey paper London, The Courtauld Gallery Inv. D.1952.RW.3232 Sir Robert Clermont Witt Bequest, 1952 © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London.

Fig.1 Louis-Félix de La Rue, after François Boucher Autumn Etching, engraving and drypoint New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Inv. 53.600.1079(15) Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953.

No.3 Watteau Fig.1 Jean-Antoine Watteau Three Studies of a Standing Woman: Seen from Behind, Seen from the Front, and in Profile Red chalk Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett Inv. KdZ 1768 © Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

No.4 Delobel

Fig.2 François Boucher and workshop Allegory of Autumn, 1753 Oil on canvas New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Inv. 69.155.1 Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman Gift, 1969.

No.12 Boucher Fig.1 François Boucher Neptune and Amymone, 1764 Oil on canvas Versailles, Chateau de Versailles et de Trianon Inv. MV 7093.

Fig.1 Nicolas Delobel View from the Cloister of San Bartolommeo on the Tiber Island, 1728 Watercolour, ink and chalk Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Inv. RP-T-1956-57 Purchased with the support of the F. G. Waller-Fonds, 1956.

Fig.2 Jacques Germain Soufflot and François Boucher Workshop of Jacques Neilson, Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins Allegory of Water (Neptune Rescuing Amymone), designed 1758-1767, woven 1764-1771 New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Inv. 58.75.3 Gift of Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1958.

No.6 Oudry

No.16 Fragonard

Fig.1 Jean-Baptiste Oudry Belphagore, 1734 Brush and black ink, gray wash, heightened with white gouache, on blue paper Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum Inv. 2002.52.4 © J. Paul Getty Trust.

Fig.1 Jean-Honoré Fragonard Scene in a Park, c.1760 Pen and brown and gray ink, brush and brown and gray wash, and traces of yellow watercolor over black chalk Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art Inv. 1925.1006 Dudley P. Allen Fund.

No.10 Dumont le Romain

No.17 Robert

Fig.1 Jacques-François Blondel after Jacques Dumont le Romain La Marine Les Arms Ottomans Etching for the Livre de nouveaux trophées inventez par J. Dumont le Romain, Paris, c.1736 © The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 13688:4

Fig.1 Hubert Robert The ‘Temple of Jupiter Serapis’ at Pozzuoli, 1760 Watercolour Turin, Biblioteca Reale Inv. 16338

Fig.2 Hubert Robert The Temple of Serapis, Pozzuoli, 1760 Red chalk Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Inv. 65.2601 Bequest of Forsyth Wickes - The Forsyth Wickes Collection.

Fig.1 Jean Duplessis-Bertaux after Louis-Jean Desprez Lateral view of the temple of Segesta, Sicily Engraving, published in the Voyage pittoresque, ou description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile, 1786.

No.18 Deshays

No.32 Greuze

Fig.1 Jean-Baptiste Deshays The Raising of Lazarus, 1763 Oil on canvas The Horvitz Collection Inv. P-F-17 © THE HORVITZ COLLECTION. Photo: Michael Gould

Fig.1 Jean-Baptiste Greuze The Family Reconciliation (La réconciliation de la famille), c.1770 Pen, grey and black wash, over a black chalk underdrawing Phoenix, Phoenix Art Museum Inv. 1964.209

No.23 Vincent

No.48 Ingres

Fig.1 François-André Vincent A Sacrifice to an Egyptian God, 1772 Pen and black ink and brown wash Stockholm, Nationalmuseum Inv. NM 154/1983.

Fig.1 Copy after Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Portrait of Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux Paris, Musée du Louvre Pencil Inv. RF 1091 © 2012 - Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques

No.27a Cauvet Fig.1 Simon-Charles Miger after Gilles-Paul Cauvet Two Sirens Holding a Vase, 1777 Etching New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Inv. 20.61.1 Rogers Fund, 1920.

No.27b Cauvet Fig.1 Elise-Caroline Liottier after Gilles-Paul Cauvet Cupid Standing on a Globe, 1777 Etching New York, The New York Public Library The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Art & Architecture Collection.

Fig.2 Gilles-Paul Cauvet Design for a Carved Panel Black and red chalk New York, Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Inv. 1911-28-30 Purchased for the Museum by the Advisory Council.

No.28 Desprez

Fig.2 Copy after Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Portrait of Louise-Rosalie Gatteaux Paris, Musée du Louvre Pencil Inv. RF 1092 © 2012 - Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques Fig.3 Copy after Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Portrait of Edouard Gatteaux Paris, Musée du Louvre Pencil Inv. RF 1093 © 2012 - Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques

NOTES TO THE CATALOGUE No.1 Louis Chéron 1.

Alvin L. Clark, Jr., ‘A Self-Proclaimed Student of Raphael and Giulio: Louis Chéron as a Draftsman’, in Achim Gnann and Heinz Widauer, ed., Festschrift für Konrad Oberhuber, Milan, 2000, p.350.

2.

Ibid., p.350.

3.

These are Tobias and the Angel (lot 9, sold for 16s), Tobias (lot 50, sold for £4), and Tobit and the Angel (lot 65, sold for £2,6s.); A Catalogue of the Paintings and Drawings Of that Great Master Mr. Louis Cheron, lately deceas’d, London, Covent-Garden, 26 February-2 March 1726; transcribed in Francis Russell, ‘Louis Cheron: a sale catalogue’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1988, pp.465-466.

No.2 Jean-Baptiste Oudry 1.

Opperman, op.cit., 1983, p.4.

2.

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

3.

Inv. D.1952.RW.3232; Opperman, op.cit., 1977, Vol.II, p.661, no.D161, p.990, fig.35; Opperman, op.cit., 1983, pp.93-95, no.4; Gillian Kennedy and Anne Thackray, French Drawings XVI-XIX Centuries, exhibition catalogue, London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, 1991, pp.84-85, no.37; Christine Gouzi and Christophe Leribault, ed., Le Baroque des Lumières: Chefs-d’oeuvre des églises parisiennes au XVIIIe siècle, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2017, p.50, under no.2, fig.1. The dimensions of the drawing are 230 x 206 mm.

4.

Inv. 31500; Opperman, op.cit., 1977, Vol.II, p.661, no.D162, p.987, fig.30; Prat, op.cit., p.357, fig.662. The drawing measures 215 x 247 mm.

No.3 Jean-Antoine Watteau 1.

The present sheet was one of around fifteen drawings by Watteau that were in the collection of Raoul Dastrac (1891-1969), a painter and collector.

2.

Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, Comte de Caylus, ‘La vie d’Antoine Watteau, peintre de figures et de paysages, sujets galants et modernes, lué à l’Académie le 3 fevrier 1748’, 1748, in Pierre Rosenberg, Vies anciennes de Watteau, Paris, 1984, pp.78-79; quoted in translation in Alan Wintermute, ‘Le Pelerinage à Watteau. An Introduction to the Drawings of Watteau and His Circle’, in Alan Wintermute, Watteau and His World: French Drawing from 1700 to 1750, exhibition catalogue, New York and Ottawa, 1999-2000, pp.28-29.

3.

Quoted in translation in Roland Michel, op.cit., p.73.

4.

Ibid., p.73

5.

Edme-Francois Gersaint, ‘Abrégé de la vie d’Antoine Watteau’, 1744, in Pierre Rosenberg, Vies anciennes de Watteau, Paris, 1984, p.40; quoted in translation in Wintermute, op.cit., p.16.

6.

Stein in Baetjer, ed., op.cit., p.76, under no.27.

7.

Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500-1800, exhibition catalogue, 20092010, p.102, under no.42. In 1697, during the reign of Louis XIV, performances of the Comédie Italienne, the Paris-based troupe of the Italian commedia dell’arte, were officially banned. By the time Watteau had been admitted to the Académie Royale in 1717, however, the King had died and the Regent, Phillippe, Duc d’Orléans, had invited the Italian actors back to Paris to re-establish the Comédie Italienne.

8.

‘…l’extraordinaire liberté de la silhouette du galant qui enlace la femme de gauche. Celle-ci est entièrement dessinée à la sanguine, avec une reprise de son justaucorps à la pierre noire, comme une surimpression, tandis que l’autre jeune femme est traitée de façon à peu près inverse. La beauté de la mise en page, l’équilibre des figures entre elles sont tout à fait remarquables.’; Rosenberg and Prat, op.cit., Vol.II, p.924, under no.546.

9.

Inv. KdZ 1768; Parker and Mathey, op.cit., Vol. II, p.314, no.589, fig.589; Rosenberg and Prat, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.924-925, no.547 (where dated c.1717).

10. Martin P. Eidelberg, Watteau’s Drawings: Their Use and Significance, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Princeton University, 1965, p.4.

11. Stein in Baetjer, ed., op.cit., p.76, under no.27.

No.4 Nicolas Delobel 1.

Inv. RP-T-1956-57; Marianne Roland Michel, Le dessin français au XVIIIe siècle, Paris and Fribourg, 1987, p.154, fig.176. The drawing is signed, dated and inscribed Vüe dedans le cloîstre de St. Barthelemy / 1728 / N. Delobel. The drawing, which measures 222 x 346 mm, is illustrated at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-T-1956-57. The Amsterdam drawing appears to show the same tower seen at the upper right of the present sheet, though surmounted by a roof.

2.

Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 27 January 2010, lot 93 (sold for $10,625). Of vertical format, the drawing measures 382 x 257 mm., and is inscribed ‘Sur le bord du Tibre vis a vis St Bartelemy’.

3.

Inv. RF 51727; Revue du Louvre, December 1998, p.88, no.40 (entry by Jean-François Méjanès); Pierre Rosenberg, From Drawing to Painting: Poussin, Watteau, Fragonard, David & Ingres, Princeton, 2000, p.109, fig.132; Sonia Couturier, Drawn to Art: French Artists and Art Lovers in 18thCentury Rome, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa and Caen, 2011-2012, p.72, under no.22, fig.22.1; Martin Eidelberg, Rêveries italiennes: Watteau et les paysagistes français au XVIIIe siècle, exhibition catalogue, Valenciennes, 2015-2016, p.122, fig.134; Prat, op.cit., 2017, p.66, fig.104. The drawing measures 250 x 403 mm., and is dated and inscribed ‘novembre 1724 du palais des Empereurs’.

4.

Inv. D-F-1159; Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 18 March 2004, lot 127; Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 15 December 2004, lot 103 (sold for €3,290); Eidelberg, ibid., p.123, fig.135; ‘Appendix of Other Early French Art in The Horvitz Collection’, in Alvin L. Clark, Jr., ed., Tradition & Transition: Eighteenth-Century French Art from The Horvitz Collection, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2017, p.603, no.A533 (not illustrated). The dimensions of the drawing are 255 x 377 mm.

5.

Sale (‘Drawings from the Collection of Denys Sutton’), New York, Christie’s, 25 January 2005, lot 9 (sold for $24,000). The drawing measures 241 x 387 mm.

6.

Inv. 2017.159; Sale (‘Drawings from the Oppé Collection’), London, Sotheby’s, 5 July 2016, lot 75 (sold for £17,500). The dimensions of the drawing are 337 x 228 mm.

No.5 Jean-Baptiste Pater 1.

Perrin Stein and Mary Tavener Holmes, Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in New York Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1999, p.18, under no.9 (entry by Perrin Stein).

2.

Alvin L. Clark, Jr., ed., Mastery & Elegance: Two Centuries of French Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, 1998, p.200, under no.47 (entry by Margaret Morgan Grasselli).

3.

Inv. GKI 5633; Florence Ingersoll-Smouse, Pater, Paris, 1928, p.55, no.233, p.131, fig.58; Christoph Martin Vogtherr et al, Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten: Bestandskataloge der Kunstsammlungen. Französische Gemälde I. Watteau, Pater, Lancret, Lajoüe, Berlin, 2011, pp.266-272, no.16 (where dated c.1725). The dimensions of the painting, which has been enlarged on all four sides, are 130.5 x 193.5 cm.

4.

In assembling one of the finest collections of 18th century art in Europe, Frederick the Great, a friend and patron of Voltaire, came to own more than forty paintings by Pater, alongside numerous works by Watteau and Nicolas Lancret.

5.

Inv. 1942.53; Ibid., p.55, no.234, p.130, fig.56; Helen Comstock, ‘The Connoisseur in America: Pater’s The Dance for Worcester’, The Connoisseur, September 1943, p.50, illustrated p.49; Daniel Catton Rich, ‘Delights of the Dix-huitième’, Apollo, December 1971, p.482, fig.1; Louisa Dresser, ed., European Paintings in the Collection of the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, 1974, Vol.I, pp.270-271, no.1942.53 (entry

by Daniel Catton Rich), Vol.II, illustrated p.595; Worcester, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester Art Museum: Selected Works, Worcester 1994, illustrated p.129 (entry by James A. Welu); Vogtherr et al, op.cit., p.270, fig.1. The dimensions of the painting are 96.9 x 130.2 cm.

6.

‘Études de Mezzetins…L’autre, assis, vu de dos, la tête retournée de profil à gauche, un bras tendu.’; Beurdeley sale (‘Dessins, aquarelles, gouaches des ecoles Française et Anglaise du XVIIIe siècle…composant la collection de M. A. Beurdeley’), Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 13-15 March 1905, p.155, under lot 277.

7.

The Art Quarterly, Autumn 1958, p.337 [advertisement]; New York, Charles E. Slatkin Galleries, French Master Drawings: Renaissance to Modern, exhibition catalogue, 1959, no.36; Minneapolis, University Gallery, The Eighteenth Century: One Hundred Drawings by One Hundred Artists, exhibition catalogue, 1961, p.27, no.68, pl.XVII; Sale (‘Old Master Drawings and Paintings from the Private Collection of Norton Simon’), New York, Parke-Bernet Galleries, 7-8 May 1971, lot 203 (sold for $2,800); Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 25 January 2002, lot 65; Vogtherr et al, op.cit., p.264, fig.3. The drawing, which was the Galerie Prouté in Paris in 2005, measures 115 x 190 mm.

8.

Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 June 1970, lot 102. The dimensions of the drawing are given as approximately 135 x 180 mm.

9.

Inv. AG 1975.4.1464; Diederik Bakhüys, Trésors de l’ombre: Chefs-d’oeuvre du dessin français du XVIIIe siècle. Collections de la Ville de Rouen, exhibition catalogue, Rouen, 2013-2014, pp.240-241, no.106.

No.6 Jean-Baptiste Oudry 1.

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

2.

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

3.

Opperman, e-mail correspondence, 12 and 21 May 2018.

4.

Inv. 2002.52.4. The drawing is signed and dated 1734.

5.

Opperman, e-mail correspondence, 12 and 21 May 2018.

No.7 Jean-Baptiste Oudry 1.

Opperman, e-mail correspondence, 12 and 21 May 2018.

2.

Hal Opperman, J. B. Oudry 1686-1755, exhibition catalogue, Fort Worth, 1983, p.147, under no.39.

No.8 Jean-Baptiste Oudry 1.

Opperman, e-mail correspondence, 12 and 21 May 2018.

2.

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

No.9 Jacques Dumont le Romain 1.

Jean-Baptiste-Denis Lempereur, Dictionnaire général des artistes anciens et modernes, Paris, 1795, Vol.II, pp.351-352; quoted in translation in Emmanuelle Brugerolles, ed., Boucher, Watteau and the Origin of the Rococo: An exhibition of 18th century drawings from the collection of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, exhibition catalogue, Sydney, 2005, p.270, under no.65 (entry by Peter Fuhring).

2.

Matthieu Pinette and Françoise Soulier-François, De Bellini a Bonnard: Chefs-d’oeuvre de la peinture du Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon, Paris, 1992, pp.124-125. The painting is signed and dated 1747.

3.

Alvin L. Clark, Jr., ed., Mastery & Elegance: Two Centuries of French Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, 1998, pp226-227, no.59 (entry by Jean-François Méjanès).

No.10a Jacques Dumont le Romain 1.

Emmanuelle Brugerolles, ed., Boucher, Watteau and the Origin of the Rococo: An exhibition of 18th century drawings from the collection of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, exhibition catalogue, Sydney, 2005, p.272, under no.65 (entry by Peter Fuhring).

2.

Inv. 0.503; Emmanuelle Brugerolles, ed., François Boucher et l’art rocaille dans les collections de l’École des Beaux-Arts, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2003, pp.270-272, no.65 (entry by Peter Fuhring); Brugerolles, ibid., 2005, pp.270-272, no.65 (entry by Peter Fuhring). Signed and dated 1736, the drawing measures 332 x 124 mm.

3.

Inv. Hdz 6632; Ekhart Berckenhagen, Die Französischen Zeichnungen der Kunstbibliothek Berlin, Berlin, 1970, p.243, no. Hdz 6632; Brugerolles, ed., ibid. and op.cit., p.272, under no.65, fig.2. The dimensions of the drawing are 334 x 124 mm.

4.

Inv. 28087. The two drawings, both in red chalk, measure 331 x 122 mm. and 331 x 119 mm.

No.10b Jacques Dumont le Romain 1.

These two drawings by Dumont le Romain (Nos.10a and 10b) may once have been part of the extensive collection of the American designer and collector Edward C. Moore (1827-1891), who worked as the head silversmith at Tiffany and Company during the latter half of the 19th century. Moore assembled a large study collection of several thousand objects, predominantly of Islamic origin, and some five hundred books.

Much of the collection was left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after Moore’s death in 1891.

2.

Emmanuelle Brugerolles, ed., Boucher, Watteau and the Origin of the Rococo: An exhibition of 18th century drawings from the collection of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, exhibition catalogue, Sydney, 2005, p.270, under no.65 (entry by Peter Fuhring).

3.

Peter Fuhring, Design into Art. Drawings for Architecture and Ornament: The Lodewijk Houthakker Collection, London, 1989, Vol.I, p.216, no.219 verso. The verso of the Houthakker drawing also iincludes a second copy after another trophy design by Dumont from the Livre de nouveaux trophées of c.1736.

No.11 François Boucher 1.

Jo Hedley, François Boucher: Seductive Visions, exhibition catalogue, London, 2004-2005, p.28.

2.

Regina Shoolman Slatkin, François Boucher in North American Collections: 100 Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Washington and Chicago, 19731974, p.xix and p.13, under no.9

3.

Pierrette Jean-Richard, Musée du Louvre. Inventaire général des gravures, École française I: L’Oeuvre gravé de François Boucher dans le Collection Edmond de Rothschild, Paris, 1978, p.312, no.1271. The dimensions of the print are 188 x 256 mm.

4.

Dominique Radrizzani, Dessins français: Collection du Cabinet des dessins du Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, exhibition catalogue, Geneva, 2004-2005, p.55, under no.30, fig.1.

5.

Inv. 1977-251; Ibid., p.55, no.30.

6.

Alastair Laing, The Drawings of François Boucher, exhibition catalogue, New York and Fort Worth, 2003-2004, pp.136-137, no.47 (where dated to the 1750s), and a detail illustrated on the cover. The drawing is in the collection of Louis de Strycker, Brussels.

7.

Inv. 69.155.1; Katherine Baetjer, European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by artists born before 1865. A Summary Catalogue, New York, 1995, illustrated p.390. The painting measures 113.7 x 161.9 cm.

8.

Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500-1800, exhibition catalogue, 20092010, p.128, under no.55.

No.12 François Boucher 1.

Denys Sutton, ‘Frivolity and Reason’, in London, Royal Academy of Arts, France in the eighteenth century, exhibition catalogue, 1968, p.24.

2.

Regina Shoolman Slatkin, ‘Alexandre Ananoff: L’Oeuvre dessiné de Boucher, Catalogue raisonné, Vol.I.’ [book review], Master Drawings, Spring 1967, p.54.

3.

Carl Christian Dauterman et al, Decorative Art from the Samuel H. Kress Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Aylesbury, 1964, p.45, fig.23; Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1976, Vol.II, pp.160-164, no.483, figs.1358, 1359 and 1369; Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1980, pp.126-127 no.509, fig.509.

4.

The two paintings at Versailles, which are on deposit from the Mobilier National, appear to have originally been oval in shape, but were later made up at the corners to create horizontal compositions.

5.

Laing, e-mail correspondence, 14 May 2018.

6.

Dauterman et al, op.cit., pp.42-52, no.5; Standen, op.cit., 1985, pp.385-401, no.57; Edith Appleton Standen, ‘Renaissance to Modern: Tapestries in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Spring 1987, pp.47-49, no.28.

7.

However, he produced many more designs for the Beauvais tapestry works between 1736 and 1753.

8.

Laing, e-mail correspondence, 24 May 2018.

9.

Dauterman et al, op.cit., p.45, fig.22; Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1976, Vol.II, pp.160-163, no.483/6, fig.1360; Standen, op.cit., 1985, pp.385-401, no.57, fig.57b; Standen, op.cit., 1987, illustrated p.49.

10. Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1976, Vol.II, p.45, under no.346, fig.1005.

11. Inv. 24752; Ananoff, op.cit., 1966, pp.239-240, no.923 (not illustrated); Françoise Joulie and Jean-François Méjanès, François Boucher: hier et aujourd’hui, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2003-2004, p.127, no.59; Françoise Joulie, François Boucher: Fragments of a World Picture, exhibition catalogue, Holte, 2013, pp.216-217, no.72.

No.13 François Boucher 1.

Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500-1800, exhibition catalogue, 20092010, p.130, under no.56.

2.

Alexandre Ananoff and Daniel Wildenstein, François Boucher, Lausanne and Paris, 1976, Vol.I, pp.219-221, no.86 (as Venus and Adonis); Alastair Laing et al, François Boucher 1703-1770, exhibition catalogue, New York, Detroit and Paris, 1986-1987, pp.136-138, no.18; Colin B. Bailey, The Loves of the Gods: Mythological Painting from Watteau to David, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Philadelphia and Fort Worth, 1991-1992, pp.380390, no.44. The Nancy painting was commissioned as a pendant to a painting of Venus Requesting Arms for Aeneas, completed the previous year.

3.

Ananoff and Wildenstein, ibid., 1976, Vol.I, pp.278-279, no.161; Alexandre Ananoff and Daniel Wildenstein, L’opera completa di François Boucher, Milan, 1980, pp.97-98, no.163, fig.163.

4.

Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1976, Vol.II, pp.295-296, no.670, fig.1751; Ananoff and Wildenstein, ibid., 1980, pp.141-142, no.708. In their 1976 catalogue raisonné, Alexandre Ananoff and Daniel Wildenstein wrongly related the present sheet – which was also misidentified as representing Venus and Endymion - to the Getty painting, which is one of a pair of large canvases, the other depicting Venus on the Waves.

5.

Ananoff and Wildenstein, ibid., 1976, Vol.I, p.401, no.291; Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1980, pp.109-110, no.302.

6.

Ananoff and Wildenstein, ibid., 1976, Vol.II, pp.1560-157, no.481; Ananoff and Wildenstein, op.cit., 1980, p.127, no.507.

7.

Laing, e-mail correspondence, 14 May 2018.

8.

Alden R. Gordon, The Houses and Collections of the Marquis de Marigny, Los Angeles, 2003, p.1.

9.

Laing, e-mail correspondence, 14 May 2018.

10. Anonymous sale, London, ACR Auctions, 30 June 2015, lot 61.

No.14 Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Younger 1.

This drawing may have once belonged to Cochin’s friend and patron, the bookseller and publisher Charles-Antoine Jombert (1712-1784).

Jombert commissioned his first book illustrations from Cochin in 1737 and maintained a close professional relationship with the artist until his death, publishing a catalogue raisonné of Cochin’s prints in 1777. Jombert owned 284 drawings by Cochin, almost all of which were studies for book illustrations, and these were dispersed at auction in Paris in 1776.

2.

Amedée-François Frézier, Traité des feux d’artifice pour le spectacle, Paris, 1747, p.507, pl.XIII; Charles-Antoine Jombert, Catalogue de l’oeuvre de Ch. Nic. Cochin fils, Paris, 1770, part of no.172 (‘Quatre frontispieces ou estampes de la grandeur du livre…la troisiéme, un feu pour la prise d’une ville de guerre…dessinées par Cochin fils, gravées par Marvye.’), where dated 1747; Christian Michel, Charles-Nicolas Cochin et le livre illustré au XVIIIe siècle, Geneva, 1987, p.243, no.69g. The dimensions of the print are 162 x 102 mm.

3.

‘Le Théatre d’Artifice représenté sur cette Planche, est relatif à quelque expédition militaire, comme seroit une bataille gagnée, une prise de Ville, &c.

Le corps de l’Edifice est une forteresse, dont la principale entrée est annoncée par deux guerites sux deux côtés de la porte, pour placer des sentinelles, & server en même tems de soubassement à des trophies militaires élevés au-dessus. Sur le haut des murailles on apperçoit d’un côté la Victoire qui vient y planter le drapeau du vainqueur, & de l’autre, la Renommée qui s’élance pour en aller announcer la nouvelle à toute la terre. Cet Edifice est terminé par un donjon ou befroy fort élevé, au haut duquel on parvient par une rampe en spirale, pratiquée extérieurement autour de ce donjon. Cette décoration est dans le goût du Théatre d’Artifice, qui fut élevé à Paris en face de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, en réjouissance de la prise de la Ville d’Ypres par Sa Majesté, le 27 Juin 1744.’; ‘Explication de la Planche XIII’, in Frézier, ibid., pp.LI-LII.

No.15 Augustin Pajou 1.

The contents of these albums are catalogued in James David Draper and Guilhem Scherf, Augustin Pajou: dessinateur en Italie 1752-1756, [Archives de l’Art français, Vol.XXXIII], Nogent-le-Roi, 1997.

No.16 Jean-Honoré Fragonard 1.

Eunice Williams, Drawings by Fragonard in North American Collections, exhibition catalogue, Washington and elsewhere, 1978-1979, p.20.

2.

Letter of 27 August 1760; quoted in translation in Pierre Rosenberg, Fragonard, exhibition catalogue, Paris and New York, 1987-1988, p.94.

3.

Near, op.cit., p.23, under no.10.

4.

Williams, op.cit., p.34, under no.4.

5.

Inv. R.11826.971; Ibid., pp.34-35, no.4; Jean Montague Massengale, ‘Drawings by Fragonard in North American Collections’ [exhibition review], The Burlington Magazine, April 1979, p.274, fig.105; Near, op.cit., p.18, no.4. The sheet measures 148 x 215 mm.

6.

Inv. 1925.1006; Alexandre Ananoff, L’oeuvre dessiné de Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), Paris, Vol.III, 1968, pp.69-70, no.1371, fig.391; Near, op.cit., p.19, no.5; Williams, op.cit., pp.36-37, no.5; Catherine Boulot et al, J. H. Fragonard e H. Robert a Roma, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 1990-1991, pp.135-135, fig.81. The dimensions of the drawing are 192 x 250 mm.

7.

New York, Katrin Bellinger Kunsthandel and W. M. Brady & Co., Old Master Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1997, no.26 (entry by Eunice Williams); Katrin Bellinger, Master Drawings 1985-2005, pp.96-97, no.45; Brugerolles, ed., op.cit., pp.203-206, no.47 (entry by Diederik Bakhuÿs). The sheet measures 192 x 247 mm.

8.

Springell sale (‘Drawings from the Springell Collection’), London, Sotheby’s, 30 June 1986, lot 83. The dimensions of the sheet are 149 x 214 mm.

9.

Alexandre Ananoff, L’oeuvre dessiné de Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), Paris, Vol.I, 1961, p.156, no.356, Vol.II, 1963, fig.367; Bacri sale (‘Bacri Frères, Antiquaires, Paris: Collection Jacques Bacri’), Paris, Sotheby’s, 30 March 2017, lot 101 (sold for €150,000). The drawing measures 227 x 173 mm.

10. Paris and Geneva, Galerie Cailleux, Artistes en voyage au XVIIIe siècle, exhibition catalogue, 1986, unpaginated, no.21.

11. Williams, op.cit., p.36, under no.5.

No.17 Hubert Robert 1.

Margaret Morgan Grasselli, ‘Robert, Master Draftsman’, in Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Yuriko Jackall, Hubert Robert, exhibition catalogue, Paris and Washington, D.C., 2016, pp.13 and 20.

2.

Robert was, in fact, criticized for this by Dominique Vivant-Denon, who was on the same trip to Naples with the artist and Saint-Non.

3.

Lamers, op.cit., pp.352-353, no.407; Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Les Hubert Robert de Besançon, exhibition catalogue, 2013-2014, p.43, illustrated under no.14.

4.

Sale (‘The Property of Mr. Craig Mitchell of New York City’), London, Sotheby’s, 23 March 1972, lot 39; Lamers, op.cit., pp.352-354, no.407b.

The drawing measures 325 x 487 mm. A counterproof of this drawing is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie in Besançon (Lamers, op.cit., p.354, no.407c; Besançon, op.cit., p.43, no.14).

5.

Inv. 16338; Sciolla, ed., op.cit., 1989, pp.340-341, no.139 (entry by Catherine Boulot); Sciolla, ed., op.cit., 1990, pp.340-341, no.139 (entry

by Catherine Boulot); Lamers, op.cit., pp.352-353, no.407a. The dimensions of the watercolour are 312 x 453 mm.

6.

Inv. 65.2601; Catherine Boulot, ‘E Roma creò Hubert Robert’, in Catherine Boulot et al, J. H. Fragonard e H. Robert a Roma, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 1990-1991, p.35, fig.4. The drawing, which is signed and inscribed ‘tempio di Serapid puzzuolo’, measures 343 x 454 mm.

7.

Ibid., p.99, no.47, illustrated in colour p.127, pl.XV. The drawing, in red chalk, measures 331 x 452 mm.

8.

Inv. 12738; Boulot et al, op.cit., p.99, under no.47, fig.47a; Christine Ekelhart, From Poussin to David: French Drawings from the Albertina, exhibition catalogue, Vienna, 2017, pp.116-117, no.44. The dimensions of the Albertina drawing are 330 x 459 mm. Two weaker variants or copies of the composition are in private collections (Boulot et al, op.cit., p.99, under no.47, figs.47b and 47c).

9.

Sciolla, ed., op.cit., 1990, p.340, under no.139.

No.18 Jean-Baptiste Deshays 1.

Denis Diderot, Salon of 1761; quoted in translation in Pierre Rosenberg and Marion C. Stewart, French Paintings 1500-1825: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, 1987, p.153.

2.

Denis Diderot, Salon of 1765; quoted in translation in ibid., p.153.

3.

Inv. P-F-71; Bancel, op.cit., pp.161-162, no.P.126, illustrated in colour p.71; Michel Hilaire, Sylvie Wuhrmann and Olivier Zeder, ed., Le Goût de Diderot: Greuze, Chardin, Falconet, David…, exhibition catalogue, Montpellier, and Lausanne, 2013-2014, p.331, no.49, illustrated in colour p.197; Clark, Jr., ed., op.cit., 2017, pp.446-447, no.172.

4.

The Horvitz painting measures 106 x 128 cm. (39 5/8 x 50 3/8 in.)

5.

Inv. 26200; Marc Sandoz, ‘Études et esquisses peintes ou dessinées de Jean-Baptiste Deshays’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1951 (Vol.I), illustrated p.140, fig.7; Marc Sandoz, Jean-Baptiste Deshays, Paris, 1977, p.89, illustrated p.40, fig.24; Alvin L. Clark, Jr., ed., Mastery & Elegance: Two Centuries of French Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, 1998, p.280, under no.84, fig.3 (entry by Jean-François Méjanès); Louis-Antoine Prat, Le dessin français au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 2017, p.186, fig.312.

6.

J. Patrice Marandel, French Oil Sketches from an English Collection, exhibition catalogue, Houston and elsewhere, 1973-1975, p.20, no.11 (as Deshays); Anonymous sale, Paris, Hotel Drouot [Beaussant-Lefèvre], 28 June 2002, lot 56 (as studio of Deshays).

7.

Mary Tavener Holmes, in Perrin Stein and Mary Tavener Holmes, Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in New York Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1999, p.121, under no.53.

8.

Strasbourg, Musée des Beaux-Arts and Tours, Musée des Beaux-Arts, L’apothéose du geste: L’esquisse peinte au siecle de Boucher et Fragonard, exhibition catalogue, pp.156-157, no.47 (entry by Dominique Jacquot).

9.

Ibid., pp.178-179, no.61 (entry by Dominique Jacquot).

10. Dominique Jacquot, ‘<<Cette fraîcheur de l’esquisse qui est la beauté du diable de la peinture>>’, in Strasbourg and Tours, op.cit., illustrated p.69.

11. Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500-1800, exhibition catalogue, 20092010, p.164, under no.71.

No.19 Gabriel de Saint-Aubin 1.

Pierre Rosenberg, ‘The World of Saint-Aubin’, in Colin B. Bailey et al, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin 1724-1780, exhibition catalogue, New York and Paris, 2007-2008, p.11.

2.

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

3.

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

4.

Suzanne Folds McCullagh, ‘The Development of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin as a Draftsman’, in Bailey et al, op.cit., p.53.

5.

Three are illustrated in Colin B. Bailey, ‘“The Indefatigable, Unclassifiable Art Lover”: Saint-Aubin’s Curiosité’, in Bailey et al, op.cit., p.73, fig.4, p.88, fig.31, p.,97, fig.53.

6.

Bailey et al, op.cit., p.288, under no.77.

7.

Perrin Stein and Mary Tavener Holmes, Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in New York Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1999, p.116, under no.51.

8.

‘Réunion de six têtes d’hommes, de femmes, d’enfants, au milieu desquels se trouve une femme qui allaite son enfant…Au vo de ce croquis qui a la grâce et l’aspect d’un dessin de Watteau, un groupe de femmes dans un parc; très-curieuse aquarelle.’; Hippolyte Destailleur sale, Paris, Hôtel des Commissaires-Priseurs [Morgand], 19-23 May 1896, lot 861.

No.20 Gabriel de Saint-Aubin 1.

Émile Dacier, L’oeuvre gravé de Gabriel de Saint-Aubin: Notice historique et catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1914, p.89 (not illustrated); Émile Dacier,

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin: Peintre, dessinateur et graveur, Vol.II, Paris, 1931, p.176, no.924a (not illustrated). The engraving, which measures 208 x 143 mm., is captioned ‘L’enlèvement des Sabines pendant les jeux publics.’

2.

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

3.

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

4.

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

5.

Dacier, op.cit., 1914, p.89 (not illustrated); Dacier, op.cit., 1931, p.176, no.924 (not illustrated); Delaplanche, op.cit., pp.74-75, no.28. The drawing, executed in black chalk and brown wash and measuring 194 x 153 mm., includes on the verso an unrelated drawing of Jupiter and Venus in black chalk.

6.

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

7.

This may be inferred from an inscription on the artist’s copy of a book of poetry by Michel Sedaine, in which he notes ‘Manlius vendu à M. Philippe le 9 8bre 1761’, referring to his drawing of Manlius Torquatus Ordering the Execution of his Son from the series (Kim de Beaumont, Reconsidering Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724-1780): The Background for his Scenes of Paris, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, New York University, 1998, Vol.II, Appendix C, p.520, note 4).

8.

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

9.

Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Piasa], 16 June 2004, lots 77-104. This group of drawings included Saint-Aubin’s design for a frontispiece for the book, dated 1766, which was, however, never engraved; this drawing is today in a private Canadian collection, along with one of the designs for the book illustrations (Montreal, Museum of Fine Arts, From the Hands of the Masters: A Private Collection, exhibition catalogue, 2013, pp.72-73, nos.53-54).

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

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

No.21 Jean-Baptiste Huet 1.

Inv. D.76.27; Laure Hug, ‘Jean-Baptiste Huet ou l’art de la pastorale’, L’Estampille / L’Objet d’Art, March 1997, illustrated p.26; Couilleaux, op.cit., pp.84-85, no.34. The drawing, which is signed and dated ‘J. huet. 1767’, measures 277 x 410 mm.

No.22 Jean-Baptiste Le Prince 1.

Jean Chappe d’Auterche, Voyage en Sibérie, Paris, 1768, Vol.I, p.iii; Quoted in translation in Kimerly Rorschach, Drawings by Jean-Baptiste Le Prince for the Voyage en Sibérie, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia and elsewhere, 1986-1987, p.11.

2.

Rorschach, ibid., p.9.

3.

As Perrin Stein has noted, ‘Le Prince’s ability with ink wash [as a draughtsman] undoubtedly played a role in his contributions to the development of the aquatint technique in printmaking, in which areas of uneven ground are successively stopped out with varnish to create etched plates in imitation of ink-wash drawings.’; Perrin Stein and Mary Tavener Holmes, Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in New York Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1999, p.122, under no.54 (entry by Perrin Stein).

4.

‘Douze petits Cartons contenant des Croquis faits en Russie, d’après nature’; Jules Hedou, Jean Le Prince et son oeuvre, Paris, 1879, pp.305-306 and p.311.

5.

Rorschach, op.cit., p.15.

No.23 François-André Vincent 1.

‘Cette scène totalement imaginaire paraît bien représenter un cortège funéraire, avec une pyramide à l’arrière-plan à droite. Le paysage tient ici une large place. On notera l’audace de la représentation nocturne, l’enérgie et la rapidité du pinceau, les forts contrastes d’ombre et de lumière. L’effet d’ensemble évoque certaines des plus belles réussites de Louis-Jean Desprez (1734-1804), grand spécialiste dans ses dessins des effets de nuit.

Notons pourtant que l’artiste franco-suédois n’arrivera en Italie qu’en 1776, après avir obtenu le Grand Prix d’architecture.’; Cuzin, op.cit., 2013, p.352, under no.55 D.

2.

Inv. NM 154/1983; Cailleux and Roland Michel, op.cit., no.58; Bjurström, op.cit., 1986, no.1853; Bjurström, op.cit., 1987, p.172, no.115 (illustrated in colour); Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Cahiers du dessin français: François-André Vincent 1846-1916, Paris, n.d. (1988?), p.17, no.4, pl.4; Cuzin, op.cit., 2013, p.351, no.54 D (as Cérémonie dans l’Égypte antique: sacrifice à une divinité). The Stockholm drawing, signed and dated in a manner identical to the present sheet, measures 340 x 485 mm, and shared much of the same provenance.

3.

‘Les deux feuilles, très finies, comportant chacune un nombre important de figures, sont les plus ambitieuses compositions des débuts de Vincent, jeune pensionnaire à Rome. Il s’agit bien sûr de dessins faits pour eux-mêmes et non d’études pour des compositions peintes. Les mouvements énergetiques des personnages, l’articulation des groupes, le dessin des draperies, et particulièrement celui des mains, dans un clair-obscur contrasté, rapellent des oeuvres parisiennes comme l’esquisse peinte de l’Assomption exécutée l’année précédente. On remarque l’importance que prend la gouache blanche, utilisée plus ou moins diluée pour obtenir des effets très picturaux, et non réservée à de simples rehauts.’; Cuzin, op.cit., 2013, p.351, under no. 54 D.

4.

Cuzin, op.cit., 2013, p.351; no.53D, illustrated in colour p.32; Prat, op.cit., p.598, fig.1233. The drawing, dated 1772 and executed in pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, on blue paper, measures 405 x 510 mm.

No.24 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg 1.

The pencil inscription on the verso may transcribe the artist’s signature on a previous mount. Loutherbourg traditionally signed his drawings not on the sheets themselves, but on their mounts, which he often made himself.

2.

Quoted in translation in Rüdiger Joppien, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, RA 1740-1812, exhibition catalogue, London, 1973, unpaginated.

3.

The St. James’s Chronicle, 1-4 May 1784; Quoted in Olivier Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg 1740-1812, Paris, 2012, p.97.

4.

Lefeuvre, ibid., pp.223-224, nos.98-99, one illustrated in colour p.143.

5.

Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 12 June 2009, lot 66; Lefeuvre, op.cit., p.229, no.111 (where dated to the end of Loutherbourg’s French period).

6.

Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman and a Lady’), London, Sotheby’s, 6 June 2007, lot 178.

No.25 Louis-Roland Trinquesse 1.

Yuriko Jackall et al, America Collects Eighteenth-Century French Painting, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 2017, p.280, illustrated p.171, pl.12.

2.

Edmond de Goncourt, La maison d’un artiste, Paris, 1881, p.164.

3.

Cailleux, op.cit., nos.4, 28 and 36, pls.1-3.

4.

Perrin Stein and Mary Tavener Holmes, Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in New York Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1999, p.220, under no.95 (entry by Perrin Stein)

5.

Alvin L. Clark, Jr., ed., Tradition & Transition: Eighteenth-Century French Art from The Horvitz Collection, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2017, p.228, under no.85 (entry by Sonia Couturier).

6.

Cailleux, op.cit., p.viii.

7.

Inv. 18386; Cailleux, op.cit., p.iv., no.1, pl.4.

8.

Inv. 1936.221; Jon Whiteley, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, Volume VII: French School, Oxford, 2000, Vol.I, p.269, no.822, Vol.II, pl.822.

9.

Marianne Roland Michel, Le dessin français au XVIIIe siècle, Paris and Fribourg, 1987, p.89, fig.79 (where the women are tentatively identified as Marianne Franmery and Isabelle Bain). The drawing, which has been dated to c.1775, was in the collection of Michael Gregor in Paris.

10. Cara Dufour Denison, French Master Drawings from the Pierpont Morgan Library, exhibition catalogue, Paris and New York, 1993-1994, pp.19019, no.86.

No.26 Hubert Robert 1.

Although more than fifty sketchbooks or albums of drawings are listed in the catalogue of the posthumous sale of the contents of Robert’s studio in April 1809, only three such albums have survived intact to this day. Examples of other drawings by Robert for frontispieces are in the Louvre, the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie in Besançon, the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, and elsewhere.

2.

Inv. RF 30585; Pierre Rosenberg et al, Des mécènes par milliers: Un siècle de dons par les Amis du Louvre, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1997, p.290, no.335 (entry by Jean-François Méjanès); Jean-François Méjanès, Hubert Robert [Louvre: Cabinet des Dessins], Paris and Milan, 2006, p.70, no.1, pl.1; Louis-Antoine Prat, Le dessin français au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 2017, p.493, fig.999. The Louvre drawing measures 175 x 228 mm. and is inscribed on the fountain RACOLTA / DI [crossed out] VARIE VEDUTE / DISEGNATE A ROMA / DA H ROBERT / 17—.

3.

Louis Gimbaud, Saint-Non et Fragonard, Paris, 1928, p.200, no.68 (not illustrated); Jean de Cayeux, ‘Catalogue des Griffonis de Saint-Non’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de l’art français, 1963 (published 1964), p.362, no.259 (not illustrated). The dimensions of the print, at 132 x 192 mm., are nearly identical to the present sheet.

No.27a Gilles-Paul Cauvet 1.

Some works, however, remained in the Cauvet family and passed to his granddaughter, Henriette Hélix Cauvet (Mme. Ernest Lefevre), before being sold at auction in Paris in 1883.

No.27b Gilles-Paul Cauvet 1.

Inv. 1997.84; Béhague sale (‘Ancienne collection de la Comtesse de Béhague’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Laurin Guilleux Buffetaud Tailleur], 29 November 1995, part of lot 107 (not illustrated); Paris, London and New York, Didier Aaron, Catalogue IV, n.d. (1996?), unpaginated, no.12.

The drawing measures 477 x 174 mm.

2.

Béhague sale, ibid., lot 108 (one illustrated); Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 25 January 2007, lot 79 (sold for $33,600). The two drawings measure 470 x 199 mm. and 473 x 188 mm.

3.

Inv. Hdz 4124; Ekhart Berckenhagen, Die Französischen Zeichnungen der Kunstbibliothek Berlin, Berlin, 1970, pp.323-324, no. Hdz 4124. The dimensions of the drawing are 444 x 183 mm.

4.

Inv. 1911-28-30.

No.28 Louis-Jean Desprez 1.

Nils G. Wollin, Gravures originales de Desprez ou exécutées d’après ses dessins, Malmö, 1933, p.92, no.31 (not illustrated); Lamers, op.cit., p.272, no.264.

2.

Inv. A242/1971; Lamers, op.cit., p.267, no.264a.

3.

Inv. 12910; Lamers, op.cit., p.268, no.265a. The engraving by Duplessis-Bertaux used in the Voyage pittoresque (Lamers, op.cit., p.267, no.264) displays significant difference in staffage from Desprez’s watercolour in Vienna.

4.

Inv. 864.2.461; Lamers, op.cit., p.267, no.271b, illustrated in colour p.67.

5.

Inv. E.3951-1919; Lamers, op.cit., p.277, no.276c.

6.

Lamers, op.cit., pp.273-275, nos.272b and 273b.

7.

Pierre Rosenberg, French Master Drawings of the 17th & 18th centuries in North American collections / Dessins français du 17ème & du 18ème siècles des collections américaines, exhibition catalogue, Toronto and elsewhere, 1972-1973, p.155, under no.42.

8.

Perrin Stein and Mary Tavener Holmes, Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in New York Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1999, pp.154-156, under no.66 (entry by Mary Tavener Holmes).

No.30 Claude-Louis Châtelet 1.

Anonymous sale, Monaco, Christie’s, 20 June 1994, lot 107; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 9 January 1996, lot 65; New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1996, no.39; John Gaines sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 23 January 2001, lot 336.

2.

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

3.

Clark, Jr., ibid., p.413, nos.A.67 and A.68 (not illustrated); Alvin L. Clark, Jr., ed., Tradition & Transition: Eighteenth-Century French Art from The Horvitz Collection, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2017, p.600, nos.A.490 and A.491 (not illustrated).

4.

Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 28 January 2015, lot 135.

5.

Inv. RF 38962. The dimensions of the drawing are 366 x 514 mm.

6.

Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 28 January 2000, lot 76 (sold for $36,800). The drawing measures 511 x 365 mm.

No.31 Louis Bélanger 1.

Charlotte Ann Waldie (later Charlotte Ann Eaton), Rome in the Nineteenth Century; Containing a Complete Account of the Ruins of the Ancient City, The Remains of the Middle Ages, and the Monuments of Modern Times, Edinburgh, 1820, [5th ed., London, 1860], Vol.II, pp.328-329.

2.

Inv. GAC 7966.

3.

Anonymous sale, Zurich, Koller, 18 September 2007, part of lot 18.

4.

Repnine sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 6 June 1907. The present sheet was sold alongside a pendant drawing of A Gorge in the Mountains, also signed and dated 1783, that was later in the collection of Baron Roger Portalis and was in turn sold in his sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 2-3 February 1911, lot 4.

No.32 Jean-Baptiste Greuze 1.

Quoted in translation in Edgar Munhall, Greuze the Draftsman, exhibition catalogue, New York and Los Angeles, 2002, p.16.

2.

Inv. 1964.209; Pierre Rosenberg, French Master Drawings of the 17th & 18th centuries in North American collections / Dessins français du 17ème & du 18ème siècles des collections américaines, exhibition catalogue, Toronto and elsewhere, 1972-1973, pp.165-166, no.60, illustrated p.89, pl.108; Edgar Munhall, Jean-Baptiste Greuze 1725-1805, exhibition catalogue, Hartford and elsewhere, 1976-1977, pp.206-207, no.97; Pierre Rosenberg, Masterful Studies: Three Centuries of French Drawings from the Prat Collection, exhibition catalogue, New York and elsewhere, 19901991, p.156, under no.61, fig.2; Munhall, op.cit., 2002, p.248, under no.89, fig.215; New York, Wildenstein, The Arts of France from François Ier to Napoléon Ier: A Centennial Celebration of Wildenstein’s Presence in New York, exhibition catalogue, 2005-2006, p.69, fig.113. The dimensions of the large drawing are 483 x 627 mm.

3.

Inv. 61.1.1; Munhall, op.cit., 1976-1977, pp.204-205, no.96; Jacob Bean and Lawrence Turcic, 15th – 18th Century French Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1986, p.119, no.125; James Thompson, Jean-Baptiste Greuze [The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin], New York, Winter 1989-1990, p.38, fig.33; Perrin Stein and Mary Tavener Holmes, Eighteenth-Century French Drawings in New York Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1999, pp.193-195, no.84 (entry by Perrin Stein, who refutes the suggestion that the Metropolitan Museum drawing is a pendant to the Phoenix sheet); Munhall, op.cit., 2002, pp.247-249, no.89. The drawing measures 515 x 634 mm.

4.

Rosenberg, op.cit., 1990-1991, pp.156-157, no.61; Munhall, op.cit., p.248, under no.89, fig.216. The drawing measures 373 x 475 mm.

5.

Inv. L.88.10.17; Stephen B. Spiro and Mary Frisk Coffman, Drawings from the Reilly Collection, 1993, pp.34-35, no.36, pl.36; Munhall, op.cit., p.248, under no.89, fig.214. The dimensions of the drawing are 234 x 339 mm.

6.

Inv. 1955.1003; Edgar Munhall, ‘Greuze and the Protestant Spirit’, The Art Quarterly, 1964, p.23, fig.14; Rafael Fernandez, ‘Greuze’s The Paternal Blessing’, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 1970, p.92, fig.1; Harold Joachim and Suzanne Folds McCullagh, Dessins français de l’Art Institute of Chicago de Watteau à Picasso, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1976-1977, unpaginated, no.15; Emma Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment, Cambridge, 2005, p.85, fig.18. The drawing measures 373 x 508 mm.

No.33 Jacques Gamelin or Guillaume Goudin 1.

Pierre Rosenberg, French Master Drawings of the 17th & 18th centuries in North American collections / Dessins français du 17ème & du 18ème siècles des collections américaines, exhibition catalogue, Toronto and elsewhere, 1972-1973, p.160, under no.52.

2.

Richard J. Campbell and Victor Carlson, Visions of Antiquity: Neoclassical Figure Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles and elsewhere, 19931994, pp.159-159, under no.23.

3.

Inv. Ro 522; Olivier Michel, Gamelin: peintre de batailles (1738-1803), exhibition catalogue, Carcassonne, 2003, p.31, no.A3.

4.

Michel, ibid., p.35, no.A10.

5.

Inv. 975.16 and 975.17; Michel, op.cit., p.50, nos.B3-4.

6.

Inv. 837.1.197; Michel, op.cit., p.56, nos.B16.

7.

Victor Carlson, ‘A New Drawing by Jacques Gamelin’, Master Drawings, Winter 1996, pp.415-417.

8.

Carlson, op.cit., 1996, pp.416-417.

No.34 Jacques Gamelin or Guillaume Goudin 1.

Ackley, op.cit., p.90.

2.

‘Goudin n’avait pu faire le voyage de Rome; soutenu par ses seules dispositions, luttant contre une foule d’obstacles, il fit tout ce qu’il pouvait faire. Son goût était peu sûr, mais il dessinait avec beaucoup de correction et d’energie. Ses dessins lavés au bistre sur papier blanc ou bleu, sont recherchés des amateurs; ses tableaux ont moins de prix…[il] excellait principalement à peindre les batailles et les scènes des camps.’; quoted in Oliver Michel, Gamelin: peintre de batailles (1738-1803), exhibition catalogue, Carcassonne, 2003, p.93.

3.

A list of Goudin’s submissions to the Salons in Toulouse between 1761 and 1791 is given in Michel, ibid., p.94.

4.

Paris, Galerie Charles et André Bailly, Tableaux de Maîtres, exhibition catalogue, 1990, unnumbered, pp.32-33, (as Battle, by Gamelin); Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Ader Picard Tajan], 18 April 1991, lot 108 (as The Death of Darius, by Gamelin).

5.

Inv. 1924-301-17; Tours, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dessins XVe–XXe siècle: La collection du musée de Tours, exhibition catalogue, 2001-2002, pp.126-128, no.39 (entry by Olivier Michel); Olivier Michel, ‘Un rival de Gamelin, Guillaume Goudin’, in Michel, op.cit., illustrated p.92; LouisAntoine Prat, Le dessin français au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 2017, p.386, fig.738 (as Jacques Gamelin or Guillaume Goudin). The drawing, which measures 464 x 660 mm., is signed Goudin.

6.

Inv. 00-1-1; Toulouse, Musée Paul-Dupuy, Dessins de maîtres. Derniers acquisitions 1990-2002, exhibition catalogue, 2002, p.33, no.25; Michel, op.cit., illustrated p.92. The dimensions of the drawing, which is signed and dated ‘goudin 1789’, are 473 x 630 mm.

No.35 André Le Brun 1.

M. V. Dobroklonsky, ‘Drawings by André Le Brun in the Hermitage’, Master Drawings, Winter 1964, p.408.

2.

Ackley, op.cit., p.89.

3.

Mikocka-Rachubowa, op.cit., p.71, no.26a.

4.

As noted in New York, W. M. Brady & Co., op.cit., under no.24.

5.

Andrzej Rottermund, Zamek Warszawski w Epoce O wiecenia: Rezydencja monarsza funkcje i tre ci, Warsaw, 1989, p.240.

6.

Photographs of the Senatorial Antechamber, taken before the Nazi invasion in 1939 and the eventual destruction of the Castle in 1944, are illustrated in Rottermund, ibid., pls.92-93 and 99-103.

7.

Rottermund, op.cit., pl.204; Mikocka-Rachubowa, op.cit., pp.66-71, no.26. The flanking allegorical figures are the work of the sculptor Giacomo Monaldi.

8.

Anonymous sale, Paris, Christie’s, 22 March 2007, lots 89 and 90; Mikocka-Rachubowa, op.cit., pp.444-448, nos.92-95.

9.

Inv. KK 9364; David Mandrella et al, From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar, exhibition catalogue, Weimar, New York and Paris, 2005-2006, pp.242-244, no.92 (entry by Benjamin Peronnet); Mikocka-Rachubowa, op.cit., pp.439-440, no.85. The drawing measures 335 x 472 mm.

10. Inv. RF 41306 and RF 41307. The first of these (RF 41306) is illustrated in Jean-François Méjanès et al, Poussintöl Davidig: francia mesterrajzok a Louvre gyüjteményéböl / From Poussin to David: French Master Drawings from the Louvre, exhibition catalogue, Budapest, 2008, p.111, no.80. The other (RF 41307) is illustrated in Prat, op.cit., p.289, fig.509.

11. Inv. 18724; Dobroklonsky, op.cit., p.408, pl.35; Mikocka-Rachubowa, op.cit., p.436, no.80; Prat, op.cit., p.289, fig.508. The drawing measures 700 x 520 mm.

No.36 Dominique-Vivant Denon 1.

Paris, Galerie de Bayser, Exposition: Le dessin en France, 1990, pp.8-9, no.18, illustrated p.28. The dimensions of the drawing are 140 x 100 mm.

No.37 Jean-Baptiste Pillement 1.

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

2.

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

No.38 Jean-Baptiste Pillement 1.

Maria Gordon-Smith, ‘Jean Pillement at the Imperial Court of Maria Theresa and Francis I in Vienna (1763-1765)’, Artibus et Historiae, No.50, 2005, pp.194-201, figs.7-19; Maria Gordon–Smith, Pillement, Cracow, 2006, pp.111-117, figs.93-103.

2.

Anonymous sale, Lyons-la-Fôret, Pillet, 8 May 2011, lot 7; Jeffares, op.cit., no.J.592.135. The pastels are each dated 1767 and measure 450 x 590 mm.

3.

Inv. 896.1.109; Béziers, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Béziers, Jean Pillement: Paysagiste du XVIIIe siècle (1728-1808), exhibition catalogue, 2003, p.34, no.18; Gordon–Smith, op.cit., 2006, p.272, fig.269.

4.

Maria Gordon-Smith, ‘English Engravings of Picturesque Views after Jean Pillement (1782-1808)’, Artibus et Historiae, No.49, 2004, p.67.

5.

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

No.39 Hilaire Ledru 1.

A fine example of Ledru’s manner as a painter is an 1808 portrait of a young girl in the act of drawing an antique bust, formerly in the collection of J. P. Heseltine in London and sold at auction in 1935; Heseltine sale (‘The Celebrated Collection of Paintings and Drawings; The Property of the late J. P. Heseltine, Esq.’), London, Sotheby’s, 27 May 1935, lot 60.

2.

An interesting account of the vogue for drawings à la manière noire at the very end of the 18th century is found in Tony Halliday, ‘Academic Outsiders at the Paris Salons of the Revolution: the Case of Drawings à la manière noire’, Oxford Art Journal, 1998, Vol.21, No.1, pp.69-86.

3.

‘Comme peintre, et surtout comme coloriste, il n’avait rien de remarquable. Son talent résidait dans le dessin, et ce talent était à la fois fin, aimable, correct, expressif, quand le situation l’exigeait, et toujours distingué. C’était à la mine de plomb qu’il exécutait ses compositions, ses portraits, et il savait en tirer un excellent parti.’; P. Hédouin, ‘Hilaire Ledru: Détails biographiques sur ce dessinateur’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1857, p.234.

4.

Matthew Hargraves, Varieties of Romantic Experience: British, Danish, Dutch, French and German Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp, exhibition catalogue, New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, 2010, p.184, no.148; Ryskamp sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 25 January 2011, lot 69 (sold for $9,375). The drawing is signed ‘Hilaire ledru’ and measures 235 x 187 mm.

5.

Esther Bell et al., The Age of Elegance: The Joan Taub Ades Collection, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2011, pp.66-67, no.25. Signed ‘Hilaire Le Dru’, the drawing measures 456 x 325 mm.

6.

Charles Saunier, ‘Les Oubliés: Hilaire Ledru’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, January 1913, illustrated p.55; London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, Nineteenth Century French Drawings, 1978, p.4, no.5, pl.4; Keith Roberts, ‘Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1978, pp.410-411, fig.79. The dimensions of the drawing, which is signed ‘Hilaire L.’ and dated 1800, are 580 x 420 mm.

7.

Paris, Musée du Louvre and Versailles, Musée national du château, Jacques-Louis David, exhibition catalogue, 1989-1990, p.156, no.63 (as David); Rosenberg and Prat, op.cit., Vol.I, p.85, no.66 (as by David, though it is noted that Rosenberg retains a measure of doubt about the attribution).

No.40 Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard 1.

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

2.

Inv. RF 3615; Jean Guiffrey and Pierre Marcel, Inventaire général des dessins du Musée du Louvre et du Musée de Versailles: Ecole Française, Vol.V, Paris, 1910, pp.100-101, no.4044; Arlette Sérullaz, Dessins français de 1750 à 1825 dans le collections du Musée du Louvre: le néo-classicisme, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1972, p.37, no.100 (not illustrated). The drawing measures 165 x 218 mm.

3.

Inv. 26558; Guiffrey and Marcel, ibid., pp.100-101, no.4042; Sérullaz, ibid., p.37, no.99, illustrated pl.XIII. The drawing measures 665 x 1215 mm.

4.

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

5.

Inv. 2012.1.5799-5813 and 2012.1.5839-5840.

6.

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

No.41 Jean-Georges Wille 1.

‘La fascination pour les monuments en ruines de l’histoire nationale date des années 1760 et fut en partie inspirée par les Hollandais italianisants du XVIIe siecle, notamment Jacob van Ruisdael ou plus encore Laurens Vincentsz van der Vinne...Si Wille recherche une description objective des motifs dans ses premiers dessins...il semble plus sensible dans les années 1770 à la dégradation provoqué par le temps et la nature sur les bâtiments moyenâgeux.’; Emmanuelle Brugerolles, Carnet d’études 1: Paysages dessinés de l’école française du XVIIIe siècle dans la donation Mathias Polakovits, exhibition catalogue, Paris, École des Beaux-Arts and Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2005, p.58, under no.31.

2.

Inv. KK 4244; David Mandrella et al, From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar, exhibition catalogue, Weimar, New York and Paris, 2005-2006, pp.230-232, no.86 (entry by Hermann Mildenberger); Louis-Antoine Prat, Le dessin français au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 2017, p.416, fig.823.

No.42 Victor-Jean Nicolle 1.

The present sheet once belonged to the curator Otto Wittmann (1911-2001), who worked for thirty years at the Toledo Museum of Art, becoming its director in 1959, and is credited with establishing the museum’s collection as one of the finest in America. On his retirement from Toledo in 1977, he served as a trustee, consultant and curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, between 1979 and 1989.

2.

London, Heim Gallery, and elsewhere, From Poussin to Puvis de Chavannes: A Loan Exhibition of French Drawings from the Collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts at Lille, exhibition catalogue, 1974-1975, unpaginated, under no.72.

3.

Inv. 2009.70.176; Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Arthur K. Wheelock, ed., The McCrindle Gift: A Distinguished Collection of Drawings and Watercolors, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 2012, illustrated p.175.

4.

Olga Popovitch, ‘Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen. I: Les dessins de la donation Chédanne’, La Revue du Louvre et des Musées de France, 1964, p.271, fig.1.

5.

London, British Museum, French Landscape Drawings and Sketches of the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, 1977, p.104.

6.

Pierre Rosenberg and François Bergot, French Master Drawings from the Rouen Museum: From Caron to Delacroix, exhibition catalogue, Washington and elsewhere, 1981-1982, p.69, under no.84.

No.43 Nicolas Huet the Younger 1.

‘Les vélins de Nicolas Huet sont peut-être les meilleurs après ceux de Maréchal; quelquefois même il a fait aussi bien et mieux que celui-ci. S’il n’avait pas le science anatomique de Maréchal, il avait quelque chose de plus précieux peut-être au point de vue artistique: le don de la vie; ses animaux, ses

oiseaux, ont toujours l’attitude qui leur est familière, qui les caractérise: ils vivent.’; C. Gabillot, Les Hüet: Jean-Baptiste et ses trois fils, Paris, 1892, p.134.

2.

Quoted in Geri Walton, ‘Hans and Marquerite: The Elephants of France’, in Geri Walton: Unique Histories from the 18th and 19th centuries [online blog], published 11 November 2016, accessed May 2018 at https://www.geriwalton.com/hans-and-marguerite-elephants-of-france/.

3.

Ibid.

4.

No.306: ‘L’elephant femelle. Elephas indicus.’

5.

Collection de mammifères du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle…dessinée d’après nature par HUET fils, Dessinateur du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris. et de la Ménagerie de Sa Majesté L’IMPÉRATRICE et REINE; et grave pr [sic] J.-B. HUET, jeune, Paris, 1808, pl.30.

6.

Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 July 2004, lot 148 (sold for £28,680).

7.

Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 24 January 2007, lot 70 (sold for $108,000).

8.

Inv. 1994.1; Cara Dufour Denison, Fantasy and Reality: Drawings from the Sunny Crawford von Bülow Collection, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1995-1996, pp.62-63, no.27.

9.

Inv. KK 9302; David Mandrella et al, From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar, exhibition catalogue, Weimar, New York and Paris, 2005-2006, pp.270-271, no.105 (entry by Benjamin Peronnet).

No.44 François-Marius Granet 1.

Letter of 21 August 1826; quoted in Colta Ives and Elizabeth E. Barker, Romanticism & The School of Nature: Nineteenth-Century Drawings and Paintings from the Karen B. Cohen Collection, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2000-2001, p.20.

2.

Inv. 1987.18; Cheryl K. Snay, Storied Past: Four Centuries of French Drawings from the Blanton Museum of Art, exhibition catalogue, Pittsburgh and elsewhere, 2011-2014, pp.110-111. no.42 (where dated 1802-1819).

No.45 François-Marius Granet 1.

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

2.

Ibid., pp.36-38.

3.

Carol C. Gillham and Carolyn H. Wood, European Drawings from the Collection of the Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, 2001, p.98, under no.36 (entry by Carolyn Wood).

4.

Paris, Hôtel des Commissaires-Priseurs, 26-27 May 1893, lots 44 to 46, one of which contained ‘dessins, croquis, esquisses et chargés, exécutés à Rome de 1822 à 1824...Album composé de 61 dessins à la plume, à la sépia et à l’aquarelle’.

No.46 Théodore Gericault 1.

At the time of the sale of this drawing in January 2002, though after the catalogue had gone to press, it was noted that the late Dr. Lorenz Eitner, in a letter of 4 December 2001, had confirmed the attribution of the present sheet to Gericault and dated the drawing to c.1814-1815.

2.

Philippe Grunchec, Géricault’s Horses: Drawings and Watercolours, New York and Paris, 1984, p.5.

3.

Typewritten correspondence, dated 4 December 2001.

4.

Bruno Chenique, Les chevaux de Géricault, Paris, 2007, p.14, fig.8.

5.

Inv. X-1029-21; Germain Bazin, Théodore Géricault: Étude critique, documents et catalogue raisonné. Vol.III - La gloire de l’Empire et la première Restauration: Étude critique et catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1989, pp.232-233, no.942; Dominique Brachlianoff, De Gericault à Leger: Dessins français des XIXe et XXe siècles dans les collections du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, exhibition catalogue, Lyon, 1989, pp.60-61, no.40; Bruno Chenique and Sylvie Ramond, Géricault: La folie d’un monde, exhibition catalogue, 2006, p.82, no.16, fig.19.

6.

Inv. RF 6072, 1; Bazin, ibid., p.260, no.1020.

7.

Inv. 87.GG.97; Lorenz Eitner, Géricault: His Life and Work, London, 1983, p.81, fig.63 (where dated c.1815); London, Christie’s, Théodore Géricault: The Hans E. Bühler Collection of Pictures, Drawings and Lithographs, 15 November 1985, lot 39; George R. Goldner and Lee Hendrix, The J. Paul Getty Museum - European Drawings 2: Catalogue of the Collections, Malibu, 1992, pp.142-143, no.57.

8.

Bazin, op.cit., p.140, no.696 (as not by Gericault).

No.47 François-Auguste Ravier 1.

Quoted in translation by Paul Jamot in London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Loan Exhibition of Drawings by Auguste Ravier, 1923, pp.2-3.

2.

Quoted in translation in Paul Jamot, ‘Ravier and the Influence of England on French Landscape Work of the Nineteenth Century’, The Burlington Magazine, August 1923, p.91.

3.

Quoted in translation in Jamot, ibid., August 1923, p.91.

4.

‘A trois quarts de lieue en dehors des murs commence un desert où il n’y a que des plantes sauvages et des ruines. J’ai marché une heure sans rencontrer d’autres personnes qu’un moine qui disait son bréviaire…Mais ce qui porte au supreme degré la beauté et la tristresse de ce lieu, ce sont les tombeaux antiques ruinés qui bordent des deux côtés la route à droite et à gauche…C’est le paysage qui m’a fait le plus d’impression.’; Quoted in ‘Chronologie’, in Paris, Galerie Jonas, op.cit., unpaginated, under 1840.

5.

Christine Boyer-Thiollier, ‘François-Auguste Ravier’, in Nathalie Lebrun, ed., J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) / F. A. Ravier (1814-1895): Lumières partagées, Aquarelles, exhibition catalogue, Morestel, 2007, p.86.

6.

Paris, Galerie Jonas, op.cit., unpaginated, no.62 (not illustrated); Dominique Brachlianoff and Christine Boyer-Thiollier, ed., François-Auguste Ravier 1814-1895, exhibition catalogue, Lyon, 1996, p.139, no.11.

7.

Inv. 949.1.45; Brachlianoff and Boyer-Thiollier, ed., p.139, no.12, illustrated in colour p.84.

8.

Inv. 2009.3.1; Nathalie Lebrun, F. A. Ravier 1814-1895, Morestel, 2016, pp.30-31.

No.48 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 1.

A complete list of the very extensive publication and exhibition history of this drawing is available on request.

2.

Naef, op.cit., Vol.II, p.485; Quoted in translation in Condon, op.cit., p.49.

3.

Inv. RF 1091-1093; Jean Guiffrey and Pierre Marcel, Inventaire général des dessins du Musée du Louvre et du Musée de Versailles: Ecole Française, Vol.VI, Paris, 1911, pp.124-127, nos.5041-5043 (as by Ingres); Naef, op.cit., Vol.V, pp.78-80, no.291 (Mme. Gatteaux); Vol.V, pp.128-130, no.317 (M. Gatteaux) and Vol.II, p.500, fig.5 and Vol.V, pp.180-182, no.345 (Edouard Gatteaux), respectively. The last of these is Naef’s reconstruction of what he assumed the original drawing of Edouard Gatteaux looked like, combining the drawn copy of the bust portrait with the Réveil print (see note 4 below). Hans Naef has tentatively suggested that the drawn copies in the Louvre may be the work of the engraver, Claude-Marie-François Dien.

4.

Naef, op.cit., Vol.II, p.501, fig.6. See also Naef, op.cit., Vol.V, p.481.

5.

Inv. 867.250; Ternois, op.cit., no.58; Vigne, op.cit., pp.476-477, no.2655; Fleckner, op.cit., p.166, fig.68; Goetz, op.cit., illustrated p.33. The drawing measures 224 x 175 mm.

6.

Inv. 867.249; Ternois, op.cit., no.57; Vigne, op.cit., p.476, no.2654; Fleckner, op.cit., p.167, fig.69; Florence Viguier-Dutheil, ed., Ingres: Secrets de dessins, exhibition catalogue, Montauban, 2011, illustrated p.183. The drawing measures 570 x 755 mm.

7.

Inv. 867.251; Ternois, op.cit., no.59; Naef, op.cit., Vol.II, p.493, fig.4; Vigne, op.cit., p.476, no.2656; Fleckner, op.cit., p.166, fig.67. The drawing measures 187 x 115 mm.

8.

Inv. RF 1450; Gary Tinterow and Philip Consibee, ed., Portraits by Ingres: Images of an Epoch, exhibition catalogue, London and elsewhere, 19992000, pp.92-94, no.23. The drawing measures 233 x 319 mm.

9.

Inv. 1948.837; Stephan Wolohojian, ed., A Private Passion: 19th-Century Paintings and Drawings from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, Harvard University, exhibition catalogue, London and New York, 2003-2005, no.55, p.26. The drawing measures 412 x 532 mm.

10. Inv. RF 4114; Vincent Pomarède et al, Ingres 1780-1867, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2006, pp.206-207, no.60. The drawing measures 463 x 371 mm.

11. Naef, op.cit., Vol.II, p.501, fig.8.

12. The Réveil engraving, however, seems also to have been based on the preparatory compositional study in Montauban, as it shows the seated figures full length.

13. Condon, op.cit., p.49.

14. ‘Le morceau le plus admirable peut-être de cette précieuse collection était le dessin à la mine de plomb qui représentait la famille de M. Gatteaux...C’était un merveilleux travail, dont la vue causa une vive jouissance aux délicats.’; Lecomte, op.cit., p.247.

15. Pach, op,cit., pp.251-252.

16. A Baltimore attorney, Gordon is best known today for his collection of some 1,200 French Renaissance books, which he bequeathed to the University of Virginia. His collection of drawings included works by Italian, Dutch, American and, above all, French and English artists. Some 215 drawings from the Gordon collection were bequeathed to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1986.

No.49 Paul Flandrin 1.

An album of photographs recording thirty-six such portrait drawings by Paul Flandrin is in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (Inv. DC 294C).

2.

Several examples of Paul Flandrin’s portrait drawings of fellow artists are in the Louvre; Cyrille Sciama, ed., Hippolyte & Paul Flandrin: paysages et portraits, exhibition catalogue, Nantes, 2007, pp.92-95, nos.22-25. Flandrin also drew several caricatures of other artists.

3.

Inv. RF 4021; Jacques Foucart et al, Hippolyte, Auguste et Paul Flandrin: Une fraternité picturale au XIXe siècle, exhibition catalogue, Paris and Lyon, 1984-1985, pp.278-280, no.194; Sciama, ed., ibid., pp.98-99, no.28.

No.50 Henri Lehmann 1.

Among his students was the young Georges Seurat.

2.

Aubrun, op.cit., 1984, Vol.I, pp.221-224, no.931, Vol.II, p.210, fig.931.

3.

The other three drawings by Lehmann included two nude studies of the kneeling figure of Widukind on one sheet and two separate studies of his arms. The four drawings on one page are illustrated in Aubrun, op.cit., 1984, Vol.I, p.227, no.D.948 A.B.C.D., Vol.II, p.216, fig.D.948 A.B.C.D. The drawing of two studies of the kneeling figure of Widukind is also illustrated in Paris, Galerie de Bayser, Le rouge dans le dessin du XVIe au XXe siècle, n.d. (1986?), p.8, no.55, illustrated p.65.

4.

Inv. 972.17.3; Aubrun, op.cit., 1983, p.125, no.240; Aubrun, op.cit., 1984, Vol.I, p.226, no.D.946, Vol.II, p.215, fig.D.946.

5.

Inv. P.1085; Aubrun, op.cit., 1983, pp.122-123, no.234; Aubrun, op.cit., 1984, Vol.I, pp.224-225, no.933, Vol.II, p.211, fig.933.

No.51 Jean-François Millet 1.

The J.F. Millet stamp at the lower left of the sheet was applied to the unsigned works dispersed at the sale of the collection of the artist’s widow in April 1894.

2.

The prominent Alsacian industrialist and collector Jean Dollfus (1823-1911) owned numerous paintings and drawings by Camille Corot, as well as works by Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Rousseau, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and many others. At the posthumous sale of Dollfus’s collection in Paris in 1912, this drawing and the large painting for which it is a study were both acquired by the Knoedler Gallery in New York and almost immediately sold by them to the collector Robert Paterson of Massachusetts.

3.

The present sheet is described in the 1938 Paterson sale catalogue: ‘Le Retour des Champs. A peasant woman mounted upon a pack donkey, with a man on foot at the right, the group preceded by three sheep. Signed at lower left, J. F. MILLET. Black crayon: Height, 11 inches; length, 14 1/4 inches.

Note: This is an original drawing for the painting Return from the Fields, Evening Star, which was formerly in the collection of the late Mr. Paterson, acquired by Knoedler & Co. from the collection of M. Jean Dollfus. Both the drawing and the painting were executed about 1873...From M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York, 1912’.

4.

Robert L. Herbert, Jean-François Millet, exhibition catalogue, London, 1976, p.111.

5.

Robert L. Herbert, ‘Peasant Naturalism and Millet’s Reputation’, in Ibid., p.12.

6.

Pierre Millet, ‘The Story of Millet’s Life at Barbizon’, Century, April 1894, p.909.

7.

Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, Paris, 1921, Vol.III, illustrated between pp.96 and 97, fig.293 (where dated 1873); Dollfus sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit [Lair-Dubreuil and Baudoin], 2 March 1912, lot 51; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of an American Collector’, New York, Christie’s, 16 October 1991, lot 88 (sold for $2,145,000). The painting measures 81.3 x 100.4 cm.

8.

Dollfus sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Lair-Dubreuil and Baudoin], 4 March 1912, lot 84 (‘Le Retour des champs (l’Etoile du soir)’; measuring 255 x 330 mm.).

9.

Paris, Galerie Hector Brame, J. F. Millet, dessinateur, exhibition catalogue, 1938, no.19. The drawing, in black chalk, measured 190 x 170 mm.

10. Inv. 17.1518; Herbert, op.cit., p.129, no.78, illustrated on the cover; Alexandra R. Murphy, Jean-François Millet, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 1984, pp.116-117, no.78; Alexandra R. Murphy et al, Jean-François Millet: Drawn into the Light, exhibition catalogue, Williamstown and elsewhere, 1999, pp.101-102, no.66. The sheet measures 505 x 389 mm.

11. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 21 June 1988, lot 35, where dated c.1865-1870 (sold for £68,200); Anonymous sale (‘The Constant Draftsman: An Important Collection of Drawings by Jean-François Millet’), New York, Sotheby’s, 3 November 2015, lot 81. The drawing measures 414 x 508 mm.

12. New York, W. M. Brady & Co., Paintings, Drawings and Oil Sketches 1810-1930, exhibition catalogue, 2016, unpaginated, no.25 (entry by Alexandra Murphy).

No.53 Eva Gonzalès 1.

Ingrid Pfeiffer, ‘Impressionism Is Feminine: On the Reception of Morisot, Cassatt, Gonzalès, and Bracquemond’, in Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein, ed., Women Impressionists. Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, Marie Bracquemond, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt and San Francisco, 2008, p.21.

2.

‘...un artiste d’un talent rare, qui prend le pinceau après avoir manié le pastel comme Rosalba.’; Jules Clarétie, Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains, Paris, 1874, p.263.

3.

‘C’est la simplicité; c’est la sincérité; c’est la sérénité. Aucune mièvrerie de femme, aucun désir de faire jolie et sympatique, et pourtant quel charme exquis.’; Octave Mirbeau in Paris, Bernheim-Jeune & Cie., op.cit., pp.5-7; Quoted in translation in Holm, op.cit., p.33.

4.

‘Merveilleux pastels, écrasés à la manière du bonhomme Chardin, avec de subtiles hardiesses, les tons rompus, délicats, se fondent en douces harmonies...et le dessin viril.’; Paul Bayle, ‘Eva Gonzalès’, La Renaissance, 6 June 1932, p.115; Quoted in translation in Holm, op.cit., p.36.

5.

Thomson, op.cit., p.605.

6.

Sainsaulieu, op.cit., pp.216-217, no.98.

7.

‘J’aime beaucoup les deux études de mariées, qui sont d’une fraîcheur et d’un esprit tendre, délicieux à regarder. Je retrouve-là, dans la douceur des tons, dans le jeu de la lumière sur l’étoffe blanche et le nuage transparent des voiles, une caresse particulière.’; Mirbeau, op.cit., 1885, p.2.

8.

A pastel portrait of Jeanne, formerly in the collection of Adolphe Stein, was recently sold at auction in Paris and is today in the collection of Diane Wilsey in San Francisco (Anonymous sale (‘Une Collection Privée des Dessins 1500-1900’), Paris, Christie’s, 22 March 2007, lot 346 (sold for €528,000); Sainsaulieu, op.cit., pp.218-219, no.99; Lloyd, op.cit., illustrated in colour p.107, pl.48).

9.

Jeanne Gonzalès posed as a milliner, for example, for the pastel Une Modiste in the Art Institute of Chicago (Sainsaulieu, op.cit., pp.264-265, no.123).

10. Grant, op.cit., p.209.

11. ‘C’est sa robe de satin blanc, les ornements de sa coiffure de mariée, qu’elle chargera par deux fois Jeanne de porter. On dirait qu’elle s’est observée et rêvée à travers ce double d’elle-même qu’elle aimait, rudoyait, transformait à sa guise, de manière à en faire vingt soeurs différentes d’elle...’; Roger-Marx, op.cit., unpaginated (p.20).

12. Châtelet in Pfeiffer, ed., op.cit., pp.55-68.

13. ‘Elle atteint à une véritable maîtrise du pastel: ses Demoiselles d’honneur ou ses Mariées le prouvent; elle procède par touches parallèles qui enferment les ombres et les lumières dans la continuité de leurs stries; elle aime les tonalités claires, les nuances aux gris atténués, mais colorés, les scènes de tranquille intimité, et certains de ces pastels sont d’excellentes oeuvres.’; Hautecoeur, op.cit., p.115.

14. des petits portraits de femmes au pastel (La femme au chapeau rouge, Mariée, Demoiselle d’honneur, Le Bouquet de Violettes)...tous charmants de candeur, d’un accent très personnel et, sans qu’il y paraisse, d’étonnante virtuosité dans la brusquerie et l’économie uniforme de leur exécution.’; Monod, op.cit., p.3.

No.54 Jules Bastien-Lepage 1.

The present sheet was, in all likelihood, at one time in the collection of Dr. Joseph Liouville (1809-1882), an eminent mathematician who was a close friend of Bastien-Lepage and acquired several paintings and drawings by him. Bastien-Lepage also painted a portrait of Liouville in 1880.

2.

‘Je me suis remis au travail en commençant un petit tableau (je veux dire de petite taille). Il représente Orphée redemandant Eurydice au dieu des Enfers…Orphée marche le premier, comme il a été convenu; tout en marchant, il joue de la lyre. Distrait ou plutôt tourmenté par le désir de revoir Eurydice, on sentira qu’il va bientôt tourner la tête, et Mercure, qui ne le perd pas de vue, lui ravira sa bien-aimée. Tout cela est ébauché, et j’espere bien le finir en peu de temps.’; Henry Amic, ‘Jules Bastien-Lepage: Lettres et souvenirs’, Revue Générale Internationale Scientifique, Littéraire et Artistique illustrée, Paris, 1896, p.578.

3.

Aubrun, op.cit., p.115, nos.125-128. These esquisses peints are recorded in old auctions or exhibitions but are now lost.

4.

An oil sketch for the painting of Orpheus, measuring 610 x 460 mm., was in the collection of Jean-Claude Barrié in Paris in 1985 and is today in a private collection in Bois-Colombes; Aubrun, op.cit., p.115, no.126; Lemoine et al, op.cit., pp.102-103, no.21.

5.

Aubrun, op.cit., p.116, nos.D 129 - D 133, figs.D 129 and D 130 (all as location unknown). One of these is also illustrated in Kenneth McConkey, ‘After Holbein: A Study of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Portrait of the Prince of Wales’, Arts Magazine, October 1984, p.107, fig.11 (as location unknown).

6.

Aubrun, op.cit., p.116, under no.D 129, illustrated as fig.G 129.

7.

Julia Cartwright (Mrs. Henry Ady), Jules Bastien-Lepage, London, 1894, illustrated p.77; Aubrun, op.cit., pp.114-115, under no.125, fig.S125.

The statuette measures 25 x 12 x 12 cm.

8.

Aubrun, op.cit., pp.166-167, no.234; Kenneth McConkey, Edwardian Portraits: Images in an Age of Opulence, Woodbridge, 1987, pp.72-73, no.5; Carol Ockman and Kenneth E. Silver, Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama, exhibition catalogue, New York, The Jewish Museum, 2005-2006, p.120, illustrated in colour fig.24; Lemoine et al, op.cit., pp.110-113, no.26.

9.

Cartwright, op.cit., p.45.

No.55 Pierre Auguste Renoir 1.

François Fosca, ‘Les Dessins de Renoir’, Art et décoration, July 1921; quoted in translation in Isabelle Gaëtan, ‘“A painter who has never learned how to draw but who draws well – that is Renoir”’, in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Renoir in the 20th Century, exhibition catalogue, 2009-2010, p.84.

2.

Quoted in Nicholas Wadley, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Drawings, New York, 1991, p.130, under no.24.

3.

Paul Gauguin, Racontars de Rapin, MS, c.1898-1902; Quoted in translation in ibid., p.133, under no.25.

4.

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

5.

Ibid., p.10.

6.

Klaus Albert Schröder and Christine Ekelhart, ed., Impressionism: Pastels, Watercolors, Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Vienna, 2012, p.227.

7.

‘C’était la muse même de la Comédie en belle humeur: c’était le sourire de Marivaux, ’était la fantaisie de Regnard, c’était le rire de Molière, c’était l’étincelle de l’art contemporain.’; quoted in H. Dottrens, ‘Chronique Parisienne, Mme Jeanne Samary’, Le Passe-Temps, 28 September 1890, p.3.

8.

Bailey, op.cit., 1997-1998, pp.155-160, no.30; Colin B. Bailey, Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2012, pp.108-123. Two bust-length painted portraits of Jeanne Samary by Renoir, each painted in 1877, are in the collections of the ComédieFrançaise in Paris and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (Bailey, op.cit., 1997-1998, pp.155-160, nos.28-29; Bailey, op.cit., 2012, pp.112-113, figs.4 and 6).

9.

An 1879 photograph of Samary in the role of Toinon in Edouard Pailleron’s comedy L’Étincelle, in which she is dressed in a similar manner, is illustrated in Bailey, op.cit., 2012, p.119, fig.12.

10. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 June 1985, lot 7 (unsold); Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 25 June 1990, lot 12 (sold for £1,210,000); Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville, Renoir: Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, Vol.I (1858-1881), Paris, 2007, p.603, no.642 (where dated c.1879-1880); Anonymous sale (‘Property from a Private Collection’), New York, Sotheby’s, 7 November 2013, lot 117 (sold for $425,000). The pastel measures 616 x 463 mm.

11. Inv. 1946.107; Wadley, op.cit., 1991, pp.132-133, no.25 (where dated c.1878). The dimensions of the pastel are 697 x 477 mm.

12. Wadley, op.cit., 1991, p.133, under no.25.

13. Inv. 195; Nicholas Wadley, ed., Renoir: A Retrospective, New York, 1987, illustrated p.183 (where dated c.1886-1887); Denis Rouart, The Unknown Degas and Renoir in the National Museum of Belgrade, New York, Toronto and London, 1964, pp.82-83, no.82, pl.82 (where dated c.1885). The drawing measures 280 x 235 mm.

14. Octave Mirbeau, ‘Notes on Renoir’, La France, 8 December 1884; quoted in translation in Wadley, ed., ibid., 1987, p.165.

15. Théodore Duret, Histoire des Peintres Impressionistes, Paris, 1878; quoted in translation in Wadley, ed., op.cit., 1987, p.120.

No.56 James Tissot 1.

Michael Justin Wentworth, James Tissot: Catalogue Raisonné of his Prints, exhibition catalogue, Minneapolis and Williamstown, 1978, pp.342-343, no.87; Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, ed., James Tissot, exhibition catalogue, London and elsewhere, 1984-1985, p.139, no.176. The dimensions of the etching are 76 x 293 mm.

2.

Cyrille Sciama, ed., James Tissot et ses Maîtres, exhibition catalogue, Nantes, 2005-2006, p.178, no.57.

3.

Paris, Hôtel Drouot, L’Atelier de J. James Tissot, 9-10 July 1903, lot 151 (‘Un vestiaire. Deux épreuves’).

4.

Wentworth, op.cit., pp.340-341, no.86; Matyjaszkiewicz, ed., op.cit., p.139, no.175; Christopher Wood, Tissot: The Life and Work of Jacques Joseph Tissot 1836-1902, London, 1986, p.138, fig.147; Sciama, op.cit., p.178, no.58. The dimensions of the etching are 87 x 84 mm.

5.

Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, ‘Costume in Tissot’s Pictures’, in Matyjaszkiewicz, ed., op.cit., p.69.

No.57 Maximilien Luce 1.

Dayton, Dayton Art Institute, French Paintings 1789-1929 from the Collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., exhibition catalogue, 1960, p.84, no.76; Anonymous sale, New York, Parke-Bernet Galleries, 10 March 1971, lot 11 (unsold); Bouin-Luce and Bazetoux, op.cit., Vol.II, p.240, no.958; Anonymous sale, New York, Christie's, 22 November 1992, lot 42; Margaret Werth, The Joy of Life: The Idyllic in French Art, circa 1900, Berkeley, 2002, p.120. The painting measures 130 x 162.5 cm.

2.

Bouin-Luce and Bazetoux, op.cit., Vol.II, p.239, nos.955-956. The two drawings measure 230 x 390 mm. and 300 x 265 mm.

3.

Bouin-Luce and Bazetoux, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.239-240, no.957 (where dated 1893). The oil sketch measures 54 x 64.1 cm.

4.

Adolphe Tabarant, ‘Impressions quotidiennes’, La Pétite République, 16 December 1894, p.1; quoted in translation in Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, ‘Maximilien Luce, Neo-Impressionist: A “Barbaric but Solid and Daring Painter”, in Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, ed., Maximilien Luce: NeoImpressionist. Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Giverny, 2010, p.14.

No.58 Paul Gauguin 1.

Paul Gauguin, Avant et après, MS, 1903; translated in Belinda Thomson, ed., Gauguin by Himself, London, 1993, p.279.

2.

Jean Leymarie, ed., Paul Gauguin: Water-colours, pastels and drawing in colour, London, 1961, p.7.

3.

Marjorie Shelley, ‘Gauguin’s Works on Paper: Observations on Materials and Techniques’, in Colta Ives et al., The Lure of the Exotic: Gauguin in New York Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2002, p.199.

4.

In a letter of February 1888 from Pont-Aven; quoted in translation in Thomson, op.cit., p.84.

5.

In a letter of October 1889 from Le Pouldu; quoted in translation in Thomson, op.cit., p.106.

6.

Pickvance, op.cit., 1970, p.39, under pl.97.

7.

Georges Wildenstein, Gauguin, Paris, 1964, p.213, no.521; Michel Hoog, Paul Gauguin: Life and Work, London, 1987, p.223, pl.155; Françoise Cachin, Gauguin, Paris, 1990, p.206, fig.255; Thomson, op.cit., p.242, pl.199; Gloria Groom, ed., Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist, exhibition catalogue, Chicago and Paris, 2017, p.136, no.58.

8.

Inv. 2004-3-1; John Rewald, Gauguin, London and Toronto, 1939, illustrated p.85; Pickvance, op.cit., 1970, pl.25; René Huyghe, Gauguin, Naefels, 1988, illustrated p.40; Paris, Musée du Luxembourg and Quimper, Musée des Beaux-Arts, L’Aventure de Pont-Aven et Gauguin, exhibition catalogue, 2003, pp.316-317, no.118; Catherine Puget, ‘Un pastel de Gauguin acquis par le musée de Pont-Aven: Deux têtes de Bretonnes’, Revue du Louvre, June 2004, p.17; Le Nouveau Musée de Pont-Aven: Un écrin pour Gauguin et l’École de Pont-Aven [L’Objet d’Art, hors-série], 2016, p.30, illustrated p.30 and on the cover; André Cariou, Dessins de Gauguin: La Bretagne à l’oeuvre, Paris, 2017, illustrated pp.128-129.

9.

In a letter of October 1889 from Le Pouldu; quoted in translation in Thomson, op.cit., p.106.

10. Inv. 1991.217.61.b; Cariou, op.cit., illustrated p.32; Claire Bernard, ‘Iteration and Invention in Gauguin’s Paintings’, in Groom, ed., op.cit., p.61, fig.4. The drawing includes studies for Gauguin’s painting Four Breton Women of 1886, today in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich.

11. Caroline Boyle-Turner, Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven: Prints and Paintings, exhibition catalogue, London and Edinburgh, 1989-1990, p.102, nos. S.2a and S.2b; Jean-Marie Cusinberche, ed., Gauguin e i suoi amici in Bretagna / et ses amis en Bretagne / and his Painter Friends in Brittany.

Pont-Aven et Le Pouldu, exhibition catalogue, Valle d’Aosta, 1993, illustrated p.206. The model for this print may tentatively be identified as the Breton woman Marie Louarn, who is likely to have also posed for the present drawing.

12. Daniel Wildenstein et al, Gauguin: A Savage in the Making. Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings (1873-1888), Paris and Milan, 2002, Vol.II, pp.408411, no.293. The painting appeared at auction in New York in 1992.

13. Ibid., p.408, under no.293.

14. Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, exhibition catalogue, Chicago and Amsterdam, 20012002, p.199, figs.56-57; Emmanuelle Brugerolles, ed., Suite française: Dessins de la collection Jean Bonna, exhibition catalogue, Paris and Geneva, 2006-2007, pp.353-355, no.92 (entry by Laurence des Cars); Nathalie Strasser, ed., De Raphaël à Gauguin: Trésors de la collection Jean Bonna, exhibition catalogue, Lausanne, 2015, p.239, no.145, pl.145.

15. Wildenstein et al, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.402-403, no.290. The painting was on the German art market in 1991. A preparatory drawing for this painting is in the Art Institute of Chicago (Inv. 1955.1023R; John Rewald, Gauguin Drawings, New York and London, 1958, p.24. no.8. pl.8; Wildenstein et al, op.cit., p.402, under no.290; Groom, ed., op.cit., p.120, no.36).

16. A comprehensive account of Paco Durrio’s collection of works by Gauguin is given in Javier González de Durana, ‘Francisco Durrio y su colección de gauguins’, in Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes, Francisco Durrio (1868-1940): Sobra las huellas de Gauguin, exhibition catalogue, 2013, pp.195-234.

INDEX OF ARTISTS

BASTIEN-LEPAGE, Jules; no.54 BÉLANGER, Louis; no.31 BOUCHER, François; nos.11-13 CAUVET, Gilles-Paul; no.27 CHATELET, Claude-Louis; nos.29-30 CHÉRON, Louis; no.1 COCHIN, Charles-Nicolas, The Younger; no.14 DELOBEL, Nicolas; no.4 DENON, Baron Dominique-Vivant; no.36 DESHAYS, Jean-Baptiste; no.18 DESPREZ, Louis-Jean; no.28 DUMONT, Jacques, called Dumont le Romain; nos.910 FLANDRIN, Paul-Jean; no.49 FRAGONARD, Alexandre-Evariste; no.40 FRAGONARD, Jean-Honoré; no.16 GAMELIN, Jacques; nos.33-34 GAUGUIN, Paul; no.58 GÉRICAULT, Théodore; no.46 GONZALÈS, Eva; no.53 GOUDIN, Guillaume; nos.33-34 GRANET, François-Marius; nos.44-45 GREUZE, Jean-Baptiste; no.32 GUDIN, Théodore; no.52 HUET, Jean-Baptiste; no.21 HUET the Younger, Nicolas; no.43 INGRES, Jean-Auguste-Dominique; no.48

LEBRUN, André-Jean; no.35 LEDRU, Hilaire; no.39 LEHMANN, Henri; no.50 LE PRINCE, Jean-Baptiste; no.22 LOUTHERBOURG, Philippe-Jacques de; no.24 LUCE, Maximilien; no.57 MILLET, Jean-François; no.51 NICOLLE, Victor-Jean; no.42 OUDRY, Jean-Baptiste; nos.2, 6-8 PAJOU, Augustin; no.15 PATER, Jean-Baptiste; no.5 PILLEMENT, Jean-Baptiste; nos.37-38 RAVIER, François-Auguste; no.47 RENOIR, Pierre Auguste; no.55 ROBERT, Hubert; nos.17, 26 SAINT-AUBIN, Gabriel de; nos.19-20 TISSOT, James (Jacques) Joseph; no.56 TRINQUESSE, Louis-Roland; no.25 VINCENT, François-André; no.23 WATTEAU, Jean-Antoine; no.3 WILLE, Johann Georg; no.41

Maximilien Luce (1858â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1941) Study of a Nude Bather No. 57

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