Stephen Ongpin Fine Art
Front cover: Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609-1664) The Nativity or The Angel Instructing Joseph to Flee with his Family to Egypt No.5
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino (1591-1666) River Landscape with a Hunter and his Dog No.6
From Giorgione to Picasso: Masterworks FROM five Centuries
Stephen Ongpin Fine Art
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This catalogue serves something of a dual purpose; to celebrate the first fifteen years of Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, and to announce the gallery’s move to new premises in London. Spread across six floors of a townhouse on Park Street, near Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, our new gallery gives us the opportunity to display a greater range of our stock than ever before, as well as allowing visitors and clients to view and study drawings in a more intimate and private environment. I am, as always, extremely grateful to my wife Laura for her advice, support and patience while I was working on this catalogue. I am also greatly indebted to the incredible gallery team of Alesa Boyle, Megan Corcoran Locke and Eilidh McClafferty for their invaluable assistance in every single aspect of preparing this catalogue and exhibition. At Healeys printers, Sarah Ricks, Alastair Frazer and Jenny Willings have, as always, been a pleasure to work with. Andrew Smith has photographed all of the drawings to his usual high standard, and has also been responsible for the vital task of colour-proofing the images for the catalogue against the original artworks. In addition, I would like to thank the following people for their help and advice in the preparation of this catalogue and the drawings included herein: Deborah Bates, Dario Beccarini, Peter Bower, Alexander Faber, Cheryl and Gino Franchi, Meg Grasselli, Teresa Krasny, Alastair Laing, Thomas Le Claire, Martin Moeller, Guy Peppiatt and Britany Salsbury. Laura, Megan, Alesa, Eilidh and I look forward to welcoming you to 82 Park Street in the near future. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this special catalogue.
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.
Stephen Ongpin
All enquiries should be addressed to Stephen Ongpin at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art Ltd. 82 Park Street London W1K 6NH Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 or [+44] (0)7710 328-627 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com
From Giorgione to Picasso: Masterworks FROM five Centuries
presented by
Stephen Ongpin
1 Attributed to GIORGIO BARBARELLI DA CASTELFRANCO, called GIORGIONE Castelfranco Veneto c.1473/74-1510 Venice An Imaginary Townscape on a Riverbank Brush and brown wash, with touches of white heightening, on paper washed a light brown. Inscribed Tiziano in a 16th century hand in brown ink at the lower right. A triangular section at the upper right corner of the sheet previously torn and reattached. Laid down. 264 x 228 mm. (10 3/8 x 9 in.) PROVENANCE: Private collection, Germany. LITERATURE: Peter Dreyer, ‘An Unknown Drawing by Giorgione’, Master Drawings, Summer 2015, pp.179-190, figs.3, 5 and 8 (as Giorgione). Nothing is known of the early training of the painter Giorgio da Castelfranco, known as Giorgione (or ‘Zorzi’ in the local Venetian dialect), who was of humble origins but became one of the most significant artists of the Renaissance in Venice. Indeed, what we know of the artist’s career as a whole is limited; as Terisio Pignatti has noted, ‘in spite of the great success and fame that accompanied Giorgione’s short life, there is very little in the way of documents and reliable sources to enable us to write a biography that goes into any more detail than the very sketchy account that tradition has passed on.’1 Furthermore, Giorgione’s modern fame, by contrast with any other artist of comparable stature, rests on just a handful of securely documented or attributed works. He appears to have joined the studio of Giovanni Bellini in Venice sometime in the late 1480s, and his first independent works are likely datable to the early 1490s. One of his earliest known paintings is a large altarpiece of The Virgin and Child with Saints Francis and George, known as the Pala del Castelfranco, executed around 1504 and still today in the cathedral in the painter’s native town of Castelfranco Veneto. In 1507-1508 Giorgione painted a canvas, now lost, for the audience chamber of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, and in 1508 he worked alongside Titian on the fresco decoration of the exterior of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, near the Rialto bridge, of which only ghostly fragments survive today. These were among the very few public works that the artist painted, since, unlike many of his contemporaries, Giorgione seems to have had little interest in obtaining major civic or religious commissions in Venice; he did not, for example, work for any of the Scuole of the city. He did, however, paint a handful of façade decorations for Venetian palaces, all of which are now lost. Most of Giorgione’s output was in the form of small-scale easel pictures and portraits, the result of private commissions from Venetian collectors. The landscape backgrounds in his paintings seem to have played a particularly significant role in his artistic methodology; indeed, as the scholar Max J. Friedländer observed, ‘no one can deny Giorgione, the Venetian master, the distinction of being the first great landscape painter.’2 The artist’s contemporary biographer, the Venetian nobleman Marcantonio Michiel, noted in particular two paintings by Giorgione that he described as either a ‘paese’ or a ‘paesetto’; the small canvas known as The Tempest or La Tempesta, painted between 1505 and 1508 and now in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice, and the larger Three Philosophers in a Landscape of c.1508-1509, today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The fact that no signed and very few dated works by Giorgione have survived has led to much scholarly controversy over the extent of his painted oeuvre, as well as distinguishing his work from that of the young Titian, who was profoundly influenced by him. Titian was several years younger than Giorgione, for whom he seems to have worked as an assistant, but the two artists soon came to be seen as artistic rivals and the leaders of a new school of painting in Venice. Giorgione died of the plague in Venice in September 1510, at the age of thirty-six. Giorgione is almost completely unknown as a draughtsman. The Florentine biographer Giorgio Vasari asserts that the artist made very few drawings, and further claimed that he prepared his paintings without the aid of initial preparatory studies on paper. Indeed, only a tiny handful of drawings have ever
been attributed to Giorgione. Of these, just one has been generally accepted as an autograph work by the artist; a landscape in red chalk, today in the collection of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, that depicts a shepherd seated in front of the walls of the Castel San Zeno in the town of Montagnana in the Veneto3. The delicate landscape study here exhibited was attributed to Giorgione in 2015 by the scholar Peter Dreyer, who noted in particular a series of stylistic and compositional analogies with two of the few documented paintings by the artist; the enigmatic La Tempesta (fig.1) in Venice4, which has long been regarded as one of the very first landscape paintings in the history of Western art, and the Three Philosophers in a Landscape (fig.2) in Vienna5. The present sheet, which bears an old attribution to Titian, is drawn in a technique – with the point of the brush used to apply brown ink and wash on prepared paper that has been tinted by hand – that, as has been noted, was ‘common in Venetian art during the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth...the brush technique employed in the drawing comes close to painting.’6 As Dreyer writes of this study of an Imaginary Townscape on a Riverbank, ‘there are striking parallels with Giorgione’s La Tempesta…The buildings in the drawing are painted with vertical brushstrokes, just like many of those in the painting, which are clearly visible between the structure with the dome at the left and the central twin towers. The subject matter and the “mood” of the drawing are redolent of the architectural background of La Tempesta. The relationship between the high riverbank, water, and townscape in the drawing corresponds to that in the painting between the horizontal bridge, its reflection in the dark blue river, and the architectural background. In this regard, the compositional principles are the same. The steeply foreshortened buildings, their separation by empty space, the varying proportions of the structures, and the resulting creation and embracing of space also find parallels. Both works depict structures on the border of a city or town without walls. The architectural typology is also the same, and towers without roofs and very slightly sloping roofs occur in both.’7 Dreyer further identifies a number of specific architectural details that are found in both the present drawing and Giorgione’s La Tempesta. As he writes, ‘In both drawing and painting, we find narrow vertical windows rendered as small slits; and some windows and doorways are outlined in bright bands, with the openings sometimes rendered as dark spots without any indication of depth. In addition, there are amazingly similar oblique views into windows that display the inner faces of their openings, as, for example, in the tower of the drawing and in the house at the right margin of La Tempesta.’8 The present sheet also finds parallels with Giorgione’s painting of Three Philosophers in a Landscape in Vienna. As Dreyer notes, ‘The buildings in the drawing correspond in size nearly exactly to the water mill in the middle ground of the Vienna painting’9, while many of the same stylistic and architectural elements
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shared by the drawing and La Tempesta are likewise found in the Three Philosophers. This is also true of the depiction of nature in the present sheet: ‘The tree at the drawing’s left margin with its thin trunk and transparent crown of thin foliage, corresponds to the tree in the left middle ground of La Tempesta, as well as to that between the rocky cliff and the mill in the Three Philosophers. There the upright trunk crosses that of a smaller tree bent to the right, similar to the depiction in the drawing. Some of the leaves before the silhouette of the rock in the left half of the painting resemble plants on the riverbank in the drawing...they do not imitate nature, but originate from the abstract way in which the artist conceived foliage and plants, a device used in both the painting and the drawing.’10 Looking closely at the present sheet, Dreyer pointed out that ‘a characteristic feature of the draftsman responsible for the new drawing is the uncommon use of the brush. He did not outline the bushes on the far riverbank, but indicated them with isolated dots and depicted the foliage of the bush in front of the entrance to the first house, as well as that of the trees, as bright dabs. The same predilection for dots and dabs is found in Giorgione’s paintings. He used them for the clumps of foliage in his trees, for single leaves, for the bright heightening within more compact masses of leaves, and finally for the characteristic gravel at the feet of the “gypsy” woman in the Venice painting and of the seated philosopher in the Vienna picture.’11 In summary, as Dreyer has opined, this refined, atmospheric landscape drawing may be regarded as ‘a potential preparatory study by Giorgione for an architectural background such as that featured in La Tempesta. Although it is neither documented as Giorgione, nor directly used in his painted oeuvre, its thematic and stylistic similarities with the two painted landscapes mentioned by Marcantonio Michiel [ie. La Tempesta and Three Philosophers in a Landscape] are obvious enough to allow for a plausible attribution to Giorgione...the composition, the details, and finally the microstructure can only be observed in Giorgione’s paintings.’12
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2 JACQUES LE MOYNE DE MORGUES Dieppe c.1533-1588 London A Globe Artichoke (Cynara scolymus) Watercolour and gouache on paper prepared as vellum, with framing lines in brown ink and watercolour. 140 x 101 mm. (5 1/2 x 4 in.) [image] 195 x 147 mm. (7 5/8 x 5 3/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Du Marry (according to an inscription on the frontispiece of the album in which the present sheet was included); Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 January 2005, part of lot 46 (the album sold for $1,136,000); W. Graham Arader, New York. The extraordinary life, career and work of the 16th century Huguenot artist Jacques Le Moyne has only relatively recently been studied. Born in Dieppe around 1533, he is assumed to have received his training as an artist there, but little else is known of the first thirty years of his life and career. He may have worked at the court of King Charles IX, and is first recorded as an official artist and cartographer attached, at the King’s behest, to the 1564-1565 Huguenot expedition to northern Florida. The expedition, led by René Goulaine de Laudonnière, was intended to relieve a small Huguenot colony founded earlier by Jean Ribaut and to establish a new French Protestant settlement there. Le Moyne’s task was to map the Florida coastline and riverways, and to make drawings of the natives, their villages, and anything else worthy of observation. Beset by a lack of provisions and reliant on the sometimeshostile native Indians for food, many members of the expedition died of starvation or disease. Although much of the remaining French garrison was attacked and killed by Spanish forces in the autumn of 1565, Le Moyne and a few dozen Frenchmen, including Laudonnière, managed to escape the massacre. They travelled overland for three days, through swamps and rivers with little or no food, before reaching the coast and one of Ribaut’s ships. The fifteen survivors of the expedition sailed back to Europe, unexpectedly landing in Wales in 1565. On his return to France, Le Moyne presented his maps and drawings to Charles IX, who had supported Laudonnière’s expedition. (Only one original drawing by Le Moyne from the Florida expedition survives today, however; a study in watercolour and gouache on vellum of The Indian Chief Athore Showing Laudonnière the Marker Column Set Up by Ribaut, now in the New York Public Library.) Le Moyne also wrote an account of the ill-fated Florida expedition, illustrated with engravings after his drawings and maps, which was published in 1591, a few years after his death. Like many of his Huguenot compatriots, Le Moyne escaped from France after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots by Catholics in 1572. He settled in England, adding ‘de Morgues’ to his name, and soon gained the patronage of such significant figures of the era as Sir Walter Raleigh and Lady Mary Sidney, and began to concentrate in particular on small-scale botanical studies. In London in 1586 Le Moyne published a series of simple woodcuts of flora and fauna with the title La clef des champs, pour trouver plusieurs animaux, tant bestes qu’oyseaux, avec plusieurs fleurs et fruitz, intended as a sort of model book for artists and dedicated to Lady Sidney. (The book is very rare, and only three copies are known today.) It was also around this time that Le Moyne drew the extraordinary gouache known as The Young Daughter of the Picts – a fantastical depiction of a woman whose body is entirely covered with beautifully painted flowers – which is today in the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. Firmly established as a highly-regarded botanical artist, Le Moyne lived in the parish of Saint Anne’s in Blackfriars until his death in 1588. Previously known for the ethnographic drawings he produced during his travels, Le Moyne was only recognized as an important botanical artist in the early 20th century. In 1922 the librarian of the Linnean Society, Spencer Savage, identified Le Moyne as the artist responsible for a small album containing fifty-nine watercolours of flowers, fruit and butterflies in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Le Moyne seems to have produced a number of such albums of botanical watercolour drawings. As well as the album in the Victoria and Albert Museum, a volume of fifty studies of flowers and fruit, dated 1585,
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appeared at auction in 1961 and is today in the British Museum, while a further example, containing sixty drawings in watercolour and gouache, is in the Oak Spring Garden Library in Upperville, Virginia. Indeed, as one modern scholar has noted, Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues was ‘one of the earliest and most gifted botanical painters…His surviving watercolours and miniatures…show a surprising naturalism and a highly refined sense of colour and form.’1 The present sheet comes from the largest and most recently discovered compendium of botanical drawings by Jacques Le Moyne; the so-called ‘Du Marry’ album, which appeared at auction in New York in 2005 and was subsequently broken up. Perhaps the earliest, and certainly the most substantial, album of botanical studies by Le Moyne to have come to light, the ‘Du Marry’ album contained eighty drawings in watercolour and gouache, together with an elaborate frontispiece in the form of an architectural cartouche2. The drawings from this album appear to date to the mid to late 1560s, when Le Moyne was still working in France, and as such are probably earlier in date than those found in the albums in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum. While several of the plants depicted in the ‘Du Marry’ album also appear in the other known albums, Le Moyne was careful to make each watercolour composition different from others of the same species. Characterized by elegant compositions enclosed in fictive frames, the watercolours in the ‘Du Marry’ album are drawn on paper smoothed with a stone to achieve a vellum-like surface. The paper is almost identical to that found in the Victoria and Albert florilegium, which is closest to the ‘Du Marry’ album in conception, appearance and date. As the paper historian Peter Bower has noted of the ‘Du Marry’ album, ‘a measure of the quality of this volume is that the papers have been stone glazed to achieve a very highly polished surface, more typical of Islamic calligraphy papers than western papers. Stone glazing was commonly practised in Northern Italy for papers intended for export to the Islamic World, but was also used, elsewhere in Europe, to achieve a vellum or parchment like look to the surface of the paper. The warm deep slightly yellow tone of these sheets has been achieved by the addition of casein to the surface during the glazing process. The use of the highly glazed finish and the presence of gold, both in the framing of the images and in the detail of several of the insects suggest that this work was destined for a rich client. The presentation is more expensive than that seen in other examples of Le Moyne’s work on paper.’3 Le Moyne’s ‘Du Marry’ album is one of the earliest French florilegia known. A compendium of images of flowering plants, studied directly from nature, a florilegium was related to the herbal; an early form of plant book providing exacting descriptions of plants for medicinal purposes. The rise of exploration in the 16th century brought many new plants to Europe, and stimulated a concurrent interest in garden design. There was also much demand, among collectors and scholars of exotic plants, for artists to record their transient beauty. Le Moyne was among the leading 16th century artists who specialized in the production of elaborately painted florilegia, and his splendid work in this field found a particularly receptive audience in Elizabethan England. A domesticated variety of the wild cardoon (Cynara cardunculus), the artichoke began to be cultivated in southern France and Italy in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The plant was introduced into England in the first quarter of the 16th century, and by 1530 artichokes were being grown in Henry VIII’s garden at New Hall in Essex. A similar study of a globe artichoke is part of the album of watercolours by Le Moyne in the Victoria and Albert Museum4, while an artichoke is also found among the woodcuts of the La clef des champs, pour trouver plusieurs animaux, tant bestes qu’oyseaux, avec plusieurs fleurs et fruitz, published by the artist in London in 1586. As the scholar Paul Hulton has noted of Le Moyne’s watercolours in the British Museum album, in terms that are equally applicable to the present sheet, ‘The drawings are nearly all of plants then commonly found in French or English gardens…They show an exquisite attention to detail, yet are drawn with a deep understanding and love of the subject which avoids all traces of superficial prettiness. They are plant portraits which delight the eye and at the same time satisfy to a remarkable extent the scientific requirements of the botanist. The combination of these virtues is very rarely found to the same degree at this period.’5
3 JACOPO NEGRETTI, called PALMA GIOVANE Venice c.1548-1628 Venice Soldiers Attacking the Defenders of a Walled City Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. A small made-up strip along part of the top edge. 375 x 270 mm. (14 3/4 x 10 5/8 in.) PROVENANCE: Jacques Bacri, Paris; Thence by descent. Known as Palma Giovane to distinguish him from his great-uncle, the painter Palma Vecchio, the Venetian artist Jacopo Negretti studied in Pesaro and Urbino, where he gained the support of Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. Sent to complete his studies in Rome, he spent several years there, making copies after the frescoes of Michelangelo and Polidoro da Caravaggio. On his return to Venice in 1573 Palma may have worked in the studio of Titian, completing a Pietà left unfinished at the master’s death in 1576. To the influence of Titian was added that of Tintoretto and Veronese, which Palma combined with his experiences of Roman Mannerism to create his own distinctive, painterly style. His first important commission came in 1578, when he provided three paintings for the ceiling of the Sala di Maggior Consiglio in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. Although Tintoretto was some thirty years older than Palma, the two worked side by side on a number of decorative projects in Venice, notably in the Palazzo Ducale, and they seem to have had a fairly close relationship. Indeed, it is thought that the younger artist may have spent some time in Tintoretto’s studio, though probably not – given his already successful independent career – in any formal capacity as an assistant. A prolific artist, Palma Giovane enjoyed a long career and received a large number of important commissions in Venice, particularly after the deaths of Veronese and Tintoretto. As well as providing altarpieces and ceiling paintings for numerous Venetian churches, Palma painted a cycle of pictures for the Ospedaletto dei Crociferi between 1583 and 1592 – a rare example in Venice of an entire cycle of paintings entrusted to one artist alone – and continued to contribute to the extensive redecoration of the various rooms of the Palazzo Ducale. He was also a talented portrait painter, although only a handful of examples are known today. By the beginning of the 17th century Palma was firmly established as the leading painter in Venice, receiving commissions from patrons throughout Italy and beyond, such as the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. He ran a large and busy workshop, and more than six hundred paintings by him or his studio are known. Palma Giovane was an inveterate draughtsman, and more drawings by him survive than by any other Venetian artist of the Cinquecento. As the 17th century biographer Carlo Ridolfi wrote of Palma, ‘the drawings which he made in various techniques from the Old and the New Testament and from which he drew inspiration for his compositions were innumerable, and he turned out also many drawings just by caprice. Hardly had the table cloth been removed after his meals when he asked for the pencil, all the time formulating some idea, and many of such drawings still exist.’1 The majority of Palma’s spirited drawings are in pen and ink wash; a medium which he tended to utilize for compositional studies and groups of figures, while individual figure studies were often drawn in black chalk on blue paper. Palma seems to have drawn as much for pleasure as to prepare his paintings, and many of his drawings cannot be related to known works. As has been noted of the artist, ‘Drawing was for him the most important outlet of his artistic personality...what strikes us most is the luxuriant, almost purposeless character of the drawings. Though occasionally referring to compositions also existing in paintings, they are entirely without roots – output of a permanent and unconcentrated creative urge, fulfilling more an uncontrollable drive rather than a need of the artist – mere finger-exercises to loosen the hand.’2 The influence of Veronese and Tintoretto is evident in much of Palma’s draughtsmanship. As Andrew Robison has recently written, ‘Palma effortlessly filled sheet after sheet with pen drawings showing constantly varied
presentations of primarily religious subjects...Palma’s pen drawings are reminiscent of those by Paolo Veronese. Both artists filled sheets with series of rapid studies, their hands barely keeping up with their thoughts, including different subjects on the same sheet in a sprightly pen...Appropriately for that speed, they both usually drew “alla prima”, directly with their pen on the paper, not bothering to begin with chalk or stylus underdrawing...Palma’s many drawings produced visual resources he could use or revisit for years to feed the prodigious output of paintings from his hand, and from his studio.’3 The drawings of Palma Giovane have long been admired by collectors and connoisseurs. As the 18th century French amateur Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville wrote of the artist, ‘There is nothing more spirited than his drawings: his pen…is fine & light; it gives off imaginative fireworks, a vivacity of genius that has few equals.’4 Significant groups of drawings by Palma, including several sheets from now-disbound sketchbooks, are today in the collections of the Graphische Sammlung in Munich (which holds more than four hundred drawings by the artist), the Uffizi in Florence, the British Museum in London, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and the Albertina in Vienna. The present sheet may be related to at least two different paintings of battle scenes by Palma Giovane. A similar grouping of soldiers climbing ladders to attack a walled city is found at the upper left corner of a vast painting of The Siege of Constantinople (fig.1) of c.1584-1585 in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice5, while comparable soldiers also appear in a very large canvas of The Battle of San Quintino (fig.2) in the Palazzo Reale in Turin, painted around 1580-15816. The present sheet may also be tentatively connected with a now-lost painting of The Assault on the Fort of Barbagno, painted by Palma in c.1583 for the end wall of the Sala dello Scrutinio in the Palazzo Ducale. Among stylistically and thematically comparable pen and ink drawings by Palma Giovane is a Battle Scene in the Museo Correr in Venice7, which has been related to the Siege of Constantinople in the Palazzo Ducale. The Correr sheet is part of an album of drawings by Palma which once belonged to the 18th century Venetian artist, engraver, art dealer and collector Count Anton Maria Zanetti. A similar arrangement of soldiers is also found in the upper part of a drawing of An Assault on a Fortress in the Louvre8, which has been associated with the lost Assault on the Fort of Barbagno in the Palazzo Ducale.
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4 HENDRICK GOLTZIUS Muhlbracht 1558-1617 Haarlem Pluto, after Polidoro da Caravaggio Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk, on blue paper. Indistinctly inscribed a [?] H. Goltzius / [?] / E. Reznicek 1994 in pencil on the backing sheet. 264 x 170 mm. (10 3/8 x 6 5/8 in.) PROVENANCE: Emile E. Wolf, New York, by 1979; Given by him to Lisa Walborsky, New York, in 1984; Anonymous sale, Amsterdam, Sotheby’s, 8 November 2000, lot 35 (unsold); By descent in the family of Emile Wolf, until 2017. LITERATURE: Creighton E. Gilbert et al, Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century from a Collection, exhibition catalogue, Ithaca, 1979, unpaginated, no.5; E. K. J. Reznicek, ‘Hendrik Goltzius 15581617: the complete engravings and woodcuts’ [book review], Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 1978-1979, p.203, under Strauss 291; Walter L. Strauss, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch. 3 (Commentary). Netherlandish Artists: Hendrick Goltzius, New York, 1982, p.285, under no.0301.251; E. K. J. Reznicek, ‘Drawings by Hendrick Goltzius, Thirty Years Later: Supplement to the 1961 catalogue raisonné’, Master Drawings, Autumn 1993, p.250, no.K241a; Holm Bevers, ‘Unpublished Drawings by Hendrick Goltzius in Berlin’, Master Drawings, Winter 1997, p.394, under no.3; Marjolein Leesberg and Huigen Leeflang, The New Hollstein: Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 14501700. Hendrick Goltzius, Part 2, Ouderkerk aan der IJssel, 2012, p.256, under No.(317); Yvonne Bleyerveld and Ilja M. Veldman, The Netherlandish Drawings of the 16th Century in Teylers Museum, Haarlem, 2016, p.146. EXHIBITED: Ithaca, New York, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century from a Collection, 1979, no.5. ‘The dominant figure in Netherlandish art around 1600’1, the Dutch draughtsman and engraver Hendrick Goltzius began publishing his prints in Haarlem around 1580. These came to be avidly collected, and indeed ‘The prints that came off Goltzius’s presses count as some of the finest achievements in the history of graphic art.’2 After recovering from a severe illness that lasted some three years, he left Haarlem in November 1590 for an extended stay in Italy, where he made a close study of the works of antiquity and the Renaissance. Goltzius spent most of his time in Rome, where he arrived at the beginning of 1591 and stayed for several months. He produced drawn copies after the paintings and frescoes of Raphael and Polidoro da Caravaggio, as well as numerous drawings of the most celebrated antique sculptures to be found in Rome. He left the city at the beginning of August 1591 and returned to Haarlem via Florence, Bologna, Venice and Munich. Goltzius continued his highly successful career as an engraver and designer of prints, gaining an Imperial privilege from the Emperor Rudolf II in 1595 and dedicating series of engravings to such notable patrons as Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria and the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Federico Borromeo. Around 1600 Goltzius decided to give up printmaking to work as a painter, leaving the print workshop and publishing business to his stepson Jacob Matham. Goltzius was a highly gifted draughtsman, and over five hundred drawings by him survive. As has been noted of the artist, ‘His technical skill, the virtuosity of his style, and the brilliance and erudition of his inventions in printmaking were matched only by his achievements as a draftsman…Goltzius addressed a wide variety of subjects…[and] experimented with most of the drawing media available to him, including red and black chalks, colored chalks, ink and wash, watercolor and gouache, and metalpoint.’3 This splendid drawing can be dated to the period of Goltzius’s stay in Rome, between January and August 15914. The artist’s brief period in Italy led to a profound and distinct change in his style, as he abandoned the Mannerist figures characteristic of his work of the 1580s in favour of a new, more classical
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type inspired by the works of the High Renaissance. Goltzius was particularly taken with the paintings of the 16th century artist Polidoro da Caravaggio (c.1500-1543), who had developed a specialty as a painter of grisaille frescoes for Roman palace façades. As James Byam Shaw has written, ‘These façadepaintings…were much admired and copied, especially by foreign artists visiting Rome. Those executed in chiaroscuro monochrome were considered particularly admirable; and their subjects, from ancient history or mythology, chiefly derived from Plutarch, Livy or Ovid…provided a rich mine of iconography for visiting artists to take home with them. Hardly a trace of these famous paintings now remains on the walls of the Roman palaces.’5 Goltzius made drawn copies of several of Polidoro’s painted facades. The present sheet copies the figure of Pluto, one of a group of now-lost monochrome frescoes by Polidoro of eight Olympian gods in niches that adorned the façade of a house on the Quirinal Hill (also known as Monte Cavallo), near the church of San Silvestro al Quirinale. Although no longer extant, the appearance of the frescoes, which were likely executed after 1524, is recorded in a series of prints published many years later6, as well as a number of drawn copies. Goltzius made finished pen and wash drawings of each of the eight gods depicted on Polidoro’s façade. Six of these drawings – depicting Saturn, Neptune, Pluto, Vulcan, Jupiter and Mercury – are today in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem7. The drawing for Apollo is in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin8, while the final drawing in the series, of Bacchus, has been lost since the 18th century. Among the Haarlem drawings is a slightly larger study of Pluto (fig.1), the god of the underworld who holds a flaming torch to light his way, with which the present sheet can be closely related9. After his return to Haarlem from Italy, Goltzius made engravings of his eight drawings after Polidoro’s Monte Cavallo frescoes, adding the name of each god at the top.10. The Goltzius scholar Emil Reznicek has suggested that the artist first made chalk or pen copies of the Polidoro frescoes in situ, before making more detailed studies in his studio, which would in turn serve as models for the engravings. This drawing of Pluto, which differs slightly from the Haarlem drawing and the related print (fig.2) in some details of the figure, and also does not include the winged figures and the decorative framing elements at the top of the niche, would appear to represent just such an earlier stage in the process of preparing the engravings. As Reznicek has pointed out, ‘Differences such as the figure’s placement in the niche and the more sketchy character of [the present] sheet suggest that it is preparatory for the drawing in Haarlem.’11 Goltzius’s engraving of Pluto12 is, moreover, the only print in the series for which more than one preparatory drawing is known.
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5 GIOVANNI BENEDETTO CASTIGLIONE Genoa 1609-1664 Mantua The Nativity or The Angel Instructing Joseph to Flee with his Family to Egypt Brush and brown ink and ochre wash, with white heightening, and touches of pink, blue and reddishbrown oil paint. Made up at the upper left corner and a small made-up area at the lower centre. A repaired tear in the upper left quadrant and another repaired tear extending diagonally across the sheet. Laid down. 440 x 324 mm. (17 3/8 x 12 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Jules S. Bache, New York; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 2 July 1997, lot 11; Galerie de Bayser, Paris, in 1998; Jean Bonna, Geneva. LITERATURE: Nathalie Strasser, Carnets d’études 4: Dessins italiens de la collection Jean Bonna, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2006, pp.46-47, no.24; Nathalie Strasser, Dessins italiens de la Renaissance au siècle des lumières: Collection Jean Bonna, Geneva, 2010, pp.220-221, no.97 (where dated c.1650). EXHIBITED: Paris, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts, Dessins italiens de la collection Jean Bonna, 2006, no.24. Sometimes known as ‘il Grechetto’, the Genoese artist Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione received his training in the studios of Giovanni Battista Paggi and Giovanni Andrea de’ Ferrari. He may also have studied with Anthony Van Dyck, who was in Genoa between 1621 and 1627, and the animal painter Sinibaldo Scorza, whose work seems to have had the most influence on the young artist. Castiglione developed a particular penchant for animal paintings, landscapes, pastoral scenes and Old Testament subjects, and was also highly regarded as a portrait painter, although only a very few examples have been identified today. For much of his career, he was regarded as one of the finest painters in Genoa, producing altarpieces and canvases for churches and palaces all over the city, and his fame eventually spread throughout Italy. In the latter part of his career Castiglione began to produce paintings and drawings that were intensely religious. Apart from working extensively in and around Genoa, Castiglione was active in Venice, Parma, Naples and Rome, where he worked for several years in the 1630s and again between about 1647 and 1651. From 1651 onwards he was mainly active in Mantua, where he was employed by the Gonzaga court, and where he died in 1664. As Jonathan Bober has summed up the artist’s career, ‘Castiglione was, beyond the quintessential Genoese artist, a genius of the highest order. He was not responsible for any of the basic languages of the Italian baroque, or even any of the major currents in the art of his native city. But by restless nature, genuine intellect, and seemingly boundless imagination, he attended to more styles, and synthesized them more thoroughly, than any other artist of the school, if not the entire seventeenth century.’1 Despite not having many pupils or followers of note, apart from his brother Salvatore, son Francesco and the Neapolitan painter Andrea de Leone, Castiglione’s influence on later Genoese painting was profound and long lasting. As another scholar has written, ‘Grechetto’s art is at the very core of the “decorative trend” of Genoese Baroque painting. Without him there would never have existed Gregorio de Ferrari, Domenico Piola, even Gaulli.’2 Castiglione has always been better known for his extraordinary graphic output than his paintings. He was a prolific and spirited draughtsman, working mainly in pen and wash, and made numerous drawings not just as studies for painted compositions but as works of art in their own right. He was also a gifted printmaker, and may well be credited with the invention of the monotype process. As noted by James Byam Shaw, ‘[Castiglione] was something of a wild character, and there is wild grandeur in his style of painting, drawing, and etching.’3 The largest surviving group of drawings and oil sketches by the artist, amounting to more than two hundred sheets, is today in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.
The present sheet is a fine example of the practice of dry-brush drawing on untreated paper that Castiglione made distinctively his own. The innovative technique of drawing with oil paint applied directly onto the sheet with the brush resulted in a group of drawings that are among the artist’s bestknown works. Using coarsely-ground pigment mixed with linseed oil, Castiglione was able to achieve remarkable effects, with brown pigment used for the forms and shadows (often smudged to suggest animal fur) contrasted with blue paint in the sky and areas of white paper left untouched to create highlights. In these works, Castiglione is likely to have been inspired by the oil sketches of Rubens and Van Dyck, which he would have seen in Genoa. As Anthony Blunt suggested, ‘the brush drawings are in a completely personal technique, invented by the artist himself. He may have been trying to produce an equivalent on paper for the rapid oil sketches which Rubens and van Dyck made on lightly primed wooden panels, but the effect is novel because the oil with which the pigment is mixed sinks into the paper and blurs the edges of the brushstrokes, giving them added subtlety...Castiglione achieved a great variety of effects with this technique. It can be light and almost feathery in his gayer scenes, powerful and dramatic in his grander, more Baroque religious subjects, or savagely expressive in his very late drawings.’4 Despite their seemingly unfinished appearance, Castiglione’s brush drawings seem to have been conceived and made as independent works for sale, rather than preparatory studies or working drawings, although their compositions are sometimes replicated in his pictures. They are difficult to date, since they can only rarely be directly associated with paintings, but the earliest are thought to date from the 1630s, with the majority produced after the middle of the 1640s. In general, it appears that earlier in his career Castiglione’s brush drawings in oil are handled in a looser, more fluid manner than his later studies, which have a more elaborate, finished quality. As Blunt has noted, ‘The pigment used varies at different periods from a yellowish or even greenish brown, to a fairly strong orange, and in the late drawings to a dull crimson. In the early sketches the whole effect is obtained by sharp, clearly defined brush strokes, but in the later works semi-transparent washes are used, and in some cases the sky and parts of the figures are finished with ordinary oil paint mixed in the normal way with a binding medium. This method had great advantages for an artist of Castiglione’s particular temperament. It is a rapid and fluent technique which enables the painter – one cannot really say draughtsman in this context – to obtain with a few strokes a striking, if sometimes rather superficial effect. It is well suited to the lively baroque form of composition which Castiglione used, particularly in his later period. It offers no opportunity for the careful, thoughtful formulation employed by a Poussin, but such a conception of art was in any case entirely foreign to Castiglione.’5 This fine brush drawing may be dated to the last years of Castiglione’s career. As has been noted, ‘By the late 1650s Castiglione’s working procedure was entirely internalised, and increasingly his expressiveness outweighed the descriptive function of the drawings…he applied successive layers of drier and more opaque red-brown earth colours over initial markings of liquid yellowish-brown stains, then set off the composition with accents of pale blue-greys and off-whites, sometimes even violets, and a smattering of illegible stray lines to hint at unresolved components of the composition. In their unfinished painterly state, these drawings appeal strongly to our modernist sensibilities, revealing much of his creative process as he built up the image… Castiglione’s prodigious creative capacities remained undimmed even at the end of his artistic journey.’6 While the present sheet is likely to date to the late 1650s or early 1660s, it may be noted that the pose of the Virgin and Child is reminiscent of the same figure group in Castiglione’s monumental altarpiece of The Adoration of the Shepherds, signed and dated 1645, in the church of San Luca in Genoa7, which is one of the artist’s earliest dated works, and among his most celebrated. An almost identical figure of the reclining Saint Joseph also appears in a brush drawing of The Angel Appearing to Saint Joseph at Windsor Castle8. An analogous, albeit somewhat smaller, brush drawing of The Penitence of Saint Peter by Castiglione – which was, like the present sheet, at one time in the notable collection of the American banker and philanthropist Jules Semon Bache (1861-1944) – was on the art market in New York in 19999. Stylistic comparisons may also be made with a brush drawing of The Adoration of the Magi, formerly in the Mariette collection and today in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg10 and another of Angels Adoring the Virgin and Child in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm11.
6 GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna River Landscape with a Hunter and his Dog Pen and brown ink. Inscribed (in a modern hand) Guercino / da Cento and numbered 1.8 in pencil on the verso. Further inscribed (with mountmaker’s notes?) in German in pencil on the verso. 240 x 371 mm. (9 1/2 x 14 5/8 in.) Watermark: The letter M with a six-pointed star in a shield. PROVENANCE: Probably the artist’s nephews, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari (the ‘Casa Gennari’), Bologna and Bel Poggio, and thence by descent to Carlo Gennari, Bologna, until the middle of the 18th century; Possibly Francesco Forni, Bologna; Private collection, Austria; Prisco Bagni, Milan; Thence by descent. LITERATURE: Prisco Bagni, Guercino a Cento: Le decorazioni di Casa Pannini, Bologna, 1984, p.133, pl.103; Prisco Bagni, Il Guercino el il suo falsario: I disegni di paesaggio, Bologna, 1985, p.20, no.2. EXHIBITED: Bologna, Museo Civico Archeologico, Il Guercino: disegni, 1991, no.170. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Il Guercino (‘the squinter’) because he was cross-eyed, was, by the second decade of the 17th century, one of the leading painters in the province of Emilia. Enjoying a long and successful career, he received significant commissions from patrons throughout Italy and beyond, and turned down offers of employment at the royal courts in London and Paris. He was also among the most prolific draughtsmen of the Seicento in Italy, producing figural and compositional studies for paintings, landscapes, genre scenes and caricatures. As early as 1617, the aged Ludovico Carracci wrote of the young Guercino in a letter to the priest and scholar Ferrante Carli: ‘He is a great draughtsman and a most felicitous colourist; he is a monster created by nature and by miracle who astounds those who see his works.’1 Guercino appears to have assiduously kept his drawings throughout his career, and to have parted with only a few of them. On the artist’s death in 1666, all of the numerous drawings in his studio passed to his nephews and heirs, the painters Benedetto and Cesare Gennari, and they remained with their descendants until the middle of the 18th century. Since then they have been greatly prized by collectors and connoisseurs. Guercino’s drawings were often copied and many were reproduced as engravings, and his lasting influence as a draughtsman is particularly notable in the work of such later artists as Pietro Giacomo Palmieri, Francesco Bartolozzi, John Hamilton Mortimer and Benjamin West. The practice of landscape drawing occupied Guercino throughout his career, and such drawings account for a large and prominent part of his drawn oeuvre. Indeed, it has been noted that more landscape studies are known by Guercino than by any other Italian draughtsman of the period. Yet these drawings were not intended as studies for paintings, and instead were done for their own sake; drawn for the artist’s own pleasure and occasionally, perhaps, given away as gifts. As Sir Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner have pointed out, ‘Since they are not connected with his figure paintings, they presumably cannot have been made with any expectation of financial gain. For an artist who was attentive to such matters, besides being under pressure for time from his numerous commissions, this dedication to what might be considered a merely peripheral activity bespeaks Guercino’s devotion to what he himself must have considered of some importance.’2 Because they are unrelated to his finished paintings, these landscape drawings are often difficult to accurately date. Almost always executed in pen and ink, but without wash, Guercino’s landscape drawings display little of the reworking and experimentation so typical of his figure studies. Carefully composed and incorporating such stock elements as solitary windblown trees, many of these drawings were probably not drawn on
the spot, although they often contain motifs reminiscent of the landscape and river of the artist’s native Cento, a small town between Bologna and Ferrara. Indeed, while a number of Guercino’s landscape drawings appear to depict actual sites in and around Cento, most are imaginary views, combining different topographical and figural motifs in a fanciful manner to create a pleasing scene. Mahon and Turner further note that, ‘As statements, many of [these landscape drawings] have a completeness not found in his more experimental and hastily drawn figure studies, and they contain something of the force and concentration of a painting rather than a drawing. In them the artist demonstrates the fecundity and power of his imagination by inventing a scene, shaping the space within it, giving the whole a unity by the suggestion of light and, finally, evoking a mood – all within the confines of a relatively small piece of paper.’3 In many of Guercino’s landscape drawings there are echoes of the pastoral views of such 16th century Venetian artists as Giorgione, Titian and Domenico Campagnola. (The last of these, like Guercino, drew a large number of landscapes as independent works of art.) The artist may also have found other sources of inspiration in the work of contemporaries in Rome such as Agostino Tassi, Annibale Carracci, Domenichino and Paul Bril, all of whom produced landscape drawings. It has further been suggested that Guercino may have been influenced by Netherlandish landscape prints of the early 17th century, of which he may have owned some examples; he is certainly known to have admired the etchings of Rembrandt. As early as about 1674 a series of fourteen landscape drawings by Guercino, all of which were until recently in the collection of the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth, were sent by the artist’s nephew and pupil Cesare Gennari to Paris, to be engraved by the printmaker Jean Pesne. These were published a few years later in Italy, accompanied by a frontispiece designed by Gennari. Guercino’s landscapes continued to be greatly admired well into the 18th century, and the largest surviving group of them, numbering some thirty sheets, is today in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. These were acquired from the artist’s heirs, in the late 1750s and 1760s, by King George III’s Librarian, Richard Dalton. The present sheet is a very fine and characteristic example of Guercino’s landscape drawings. A sense of spatial recession is achieved by the artist’s use of the pen, with darker and thicker strokes of ink in such prominent foreground elements as the trees at the left becoming progressively lighter and more delicate as the eye moves through the landscape towards the mountains in the far distance. Also typical of the artist is the figure of the hunter, which adds a vital human element to the finished composition. This River Landscape with a Hunter and his Dog was almost certainly part of the large and important group of drawings by Guercino that belonged to the artist’s nephews and heirs in Bologna, Benedetto and Cesare Gennari. The Gennari owned nearly 5,300 drawings by Guercino, divided between their home in Bologna and the family villa at Bel Poggio, outside the city. While some of these drawings were displayed in frames (though usually not behind glass), the vast majority were either pasted into a series of large albums or kept as loose sheets in folios. According to the Bolognese biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia, the Gennari collection included ‘Ten volumes of drawings, some in pen, some in red and black chalk, with a variety of exquisitely drawn landscapes’4. In the inventory of the Casa Gennari, drawn up in October 1719, several albums of drawings by Guercino are listed, one of which contained ninety-two landscapes (‘Dissegni à Penna ed’ Acquarella rapresentanti vedute di Paesi diversi’)5. Of the two hundred landscape drawings by Guercino listed in the 1719 Gennari inventory, five were valued very highly, at twenty-five lire each, while some thirty landscapes were framed and displayed on the walls of the Casa Gennari in Bologna or the country villa at Bel Poggio. More recently, the present sheet was one of a number of very fine Guercino drawings in the collection of the Italian scholar and art historian Prisco Bagni (1921-1995), a native of Cento who published several important studies on Guercino and his studio, as well as on the Gandolfi family of artists. Bagni lent this drawing to the important exhibition of Guercino drawings held in Bologna in 1991, on the four hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth.
7 MELCHIOR D’HONDECOETER Utrecht 1636-1695 Amsterdam A Peacock Pen and black ink and grey wash, with framing lines in black ink. Laid down on an old mount, inscribed Melchior, / HONDEKOTER in black ink within a cartouche. 205 x 315 mm. (8 1/8 x 12 3/8 in.) PROVENANCE: Private collection, France. Born into a family of several generations of landscape and animal painters of Flemish origins, Melchior d’Hondecoeter became the leading Dutch painter of birds in the second half of the 17th century. He received his artistic training from his father Gijsbert Gillisz. d’Hondecoeter and his uncle Jan Baptist Weenix, and by 1658 he had moved to The Hague, becoming the head of the artist’s guild there in 1662. By the beginning of the following year, however, the newly-married artist had settled in Amsterdam, where he was to live and work for the remainder of his career. Hondecoeter came to specialize in highly realistic paintings of birds and fowl and, with his remarkable powers of observation and understanding of the behaviour of all manner of domestic and exotic birds, became indisputably the most renowned artist in this particular genre. He found a ready market for his accurate depictions of native European birds, as well as many unusual species from Asia, Africa and South America, all depicted in landscape settings. As the Hondecoeter scholar Joy Kearney has noted, ‘The most remarkable aspect of his work is the ornithological accuracy with which he depicted his subjects…Such realistic interpretation of birds was unrivalled in seventeenth-century art and paved the way for a new genre in Dutch art of the period.’1 It is thought that Hondecoeter painted over 250 works, ranging from gamepieces, barnyard scenes with poultry, and still life compositions, as well as a number of allegorical subjects, notably two large canvases of fighting birds known as The Lowland Wars of William III, today at Holkham Hall in Norfolk. Only about twenty of his paintings are dated, however, which makes a chronology of his work difficult to establish. The artist produced a number of grand park landscapes populated by exotic live birds, sometimes very large in scale. This was a particularly inventive genre that he created, which became especially popular in the form of decorations for the town and country homes of wealthy burghers such as the merchant Adolf Visscher, who owned a number of works by Hondecoeter. Among other important patrons was the King-Stadtholder Willem III, Prince of Orange, who commissioned several paintings from the artist – including depictions of birds and animals from the royal menagerie – for his palaces at Het Loo, Soestdijk and Honselaarsdijk. As Kearney has noted of Hondecoeter, ‘His merit is that he raised the genre of painting birds and animals from a rural subject associated with peasantry to the sophistication and elegance of the Royal family and the landed gentry, thereby gaining considerable fame during his lifetime.’2 Hondecoeter enjoyed a successful career, and his paintings were immensely popular with collectors throughout his lifetime and for many years thereafter. By the time of his death in 1695, however, he appears to have been in some financial difficulty, leaving behind a number of significant debts. Such was Hondecoeter’s reputation that his painted compositions were often copied or imitated, and he was a great influence on later painters of animal and still life subjects. His reputation as a painter of avian subjects has never dimmed; in the 18th and early 19th centuries, his work became especially popular among collectors in England, where he was known as ‘The Raphael of Birds’. As one early 20th century writer opined, ‘Melchior d’Hondecoeter…is the only painter who seems ever to have appreciated to the full the material of design before our eyes in the various shapes and gay plumage of birds. Before him these had been accessories to landscape. He made them the purpose of his picture...The result was the rich compositions representing a bit of landscape seen from among a group of domestic fowl…They impress at once by the sober strength of their glowing dark colors…and by their intelligent fidelity to the humble forms of life they depict.’3 And, as another scholar has noted, ‘Hondecoeter learned from his teacher, Weenix, who had studied in Italy, a fine decorative ease and breadth, to which he added a Dutch sense
of life and character. The splendid vitality of these birds, the characteristic quick, nervous movements, the soft but glowing colors of various kinds of feathers…are studied with a Dutch painter’s wonderful accuracy.’4 The present sheet may be counted among the finest surviving drawings by Hondecoeter, by whom only a handful of autograph sheets are known. As Kearney points out, ‘it may be assumed from his work that the artist painted from living birds as well as from dead specimens. The few known drawings which can reasonably be ascribed to him depict birds as if from life...That so few such drawings by the artist appear to have survived, or been identified, is regrettable, given that he must have made many sketches and watercolour drawings of living birds as studies for the lifelike birds in his oil paintings...The constant reappearance of certain birds, in the same pose though arranged in different groupings, must surely indicate a series of drawings of such prototypes which were then used repeatedly as reference material.’5 It has been suggested that Hondecoeter may have preferred to make small-scale studies of various birds in oil on canvas for later use in his larger painted works; fourteen of these oil sketches were noted in the posthumous inventory of his studio contents. The Indian peafowl (Pavo cristatus) appears in many of Hondecoeter’s paintings. As has been noted, ‘This bird was kept at the royal menageries and was viewed as the epitome of elegance and grace, often depicted by the artist perched on a classical plinth or urn in an Italianate garden...They were certainly painted for their beauty and elegance, apart from any literary or symbolic references and they appear on numerous occasions in de Hondecoeter’s work.’6 This rare and exotic species – imported into Holland by the ships of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company – was particularly popular with wealthy Amsterdam citizens, serving to ornament the gardens of their country estates, where they were allowed to roam free. As Walter Liedtke has pointed out, ‘Hondecoeter turned curiosities of nature into curiosities of art, and…into elements of interior decoration. However, contemporary interest in and knowledge of the variety of nature should not be underestimated. Even the peacock, which served as a symbol of pride in much earlier Netherlandish pictures, would have been recognized immediately as a creature from another continent, in this case southeastern Asia and the East Indies. In the confines of a room hung with paintings by Hondecoeter, it was easy to imagine not only the great outdoors of the Dutch countryside but also the entire world of Dutch overseas trade.’7 This fine sheet is one the very few drawings by Hondecoeter which appears to have been produced as a preparatory study for a painting. The same peacock, striding to the left, appears in a signed canvas of A Monkey, Peacock and Other Birds (fig.1), datable to the 1660s, which appeared at auction in London in 19958. A very similar peacock is also found in a large painting of Birds in a Park of 1686, today in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg9. Among the few other extant drawings of peacocks by Hondecoeter is a similar pen and wash study of a single bird in the British Museum10. Peacocks also appear in a finished watercolour of Two Peacocks, Five Chickens and a Parrot in the Albertina in Vienna11, and in a watercolour composition of a peacock with several other birds in the British Museum12.
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8 CARLO MARATTI Camerano 1625-1713 Rome Recto: The Head of a Young Boy Verso: The Penitent Saint Peter Red chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk, on blue paper. Inlaid on an 18th century mount. Inscribed Di Carlo Maratti in brown ink on both sides of the mount. 267 x 204 mm. (10 1/2 x 8 in.) [sheet] 413 x 319 mm. (16 1/4 x 12 1/2 in.) [mount] PROVENANCE: From an album of drawings by Maratti and his circle, probably assembled in the early 18th century and later in the possession of the Shirley family, Ettington Park, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire; The album acquired from Lt. Col. Evelyn Charles Shirley by P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 19371; The present sheet acquired from Colnaghi by Hans M. Calmann, London, on 21 April 1943 for £15; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 30 March 1975, lot 60; Agnew’s, London, in 1977; Mr. and Mrs. George Walker, Banbury; Lewis Reines, New York. LITERATURE: James Byam Shaw, The Italian Drawings of the Frits Lugt Collection, Paris, 1983, Vol.I, pp.170-171, under no.168, note 2. EXHIBITED: London, Thos. Agnew & Sons, Master Drawings, 1977, no.18; Barnard Castle, The Bowes Museum and Newcastle, Hatton Gallery, Pleasure in Drawings, 1980, no.9; Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, For the Love of Drawing: Drawings from an Oxfordshire Private Collection, 2002. Carlo Maratti worked in Rome for almost the whole of his remarkably successful career. His reputation was established with his first public commission, an altarpiece of The Adoration of the Shepherds painted in 1650 for the church of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami. By the early 1660s he had established one of the largest and most successful workshops in Rome, receiving numerous commissions for altarpieces, cabinet pictures and frescoes. Appointed painter to seven popes, as well as King Louis XIV of France, Maratti also counted among his patrons the most illustrious Roman families, including the Altieri, Barberini, Chigi, Colonna, Rospigliosi, Spada and Pallavicini. Among his many ecclesiastical commissions were the decoration of three chapels in St. Peter’s and altarpieces for such Roman churches as San Carlo al Corso, the Gesù, Santa Maria sopra Minerva and Sant’Andrea al Quirinale. In 1674 Maratti received one of his most important commissions from Pope Clement X; the extensive fresco decoration of the audience chamber of the Palazzo Altieri, a project left unfinished by the death of the pontiff in 1676. Following the death of Gianlorenzo Bernini in 1680 Maratti became the leading artist in the city, and in 1701 was awarded the unprecedented honour of being named principe for life of the Accademia di San Luca. Although he painted very little in the last decade of his career, his influence remained strong well into the 18th century, as seen in the work of his many pupils and followers, known collectively as the Maratteschi. In his posthumously published life of the artist, Giovan Pietro Bellori notes that, even as a young man, Maratti’s skill as a draughtsman was readily apparent: ‘his drawings were already held in great esteem because there was no one who equaled him, and Bernabeo [his elder half-brother] was earning no little profit from them, frequently selling them to foreigners interested in painting, because the skill of a master was apparent in them...’2 A prolific draughtsman, Maratti had a preference for red chalk, and made numerous studies of drapery, anatomy and pose for each of his paintings. He seems to have jealously guarded his drawings, and kept most of them in his studio until his death, after which many passed into the possession of his daughter Faustina, while others were kept by some of his pupils. Describing the present sheet as ‘a fine example of the artist’s later graphic manner’3, the Maratti scholar Stella Rudolph has noted that the head of a putto on the recto is a preparatory study for his painting of The Death of Saint Joseph (fig.1), dated 1676, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna4. The painting
was commissioned from Maratti by the papal legate Cardinal Alberizzi for the private chapel of the dowager Empress Eleonora Gonzaga of Mantua, wife of the Emperor Ferdinand III, in the Hofburg in Vienna5. The recto of this drawing, which should be viewed horizontally, is a study for the small winged putto that appears just to the left of centre of the composition, over the bed of the dying saint and just below the foot of an angel. Other studies for the painting, including drawings for Christ, the Virgin and several of the angels, are among the large collection of drawings by Maratti in the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf6. Also in the same collection is a similar study in black chalk of the head of a young boy7, apparently the same model as seen here, which is a preparatory drawing for a painting of The Death of Saints Blaise and Sebastian of c.1680 in the Genoese church of Santa Maria di Carignano. Among stylistically comparable studies of young children by Maratti, executed in red chalk on blue paper, is a drawing in the Philadelphia Museum of Art8 and another in a French private collection9. The study of a penitent saint on the verso of this sheet remains unconnected to any surviving work by Maratti. Although a somewhat similar praying figure appears in his painting of The Death of the Virgin in the Villa Albani in Rome10, painted around 1686, the verso of the present sheet should more likely be dated several years earlier, and to the same period – namely, the second half of the 1670s – as the study on the recto. Stella Rudolph has likened the drawing on the verso with some of Maratti’s initial studies in red chalk for the pendentive mosaics in the Cappella della Presentazione in St. Peter’s, begun in 167711. On the other hand, while Dario Beccarini has recently confirmed the attribution of the recto of this drawing to Maratti, he has suggested that the study on the verso may be the work of a pupil or follower, possibly Giacinto Calandrucci (1646-1707). The present sheet was once part of an album of drawings by Carlo Maratti and other artists, assembled in the late 17th century or early 18th century. The album included twenty-seven chalk drawings by Maratti, most of which were preparatory studies for paintings12.
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9 JEAN-ANTOINE WATTEAU Valenciennes 1684-1721 Nogent-sur-Marne A Young Man Looking Down Black chalk, graphite and red chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk. A strip of paper added at the top edge of the sheet. Laid down. 185 x 125 mm. (7 1/4 x 4 5/8 in.) PROVENANCE: Jean Delaigne, Paris; His (anonymous) sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Lair-Dubreuil], 14 February 1914, lot 123 (‘Tête d’homme. Etude à la pierre noire, rehaussée de sanguine’); Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Lair-Dubreuil], 2 June 1923, lot 101 (‘Buste d’homme, la tête inclinée. Dessin à la pierre noire et sanguine, sold for 670 francs); (Victor?) Galippe collection; Anonymous sale (‘Collection de M. X…’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 30 April 1924, lot 143 (as attributed to Watteau); Matthiesen Gallery, London, by c.1946; Acquired from them by Baron Paul Hatvany, London1; His posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 24 June 1980, lot 41; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Lady’), London, Christie’s, 2 July 1991, lot 324; Arturo Cuéllar-Nathan, Zurich; Anonymous sale (‘Property of a Swiss Family’), London, Christie’s, 5 July 2017, lot 72. LITERATURE: K. T. Parker and Jacques Mathey, Antoine Watteau: Catalogue complet de son oeuvre dessiné, Paris, 1957, Vol.II, p.328, no.679, fig.679; Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, Antoine Watteau: Catalogue raisonné des dessins, Milan, 1996, Vol.I, pp.576-577, no.358. EXHIBITED: London, Matthiesen Gallery, French Master Drawings of the 18th Century, 1950, no.108. Although he enjoyed a relatively brief career as an independent artist before his death at the age of thirty-seven, Antoine Watteau was a gifted and immensely prolific draughtsman; indeed, perhaps the greatest of his generation. He 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 his figure drawings, which were often reused over several years for different paintings.) It has been suggested 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...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 aux trois crayons technique; using a combination of 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 The artist 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, Watteau’s drawings were to become as highly regarded among collectors and
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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 as a draughtsman was also 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 between 1726 and 1728. As the artist’s friend and executor Edmé-François Gersaint, who claimed that Watteau preferred drawing to painting, noted, ‘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 This half-length trois crayons study of a young man looking down has been dated by Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat to around 1715. In their 1996 catalogue raisonné of Watteau’s drawings, Rosenberg and Prat noted of the present sheet that ‘The drawing belongs to the series of copies after Venetian works (Bassano or Veronese?), and is datable to around 1715, but despite our researches...we have not found the precise source.’6 Throughout his career, Watteau made drawn copies of motifs from the work of earlier artists, notably the great Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens and the Venetian painters of the 16th century. In a letter of 1946, Karl Parker noted that he first saw the present sheet some fifteen years earlier, and describes the drawing as ‘manifestly genuine and extremely fine.’7 As the same scholar has written elsewhere, ‘It has often been stated, by Goncourt, among others, that portrait drawings by Watteau are exceptional. In point of fact just the opposite is the case; almost all his studies of heads are in a general sense portraits, the natural result of drawing constantly from the living model, and of seizing with supreme facility its distinctive characteristics.’8 The pose of the figure in this drawing is very similar, albeit in reverse, to one of the pair of lovers in Watteau’s late painting La Surprise (fig.1) of c.1718-1719, long thought to be lost and known only from an engraving until its reappearance at auction in London in 2008; the painting was acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 20179. Two preparatory drawings by Watteau related to La Surprise are known; a study in red and black chalk in the Louvre for the seated figure of Mezzetin playing his guitar10 and a red chalk drawing for the amorous couple, in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris11. The latter sheet is in turn derived from two peasant figures in Rubens’ large painting The Village Wedding (La Kermesse), today in the Louvre, which Watteau studied when it was in the French Royal Collection.
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10 GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO Venice 1696-1770 Madrid Allegorical Figures of Valour and Fame: The Apotheosis of a Warrior Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Inscribed M. Fauchier Magnan / J. B. Tiepolo / Allegorie in black ink on a label pasted onto the old backing board. 216 x 289 mm. (8 1/2 x 11 3/8 in.) PROVENANCE: William Bateson, Merton House, Grantchester, nr. Cambridge, in 1910; Adrien Fauchier-Magnan, Neuilly-sur-Seine (according to a label on the old backing board); Winterfeld collection; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman’), London, Sotheby’s, 9 December 1936, lot 59 (bt. Walford Wilson for £90); E. V. Thaw and Co., New York; John R. Gaines, Lexington, Kentucky; His sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 17 November 1986, lot 23; Private collection. LITERATURE: Eduard Sack, Giambattista und Domenico Tiepolo: Ihr Leben und ihre Werk, Hamburg, 1910, p.252, no.103 (not illustrated). EXHIBITED: London, Burlington Fine Arts Club, Exhibition of Venetian Painting of the Eighteenth Century, 1911, no.65 (as The Genii of Victory and Fame, lent by Bateson). ‘Tiepolo originally drew mainly for himself, but this does not prevent his drawings from being aesthetically completely autonomous. Far from constituting mere preparatory exercises for paintings, they can be seen as independent and distinctive works of art in their own right which exist in many cases alongside his paintings as a vast and exceptional body of work. Going through them page by page is like reading an extraordinary adventure of the imagination.’1 One of the leading painters in Venice for much of his life, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was also undoubtedly one of the greatest draughtsmen of the 18th century in Italy. His career spanned over fifty years, throughout most of which he enjoyed fame, wealth and considerable success. From the late 1730s until his departure for Spain in 1762 Tiepolo experienced his most creative period as a draughtsman, producing a large number of vibrant pen and wash studies that have long been coveted by collectors and connoisseurs, and are among the archetypal drawings of the Venetian Settecento. This splendid drawing by Giambattista Tiepolo may be dated to the late 1740s or 1750s, and can be associated with a handful of other drawings by the artist that depict the apotheosis of a bearded man in military dress, sometimes identified as representing Valour, accompanied by an allegorical female figure of Fame. These include two drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York2 and another in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York3, as well as drawings in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven4 and the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin5. Likewise included in this group are two compositionally similar drawings of The Apotheosis of a Venetian Hero, in the Courtauld Gallery in London6 and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm7. The late Tiepolo scholar George Knox related several of these drawings to Tiepolo’s ceiling fresco of an Allegory of Merit Between Nobility and Virtue (fig.1) in one of the rooms of the Ca’ Rezzonico in Venice8, painted in the spring of 1757 to celebrate the forthcoming marriage of Ludovico Rezzonico and Faustina Savorgnan, and one of the last major decorative works completed by the artist in Italy before his move to Spain in 1762. As James Byam Shaw has noted of Tiepolo’s drawings of this type, however, ‘there is seldom an exact correspondence with the finished work, so that sometimes it is difficult to decide whether the drawing is a preliminary idea, or a return to an earlier motive.’9 As such, some of these drawings may perhaps also be related to a number of other ceiling paintings of analogous subjects. Indeed, as Knox has pointed out, ‘The theme of the apotheosis of the hero recurs often in the Tiepolo oeuvre, both in his painting and in his drawings’10, a statement echoed by another recent scholar, who writes that ‘[A] type
of figure, where a member of a patrician family is shown with the attributes of Valor, would prove to be one of Tiepolo’s most durable creations.’11 A similar laurel-wreathed soldier accompanied by a trumpet-bearing figure of Fame, for example, appears in Tiepolo’s ceiling canvas of The Glorification of the Barbaro Family (or Valour with Virtue and Fame and Other Virtues) of c.1750 (fig.2), painted for the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art12. Other ceiling paintings of similar subjects executed in the 1750s include a vast Apotheosis of Francesco Morosini (or Fame with Valour and Virtue), painted for the Palazzo Morosini a Santo Stefano in Venice and today in the Palazzo Isimbardi in Milan13, and a fresco of The Apotheosis of Orazio Porto (or Valour Crowned by Virtue Overcoming Time), painted for the Palazzo Porto in Vicenza and now in the Seattle Art Museum14. As a draughtsman, Tiepolo favoured pen, ink and brush, and the present sheet is a superb example of his abilities. Byam Shaw has described the artist’s technique; ‘Often he used a hard black chalk, or a lead point, to indicate first, very roughly, the main character of the composition; then comes the finely cut quill – more rarely a reed – to sketch the forms; and finally a brush, with a tawny bistre or greyish-brown colour, for the shadows. This wash is often the lightest possible, and of a single tone, or varying only according to the fullness of the brush; but often, and especially in more pictorial compositions, there are two distinct tones...strong accents being added with a drier brush, over the lighter and more transparent wash, before this was completely dry...there is a remarkable degree of volume and solidity, which, with his delicate line and apparently casual washes, the artist is able to impart to all his forms.’15 The first known owner of this Apotheosis of a Warrior was the eminent biologist William Bateson (18611926), who owned a choice group of pen and ink drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo. In 1911 Bateson lent this drawing, along with several others by the artist, to the important Exhibition of Venetian Painting of the Eighteenth Century at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in London. The present sheet, however, does not seem to have been included in the posthumous sale of Bateson’s collection of drawings, held at Sotheby’s in London on 23-24 April 1929, which included twenty-six drawings by Tiepolo. According to a label on the old backing board, the present sheet later entered the collection of the French art historian Adrien Fauchier-Magnan (1873-1965), who assembled a particularly fine group of mainly 18th century French and Italian drawings, including superb works by Canaletto, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Francesco Guardi, Hubert Robert, Giambattista Tiepolo and Jean-Antoine Watteau.
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11 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 de Beistegui, Château de Groussay, Montfortl’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, Gloucester, Massachusetts. LITERATURE: Pinkney L. Near, Three Masters of Landscape: Fragonard, Robert, and Boucher, exhibition catalogue, Richmond, 1981, p.23, no.10; Jean Cailleux and Marianne Roland Michel, Rome 17601770: Fragonard, Hubert Robert et leurs Amis, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1983, unpaginated, no.22; Marianne Roland Michel, Aspects de Fragonard: Peintures – Dessins – Estampes, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1987, unpaginated, no.44; New York, Pandora Old Masters, Recent Acquisitions, 2004, pp.2425, unnumbered; 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 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 and brush and wash with complete assurance and freedom. A pupil of Jean-Baptiste Chardin and François Boucher, whose studio he entered around 1749, Fragonard won the Prix de Rome in 1752 and, after studying under Carle Vanloo at the Ecole Royale des Elèves Protégés, arrived in Rome in 1756. While a pensionnaire at the Académie de France in Rome, Fragonard made numerous drawings after ancient sculpture and paintings by Italian artists, as well as a series of fine landscape drawings. On his return to France in 1761, he was agrée at the Académie Royale with a large history painting of Coresus and Callirhoe, although he was never appointed a full Academician. Rejecting the practice of history painting, Fragonard turned his attention instead to genre and landscape painting, also 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 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. In the summer of 1760, the young Fragonard, then a student at the French Academy in Rome, was invited by the painter, engraver and amateur Jean-Claude Richard, Abbé de Saint-Non, 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. As the director of French Academy, Charles-Joseph Natoire, writing from Rome to the Marquis de Marigny, director of the Bâtiments du Roi, at the end of August 1760, noted, ‘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 astonishing freedom in brush and wash, this atmospheric landscape drawing is likely to have been made during or shortly after Fragonard’s summer at Tivoli in 1760. As one scholar has described the present sheet, ‘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 This drawing may be included among a handful of small-scale, early landscape studies in pen 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 Stylistically comparable small-scale landscape drawings by Fragonard of the same date include 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 Springell collection 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 French art market in 198610. Executed during the first of Fragonard’s two stays in Rome, all of these drawings share a similar use of ink and wash over a black chalk underdrawing. As the Fragonard scholar Eunice Williams has written of the Baltimore and Cleveland drawings in terms that apply equally to the present sheet and others from this same 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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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 onto an 18th century French mount, with the blind stamp of the mountmaker JeanBaptiste Glomy (Lugt 1085, with 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 Post-Medieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985, Vol.I, pp.393-394, under no.57. One of the leading painters in France between the 1730s and the 1760s, François Boucher was also among the greatest draughtsmen of the eighteenth century. Reçu into the Académie Royale in 1734, he became the favourite painter of Louis XV’s mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour, and painted decorations for Versailles, Fontainebleau, Marly and elsewhere. Boucher produced numerous easel pictures – pastoral landscapes, religious and mythological subjects, genre scenes, chinoiseries and portraits – and designed tapestry cartoons for the Gobelins tapestry manufactory. 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. As Denys Sutton has written, ‘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 A gifted and prolific draughtsman, Boucher claimed to have produced ten thousand drawings over a career of some fifty years. As one modern scholar has noted, ‘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 pastoral scenes, nudes, religious, historical and mythological subjects, book illustrations, chinoiseries, landscapes, nudes, genre scenes and studies of children and heads, as well as designs for tapestries, porcelain and fountains. He also produced many finished drawings as independent works for collectors and the art market, often adapting and elaborating a head or figure from one of his paintings. Several of Boucher’s drawings were engraved – often making use of new printmaking techniques that allowed chalk drawings to be replicated with a high degree of verisimilitude – by such printmakers as Louis-Marin Bonnet, Gilles Demarteau and Gabriel Huquier. Indeed, Boucher’s popularity as a draughtsman owes much to the fact that many of his drawings were reproduced and widely distributed as engravings.
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 executed by Boucher in 1763 and 1764, as models for tapestries. Two upright oval paintings – one depicting Aurora and Cephalus, signed and dated 1763, and the other Vertumnus and Pomona, dated the following year – are today in the Louvre, while a pair of horizontal oval compositions – of Venus at the Forge of Vulcan and Neptune Rescuing Amymone, the latter dated 1764 – are at Versailles, on deposit from the Mobilier National4. 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, which was being remodelled by the architect Robert Adam. Commissioned by the Earl of Coventry from the master weaver Jacques Neilson, the head of the Gobelins workshop, these tapestries depicted fictive 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 with 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 installed 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, succeeding Jean-Baptiste Oudry. 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 The present sheet, which may be dated to 1764, is related to the central medallion of the tapestry of Neptune Rescuing Amymone9, and depicts the sea god Neptune, armed with his trident, leaping from his horse-drawn chariot to save Amymone from the ravages of a satyr. The artist 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 by Boucher, with considerable differences, 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 onto an 18th century French mount, with the blind stamp of the mountmaker Jean-Baptiste 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, 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 tapestries. While the subject of Aurora and Cephalus does appear in the Tentures de Boucher tapestries, it is as an oval composition of 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 seems to have ever been woven, at the Gobelins or elsewhere. These two oval drawings by Boucher may be dated to the 1760s. However, as 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 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 to have been treated in exactly the same way.’8 Both the Aurora and Cephalus and Neptune and Amymone are on their original 18th century mounts, each twice stamped by the eminent Parisian dealer and mountmaker Jean-Baptiste Glomy (c.17201786). 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 Pierre-Jacques-Onésyme Bergeret de Grancourt, the Chevalier de Damery, Gilbert PaignonDijonval, 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. 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. Marigny served as directeur general des bâtiments, jardins, arts, académies, et manufactures de roi between 1751 and 1773, and 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.’9 An autograph variant of this composition, of similar size but drawn in black chalk alone and somewhat simpler and less finished (fig.1), was formerly in a private collection in Florence, and was recently offered for sale at auction10. Alastair Laing has suggested that the Florence 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 drawings executed on blue paper, here exhibited, thereafter presented to Marigny, the surintendent des bâtiments.
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14 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH RA Sudbury 1727-1788 London Wooded Landscape with Cattle and Goats Black and white chalk, with stumping, on buff paper, backed. Originally of oval format, and later made up, probably by the artist, at the lower left and right corners and the upper left corner. 229 x 294 mm. (9 x 11 1/2 in.) PROVENANCE: Mr. McPeake; His sale, London, Puttick & Simpson, 3 June 1943, lot 56 (bt. Yakaloff); Agnew’s, London, in 1944; Sold by them to Francis Falconer Madan, Oxford; Bought back by Agnew’s, London; Sold by them in 1944 to Roger Mellor Makins, later 1st Baron Sherfield, Washington, D.C.; Agnew’s, London; Sold by them to Sir Raymond and Lady Smith, Caracas, Venezuela; Private collection, Connecticut; Agnew’s, London, in 1989; Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Witt; Their sale, London, Sotheby’s, 10 November 1994, lot 50; Spink, London, in 1995; Acquired from them by Bernadette and William M. B. Berger, Denver, Colorado; The Berger Collection Educational Trust, Denver. LITERATURE: John Hayes, The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough, New Haven and London, 1970, Vol.I, p.168, no.258 (not illustrated); Hugh Belsey, ‘A Second Supplement to John Hayes’s The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough’, Master Drawings, 2008, p.442, no.258. EXHIBITED: London, Agnew’s, 71st Annual Exhibition of Water-Colour Drawings, 1944, no.68; London, Agnew’s, 116th Exhibition of Watercolours and Drawings, 1989, no.81; London, Spink, Annual Exhibition of Watercolours and Drawings, 1995, no.4; Denver, Denver Art Museum (on loan). Landscape drawings account for over three-quarters of Thomas Gainsborough’s output as a draughtsman, and include some of his finest works. The musician William Jackson, a close friend of the artist and an early biographer, wrote of him that, ‘If I were to rest his reputation upon one point; it should be on his Drawings...No man ever possessed methods so various in producing effect, and all excellent…his works, therefore, in this branch of the art, approach nearer to perfection than his paintings.’1 Overburdened with portrait commissions, the artist seems to have turned to the freedom of landscape drawing as a means of relaxation. As he wrote in a letter to Jackson, ‘I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol[a] da Gam[ba] and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness & ease.’2 In the words of the scholar John Hayes, ‘Gainsborough was a prolific, indeed compulsive, landscape draughtsman.’3 His landscape drawings were done for his own pleasure, and evince a deeply personal, and often quite poetic, view of nature. Such landscapes were not meant to be topographically accurate, and were almost always imaginary views. The drawings exist in varying degrees of finish, and utilize a range of different techniques; they are, in fact, among his most experimental works as a draughtsman. Gainsborough apparently never sold any of his drawings, although he is thought to have given away some of them as presents. As Susan Sloman has pointed out, ‘During his lifetime Gainsborough’s drawings were known to an inner circle of friends, artist and connoisseurs, but not to the wider public.’4 This large, finished landscape drawing, of remarkable richness of colour, may be dated to the late 1760s or early 1770s. At this time Gainsborough was living and working in Bath, and his landscapes, previously quite rustic in spirit, began to take on a more classical air, with echoes of the paintings of Claude and Rubens that the artist would have seen in private collections in the area. It was also at this time that Gainsborough was experimenting with various combinations of ink, chalk, watercolour and varnish in his landscape drawings. The artist produced a number of other highly finished landscape drawings in the late 1760s and early 1770s, all of about the same size, which may be seen as part of his stated desire to imbue his drawings with the depth and intensity of his oil paintings.
The composition of the present sheet was further developed in a very large, varnished oil sketch of a Rocky Wooded Landscape with Drovers and Cattle (fig.1), painted in oil and watercolour on six sheets of paper joined together and mounted onto canvas, which is today in the Faringdon Collection at Buscot Park in Berkshire5. The Buscot Park picture was one of only a handful of landscape drawings that the artist exhibited in London in his lifetime, as one of ‘Two Landscapes, Drawings, in imitation of oil painting’ that were shown, alongside eight smaller landscapes, at the Royal Academy in 1772. They were described by Horace Walpole, in a note in his copy of the exhibition catalogue, as of ‘very great effect, but neat, like needlework’. In his 1970 catalogue raisonné of Gainsborough’s drawings, John Hayes compares the present sheet, on stylistic grounds, with a drawing of a Wooded Landscape with Figures and Cattle in a Stream (fig.2), formerly in the collection of Lord Wharton in London6. He points out that ‘the treatment of the foliage and foreground detail, the hatching in the sky and the outlining of the clouds’7 are similar in both drawings. Hayes further notes that a painted copy of the present sheet by the artist Thomas Barker of Bath (1769-1847), ‘which varies only in the inclusion of a herdsman and dog and the omission of the birds’8, was sold at auction in London in 1964.
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15 GAETANO GANDOLFI San Matteo della Decima 1734-1802 Bologna The Head of a Young Woman in Profile Pen and brown ink. 145 x 103 mm. (5 3/4 x 4 in.) PROVENANCE: Savelli Dipinti Antichi, Bologna, in 1996. LITERATURE: Donatella Biagi Maino et al, “Idea Prima”: Disegni e modelli preparatori, pittura di tocco dal ‘500 al ‘700, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, 1996, pp.112-115; Fausto Gozzi, Ubaldo, Gaetano e Mauro Gandolfi: le incisioni, exhibition catalogue, San Matteo della Decima, 2002, unpaginated, under no.10; Hamburg, Dr. Moeller & Cie., Meisterzeichnungen / Master Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 2009, unpaginated, under no.1, fig.1; Hamburg, Dr. Moeller & Cie., Portraits: Vom 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert, 2020, unpaginated, fig.1. EXHIBITED: Bologna, Savelli Dipinti Antichi, “Idea Prima”: Disegni e modelli preparatori, pittura di tocco dal ‘500 al ‘700, 1996, unnumbered. Gaetano Gandolfi worked almost exclusively in his native Bologna, where he established a prosperous and successful career. As a student at the Accademia Clementina, where he is documented from 1751, he won two medals for sculpture and four medals for his drawings. His brief period of study in Venice in 1760 was of great importance, and is reflected in the dynamic brushwork and rich colours of his paintings. Gandolfi received numerous commissions for altarpieces for churches throughout Emilia and elsewhere, and also worked extensively as a fresco painter. One of his first important decorative projects was a ceiling fresco of the Four Elements, painted for the Palazzo Odorici in Bologna in collaboration with the quadraturista Serafino Barozzi. This was followed by work in several other Bolognese palaces, including the Palazzo Guidotti, the Palazzo Centurione and the Palazzo Montanari. In 1776 Gandolfi painted a massive canvas of The Marriage at Cana for the refectory of the convent of San Salvatore, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna. Another prominent commission was the decoration of the cupola of the church of Santa Maria della Vita, painted between 1776 and 1779 with frescoes of The Virgin in Glory and The Sacrifice of Manoah. In the later years of his career Gandolfi also produced easel pictures of historical and mythological subjects. Throughout his life he remained actively involved in the affairs of the Accademia Clementina, where he taught a class in life drawing. Gandolfi was a gifted draughtsman, and his drawings were highly prized by contemporary and later collectors. Towards the end of his life, he produced a small group of large and highly finished black chalk drawings of classical or mythological subjects, almost certainly intended as independent works of art in their own right, which are often signed and dated between the late 1790s and 1802, the year of his death. The present sheet may be included among a number of elaborate pen and ink drawings of studies of heads – mainly of young women, but also depicting boys, old men and children, and often with several heads on one sheet – that are among Gandolfi’s most appealing works. As James Byam Shaw has noted, ‘these groups of heads, closely juxtaposed, evidently had a great vogue in Bologna and elsewhere in North Italy’1. Characterized by the Gandolfi scholar Donatella Biagi Maino as works ‘of inventive verve and confidence of handling’2, these beautiful, highly finished drawings by Gaetano Gandolfi – some of which were signed – were probably made as autonomous works of art for sale to collectors. At the same time, however, the precise nature of the artist’s penwork made them particularly suitable for reproduction as prints, and indeed several of Gandolfi’s drawings of this sort were engraved in the 1780s by his pupil Luigi Tadolini. It may be noted that Gandolfi was already producing finished capricci drawings of this type by the 1770s – to judge from a drawing of four heads, dated 1777, in the collection of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan – and he continued to do so until at least the late 1790s. Gaetano’s son Mauro Gandolfi (1764-1834) also produced several pen drawings of this type.
actual size
A splendid example of the artist’s refined draughtsmanship, this drawing is a preparatory study, of identical size and in reverse, for an etching by Gaetano Gandolfi of The Head of a Woman in Profile to the Right3. One of the artist’s rare forays into the print medium, this small etching (fig.1) has been dated to the late 1770s or 1780s. (The etching also appears along with six other prints by Gandolfi, two of them signed, in a single large sheet; examples are in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna and in a private collection4.) As Biagi Maino has noted of the present sheet, ‘This drawing, both for its preparatory character but especially for the superb quality of draughtsmanship and invention…should be considered an important addition to the catalogue of drawings by Gandolfi.’5 In a recent catalogue of the Gandolfi family’s work as printmakers, another scholar has described the present sheet as ‘an outstanding pen and ink drawing’6 by Gaetano. A nearly identical head of a young woman reappears on a drawing by Gaetano Gandolfi of eight different studies of heads (fig.2), which was on the art market in London in 1973 and again recently in Germany7. Similar female heads may also be found throughout the artist’s painted oeuvre, such as a Portrait of a Young Woman in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna8 and a painting of the Head of a Young Girl, signed and dated ‘G. Gandolfi 1763’, in a Bolognese private collection9. It has been suggested that some of these heads may be portraits of the artist’s young wife Giovanna Spisani, whom he married in 1763, and who posed for a number of paintings by her husband. Exhibited alongside the present sheet in Bologna in 1996 was a pendant drawing by Gaetano Gandolfi of a bearded man facing right10, of identical dimensions. That drawing is, however, unrelated to any known print. A fine impression of the etching for which this drawing is a preparatory study, illustrated below as fig.1, is sold with the present sheet.
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16 LUIGI SABATELLI Florence 1772-1850 Milan Rinaldo and Armida on a Chariot Drawn by Dragons Pen and brown ink, over traces of an underdrawing in pencil, on buff paper, with framing lines in brown ink. Signed Luigi Sabatelli fece in brown ink at the lower left. 424 x 699 mm. (16 1/4 x 27 1/2 in.) [image] 480 x 754 mm. (18 7/8 x 29 3/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Probably the Marchese Pier Roberto Capponi, Florence; By descent to his son, Marchese Gino Capponi, Florence; Thence by descent; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 1998; Private collection, London. LITERATURE: Luigi Sabatelli, Cenni biografici sul cav. Prof. Luigi Sabatelli scritti da lui medesimo e raccolti dal figlio Gaetano, pittore, Milan, 1900, p.34, ‘Disegni a penna’ no.2 (‘Armida che trasporta Rinaldo sul carro di Amore (Tasso); largo 0,70, alto 0,43.’); Edgar Peters Bowron and Joseph J. Rishel, ed., Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia and Houston, 2000, pp.553-554, no.400 (entry by Stefano Susinno), where dated c.1794; Ann Percy and Mimi Cazort, Italian Master Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2004, unpaginated, under no.62; David Franklin, ‘Two New Drawings by Sabatelli Father and Son’, Master Drawings, Autumn 2009, p.347. EXHIBITED: New York and London, Colnaghi, Master Drawings, 1998, no.37; Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century, 2000, no.400. The Florentine artist Luigi Sabatelli enjoyed the patronage and support of a number of important figures from almost the very start of his career. The financial support of the Marchese Pier Roberto Capponi allowed the young artist to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and to continue his training in Rome and Venice between 1789 and 1797. Another significant patron was the Pisan collector Tommaso Puccini, a future director of the Uffizi, who commissioned a series of highly finished drawings of literary subjects from the young artist. In Rome in the early 1790s Sabatelli studied with the painter Domenico Corvi, and was also a frequent participant in the informal drawing study sessions hosted by Felice Giani at his studio, known as the Accademia dei Pensieri. He met several Italian and foreign artists working in Rome, notably Vincenzo Camuccini, Giuseppe Bossi, François-Xavier Fabre and Antoine-Jean Gros. On his return to Florence in 1797, Sabatelli began working as a fresco painter, decorating several local churches and the palazzi of the Gerini, Bardi, Spinelli, Tempi, Bartolommei and Guicciardini families. He also produced splendid portrait drawings in pen and ink, his sitters including members of his own family and those of a number of noble Florentine families, as well as several significant figures in the cultural life of Florence at the onset of the 19th century. Sabatelli was appointed a professor of painting at the Accademia di Brera in Milan in 1808, and lived and worked in the city for the remainder of his long career. Although he executed many decorative projects in Milan and elsewhere in Lombardy, he continued to be active in his native Florence, notably between 1820 and 1825, when he painted the frescoes in the Sala dell’Iliade in the Palazzo Pitti. These show the influence of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who was in Florence around this time and with whom Sabatelli became friendly. (The influence of Ingres is similarly evident in the Italian artist’s portrait drawings of this period.) Sabatelli worked in the Florentine oratory of San Filippo Neri in 1830 and undertook the decoration of the Villa Puccini in Pistoia in 1840 and the Tribuna di Galileo of the Palazzo della Specola in Florence the following year. In his posthumously published autobiography, Sabatelli recalled of his youthful period in Rome in the 1790s that he became known for his elaborate drawings in pen and ink of scenes from Greek, Roman and Florentine history, as well as episodes from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton and the Old
Testament. These highly finished, independent pen drawings, and the engravings derived from them, were greatly admired, and many were acquired by collectors. Indeed, the artist claimed to have earned some one hundred zecchini over four years from the sale of these drawings1. A talented printmaker in his own right, Sabatelli also provided finished drawings for engravers. Among his engraved designs are the series of Pensieri diversi, published in Rome in 1795, and The Plague of Florence, inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron and published in 1801. A superb example of the vigour of Sabatelli’s bold and inventive pen draughtsmanship, which has been aptly described as ‘virtuoso calligraphy’2, this very large drawing may be dated to the artist’s years in Rome, between 1789 and 1794, and in particular towards the end of that period. The drawing is listed among the artist’s finished pen drawings in his autobiography, and takes its subject – the abduction of the Christian knight Rinaldo by the sorceress Armida – from Canto XIV of Torquato Tasso’s 16th century epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata. Having fallen asleep under Armida’s magic spell, Rinaldo is bound with a chain of roses, lilies and woodbines and taken in her chariot to her palace on the Island of the Fortunate. Interestingly, Sabatelli has here shown the chariot drawn by dragons, in keeping with Tasso’s original text, instead of the horses found in almost all other depictions of this theme. Indeed, the striking and original conception of the creatures is typical of the inventiveness and imagination common to much of Sabatelli’s work. Despite the popularity of Tasso’s epic poem among artists, the theme of the abduction of Rinaldo by Armida in her chariot is relatively rare in Italian art, and Sabatelli may have taken inspiration for the composition of this drawing from Guercino’s ceiling fresco of the same subject in the Palazzo Costaguti in Rome3, painted around 1621. At least two other large and highly finished pen and ink drawings by Sabatelli take their subjects from the Gerusalemme Liberata. A drawing of Armida Abandoned is in a private collection4, while a more obscure subject from the poem, Ismen Populating the Forest of Saron with Demons, is depicted in a drawing now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa5. (A further pen and ink drawing from Tasso, The Infernal Council from Canto IV, is mentioned in Sabatelli’s autobiography.6) As David Franklin has noted, ‘The purpose of the Tasso drawings has not yet been established, but since Sabatelli was an accomplished printmaker and the studies are so finished and complete, it is possible they were intended as designs for a new (but unrealized) large-format edition of the text. Perhaps more likely, they were created as works in their own right, maybe even meant playfully to imitate the permanence of engravings, to judge by the tight, even hatching. The complete lack of wash and the bold, virtuoso handling would strongly support the interpretation that these drawings were always intended as demonstration sketches of a type the artist sometimes sold to private collectors.’7 This impressive drawing of Rinaldo and Armida on a Chariot drawn by Dragons has much in common with a series of large and highly finished pen drawings commissioned from the artist by Tommaso Puccini. An erudite connoisseur, Puccini seems to have had a particular penchant for dramatic and visionary scenes from literature, and encouraged Sabatelli to treat such themes in his work. Several very large pen drawings made by Sabatelli for Puccini are today in the Uffizi, including Philopoemen Kills Machanidas, signed and dated 17938, and two versions of Athenodorus and the Ghost9. Among other comparable drawings of similar size and technique are The Madness of Orlando in the Philadelphia Museum of Art10, which, like the present sheet, was once in the Capponi collection in Florence, and several works in private collections, including two large pen and ink drawings of Dido Abandoned11 and Dante Conversing with Farinata degli Uberti12. The present sheet was one of fourteen large pen and ink drawings by Luigi Sabatelli recorded in the collection of the 19th century Florentine historian and patriot Marchese Gino Capponi (1792-1876), the son of the artist’s first patron, Pier Roberto Capponi (1752-1839). The younger Capponi must have inherited a number of these drawings from his father, although some presumably later works bear the artist’s dedications to Gino Capponi himself13.
17 SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE PRA Bristol 1769-1830 London The Beautiful Washerwoman Black and red chalk, with stumping. 632 x 413 mm. (24 7/8 x 16 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, London and Fryston Hall, Castleford, West Yorkshire; By descent to his granddaughter, Mary Innes-Ker, Duchess of Roxburghe, London and West Horsley Place, Surrey; Her posthumous sale, (‘The Duchess: Property & Precious Objects from the Estate of Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe’), London, Sotheby’s, 27-28 May 2015, lot 71; Daniel Katz, London. EXHIBITED: Saltaire, The Royal Yorkshire Jubilee Exhibition, 1887. The leading portrait painter of his generation in England, and indeed arguably in Europe, Sir Thomas Lawrence was from his early childhood recognized as a brilliant and gifted draughtsman, and it was through his drawings and pastels that he established his initial reputation. His abilities as a draughtsman were all the more notable in that it was a skill in which he was, for the most part, self-taught. (From the age of eleven, when his father declared bankruptcy, Lawrence, with the sales of his portrait drawings, became the principal breadwinner in his family. He briefly attended the Royal Academy Schools, but was unable to continue his studies due to the pressure of completing portrait commissions.) When the young artist made his debut at the Royal Academy in 1787, he showed a total of seven works, all of which were drawings or pastels, a medium he used well into the 1790s. Lawrence started his career producing portrait drawings and pastels on commission, first in Bath and later in London, and began to take up oil painting around 1786. Appointed painter-in-ordinary to King George III in 1792, following the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lawrence became a full member of the Royal Academy two years later, at the age of twenty-four. He continued to enjoy Royal patronage throughout his career, and received a knighthood in 1815. Five years later, in 1820, he was elected president of the Royal Academy. It was Lawrence’s close study and appreciation of the great draughtsmen of the past that led him to assemble one of the finest collection of Old Master drawings ever seen in Britain. He retained an exalted position in the artistic establishment in England until his death in 1830, at the age of sixty. As Michael Levey has noted, Lawrence was ‘a draughtsman of instinctive, masterly ability, drawing with a facility far beyond anything that Reynolds could attempt, and with a precision of outline alien to Gainsborough.’1 The importance of drawing in the painter’s artistic process throughout his career cannot be overstated. Lawrence began each portrait painting by drawing in black chalk on the canvas, and created a large number of preparatory studies as well as autonomous portrait drawings, deftly executed in red and black chalks. (Although he had first established his reputation as a gifted portraitist in pastels, he seems to have given up working in pastel in the middle of the 1790s, and after 1795 his drawings were mainly executed in black and red chalk.) Many of Lawrence’s finest portrait drawings were intended to be framed and glazed for exhibition and display, and from around 1810 onwards these were often engraved, at the artist’s behest, by the printmaker Frederick Christian Lewis. The vast majority of the artist’s portrait drawings have remained in the families of the descendants of the sitters, with the result that relatively few examples are today in museum collections. Lawrence’s refined draughtsmanship was much admired in his lifetime – as his good friend Lavinia Banks recalled of him, shortly after his death, ‘The Taste, the delicacy, the elegance of his drawings was unrivalled and unique, and rendered them deservedly prized and admired’2 – and it has been noted that, among his contemporaries, only Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in France may be said to have
been his equal as a draughtsman in the delicacy and precision of his technique. Most of Lawrence’s extant drawings are portrait studies, and only a handful of drawings of landscape or history subjects, or academic studies, are known. The artist’s skill continued to be praised long after his death. As Cosmo Monkhouse noted, ‘As a draughtsman, especially of faces and hands, he is scarcely equaled by any English artist…His most perfect works are his drawings in crayon and pencil, which he continued to execute throughout his life.’3 Writing in 1913, another noted art critic commented that, ‘Of the many who admire Sir Thomas Lawrence, as one of the most individual and fascinating of English portrait painters, few realise that he was greater with the pencil than with the brush; and that the grace and elegance which characterise his art are more superbly expressed in the delicate tints of water-colour than in the heavier, more solid, and more opaque oil pigments…Lawrence thought in pencil what he expressed in oil. Unlike his great contemporaries and predecessors, he found it necessary to make elaborate drawings from his sitters before setting down their likeness in color. Thus it is almost only in his drawings that he attained that perfect ease and spontaneity of expression which is the hall-mark of a great master.’4 Similar assessments of Lawrence’s drawings have been expressed in modern scholarship. As Levey has noted, ‘It is not just that Lawrence had been profoundly trained – self-trained – as a draughtsman and that he continued to draw expertly throughout his life. For him, drawing was the method whereby he pinned down his prime visual sensations.’5 The artist was also particularly admired for his depictions of young children, whom he portrayed with great sensitivity and charm. Kenneth Garlick has observed that ‘Lawrence was noted for his success not only in drawing children but also in identifying with them. They loved him, and his quick, sympathetic eye could catch their movements to perfection.’6 Executed with delicate touches of black and red chalk, the present sheet is likely datable to the 1790s. It is among the largest known drawings by the artist, and is also unusual in his drawn oeuvre on account of its genre subject. Indeed, this fine drawing can be seen as Lawrence’s contribution to the popular 18th century English genre known as the ‘fancy’ picture; scenes of everyday life that usually involved an element of narrative or storytelling, often of a sentimental nature, and were imbued with ‘quasi-religious or social implications, [and] with an emphasis on poverty, benevolence and sympathy.’7 An antecedent of Victorian subject paintings, the 18th century ‘fancy’ picture included depictions of children, street urchins, maids, market women, shepherds, beggars and so forth, in the form of portraits or character studies. Although he painted very few genre subjects, it may be noted that Lawrence’s diploma work upon his election to the Royal Academy in 1794 was just such a ‘fancy’ painting of a Gypsy Girl, which remains today in the collection of the Royal Academy in London. The first known owner of this large drawing was the poet, politician and patron of the arts Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton (1809-1885). Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Apostles Club, Milnes travelled around Italy and Greece, publishing an account of his tour in 1834. Elected as a Conservative MP for Pontefract in 1837, he was raised to the peerage by Lord Palmerston in 1863. Elected to the Royal Society in 1868, Milnes was a poet and writer, and a noted patron of such authors as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Alfred Lord Tennyson. The present sheet was later inherited by his only son, the Liberal politician and statesman Robert Crewe-Milnes, 1st Marquess of Crewe (1858-1945), who lent the drawing to the Royal Yorkshire Jubilee Exhibition in 1887, and thence passed to his youngest daughter, Lady Mary Evelyn Hungerford Crewe-Milnes, later Mary Innes-Ker, Duchess of Roxburghe (1915-2014).
18 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 of Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux and Louise-Rosalie Gatteaux, as well as the upper part of the seated figure of Edouard Gatteaux, each engraved separately by C.-M.-F. Dien and mounted by Ingres onto another sheet, on which the artist has drawn the background, as well as the standing figure of Mme. Edouard Brame at the right of centre and the figure of Mlle. Anfrye at the extreme left, all in pencil. Most of the lower half of the figure of Edouard Gatteaux, seated 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 (sold for £143,000); 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.812; 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; 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; Hans Eckstein, ‘Romantische Malerei in Deutschland und Frankreich’, Kunst und Künstler, 1931, p.442; 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; Adelyn D. Breeskin, ‘From Maryland Collections: Brilliant Facets of French 19th-Century Art’, The Art Digest, 15 November 1951, p.11; 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.485503 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-Auguste-Dominique 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 (entry by Sigrid Achenbach); Philip Rylands, ed., The Timeless Eye: Master Drawings from the Jan and MarieAnne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1999, pp.182-183, no.84; 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; Patrick Elliott, Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage, exhibition catalogue, Edinburgh, 2019, p.61, no.15. SELECTED EXHIBITIONS: 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, no.165; Paris, Chambre Syndicale de la Curiosité et des BeauxArts, Exposition Ingres, 1921, no.120; Munich, Ludwigsgalerie, Romantische Malerei in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1931, no.43; Springfield, MA, Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, and elsewhere, David and Ingres: Paintings and Drawings, 1939-1940, 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, The J. B. Speed Art Museum and Fort Worth, The 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; Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage, 2019, no.15. ENGRAVED: By Achille Réveil, for Albert Magimel’s Oeuvres de J. A. Ingres, 1851. Among the largest and most ambitious of Ingres’s portrait groups, as well as one of his best-known and most widely exhibited and published works on paper, the present sheet bears a dedication to one of the artist’s closest friends, the sculptor, medal engraver and collector Jacques Edouard Gatteaux (17881881). 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.’3) Gatteaux was a major supporter of Ingres’s work, and assembled a superb collection of his drawings, numbering over one hundred sheets. Unfortunately, most of these were all lost in a fire in his home in Paris during the Commune in 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 family group. The Gatteaux Family is unique in
Ingres’s oeuvre, both in being a retrospective group portrait as well as in its method of composition. Using single portraits made at different times, Ingres has created a composite family group and placed the whole in an elegant interior setting. The artist has here assembled three engravings by ClaudeMarie-François Dien, each 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 engravings 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, executed in fine pencil, the lower half of his friend’s body. Also drawn by the artist in pencil, standing to the left of Edouard Gatteaux, is the figure of Paméla de Gardanne (1824-1862), the orphaned granddaughter of Nicolas-Marie 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. Ingres’s original drawings of M. and Mme. Gatteaux, drawn in 1828 and 1825, respectively, together with the bust-length portrait drawing of their son, dated 1834, all belonged to Edouard Gatteaux and were destroyed in the fire at his home in May 1871. Their appearance is recorded, however, in the engravings made after them by Claude-Marie-François Dien in the 1830s, as well as drawn copies of all three portraits by an unknown hand (figs.1-3), which are now in the Louvre4. 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 years, 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 Dien engraving after Ingres’s lost bust-length portrait drawing of 1834, the lower half of the figure was newly drawn by the artist. (Ingres may, however, have referred to a three-quarter length portrait of Edouard Gatteaux, in a similar but not identical pose to that seen in the present sheet, which is recorded in an engraving by Achille Réveil5. Dated 1851, Réveil’s engraving shows Ingres’s friend seated at a table with his work tools before him, and may record a lost drawing of the same approximate date as the bust-length portrait of 1834.) It appears that, for this large Gatteaux Family, Ingres combined Dien’s bust-length engraving with an entirely new conception of the lower half of Gatteaux’s body, developed from that of the lost three-quarter length portrait drawing engraved by Réveil. This is further suggested by the existence of a preparatory pencil study for the torso and costume of the seated figure of Edouard
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2.
3.
Gatteaux, similar in pose and detail to the same figure in this drawing of The Gatteaux Family, in the collection of the Musée Ingres in Montauban6. A large preparatory study by Ingres for the entire composition of The Gatteaux Family, on several sheets of joined tracing paper, is likewise in the Musée Ingres in Montauban7. This sizeable drawing shows the seated figures full-length, a concept that Ingres abandoned in the final drawing. Also in the Musée Ingres is a half-length pencil study for the standing figure of Paméla de Gardanne8. Ingres produced only three other comparably large and complex, multifigured portrait group drawings, all dated much earlier in his career. These are The Forestier Family of 1806 in the Louvre9, The Family of Lucien Bonaparte, dated 1815, in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge10, and The Constantin Stamaty Family of 1818 in the Louvre11. 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 made12. 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 likely that Ingres made the present sheet with the intention of having it reproduced for this publication13. As Patricia Condon has recently noted of The Gatteaux Family, ‘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.’14 The Gatteaux Family has long been admired as one of Ingres’s most significant works on paper. As early as 1863 it was described by one writer as the finest drawing in the Gatteaux collection; ‘a marvelous work, the sight of which brings great pleasure.’15 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.’16 Extensively published and widely exhibited since 1881, the present sheet remained in the collection of Edouard Gatteaux and his descendants until 1931. In 1932, The Gatteaux Family was acquired by the American attorney, bibliophile and collector Douglas H. Gordon, Jr. (1902-1986), in whose collection it remained for over fifty years17.
19 ADOLPH MENZEL Breslau 1815-1905 Berlin Coffee Time in Kissingen (Kaffeezeit in Kissingen) Gouache and watercolour on card. Laid down. Signed and dated Menzel / 86 in brown ink at the lower right. 116 x 184 mm. (4 5/8 x 7 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Galerie Honrath & von Baerle, Berlin; Ludwig Erdwin Amsinck, Hamburg; By descent to his wife, Marie Helene Antonie Amsinck, Hamburg; Bequeathed by her to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, in 1921 (Inv. 2458); Acquired from the museum by exchange by Karl Haberstock, Berlin, in 1925; Wilhelm Girardet (Junior), Essen, in 1955; Anonymous sale, Cologne, Kunsthaus Lempertz, 30 November 1975, lot 495; Private collection, Switzerland; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 February 2006, lot 4; Katrin Bellinger, London; Acquired from her by a private collector in 2009; Private collection, London. LITERATURE: Berlin, Königliche National-Galerie, Ausstellung von Werken Adolph von Menzels, 1905, p.XXVIII and p.17, no.208; Hugo von Tschudi, Adolph von Menzel: Abbildungen seiner Gemälde und Studien, Munich, 1905, p.XVI, pp.430-431, no.660 (‘Kaffeezeit in Kissingen’); Anton Bettelheim, ed., Biographisches Jahrbuch und Deutscher Nekrolog, Berlin, 1907, p.285; Werner Schmidt, Adolph Menzel: Zeichnungen, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, National-Galerie, 1955, p.218; Berlin, Museum Dahlem, Ausstellung Adolph von Menzel aus Anlass seines 50 Todesjahres, 1955, pp.59-60, no.133; Essen, Museum Folkwang, Freunde des Museums sammeln, exhibition catalogue, 1972, pp.156-157, no.202; Heidi Ebertshaüser, Adolph von Menzel: Das graphische werk, Munich, 1976, Vol.II, p.1422; Peter Betthausen et al, Adolph Menzel 1815-1905: Master Drawings from East Berlin, exhibition catalogue, New York and elsewhere, 1990-1991, p.196, under no.66; Gisold Lammel, Preussens Künstlerrepublik von Blechen bis Liebermann: Berliner Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, 1995, p.188, pl.20 (illustrated in reverse); Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher, ed., Menzel (1815-1905): “la névrose du vrai”, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1996, p.61 and p.443, under no.203; Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher, ed., Adolph Menzel 1815-1905: Between Romanticism and Impressionism, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 1996-1997, p.60 and p.443, under no.203; Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher, ed., Adolph Menzel 1815-1905: Das Labyrinth der Wirklichkeit, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 1997, p.60 and p.346, under no.203; Ute Haug, ‘Provenienzforschung. Die Hamburger Kunsthalle und der Kunsthändler Karl Haberstock in Berlin’, Anzeiger der Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2005, p.63; Bernhard Maaz, ed., Adolph Menzel: radikal real, exhibition catalogue, Munich, 2008, p.129, no.87; Martin Harth, ‘Adolph Menzel: „Alles Zeichnen ist nützlich”, Main Post, 27 May 2008 (incorrectly described as undated); Uwe Fischer, ‘Diskret, abgeschieden und trotzdem in Ruhe genießen’ Werte, 2009, illustrated p.36; Olga Grimm-Weissert, ‘Wie in den besten Jahren: Die Pariser Messen für Handzeichnung starten mit guten Verkäufen’, Handelsblatt, 27 March 2015, p.65; Bernhard Schulz, ‘Sog der Linie’, Der Tagesspiegel, 28 March 2015; Bettina Wohlfarth, ‘Die Jahrhunderte auf drei Messen durchschreiten’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28 March 2015. EXHIBITED: Berlin, Königliche National-Galerie, Ausstellung von Werken Adolph von Menzels, 1905, no.208; Berlin, Museum Dahlem, Ausstellung Adolph von Menzel aus Anlass seines 50 Todesjahres, 1955, no.133; Essen, Museum Folkwang, Freunde des Museums sammeln, 1972, no.202; Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Adolph Menzel: radikal real, 2008, no. 87. One of the finest draughtsmen of the 19th century, Adolph Menzel produced several thousand drawings over the course of a career that lasted nearly seventy-five years. Possessed of great technical virtuosity, he was equally adept at pencil, chalk, watercolour, pastel and gouache, and his oeuvre as a draughtsman is made up of individual sketches of figures and parts of figures, interiors, landscapes and still life subjects, as well as preparatory studies for paintings and finished drawings, watercolours, gouaches and pastels. Although only a small percentage of the drawings Menzel produced were used
in his larger, finished paintings, the artist seems to have regarded most of his drawings as independent works in themselves, and he almost always signed (and often dated) them. From the late 1850s onwards, Menzel tended to use gouache – a kind of opaque watercolour – for his finished compositions on paper. He seems to have preferred the medium for its freedom of handling and for the ability it gave him to be as precise as he wished, particularly on the relatively small scale that he favoured. As the Menzel scholar Claude Keisch has noted, ‘Menzel’s use of gouache, which began in the 1850s, soon superceded his technique in coloured chalks. He adopted it to such an extent that his representations in color became denser and more detailed; he left the generous summarization of forms to his pencil drawings. In presentation, many of these gouaches are actually paintings.’1 The Franconian spa town of Bad Kissingen, near Würzburg, was frequented by Menzel’s sister Emilie Krigar-Menzel and her family, and the artist often accompanied them there. He spent much of his time in Kissingen making drawings of the surroundings and the visitors to the spa. As has been noted of the artist, ‘In his old age he seems to have appreciated the bourgeois tranquillity of the spa and a number of drawings as well as numerous gouaches show that the place provided a constant stream of subjects.’2 Menzel often stayed at the Villa Hailmann at Kurhausstraße 3 (today Martin-Luther-Straße 9) in Kissingen, and from the window of one of the rooms could look down onto the spa garden with its fountain. It was this view that the artist recorded in another small gouache, of similar dimensions to the present sheet and dated the previous year, of a Lady Walking by a Fountain in the Kissingen Spa Garden, today in the Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw3. Although Menzel had first painted a genre subject set in Kissingen in a watercolour of 1874, it was not until the following decade that he produced several small-format gouaches of subjects in the spa town, of which this delightful Coffee Time in Kissingen of 1886 is a very fine example. Works such as the present sheet, writes Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher, ‘suggest more or less comic behaviour, in a convincing image of bourgeois life in the spa town. Menzel is rarely ironic but, rather, his eye is sharpened by a critical faculty of differentiation which has no wish to judge, but to find the characteristic trait which makes the result so eloquent.’4 Like his Parisian city scenes or his paintings of court balls, Menzel’s Kissingen gouaches, despite their generally small scale, are often crowded with figures and full of anecdotal detail. Menzel here captures something of the lively bustle of the spa town, with the artist an amused observer as a young boy attempts to pick up a struggling baby and a man is confronted by a dog tugging at its leash. The first owner of this small gouache was the eminent Hamburg businessman and collector Erdwin Amsinck (1826-1897). Working with the help and advice of the art critic Emil Heilbut, Amsinck assembled a fine collection of contemporary French and German art, which included three small oil paintings and two gouaches by Adolph Menzel. In 1921, almost a quarter of a century after Amsinck’s death, his widow Antonie presented the collection of over 120 paintings to the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Four years later, however, this small gouache was one of eight works deaccessioned by the museum and given, together with 40,500 Marks in cash, to the Berlin dealer Karl Haberstock, in exchange for paintings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Bernardo Bellotto.
Adolph Menzel asleep on a bench in the park at Bad Kissingen, 1904
20 PAUL GAUGUIN Paris 1848-1903 Atuona (Hiva Oa, The Marquesas) The Head of a Breton Woman Black chalk, charcoal and watercolour, on buff paper. A study of legs in pencil on the verso. Inscribed Fran 2627 and numbered 70 in pencil on the verso. 268 x 199 mm. (10 1/2 x 7 3/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Paco Durrio, Paris and Spain, by 1895; Sir John Clermont Witt, London; His posthumous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 19 February 1987, lot 362; Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva. SELECTED 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; 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. Although Paul Gauguin was a brilliant and gifted draughtsman, the practice of drawing was for him a very personal and private act. In his correspondence, he frequently referred to his drawings as ‘documents’, and they were 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 a handful of his drawings were given to such artist friends as Charles Laval, Maxime Maufra, Emile Schuffenecker and Vincent Van Gogh, and a few were sold to the dealer Theo Van Gogh, for the most part Gauguin’s 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 spanned some three decades. While a number of his 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, ‘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 In 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 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, painting and drawing 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 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, since the artist produced very little 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, 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 PontAven, 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 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 also 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
1
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 painted Portrait of a Pont-Avennoise by Gauguin of c.1888 (fig.2), today in a private collection12, and has been identified as one Marie Louarn (or Louarin), who was apparently the only woman in Pont-Aven willing to pose nude, although she always insisted on keeping her coiffe on her head. (As Sérusier later recalled of Louarn, in a letter of 1906 to Maurice Denis, ‘she charmed the solitude of the entire Pont-Aven 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 Marie Lagadu (Marie ‘Black Eyes’), a Breton woman who is thought to have been a serving girl at the pension Gloanec in Pont-Aven, where Gauguin stayed in 1894, and who may have posed for a small Portrait, Presumed to be Marie Lagadu, painted by Gauguin six years earlier, in 188815. 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 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.
2
verso
21 ODILON REDON Bordeaux 1840-1916 Paris The Head of a Young Woman Looking Down (Tête de femme penchée) Watercolour and pencil. Signed ODILON REDON in green ink at the upper right. Several mountmaker’s inscriptions in pencil in the lower margin. 210 x 173 mm. (8 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.) [image] 247 x 173 mm. (9 3/4 x 6 3/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, and by descent to his son, Arï Redon, Paris; Acquired from him by Mira Jacob, Paris; The Mira Jacob – Galerie Le Bateau Lavoir sale, Paris, Drouot Montaigne [Bailly-Pommery and Sotheby’s], 23-24 September 2004, lot 50; Private collection, Brescia. LITERATURE: Klaus Berger, Odilon Redon: Phantasie und Farbe, Cologne, 1964, p.220, no.525; Klaus Berger, Odilon Redon: Fantasy and Colour, New York, 1965, p.220, no.525 (as Girl with Bent Head (after Decamps), and dated c.1904); Jean Selz, Odilon Redon réveillé, Paris, 1971, illustrated in colour p.85; Jean Selz, Odilon Redon, Lugano, 1971, illustrated in colour p.85 (as Inclined Female Head, c.1910); Alec Wildenstein, Odilon Redon: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint et dessiné. Vol.I: Portraits et figures, Paris, 1992, p.124, no.297 (as Tête de Femme Penchée’). EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Barbazanges, Exposition rétrospective d’oeuvres d’Odilon Redon (18401916), 1920, no.176 (as ‘Copie de Decamps’); Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Odilon Redon: Exposition rétrospective de son oeuvre, 1926, no.164 (‘Copie de Decamps’); Paris, Petit Palais, Exposition Odilon Redon, 1934, no.116 (‘Profil’); Paris, Orangerie des Tuileries, Odilon Redon, 1956-1957, no.197 (‘Femme a la tête penchée’); New York, The Museum of Modern Art and Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Bresdin, 1961-1962, no.73 (as Profile of a Woman). Although Odilon Redon had experimented with watercolour as a youth at the beginning of the 1860s, it was not until some thirty years later that he began again to work seriously in the medium. His use of watercolour is largely a hallmark of the later years of his career, ‘when he turned from working primarily in black to enthusiastically embrace color. Indeed, the watercolors seem to have had a somewhat more private role in his oeuvre than his work in other media. Although he discussed his noirs, or fusains (charcoal drawings), his prints, pastels, and paintings in his correspondence – and in his posthumously published writings on art – watercolor is never discussed. The mature watercolors, however, treat themes that concerned the artist throughout his career, and some...are complete and accomplished works of art.’1 This is certainly true of this vibrant late watercolour by Redon. Last exhibited in 1961, the present sheet has remained relatively little known, and unseen by most recent scholars. Redon’s drawings and prints allowed him to express his lifelong penchant for imaginary subject matter, and were dominated by strange and unsettling images of fantastic creatures, disembodied heads and masks, solitary eyes, menacing spiders and other dreamlike forms. For much of the first thirty years of his career Redon worked almost exclusively in black, producing his ‘noirs’ in charcoal and chalk; the drawings he described as ‘mes ombres’, or ‘my shadows’. It was not until 1881, when he was more than forty years old, that Redon first mounted a small exhibition of his work, to almost complete indifference on the part of critics or the public. The following year, however, a second exhibition of drawings and lithographs brought him to the attention of a number of critics. One of these was the novelist J. K. Huysmans, who wrote perceptively that ‘It would be difficult to define the surprising art of M. Redon. Basically, if we except Goya, whose spectral side is less rambling and more real, if we also except Gustave Moreau, of whom M. Redon is, after all, in the healthy parts of his work, a very distant pupil, we shall find his ancestry only among musicians perhaps, and certainly among poets. It is indeed a genuine transposition of one art into another. The masters of this artist are Baudelaire and especially Edgar Poe, whose consoling aphorism that all certitude lies in dreams he appears to have pondered.’2 Redon’s critical reputation
actual size
began to grow, and in 1884 he exhibited at the first Salon des Indépendants. Two years later he was invited to show at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, and the same year exhibited with Les XX, a group of avant-garde artists, writers and musicians in Brussels. Towards the end of the 19th century Redon began to move away from working mainly in charcoal and black chalk, in favour of a new emphasis on colour, chiefly using the medium of pastel but also watercolour, oil paint and distemper. Indeed, after about 1900 he seems to have almost completely abandoned working in black and white. Like his noirs, his pastels of floral still lives and portraits were popular with a few collectors, and several were included in exhibitions of his work in Paris and abroad. Despite this change in direction, however, Redon’s work remained unpopular with the public at large, and it was left to a few enlightened collectors to support the artist in his later years. Nevertheless, an entire room was devoted to Redon’s work at the seminal Armory Show held in New York in 1913, an honour shared by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh. Redon’s watercolours reflect a more reserved side of his experiments with colour, and his work in this fluid medium seems to have been done largely for his own pleasure. His late watercolours were never exhibited in his lifetime, and seem to have been retained by the artist until his death, after which a number of examples were sold by his widow to private collectors such as Jacques Zoubaloff. Redon’s work as a watercolourist was first seen by the public only in posthumous exhibitions of his work, such as that held at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in 1917 or at the Galerie Barbazanges three years later, in which the present sheet was shown for the first time. The subject of this magnificent, glowing late watercolour – described by the Redon scholar Alec Wildenstein as a ‘woman, young and with a rebellious pout, her hair dripping with water, [who] seems to come out of the waves’3 – is depicted enclosed by a sort of colourful aura or nimbus; a motif found in a number of Redon’s paintings, watercolours and pastels of the second decade of the 20th century. Like many of Redon’s works, the subject of this watercolour remains enigmatic. Throughout his career Redon produced paintings, pastels and drawings of heads in profile; often idealized, sometimes grotesque, and always somewhat mysterious. In remarkably fresh condition, this watercolour once belonged to Redon’s only son, Arï Redon (18891972), who inherited the bulk of the contents of his father’s studio. (The present sheet has, in fact, occasionally been regarded as a portrait of Arï Redon as a child, but has more generally been identified as the head of a young girl, despite some superficial similarities with the appearance of Redon’s son at the age of around ten or eleven.4) In 1920 Arï Redon organized the retrospective exhibition of his father’s work at the Galérie Barbazanges in Paris, which included this watercolour from his collection. Most of the rich assortment of works by Redon inherited by his son was presented to the Louvre, in accordance with his wishes, by Arï’s widow Suzanne in 1982, ten years after his death. The present sheet, however, was acquired directly from Arï Redon by the Parisian dealer and collector Mira Jacob (1912-2004). Jacob opened her gallery in Paris, called Le Bateau-Lavoir after the famous artist’s studios in Montmartre, in 1955. Located on the rue de Seine, the gallery specialized in drawings and prints by artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular emphasis on Symbolist works. Apart from her activities as a gallerist, Jacob owned an impressive private collection of drawings and prints, dominated by the work of Redon and Paul Delvaux. She held two exhibitions of prints and drawings by Redon at Le Bateau-Lavoir, in 1969 and 1979, and translated the artist’s memoirs A soi-même into English in 1986. Jacob assembled a personal collection of works by Odilon Redon of great breadth and variety, much of it acquired from Arï Redon.
22 EMIL NOLDE Nolde 1867-1956 Seebüll Head of a South Sea Island Woman (Bildnis einer Südseeinsulanerin) Watercolour and gouache, brush and black ink, on rice straw paper. Signed Nolde. in pencil at the lower right. 522 x 371 mm. (20 1/2 x 14 5/8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Acquired by a private collector in December 1921; Thence by descent until 2015. Born Emil Hansen, Emil Nolde took his name of his birthplace, on the border of Germany and Denmark, in 1902. He grew up and spent much of his life in the province of Schleswig-Holstein, and apart from some time spent in Berlin was never far from the sea. His first studio was a hut on the beach on the island of Alsen, and there he delighted in observing the sea at close hand. This obsession with the sea and its power was to remain with him throughout his career, and provided the inspiration for a large number of paintings and watercolours. Nolde was briefly a member of the expressionist group Die Brücke in 1906-1907 and the Berlin Secession between 1908 and 1910, but eventually left both groups. In 1912 he also exhibited with the Der Blauer Reiter group, although he was never a member. Despite being a successful and highly regarded artist, Nolde found himself, at the age of seventy, crushed by the Nazi party’s official condemnation of modernism in art. In 1937 he was declared a ‘degenerate’ artist by the Nazis, and nearly fifty of his works were included in the Entartete Kunst (‘Degenerate Art’) exhibition held that year. Over a thousand of his works – more than those of any other artist – were confiscated from museums and private collections, as well as from his studio, and many of his paintings and drawings were destroyed. In 1941 he was expelled from the Reichskunstkammer (the Reich Chamber of Art), and was forbidden to paint, even in private, and was also prohibited from exhibiting or selling his work. As a result Nolde turned towards working on paper, producing a large number of small watercolours and gouaches that he referred to as his ‘unpainted pictures’. Nolde produced watercolours almost continuously from around 1908 onwards, and the medium would come to dominate his output over oil paintings. As one scholar has noted, ‘Numerically...it is the watercolours which occupy pride of place in his oeuvre: indeed, he can claim to have been one of the most prolific watercolourists of the twentieth century – one of the relatively few modern artists to devote such close attention to what seemed to many an old-fashioned medium. In his hands, watercolour revealed new possibilities...It was the medium to which he would confide his most intimate thoughts...It was also the one in which he felt most thoroughly at home.’1 This large and striking watercolour was drawn in New Guinea in the early months of 1914. Nolde and his wife Ada visited the island – the southeastern part of which was, at the time, Germany’s main colonial territory in the Pacific – as part of a scientific expedition organized and funded by the German government. Unlike Paul Gauguin in Tahiti before him, or Max Pechstein in Palau at about the same time, Nolde seems not to have gone to German New Guinea with the romantic idea of seeking an alternative way of life, but rather for the purposes of study. As the Nolde scholar Jill Lloyd has written of this period, ‘Like most Expressionists, Nolde displayed a growing interest in the art of non-European cultures during this period...Nolde’s enthusiasm for what he imagined to be the pure and childlike qualities of ‘primitive’ peoples, and his admiration for the expressive vitality of non-European art, reached a peak in 1913 when he decided to join an ethnographic and demographic expedition to German New Guinea. His journey overland through Russia, Manchuria, Korea, Japan, China, Manila and the Palau Islands resulted in a series of lively sketches, depicting the people and situations he encountered. In New Guinea he painted large, luminous watercolours of native heads, as well as a series of oil paintings...In 1916 the German Colonial Office bought 50 of Nolde’s watercolours as a demographic record, despite their stylistic boldness and Nolde’s Romantic response to the New Guinea peoples.’2
In a letter sent while on his journey, Nolde wrote, ‘All these countries are so unique, the people, the animals, the plants, everything is so strange, not always beautiful, but always interesting.’3 The artist painted only a few oil paintings during this trip, and the bulk of his output was in the form of watercolours and drawings. Many of these were confiscated on his journey back to Germany, during which World War I broke out, and were only recovered by the artist from a warehouse in England in 1921. The watercolour portraits and head studies that Nolde produced in New Guinea are invariably frontal images that are direct and reflect the artist’s personal encounter with the subject; as one scholar has noted of these works, ‘The sense of confrontation suggests the challenge of dealing with one’s own otherness.’4 Nolde’s autobiographical recollections of his time in New Guinea show how closely he studied the inhabitants, and recorded their appearance: ‘The other natives put white paint onto their foreheads as a sign of mourning. At dances they covered their bodies with light-coloured dots and lines, sometimes also blue. They rubbed lime into their hair to rid it of bugs, which made it a curious brown or rather brownish-red. All that made their appearance even more interesting.’5 On his trip to New Guinea, Nolde developed a watercolour technique of translucent layers of colour over outline drawings in pen or brushed ink. The present sheet, previously unpublished, is a particularly fine example of his head studies of native subjects of this period. Among stylistically comparable head studies of South Sea islanders by the artist are a large group of watercolours, all of similar dimensions to the present sheet, in the Stiftung Seebüll Ada und Emil Nolde in Neukirchen6. Another significant group of watercolour head studies of this type is in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin7. As Peter Vergo has written of the artist’s trip to the South Seas, ‘Nolde’s most vivid images brought back from the Pacific remain his figure drawings and watercolours, particularly the powerful series of watercolour heads, both male and (occasionally) female. These, for the most part represented singly, are often shown wearing the characteristic headdresses and ornaments of the New Guinea tribespeople, “as colourful as parakeets, with flowers and brightly coloured feathers in their hair”, according to Ada Nolde’s recollection.’8 The scholar Jill Lloyd adds that, ‘The South Seas journey, which terminated with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, was a turning-point in Nolde’s art. Coinciding with the end of the heroic years of firstgeneration Expressionism, it marked the end of the artist’s engagement with modern, urban subjects. Nolde’s objections to colonialism, which he believed detrimental to the pure racial integrity and creative originality of indigenous peoples, confirmed his mistrust in the progress of modern civilization. From this time Nolde drew inspiration more exclusively from the recurrent cycles of nature, peopling his paintings with primitivist figures from the Bible, from fables, or from the wells of his imagination.’9 Manfred Reuther, director of the Stiftung Nolde, has confirmed the authenticity of this hitherto unknown watercolour, which had remained in the same private collection (fig.1) since 1921, only a few years after it was drawn. The present sheet is accompanied by a photo-certificate from Dr. Reuther.
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23 EGON SCHIELE Tulln 1890-1918 Vienna Portrait of August Lederer Black crayon. Signed and dated EGON / SCHIELE / 1918 in pencil at the lower left. Inscribed and numbered A. L. / Nr. 1. and 56. / E. L. in pencil in the verso. 463 x 293 mm. (18 1/4 x 11 5/8 in.) PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist by August Lederer, Vienna; By descent to his son Erich August Lederer, Vienna and Geneva; By descent to his wife, Elisabeth Lederer, Geneva; Acquired from her estate in 1998 by De Pury & Luxembourg Art, Geneva; Acquired from them in 1999 by Ronald S. Lauder, New York; Acquired from him by a private collection; Anonymous sale (‘Property of a Distinguished European Gentleman’), London, Christie’s, 7 February 2013, lot 221; Thomas Le Claire, Hamburg, in 2014; Private collection. LITERATURE: Renée Price, ed., Egon Schiele: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2005-2006, p.316, no.D158; Agnes Husslein-Arco and Jane Kallir, ed., Egon Schiele: Self-Portraits and Portraits, exhibition catalogue, Vienna, 2011, p.201, no.89; London, Christie’s, Impressionist/Modern Works on Paper, 19 June 2013, under lot 119; Hamburg, Le Claire Kunst, Modern Line. New Acquisitions: Works on Paper, Sculptures, Paintings, 2014, no.7. EXHIBITED: New York, Neue Galerie, Egon Schiele: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, 2005-2006, no.D158; Vienna, Belvedere, Egon Schiele: Self-Portraits and Portraits, 2011, no.89; Liverpool, Tate Liverpool, Life in Slow Motion: Egon Schiele / Francesca Woodman, 2018, unnumbered. In a brief artistic career that lasted some twelve years, Egon Schiele produced a few hundred paintings and nearly three thousand drawings and watercolours. Born in the town of Tulln, on the Danube northwest of Vienna, Schiele drew obsessively from an early age. In 1906, he was accepted at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, where at sixteen years old he was the youngest student. In 1908 he exhibited his work in public for the first time, and the following year was one of several young artists who left the Academy and established the Neukunstgruppe (New Art Group), exhibiting their work at the Kunstsalon Pisko in Vienna. Through this exhibition Schiele met several important collectors and art critics, who began to acquire and promote his work. He also received a number of portrait commissions, although he continued to struggle financially. After his first solo exhibition in Vienna in 1911, Schiele settled outside the city, living in the village of Neulengbach. In 1912 he was arrested there on the alleged kidnapping of a minor – one of several village children who had posed for the artist – and was imprisoned for just over three weeks. The artist was eventually acquitted of the charges, but was found guilty of public immorality on account of the indecent imagery of some of his drawings. After his release from prison Schiele returned to Vienna, and his work took on a less overtly erotic tone, with allegories, landscapes and urban scenes becoming more prominent, alongside portraits. It was not until the last year of his life that he began to achieve a modest amount of financial success. With the critical and financial triumph of his one-man exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 1918, when every one of his works was sold, Schiele’s reputation was secured. Following the death of Gustav Klimt in February 1918, he was firmly established as the leading avant-garde artist in Vienna. Sadly, this late taste of success was short-lived, as the artist died in October 1918 at the age of just twenty-eight, a victim of the worldwide Spanish flu pandemic. Around 1917 Schiele’s drawings began to display a distinct change in his approach to the depiction of the figure, with a new emphasis on line over colour. As the Schiele scholar Jane Kallir has written, ‘During the last years of his life, the pace of Schiele’s artistic development slowed markedly. The stylistic shifts that occurred between 1917 and the artist’s death in October 1918 are almost imperceptible, and they evidence none of the volatility that characterizes his work through mid 1915…Soft pencil gives way to black crayon, which yields heavier, more even lines that are less prone to fluctuations in density and
strength. The artist’s contours now hew exclusively to the requirements of representational accuracy, with little latitude for expressive deviation…Overall, Schiele’s palette is more subdued and naturalistic than ever before. He was less concerned with color than with volume and shape, and increasingly he was driven to explore his subjects through drawing alone.’1 Drawn in the final year of Schiele’s short life, the present sheet is a portrait of the Viennese industrialist and art collector August Lederer (1857-1936). August Lederer (fig.1), his wife Serena and eldest son Erich were among the artist’s most significant patrons. The second wealthiest family in Vienna, after the Rothschilds, the Lederers assembled a superb art collection, mostly devoted to artists of the Vienna Secession. They were the most important patrons and collectors of the work of Gustav Klimt, by whom they owned some twenty paintings and numerous drawings, although much of the collection was destroyed during the Second World War. It was through Klimt that Schiele was first introduced to the Lederer family in 1912, and he became especially close to their young son Erich Lederer (18961985), a budding collector who greatly admired the artist’s work. Schiele was to spend Christmas and New Year of 1912 as a guest on the Lederer estate in Györ in Hungary, when he began work on a painted portrait of the fifteen-year-old Erich, commissioned by the sitter. It is said that, upon first meeting Schiele, August Lederer asked him if he was as good as his son Erich said he was. In response, the young artist, then aged twenty-two, took out some paper, pencils and watercolours and, looking into a hallway mirror, produced a striking self-portrait drawing on the spot2. Over the next few years Schiele established an enduring friendship with the Lederer family, often visiting them at their home in Vienna and occasionally giving Erich drawing lessons. As Alessandra Comini has noted, ‘The patronage of this sympathetic and influential family was an important factor in Schiele’s eventual personal rehabilitation and one which deepened his appreciation of and interest in others.’3 August and Serena Lederer always remained somewhat aloof from Schiele, however, and only owned one other painting by him, apart from the portrait of their son, along with several drawings. Erich Lederer, on the other hand, became a lifelong friend of the artist and continued to collect his drawings for many years after Schiele’s death. As has been noted, in this drawing, ‘deftly sketched in only a few moments, Schiele sensitively captures the formally attired sitter, looking off to the left, a rather remote figure.’4 The artist produced drawings of every member of the Lederer family, including three other portraits of August Lederer, all drawn in 1918, which were acquired by the sitter and share the same later provenance as the present sheet. A stylistically comparable drawing, showing Lederer facing to the right, was on the art market in 20135, while another charcoal drawing of him looking to the left is in a private collection6. A third portrait drawing of the same date, again showing Lederer looking to the left, is also in a private collection7. The authenticity of this drawing has been confirmed by Jane Kallir, who has assigned it the catalogue raisonné number D.2455a in her archives.
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24 HENRI MATISSE Le Cateau-Cambrésis 1869-1954 Nice Portrait of Janie Bussy Black chalk on watermarked paper. Signed, dated and dedicated a Jenny Bussy / respecteusement / affectueux / H. Matisse Mars 52 in pencil at the lower right. Numbered 3 in pencil at the upper left. 457 x 286 mm. (18 x 11 1/4 in.) PROVENANCE: Given by the artist in 1952 to Jane Simone (Janie) Bussy, France; Her mother, Dorothy Bussy, née Strachey; Her posthumous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 1 July 1964, lot 47 (sold for £550 to Levinsohn); Robert Elkon Gallery, New York; Acquired from them in the 1960s by George Weidenfeld, Baron Weidenfeld GBE, London; Thence by descent until 2017. LITERATURE: Susan Mary Alsop, ‘Sir George Weidenfeld at Home in London: The Publisher’s Artful Rooms on the Thames’, Architectural Digest, December 1991, pp.149 and 153, illustrated in situ p.149; ‘Riverside Apartment for Lord Weidenfeld, Chelsea, London, 1973’, in Gillian Newberry, Geoffrey Bennison: Master Decorator, New York, 2015, p.89. In 1954, a few months before his death, Henri Matisse was asked to write an essay to accompany the publication of a folio of reproductions of his portrait paintings and drawings, published that year. As he wrote: ‘The human face has always greatly interested me. I have indeed a rather remarkable memory for faces, even for those I have seen only once. In looking at them I do not perform any psychological interpretation, but I am struck by their individual and profound expression…The driving force which leads me throughout the execution of a portrait depends on the initial shock of contemplating a face…I ended up discovering that the likeness of a portrait comes from the contrast which exists between the face of the model and other faces, in a word from its particular asymmetry. Each figure has its own rhythm and it is this rhythm which creates the likeness.’1 Created primarily in ink, pencil, chalk and charcoal, the drawings produced by Matisse were almost always finished works of art. As one scholar has noted, ‘For Matisse drawing has considerable value as a medium in its own right. There is nothing provisional about his drawings: they are complete, finished works, resulting from an extended process of identification. The line which encircles the objects supplies a final, conclusive definition…It is difficult to overestimate the importance of drawing in Matisse’s oeuvre.’2 Drawn in 1950 and presented to the sitter two years later, this portrait drawing depicts Janie Bussy, the daughter of one of Matisse’s oldest and dearest friends, the artist Simon Bussy. The sitter, Jane Simone Bussy (1906-1960) was the only child of Simon Bussy and Dorothy Strachey, the sister of Lytton Strachey. Her father and Matisse had been fellow students in the atelier of Gustave Moreau in the 1890s, and maintained a lifelong friendship. Living in Nice and Cimiez, Matisse was a near neighbour of the Bussy family, who lived at Roquebrune, and came weekly to visit, so that the young Janie Bussy grew up seeing much of the master. As the Matisse biographer Hilary Spurling has noted, however, ‘Janie, positioned like her parents between England and France, grew up among some of the finest minds and keenest gossips of both countries…[she] spent much time as a teenager in the company of adults who revered Matisse...but she herself has sucked in a healthy dose of Strachey scepticism and satirical dissent with her mother’s milk.’3 Janie Bussy appears to have regarded Matisse as a somewhat pompous figure, and was envious of the time that her father spent with him. As Spurling has written, ‘Bussy’s wife and daughter…were increasingly exasperated by the amount of time Simon spent apparently dancing attendance on his prosperous old friend. Janie especially resented the contrast between Matisse’s international standing and her father’s poverty and obscurity (“She was jealous on her father’s behalf,” Lydia [Delectorskaya] said in retrospect: “Matisse was perfectly aware of the hostility felt for him by Bussy’s daughter, but he discounted
it because he felt it came from wounded pride at her father’s lack of success”)…Janie, whose wit, intellect, and erudition could have made her an outstanding scholar, produced instead mild, unassertive paintings of landscapes and flowers. Both [she and her mother] amused themselves by including an ironic, mocking, mercilessly entertaining commentary on Matisse’s latest doings in their voluminous correspondence with some of the finest minds and best gossips in London and Paris.’4 In 1947 Janie Bussy wrote a highly satirical memoir of Matisse, entitled ‘A Great Man’, which was read to a meeting of the ‘Memoir Club’ in Bloomsbury that year, but remained unpublished until 19865. Perhaps not surprisingly, ‘Matisse respected Mme [Dorothy] Bussy’s cultivated mind and critical acumen, but he never felt comfortable in her company or her daughter’s. He showed up at her tea table for Simon’s sake, making solemn small talk and wearing the reddish-brown tweed suit he kept for polite occasions of this sort.’6 Nevertheless, there seems to be no trace of any animosity in this affectionate portrait by Matisse of Janie Bussy, who was, like her father, a painter, and exhibited her landscapes and still life paintings at the Lefevre Gallery in London. Among stylistically comparable late portrait drawings by Matisse are a suite of ten studies of the head of his granddaughter Jacqueline, drawn in 1947 and similarly imbued with a certain intimacy; two of these drawings are in the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne in Paris and the rest are in a private collection7. As Matisse described his approach to making portrait drawings, ‘I find myself before a person who interests me and, pencil or charcoal in hand, I set down his appearance on the paper, more or less freely. This… permits me to give free rein to my faculties of observation. At that moment, it wouldn’t do to ask a specific question, even a banal one such as ‘What time is it?’ because my reverie, my meditation upon the model, would be broken, and the result of my effort would be seriously compromised. After half-an-hour or an hour I am surprised to see a more or less precise image, which resembles the person with whom I am in contact, gradually appear on my paper. The image is revealed to me as though each stroke of charcoal erased from the glass some of the mist which until then had prevented me from seeing it.’8 The present sheet displays the confident draughtsmanship of Matisse even in old age. It is, in fact, among the very few independent drawings from the 1950s, a period when the artist was often bedridden with illness, and was focusing much of his energy on the seminal series of paper cut-outs that made up his final significant artistic endeavour. When he made drawings, he sometimes did so from his bed, using a long stick of bamboo with a brush or a piece of chalk or charcoal attached to the end, to draw on paper tacked to the walls of his bedroom. As John Golding has written, ‘Confined to his bed for many of his waking as well as his sleeping hours, drawing, for obvious reasons, became increasingly paramount as a means of expression.’9 Many of Matisse’s drawings of the 1950s can be seen as a sort of monochromatic complement to the colourful paper cut-outs, with the line kept to its bare essentials, without sacrificing any of its rhythmic vitality and expression. As the artist himself wrote, in an article published in 1939, ‘My line drawing is the purest and most direct translation of my emotion. The simplification of the medium allows that. At the same time, these drawings are more complete than they may appear to some people who confuse them with a sketch...Once my emotive line has modelled the light of my white paper without destroying its precious whiteness, I can neither add nor take anything away. The page is written; no correction is possible. If it is not adequate, there is no alternative but to begin again, as if it were an acrobatic feat.’10 Furthermore, as Golding has noted, ‘in many of the quickly executed pure line drawings we feel our way into the artist’s mind by the way in which we instinctively follow and identify with the sure, rhythmic notations of his hand. Matisse’s output as a draughtsman was immense and he seems to have destroyed relatively little; because of this his drawings inevitably vary quite astonishingly in quality, but this appears not to have bothered him. It might perhaps be fair to say that, in a way that the paintings are not, the drawings are his artistic autobiography.’11 The attribution of this drawing has been confirmed by Wanda de Guébriant and the late Marguerite Duthuit, who issued a certificate for the drawing in 1964.
25 PABLO PICASSO Málaga 1881-1973 Mougins The Artist and his Model (Le peintre et son modèle) Pen and black ink and white chalk on light brown card. Dated 30.6.70. in black ink and signed Picasso in pencil at the upper left. Dated and numbered 30.6.70. / I in brush and black ink and white chalk on the reverse. 224 x 309 mm. (8 3/4 x 12 1/8 in.) PROVENANCE: Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris, in 1971; Acquired from them by a private collector in 1992; Private collection, until 2013. LITERATURE: Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, Picasso: Dessins en noir et en couleurs 15 décembre 1969 - 12 janvier 1971, exhibition catalogue, 1971, no.93, illustrated p.56; Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Vol. XXXII: Oeuvres de 1970, Paris, 1977, p.61, no.178; The Picasso Project. Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 1885-1973. The Final Years – 19701973, San Francisco, 2004, p.62, no.70-209. EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, Picasso: Dessins en noir et en couleurs, 15 décembre 1969 - 12 janvier 1971, April-June 1971, no.93. The last two decades of his career found Pablo Picasso producing a very large number of paintings, drawings and prints on the subject of the artist and model. Indeed, as one scholar has noted, ‘the theme [is] one of the most frequently recurring motifs of Picasso’s late period…During Picasso’s later years, as he grew ever more obsessed with the theme, the repeated focus on the artist and his model became a means by which he could explore the mysteries of the creative process, parody the effects of aging and his own image as a living Old Master, while also, on a deeper level, actively denying his own fear of death.’1 These works take a variety of forms, but in general depict a painter, armed with a palette and brushes, facing a canvas, usually seen from the side, and a nude model, either sitting or reclining. Sometimes the painter is shown alone with the canvas but without the model, while at times the scene is set in a studio, or else outdoors. Another scholar has interpreted these late works to be part of a larger theme; that of painting itself: ‘In the last twenty years of his life, Picasso literally took painting as his model, his subject, or his example… Whether in variations on the old masters, or in depictions of the place of creation (the studio), or of the model (the woman, the nude), or of the painter (young or old, bearded, with or without palette, costumed or stripped bare), all the works of this period have to do with a single theme, that of painter and model. This theme enables him to illustrate the mechanics of creation through the relationship between the three principal participants, the artist, the model and the canvas, ie. the subject, the object and the verb, with all the thousand ways in which it can be conjugated.’2 During the summer months of June and July of 1970, Picasso turned with renewed energy to the subject of the artist and model in a substantial number of drawings, executed in pencil, chalk, ink, gouache or coloured crayons. Indeed, more than half of the nearly two hundred drawings exhibited at the Galerie Louis Leiris the following year – representing almost all of the drawings which the artist had produced over a period of thirteen months, between December 1969 and January 1971 – were devoted to this theme. Drawn on the 30th of June 1970, the present sheet came in the midst of this period of frenzied activity, and is one of two drawings executed on the same day3. In drawings such as this, Picasso depicts the artist as both creator and voyeur, in the act of painting and observing a sleeping nude model. We are here watching a work in progress, rather than the finished result, and are thus observing the creative process. As in many of these drawings, the artist in the composition may be – indeed, was almost certainly intended to be – identified with Picasso himself,
although here depicted in the guise of a much more youthful painter. (It should be noted, however, that unlike the artist in these drawings, Picasso did not usually use a palette – he preferred newspaper – and only rarely worked from a posed model; nor, indeed, did he often use an easel.) Gary Tinterow’s perceptive description of a closely comparable drawing from this period – executed two days later, on July 2nd, 19704 – may equally be applied to the present sheet: ‘Picasso delineates both the painter and the recumbent woman with the same fluid line, highlighting the forms with white crayon to achieve an effect of low relief. The consistent treatment of the figures suggests that the contributions of both painter and model to the achievement of the work of art are equal, and at the same time establishes a certain ambiguity. For the observer is unsure whether he should read the model as a drawing or painting on a canvas, or as a woman lying adjacent to the painter’s stool, or both. This ambiguity is further heightened by the position of the tacking edge of the canvas at the extreme left. Or finally, this same clue can be interpreted as an indication that the entire scene takes place only in the fictional realm of art, which of course it does.’5 Picasso’s fertile imagination can be seen in the immense variety of the drawings devoted to the artist and model theme during this particular period in the summer of 1970. This compositional diversity is especially evident in the case of drawings executed on the same day. For example, a series of eight successive drawings of The Artist and his Model, all drawn on the 4th of July, 1970, and today in the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris6, retain the same relative positions of the artist, model and canvas but vary in the appearance of the artist and the pose of the model, as well as the interplay between them, in each composition. It has been said of Picasso that his late drawings ‘offer a richness of ideas and iconography for which no complete lexicon is likely to exist…The unabashedly first-person, diarylike entries, compulsively dated and frequently serialized, probably once held together more tightly, like a vast confessional epic novel. We are at a disadvantage, left to consider them now as individual sheets without the benefit of viewing the drawings in their original sequences as an organic whole.’7 Of the artist and model drawings of 1970 in particular, Christopher Lloyd has recently noted that they are ‘varied and inventive…the style is broader, and some of the images have a more significant degree of intimacy, as if the viewer is brought into greater proximity with the figures. The issue addressed…[is] the difference between art and reality as personified by the interaction between the artist and the model. Picasso was fully aware of how such issues had exercised the minds of some of the greatest artists of the past, and it was amongst these peers that he now strove hard to be numbered.’8 Drawn three years before the artist’s death, this superb sheet is a testament to the artist’s undiminished skills as a draughtsman at the age of eighty-nine. Executed while the great exhibition of his paintings and drawings from the previous year was on display at the Palais des Papes in Avignon, the drawing represents the artist continuing to explore a theme that had occupied him for many years. After 1970, however, and in the final two years of his life, Picasso only rarely returned to the subject of the artist and model.
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PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
No.8 Maratti
No.15 Gandolfi
Fig.1 Carlo Maratti The Death of Saint Joseph Oil on canvas Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum Inv. 121 Photo © KHM-Museumsverband
Fig.1 Gaetano Gandolfi The Head of a Young Woman in Profile Etching, only state London, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art.
No.9 Watteau Fig.1 Jean-Antoine Watteau La Surprise, c.1718–1719 Oil on panel Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum Inv. 2017.72 No.11 Fragonard 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 watercolour over black chalk Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art Inv. 1925.1006 Dudley P. Allen Fund. 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.2 Gaetano Gandolfi Eight Studies of Heads Pen and brown ink Hamburg, Dr. Moeller-Kunsthandel. No.18 Ingres Fig.1 Copy after Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Portrait of Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux Pencil Paris, Musée du Louvre Inv. RF 1091 © 2012 – Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques Fig.2 Copy after Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Portrait of Louise-Rosalie Gatteaux Pencil Paris, Musée du Louvre Inv. RF 1092 © 2012 – Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques Fig.3 Copy after Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Portrait of Edouard Gatteaux Pencil Paris, Musée du Louvre Inv. RF 1093 © 2012 – Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques
NOTES TO THE CATALOGUE
No.1 Giorgione 1. Terisio Pignatti, Giorgione, London, 1971, p.7. 2. Max J. Friedländer, Von Kunst und Kennerschaft, Oxford and Zurich, 1946; translated by Tancred Borenius as On Art and Connoisseurship, Boston, 1960, p.119. 3. Inv. I 485; Pignatti, op.cit., p.102, no.14, pl.53; Ger Luitjen and A. W. F. M. Meij, From Pisanello to Cézanne: Master Drawings from the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, exhibition catalogue, New York, Fort Worth and Cleveland, 1990-1991, pp.156-158, no.57; Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: The Painter of ‘Poetic Brevity’, Paris and New York, 1997, p.301, illustrated p.107, fig.61; Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo, Giorgione, Milan, 2009, pp.182-185 and 187, figs.146-147 and 149; Jaynie Anderson, Kim Wilson, Nerida Newbigin and Julie Sommerfeldt, ‘Giorgione in Sydney’, The Burlington Magazine, March 2019, p.197, fig.11. The drawing is in poor condition. 4. Inv. 881; Pignatti, op.cit., pp.101-102, no.13, pl.50; dal Pozzolo, op.cit., p.239, fig.207; Anderson, op.cit., 1997, pp.301-302, p.169, fig.108. The dimensions of the painting are 82 x 73 cm. 5. Inv. 111; Pignatti, op.cit., pp.105-106, no.18, pl.87; dal Pozzolo, op.cit., p.253, fig.217; Anderson, op.cit., 1997, pp.298-299, p.89, fig.49. The canvas measures 125.5 x 146.2 cm. 6. Dreyer, op.cit., pp.182 and 185. 7. Dreyer, op.cit., p.185. Detailss of the landscape background of La Tempesta are illustrated in colour in Pignatti, op.cit., p.29, pl.XI, dal Pozzolo, op.cit., p.39, fig.17, pp.244-245, fig.211 and p.249, fig.213, and Anderson, op.cit., 1997, p.171, fig.109. 8. Dreyer, op.cit., p.185. 9. Dreyer, op.cit., p.185. A detail of this section of the Vienna painting is illustrated in colour in Pignatti, op.cit., p.37, pl.XV, as well as in Anderson, op.cit., 1997, p.91, fig.50, and dal Pozzolo, op.cit., p.258, fig.222. 10. Dreyer, op.cit., p.186. 11. Dreyer, op.cit., pp.186-188. 12. Dreyer, op.cit., pp.180-182. No.2 Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues 1. Paul Hulton, ‘Le Moyne de Morgues, Jacques’, Grove Art Online, 2003 (https://www-oxfordartonline-com.ezproxy2.londonlibrary.co.uk/ groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000050277 [accessed 12 May 2020]). 2. Below the cartouche is written, in a 16th century hand, ‘Cela est donné par Du Marry’, signed with the initial H(?) below. On the verso of the frontispiece are four lines of verse in French: ‘Il ne fault plus chercher l’esmail d’un gay Printemps / De qui les uiues fleurs se fannent en une heure, / Icy la douce Flore en sa beaulté demeure, / Et ne perd ses honneurs par la rigueur des témps.’, which may be approximately translated as ‘Seek no longer the colours of a gay Spring / Whose flowers fade in an hour, / Here sweet Flora remains in her beauty, / And loses none of her distinction through the rigours of time.’ 3. Peter Bower, ‘Magical lllusion: Two Collections of Watercolours by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (c.1533-1588)’, The Quarterly: The Journal of the British Association of Paper Historians, April 2010, p.11. 4. Inv. AM.3267U-1856; London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Portraits of Plants: Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (1533-1588), London, n.d. (1984), unpaginated. 5. Paul Hulton, ‘An Album of Plant Drawings by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues’, The British Museum Quarterly, September 1962, pp.38-39. No.3 Palma Giovane 1. Carlo Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte, Venice, 1648, Vol.II, p.203; quoted in translation in Hans Tietze and E. Tietze-Conrat, The Drawings of the Venetian Painters in the 15th and 16th Centuries, New York, 1944, [1979 ed.], p.198. 2. Tietze and Tietze-Conrat, ibid., p.198 and pp.18-19. 3. Andrew Robison, La Poesia della Luce: Disegni Veneziani dalla National Gallery of Art di Washington / The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2014-2015, p.99, under no.32. 4. Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville, Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, Paris, 1762, Vol.I, p.285.
5. Nicola Ivanoff and Pietro Zampetti, Giacomo Negretti detto Palma Il Giovane, Bergamo, 1980, p.587, no.374, illustrated p.637; Stefania Mason Rinaldi, Palma il Giovane: L’opera completa, Milan, 1984, p.143, no.540, p.343, fig.385 (where dated c.1604). 6. Ivanoff and Zampetti, ibid., p.559, no.217, illustrated p.638, fig.1; Mason Rinaldi, ibid., p.113, no.302, p.196, fig.22 (where dated c.15801581). 7. Inv. III 8604; Stefania Mason Rinaldi, Palma il Giovane 1548-1628: Disegni e dipinti, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1990, p.165, no.68b. 8. Inv. RF87 and RF87 bis; Mason Rinaldi, op.cit., 1984, p.162 no.D159, p.216, fig.79. No.4 Hendrick Goltzius 1. William W. Robinson, Bruegel to Rembrandt: Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, exhibition catalogue, London, Paris and Cambridge, 2002-2003, p.68, under no.22. 2. Huigen Leeflang, ‘Editorial’, in Marjolein Leesberg and Huigen Leeflang, The New Hollstein: Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 1450-1700. Hendrick Goltzius, Part 1, Ouderkerk aan der IJssel, 2012, p.vii. 3. Robinson, op.cit., p.68, under no.22. 4. Although many of Goltzius’s Roman drawings have been lost, fifty-four studies from this trip are today in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, which houses the largest group of drawings by Goltzius – numbering some 125 sheets in total - in a public collection. 5. James Byam Shaw, The Italian Drawings of the Frits Lugt Collection, Vol.II: Polidoro Album, Paris, 1983, pp.3-4. 6. By Cherubino Alberti in 1590, by Goltzius in 1592, and by Antonio Carenzano and Raffaello Guidi in 1613; see Luigi Grassi, ‘Bernini: Two Unpublished Drawings and Related Problems’, The Burlington Magazine, April 1964, pp.172 and 175, figs.37, 40-41 and 43 and Alessandro Marabottini, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Rome, 1969, Vol.I, pp.351-352, no.1, Vol.II, pl.CXXIV. 7. Inv. N 011 to N 016; E. K. J. Reznicek, Die Zeichnungen von Hendrick Goltzius, The Hague, 1961, Vol.I, pp.343-344, nos.239-244, Vol.II, figs.188-193; Bleyerveld and Veldman, op.cit., pp.147-150, nos.127-132. 8. Inv. KdZ 27739; Bevers, op.cit., p.394, no.3, fig.2. 9. Inv. N 013; Reznicek, op.cit., 1961, Vol.II, fig.193; Lanfranco Ravelli, Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio, Bergamo, 1978, pp.297-299, no.482; Bleyerveld and Veldman, op.cit., pp.148-149, no.129. The drawing measures 347 x 196 mm. 10. The first print in the series, of Saturn, is dated 1592 and bears a Latin text which translates as: ‘[These] eight heathen gods were painted by Polidoro on a courtyard wall in the quarter of St. Paul’s Convent, on the Quirinal in Rome, now called Monte Cavallo. They are distinguished by the excellence of their clair-obscure effect. HG[oltzius] has sketched them on location and now engraved them for the use of students.’; Quoted in translation in Walter L. Strauss, ed., Hendrik Goltzius 1558-1617: The Complete Engravings and Woodcuts, 1977, Vol.II, p.516. 11. Reznicek, op.cit., 1993, p.250, under no.K241a. 12. Strauss, ed., op.cit., pp.520-521, No.291; Walter L. Strauss, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch. 3. Netherlandish Artists: Hendrick Goltzius, New York, 1980, p.217, no.251 (77). No.5 Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione 1. Jonathan Bober, ‘The Styles of the Baroque in Genoa’, in Jonathan Bober, Piero Boccardo and Franco Boggero, A Superb Baroque: Art in Genoa 1600-1750, exhibition catalogue, Washington and Rome, 2020-2021, p.82. 2. Robert L. Manning, in New York, Finch College Museum of Art, Genoese Painters: Cambiaso to Magnasco 1550-1750, exhibition catalogue, 1964-1965, unpaginated, under Castiglione. 3. James Byam Shaw, ‘Castiglione and Stefano della Bella’ [book review], The Burlington Magazine, October 1955, p.325. 4. Anthony Blunt, ‘Foreword’, in Ann Percy, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione: Master Draughtsman of the Italian Baroque, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia, 1971, p.18. 5. Anthony Blunt, The Drawings of G. B. Castiglione & Stefano della Bella in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1954, p.8. 6. Timothy J. Standring and Martin Clayton, Castiglione: Lost Genius, exhibition catalogue, London, 2013-2014, p.148. 7. Gianvittorio Dillon et al, Il Genio di Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione Il Grechetto, exhibition catalogue, Genoa, 1990, pp.118-121, no.14, illustrated in colour pp.82-83, figs.97-99; Standring and Clayton, ibid., p.101, fig.20; Bober, Boccardo and Boggero, op.cit., pp.208-209, no.57. 8. Inv. 3964; Blunt, op.cit., 1954, p.44, no.238 (as Studio of Castiglione, not illustrated). Although the drawing was given by Anthony Blunt to an artist in the studio of Castiglione, James Byam Shaw had convincingly argued for a full attribution to the artist in 1955 (see note 3 above). 9. New York, W. M. Brady & Co., Old Master Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1999, unpaginated, no.9. The drawing measures 408 x 283 mm.
10. Inv. 18280; Irina Grigorieva et al, Disegni dell’Europa Occidentale dall’Ermitage di Leningrado, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1982, pp.19-20, no.8, fig.27; Pierre Rosenberg, Les dessins de la collection Mariette: Écoles italienne et espagnole, Paris, 2019, Vol.I, p.394, no.I606 (where dated to the 1660s). 11. Inv. NMH 1605/1863; Percy, op.cit., p.88, no.48, illustrated p.91; Per Bjurström, Drawings in Swedish Public Collections. Italian Drawings: Venice, Brescia, Parma, Milan, Genoa, Stockholm, 1979, unpaginated, no.363 (where dated to early 1650s). No.6 Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino 1. Giovanni Gaetano Bottari and Stefano Ticozzi, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed architettura scritte da’ piu celebri personnaggi dei secoli XV, XVI e XVII, Milan, 1822, Vol.I, p.286; Quoted in translation in Montreal, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Dessins italiens du XVIIe siècle du Musée des Offices de Florence / Italian XVIIth-Century Drawings from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, exhibition catalogue, 1986, p.120, under no.27. 2. Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge, 1989, p.101. 3. Ibid., p.101. 4. ‘Dieci Libri di dissegni, parte à penna, parte di lapis rosso, e nero, con diversi paesini dissegnati con esquitezza’; Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina pittrice: Vite de’ pittori Bolognesi, Bologna, 1678, supplemented and annotated by Giampietro Zanotti, 1841, Vol.II, p.273. 5. Quoted in Mahon and Turner, op.cit., p.xxi. No.7 Melchior d’Hondecoeter 1. Joy Kearney, ‘Birds of a Feather: De Hondecoeter and the Birth of a New Genre’, The Low Countries, 2008, p.1. 2. Joy Kearney, ‘Melchior de Hondecoeter in the Service of William III – Royal Taste and Patronage in the Dutch Golden Age’, in Susan Bracken, Andrea M. Gáldy and Adriana Turpin, ed., Collecting and the Princely Apartment, Newcastle, 2011, p.42. 3. G., ‘Three Dutch Pictures’, Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin, October 1907, p.58. 4. E. P. Richardson, ‘The Barnyard, by Melchior de Hondecoeter’, Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts of the City of Detroit, 1945, p.63. 5. Kearney, op.cit., 2008, p.3. 6. Kearney, op.cit., 2011, pp.49-50. 7. Walter Liedtke, Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Haven and London, 2007, Vol.I, pp.349-350, under no.82. 8. Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman’), London, Christie’s, 7 April 1995, lot 3 (as Hondecoeter and Studio, sold for £188,500). The dimensions of the painting are 141.5 x 171.8 cm. An image of the painting is visible at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/8058 [accessed 22 May 2020]. 9. Inv. 1043; Colin Eisler, Paintings in the Hermitage, New York, 1990, p.653. The painting measures 135 x 155 cm. 10. Inv. 1836,0811.320; An image of the drawing, which measures 231 x 401 mm. and is drawn in brush and brown wash, is visible at https://www. britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1836-0811-320 [accessed 25 May 2020]. 11. Inv. 10121. 12. Inv. 1861.0810.23; An image of the drawing is visible at https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1861-0810-23 [accessed 25 May 2020]. Two autograph variants of this drawing are known; one in the Klassik Stiftung Weimar in Weimar (Inv. 5104) and another, formerly in the Goll van Franckenstein collection, which was sold at auction in 2016 (Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s South Kensington, 7 December 2016, lot 70). A red chalk study of two peacocks, in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, has long been regarded as autograph, but has recently been downgraded to the work of a pupil or follower of the artist (Inv.60:82; Marrigje Rikken, Melchior d’Hondecoeter: Bird Painter, Amsterdam, 2008, pp.52-53, fig.44). No.8 Carlo Maratti 1. The album was purchased by Colnaghi on 26 February 1937 from Lt. Col. George Ambrose Cardew on behalf of his son-in-law, Lt. Col. Evelyn Charles Shirley of Ettington Park. At the time of the purchase, the present sheet was valued at the sum of £10.00. 2. Giovan Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects: A New Translation and Critical Edition, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl and ed. Hellmut Wohl, New York, 2005, p.399. 3. Written correspondence, 9 November 1977. 4. Inv. 121; Friderike Klauner, Die Gemäldegalerie des Kunsthistorischen Museums in Wien, Salzburg and Vienna, 1978, p.390, fig.203.
5. As Giovan Pietro Bellori records, ‘During the time when Cardinal Alberizzi was nuncio in Germany, while the old Empress Eleonore was alive, he had an opportunity to promote Carlo [Maratti] with this princess…She was a devotee of Saint Joseph, hence she ordered a picture from him of the death of the saint for her chapel in Vienna. Notified by the cardinal, Carlo made a highly finished drawing that met the expectations of the empress, and it was very dear to her. He proceeded with the painting on a canvas about 18 palmi in height, arched at the top, with figures larger than reality. He displayed the aged saint lying weakly on his bed with his hand on his half-naked breast and his face drooping, his eyes languid, his lips breathing his last breaths. At his feet Jesus Christ attends him and blesses him, at the other side is the Virgin, sorrowful, with her hands twined in her lap; in the foreground and at the side two angels kneel devoutly, and another one beside them lifts a golden vessel in both hands, sending smoke with sweet odors up to heaven as a token of the virtues that this sainted patriarch practiced in life; two angels emerge from the clouds overhead and gaze piously at the dying Joseph as if awaiting his perfectly pure soul in order to bear it up to beatitude, and they are preceded by three winged children, one of whom bears the saint’s flowering rod; and closer to the bed three cherubs are approaching; and paradise opens in that chamber.’; Bellori (trans. Wohl), op.cit., p.412. 6. Ann Sutherland Harris and Eckhard Schaar, Die Handzeichnungen von Andrea Sacchi und Carlo Maratta, Düsseldorf, 1967, pp.112-113, no.280 verso and pp.115-116, nos.293-296 (none illustrated). 7. Ibid., p.123, no.323, fig.84 8. Inv. 1928-42-4025; Ann Percy, ‘Collecting Italian Drawings at Philadelphia: Two Nineteenth-Century Amateurs and a Twentieth-Century Scholar’, in Ann Percy and Mimi Cazort, Italian Master Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2004, p.19, fig.VIII, p.264. The drawing measures 344 x 420 mm. 9. Rennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, L’Oeil et la Passion 2: Dessins baroques italiens dans les collections privées françaises, exhibition catalogue, 2015, pp.172-173, no.62 (entry by Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò). The drawing measures 284 x 217 mm. 10. Mezzetti, op.cit., p.287, fig.36. 11. Sutherland Harris and Schaar, op.cit., pp.117-118, nos.298 and 304, figs.76 and 80. 12. The album also included a few drawings by Maratti’s chief pupil Niccolò Berrettoni , as well as a handful of works by earlier artists including Parmigianino, Agostino Carracci, Taddeo Zuccaro, Federico Barocci and Guercino. The drawings were laid onto mounts inscribed with the names of the artists; the handwriting is no later than the early 18th century and would appear to be that of the collector or connoisseur who assembled the album. Later owned by the Shirley family at Ettington Park in Warwickshire, the album was acquired from them by P. & D. Colnaghi in 1937. Most of the Maratti drawings in the album were acquired from Colnaghi’s by such private collectors as Sir Robert Witt, Sir Brinsley Ford, Villiers David, Sir Thomas Barlow, Frits Lugt and Philip Hofer. Drawings by Maratti from the Ettington Park album are today in the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham, the Courtauld Gallery in London, the Fondation Custodia (Frits Lugt Collection) in Paris, and elsewhere. No.9 Antoine Watteau 1. The present sheet was formerly in the collection of Baron Paul Bernhard Hatvany (1899-1977). Born and raised in Hungary, Hatvany left the country as an emigré and settled with his family in England shortly before the Second World War. He assembled an important collection of Old Master paintings and drawings, kept at his home in Cadogan Place in London, that was dispersed at auction three years after his death. 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 Marianne Roland Michel, Watteau: An Artist of the Eighteenth Century, London, 1984, 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. ‘Le dessin appartient à la série des copies d’après des oeuvres vénitiennes (Bassano ou Véronèse?), datées vers 1715, mais malgré nos recherches… nous n’en avons pas trouvé la source precise.’; Rosenberg and Prat, op.cit., p.576, under no.358. 7. London, Christie’s, The Hatvany Collection: Highly Important Old Master Drawings, 24 June 1980, p.55, under lot 41. 8. K. T. Parker, The Drawings of Antoine Watteau, London, 1931, p.21. 9. Inv. 2017.72; Anonymous sale (‘Property from a Private Collection’), London, Christie’s, 8 July 2008, lot 21 (sold for £12,361,250); Katherine Baetjer, ed., Watteau, Music, and Theater, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2009, pp.42-44, no.11. 10. Inv. RF 31370; Rosenberg and Prat, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.762-763, no.459 (where dated c.1716). 11. Inv. CD 16421; Rosenberg and Prat, op.cit., Vol.I, pp.392-393, no.245 (where dated to c.1714). No.10 Giambattista Tiepolo 1. Adriano Mariuz, ‘The Drawings of Giambattista Tiepolo’, in Giandomenico Romanelli et al, Masterpieces of Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawing, London and New York, 1983, p.21. 2. Inv. IV, 104 and IV, 105 (The Apotheosis of an Aged Warrior or The Apotheosis of Merit); J. Pierpont Morgan Collection of Drawings by the Old Masters formed by C. Fairfax Murray, London, 1912, Vol.IV, unpaginated, pls.104-105; Jacob Bean and Felice Stampfle, Drawings from New York
Collections III: The Eighteenth Century in Italy, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1971, p.62, nos.140-141, pls.140-141; Bernard Aikema, Tiepolo and His Circle: Drawings in American Collections, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge and New York, 1996-1997, pp.172-173, no.64. 3. Inv. 37.165.26 (The Apotheosis of a Warrior); Bean and Stampfle, ibid., p.62, no.139, pl.139; Jacob Bean and William Griswold, 18th Century Italian Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, p.235, no.228. 4. Inv. 1941.295 (The Apotheosis of Merit); Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann and Anne-Marie S. Logan, European Drawings and Watercolors in the Yale University Art Gallery 1500-1900, New Haven and London, 1970, Vol.I, p.173, no.321, Vol.II, pl.173; George Knox, Tiepolo: A Bicentenary Exhibition 1770-1970, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge (MA), 1970, unpaginated, no.77 (where dated c.1758); Aikema, op.cit., pp.174-175, no.65. 5. Inv. 181-1928; Hein-Th. Schulze Altcappenberg, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) und sein Atelier: Zeichnungen & Radierungen im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 1996-1997, pp.30-31, no.7, illustrated p.17, pl.III (where dated 1748-1750). 6. Inv. D.1978.PG.157; Count Antoine Seilern, Italian Paintings and Drawings at 56 Princes Gate London SW7, London, 1959, Vol.I, pp.131-132, no.157, Vol.II, pl.CXVII. 7. Inv. NM 24/1914; Per Bjurström, Drawings in Swedish Public Collections 3. Italian Drawings: Venice, Brescia, Parma, Milan, Genoa, Stockholm, 1979, unpaginated, no.224, illustrated in colour p.xv. 8. Keith Christiansen, ed., Giambattista Tiepolo 1696-1996, exhibition catalogue, Venice and New York, 1996-1997, pp.181-185, no.25b. 9. James Byam Shaw, ‘Introduction’, London, Arts Council, Drawings and Etching by Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, exhibition catalogue, 1955, p.6. 10. Knox, op.cit., unpaginated, under no.77. 11. Beverly Louise Brown, Giambattista Tiepolo: Master of the Oil Sketch, exhibition catalogue, Fort Worth, 1993, p.244, under no.33. 12. Christiansen, ed., ibid., pp.157-168, no.21a. 13. Guido Piovene and Anna Pallucchini, L’opera completa di Giambattista Tiepolo, Milan, 1968, pp.128-129, no.270, fig.270. A line reproduction of this painting is illustrated in Seilern, op.cit., Vol.I, unpaginated, fig.53. 14. Antonio Morassi, A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings of G. B. Tiepolo, London, 1962, no.48, fig.331. 15. Byam Shaw, op.cit., pp.6-7. No.11 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; Williams, op.cit., 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.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 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. Laing, e-mail correspondence, 14 May 2018. 9. Alden R. Gordon, The Houses and Collections of the Marquis de Marigny, Los Angeles, 2003, p.1. 10. Anonymous sale, London, ACR Auctions, 30 June 2015, lot 61; Anonymous sale, Florence, Pandolfini Casa d’Aste, 1 October 2019, lot 51. The drawing was at one time in the R. Fuda collection in Florence. No.14 Thomas Gainsborough 1. William Jackson, “Character of Gainsborough’, in William Jackson, The Four Ages; Together with Essays on Various Subjects, 1798, p.154; reprinted in The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature, Vol.22, March 1798, p.265. 2. John Hayes, ed., The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough, London, 2001, p.68. 3. John Hayes, ‘Gainsborough Drawings: A Supplement to the Catalogue Raisonné’, Master Drawings, Winter 1983, p.367. 4. Susan Sloman, Gainsborough’s Landscapes: Themes and Variations, exhibition catalogue, Bath, 2012, p.11. 5. John Hayes, The Landscape Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough: A Critical Text and Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1982, Vol.II, pp.446-447, no.102 (where dated c.1771-1772); Michael Rosenthal and Martin Myrone, ed., Gainsborough, exhibition catalogue, London and elsewhere, 20022003, p.240, no.132. The large oil sketch at Buscot Park is likely to have been one of ‘Two Landscapes, Drawings, in imitation of painting’ by Gainsborough exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1772. 6. Hayes, op.cit., 1970, Vol.I, p.168, no.257, Vol.II, pl.384 (where dated to the early 1760s). 7. Hayes, op.cit., 1970, Vol.I, p.168, under no.258.
8. Hayes, op.cit., 1970, Vol.I, p.168, under no.258. According to Hayes, the painting by Barker was sold anonymously at auction in London, Christie’s, 17 April 1964, lot 43, although it does not appear in the catalogue of that sale. No.15 Gaetano Gandolfi 1. James Byam Shaw, The Italian Drawings of the Frits Lugt Collection, Paris, 1983, Vol.I, pp.373-374, under no.379. 2. Donatella Biagi Maino, ‘Gaetano Gandolfi’s ‘capricci’ of heads: drawings and engravings’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1994, p.378. 3. Alexandre de Vesme, Le peintre-graveur italien, Milan, 1906, p.151, no.19 (not illustrated). The etching measures 144 x 100 mm. 4. Biagi Maino et al., op.cit., 1996, illustrated p.114; Gozzi, op.cit., no.10/1. The sheet of seven etchings is an unusual example of a sheet of several printed etchings remaining intact, and not having been cut up into its component etchings. 5. ‘Il disegno, sia per questo carattere preparatorio ma sopratutto per la qualità superba di stesura e invenzione che condivide con il compagno, e’ da ritenere importante acquisizione al catalogo della grafica del Gandolfi.’; Biagi Maino et al., op.cit., 1996, p.112. 6. ‘uno straordinario disegno a penna’; Gozzi, op.cit., unpaginated, under no.10. 7. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 26 November 1973, lot 274A (bt. Agnew for 550 gns.); London, Thos. Agnew & Sons Ltd., Master Drawings and Prints, 1974, no.36; Hamburg, Dr. Moeller & Cie., op.cit., no.1; Adriano Cera, ed., Disegni, acquarelli, tempere di artisti italiani dal 1770 ca. al 1830 ca., Bologna, 2002, Vol.II, unpaginated, Mauro Gandolfi no.17 (as Mauro Gandolfi). The drawing measures 236 x 136 mm. 8. Prisco Bagni, I Gandolfi: Affreschi dipinti bozzetti disegni, Cittadella, 1992, p.532, no.501; Donatella Biagi Maino, Gaetano Gandolfi, Turin, 1995, p.354, no.40, fig.40. 9. Bagni, ibid., p.533, no.502; Biagi Maino, ibid., p.346, no.10, fig.11. 10. Biagi Maino et al., op.cit., 1996, illustrated p.115. No.16 Luigi Sabatelli 1. ‘Soggetti greci, romani, ebraici, danteschi, fiorentini, omerici, ecc., ecc., in somma senza numero. Io calcolo che nella mia dimora in Roma, che fu di oltre quattro anni, avrò guadagnato circa cento zecchini.’; Sabatelli, Cenni biografici, op.cit., p.26. 2. Roberta J. M. Olson, ‘An Early Drawing by Luigi Sabatelli Rediscovered’, Master Drawings, Autumn 1997, p.291. 3. Nicholas Turner, The Paintings of Guercino: A Revised and Expanded Catalogue raisonné, Rome, 2017, p.11, fig.6, p.375, no.109. 4. Fernando Mazzocca et al, Il Neoclassicismo in Italia: da Tiepolo a Canova, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 2002, p.458, no. VI.45, illustrated p.180 (where dated c.1794). The drawing measures 482 x 758 mm. 5. Inv. 41425; Franklin, op.cit., pp.346-352, fig.1 (where dated c.1794). The dimensions of the drawing are 574 x 775 mm. 6. ‘Disegni a penna…Il Concilio infernale (Tasso c. IV); largo 0,56, alto 0,83.’; Sabatelli, op.cit., p.35. 7. Franklin, op.cit., pp.347-348. 8. Inv. 92488; Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, Luigi Sabatelli (1772-1850): Disegni e Incisioni, exhibition catalogue, Florence, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, 1978, pp.28-29, no.11, fig.11. The drawing measures 525 x 762 mm. 9. Inv. 92482 and 92483; Ibid., pp.42-44, nos.28 and 31, figs.32 and 34. The dimensions of the two drawings are 455 x 723 mm. and 410 x 710 mm., respectively. 10. Inv. 1999-3-1; Adriano Cera, ed., Disegni, acquarelli, tempere di artisti italiani dal 1770 ca. al 1830 ca., Bologna, 2002, Vol.II, unpaginated, Sabatelli no.11; Percy and Cazort, op.cit., unpaginated, no.62 (where dated c.1795). The drawing measures 429 x 708 mm. 11. Cera, ed., ibid., unpaginated, Sabatelli no.13. 12. Cera, ed., op.cit., unpaginated, Sabatelli no.12. 13. Such as the drawing of Ismen Populating the Forest of Saron with Demons in Ottawa (see note 5 above), which is inscribed by the artist ‘A il Sig. Marchese Gino Capponi a Firenze da Sabatelli.’ No.17 Sir Thomas Lawrence 1. Michael Levey, Sir Thomas Lawrence, New Haven and London, 2005, p.12. 2. Quoted in The Builder, 6 July 1867, p.483; reprinted in C. F. Bell, ed., Annals of Thomas Banks, Cambridge, 1938, p.214. 3. William Cosmo Monkhouse, ‘Lawrence, Sir Thomas’, in The Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford and London, 1892-1893, [1921-1922 ed.], Vol.XI, pp.725-726.
4. Cecil Reginald Grundy, ‘Foreword’, in New York, Scott & Fowles Co., Catalogue of Original Drawings by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A., 1913, unpaginated. 5. Michael Levey, Sir Thomas Lawrence, exhibition catalogue, London, 1979-1980, p.16. 6. Kenneth Garlick, Sir Thomas Lawrence: Portraits of an Age, 1790-1830, exhibition catalogue, New Haven and elsewhere, 1993, p.34, under no.8. 7. Amal Asfour and Paul Williamson, ‘Exhibition Review’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Spring 1999, p.392. No.18 Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres 1. A complete list of the very extensive publication and exhibition history of this drawing is available on request. 2. ‘Le dessin représentant la famille Gatteaux...le montrent affable, naturel, assaisonné d’intentions fines et délicates.’ 3. Naef, op.cit., Vol.II, p.485; Quoted in translation in Condon, op.cit., 2006, p.49. 4. 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 Hans 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 5 below). Naef has suggested that the drawn copies in the Louvre may be the work of the engraver, Claude-MarieFrançois Dien. 5. Naef, op.cit., Vol.II, p.501, fig.6. See also Naef, op.cit., Vol.V, p.481. 6. 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. 7. 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. 8. 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. 9. Inv. RF 1450; Gary Tinterow and Philip Consibee, ed., Portraits by Ingres: Images of an Epoch, exhibition catalogue, London and elsewhere, 1999-2000, pp.92-94, no.23. The drawing measures 233 x 319 mm. 10. 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. 11. 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. 12. Naef, op.cit., Vol.II, p.501, fig.8. 13. 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. 14. Condon, op.cit., 2006, p.49. 15. ‘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. 16. Pach, op.cit., pp.251-252. 17. Douglas Gordon’s 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.19 Adolph Menzel 1. Peter Betthausen et al, Adolph Menzel 1815-1905: Master Drawings from East Berlin, exhibition catalogue, New York and elsewhere, 19901991, p.134. 2. Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher, ed., Adolph Menzel 1815-1905: Between Romanticism and Impressionism, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 1996-1997, p.421, under no.184. 3. Inv. 1361; Keisch and Riemann-Reyher, ibid., pp.420-421, no.184. 4. Keisch and Riemann-Reyher, op.cit., p.443, under no.203.
No.20 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. Inv. RF 1973-17; 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; Jean-Marie Rouart et al, The Pont-Aven School: Cradle of the Modern Sensibility, Milan, 2018, unnumbered, pp.58-59. 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, 2001-2002, 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; Nathalie Strasser, ed., De Raphaël à Gauguin: Trésors de la collection Jean Bonna, exhibition catalogue, Lausanne, 2015, p.239, no.145, pl.145; Nathalie Strasser, Collection Jean Bonna. Dessins du XIXe au XXe siècle: Du Romantisme à l’après-guerre, Geneva, 2019, pp.198-199, no.88. 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. No.21 Odilon Redon 1. Ann H. Sievers, Linda Muehlig and Nancy Rich, Master Drawings from the Smith College Museum of Art, New York, p.207, under no.52. 2. Joris-Karl Huysmans, L’art moderne, Paris, 1883, p.215; Quoted in translation in John Rewald, ‘Odilon Redon’, in New York, Museum of Modern Art and Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Rodolphe Bresdin, exhibition catalogue, 1961-1962, p.30. 3. ‘La femme, jeune et à la moue rebelle, la chevelure ruisselante d’eau, semble sortir des flots.’; Wildenstein, op.cit., p.124, under no.297. 4. Redon produced several works that may be more firmly identified as portraits of Arï, such as a painting in the Musée d’Orsay (Inv. RF 1984-42; Roseline Bacou, Musée du Louvre: La donation Arï et Suzanne Redon, Paris, 1984, pp.6-7, no.9) or a chalk drawing in the Louvre (Inv. RF 40956; Bacou, op.cit., pp.90-91, no.180; Roseline Bacou, Odilon Redon Pastels, London, 1987, p.23). No.22 Emil Nolde 1. Peter Vergo and Felicity Lunn, Emil Nolde, exhibition catalogue, London and Copenhagen, 1995-1996, p.170.
2. Jill Lloyd, ‘Nolde [Hansen], Emil’, in Jane Turner, ed., The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, Vol.23, p.186. 3. ‘Es sind die Länder alle so eigentümlich, die Menschen, die Tiere, die Pflanzen, alles ist so fremdartig, nicht immer schön, aber immer interessant.’; from a letter written in December 1913; Emil Nolde, Welt und Heimat: Die Südseereise 1913-1918, 1936, published Cologne, 1965, p.50. 4. Øystein Ustvedt, ‘In search of the authentic’, in Øystein Ustvedt et al, Emil Nolde: Jakten på det autentiske / In Search of the Authentic, exhibition catalogue, Oslo, 2012-2013, p.115. 5. ‘Die sonstigen Eingeborenen bestrichen sich als Trauerzeichen die Stirn mit weißer Farbe. Bei Tanzfesten bemalten sie sich den Körper mit hellen Punkten und Linien und auch mit Blau. Gegen Ungeziefer durchrieben sie die Haare mit Kalk, welcher nachher ein merkwürdiges Braun oder Braunrot ergab. Alles solches steigerte den Reiz ihrer Erscheinung.’; Nolde, op.cit., p.93. 6. Some of these are illustrated in Ingried Brugger et al, Emil Nolde und die Südsee, exhibition catalogue, Vienna and Munich, 2001-2002, nos.7174, 76, 78-79, 85 and 165-166. 7. Inv. SdZ 1, SdZ 3, SdZ 6, SdZ 7, SdZ 8, SdZ 10, SdZ 12 and SdZ 13; Karin Orchard, Emil Nolde: Reise in die Südsee 1913-1914, exhibition catalogue, Hannover, Sprengel Museum, 1992, pp.23-26, nos.5-9 and 11-12; Brugger et al, ibid., nos.167-169; Magdalena Moeller, Emil Nolde in der Südsee, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, Brücke-Museum, 2002, pp.56-65, nos.13-17. 8. Vergo and Lunn, op.cit., p.142. 9. Lloyd, op.cit., p.186. No.23 Egon Schiele 1. Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolours, London and New York, 2003, p.388. 2. The self-portrait drawing in question was given to Erich Lederer and is today in a private collection (Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works, New York, 1990, p.483, no.D.1178, p.140, fig.64; Husslein-Arco and Kallir, ed., op.cit., pp.142-143, no.50.) 3. Alessandra Comini, Egon Schiele’s Portraits, Berkeley, 1974, p.117. 4. Price, ed., op.cit., p.424, under nos.D157-D158. 5. Christian M. Nebehay, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele und die Familie Lederer, Bern, 1987, illustrated p.12; Kallir, op.cit., 1990, p.635, no.D.2453; Tobias G. Natter, Die Welt von Klimt, Schiele und Kokoschka: Sammler und Mäzene, Cologne, 2003, illustrated p.162; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Distinguished European Gentleman’), London, Christie’s, 19 June 2013, lot 119. The dimensions of the drawing are 461 x 296 mm. 6. Kallir, op.cit., 1990, p.635, no.D.2454; Price, ed., op.cit., p.316, no.D157. The drawing measures 461 x 297 mm. 7. Kallir, op.cit., 1990, p.635, no.D.2455; Alessandra Comini, ed., Egon Schiele: Portraits, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2014-2015, p.198, no.72. The sheet measures 464 x 297 mm. No.24 Henri Matisse 1. Henri Matisse, Portraits, Monte Carlo, 1954; quoted in translation in Jack Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, London, 1973, p.151. 2. Ernst-Gerhard Güse, ed., Henri Matisse: Drawings and Sculpture, Munich, 1991, p.10. 3. Hilary Spurling, ‘Debits and credits: Henri Matisse, the Bussys and Blloomsbury’, The Burlington Magazine, April 2005, pp.235-236. 4. Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master, Vol.II: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954, London, 2005, p.368. 5. Jane Simone Bussy, ‘A Great Man’, The Burlington Magazine, February 1986, pp.80-84. 6. Spurling, Matisse the Master, op.cit., p.370. 7. Inv. AM 1730 D and AM 1731 D; John Elderfield, The Drawings of Henri Matisse, exhibition catalogue, London, 1984-1985, pp.277-278, nos.126-135; illustrated pp.229-231; Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, Anne Baldassari and Claude Laugier, Matisse, Paris, 1989, pp.292-295, nos.107 and 108. 8. Matisse, Portraits, 1954; quoted in Flam, ed., op.cit., p.152. 9. John Golding, ‘Introduction’, in Elderfield, op.cit., pp.15-16. 10. Henri Matisse, ‘Notes d’un peintre sur son dessin,’ Le Point, July 1939; translated into English as ‘Notes of a Painter on his Drawing’, in Jack Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995, p.21. 11. Golding in Elderfield, op.cit., p.11.
No.25 Pablo Picasso 1. Karen L. Kleinfelder, The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze: Picasso’s Pursuit of the Model, Chicago, 1993, p.4. 2. Marie-Laure Bernadac, ‘Picasso 1953-1972: Painting as Model’ in London, Tate Gallery, Late Picasso, exhibition catalogue, 1988, p.49. 3. The other drawing executed on the same day, in the same technique as the present sheet and also depicting an artist and model, is illustrated in colour in Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, op.cit., no.94, p.56. The drawing, which measures 218 x 282 mm., is also illustrated in Zervos, op.cit., no.179 and The Picasso Project, op.cit, p.62, no.70-210. 4. The drawing is illustrated in colour in Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, op.cit., no.95, illustrated p.57. See also Zervos, op.cit., no.178; The Picasso Project, op.cit, p.63, no.70-211, and Gary Tinterow, Master Drawings by Picasso, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge and elsewhere, 1981, pp.226-227, no.98. The drawing was with the Perls Galleries in New York in 1981, and measures 268 x 338 mm. 5. Tinterow, ibid., p.226, under no.98. 6. Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, op.cit., nos.102-109, illustrated pp.60-61; Zervos, op.cit., nos.187-194; London, Tate Gallery, op.cit., p.250-253, nos.87-94; Brigitte Léal et al, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, p.462, nos.1135-1142; The Picasso Project, op.cit, pp.64-66, nos.70-21870-225. 7. Jeffrey Hoffeld, ‘Picasso’s Endgame’, in New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Picasso: The Late Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1988, p.7. 8. Christopher Lloyd, Picasso and the Art of Drawing, London, 2018, pp.190-191.
INDEX OF ARTISTS BOUCHER, François; Nos.12-13 CASTIGLIONE, Giovanni Benedetto; No.5 FRAGONARD, Jean-Honoré; No.11 GAINSBOROUGH, Thomas; No.14 GANDOLFI, Gaetano; No.15 GAUGUIN, Paul; No.20 GIORGIONE, Giorgio da Castelfranco, called [attr.]; No.1 GOLTZIUS, Hendrick; No.4 GUERCINO, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called; No.6 HONDECOETER, Melchior d’; No.7 INGRES, Jean-Auguste-Dominique; No.18 LAWRENCE, Sir Thomas; No.17 LE MOYNE DE MORGUES, Jacques; No.2 MARATTI, Carlo; No.8 MATISSE, Henri; No.24 MENZEL, Adolph; No.19 NOLDE, Emil; No.22 PALMA GIOVANE, Jacopo Negretti, called; No.3 PICASSO, Pablo; No.25 REDON, Odilon; No.21 SABATELLI, Luigi; No.16 SCHIELE, Egon; No.23 TIEPOLO, Giovanni Battista; No.10 WATTEAU, Jean-Antoine; No.9
Thomas Gainsborough RA (1727-1788) Wooded Landscape with Cattle and Goats No.14
Back cover: Egon Schiele (1890-1918) Portrait of August Lederer No.23
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