SOFA British Catalogue 2025 by Masterart

ONGPIN

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

High-resolution digital images of the drawings, as well as framed images, are available on request, and are also visible on our website.

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Stephen Ongpin

JOHN VARLEY OWS

London 1778-1842 London

A View of Conwy Castle, North Wales

Watercolour over a pencil underdrawing. Inscribed I certify that this is an Original Drawing / by Old John Varley / Born 1779 / Died 1842 / Herb. Varley / Grandson / 18th July 1899 in black ink on a label formerly attached to the reverse of the frame. Inscribed Conway Castle in pencil on another label formerly attached to the reverse of the frame. 318 x 226 mm. (12 1/2 x 8 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Bonhams, 7 March 2006, lot 73; Martyn Gregory, London, in 2012.

EXHIBITED: London, Martyn Gregory, An Exhibition of British Watercolours and Drawings 1730-1870, 2012, no.69.

Born in the inner London borough of Hackney, John Varley was apprenticed to a silversmith at the age of thirteen, having been forbidden by his father to train as a painter. Following the death of his father a few months later, however, and with the support of his mother, Varley was able to pursue a career as an artist. In 1798 he exhibited his work for the first time, at the Royal Academy. Not long afterwards he became one of the group of young artists, including Thomas Girtin and J. M. W. Turner, who met regularly at the home of the physician and collector Thomas Monro, who also introduced Varley to a number of other collectors.

It was around the turn of the century that Varley began to take on students and develop a reputation as a fine teacher; among his pupils were Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding, William Henry Hunt, John Linnell and William Turner of Oxford. In 1804 Varley was one of the founding members of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours (later known as the Old Water-Colour Society), and he exhibited numerous works there every year between 1805 and 1842, as well as posthumously in 1843. In 1815 he published his influential book A Treatise on the Principles of Landscape, and his work was to have a profound influence on such later watercolourists as John Sell Cotman, David Cox and Peter de Wint. Varley’s reputation lasted well after his death; in their A Century of Painters of the English School, first published in 1866, Richard and Samuel Redgrave described the artist as ‘a perfect master of the rules of composition.’1

From early in his career, Varley made numerous sketching tours of Wales, and Welsh subjects were a large part of his output throughout his long career. He first visited Wales in 1798, in the company of the landscape painter George Arnald, and returned there often. The artist made several visits to the town of Conwy (or Conway), in Caernarvonshire on the north coast of Wales, and views of the town and its 13th century castle were among his earliest exhibited watercolours, shown at the Royal Academy in 1800, 1803 and 1804.

Built by King Edward I between 1283 and 1287, during his conquest of Wales, Conwy Castle had fallen into ruin by the middle of the 17th century. Its picturesque setting was much admired by artists in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Varley painted numerous views of the castle, several of which were exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society between 1805 and 1823. The artist was particularly fond of depicting Conwy Castle from a distance, with trees acting as repoussoir elements in the foreground of the composition, as here. One such example, a very large and finished watercolour with a similar distant view of Conwy Castle framed by trees in the foreground, is today in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York2

JOHANN HEINRICH FÜSSLI, called HENRY FUSELI RA

Zurich 1741-1825 Putney Hill

Recto: The Quarrel of the Queens: Kriemhild and Brunhild at the Church, from Das Nibelungenlied Verso: Kriemhild and Brunhild, with Siegfried Between Them

Brush and grey and brown washes, heightened with white, over an extensive underdrawing in pencil. The verso in pencil and brown and grey wash, with touches of white heightening. Inscribed and dated P.C. [Purser’s Cross] Augt 05 in brown ink at the lower left. Inscribed (not in the artist’s hand) The Ladies Dancing in pencil on the verso.

464 x 371 mm. (18 1/4 x 14 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Switzerland, in 1973; Private collection, Germany.

LITERATURE: Gert Schiff, Johann Heinrich Füssli 1741-1825, Zürich, 1973, Vol.I, p.317, pp.638-639, no.1798, Vol.II, fig.1798; Christian Klemm, ‘Friedel’s Love and Kriemhild’s Revenge. Fuseli’s Revels in the Kingdom of the Nibelungs’, in Franziska Lentzsch et al, Fuseli: The Wild Swiss, exhibition catalogue, Zurich, 2005-2006, pp.160-162 (illustrated).

Although born and brought up in Switzerland, the artist and writer Henry Fuseli spent most of his career in England. The son of a Swiss painter of portraits and landscapes, he was educated at the Collegium Carolinum in Zurich, the intellectual and literary capital of Switzerland in the 18th century. Fuseli became part of a highly educated circle that included his fellow student, the poet and physiognomist Johan Kaspar Lavater, and the historian Johan Jakob Bodmer, who was his teacher and first instilled in his young student an abiding love of the works of Shakespeare and John Milton, as well as Dante, Homer and the Nibelungenlied. Fuseli was extremely well read and became proficient in several languages apart from his native German, including English, French, Italian, Latin and Greek. Destined by his father for the church, he was ordained into the Zwinglian Swiss Reformed Church at the age of twenty, together with Lavater. In 1762 Fuseli and Lavater published an attack on a corrupt local magistrate and the following year had to leave Switzerland to avoid its repercussions. After several months in Berlin, Fuseli settled in London in 1764.

While Fuseli had drawn since his childhood, during his early years in London he expressed himself mainly in his writings. In 1768, however, he met Sir Joshua Reynolds, the President of the Royal Academy, who encouraged him to become a painter and to travel to Rome. With the support of several friends and patrons, including the wealthy banker Thomas Coutts, he was able to spend the years between 1770 and 1778 studying in Italy, mainly in Rome. A passionate admirer of Michelangelo and the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel in particular, which he copied extensively, Fuseli became part of a circle of foreign-born artists working in Rome that included Nicolai Abildgaard, Thomas Banks, John Brown and Johan Tobias Sergel. After his return to London he began to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy, enjoying success in the 1780s with such grandiose and inventive compositions as The Nightmare, shown to considerable acclaim in 1782 and arguably his most famous painting. He was inspired by performances of Shakespeare and other works on the London stage, and a theatrical influence is manifest in many of his early paintings. Fuseli continued to enjoy the patronage of Coutts and also received commissions from the Liverpool banker and lawyer William Roscoe. Another early supporter was the influential publisher Joseph Johnson, through whom he met William Blake. Fuseli was elected an Associate of the Academy in 1788 and a Royal Academician in 1790.

Throughout his career, Fuseli’s work remained deeply rooted in literature. From 1786 he produced nine paintings to illustrate John Boydell’s ‘Shakespeare Gallery’, and a few years later began his greatest task; a series of more than fifty paintings of subjects taken from the writings of John Milton. The project took a decade to come to fruition, and the paintings – many of them on a monumental scale – were exhibited, as the ‘Milton Gallery’, in London between 1799 and 1800 but with little commercial

success. Fuseli served as Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy Schools from 1799 to 1805 and again from 1810 onwards, and as Keeper from 1784. Although he was much respected in artistic circles in London, his paintings and drawings were little known outside of a small group of aristocratic private collectors, and he was largely forgotten by the middle of the 19th century. It was not until the centenary of Fuseli’s death that his work became known to a wider audience, when an exhibition of 361 drawings and paintings, mainly from Swiss and English collections, was held at the Kunsthaus in Zurich in 1926. In 1941 an even larger exhibition was held at the same museum, which today houses the most comprehensive collection of Fuseli’s oeuvre.

Fuseli’s intellectual background, which set him apart from almost any other artist working in England at the same time, is reflected in his conception of his own art, and this is especially true in his drawings. Relatively few of his drawings may be related to finished paintings, and most seem to have been done as independent exercises1. As Paul Ganz has noted, in one of the earliest accounts of the artist’s output as a draughtsman, ‘Fuseli’s drawings are less the product of his age than his paintings; they are the direct expression of his creative power and reveal his personal outlook and his fiery artistic temperament…In the drawings the artist’s genius has unfolded itself in a free and unrestricted manner without regard to contemporary taste; they therefore open the way to a proper understanding of his art and reveal what was unusual in it and far ahead of his time. 2 Similarly, a more recent writer has commented that ‘Fuseli concentrated especially on original subjects and inventive interpretations of those subjects, especially in drawings. Indeed, the drawings are the most immediate evidence of the sparkling genius, the tenderness, the intense and highly eccentric individuality that was Fuseli’s.’3

In the early years of the 19th century Fuseli began to depict subjects and characters from the medieval German epic poem the Nibelungenlied. He was well acquainted with the tale; his teacher Bodmer had been the first to publish a portion of the Nibelungenlied in 1755 and he himself owned the first German edition of the full text, published in 1782. (The poem was not translated into English until 1848 and so would have been largely unknown to a British audience.) Fuseli exhibited paintings of scenes from the Nibelungenlied at the Royal Academy in 1807 and between 1814 and 1820, and also wrote a number of poems based on the text.

It was in the year 1805, however, that Fuseli worked most consistently on a series of large, finished drawings of episodes from the Nibelungenlied, of which the present sheet is one. A recurring character in these drawings is that of Kriemhild, the central female protagonist of the story. As one scholar has recently suggested, ‘Kriemhild is Henry Fuseli’s representation of the ideal woman, embodying values of justice and morality.’4 A Burgundian princess, Kriemhild is married to the great warrior prince Siegfried. Their love is shattered when Siegfried is murdered by Hagen, a close friend of Kriemhild’s brother, the Burgundian King Gunther. Kriemhild’s grief is overwhelming, and the remainder of the story is taken up with her search for revenge, culminating in the savage deaths of Gunther and Hagen, and the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom. As Christian Klemm points out, ‘[one] aspect that particularly fascinated Fuseli in the Nibelungenlied [was] Kriemhild’s manically obsessive revenge, which is no less excessive and without restraint than her possessive love. 5

Part of the series of Nibelungenlied drawings executed between May and November 1805, this large sheet represents an episode from the first half of the poem, before the death of Siegfried. Here Kriemhild challenges her rival, the warrior-queen Brunhild, wife of King Gunther. The two women have argued over which has the higher social rank, since Brunhild wrongly believes that Siegfried is Gunther’s vassal, and that therefore she, as the wife of a King, should take precedence. Meanwhile, Kriemhild claims that Siegfried, not Gunther, took Brunhild’s virginity on her wedding night, when he stole her ring and belt as trophies. (Although Siegfried did not, in fact, seduce Brunhild that night, he did steal her ring and belt, with the help of a magical cloak of invisibility.) When both women arrive at the cathedral at the same time, Kriemhild asserts her superior status and enters first.

As Klemm has described the present sheet, Fuseli ‘presents the fight between the two Queens in an elaborately orchestrated climax in front of the church, where Brunhild tries to deny precedence to Kriemhild

and Kriemhild accuses Brunhild of being her husband’s concubine, leading to the tragedy after the mass, when Kriemhild shows the ring and belt Siegfried took from Brunhild on her wedding night...Fuseli was in every way equal to the dramatic mastery with which his literary model employs contrasts to reveal the antagonism of the two rivals; in fact he builds up the situation even further, following his predilection for diametric opposites, by contracting the whole sequence of the narrative into one single scene. Kriemhild, as the wife of the great hero Siegfried, is portrayed all in white apart from the belt which Brunhild, in black, is missing; this woman bright with light who drags the secret concealed in the darkness into the daylight is show frontally, while her opponent in diametrically opposed rear view turns back. Kriemhild strides past her up the steps of the cathedral, showing the ring with a contemptuous gesture. As in the saga, standing between the fighting queens is the object of their dispute, the enigmatic Siegfried: shadow-like, he seems to be more part of than in front of a steeply soaring geometric form, which may be seen in concrete terms as a buttress of the church. But the significance of the scene lies wholly in the abstract expressive content – in the division of the picture plane between the rivals, opening up a height and depth giving the conflict both suspense and inevitability.’6 It is this quarrel between Kriemhild and Brunhild, and the anger which the latter feels at being deceived and dishonoured, that leads her to demand justice from Gunther, who then orders Hagen to kill Siegfried.

The initials P.C. inscribed by Fuseli at the bottom of the sheet indicate that this was one of several works drawn at the country home of his longtime friend, the publisher and bookseller Joseph Johnson, at Purser’s Cross in Fulham. Indeed, most of Fuseli’s Nibelungenlied drawings of 1805 were done at Purser’s Cross. Other drawings of subjects from the Nibelungenlied are today in the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki in New Zealand, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Nottingham City Museums and Galleries, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the Kunsthaus in Zurich. As the Fuseli scholar Gert Schiff has noted, ‘In just a few months, mostly at Joseph Johnson’s country estate, he created a series of Nibelungen drawings that are among his finest achievements; had this series not remained fragmentary, this series could have been his masterpiece.’7

The verso of this double-sided sheet shows the figure of Kriemhild traced through from the recto, creating a reversed image, to which the artist has added the figures of Brunhilde and Siegfried in different poses from the recto. This allowed him to experiment with variations to the composition and is typical of Fuseli’s practice. As Ketty Gottardo has written, ‘Fuseli’s frequent practice of tracing his compositions from one side to the other of a sheet in order to obtain a mirror image…happens so frequently in his work that it could almost be considered a trademark of authenticity of the artist’s drawings, in addition to their left-handedness…for Fuseli the point of tracing through from one side of a sheet to the other was not simply about seeing how a composition would appear when turned in the opposite direction. On the contrary, trying out a design on the other side allowed him to experiment, and to play with certain details; at times he would then return to the side drawn first to make changes there…through tracing, Fuseli’s explorations on paper free his fantasy to exploit different ideas.’8

In his Nibelungenlied drawings, ‘Fuseli’s visual representation of Kriemhild is an idealized figure of Justice. She is depicted with an androgynous form consisting of both masculine and feminine features, including a strong physique and a furrowed brow, exuding absolute strength and force, alongside a shapely body and long flowing hair. This androgyny…mixes together strength and femininity…Several of the drawings from the 1805 series present Kriemhild as the largest and most detailed figure in the scene, making her a central and hierarchically important figure. Not only does this emphasize Fuseli’s interest in the character, it also shows the depth of Kriemhild and her journey towards rectifying a wrongful act.’9 Although in Fuseli’s Nibelungenlied drawings the men are usually depicted as antique nudes, the women, and in particular Kriemhild, are shown in contemporary fashions and hairstyles. As has been noted, ‘Fuseli was especially interested in changes in women’s fashions.’10

As has recently been noted, ‘Fuseli would remain an indefatigable draughtsman till the end of his life; and for him drawing would always retain its capacity to operate as a clandestine area of creative freedom – a space where he could be at liberty to break the rules, and give untrammelled expression to his genius. 11

JOHN LINNELL

London 1792-1882 Redhill

Southampton from the River Test near Netley Abbey, Hampshire

Pen and brown ink and watercolour, on a double-page spread of a sketchbook. Signed, inscribed and dated Southampton J Linnell 1819 in brown ink at the lower centre.

162 x 491 mm. (6 3/8 x 19 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Sir Lawrence Burnett Gowing, Newcastle and London, by 1968; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Frederick Cummings and Allen Staley, Romantic Art in Britain: Paintings and Drawings 1760-1860, exhibition catalogue, Detroit and Philadelphia, 1968, p.238, under no.157; Paris, Petit Palais, La peinture romantique anglaise et les préraphaélites, exhibition catalogue, 1972, p.165, under no.164.

Born in Bloomsbury in London, John Linnell was the son of a gilder, frame-maker and occasional picture dealer, with whom he worked from a young age, having had very little formal schooling. In 1805 he began studying with the watercolourist John Varley and at the Royal Academy Schools. He was also employed as a copyist in the informal artists’ academy established by the collector Dr. Thomas Monro. Linnell first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1807, at the age of fifteen, and in 1809 won a prize for landscape at the British Institution. Between 1813 and 1820 he exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society (which accepted oil paintings during those years), but although he applied for admission to the Royal Academy every year from 1821 onwards, he was always unsuccessful and eventually gave up in 18411. Even though he established his reputation as a portrait painter, as he noted in an unpublished memoir, ‘portraits I painted to live, but I lived to paint poetical landscape.’2 From the late 1840s onwards Linnell concentrated on landscapes, eventually becoming the most successful landscape painter in England following the death of Turner. Linnell built a home and family estate at Redhill, near Reigate in Surrey, where he lived and worked for thirty years, until his death at the age of ninety. His three sons – James, James Thomas and William – were all artists.

Linnell visited the port city of Southampton in September and October of 1819. He stayed there as the guest of the painter and engraver David Charles Read, who introduced him to his patron Chambers Hall, of Elmfield Lodge in Southampton. Linnell produced several studies of the landscape around Southampton Water and the Itchen and Test rivers, which he later developed into oil paintings. Drawn on the double-page spread of one of the artist’s early sketchbooks, this sunset view depicts Southampton in the distance, seen from Netley Abbey on the other side of the estuary of the River Test. Some years later, this watercolour was used as a reference study for a small oil painting (fig.1) commissioned from Linnell by Chambers Hall in 18253. The vibrant hues of sunset in the finished painting delighted Hall; as he wrote to the artist, ‘You have indeed realised ideas which I had long cherished of a most magnificent effect of nature, the interest in which is heightened to me from the circumstance of locality.’4

As the Linnell scholar Katherine Crouan has noted of the artist’s early works, ‘The skill and power which Linnell brought to his landscape studies from 1811 resulted in a plein air freshness, the most convincing local colour, a remarkable handling of sunlight and shade, and an ability to convey the expanse of landscape through the sum of its minute particulars…With rare exceptions, Linnell never parted with his studies in oil or watercolour, and he didn’t sell them. They were the raw material for his painting, essential for their documentary value but not in themselves art…However, although Linnell thought of his most intensely naturalistic work as merely factual information about nature, to be re-organised into a personal statement, the sketches he made between 1811 and 1819 take naturalism to the level of a visionary intensity.’5

WILLIAM HENRY HUNT OWS

London 1790-1864 London

Sunset with Distant Trees

Watercolour. Signed W. HUNT in brown ink at the lower right. 94 x 128 mm. (3 3/4 x 5 in.)

PROVENANCE: Cyril and Shirley Fry, London and Snape, Suffolk.

LITERATURE: John Witt, William Henry Hunt (1790-1864): Life and Work, London, 1992, p.150, no.76 (‘Trees Outlined Against a Brilliant Sunset’), where dated 1820-1830.

EXHIBITED: Norwich, Castle Museum and London, Maas Gallery, William Henry Hunt 1790-1864: Water-colours and Drawings from the Collection of Mr. & Mrs. Cyril Fry, 1967, part of no.34 (‘Three Studies of Sunsets, Water-colour, 2 signed. circa 1820-25’); London, Guy Peppiatt Fine Art, ‘Simplicity & Intensity’: Drawings and Watercolours by William Henry Hunt, 2024, no.35.

One of the finest British watercolourists of the 19th century, William Henry Hunt was born with weak and deformed legs that prevented him from physical labour, although from his youth he exhibited a talent for drawing that was to lead to a long and highly successful career as an artist. He was apprenticed to John Varley for a period of some seven years, while also studying at the Royal Academy Schools, and became close friends with two of his fellow students in Varley’s studio, John Linnell and William Mulready, with whom he went on sketching expeditions along the Thames. Like Linnell, Hunt was part of the informal drawing academy established by Dr. Thomas Monro, and was able to study Monro’s collection of watercolours. Monro became a close friend of the artist, eventually owning nearly 170 of his works and often inviting him to stay at his country home in Bushey in Hertfordshire. It was through Monro that the artist met the 5th Earl of Essex, who in the early 1820s commissioned Hunt to draw the house, grounds and servants at Cassiobury Park, near Bushey. The artist also did the same for another aristocratic patron and landowner, the 6th Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth. In general, however, and perhaps due to his infirmity, Hunt did not travel much around Britain, and was content to work relatively close to London.

In the early part of his career, between 1807 and 1825, Hunt showed both watercolours and paintings at the Royal Academy, but following his election as an Associate of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1824 and gaining full Membership two years later, he abandoned working in oils to concentrate fully on watercolours. Between 1824 and his death forty years later, Hunt exhibited well over 750 works at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, averaging some twenty-five a year during his most productive period of his career, between 1831 and 1851.

Among Hunt’s occasional pupils was John Ruskin, who was a lifelong admirer of his work and often mentioned him in his lectures and writings1. The later 1830s found Hunt producing interior scenes, studies of country folk and still life subjects, particularly of fruit, flowers and bird’s nests, painted with a particular fineness and delicacy that meant that the artist worked very slowly. Characterized by an innovative technical mastery, these detailed and highly finished still life subjects proved especially popular with collectors, and earned the artist the sobriquet ‘Bird’s Nest’ Hunt. Hunt’s watercolours were much admired by critics such as F. G. Stephens and Ruskin, who regarded him as the finest still life painter of the day. His watercolours were widely collected in his lifetime, fetching increasingly higher prices, and by the 1840s were also being engraved.

Although Hunt rarely dated his watercolours, this and the following sheet are likely to be relatively early works of the 1820s or 1830s. By the end of the 1830s, the artist’s poor health had led him to abandon landscape subjects in favour of interior genre subjects, figure studies and still life compositions.

actual size

WILLIAM HENRY HUNT OWS

London 1790-1864 London

Sunset After a Storm

Watercolour, with touches of white heightening, on blue paper. 86 x 118 mm. (3 3/8 x 4 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Cyril and Shirley Fry, London and Snape, Suffolk.

LITERATURE: John Witt, William Henry Hunt (1790-1864): Life and Work, London, 1992, p.151, no.80 (‘Sky and Trees’), where dated 1820-1830.

This and the previous watercolour may have been done during one of Hunt’s stays with Dr. Thomas Monro in Bushey early in his career, when Monro is said to have paid him 7s. 6d. a day for his sketches from nature. Alternatively, they may have been done during the winters in the coastal town of Hastings, where the artist went for his health during the early part of his career, and where he spent some time sketching out of doors. (This was despite the fact that his disability seems to have made it difficult for him to move around easily, and indeed he is recorded as sometimes being transported in a barrow, used as a sort of makeshift wheelchair, from which he would sketch.) As the 19th century poet and critic William Cosmo Monkhouse has written of Hunt, Some of his best landscapes were also painted at Hastings, which he visited regularly for thirty years, taking up his residence in a small house in the old town overlooking the beach...He was debarred by his infirmity from active exercise, and in later years his health prevented him from drawing in the open air. Many, if not most, of his landscapes were drawn from windows.’1

In his 1982 monograph on the artist, Sir John Witt noted of Hunt that ‘in his early impressionable days [he] was steeped in the spirit of the eighteenth century, and in his early landscapes and views of churches, many done with reed pen and watercolour, and others in pure watercolour, his best qualities as an artist can be seen. He possessed an innate and unobtrusive sense of composition which never deserted him. There is a liveliness and spontaneity in these early landscapes and in his seascapes and shore scenes around Hastings which he gradually lost as he came in his later years, and for good financial reasons, to concentrate on plums and grapes and birds’ nests. These early works which have only recently begun to become widely known and appreciated should rank far higher in the hierarchy of nineteenth-century watercolours…for the present writer, Hunt’s finest and most memorable works are his early landscapes…These by their directness and unerring sense of composition best convey Hunt’s passionate love of nature and his skill in portraying it in loving and simple terms. His talents as an all-round watercolourist deserve a far greater and wider recognition than they have hitherto been accorded.’2

The art dealer Cyril Fry (1918-2010) specialized in 18th and 19th century British works on paper and worked from a gallery in London between 1967 and 1986, and later in Aldeburgh in Suffolk. He and his wife Shirley were passionately devoted to Hunt’s work. They assembled a large and varied collection of his oeuvre, and organized two exhibitions of his watercolours in 1967 and 1981.

actual size

DAVID COX OWS

Birmingham 1783-1859 Harborne

The Porte Saint-Denis, Paris

Watercolour over a pencil underdrawing. A repaired tear at the upper right edge of the sheet. 366 x 260 mm. (14 1/2 x 10 1/4 in.)

Watermark: T. EDMONDS 1825.

PROVENANCE: John Herbert Roberts, 1st Baron Clwyd, Abergele, Denbighshire, Wales; By family descent to a private collection; John Manning Gallery, London, in 1960; Andrew Wyld, W/S Fine Art, London, in 2007; Lowell Libson, London, in 2012; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Horace Shipp, ‘Current Shows and Comment. Sure Eye, Sure Hand’, Apollo, March 1960, illustrated p.61; London, Spink-Leger Pictures, ‘Air and distance, storm and sunshine’: Paintings, watercolours and drawings by David Cox, exhibition catalogue, 1999, unpaginated, under no.30; Scott Wilcox, Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox, exhibition catalogue, New Haven and Birmingham, 2008-2009, p.176, no.47; London, Lowell Libson Ltd., Lowell Libson Ltd., 2012, pp.114-115.

EXHIBITED: London, John Manning Gallery, Spring Exhibition: English and Continental Drawings, March 1960; New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, and Birmingham, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox, 2008-2009, no.47.

Among the finest watercolourists in England in the first half of the 19th century, David Cox was trained as a theatrical scene painter in Birmingham before settling in London in 1804 and establishing himself as a watercolourist. Much influenced by the work of John Varley, with whom he may have briefly studied, Cox exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in 1805. Between 1809 and 1812 he showed his work at the Associated Artists in Watercolours, and in 1812 was admitted to the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, where he exhibited almost every year for the remainder of his long and productive career. Almost all of his sketching trips were in England and Wales, and he only rarely travelled abroad. A celebrated teacher and drawing master, Cox published several technical manuals for amateur watercolourists, including A Treatise on Landscape Painting and Effect in Water Colours, Progressive Lessons on Landscape for Young Beginners and The Young Artist’s Companion.

Cox enjoyed a successful career which lasted over half a century, exhibiting numerous watercolours and the occasional oil painting in London each year. Between 1844 and 1856 he spent part of every summer or autumn in the small village of Betws-y-Coed in the Conwy valley in North Wales, which he used as a base for sketching expeditions, sometimes in the company of younger artists such as George Price Boyce. A stroke, suffered in 1853, left him temporarily paralyzed, and although he recovered, his eyesight began to suffer and by 1857 had started to fail completely. While his output lessened considerably following his stroke, he continued to be well represented – usually with earlier works – at the annual exhibitions of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours. An account of his career, published shortly after his death, described Cox as ‘pre-eminent among landscapists, and the founder of a school of landscape painting purely English, but new to England itself when he created it.’1 Two large retrospective exhibitions, each numbering several hundred works, were held in Liverpool in 1875 and Birmingham in 1890.

David Cox travelled to the Continent only three times in his career, visiting Holland and Belgium in 1826 and making two excursions to France, in 1829 and 1832. This superb watercolour dates from the earlier of his two trips to France, when the artist undertook his first (and only) visit to Paris. Accompanied by his son, Cox spent several days in Calais, Amiens and Beauvais before arriving in the French capital. They had intended to travel further into France and make a tour along the Loire to Orléans, but a bad fall and a sprained ankle meant that the artist remained in Paris for six weeks. He spent this time exploring the city in hired carriages from which he sketched.

The present view was taken from the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, looking south towards the Porte Saint-Denis, a triumphal arch built on the site of one of the great gates of the city. Commissioned by Louis XIV from the architect François Blondel and the sculptor Michel Anguier, the Porte Saint-Denis was built in 1672 and is the second largest triumphal arch in Paris, after the Arc de Triomphe (which was still under construction when Cox visited the city), and was the entry point into the city for most visitors coming from Britain. As the English painter and diarist Joseph Farington, writing in 1802, noted of the Porte Saint-Denis, ‘We now saw the character of one part of Paris. Approaching the gate the view to a painters eye is picturesque, the forms, & variety & colour of the buildings & the arch which is lofty, make an assemblage very well calculated for a picture.’2

Among the lively watercolours produced by Cox during his stay in Paris in 1829 are examples in the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, the Leeds Art Gallery, the Tate in London, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as in several private collections. As Stephen Duffy has noted, ‘The sketches that Cox made during his stay in Paris, and in the other French cities he visited in 1829, are among his most impressive works. The experience seems to have inspired him to produce works of exceptional brilliance and vigour, in which he paid unusually close attention to topographical accuracy.’3 The artist exhibited only a handful of Parisian subjects at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, however; two in 1830, five the following year, and one in 1838. As the scholar Scott Wilcox has pointed out, ‘the body of Parisian sketches, which have come to be among the most highly regarded of Cox’s watercolours, were in his own lifetime known only to a small coterie of family and friends.’4

An unfinished variant of this watercolour view of the Porte Saint-Denis (fig.1), formerly in the collection of H. S. Reitlinger, was sold at auction in 20035. As Wilcox has noted of the present sheet, ‘Among his Parisian subjects, Cox’s view of the Porte St. Denis is unusual in that it exists in at least two versions. While the present work with its forceful pencil drawing and bold use of watercolor is typical of the works produced during his weeks sketching in the streets of Paris, the other version (private collection)…with its more controlled pencil outlines and application of watercolor seems less a sketch than a piece intended for exhibition and/or sale but left unfinished.’6 A third version of the composition – a smaller watercolour, signed and dated 1831 and worked up from sketches made years earlier in Paris – recently appeared at auction in London7

The first known owner of the present sheet was the Welsh Liberal politician Herbert Roberts, 1st Baron Clwyd (1863-1955), who owned a number of other watercolours by David Cox, including a study of clouds now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

WILLIAM ROXBY BEVERLEY

Richmond 1811-1889 Hampstead

Fishing Boats on a Beach

Watercolour over a pencil underdrawing. Signed and dated WBeverley [?] Augt. / 28 1835 in brown ink at the lower right.

258 x 358 mm. (10 1/8 x 14 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Michael Ingram, Driffield Manor, Driffield, Gloucestershire; His posthumous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 6 June 2007, part of lot 248; Private collection, England.

The son and grandson of actors and theatre managers, William Roxby Beverley began his career as a painter of scenery for the theatre and continued to work in this field throughout his life. Indeed, his reputation was established by his renown as a scene painter, and in particular his skill in rendering atmospheric effects. (An obituary published in the Daily Telegraph in 1889 described Beverley as the ‘long acknowledged chief and doyen of English scenic artists’, although the author also noted his ‘noble water-colours done in leisure hours.’) Beverley began to produce landscape watercolours under the influence of Clarkson Stanfield, also a former scenographer, whom he joined on sketching tours, as well as Richard Parkes Bonington. Although Beverley began exhibiting his marine watercolours from 1831 onwards, he continued to make his living as a scene painter at the Theatre Royal in Manchester and, occasionally, as an actor. By 1846 he had settled in London, and was engaged as scenic director at several theatres, notably at the Lyceum, Covent Garden and Drury Lane. By comparison with many of his fellow artists, Beverley produced relatively few watercolours, since he was kept busy by the demands on his time as a theatrical painter. Nevertheless, as one early critic had noted, ‘Beverley painted water-colour pictures of rare and delicate beauty, works which alone should suffice to win for him a place in the front rank among our masters of water-colour art.’1

Beverley worked for his entire career in England, although he is known to have visited France and Switzerland. He was particularly fond of coastal scenes and depictions of such port towns and fishing communities as Scarborough, Eastbourne, Hastings and Sunderland, and also painted views in London, the upper Thames valley and the Lake District. Common to many of his watercolours is a particular interest in skies and atmospheric effects; a legacy of his training as a scene painter. Beverley’s landscape watercolours, which were almost always of English coastal scenes, were regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1865 and 1880. He also showed his work at such commercial galleries as the Dudley Gallery, charging up to £400 for his finished watercolours.

An early work, the present sheet is a fine example of Beverley’s lively watercolour sketches. The scene depicted is likely to be found in one of the fishing communities in the Northeast coast of England, where he made several sketching tours. In one of the first critical reappraisals of the artist’s oeuvre, published in 1921, Frank Emanuel noted that ‘there are numbers of charming little compositions and studies of boats and shipping, of which he had the completest practical knowledge, down to the smallest detail. Indeed, his knowledge of shipping was equal to that of any of the specialists in marine work...His drawing of the subtly curving lines of hulls, his delineation of spars and rigging, is absolutely faultless, and put in with a line unrivalled for certainty and purity.’2 Similarly, a later writer opined that ‘Beverley was primarily a marine artist and his best works, I think, are his watercolours of coastal scenes, with boats either on the beach or off-shore. He did many such works in the early morning or at sunset and was masterly at depicting the sun just peeping through the dawn clouds…His draughtsmanship was first class. A close examination of some of his fishing boats, for example, shows what Martin Hardie described as a “structure of crisp and finely descriptive drawing”; the hulls, masts and rigging are put in with an accurate, confident line…Technically, too, his boats are good enough to withstand the scrutiny of any sea-going man.’3

PETER DE WINT OWS

Hanley 1784-1849 London

Wooded Hills and a Valley near Lowther, Westmoreland

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

PROVENANCE: The artist’s studio sale, London, Christie’s, 22-28 May 1850, lot 433 (as ‘Lowther’, bt. Smith for £5,15.6); John F. Laycock; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 11 July 1972, lot 26; Cyril and Shirley Fry, London and Snape, Suffolk.

LITERATURE: Hammond Smith, Peter DeWint 1784-1849, London, 1982, p.149; Andrew Wilton and Anne Lyles, The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880, exhibition catalogue, 1993, p.224, no.121, illustrated pl.238 (where dated c.1840-1845).

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

The son of a Staffordshire physician of Dutch descent, Peter De Wint was trained in the London studio of the portrait painter and engraver John Raphael Smith. There he soon met the young artist William Hilton from Lincoln, who was to become a lifelong friend, as well as his brother-in-law. Released from his apprenticeship in 1806, De Wint studied briefly with the landscape artist John Varley but in general seems to have begun his independent career without further training. He did have access to the private collection of the noted connoisseur Dr. Thomas Monro, whose works by Thomas Girtin he found particularly appealing. In 1809 De Wint became an Associate member of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, rising to full membership the following year, and he showed numerous works there almost yearly between 1810 and his death in 1849. He also exhibited landscape paintings and watercolours at the Royal Academy, the British Institution and the Associated Artists in Water Colours. He soon found favour with critics, and he began to establish a particular reputation, with regular sales to a large number of devoted patrons and collectors. From 1827 onwards De Wint’s wife Harriet maintained a comprehensive list of the artist’s output, noting the locations depicted, the purchasors of the works and the prices paid for them.

De Wint undertook sketching tours throughout England and Wales, with a particular fondness for his native Lincolnshire, as well as Derbyshire, Yorkshire and the Lake District. (He never seems to have had much desire to travel abroad, however, and his only foreign tour was a brief visit to Normandy in 1828.) He was fond of sketching out of doors, and among his favourite subjects were rivers and streams, harvest scenes and pastoral views. Somewhat unusually, however, De Wint seems to have almost never signed or dated his works, even those sent to exhibitions. He produced a significant number of topographical landscape prints, many of which were published in book form. The artist died in 1849, at the age of sixty-six. In the opinion of Walter Armstrong, in his Memoir of Peter De Wint, published in 1888, ‘De Wint’s place in English art is with Constable and David Cox. Like Constable he saw instinctively the true capabilities of English landscape, and, like Cox, the true powers of the medium in which he worked. His coup d’oeil for a subject was even finer than theirs. He seized with a quicker instinct on the best point of view, the most rhythmical combination of line, the most effective chords of colour. His sense of unity was almost unerring. In his most hasty sketches, no less than his finished pictures, there is ever a central idea led up to and enhanced by every touch of his brush.’1 Writing some thirty years later, a fellow watercolourist added that ‘No artist ever came nearer to painting a perfect picture than did Peter DeWint. His sense of colour was more brilliant, his choice of subject matter more apt, and his judgment as to the exact time when a picture should be left, better than any of his contemporaries.’2

Datable to the late 1830s or early 1840s, this exceptionally large and freely painted watercolour depicts a view near Lowther Castle in Cumbria, the seat of one of De Wint’s foremost patrons, the MP and collector William Lowther, 2nd Earl of Lonsdale (1787-1872). The Earl, who inherited Lowther Castle in 1802, was a keen supporter of artists and writers, including William Wordsworth. De Wint was a frequent visitor to Lowther Castle and was occasionally employed as a drawing master to the Earl’s grandchildren. The artist produced numerous views of the Lowther estate between 1834 and 1843, several of which were exhibited at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours. As De Wint’s widow (and first biographer) noted of him, ‘His love for nature was excessive, and his study from nature constant and unwearied. He never tired of sketching, which was his great delight…He preferred the North of England, and spent much time in Yorkshire, Cumberland and Westmorland. He was frequently at Lowther Castle, where, through the kindness of the then Earl of Lonsdale and his family, he was enabled to visit the most remote and picturesque spots in that wild and beautiful district.’3

In an early account of the artist’s life and work, published in 1891, Gilbert Redgrave noted of De Wint that ‘His method in water-colours was very simple. He used as a rule only ten pigments:- Yellow Ochre. Gamboge. Vermilion. Indian Red. Purple Lake. Brown Pink. Burnt Sienna. Sepia. Prussian Blue. Indigo…De Wint made a practice of painting on ivory-tinted Creswick paper, which he kept rather wet…He laid in his effect at once in broad flat washes, and he had a fine sense of colour, and a most keen appreciation of the tints and harmonies of nature, which his rich and flowing brush enabled him to carry out swiftly, with great freshness and purity…In his feeling for breadth and in the fine sense of colour De Wint’s water-colour art is truly original…Many of De Wint’s sketches seem to have more freshness and ease than his more elaborate and finished compositions. The very onceness of his sketches made out of doors has in it a most peculiar charm.’4 More recently, the scholar Andrew Wilton has written that ‘De Wint’s work is characterised by a warm range of browns and greens that obviously derives from [Thomas] Girtin; later, he varied this with touches of unmixed red or blue. But he did not make the study of climate a priority. His chief concern remained the creation of subtle and beautifully articulated compositions based on stretches of open or wooded country, often in the broad Wolds of his own Lincolnshire…When well preserved, his watercolours often display fine atmospheric effects.’5

The present sheet was among a group of around five hundred sketches, drawings from nature, and finished watercolours from De Wint’s studio – including sixteen views of Lowther Castle and the surrounding park – that were sold at auction and dispersed the year after the artist’s death, for a total of £2,364. A later owner of this fine watercolour was the art dealer Cyril Fry (1918-2010), who established a gallery, specializing in 18th and 19th century British works on paper, in London between 1967 and 1986, and later in Aldeburgh in Suffolk. Fry acquired the present sheet for his personal collection, which included a number of very fine works by De Wint, an artist he particularly admired.

Among stylistically comparable watercolours by Peter De Wint of the same period is a Wooded River Landscape in the Art Institute of Chicago6. Another comparable view near Lowther, of the same size as the present sheet, is in the Hickman Bacon collection7

JOSEPH

MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER RA

London 1775-1851 London

The Approach to Venice or Venice, from the Lagoon Watercolour, with touches of pen and brown and red ink. 221 x 319 mm. (8 3/4 x 12 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Thomas Griffith, London and Norwood, Surrey; By descent to his daughter, Jemima Lardner Griffith, Rochester, Kent; Probably her sale, London, Christie’s, 4 July 1887, lot 193 (‘Approach to Venice’, sold for 150 gns. to Agnew’s); Thomas Agnew and Sons, London; Acquired from them on 6 July 1887 by Thomas Stuart Kennedy, Park Hill, Wetherby, Yorkshire, and thence by descent to his wife Clara Thornton Kennedy, Harrogate, Yorkshire; Haddon C. Adams, Merton Park, London; Thence by family descent until 2025.

A new and fascinating addition to the corpus of views of Venice produced by J. M. W. Turner throughout his career, this fine and atmospheric watercolour is a noteworthy rediscovery that can be closely associated with a sketchbook used by the artist on his last visit to the city on the lagoon. In the course of his lifetime, Turner travelled to Venice just three times, the first time for a few days in September 1819, when he was forty-four years old. He was there again for just over a week in the late summer of 1833, and made a final visit in August 1840, when he stayed for a fortnight. (It was during this last visit that a fellow artist, William Callow, who was staying at the same hotel as Turner, recalled, ‘One evening whilst I was enjoying a cigar in a gondola I saw Turner in another one sketching San Giorgio, brilliantly lit up by the setting sun. I felt quite ashamed of myself idling away my time whilst he was hard at work so late.’1) Although he spent a total of less than four weeks in Venice during the course of his life, Turner painted Venetian subject pictures throughout much of his later career, exhibiting at least one such painting at the Royal Academy almost every year between 1833 and 1846. It was only after Turner’s death in 1851, however, that his remarkable watercolours of Venice came to light, in sketchbooks or loose sheets found in the artist’s studio, almost all of which are now part of the Turner Bequest at the Tate. Long regarded as a particular high point of Turner’s late work, the artist’s Venetian watercolours number around 150 in total, almost all today in museum collections, to which may now be added the present sheet.

As the pioneering Turner scholar A. J. Finberg, writing in 1930, noted, ‘Though the number of Turner’s Venetian paintings and drawings is not very impressive when compared with the total of his enormous output, yet the works themselves, dealing as they do with a single and clearly-defined subject-matter, form a very interesting and important series. I believe this series, especially the water-colours, is more generally liked and admired at the present time than any other group of his works…There is something in Turner’s Venetian drawings and paintings which appeals with peculiar force to the artist, to the art-critic, and to the art-loving public of to-day.’2 More recently, Martin Butlin has agreed that ‘Turner’s Venetian subjects, both in oil and watercolour, are now amongst the most sought after of his works.’3

Another scholar, Luke Herrmann, has written of Turner’s third and final stay in Venice, in 1840, that ‘As well as making more rapid pencil notations…in three small sketchbooks,…he used larger roll-sketchbooks (which could be rolled up and kept in a pocket) to work in watercolours, very probably on the spot. These late Venetian watercolours, of which some two dozen were removed from the sketchbooks and sold during Turner’s lifetime, are among the artist’s supreme achievements in the medium of which he was such a complete and unrivalled master. Taken as a whole they provide the most engrossing survey of the unique character, atmosphere, and light of Venice; seen individually each one is an outstanding achievement in its own right.’4

It appears that Turner used two identical soft-backed sketchbooks (known as roll-sketchbooks) on his 1840 tour to Venice. One of these – sometimes called the ‘Grand Canal and Giudecca’ sketchbook and containing twenty-one sheets, aptly described as ‘the most perfect, inventive and dream-like of Turner’s watercolours of Venice’5 – is today part of the Turner Bequest at the Tate6. The Tate sketchbook

consists of off-white Whatman paper in sheets measuring approximately 222 x 322 mm., about half of which are watermarked 1834. A second, now dismembered roll-sketchbook of the same Whatman paper, known as the ‘Storm’ sketchbook, appears to have been broken up after Turner’s death. As has been noted, ‘It has sometimes wrongly been suggested that these leaves [from the ‘Storm’ sketchbook] were also part of TBCCCXV [the roll-sketchbook in the Turner Bequest]. However, few of Turner’s late roll sketchbooks contained more than twenty-four sheets, which argues strongly for a second sketchbook; as does the fact that these sheets became separated from the main group of Venetian studies in the Bequest. 7 As Ian Warrell further notes, ‘The second of the Venetian roll sketchbooks contained a number of images, now widely dispersed, that were more fully developed than those in its companion [in the Tate].’8 As the paper historian and analyst Peter Bower has confirmed, the present sheet is on the same paper as the ‘Grand Canal and Giudecca’ and ‘Storm’ sketchbooks, and must have come from the latter.

The late, ephemeral watercolours from the ‘Storm’ roll-sketchbook, amounting to at least twenty sheets and including the present example, were removed and sold to collectors through Turner’s agent and dealer Thomas Griffith, probably after the artist’s death. At least six of the watercolours were purchased by John Ruskin, of which three were later presented by him to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and three to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Other watercolours from the ‘Storm’ sketchbook, all outside the Turner Bequest, are today in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, the British Museum in London and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as in a handful in private collections.

As another scholar has noted of the Venice sketchbooks, ‘With the group of watercolours from the roll sketchbook there are wide variations of style and mood, suggesting that Turner was deliberately exploring a range of responses to the city and its setting.’9 It is sometimes difficult to determine the precise views depicted, since Turner’s intention was mainly to capture fleeting effects of light and colour. While the prominent bell tower in the centre of this composition may at first glance be thought to be the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco, the lack of any identifiable buildings near it, such as the Doge’s Palace or the church of Santa Maria della Salute, or indeed the entrance to the Grand Canal, would suggest that Turner was here depicting a different view altogether. Ian Warrell has suggested that the bell tower may be that of the church of San Francesco della Vigna, in the northeastern part of Venice. If so, then the large squarish building to its right in this watercolour could be the nearby church of San Lorenzo, with the great semi-circular Diocletian window dominating its façade, with Turner viewing the scene from a gondola on the lagoon, near the cemetery island of San Michele. As has been noted, ‘Turner developed a fascination for the city’s profile as seen from the broad expanses of adjacent water... even when restricting himself to the islands closest to the Bacino, Turner discovered vantage points that allowed him to frame the city in novel ways.’10

Not long after Turner’s final visit to Venice in 1840, a railway bridge was constructed that connected the city with the mainland for the first time. As Warrell has pointed out, ‘Turner was fortunate in being among the last generation of travellers to experience Venice as a city that was still completely separate from the surrounding terra firma…the wide spaces of the lagoon were stimulating for Turner, liberating him from the constrictions of more contained outlooks within the city. Here sea and sky become as one and seem to extend without limits in a way that is timeless.’11

Similarly, Finberg has noted of the late Venetian watercolours that ‘The parts of all these drawings in which Turner seems to take most interest are the sea and the sky…he finds more pleasure in them than in the architecture or the boats or figures. The surface of the water, in particular, is always struck in decisively, and its varying shades of blue and green evidently please him.’12 This can be seen both in this previously unpublished sheet and in a closely comparable watercolour of A Storm on the Lagoon in the British Museum13, which comes from the same roll-sketchbook. As Warrell has written of the British Museum Storm on the Lagoon, in terms equally applicable to the present sheet, [several] watercolours from the ‘Storm’ sketchbook chart the arrival of a late-afternoon squall…In the study now in the British Museum, a gondolier seeks shelter in the Grand Canal from the tossing waters of the Bacino. Whether fortuitously,

or as a result of his observations, the opaque jade green that Turner uses in this work unerringly replicates what occurs when a storm aerates the Lagoon during a sudden downpour…It is as though, having returned to the [Hotel] Europa wet and dripping after being caught in the storm, he needed to work through the impressions that were still so vivid and fresh.’14

Turner here used differing, subtle shades of blue-green watercolour to depict the waves in the foreground and the ribbed clouds above, with some pale red washes added towards the top of the sheet. Also evident here is another particular characteristic of the artist’s late Venetian watercolours; the use of red tones, applied with a fine pen or tip of a brush dipped in ink or watercolour, to delineate the topography of the city in the far distance, allowing architectural features to stand out against the overall bluish tonality of the water and sky. This is seen in several other watercolours from the ‘Storm’ sketchbook of 1840, such as Venice, The Grand Canal Looking Towards the Dogana in the British Museum15 and Venice, The Mouth of the Grand Canal in the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art16

The first recorded owner of the present sheet was the art dealer and collector Thomas Griffith (17951868), who from the 1830s onwards acted as Turner’s agent. Griffith was trained as a lawyer but never practiced, despite being admitted to the Inner Temple in 1827. The same year he was entrusted with the sale of some of Turner’s finished watercolours for the Picturesque Views in England and Wales series. A collector himself, Griffith was also known as a supporter of artists17. It was at his home in 1840 that John Ruskin was first introduced to his hero Turner, and it was around the same time that Turner began to engage Griffith with handling the sales of some of his oil paintings, while he was also instrumental in marketing Turner’s late Swiss watercolours of the early 1840s. Griffith owned at least one other of Turner’s 1840 Venetian watercolours from the ‘Storm’ sketchbook; a view of the Grand Canal with Santa Maria della Salute which is now in a private collection18. At his death in 1868, his collection of watercolours and drawings by Turner passed to his unmarried daughter Jemima Lardner Griffith, and were sold by her at auction in London in 1887. One of the major buyers at the sale was the Yorkshire industrialist Thomas Stuart Kennedy (1841-1894), who seems to have acquired the present sheet, through the dealers Agnew’s, either at, or very shortly after, the 1887 auction.

This atmospheric watercolour of Venice later entered the collection of the bridge engineer Haddon Clifford Adams (1898-1971), who was a noted collector of drawings, books, documents and ephemera by John Ruskin. (As Adams stated, in a letter of 1931, ‘collecting Ruskin is my one luxury.’). Adams’s collection of Ruskiniana was bequeathed to the Ruskin Galleries at Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight and is now housed in the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University. Although Adams probably acquired the present sheet, sometime in the 1930s, as a work by Turner (and hence it was not included in his Ruskin gift to Bembridge), its correct attribution seems to have been forgotten after his death. Its recent reappearance as a new addition to the corpus of Turner’s late Venetian watercolours, from the ‘Storm’ sketchbook broken up by Griffith, is therefore an event of considerable significance.

JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER RA

London 1775-1851 London

The Lauerzersee with the Ruins of Schwanau and the Mythens Watercolour over an underdrawing in pencil, with pen and grey ink, with scratching out. 227 x 287 mm. (8 7/8 x 11 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to Mrs. Sophia Caroline Booth, Margate and London; By descent to her son, Daniel John Pound; By descent to his widow, Mary Anne Pound, and given by her to Alfred and Kate Austin, Hove, Sussex; Their anonymous sale (‘presented by J. M. W. TURNER, R.A., to MRS. POUND, and given by her son to the present owner.’), London, Christie’s, 11 June 1909, lot 185 (as ‘A View on the Rhine’, bt. Agnew’s for £346.10); Thomas Agnew and Sons, London; Acquired from them by Walter H. Jones, Blakemere Hall, Northwich, Cheshire and Hurlingham Lodge, Fulham, London; By descent to his widow, Maud Jones, Hurlingham Lodge, London, and Aberuchill Castle, Perthshire, Scotland; Her posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 3 July 1942, lot 49 (as ‘The Lake of Lucerne: Brunnen in the distance. Painted about 1840. 9 in. by 11 in. From the Collection of Mrs Pound, to whom this drawing was given by the Artist. From the Collection of A. Austin, Esq.’, bt. Agnew’s for £420); Thomas Agnew and Sons, London; L. B. Murray, in 1951, and by descent to his son; Private collection, in 1979; Sold by Agnew’s in June 1983 to D. Hoener, New York; Anonymous sale (‘Property of a New York Private Collector’), New York, Sotheby’s, 21 May 1987, lot 30; A. Alfred Taubman, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; His (anonymous) sale, London, Sotheby’s, 11 April 1991, lot 77; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Gentleman’), London, Christie’s, 9 July 1996, lot 41; (Jacob) Eli Safra, Geneva; His anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 28 January 2016, lot 61.

LITERATURE: A. J. Finberg, Early English Water-Colour Drawings by the Great Masters [Special Number of The Studio], London, Paris and New York, 1919, pp.20 and 45, no.130, illustrated in colour pl.XX; Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J. M. W. Turner, Fribourg and London, 1979, pp.478-479, no.1488 (‘The Lowerzersee, with Schwytz and the Mythen’, where dated 1843(?); ‘News and Sales Record,’ Turner Studies: His Art & Epoch 1775-1851, Summer 1987 (Vol.7 No.1), p.64; Eric Shanes, ‘Picture Notes: 1. The Lauerzer See, with the Mythens (hitherto entitled ‘Lake Brienz’), W.1562...Victoria and Albert Museum. 2. The Lauerzer See with Schwytz and the Mythen, W.1488…Private Collection, U.S.A.)’, Turner Studies: His Art & Epoch 1775-1851, Winter 1987, pp.58-59; ‘News and Sales Record,’ Turner Studies: His Art & Epoch 1775-1851, Summer 1991, p.60; Robert Upstone, ‘Salerooms Report’, Turner Society News, August 1991, p.5; ‘An Evening for the Turner Society at Agnew’s’, Turner Society News, March 1994, p.1; Ian Warrell, Through Switzerland with Turner: Ruskin’s First Selection from the Turner Bequest, exhibition catalogue, London, 1995, p.71, under no.32, p.152, no.8; Terence Rodrigues, ed., Christie’s Review of the Year 1996, London, 1996, p.49; ‘Salerooms Report’, Turner Society News, August 1997, p.11; Eric Shanes, Turner: The Great Watercolours, exhibition catalogue, London, 2000-2001, p.238, under no.110; Eric Shanes, The Golden Age of Watercolours: The Hickman Bacon Collection, exhibition catalogue, Dulwich and New Haven, 2001-2002, p.49, under no.27; Eric Shanes, La Vie et les chefs d’oeuvre de J.M.W. Turner, New York, 2008, p.239; J. R. Piggott, ‘Salerooms Report’, Turner Society News, Spring 2016, p.16; Martin Krause, ‘Mrs. Booth’s Turners’, The British Art Journal, 2021, No.1, pp.6 and 8, illustrated p.9, fig.4; Jan Piggott, ‘Salerooms Report’, Turner Society News, Autumn 2023, p.30.

EXHIBITED: London, Thos. Agnew and Sons, Exhibition of Selected Water-Colour Drawings, 1910, no.184 (as ‘On the Rhine’); London, Thos. Agnew and Sons, Exhibition of Water-Colour Drawings by Joseph Mallord William Turner R.A., 1913, no.117 (as ‘View on the Rhine. View of a bend in the river with castle on the left, and on either side snow-clad peaks; moon rising. 8 3/4 x 11 1/4.’); London, Thos. Agnew and Sons, Exhibition of Water Colour Drawings by Artists of the Early English School, 1919, no.130 (as ‘Lake of Lucerne: Brunnen in the distance.’); London, Thos. Agnew and Sons, Centenary Loan Exhibition of WaterColour Drawings by J. M. W. Turner, R.A., 1951, no.96 (‘The Lowerzer See, with Schwyz and the Myttenberg. c.1840. Formerly known as “The Lake of Lucerne, Brunnen in the distance.”’); London, Thos. Agnew and

Sons, Loan Exhibition of Paintings and Watercolours by J. M. W. Turner, R.A., 1967, no.80 (‘The Lowerzer See with Schwyz and the Myttenberg in the Distance’); Zurich, Kunsthaus Zurich, Turner und die Schweiz, 1976-1977, no.43 (‘Lauerzer See, um 1841’); London, Agnew’s, Turner Watercolours: Watercolours by J. M. W. Turner R.A. (1775-1851), 1994, no.8 (‘The Lauerzersee with Schwyz and the Mythen’).

J. M. W. Turner made a total of six visits to Switzerland; the first time in 1802, at the age of twentyseven, when he spent some three months in the Alps. He did not, however, return to the country for another thirty-four years, until 1836, when he travelled there with his friend and patron H. A. J. Munro of Novar, although this trip did not result in any finished watercolours. Most significantly, Turner travelled extensively throughout Switzerland towards the end of his life, returning there every year between 1841 and 1844. Each of these trips resulted in numerous drawings, watercolours and sketches of Swiss and Alpine subjects, as well as a handful of large, finished oil paintings. As John Russell has noted of Turner, ‘Already on his first Swiss tour in 1802 he marked down as if by instinct precisely the places which would concern him most deeply forty or more years later…they were predominantly scenes which had an unruffled lake – Lucerne, Zurich, Thun, Constance – as their point of departure. Drama they had in abundance, those late Swiss watercolours; but it was as much the drama of Turner’s own creativity as of the scenes under discussion…the late Swiss watercolours have a quality which is to be found nowhere else in Turner’s work.’1 As Russell has also written, There was nothing that Turner did not know about European landscape; but it was to Switzerland above all that he turned when he had one more great thing to say and very little time left in which to say it. And he said it in terms of the pacific inundations – the swift flooding of the paper with water and colour – of which he was the supreme master. 2

The watercolours of Swiss views that Turner produced during his final tours of the country in the first half of the 1840s, of which the present sheet is an especially fine example, have long been recognized as among his most remarkable works on paper. They were unlike any watercolours he had done before, and he chose to have them marketed in a different way as well. In 1842 Turner left fifteen ‘sample’ watercolour studies, taken from the ‘roll’ sketchbooks of his Swiss tour the previous year, with his dealer and agent Thomas Griffith. These studies he proposed to make into more finished watercolours on commission, and Griffith was tasked with finding purchasers for them. The same arrangement with Griffith was also undertaken after Turner’s Swiss tours of 1843 and 1844, although in the end most of the finished watercolours were acquired by just two collectors, Munro of Novar and John Ruskin. As the latter wrote of Turner’s late Swiss tours, ‘He made a large number of coloured sketches on this [first] journey, and realised several of them on his return…The perfect repose of his youth had returned to his mind, while the faculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength; all conventionality being done away with by the force of the impression which he had received from the Alps, after his long separation from them. The drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness and simplicity of thought: most of them by deep serenity, passing into melancholy; all by a richness of colour, such as he had never before conceived. They, and the works done in the following years, bear the same relation to those of the rest of his life that the colours of the sunset do to those of the day; and will ever be recognized, in a few years more, as the noblest landscapes ever yet conceived by human intellect.’3

The scholar Andrew Wilton has written that ‘Turner’s fascination with the landscape of Switzerland in the last decade of his career manifested itself almost exclusively in watercolours: studies briefly noted on the spot and worked up in colour afterwards were transformed, under the stimulus of consciously sought commissions, into a sequence of transcendental visions of mountains and lakes defined by the sweeping, swirling spaces between them…He produced hundreds of colour studies on these Swiss journeys, and was bursting with new responses to the lakes and mountains which needed to find expression in the ‘changed’ and ‘hazy’ manner he had newly evolved. But it was hardly in his nature to make finished watercolours without a clear economic purpose like engraving or sale to a collector…He was no doubt conscious that they represented, hazy or not, the culmination of his achievement in the medium…Turner knew these drawings to be his masterpieces.’4 Not long after the artist’s death, his late Swiss watercolours began to be highly prized by collectors, and this has continued to the present day.

In exceptional condition, this luminous watercolour depicts the Lauerzersee, or Lake Lauerz. Situated near the town of Schwyz, the Lauerzersee lies twenty-two kilometres east of the city of Lucerne and not

far from the town of Brunnen on Lake Lucerne. Turner had first visited the area on his initial Swiss journey of 1802, and returned there on sketching tours between 1841 and 1844, although it was in 1843 that he explored the Lauerzersee and its surroundings most extensively, from a base at Lucerne. In the summer of that year the sixty-eight-year old artist travelled along the northern edge of mountain massif of the Rigi, visiting the villages of Kussnacht, Arth, Goldau, Lauerz and Schwyz before ending at Brunnen.

On these excursions he carried with him one of his ‘roll sketchbooks’ of Whatman paper, with which he set down scenes that would be the basis of later, more finished watercolours. These ‘roll’ sketchbooks with soft paper covers, which could be rolled up and carried in a coat pocket, were used by Turner for more comprehensive studies in colour than the rapid pencil sketches which filled his smaller pocket sketchbooks. As Ruskin stated, ‘Turner used to walk about a town with a roll of thin paper in his pocket, and make a few scratches upon a sheet or two of it, which were so much shorthand indication of all he wished to remember. When he got to his inn in the evening, he completed the pencilling rapidly, and added as much colour as was needed to record his plan of the picture.’5

The present sheet comes from one of the ‘roll’ sketchbooks that Turner used on his Swiss tours. While the precise location depicted here remained a mystery for early scholars and collectors6, it has since been firmly identified as the Lauerzersee. Turner appears to have drawn this atmospheric watercolour from the road along the southern edge of the small lake, about a kilometre or so east of the village of Lauerz. At the left of the composition is the small island of Schwanau with its ruined castle, the Burgruine Schwanau, and at the right are the lower slopes of the Urmiberg mountain, while in the distance rise the distinctive twin peaks of the mountains known as the Grosser and Kleiner Mythen. Drawn in a fine pencil at the far end of the lake is what is probably the prominent 16th century church tower of the Alte Kapelle church in the lakeside village of Seewen, close to Schwyz. The artist may have been inspired to visit Schwyz and the Lauerzersee by the extensive description of the area given in John Murray’s guidebook A Hand-Book for Travellers in Switzerland and the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont, published in 1838, which he took with him on his travels.

As Ian Warrell has noted of this watercolour of The Lauerzersee with the Ruins of Schwanau and the Mythens, ‘Having defined the structure of the scene so deftly in his under-drawing, Turner added washes of diluted yellow and blue, leaving traces of hasty movements with his brush; or blending them at times to add green, a colour that is surprisingly rare in his works. These overlapping tones are given more tangible substance through the addition of economic penwork, at times as neat as lines of knitting, and elsewhere more freely calligraphic.’7 Warrell has likened the present sheet, in both stylistic and tonal terms, to a number of other watercolours of c.1842-1843 from the same or a similar roll sketchbook. These include three other ‘sample studies’, all of identical size to the present sheet, in the Turner Bequest at the Tate in London; Arth, on the Lake of Zug, Early Morning8 , Küssnacht, Lake of Lucerne9, and The Pass of St. Gotthard, near Faido10, as well as The Pass of St. Gotthard in the collection of the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island11. Particularly close to this watercolour in tonality and handling is a view of Schwyz, with the Mythens, in the Vaughan Bequest at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh12. Several of these watercolours, including the present sheet, were later developed into more finished works on paper.

It has been suggested that the present sheet may have been part of a group of fifteen watercolour sketches – done as ‘sample studies’ with a view to obtaining commissions for finished watercolours –seen by Ruskin on the 10th of May 1844 and noted in his diary that day13. Two of this group of slightly larger, finished Swiss watercolours are today in the Turner Bequest at the Tate in London and four more are in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, while single sheets are in the Courtauld Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. This watercolour of The Lauerzersee with the Ruins of Schwanau and the Mythens was not, however, used by the artist until several years later, when it served as the basis for one of his final ten finished watercolours of Swiss views, The Lauerzersee with the Mythens of c.1848 (fig.1), which was acquired by Turner’s patron Henry Vaughan and is today in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London14. The finished watercolour, however, lacks the lightness of the present study, and is somewhat darker in tonality.

The provenance of this superb watercolour can be traced back to Turner himself, since it was given by the artist to his housekeeper and devoted companion Sophia Caroline Booth (1799-1878). Of German descent, Sophia was born in Dover and at the age of twenty married a local fisherman named Henry Pound, who died in 1821, leaving her with an infant son, Daniel Pound. Four years later she married John Booth of Margate, and established a boarding house on the seafront there, where Turner would stay on his visits to Margate. After Mrs. Booth was widowed for a second time in 1833, Turner formed a close relationship with her. In 1846 Sophia Booth and her son Daniel moved from Margate to London, where Turner had bought a house for them in Chelsea, overlooking the Thames. She continued to look after the painter, cleaning his brushes and preparing his palettes, until his death in 1851. Turner presented her with several watercolours, including the present sheet, as well as at least eight oil paintings. This watercolour of The Lauerzersee with the Ruins of Schwanau and the Mythens first appeared at auction in 1909 and was purchased by Agnew’s. It was acquired from them by the English polo player and cotton broker Walter Henry Jones (1866-1932), a wealthy collector of Turner’s watercolours who came to own some twenty works by the artist, notably including both The Blue Rigi and The Red Rigi

The present sheet is among Turner’s most beautiful late Swiss watercolours, with the artist’s rapid technique and delicate washes combining to contrast the atmospheric effects of the calm surface of the lake with the mountains in the haze behind. There is a sense of abiding calmness and tranquility in this composition, in which an expansive view has been encapsulated on a small sheet of paper. Indeed, Turner’s ability to apply a rapid technique and confident brushstrokes to capture atmospheric effects of light and colour on a relatively modest scale is one of the hallmarks of his genius as a watercolourist. As has been noted, ‘watercolour was the logical, indeed the only, medium for this engagement with Swiss light and air…Turner’s interpretation of the Swiss atmosphere is so vivid, so strong, and expansive that the broad foundations of his classically-based compositions seem to be disintegrated by it; it is the air itself that expresses the monumentality of the landscape.’15

As Turner’s great champion John Ruskin noted of such late Swiss watercolours as this, ‘ look upon them as in some respects, more valuable than his finished drawings, or his oil pictures; because they are the simple records of his first impressions and first purposes, and in most instances as true to the character of the places they represent as they are admirable in composition.’16

PETER DE WINT OWS

Hanley 1784-1849 London

Still Life with a Bottle, a Jug and a Napkin

Brush and brown wash and watercolour, over traces of an underdrawing in pencil, on buff paper. Inscribed and dated 7 A 1847 in brown ink at the upper left. Further dated 1847 in pencil on the verso. 225 x 186 mm. (8 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Cyril and Shirley Fry, London and Snape, Suffolk, by 1967.

LITERATURE: Martin Hardie, Water-colour Painting in Britain, Vol.II: The Romantic Period, London, 1967, pl.206; David Scrase, Drawings & Watercolours by Peter De Wint, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, 1979, p.15, no.35, illustrated pl.20; Hammond Smith, Peter DeWint 1784-1849, London, 1982, p.70, illustrated p.80, fig.77.

EXHIBITED: Norwich, University of East Anglia, Library Concourse, English Watercolours and Drawings of the 18th and 19th Centuries, 1970; Arts Council of Great Britain, Peter De Wint, no.35 [date and location unknown]; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, Drawings & Watercolours by Peter De Wint, 1979, no.35; London, Fry Gallery and Brighton, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, Peter de Wint (1784–1849): Bicentenary Loan Exhibition, 1984-1985, no.79; Sudbury, Gainsborough’s House, A Peculiarly English Art: English Drawings and Watercolours, 1994, no.12.

Peter De Wint’s relatively rare still life subjects – usually comprised of jugs and bottles of the sort found in a country kitchen – are often difficult to date. While they have generally been regarded as youthful works from early in his career, the present sheet, which is dated 1847, suggests that the artist continued to engage in the practice of still life painting almost until the end of his life. It has also been suggested that some of the artist’s still life subjects may have been done as exemplars for his students. As one of his pupils, John Mayer Heathcote, described De Wint’s method of composing still life compositions to an early biographer, ‘He would take any convenient objects he could find in the room and set them in a group on the table, with a towel or other white cloth carelessly thrown against them.’1

As a modern scholar has noted of De Wint, ‘His still-lives, which, like his penchant for the panoramic landscape, suggest his Dutch ancestry, are among his most accomplished works…they appear to have been done largely for his own satisfaction, or as teaching studies, as no such subjects appear among his exhibited works, nor are any included in his wife’s list of sold works, except for those sold to the Royal Dublin Society [in 1843] for the use of their students.’2 Furthermore, as has been noted elsewhere, ‘De Wint’s still life compositions, which generally feature jugs, bottles and pails that might be found in a simple country kitchen, have a unique place in the history of early nineteenth century English watercolour painting. 3

JOHN

MARTIN

Haydon Bridge 1789-1854 Douglas, Isle of Man

The Thames at Twickenham

Watercolour, heightened with bodycolour and gum arabic, with scratching out, over an underdrawing in pencil.

280 x 699 mm. (11 x 27 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Richard Ellis, until 1870; Thence by descent; The Rev. Sir Clifford Woolmore Wigram, 7th Bt., until 1959; Private collection, Jersey; John Adams Fine Art, London; Agnew’s, London, in 2004; Andrew Wyld, London, in 2006; His posthumous sale (‘Andrew Wyld: Connoisseur Dealer, Part 1’), London, Christie’s, 10 July 2012, lot 89; Thomas Le Claire, Hamburg.

EXHIBITED: London, Agnew’s, Watercolours and Drawings, 2004, no.53; London, W/S Fine Art Ltd., Watercolours and Drawings 1750-1950, Summer 2006, no.44.

Born in Northumberland, John Martin was apprenticed to a coach painter in Newcastle until 1806, when he settled in London and found employment as a glass and china painter. He aspired to be a painter of grand historical and literary subjects, however, and made his debut at the Royal Academy in 1811. The following year he achieved his first measure of success when his painting of Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion was shown at the Royal Academy and was sold soon afterwards for fifty guineas. Nevertheless, in the early part of his career Martin earned his livelihood with small-scale landscape paintings, watercolours and sepia drawings of a classical inspiration, or topographical views in the Home Counties and elsewhere. It was not until 1821, when his grandiose canvas Belshazzar’s Feast was exhibited to popular acclaim, as well as both critical and financial success, that Martin’s reputation was firmly established. The dramatic compositions, imaginative effects and apocalyptic themes of Martin’s immense, visionary canvases of the 1820s and 1830s – notably The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum of 1822, The Seventh Plague of Egypt of 1823 and The Deluge of 1834 – captured the imagination of the viewing public. The artist’s celebrity was enhanced not only by the exhibition of these works, but also by the popularity of the prints that were published after (or inspired by) them, which were to eventually number more than 130. Indeed, in the late 1820s and early 1830s, Martin’s activity as a commercial printmaker provided a large portion of his income.

For much of the 1830s Martin forsook large-scale exhibition paintings in favour of watercolours and mezzotint engravings. He continued to produce smaller, more intimate works on occasion, and also undertook several commissions for book illustrations, notably a series of mezzotints for an edition of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, published in 1827. Between 1831 and 1836, in collaboration with the artist Richard Westall, Martin drew a series of over seventy small sepia and watercolour drawings for two publications, entitled Illustrations of the Bible and Illustrations of the New Testament, which appeared in instalments between 1834 and 1836 and were reprinted several times. In 1836 the artist became a member of the New Water Colour Society, founded four years earlier. Martin’s last major paintings were a series of three massive canvases depicting The Last Judgement, begun in 1845 but not completed until 1853. Arranged in the form of an enormous triptych, the paintings were exhibited widely over the next quarter of a century, not only throughout Britain but in several cities in America and as far afield as Australia.

In excellent condition, the present sheet is a fine example of Martin’s skill as a watercolourist, for which he arguably remains underappreciated today. In May 1854, not long after the artist’s death, an auction of sixty of his watercolours was held at Christie’s in London. As the scholar Martin Myrone has noted, ‘Many critics felt that the sale was a revelation: a number of the works displayed a delicacy and quietude that had been considered lacking in Martin’s early oils.’1 Many of these watercolours were of tranquil landscapes and were quite different from the visionary compositions that had established the artist’s fame. Writing in The Athenaeum, one critic commented that ‘These works, beautiful in execution, finished with all the

dainty minuteness of even a woman’s hand, and deep and bright in colour, presented us with a new view of the artist’s character. He who revelled in vastness and sublimity…could go out and watch, it seems, with a poet’s love, the pool where the water-lilies lie asleep, the golden waves of ripe corn rippling into furrows of exceeding lustre, the pale shadows that the trees cast on sunless days, and rivers winding “at their own sweet will” calm and child-like under the benediction of the sun. It did us good to see the same mind exulting in the blue chasms and frozen billows of Alpine scenery…and then to behold the creator of these wonders go forth to be lulled asleep on the soft breast of our common mother Nature, as if in these drawings a reaction from the wildness of his imagination has led Mr. Martin to display his tenderest feelings…The scenes he selected seem to have been of the quietest and most pastoral character: – such as Leith Hill, Richmond Park, views on the Thames (Runnymede, Twickenham, &c.)…The drawings realized very good prices.’2

During the latter part of his career, in the 1840s and early 1850s, Martin produced a number of watercolours of the area around Richmond and Twickenham on the river Thames. Characterized by an elongated, frieze-like format, several of these works were exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1844 and 1852. As William Feaver has noted, ‘These scenes of Richmond Park…are comparable to the topographical water-colours of Copley Fielding, or Samuel Palmer in his post-Shoreham days. Ideally suitable as designs for steel engravings and, in many instances, softened into haze around the margins so as to lie at ease on the paper, they invite the onlooker to become absorbed, by almost imperceptible degrees, into the central and fully formulated area of each composition.’3

The grounds of Richmond Park, a historic Royal deer park, and the banks of the Thames at nearby Twickenham were among Martin’s favourite places to sketch4. In a series of articles on ‘The Banks of the Thames’, published in 1841, the Saturday Magazine noted that Of the Thames in the vicinity of Twickenham, it has been remarked by writers of all grades, poets, painters, and topographers, that it presents scenes of extraordinary beauty. The river rolls on through meadows of the richest verdure, while its banks are adorned with the contrasted beauty of the villa and the cottage.’5 During much of the 19th century, this stretch of the Thames at Twickenham was particularly known as the location of the Palladian-style villa built for the 18th century English poet Alexander Pope, despite the fact that the building itself had been demolished in 1807.

This large sheet may be likened to a watercolour view by Martin of The Banks of the Thames, Opposite Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, signed and dated 1850, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year and is today in the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven6. Also comparable are two watercolour views of Richmond Park, one dated 1843 in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London7 and the other, signed and dated 1847, in the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery (now The Higgins) in Bedford8. Other paintings and watercolours by Martin of the area around Richmond and Twickenham are in the collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Denver Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, as well as in a number of private collections9.

JOHN FREDERICK LEWIS RA

London 1804-1876 Walton-on-Thames

Sheikh el Belled, Kom Ombos, Upper Egypt

Watercolour and gouache, over traces of an underdrawing in pencil. Signed, inscribed and dated J. F. Lewis Kom Ombos. 1850. / l. d. [?] in pencil at the lower right.

331 x 452 mm. (13 x 17 3/4 in.) [image]

367 x 526 mm. (14 1/2 x 20 3/4 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: The posthumous Lewis studio sale (‘Catalogue of the Remaining Works of That Distinguished Artist, John F. Lewis, R.A., Deceased’), London, Christie’s, 4-7 May 1877, lot 132 (unsold); Sale (‘Fifty Remaining Works of that Distinguished Artist, John Frederick Lewis, R.A. (Sold by the Direction of the Widow)…’), London, Christie’s, 3 May 1897, lot 39 (‘SHEIK EL BELLED, and horse’, bt. W. Rome for £26.5.0); Thomas Agnew & Sons, Manchester and London; Purchased from them by Arthur Greenlow Lupton, Leeds; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Emily M. Weeks, Cultures Crossed: John Frederick Lewis and the Art of Orientalism, New Haven and London, 2014, p.182, note 90.

EXHIBITED: Possibly London, Royal Academy, 1870, no.580 (as A Scheik el Belled, Upper Egypt).

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

Lewis resided in Cairo for ten years, living as an Oriental gentleman in an elegant Ottoman house in the Azbakiyyah quarter of the city, dressing in the Turkish manner and enjoying what one visitor, the writer William Makepeace Thackeray, described as a ‘dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life.’ He produced a large number of watercolours and drawings during his decade in Egypt before his return to England in 1851. For the remainder of his career Lewis painted Orientalist subjects inspired by his years in the East, and based largely on the drawings made in Cairo. These depictions of mosques, bazaars, Eastern interiors, desert encampments and imaginary harem scenes proved immensely popular. (As one modern scholar has noted, ‘Without doubt Lewis’s depictions of Oriental and, in particular, harem life were given greater veracity in the eyes of his European audience because of his well-publicised adoption of an elite Ottoman lifestyle.’1) In 1855 Lewis was elected President of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, although the previous year he had also begun to exhibit paintings at the Royal Academy. His growing interest in oil painting, at the expense of watercolours, led him in February 1858 to resign from the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, and for the remainder of his career Lewis’s exhibited works were mainly paintings. Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1859 and an Academician in 1864, Lewis showed regularly at the Academy until his death in 1876.

Lewis’s paintings and watercolours of exotic Eastern subjects, executed in a meticulous and detailed manner, remained popular with collectors and connoisseurs throughout the later stages of his career. As the fellow artist and traveller Edward Lear noted, in a letter to Lewis’s wife written the year before the painter’s death, ‘There have never been, and there never will be any works depicting Oriental life –

more truly beautiful and excellent – perhaps I might say – so beautiful and excellent. For, besides the exquisite and conscientious workmanship, the subjects painted by J. F. Lewis were perfect as representations of real scenes and people.’2

During his decade in Cairo, Lewis only seems to have made one trip to Upper Egypt, in 1849-1850 at the end of his stay, when he was accompanied by his wife Marian. The couple visited Thebes and Edfu, and travelled as far south as Philae, where they met Florence Nightingale, before returning north to Cairo via Kom Ombo, where they arrived in February 1850. About a hundred miles south of Luxor, Kom Ombo (also Kom Umbu or Ombos) was a town on the eastern bank of the Nile famous for its double temple, built during the Ptolemaic dynasty in the 2nd century BC and dedicated to both the crocodile god Sobek and Horus, the falcon god. Lewis made several drawings of the temple and the inhabitants of Kom Ombo, of which the present sheet is a particularly fine example.

A printed inscription on the former mount, probably transcribed from a now-lost label, identifies the subject of this watercolour as the ‘Sheikh el Belled (shaykh al-balad, or the headman of a village), who is likely to have acted as the artist’s guide in Kom Ombo. The sheikh is shown alongside his white horse, both apparently resting after a journey. As has been noted of Lewis, ‘Time and again, his sketches from his Nile trip reveal that his interest lay in the rural life of Upper Egypt rather than with the ancient monuments that most tourists travelled there to see.’ Also drawn at this time was a comparable watercolour of An Arab with Two Oxen Ploughing at Kom Ombos, which was also in the 1877 studio sale and recently reappeared at auction3

This large sheet is one of two watercolours with identical titles included in the sale of the contents of Lewis’s studio in May 1877, the year after his death. It seems to have been unsold and remained with the artist’s widow until May 1897, when it was sold at auction in London. The present sheet was later acquired from art dealers Agnew’s by the Yorkshire councilman, industrialist and university chancellor Arthur Greenlow Lupton (1848-1930). The other watercolour of this title, depicting the sheikh without his horse and seated next to what seems to be a floodgate (fig.1), was purchased at the posthumous 1877 Lewis studio sale by the London-based framers, gilders and art dealers William and John Henry Vokins, and has appeared at auction several times in the past thirty years4

One of the two watercolours of this title was sent by Lewis to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1870.

GEORGE RICHMOND RA

Brompton 1809-1896 London

Landscape near Walton

Watercolour, over traces of an underdrawing in pencil. Signed with the artist’s initials GR in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed and dated near. Walton / 1854 in pencil at the lower left. 135 x 213 mm. (5 1/4 x 8 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: James Mackinnon, London, in 2015; Matthew Rutenberg, New York.

A disciple of Willam Blake and a close friend of Samuel Palmer, George Richmond formed – with Palmer, Edward Calvert and other followers of Blake – a small group who called themselves ‘The Ancients’. The only member of the Ancients who received a conventional academic training, Richmond entered the Royal Academy Schools in December 1824, at the age of just fourteen, and there studied under Henry Fuseli. It was while he was at the Academy Schools that he first showed himself to be an accomplished and gifted draughtsman. Between 1824 and 1828 Richmond often joined Blake, Palmer, John Varley and others at John Linnell’s Hampstead home to draw from nature, as he also did with Palmer at Shoreham in Kent for several weeks in 1827. After his marriage in 1831, Richmond began working primarily as a portrait painter, quickly achieving a considerable measure of success. Although much influenced by Michelangelo and Italian art of the Renaissance, it was not until 1838 that Richmond was able to visit Italy, when he travelled with Palmer to Rome. In the 1840s he became friendly with John Ruskin, of whom he produced two portraits, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1843 and 1857; the second of these was later engraved. Elected to the Royal Academy in 1866, Richmond’s stature in the London art world was such that he was twice offered the directorship of the National Gallery, which he twice declined1. It is as a portraitist that he is best known today, and which makes up the bulk of his extant oeuvre as a painter.

Although Richmond painted and drew landscapes throughout his career, these were almost always private works, and were not exhibited or sold. As the artist’s biographer Raymond Lister has noted, ‘He found considerable relaxation in landscape, which gave him an artistic outlet closer to his predilection than portraiture…Richmond’s landscape studies have a gentle idyllic quality not unlike some of the postShoreham studies of Samuel Palmer and some of the work of John Linnell, although on the whole they are less luxuriant than Linnell’s. Richmond’s landscape drawings in pencil have an almost Constable-like elegance. But there is little evidence of development; landscape remained for him a static medium, so that a watercolour done at Margate in 1850 or at Mickleham in 1860 might have been drawn within a week of one another…This is not to underrate them, for some of his landscape works, even slight drawings, are first rate…Richmond’s landscapes are probably so appealing because his prime reason for painting them was to please himself; he seldom, if ever, exhibited a pure landscape. The result is often a delightful purity and freshness of observation that, unlike much of the work of his mature years, still portrays some feeling for the visual ideals of the Ancients as expressed during the Shoreham years.’2

Dated 1854 and probably drawn on a page from a small sketchbook, this watercolour view of dunes by the sea was probably drawn in September or October of that year, when Richmond is known to have taken a holiday in the town of Walton; probably the small seaside resort of Walton-on-theNaze in Essex, on the east coast of England. The present sheet would appear to depict part of the Naze, a marshy headland projecting into the North Sea, just to the north of the town, which today contains a small nature reserve. This sketch is comparable, in stylistic terms, with a handful of other landscape watercolours by the artist, such as a study of a large tree which remained in the possession of Richmond’s descendants until 20013, or a view of Norbury Woods, Surrey of 1860, in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge4. Also similar is a watercolour study of trees in the forest of Mickleham Downs in Surrey, dated 1848, in the Pilkington Collection at Eton College in Windsor5, and A Field near Margate, dated 1850, formerly in the Oppé collection and now in the Tate in London6.

ALFRED WILLIAM HUNT RWS

Liverpool 1830-1896 London

Mountainous Landscape

Watercolour. Signed with initials and dated AWH 1859 in brown ink at the lower left. 243 x 390 mm. (9 1/2 x 15 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: J. Leger & Son (The Leger Galleries), London, in 1952; Private collection.

Alfred William Hunt studied classics at Oxford and became a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, combining academic and artistic careers until the early 1860s. His early work as a watercolourist was influenced by the example of David Cox, who was a friend of his father, and in 1854 he exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy. While studying at Oxford in the 1850s Hunt made several sketching trips to North Wales, financed by the Oxford printseller James Wyatt, who exhibited Hunt’s drawings in his shop on the High Street and developed a local market for mountain views by the artist. In the second half of the 1850s Hunt produced several paintings and watercolours of mountain views in Snowdonia, while other favoured sites for painting were in Yorkshire, Northumberland and around Durham. He also made sketching tours in Germany and Switzerland – often tracing J. M. W. Turner’s earlier visits to these areas – as well as Scotland and the Lake District. In 1861 Hunt resigned his fellowship at Oxford to marry and embark on an artistic career, joining the Society of Painters in Water-Colours and moving to London in 1865.

Hunt preferred to work on the spot, producing sketches and colour studies that would be worked up into finished watercolours and paintings in the studio1. Like many artists coming of age in the 1850s, Hunt was profoundly influenced by reading John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and he has been aptly described as perhaps the quintessential artist of the Ruskinian moment in Victorian painting…[His] pictures are so rich that each one rewards detailed scrutiny, just as Ruskin demanded.’2 The other great influence on Hunt was Turner, whose watercolour style, at least in his more finished work, he attempted to emulate. As one critic wrote of him in 1884, ‘Mr. Hunt is a true artist of Turner’s school, in fact the legitimate successor of Turner, but, except in strenuously and subtly endeavouring to delineate the effects of light, not his imitator.’3

Hunt’s watercolours are characterized by an abiding interest in intense colour and luminosity, allied with a meticulous technique and an insistence of working on the spot wherever possible. Although the minute detail and precise technique of his work was sometimes criticized by Ruskin as being too laboured, most critics admired the delicate technique, subtle tonality and brilliant effects of Hunt’s exhibited watercolours, which evince his love of nature and feeling for the magnificence of the English landscape. As one scholar has perceptively written, ‘Hunt’s love of the countryside of north Wales, the Lakes, Yorkshire, Durham, and Northumberland, and the selfless dedication that he gave to the task of capturing aspects of the places he visited, imbues all his works. His work is a celebration of the beauty of the British landscape, with its extraordinary variety of aspect and constant fluctuation of atmospheric and meteorological effect.’4

As Allen Staley has opined, ‘[The] watercolours from the 1850s are Hunt’s freshest and strongest works. Their compositions seem to be the result of a direct confrontation with nature...’5 This early, atmospheric watercolour may be a view in Yorkshire or County Durham, where the artist spent some time in the autumn of 1859, following a summer trip to Germany and Switzerland. One scholar has commented on ‘Hunt’s particular interest in mountain subjects, treated with careful attention to their structure and geological character, and the physical processes which had formed the landscape’6, while Hunt must also have been inspired by the fourth volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters, published in 1856 and subtitled Of Mountain Beauty, in which the author extols the virtues of mountain subjects as worthy of serious artistic study.

JOHN DAWSON WATSON RWS

Sedbergh 1832-1892 Conwy

Haystack, Perthshire

Watercolour on buff paper. Signed with initials, dated and inscribed J. D. W. / 1859. / Inver Strath Braan. Perth. in pencil at the lower left.

213 x 214 mm. (8 3/8 x 8 3/8 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: Robert Fleming & Co., Ltd., London, in c.1985; The Maas Gallery, London; The Fine Art Society, London, in March 2010; Christopher Cone, Whitby.

Born in Yorkshire, John Dawson Watson showed artistic promise at an early age. He studied at the Manchester School of Design from 1847 onwards, and from 1851 at the Royal Academy Schools in London. In the same year his first exhibited work, entitled The Wounded Cavalier, was shown in Manchester. In 1856 he came to the attention of Ford Madox Brown, who invited Watson to exhibit his work at his home in London. Settling in London in 1860, Watson began exhibiting at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours and the Royal Academy, where he sent works between 1853 and 1890. He was elected an Associate Member of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1864, becoming a full member five years later. Settling in Surrey, Watson exhibited over 370 works in London; at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, the Grosvenor Gallery and the Society of British Artists.

Watson’s oeuvre is made up largely of small oil paintings and highly detailed watercolours of historical and genre scenes, as well as the occasional pastoral subject, executed in a manner strongly influenced by the example of the Pre-Raphaelites, and with a similar emphasis on colour and detail. Watson’s landscapes were much praised by John Ruskin in particular, while the early 20th century scholar Forrest Reid noted that he ‘was a sound draughtsman whose work frequently surprises us by its power and beauty. 1 Watson also enjoyed a highly successful career as a graphic artist and a book and magazine illustrator, notably producing a series of drawings for John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1861, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which appeared three years later. He also made etchings and designs for furniture, medals and theatre costumes.

A large retrospective exhibition of Watson’s work, organized by friends of the artist, was held at the Brazenose Club in Manchester in 1877, and contained nearly 160 works. The last years of his career were spent in Conwy in North Wales, where he was engaged on a program of decoration for the Castle Hotel there, and where he died in the early days of 1892. Works by Watson are today in the collections of the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate in London, the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, the Castle Museum and Art Gallery in Norwich, and elsewhere.

As was noted by two leading members of the Victorian family firm of reproductive engravers known as the Dalziel Brothers, writing in 1901, ‘During the sudden rage that sprung up for water colour drawings [Watson’s] work was much sought after by the dealers. 2 This small watercolour was painted during a trip to Scotland in 1859, at Strathbraan, or the valley of the River Braan, near the village of Inver in Perthshire. A stylistically comparable work by Watson – a study of the trunk of a birch tree – was formerly in the Oppé collection and is now in Tate Britain3.

JOHN RUSKIN

London 1819-1900 Brantwood

Sunrise

Watercolour, heightened with bodycolour, over traces of an underdrawing in pencil. 240 x 320 mm. (9 1/2 x 12 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably Mary Constance (‘Connie’) Hilliard (Mrs. W. H. Churchill), and by descent to her son Arnold Churchill, Norwich; Thence by descent to Anthony Churchill Dale, Wiltshire; His sale (‘The Property of Anthony Churchill Dale, Esq.’), London, Christie’s, 18 March 1980, lot 118; Harold and Nicolette Wernick, Springfield, Massachusetts and Bloomfield, Connecticut; Her sale (‘The Nicolette Wernick Collection: British Watercolours & Paintings (1800-1950)’), London, Christie’s, 16 June 2010, lot 81; Private collection.

LITERATURE: London, Guy Peppiatt Fine Art, John Ruskin (1819-1900): Drawings and Watercolours from a Private Collection, exhibition catalogue, 2024, pp.56-57, no.42.

EXHIBITED: London, Royal Academy, Ruskin Centenary Exhibition, 1919, no.337 (‘Sunset’, lent by the Rev. W. H. Churchill); Springfield, Massachusetts, George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, 19th Century English Art from the Collection of Harold and Nicolette Wernick, 1988, no.35; London, Guy Peppiatt Fine Art Ltd., John Ruskin (1819-1900): Drawings and Watercolours from a Private Collection, 2024, no.42.

Although John Ruskin received some training from artists such as Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding, William Henry Hunt and James Duffield Harding, his undeniable talents as a draughtsman were to a large extent the result of his natural gifts. As the young Ruskin noted, in a letter to his mother of 1845, ‘I can draw something better than I could, and I draw now less for the picture and more for the interest of the thing…Architecture I can draw very nearly like an architect, and trees a great deal better than most botanists, and mountains rather better than most geologists.’1 For the most part, however, Ruskin’s drawings were not intended for exhibition, but rather as a complement to his written work. As the scholar Paul Walton has noted, Ruskin’s voluminous writings, in the form of books, diaries, essays, articles and letters, are enriched by the study of his ‘watercolours and sketches of the mountains and skies, cottages and cathedrals, stones and flowers in which he found inscribed the messages that guided his life’s work as an interpreter of nature and art.’2

Many of Ruskin’s later watercolours reflect a particular interest in the close observation of skies and clouds – studied at dawn, sunset and in varying weather conditions – and the atmospheric light effects that often resulted. The artist’s interest in such themes was a lifelong one, evident as early as the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843, when he observed, ‘It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.’3 At the other end of his life, one of the very last drawings he made was a watercolour of a sunset seen from the coast at Seascale in Cumbria4, done in 1889, shortly before he suffered a massive stroke that ended his literary and artistic career. Perhaps Ruskin’s most significant study of clouds and skies, however, was undertaken in the years 1884 and 1885, when he was working on two projects related to studies of skies; Coeli Enarrant, a selection of texts and images from Modern Painters, and a pair of lectures given at the London Institution in 1884 entitled ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’, in which he railed against the ‘malignant aerial phenomena’ caused by industrial pollution, and its effect on the natural world.

Throughout his life, Ruskin was particularly interested in studying the sky at dawn and at sunset, and habitually woke early in order to see the dawn. Soon after he settled at Brantwood on the lake of Coniston Water in Cumbria in 1871 he had a turret window built at the house so that he could more

easily study the sunrise. As he advised his audience, in one of a series of lectures given between 1857 and 1859, ‘Rise early, always watch the sunrise, and the way the clouds break from the dawn’5, while several years later, as part of a series of aphorisms, he wrote, ‘Never, if you can help it, miss seeing the sunset and the dawn. And never, if you can help it, see anything but dreams between them. 6 Similarly, in his notes accompanying the Educational Series of his own drawings that were presented to the University of Oxford and intended for the instruction of undergraduates, Ruskin stated, ‘I would request any student, who finds by the pleasure he takes in colour that he has the right to hope his time will not be wasted in cultivating his gift for it, to set aside a quarter of an hour of every morning, as a part of its devotions, for the observance of the sun-rise, and always to have pencil and colour at hand to make note of anything more than usually beautiful. He will find his thoughts during the rest of the day both calmed and purified, and his advance in all essential art-skill at once facilitated and chastised; quickened by the precision of the exercise, and chastised by the necessity of restraining great part of the field of colour into altogether subdued tones for the sake of parts centrally luminous.’7

Paul Walton has noted of Ruskin’s watercolours of sunrises and sunsets that ‘Throughout his life he made careful notes of such occasions in his diary or sketch book…They were all specimens of what he regarded as the divine gift of colour in its purest and most subtle forms.’8 As another writer has pointed out of Ruskin, ‘what he takes to heart…is what he had long before perceived in art and literature: that sunrise and sunset mean the same. In Modern Painters V red is the colour of both, and of mortality: “The rose of dawn and sunset is the hue of the rays passing close to the earth. It is also concentrated in the blood of man.”’9

Watercolours such as the present sheet also reflect something of the profound and lifelong influence on Ruskin of the work of J. M. W. Turner, whose treatment of skies is mentioned in the younger artist’s writings and correspondence. (Ruskin also produced a handful of watercolour copies of the skies in Turner’s paintings.) It is with reference to such atmospheric studies as this that Christopher Newall has written, ‘Drawings of this kind demonstrate a conscious or instinctive debt to the type of colour studies of coastal or lake landscapes that J. M. W. Turner had made in the 1830s and 1840s, of which Ruskin had a number of examples in his collection…In Turner’s views, clouds frequently mask the sun with vaporous atmosphere tinged with reds and blues. Higher in the sky, bars or flecks of cloud catch the sunlight and show as pink strata in the wider cloudscape. Turner’s very personal watercolours of the rising or setting sun exemplify an instinctive response to meteorological phenomena and qualities of atmosphere and light that Ruskin found thrilling to look at and that he consciously or unconsciously imitated.’10

The present sheet may be likened to a number of watercolour studies of skies at dawn or sunset by Ruskin. These include Sunset at Herne Hill through the Smoke of London, drawn in 1876, in the Ruskin Museum in Coniston11, and Dawn at Neuchâtel, dated 1866, in the collection of David Thomson12. Also comparable are a Sunrise over the Sea in the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal13 and Sunrise, Vevey in the Alpine Club collection in London14, as well as a pair of watercolours of a Study of Dawn: The First Scarlet on the Clouds and a Study of Dawn: Purple Clouds, both drawn in 1868, in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford15

This fine watercolour probably belonged to Mary Constance (‘Connie’) Hilliard (1852-1915), one of Ruskin’s closest female friends in his middle and later years. The niece of his friend Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, Connie Hilliard first met Ruskin in August 1863 at Wallington, the Trevelyan estate in Northumberland, when she was eleven years old, at a tea party organized by the young girl. Ruskin became very fond of her and in later years Connie and her mother accompanied Ruskin on trips through France, Italy and Switzerland, while her younger brother Laurence Hilliard served as Ruskin’s secretary at Brantwood. In 1880 Connie Hilliard married the Reverend William Henry Churchill (1855-1936), headmaster of St. David’s School in Reigate. Ruskin served as godfather to one of their sons, probably Arnold Churchill (1886-1964), who later inherited the present sheet. A few years after Connie Hilliard’s death, this watercolour was lent by her widowed husband W. H. Churchill to the Ruskin Centenary Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1919.

WILLIAM LINNELL

London 1826-1906 London

Study of Trees and a Path in a Forest

Pencil and watercolour, heightened with bodycolour, on blue-grey paper. 285 x 254 mm. (11 1/4 x 10 in.)

PROVENANCE: By descent in the Linnell family to Joan Linnell Burton and the John Linnell Trust, London1; Martyn Gregory, London.

Born in 1826, the third son of the acclaimed British landscape artist John Linnell, William Linnell studied at the Royal Academy Schools alongside his two brothers James Thomas and John. William was in Italy between 1861 and 1865, and in 1866 he married a Frenchwoman, Isabelle Schuster, and the couple resided briefly in Paris. When they returned to England in 1868, William’s father John expressed his desire to build them a home on the Linnell family estate at Redhill, near Reigate in Surrey, as had been done for his brother James. William and Isabelle Linnell had three daughters, but tragically Isabelle died in giving birth to the third, in 18702. William became known for his depictions of English and Welsh landscapes and rural scenes, many of which were exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1851 and 1891, and paintings by the artist are today in museums in Birmingham, Gateshead, Liverpool, London, Sheffield, Southampton, Wolverhampton, and elsewhere.

Both William and James Linnell were regarded by contemporaries as worthy successors to their father’s legacy. William Blake’s 19th century biographer Alexander Gilchrist noted that, ‘Both brothers were destined to become famous in the picture-loving world. The art of landscape-painting will be indebted not only to John Linnell whom two generations have delighted, and many more will delight to know, but to the Linnell family collectively. Time after time, James and William Linnell have evinced capabilities which might carry them onward to almost any point of attainment in the art. In both we recognise keen, fresh, strong feeling, vivid perception, plenteous, expressive, sometimes startling realization; qualities which they are able to develop and combine in a form equally grateful to the ruralist and to the lover of art.’3

Writing a few years later, in 1872, an art critic noted that ‘James Thomas Linnell...is entitled to share with his brother William the estimation in which their pictures are held by the amateur and collector, sometimes rivalling even those of his father...It is so rare an occurrence to find a picture by any one of the Linnell family bearing the distinctive title of the place represented, that one would naturally be led to suppose the compositions are merely imaginary; but this, as a rule, is far from the case. Surrey, and the wealds of Sussex, supply the artists with the ground-work of most of their beautiful compositions, and the localities may generally be recognized by those who are well acquainted with them.’4 A later writer further opined that ‘Many of William Linnell’s pictures have a more individual touch than James Linnell’s; but though his admirers generally ranked his Italian subjects…among his best achievements, it is now more critically estimated that William Linnell’s true claim to distinction is in his best English pictures, particularly those painted after his return from Rome in 1867.’5

Drawings, watercolours and oil sketches by William Linnell may be found in the collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the British Museum and Tate Britain in London, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.. Woodland scenes are a particular characteristic of the artist’s oeuvre, and this fine watercolour may be likened in particular to a study of trees in the British Museum6. Among other stylistically comparable drawings is a pencil and watercolour study entitled On the Road from Betws-y-Coed to Dolwyddelan in the Tate collection7. Also similar are two watercolour views of trees near Redhill, in a private collection8, and another study of woods near Redhill, executed in pastel and gouache, in the Tate9

FREDERICK SANDYS

Norwich 1829-1904 London

Portrait of May Gillilan

Coloured chalks and pencil, heightened with white, on pale green tinted paper. Signed F. Sandys in pencil on part of the original sheet, cut out and pasted onto the reverse of the frame. 377 x 285 mm. (14 7/8 x 11 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Commissioned from the artist by the sitter’s father, William Gillilan, Kensington, London; Thence by descent; Anonymous sale, Salisbury, Woolley and Wallis, 15 April 1996, lot 85; Anonymous sale, London, Bonham’s Knightsbridge, 19 March 1997, lot 106; The Maas Gallery, London, in 1998; Private collection; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 21 November 2002, lot 88; Anonymous sale, London, Bonham’s, 26 September 2018, lot 39.

LITERATURE: Betty Elzea, Frederick Sandys 1829-1904: A Catalogue Raisonné, Woodbridge, 2001, pp.267-268, no.4.27.

EXHIBITED: London, Maas Gallery, British Pictures (1840-1940), 1998, no.39.

One of the finest draughtsmen of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, Anthony Frederick Augustus Sands (he added the ‘y’ to his surname after his marriage in 1853) was the son of a provincial drawing master. A precocious artist, by the age of ten he was already exhibiting his work in Norwich. At sixteen, while a student at the Norwich School of Design, he met the Reverend James Bulwer, a Norfolk clergyman, antiquarian and amateur artist who became one of his first patrons. Bulwer commissioned a number of watercolours and drawings from the young artist, culminating several years later in a fine oil portrait, today in the National Gallery of Canada. Despite his lack of a proper academic training, Sandys won a silver medal at the Royal Society of Arts in 1846 for a portrait drawing, and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851, when he showed another chalk portrait. By this time he was living in London, although he continued to divide his time between the capital and Norfolk. Sandys came to be closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and for a year shared a studio with Dante Gabriel Rossetti at 16 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. The 1860s found the artist at his most prolific, producing genre, landscape and subject paintings, commissioned portraits, finished drawings and designs for wood engravings. Like Rossetti, Sandys painted several striking half-length female figures, such as a Morgan Le Fay of 1864. His close friendship with Rossetti eventually became strained, however, over the latter’s accusation that Sandys had copied one of his designs.

In 1868 Sandys’s painting Medea was first accepted and then, at the last minute, rejected by the Royal Academy, to the considerable surprise and consternation of both critics and fellow artists. From this point onwards, he only rarely painted in oils, preferring to use coloured chalks for his portraits and subject pictures. As part of the preparatory process for his paintings, he had always made full-scale drawn cartoons in chalk, and these elaborate works – sometimes on a very large scale – began to be offered for sale in their own right. For the remainder of his career the artist developed a particular speciality of producing chalk drawings for collectors, most famously Proud Maisie, of which he made several versions. Sandys received numerous private commissions for finished portraits in coloured chalks, while between 1881 and 1885 he made a series of portraits of notable writers for the publisher Alexander Macmillan. As the scholar Douglas Schoenherr has pointed out, Sandys never really attempted to plumb any psychological depth in his portraiture – his forte was a more superficial celebration of features, costume and accessories rendered at their best in a super-refined and elegant technique and with a sure, even quirky sense of design.’1 Among his favourite models was his longtime companion, the actress Mary Emma Jones, who was known by her stage name of ‘Miss Clive’. Sandys also provided a number of splendid illustrations for wood engravings for books and such magazines as The Cornhill Magazine, Once a Week and Good Words, for which he became very well known.

Largely due to his painstaking technique, Sandys worked very slowly, and produced a relatively small oeuvre of paintings, drawings and wood engravings. An inveterate gambler and spendthrift, he was often in financial difficulties and was thrice declared bankrupt, although he was supported by such patrons as Cyril Flower, later Baron Battersea, who gave him an allowance and paid for studio expenses. Nevertheless, the last two decades of his life saw a significant reduction in the artist’s output. In 1884 an article on Sandys appeared in the Art Journal, and in 1896 a monograph devoted to his work was published in a special issue of The Artist magazine. Two years later Sandys became a founder member of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers. An exhibition of his drawings was shown, alongside works by Rossetti and Simeon Solomon, at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1904, a few months before the artist’s death. Although a small retrospective memorial exhibition was mounted at the Royal Academy in 1905, Sandys’s oeuvre soon lapsed into obscurity, and it was not until almost seventy years later that another exhibition of his work took place, at the Brighton Art Gallery in 1974.

In his day, Sandys was highly regarded as a brilliant draughtsman, and indeed Rossetti once described him as ‘the greatest of all living draughtsmen’. He used coloured chalks for many of his formal portraits, characterized by a particular sensitivity and delicacy of touch. As Schoenherr has noted, Sandys was ‘the consummate draughtsman of portraits in coloured chalks…From his student days to the end of his life, the portrait in coloured chalks remained the one constant, his most characteristic mode of expression. 2 The artist, who seems to have been short-sighted or myopic, needed to stand very close to his subjects, with the result that many of his portraits evoke an intense focus on the sitter.

Drawn in 1882, this fine portrait was one of several works commissioned from the artist by the sitter’s father William Gillilan (1845-1925). A retired officer, Gillilan owned a number of late pictures by Sandys, including The Tangled Skein of c.1870 (Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull) and Poppies of 1898 (The National Trust, Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton), as well as a final version of Proud Maisie, dated 1902 (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). Gillilan also commissioned portraits of his family from Sandys, of which the present sheet is the earliest in date. This drawing was originally created as a double portrait, incorporating a likeness of May Gillilan’s younger sister Winnie at the right of the composition3, but was trimmed at the right and bottom edges and reduced to a single portrait sometime between 1997 and 1998. The drawing originally hung in the dining room of the Gillilan home at 6 Palace Gate in Kensington, where it is recorded in a photograph (fig.1) taken in May 18914. Sandys also produced drawn and painted portraits of William Gillilan in 1886 and his wife Mary in 18855, as well as a drawing in coloured chalks of their third and youngest daughter Christabel, completed in 18876

SIR HUBERT VON HERKOMER RA RWS

Waal 1849-1914 Budleigh

Salterton

A Bavarian Wheelwright

Watercolour. Signed with the artist’s initials and dated H.H 85 in brown ink at the lower right. Inscribed Hubert Herkomer / The Wheelwright / (Stellmacher) in brown ink on a label attached to the reverse of the frame.

176 x 253 mm. (6 7/8 x 10 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Fine Art Society, London, in 1885; Private collection, London.

LITERATURE: Ludwig Pietsch, Herkomer, Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1901, p.56.

EXHIBITED: London, The Fine Art Society, Life & Work in Bavaria’s Alps: Exhibition of Sketches & Pictures by Prof. Hubert Herkomer A.R.A., November 1885, no.35.

Born in a small Bavarian village near Munich, Hubert Herkomer settled with his family in England in 1857. He received a rudimentary training from his father, a woodcarver, and studied briefly at the Akademie in Munich and the South Kensington Schools in London. He began his career as an illustrator, providing a series of scenes of contemporary urban and rural life for The Graphic magazine throughout the 1870s, popular images that first established his reputation1. Herkomer’s earliest independent paintings were portraits and genre scenes, of English and Bavarian subjects, which soon earned him considerable success. He made his home in the town of Bushey in Hertfordshire in 1873, and ten years later founded an art school in the town, attracting a large number of artists to the area. From 1870 he would spend several months each year in Germany, becoming friendly with such artists as Adolph von Menzel. Elected to the Royal Academy in 1890, Herkomer exhibited there regularly and at the Grosvenor Gallery and the New Gallery. His also exhibited in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Hamburg, while in 1893 his work was prominently hung in the inaugural exhibition of the Munich Secession.

An excellent portraitist, Herkomer depicted many eminent persons of the day, including John Singer Sargent and John Ruskin, whom he succeeded as Slade Professor at Oxford in 1885. By the turn of the century Herkomer was firmly established as one of the most famous painters of the Victorian era, and a celebrity in both England and Germany. Ennobled by the German Emperor in 1899, after which he added the prefix ‘von’ to his surname, Herkomer was knighted in England in 1907, and published his memoirs in 1910. Although best known today as an artist, Herkomer was also a musician and composer, a pioneering filmmaker – producing costume dramas accompanied by his own music – and a motor racing enthusiast.

As may be supposed from his early success as an illustrator, Herkomer was a gifted draughtsman. Writing in 1901, the contemporary biographer A. L. Baldry noted of him that, ‘though his drawings have become fewer as other artistic responsibilities have crowded upon him, they have lost none of their distinctive quality and none of their beauty of style…The technical skill he has consistently displayed in this method of expression can, indeed, be very sincerely praised. Even in his slightest and hastiest productions the power with which he has used his materials is unhesitating and free from all hint of careless compromise.’2

Herkomer painted genre scenes of Bavarian peasants throughout his career. He produced several drawings of Bavarian and Alpine scenes for The Graphic magazine in the 1870s, and his first major exhibited painting, shown at the Royal Academy in 1873, was After the Toil of the Day, set in the village of Garmisch in the Bavarian Tyrol. In 1885 Herkomer exhibited a group of drawings and watercolours – made at Ramsau in Bavaria earlier that year and including the present sheet – at the Fine Art Society in London, under the title Life and Work in Bavaria’s Alps. As the introduction to the catalogue noted, ‘In view…of the changes that are so rapidly altering the aspect of Europe, we are doubly grateful to the artist who, by pen or pencil, preserves for us those characteristics, now, alas!, fast vanishing. This it is that Professor Herkomer has elected to do for the people among whom stood his cradle…’3

SIR EDWARD JOHN POYNTER, BT. PRA

Paris 1836-1919 London

Sailboats on an Italian Lake

Watercolour on board. Signed with initials and dated 18 EJP 96 in brown ink at the lower right. 268 x 367 mm. (10 1/2 x 14 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s Belgravia, 29 June 1976, lot 296; Private collection.

One of the leading artistic figures of Victorian England, Edward Poynter made his reputation as a painter of historical subjects, often set in ancient times, in which precise archeological detail, interesting narrative themes and a polished technique were combined with great effect. Among his important public commissions were the decoration of the interior of the Palace of Westminster and the Royal Albert Hall. Apart from being the first Slade Professor of Art at University College in London, Poynter was appointed Director of the National Gallery in 1894 and from 1896 served concurrently as President of the Royal Academy.

A versatile and gifted draughtsman and a firm advocate of life drawing, Poynter made numerous figure studies for each of his paintings. He is, however, much less well known as a landscape draughtsman and watercolourist. Most of Poynter’s landscape drawings are executed in pencil, and he produced relatively few watercolour views. Nevertheless, he was among the founding artist-exhibitors at the first General Exhibition of Water Colour Drawings at the Dudley Gallery in London in 1865, and in 1883 he was elected to the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours1. As a contemporary writer noted of Poynter, his ‘love of nature and profound knowledge of plant life enable him to see and feel a keener enjoyment in landscape art than the generality of artists, and his pictures are evidently the expression of his own sincere joy in the beauty of nature...a sound knowledge of draughtsmanship and a sense of refined and beautiful colour enable him to carry out his ideas very rapidly...Sir Edward is particularly happy in catching the true atmospheric tones, and a certain serenity of outlook and restrained colour ensure the sense of repose which is characteristic of his landscapes.’2

Most of Poynter’s few landscape watercolours are records of places he visited – in Italy, Scotland and elsewhere – and are among his most personal works, done for his own pleasure and seldom exhibited. (In later years, however, he consented to show some of his landscape watercolours at the Fine Art Society, the Grosvenor Gallery and the New Gallery.) His watercolours are characterized by a precise and controlled technique and a restrained colour scheme. As another contemporary critic noted, ‘It is not too much to claim that, as Sir Edward Poynter’s more ambitious work is of [a] classic order, something of the same quality has overflowed into these small but choice water-colours which are his recreation (as he himself says), from the more severe duties of his positions as chief craftsman, instructor and governor of certain national institutions. His work is not aggressive at all; it does not even attempt sober tours de force; it is merely strong, and simple, and reposeful, and, as a rule, English. But somehow it has a way of making one want to see it again, and to pore over it...These water-colours are less known, but in their way they have that same reticent beauty which have those well-known figure drawings...There is a peculiar mental quality in them which is at once charming and dignified, despite its suspicion of severity.’3

Dated 1896, this would appear to depict a view in Northern Italy. As has been noted of Poynter, ‘The watercolours he produced in the late 1890s, especially in the area around Lago d’Orta, are minutely detailed and at the same time full of atmospheric effects. 4 Among stylistically comparable watercolours by Poynter is a view of the Isola San Giulio in Lago d’Orta, dated 1898, in the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT5, and The Approaching Storm, Lake of Orta, likewise executed in 1898, in the British Museum6

WALTER RICHARD SICKERT RA

Munich 1860-1942 Bath

The Church of Santa Maria Maddalena, Venice Oil, pen and black ink on paper, laid down on board. Signed Sickert in black ink at the lower left. 244 x 148 mm. (9 5/8 x 5 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably Judge William Evans, Bayswater, London and Ilmington Manor, Warwickshire; His wife, Mrs. Frances Louise Evans; Given by her to Dr. Lloyd Williams; Given by him to a private collector; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 13 June 1986, lot 202; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 3 March 1989, lot 311; Piccadilly Gallery, London; Max Rutherston, London, in 1990; Purchased from him by the Misses A. and O. Heywood; Private collection, until 2012.

LITERATURE: Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, New Haven and London, 2006, p.275, under no.181, no.1.

EXHIBITED: Possibly London, The Goupil Gallery, The Judge Evans Collection, May-June 1918, no.137 (‘Venice’); London, Max Rutherston, The Influence of the Slade, 1890-1920, 1990, no.85.

Walter Sickert once described Venice as ‘the loveliest city in the world’, and made several visits there, first briefly in 1894, and again in 1895-1896, 1900, 1901 and 1903-1904, staying for a few months each time. He produced a large number of drawings, oil sketches and finished paintings of Venetian subjects. As has been noted of Sickert, ‘For nearly a decade Venice formed the dominant subject in his art and the city inspired him to discover new modes of expression. Through hard work and experimentation in Venice, Sickert became the painter who was to be recognized as the most significant figure in early Modern British art. In short, Venice was the crucible in which Sickert’s mature work was formed.’1

The Sickert scholar Wendy Baron has noted that, ‘Like many artists before him, Sickert was bewitched by the unique landscape of Venice. He chronicled both its great sites and its quiet backwaters.’2 During his first proper campaign of painting in Venice, in 1895 and 1896, Sickert wandered throughout the city, making numerous drawings and oil sketches. As he wrote at the time to his friend, the painter Phillip Wilson Steer, ‘Venice is really first-rate for work…and I am getting some things done. It is mostly sunny and warmish and on cold days I do interiors in St. Mark’s.’3 While in general Sickert did not paint en plein air, as Robert Upstone points out, ‘a number of small oil on panel pochades survive from his first Venetian painting trip that indicate he took up established impressionist practice and worked directly before the subject.’4 These works were usually quite small in scale, and the present oil sketch on paper may perhaps be counted among them.

Probably datable to Sickert’s first lengthy stay in Venice, in 1895-1896, this sketch depicts the small domed Neoclassical church of Santa Maria della Maddalena (usually referred to by Venetians simply as ‘La Maddalena’), with the Fondamenta delle Colonnette at the left. The viewpoint is that of the artist standing on the small Ponte Correr, which crosses the Rio della Maddalena, just behind and to the southeast of the church (fig.1). Built around 1760 by the Venetian architect Tommaso Temanza on the site of an earlier, 13th century church, Santa Maria Maddalena has a circular plan inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. Set back in a small campo in a relatively isolated part of the Cannaregio district of Venice, it is one of the few completed buildings by Temanza, who was primarily an architectural historian and biographer. The church of the Maddalena is his most famous work, and the architect, who died in 1789, is buried there. Although the church has a very beautiful interior, it is usually closed.

The present sheet can be related to two other oil sketches of the same view by Sickert, both painted on panel. An oil sketch formerly in the collection of works by Sickert assembled by the Australian

industrialist Sir Tristan Antico and sold at auction in 2006 (fig.2) is much more superficial in appearance, and has been dated to c.19035. The present work, however, is closer in style and handling to another small panel, of similar dimensions, which was last documented in the collection of Viscount Radcliffe in 19606. Lillian Browse’s succinct description of the latter painting may equally be applied to the present work: ‘This small panel is large in conception, dark and sonorous in colour, and rich and ‘juicy’ in handling. 7 Two drawings related to this composition are also known. One of these, drawn in charcoal with touches of pastel and titled ‘The Sea is in her Broad, her narrow Streets’, appeared at auction in 19688, while an ink and pencil drawing of the same view of the church was recently sold at auction9

The first recorded owner of this small oil sketch was Mrs. Frances Evans, who, with her husband Judge William Evans (1847-1918), was among Sickert’s most loyal patrons and collectors between 1907 and 1914. Judge and Mrs. Evans would commission paintings from the artist based on drawings that he showed them in his studio. As Lillian Browse has written, ‘Sickert, being a complete professional, saw nothing wrong in repeating a subject, sometimes several times over, according to his client’s commissions. Both Lady Jowitt and Mrs. Francis Evans, old friends of his, bear witness to this fact…Mrs. Evans says that when she and her husband, Judge Evans, went to Sickert’s studio he would show them a pile of small sketches and drawings and ask them to take their pick. He would then paint an oil from whatever they chose, usually for £25.’10 The Evanses bought or commissioned at least four paintings of Venetian views by Sickert, and also owned several of his paintings of Dieppe, as well as a handful of figure compositions.

Judge and Mrs. Evans formed their collection over a period of some twenty years. In an obituary, The Burlington Magazine noted of Judge Evans that ‘He was a very genial and discriminating patron of contemporary art, and was, with Mrs. Evans who shared his taste, a constant visitor at all exhibitions, galleries, and sales where works of contemporary painting or drawing were exhibited. He and Mrs. Evans collected a large number of works which show contemporary art in England at its best.’11 An exhibition of works from the Evans collection was held at the Goupil Gallery in London in May 1918, and included, apart from several works by Sickert, paintings and drawings by Charles Conder, Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, William Orpen, Phillip Wilson Steer, William Strang, Henry Tonks and many others. As a review of the exhibition stated, ‘The interesting collection of pictures which was formed by the late Judge Evans…consists principally of works by living British artists, and might serve in some ways as a model to patrons of modern art.’12

JOHN SINGER SARGENT RA

Florence 1856-1925 London

Loch Moidart, Inverness-shire

Watercolour and pencil.

253 x 353 mm. (10 x 13 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Presented by the artist, probably in December 1898, to Emily (Mrs. William) Playfair, London; By descent to her daughters Lilias (Lilian) Playfair, Chelsea, and Edith Playfair (Mrs. William Arthur Price), Hampstead, in 1916; By descent to Edith Playfair Price’s daughters Penelope Rose Price and Edith Mary Price, in 1956; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 4 November 1992, lot 15; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 23 November 1993, lot 70; Private collection; Private collection, New York.

LITERATURE: William Howe Downes, John S. Sargent: His Life and Work, London, 1926, p.363 or pp.367-368; Stephanie L. Herdrich and H. Barbara Weinberg, American Drawings and Watercolors in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: John Singer Sargent, New York, 2000, p.290, under no.258; Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1883-1899. Complete Paintings, Volume V, New Haven and London, 2010, pp.289-290, p.295, no.990, p.360, no.990 (where dated 1896); Richard Ormond, ‘Sargent and Watercolor’, in Erica E. Hirschler and Teresa E. Carbone, John Singer Sargent Watercolors, exhibition catalogue, Brooklyn, Boston and Houston, 20132014, p.22, fig.9.

EXHIBITED: London, Royal Academy, Exhibition of Works by the Late John S. Sargent, R.A., 1926, no.506 (‘Loch Moidart, Inverness-shire’, lent by the Misses Playfair).

Born in Italy, the son of an expatriate American couple, John Singer Sargent received his artistic training in Florence, Dresden and Berlin before settling in 1874 in Paris, where he studied with the society portraitist Emile Carolus-Duran. Sargent established his independent career in Paris, enjoying some early success at the annual Salons and earning important portrait commissions. Fluent in four languages, he moved easily in Parisian social, literary and artistic circles. Stung by the scandal caused by his painting Madame X at the Salon of 1884 and the resulting decline in portrait commissions, Sargent moved to London two years later. Between 1887 and 1890 he made two long trips to New York and Boston, where he obtained commissions for paintings and portraits and for murals for the new Boston Public Library. By 1890 Sargent was firmly established as a society painter in London, becoming a member of the Royal Academy in 1897. In the early years of the new century he began to make annual trips to the Continent, visiting Switzerland, Italy and Spain, as well as sometimes venturing further afield; to Syria and Palestine in 1905, for example. During these trips Sargent produced a large number of paintings and watercolours of landscapes, figures and genre subjects. Despite his reputation as the most fashionable portrait painter in Edwardian England, Sargent made the radical decision to abandon all commissioned portraiture in 1907, in favour of landscape paintings and mural projects, notably for the Widener Memorial Library at Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the latter completed just a few weeks before his death in 1925.

A gifted watercolourist, Sargent produced numerous vibrant watercolours throughout his long career, exhibiting them in public as early as the Salon of 1881. Several watercolours were included in his first one-man exhibition in London, at the Carfax Gallery in 1903. The following year he began sending works to the annual exhibitions of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours, where he continued to show until 1924. Four further exhibitions of his watercolours were held in his lifetime; two at the Carfax Gallery in 1905 and 1908 and two at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1909 and 1912. Sargent preferred to keep his watercolours close at hand, however, and none of the works he chose to exhibit in London were for sale. This only changed with the two later exhibitions in New York. Almost the entire contents of the first Knoedler exhibition, amounting to eighty-three works, were acquired by the Brooklyn Museum for the sum of $20,000, while another large group of forty-five watercolours were purchased from the second Knoedler show by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. A third

tranche of watercolours was acquired directly from the artist in 1915 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Apart from these museum purchases, however, and a number of works given away as gifts, most of Sargent’s watercolours remained in his studio at the time of his death1

Sargent’s watercolours were, for the most part, private works done on his extensive travels in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, and they served as a welcome respite from the portraits done in his studio. As the artist wrote in a letter of 1909 to a friend, ‘I have an entirely different feeling for sketches and studies than I have for portraits…sketches from nature give me pleasure to do + pleasure to keep + more than the small amount of money that one could ask for them.’2 His virtuoso technique as a watercolourist is evident in these spirited works, which allowed the artist a particular freedom of expression. As Marjorie Shelley has noted, ‘Valued for the same virtuosity and summary qualities as his oils – a luminous palette, tactile brushwork, boldness of form, dramatic spatial organization, and immediacy of effect – Sargent’s watercolors…allowed him to abandon the somber and artificially lit studio for the brighter palette and effects of light that could be achieved in the open air.’3

Sargent made two visits to the west coast of Scotland, in 1896 and 1897, both times staying with his friends, the obstetrician Dr. William Playfair, his wife Emily (known as Milly) and their family. The present sheet was executed on the first of these two visits, when the artist was a guest of the Playfairs on the island of Eilean Shona, situated at the entrance to Loch Moidart in the Inner Hebrides and only accessible by boat. As Dr. Playfair recorded, in an unpublished autobiography, ‘[In 1893] we spent our holidays in Scotland in a particularly lovely place. Eilean Shona is situated in the middle of Loch Moidart; there is a good family house on the island and we enjoyed our holiday to the full. A more beautiful setting cannot be imagined and we returned on three further occasions…On the last occasion that we went there J. S. Sargent came with us and, during his stay, he painted three water colours of Loch Moidart for Milly. They remind us of some of our happiest times as a family is Scotland.’4 One of the Playfair daughters recalled, many years later, that ‘we have three sketches he did (among many) when he stayed with us at Eilean Shona Moidart…They were painted in 1896 & given to my mother as Xmas presents, in three successive years. [Sargent] generally dined with us on Xmas day…’5 The two other watercolour views of Loch Moidart from the Playfair collection appeared at auction in 2000 and are today in private collections6.

In their magisterial catalogue raisonné of Sargent’s oeuvre, Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray note that ‘The three water-colours that Sargent gave to Emily Playfair…are all of a piece. They are painted from the rocky shoreline of Eilean Shona across narrow passages of water to hills and headlands. They are like separate frames from a scenic panorama, recording different facets of an all-embracing view. Tonally, they match one another, with their fresh blues set off by browns, mauves, and greens…[The present sketch of Loch Moidart] was probably painted looking toward the western end of the island…The foreground slab of rock reflects the blue light from the water, and it is topped by brown seaweed. The colour of the open stretch of water beyond is predominantly pale blue and grey green. The brown tone of the seaweed is picked up in the earth colours of the headland spur, and this gives way to a pale blue sky. Though the day is seemingly overcast, the water-colour conveys the translucent atmosphere of the place in clear, crisp tones. 7 Two further watercolours thought to depict Loch Moidart, of vertical format, are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York8, while four other watercolours have also been associated with this period of Sargent’s career9

Ormond and Kilmurray have written extensively of the artist’s Scottish watercolours: In them, he charts the constantly shifting weather, the movement of the sea, and the fleeting patterns of light on rocks and water. The brush flickers over the surface, creating the sense of a landscape alive and in flux. He also captures that pearly, translucent quality of light you find in the west of Scotland in the way that he manipulates the clear tones and the wet washes of his medium. Sargent was refining his technique and developing that breadth of effect and fluency of the medium that would amaze his contemporaries in the period after 1900. His habit of isolating fragments of landscape, of seizing a motif in close-up to the exclusion of everything else, are very much in evidence in his Scottish water-colours. He was forging a new style that was altogether bolder and more exuberant than anything he had painted before…The watercolours that Sargent painted in Scotland point the way to the plein-air studies he was to paint in Europe post-1900. In his spirited use of the water-colour medium and his keen eye for the vagaries of light and weather, he anticipates the themes of his mature landscape work.’10

WILLIAM FRASER GARDEN

Gillingham 1856-1921 Huntingdon

The Bridge at St. Ives, Huntingdonshire

Watercolour. Laid down. Signed with initials and dated W. F. G. ’99. in grey ink at the lower right. 120 x 155 mm. (4 3/4 x 6 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Christopher Wood, London and Marston, Somerset; His (anonymous) sale, London, Christie’s, 5 June 2007, lot 69.

Born into a family of artists, Garden William Fraser changed his name to William Fraser Garden so as to distinguish himself from his six brothers, all but one of whom were also active as landscape artists. Arguably the best of the so-called ‘Fraser Brotherhood’, Fraser Garden abandoned his career as a clerk in the late 1870s in order to devote himself to watercolour painting, and exhibited his works at the Royal Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours. The subjects of his watercolours were by and large views of the fen villages along the river Ouse, such as Holywell, Hemingford Grey and St. Ives, characterized by a remarkable attention to detail and crisp, cool lighting. Throughout the 1880s Garden was represented by the Dowdeswell Gallery in London, who sold a number of his works. By 1890, however, he seems to have given up exhibiting in London, and from then on relied on a small number of local collectors in Huntingdonshire. He was never a very prolific artist, however. As Charles Lane has noted of the artist, ‘His apparent lack of ambition and the consequently few watercolours which he painted each year, even when at his busiest, resulted naturally enough in his failing to come to the notice of all but a local audience.’1 Although he was the most successful of the Fraser brothers, Garden was very poor for most of his life, and was declared bankrupt in 1899. He lived in the village of Hemingford Abbots and in a room at the Ferry Boat Inn at Holywell, where in his old age he is said to have paid his bills with drawings instead of bank notes. Long unknown to scholars and collectors, Garden’s body of work has only fairly recently been rediscovered, and his reputation firmly established as among the finest Victorian landscape watercolourists.

Garden’s watercolour views of his native Huntingdonshire and along the river Ouse in Bedfordshire are masterpieces of clarity and detail. As Christopher Newall has written, ‘Garden’s watercolors are a manifestation of the late-century revival of interest in the representation of landscape subjects in minute and painstaking detail. He chose picturesque but unremarkable subjects in his immediate locality – decrepit mill buildings and riverside inns along the banks of the Great Ouse, as well as pure landscapes…His works of the late 1880s and early 1890s are extraordinary in their pellucid clarity of light and their exact delineation of architectural and landscape detail.’2 Another writer has noted of the artist that ‘his drawing of buildings is nearly photographic in quality. Despite this almost too detailed approach his work lives, though he seldom populated his drawings except with a few high-flying birds.’3

The narrow stone bridge in the small town of St. Ives (formerly a village known as Slepe), on the left bank of the river Ouse in Huntingdonshire, was built around 1415. The chapel dedicated to St. Leger (or possibly St. Lawrence), constructed on the eastern, downstream side of the bridge with an altar consecrated in 1426, is one of only three surviving examples of bridge chapels in England. The present sheet depicts the upper two-story extension to the chapel which was added in 1736, when the structure was converted to a house4. The bridge chapel was returned to its original appearance in 19305

Fraser Garden painted numerous views of the town and bridge of St. Ives, beginning around 1890 and continuing into the second decade of the 20th century. While some of these show the bridge from a distance, others depict views of the structure from a closer vantage point along the riverbank; one such example, dated 1895, is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York6

SIR MUIRHEAD BONE

Glasgow 1876-1953 Oxford

The Bronze Sculpture of Saint Michael and the Dragon on the Façade of the Cathedral of Orvieto, Looking Down on the Piazza del Duomo

Pencil on two sheets of joined paper. Signed, dated and inscribed Muirhead Bone / Orvieto 1912 in pencil at the lower right.

505 x 288 mm. (19 7/8 x 11 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: An unidentified triangular collector’s mark with the initials RSM (not in Lugt) stamped in brown ink on the verso.

Initially trained as an architect, Muirhead Bone abandoned this career in favour of working as a draughtsman and printmaker. As the collector and scholar Campbell Dodgson has noted, ‘Like several etchers who have distinguished themselves in after life by a style of marked originality, he found out the technique for himself, or at least without a definite course of study under any teacher or in any school of engraving.’1 In 1904 Bone became a founding member of the Society of Twelve, an exhibition society devoted to original prints and drawings. Among his most significant works of the first decade of the new century were drypoints of The Demolition of St. James’s Hall of 1906 and 1907 and The Great Gantry, Charing Cross Station of 1906, and a large pencil drawing of The British Museum Reading Room of 1907. Each of these compositions, characterized by a novel viewpoint of a well-known building and an attention to detail, were prefaced by numerous studies and drawings. As his grandson and biographer has noted of Bone, ‘his method of working seems to have been to record as much as he could in a detailed, on-the-spot drawing and to work this up over several months to a finished print or drawing, which would be the centrepiece of his submission to the next exhibition of the Society of Twelve.’2

During the First World War Bone was appointed Britain’s first official War Artist and spent some two years on the Western Front, producing numerous drawings and watercolours of the military campaigns3 After the war Bone enjoyed considerable commercial and critical success over the next thirty-five years. His drawings were as much admired as his etchings, and his larger and more ambitious drawings were often sold for between £20 and £50 apiece. Several of his pencil studies were reproduced in such publications as the Architectural Review, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Art Journal, the Illustrated London News and the German Die Graphischen Künste. As Dodgson noted, ‘he is much more at home with pencil and charcoal, ink and water-colour wash and pastel, than with the pigments and utensils of the landscape painter in oils. He is a “black and white” artist first and foremost, and one of the most gifted, varied and accomplished draughtsmen that have ever been known. Gifted with a fresh and eager interest in the forms of things, singly and in relation to others…gifted, above all with a most astonishing eyesight, keen, searching and tireless, and with equally unfailing sureness of hand.’4

One of the first trips that Muirhead Bone made outside Britain was a long stay of about a year and a half – from the autumn of 1910 to the summer of 1912 – in central and northern Italy, accompanied by his wife Gertrude5. Bone made a number of drawings and etchings of the cliff town of Orvieto in Umbria, some of which were used to illustrate an article written by his wife and published in the magazine Country Life in February 1914. As Dodgson writes, ‘at Orvieto, on its great cliffs, with its golden wine and the mellow, almost equally golden, stone of the west front of its great cathedral…he made a memorable series of drawings, now scattered among many collections.’6

This unusual view of the façade of the Duomo at Orvieto is dominated by the 14th century bronze sculpture of The Archangel Saint Michael and the Dragon by Matteo di Ugolino da Bologna, cast in 1356, which adorned the top of the gable above the right-hand (south) door of the cathedral7. To make this drawing, Bone stood at the level of the open arcade running above the three gabled doors and below the rose window, leaning out to draw the sculpture and the piazza below. Other studies of the cathedral of Orvieto are today in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

HENRI GAUDIER-BRZESKA

Saint-Jean-de-Braye 1891-1915 Neuville-Saint-Vaast

Torso of a Male Nude

Charcoal, red chalk and watercolour, with framing lines in charcoal. Signed or inscribed Gaudier-Brzeska in pencil on the verso.

642 x 528 mm. (25 1/4 x 20 3/4 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: Claud Lovat Fraser, London; With Alan G. Thomas, Bournemouth, in 1963; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 15 December 1965, lot 83; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 23 May 1984, lot 113; Stanley J. Seeger and Christopher Cone, London and Berkshire; Their sale (‘The Eye of a Collector: Works from the Collection of Stanley J. Seeger’), London, Sotheby’s, 14 June 2001, lot 56; William Kelly Simpson, New York; His posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 20 June 2018, lot 103; Private collection, London.

One of the leading figures of 20th century sculpture, Henri Gaudier was born into a working-class family in France. In 1910, while studying in Paris, he met Sophie Brzeska, a much older Polish emigré and author with whom he was to share the remainder of his brief life, and whose surname he added to his own, though they never married. The following year the couple moved to London, where Gaudier-Brzeska began associating with such prominent figures of the avant-garde in England as Jacob Epstein, Roger Fry, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. As a sculptor he eschewed smoothness and polished surfaces in favour of a rough-hewn style of direct carving. He first exhibited at the Allied Artist’s Association in London, and also showed at the International Society, with the London Group, and at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. His work was included in the inaugural Vorticist Exhibition in London, which coincided with the artist’s death. After the outbreak of the First World War, Gaudier-Brzeska returned to France to volunteer for the French army. The following year, in June 1915, he was killed in action, at the age of just twenty-three.

A memorial exhibition of Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculptures and drawings, at the Leicester Galleries in 1918, helped to bring his work to a wider audience. However, it was largely through the efforts of a young curator of modern art at the Tate Gallery, H. S. ‘Jim’ Ede, that the artist’s posthumous reputation was firmly established. Shortly before his death, Gaudier-Brzeska had willed the contents of his studio to his companion Sophie Brzeska. When she died intestate in a mental institution ten years later, the bulk of the artist’s estate, including many sculptures and some 1,630 drawings, was acquired by Ede in 1927. Ede published a pioneering biography of the artist in 1931 and championed him as a major figure of 20th century art, donating many of Gaudier-Brzeska’s drawings to public collections in Britain and Europe.

Gaudier-Brzeska was a hugely prolific draughtsman. As his friend and biographer Horace Brodzky wrote, ‘In his short working life as a sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska produced a great many drawings; in pastel, charcoal, wash and ink. In fact he exploited all the media available to an industrious draughtsman, but the great bulk of this work is either charcoal or ink. His pastels, very few in number, were usually done in strongly contrasted positive colours…In his charcoal drawings of the human figure…he resorts to the simple flat planes introduced by the Cubists.’1 This large sheet may be closely compared to two watercolour and chalk studies of male nude torsos, both likely drawn in 1913 and of similar dimensions to the present sheet, as well as sharing some of the same provenance, which appeared on the London art market in 1984 and 20022. A similar study of a male torso, drawn in red ink and black chalk, is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans3. In its powerful modelling, this drawing also bears a noticeable resemblance to a full-face Self-Portrait drawn in pencil, dated 1912, in the National Portrait Gallery in London4

The present sheet once belonged to the English artist, theatre designer and writer Claud Lovat Fraser (1890-1921), a friend of Gaudier-Brzeska. As Brodzky recalled, ‘Brzeska at this time saw quite a lot of Lovat Fraser, who had a studio in South Kensington, and showed a number of small pieces at Fraser’s studio when the latter held a one-man show of his pictures. Lovat Fraser and Brzeska at this time were much together and were often in each other’s studios.’5

ERIC KENNINGTON RA

London 1888-1960 Reading

Portrait Study of a Boy Wearing a Cloth Cap: Study for The Costardmongers

Black chalk and charcoal, with stumping. Laid down. 460 x 303 mm. (18 1/8 x 11 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Maas Gallery, London in 1981; Private collection, London.

LITERATURE: Rosemary Treble, ‘London. British Paintings 1837-1930’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1981, p.373, illustrated p.375, fig.4; Jonathan Black, The Face of Courage: Eric Kennington, Portraiture and The Second World War, exhibition catalogue, Hendon, 2011-2012, p.14, fig.4.

EXHIBITED: London, The Maas Gallery, Eric Kennington: An Exhibition of drawings, pastels and watercolours. 1905 to 1930, 1981, no.5.

Active as a painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor, Eric Henri Kennington was active and is perhaps best known for his work as an official war artist during both World Wars. He studied at the Lambeth School of Art and at the City and Guilds School, and first came to public notice for his paintings of costermongers in London. With the outbreak of the First World War, Kennington immediately volunteered for duty, and served as a private in France in the winter of 1914, eventually returning to England and receiving a medical discharge. His first significant war painting, The Kensingtons at Laventie: Winter 1914, was exhibited to much acclaim at the Goupil Gallery in 1916. Kennington made a return trip to the Somme in December 1916, and some thirty portrait drawings of British and French soldiers that he made were shown at the Goupil Gallery in March 1917. Partly as a result of this exhibition, he was appointed an Official War Artist, and in August 1917 he returned to the Western Front, with a specific brief to make drawings of British infantrymen, or ‘tommies’. A former ‘tommy’ himself, he was able to produce convincing and realistic depictions of the soldiers he encountered1, as well as landscapes of the trenches and their shattered surroundings.

Kennington eventually returned to England after more than seven months on the Western Front, and a selection of the work he had produced was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in the summer of 1918. Later that year, however, Kennington resigned his commission as a War Artist, over a disgreement with the price offered by the government to acquire his work for the collection of the recently founded Imperial War Museum. Throughout the 1920s, art critics favourably compared Kennington’s skill as a portrait draughtsman to such contemporaries as William Orpen, Augustus John and John Singer Sargent. In the early 1920s Kennington also began to take up stone carving, mentored by Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill, and among his first public commissions as a sculptor was a memorial to the 24th Infantry Division in Battersea Park, completed in 1924. From this time onwards Kennington would describe himself primarily as a sculptor, though he continued to accept portrait commissions. In 1939 he was appointed an Official War Artist for the second time, and was attached to the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force between 1939 and 1942, spending the later years of the war working for the War Office as a portraitist. Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1951 and a full Academician eight years later, Kennington spent much of the last years of his career creating tomb monuments for Anglican churches.

This large sheet is a study for the head of a young boy seated at the left of Kennington’s first major canvas, The Costardmongers of 1914 (fig.1), today in collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris2. The painting depicts costermongers – street sellers of fruit and vegetables working from stands or barrows, also known as costers or costards – in the Walham Green district of Fulham, and was the culmination of a series of paintings of London street life and vendors painted by Kennington in 1912 and 1913. As the Kennington scholar Jonathan Black has opined, ‘Kennington… set out to idealize his coster subjects because they were not ordinary working-class people who would have worked in a factory or within some other form of enclosed and strictly regulated environment. By painting

them in the manner of the Northern or Italian Renaissance, Kennington has elevated these costers not only to make them worthy of a large canvas but also to locate them within a sort of elegy for a way of life. His costers occupy a niche of open-air working-class independence that seemed to be threatened by developments in modern urban life.’3

When it was exhibited at the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers at the Grosvenor Gallery in London in April and May 1914, The Costardmongers was praised for its sympathetic treatment of working-class Londoners. As one contemporary critic noted, ‘There is strength of purpose, intensity of characterisation, with an almost pre-Raphaelite finish and downrightness, in Mr. Eric H. Kennington’s curiously hard yet, in its own way, very interesting group, “Costermongers”. The onlooker, rebelling at first, is in the end won over by the resoluteness and the sincerity of the artist.’4 Another review of the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition praised the painting as ‘an extraordinary clever piece of work, vivid, without a patch of atmosphere, a personal vision…’5, while yet another noted that ‘this larger composition quite establishes Mr. Kennington as one of the best painters who have appeared of late years…His costers are real live people in modern clothes, his accessories real bits of paper and pots and pans and other common objects of the lee-shore of a coster’s life – only he has composed them and coloured them as Van Eyck or Ouwater would have done.’6

As Jonathan Black has noted elsewhere, ‘The Costardmongers was the first work Kennington exhibited which really made the critics sit up and take notice. He was described as a worthy successor to the mantle of Ford Madox Brown and as a draughtsman whose talent rivalled that of the far better known William Strang and William Orpen. Indeed, a number of influential critics identified him as by far the most promising among the younger generation of up and coming British artists.’7 The sale of The Costardmongers to the portrait painter William Nicholson allowed Kennington to move to a studio on Kensington High Street in London. Two years later, in 1916, the large canvas entered the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris as the gift of Sir Edmund Davis, part of a group of nearly forty British paintings and drawings from his collection8.

A related charcoal full-length study for the figure of the same youth, with a large basket alongside him, is in the Kennington Family Collection9, as is a large charcoal drawing for the woman standing at the centre of the painted composition10

RUDOLF SAUTER

Wörishofen 1895-1977 Stroud

a. Sun Through a Thin Mist Pastel.

127 x 152 mm. (5 x 6 in.)

b. Storm over a Tor, Dartmoor Pastel.

151 x 128 mm. (6 x 5 in.)

LITERATURE: Jeffrey S. Reznick, War and Peace in the Worlds of Rudolf H. Sauter. A Cultural History of a Creative Life, London and New York, 2022, p.43.

Born in Bavaria, Rudolf Helmut Sauter was the son of the German artist Georg Sauter, who had settled in London in 1894 and established a career as a portrait painter and landscapist. Raised in England and educated at Harrow, the young Sauter studied art in London and Munich. Towards the end of the First World War Sauter was interned at Alexandra Palace in London and in Frimley in Surrey, where he produced a number of drawings illustrating life in the camp in 1918 and 19191. Sauter was the nephew and heir of the writer, dramatist and poet John Galsworthy, and illustrated an edition of his complete works, as well as painting portraits of the writer and his wife Ada. (In 1967 he also published a memoir about Galsworthy.) Sauter developed a particular skill as a pastellist and showed his work at the Pastel Society. He also exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal West of England Academy and the Paris Salon, and also produced a number of lithographs of landscape subjects.

Sauter travelled extensively, often with the Galsworthys, and over his career exhibited landscapes and views of England, South Africa, Italy (particularly Venice and Sicily), Morocco and the western states of America, notably the Grand Canyon. Apart from showing at the Salons in Paris, he also had one-man exhibitions at galleries in New York and South Africa. His work was exhibited with less frequency after Galsworthy’s death in 1933, perhaps partly due to the fact that, as the novelist’s heir and executor, he was better able to support himself financially. Much of Sauter’s work was destroyed in a fire in the 1980s, shortly after his death, and thus relatively few works by him survive today.

These two small pastels may be dated to the spring of 1916, on one of the visits that the young Sauter made to his uncle John Galsworthy at Wingstone, the writer’s rented farmhouse home in the small village of Manaton on Dartmoor. As the artist later recalled, ‘It was no ordinary or sentimental love of Nature which this spot evoked. Here, the rain and the sun and the scent of the land entered in and became so much of my uncle’s own nature that he could never for long thereafter be quite happy apart from them… Even the enclosing fog, though it brought bronchitis to my aunt, made the wood fire and candles seem brighter and the little, low whitewashed rooms more comforting...At night there was a quality of stillness in the place, almost unknown in our present engine-dominated age…’2 A recent biography of Sauter has posited that such works as these may have reflected the young artist’s unease at the situation his family found themselves in at this period, when his father was interned as an enemy alien3, as well as the freedom he felt while staying with his uncle on Dartmoor, away from the anti-German feeling then so prevalent in London.

These two works are part of a small group of pastel landscapes, three of which were dated May 1916, that were loosely placed in a folio – inscribed with a handwritten label which read ‘Designs, studies and ideas for pictures’ – found among Rudolf Sauter’s effects long after his death.

FREDERICK CAYLEY ROBINSON ARA

Brentford-on-Thames 1862-1927 London

Evening in London

Tempera, watercolour and pencil on paper, laid down on board. The standing figure drawn on a separate sheet of paper pasted onto the main sheet at the left. Signed and dated CAYLEY ROBINSON 1920 in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed “Evening in London.” / F. Cayley Robinson. / In the possession of Cecil French, Esq. in black ink on the backing board. 375 x 340 mm. (14 3/4 x 13 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Probably acquired from the artist by Cecil French; The Fine Art Society, London, in 1970; Stuart Pivar, New York; Acquired from him in 1983 by a private collector; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Geoffrey Holme, ed., British Water-Colour Painting of To-day, [The Studio, Special Winter Number], London, 1921, illustrated in colour pl.18.

EXHIBITED: London, Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours, Summer Exhibition, 1920, no.98 (‘Evening in London’); London, The Fine Art Society, The Earthly Paradise: F. Cayley Robinson, F. L. Griggs and the painter-craftsmen of The Birmingham Group, 1969, no.193 (lent by Cecil French); Wilmington, Delaware Art Museum, The Pre-Raphaelite Era 1848-1914, 1976, no.6-13 (lent by Stuart Pivar).

Among the most interesting and original artists active in England in the first quarter of the 20th century, Frederick Cayley Robinson remains a relatively obscure figure today. His work has not been the subject of a monograph, nor has there been any major retrospective exhibition of his paintings since 1977; indeed, during his lifetime he was only accorded three one-man exhibitions. Cayley Robinson studied at the St. John’s Wood School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. He completed his studies at the Académie Julian in Paris, between 1891 and 1894, when he came into contact with the work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and the Nabis painters, who were to have a strong influence on his style. As early as 1896 one critic noted of the young Cayley Robinson that ‘He has already established himself as an artist who occupies a place by himself, and he is conspicuous because he fills that place with real distinction. If he goes on as he has begun he can hardly fail to make his mark on the art-record of our times.’1

Much of the early part of Cayley Robinson’s career was spent abroad. He lived for several years in Florence, where he studied the art of Giotto, Mantegna and Michelangelo, and took up the practice of painting in tempera. Following a period of four years in Paris, he settled in Cornwall in 1906, two years after his first one-man exhibition, at the Baillie Gallery in London. He began to exhibit his watercolours at the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1911 and continued to send two or three works to each of the Society’s annual exhibitions until 1926. Much of his work is characterized by a sense of stillness and meditative calm, and this is especially true of his exhibition watercolours. Indeed, as James Greig noted in an appreciation of Cayley Robinson’s work, published shortly after the artist’s death, ‘neither medium nor method counts in any great measure for the attractiveness of Cayley Robinson’s oeuvre. Its influence is exercised mainly through spiritual emotion conveyed in rhythmic movement and tender tones of alluring beauty. The rhythm is always controlled within a well thought out design, but it is the elusiveness of the inward motive of his pictures that gives them their indefinable charm.’2

Cayley Robinson also received commissions for costume and set designs for theatrical productions, most notably for a staging of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird at the Haymarket Theatre in 1909; a work that served to cement his reputation as what one recent scholar has described as ‘a sensitive painter of the child’s-eye view’3. He was equally highly regarded as a mural painter. His finest works of this type are a series of four enormous oil paintings on canvas collectively known as The Acts of Mercy, painted for the entrance hall of Middlesex Hospital in London between 1915 and 19204. In 1914 Cayley Robinson won a commission to paint a mural of The Coming of Saint Patrick to Ireland for the Dublin Art Gallery. By this time he had settled in London, although he spent three months every

year serving as Professor of Figure Composition and Drawing at the Glasgow School of Art. Elected a member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1919 and an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1921, he was also a member of the New English Art Club. Following the artist’s death from influenza in 1927, his work fell into relative obscurity. In recent years, however, there has been a reassessment of his oeuvre, culminating in the inclusion of several works by Cayley Robinson in two recent exhibitions; Dreams and Stories: Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries at the Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum and the Watts Art Gallery in Surrey in 2022-2023, and Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance in Forlì, Italy, in 2024.

Among the most common themes in Cayley Robinson’s oeuvre is that of women or girls in enclosed interior spaces, often lit from both a light source within the room and from a window beyond. As Charlotte Gere has noted, ‘It is tempting to compare the interiors which are perhaps his most successful works, with those of his French contemporaries Bonnard and Vuillard; but close examination reveals that their atmosphere has less in common with the intimism that inspired the nabis than with the quietism of the Cotswold artists and authors. In Cayley Robinson’s pictures it takes on an almost sinister quality, and one feels that the figures in their airless rooms are brooding on ancient mysteries.’5 As another modern scholar has written, ‘Cayley Robinson’s pictures are almost always of people, denizens of a silent, timeless world. There are symbolic allusions but no clear cut messages...Cayley Robinson suggests an artist who, almost consciously, evaded worldly success; his life and work evoke that of a musician who, with only a limited number of notes available to him, is able to create a corpus of amazingly subtle harmonies which is neither forced nor false.’6

This large sheet may be grouped with a number of similar depictions of women in interiors by Cayley Robinson, often incorporating standing or seated figures at the left edge of the composition, looking onto the scene, with a window behind. Among these is a large painting entitled A Winter’s Evening, dated 1918, which was on the London art market in 20037, while another sizeable painting of the same title, dating from 1899 and exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists that year, appeared at auction in 1995 and 20018. Also similar in composition is a large pencil drawing entitled Study for Twilight, dated 1902 and sold at auction in 20139

In keeping with much of Cayley Robinson’s work, the subject of the present sheet remains somewhat enigmatic. As MaryAnne Stevens has noted, the critics were perplexed by the meaning of Robinson’s paintings. When writing about his work, they tended to apply such descriptions as ‘poetic’, ‘literary’, ‘ethereal’, ‘full of associative meaning’ and ‘expressive of a mood’. However, there was one quality in his pictures upon which they all agreed: it was ‘symbolic’. This does not mean that Robinson adhered to a rigid system of visual metaphor...Instead, it is the quiet interchange between form and content, line and colour, which suggests a mood, a state of mind or the aspirations of Man. It is this aspect of his work which, in the face of pictorial innovation by other English artists after about 1900, justified Robinson’s commitment to an individual, quasi-archaic style of painting. It was this aspect that also fascinated the critics of his day and which continue to intrigue us today.’10

The present sheet was, in all likelihood, acquired directly from the artist by his friend Cecil French (1879-1953). An Irish painter, printmaker and illustrator, French assembled a collection of over 150 works by late 19th and early 20th century painters, notably Edward Burne-Jones, Simeon Solomon, Frederic Leighton, Albert Moore, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others11. Among living artists, French was particularly fond of the work of Cayley Robinson, who drew a portrait of him that is now in the British Museum. In 1922 French published an article on the artist, in which he noted that ‘it was the infrequent appearance of Cayley Robinsons at the [Society of] British Artists that drew me, as a boy, to those exhibitions. The potency of spell, the visionary strangeness, the almost desperate sincerity, of the new, mysterious, isolated artist brought to mind the first strenuous beginnings of the English Pre-Raphaelite group.’12

PERCY WYNDHAM LEWIS

Amherst, Nova Scotia 1882-1957 London

Portrait of a Seated Woman

Pencil on paper. Signed and dated Wyndham Lewis 1921 in pencil at the lower right. 575 x 388 mm. (22 5/8 x 15 1/4 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 11 December 1957, lot 53 (as a portrait of Edith Sitwell); Arthur Tooth and Sons Ltd., London; Acquired from them in 1957 by Barbara Gibbs; By descent to her son, David Gibbs; Acquired from him in 1983 by his sister, Cherry Palmer, and her husband Bill Palmer, Bussock Wood House, nr. Newbury, Berkshire; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Walter Michel, Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971, p.378, no.472 (as Portrait of a Lady, not illustrated).

One of the most significant figures of the avant-garde in Britain in the first half of the 20th century, Percy Wyndham Lewis was highly regarded as both a writer and an artist. As he noted in one autobiographical account, ‘I am a novelist, painter, sculptor, philosopher, draughtsman, critic, politician, journalist, essayist, pamphleteer, all rolled into one, like one of those portmanteau-men of the Italian Renaissance.’1 After studying at the Slade School of Art between 1898 and 1901, Lewis spent the next seven years in Europe, mainly in Paris but also in Madrid, Haarlem and Munich. Returning to England in 1908, he exhibited from 1911 onwards with the Camden Town Group and at the Allied Artists’ Association. Lewis joined Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops in 1913, but by the following year had left to establish the Rebel Art Centre and the magazine Blast, which became the manifesto of the short-lived movement known as Vorticism. One of the leaders of the Vorticist movement, Lewis was the author of most of the theoretical writings associated with the group. Immensely gifted as both artist and writer, by the early 1920s it was his writing that began to take up much of his creative energy. Nevertheless, he produced a significant group of paintings and drawings throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Lewis spent the Second World War in America and Canada, but within a few years of his return to London in 1945 he had begun to lose his sight and largely stopped painting, becoming completely blind by 1951.

Lewis’s drawings are of considerable importance in his oeuvre. He published three separate portfolios of his drawings, in 1913, 1919 and 1932, and included significant numbers of drawings in his gallery exhibitions and in group shows such as the first Vorticist exhibition in 19152. The present sheet – once identified as a portrait of the poet and critic Edith Sitwell3 but more likely to depict the artist’s future wife Gladys Anne Hoskins, known as ‘Froanna’, whom he met in 1918 and married in 1930 – is one of a distinctive group of portrait line drawings in pencil or black chalk executed in the early 1920s. Among closely comparable pencil drawings of the same date is a study of a woman seated in an armchair –quite possibly the same sitter as in the present sheet – which appeared at auction in 19884, and a drawing of a seated woman, also drawn in 1921, in a private collection5. Another drawing of perhaps the same model is known from an old black and white photograph inscribed by the artist simply as ‘Seated Figure’6 .

As noted by Charles Handley-Read, in the first major monograph on the artist, ‘perhaps the most distinctive feature of Wyndham Lewis’s portraits is [a] startlingly vivid, alive, actual quality – a feature quite unrelated, of course, to the matter of likeness. The intensity he bestows seems to transform a portrait into a presence…And yet, paradoxically it might seem, the presence or personality of these portraits is distant and remote…The portraits have…a classical, or a neo-classical air – like the work of Ingres – where the subject, having gained attention, remains entirely self-sufficient, as it were entirely indifferent to the advances of a spectator.’7

AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE

London 1886-1956 London

A Crouching Female Nude, Seen from Behind Pastel. Indistinctly signed or inscribed in charcoal at the lower left. 448 x 607 mm. (17 5/8 x 23 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Arnold Klein Gallery, Royal Oak, Michigan; Frederick J. Cummings, Detroit and New York; Thence by descent until 1994; His posthumous sale, New York, Christie’s East, 12 July 1994, lot 270; Private collection; Anonymous sale, New York, Swann Galleries, 19 September 2017, lot 482; Private collection, London.

EXHIBITED: Binghamton, State University of New York, University Art Gallery, New York, Finch College Museum of Art, and Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Strictly Academic: Life Drawing in the Nineteenth Century, 1974.

Arguably one of the most gifted draughtsmen of Edwardian London, and perhaps among the least wellknown today, Austin Osman Spare drew constantly from a very early age, and by the end of his life had produced over two thousand drawings, watercolours and pastels. Although he was largely self-taught, from the age of about twelve he took evening classes at the Lambeth School of Art, where his fellow pupils included Glyn Philpot. In 1904 the seventeen-year-old Spare had a drawing accepted at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. The following year he self-published Earth: Inferno, his first book of drawings and mystical texts, followed two years later by a second volume of drawings, entitled A Book of Satyrs. Spare’s first proper exhibition, at the Bruton Gallery in London in 1907, resulted in a number of reviews, most of which commented equally on the sheer technical proficiency of the works and their weird and disturbing subject matter. By the 1920s he was producing some of his best drawings, and although exhibitions of his work were commercial and critical failures, there came to be a small but growing band of patrons and collectors of the young artist’s work. Spare remained intensely prolific until his death from peritonitis following a burst appendix, at the age of sixty-nine. The evening of his death, a newspaper noted that ‘A strange and gentle genius died in a London hospital this afternoon. You have probably never heard of Austin Osman Spare. But his should have been a famous name.’1

This sizeable drawing may be dated to the early 1920s, when Spare produced drawings of female nudes characterized by an uncompromising realism. A closely comparable large-scale pastel study of a crouching female nude seen from the front, signed and dated 1923 and of slightly smaller dimensions, is in a private collection2. The model for many of Spare’s drawings of nudes of this period seems to have been a woman named Freda, of whom little else is known. Several nude studies of her appeared in the first few issues of a journal entitled The Golden Hind: A Quarterly Magazine of Art and Literature, founded in 1922 and edited by Spare and the writer Clifford Bax. As the artist’s biographer Phil Baker has noted, ‘The first issue of The Golden Hind…included a large lithograph by Spare entitled ‘The New Eden’: Spare’s head, bat-winged, appeared in the sky over a realistically fleshy Freda, crouching naked near a coiled snake3…As Bax remembered it, Spare “innocently filled our first number with…backviews of massive nude females”, and this caused their journal to be nicknamed The Golden Behind.’4 Issued in a large-scale folio format, the magazine lasted for just eight issues, and ceased publication in 1924.

This pastel drawing also displays similarities with a study of the back of a seated female nude of 19205, which was one of several drawings of female nudes used to illustrate Spare’s fourth book The Focus of Life, on which he worked for several years before its publication in 1921. Similar crouching figures also occur elsewhere in Spare’s work, such as a drawing entitled Metamorphosis of c.19266. As Baker writes, ‘Spare loved the flesh, perfect and imperfect, and among the idealised nudes there are other women who are more realistically naked. This was a lifelong tendency, increasing as he grew older and started to use elderly local women for models…His friend Dennis Bardens remarks that “His nudes were sometimes idyllic, sometimes earthy”…’7

GWEN JOHN

Haverfordwest 1876-1939 Dieppe

Nocturne

Watercolour and gouache on buff paper. 243 x 315 mm. (9 5/8 x 12 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist; By descent to the artist’s nephew, Edwin John; Anonymous sale, London, Lyon & Turnbull, 23 October 2020, lot 17; Private collection, London.

EXHIBITED: Possibly London, National Gallery, British Painting since Whistler, 1940, no.211 (‘Nocturne. Gouache. Size 9 1/4 x 11 3/4 ins. Lent by Edwin John, Esq.’); Possibly London, C.E.M.A., British Institute of Adult Education, British Paintings 1900-1940, 1941, no.126; London, Matthiesen Ltd., Gwen John Memorial Exhibition, 1946, probably no.206 (‘Meudon Nocturne: House with a Gate. Water Colour and Gouache. 9 1/4 x 11 1/2 in. Exhibited at the National Gallery, 1940, No.346; Exhibited at the British Institute of Adult Education, 1941, No.126.’); Chichester, Pallant House Gallery, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, 2023, unnumbered.

In 1895 Gwen John entered the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where her younger brother Augustus had enrolled the previous year. In 1904, at the age of twenty-seven, John settled in Paris, where she earned a living by modelling for artists. One of these was the renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin, with whom she had an intense love affair that lasted a decade. John lived in France for the remainder of her career, over the course of which she produced fewer than two hundred paintings. After living and working in Montparnasse for seven years, in 1911 she moved to Meudon, in the southwestern suburbs of Paris and near Rodin’s country house. Around this time she was introduced to John Quinn, a prominent American collector of modern art, who began to acquire her work and became her most significant patron. From 1912 onwards Quinn sent her a yearly stipend in exchange for her work, and he acquired almost every painting she wished to sell, eventually coming to own some twenty paintings and fifty drawings by the artist.

John painted very slowly and never signed or dated her work. Throughout her career she worked mostly in isolation, and although she occasionally exhibited her paintings in London and Paris, she seems to have been largely unconcerned with making her work better known. Only one solo exhibition was held in her lifetime, in London in 1926. By around 1930 John had largely ceased to paint, although she continued to draw. Her last datable work was done in 1933, and she seems to have stopped working almost entirely for the last five or six years of her life. At John’s death in 1939, at the age of sixty-three, the vast majority of her output remained in her studio in Meudon. In 1947 a large retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Matthiesen Gallery in London, in which the present sheet was included. Although during her life she was overshadowed by her brother Augustus John, in recent years her critical reputation has come to surpass his, and she has been recognized as one of the most significant British artists of the 20th century. Indeed, this is something Augustus had foretold, once stating that ‘In fifty years’ time I will be known as the brother of Gwen John.’

Gwen John’s beautiful, enigmatic and delicately painted intimist works were almost always modest in scale and subdued in tonality. This atmospheric study in watercolour and gouache is probably a view of Meudon, the village just southwest of Paris that John moved to in 1911, and where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. As has been noted, ‘Gwen John’s paintings of Meudon at night sometimes recall Whistler’s nocturnes in atmosphere, and Walter Sickert’s small-scale, close-toned Dieppe scenes. In their almost abstract nature and painterly freeness they are unprecedented in her oeuvre.’1 A closely related nocturne of the same house, of similar dimensions, appeared at auction in London in 19992, while among other stylistically and thematically comparable works is a Street at Night, Meudon, in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.3, and a watercolour inscribed ‘La Rue Terre Neuve. Quelqu’un qui guet’ and dated 8 April 1929, which was sold at auction in 20154

GWEN JOHN

Haverfordwest 1876-1939 Dieppe

Two Women at Church, Meudon

Watercolour over a pencil underdrawing. Dated and inscribed by the artist with colour notes May 15 / pink & white curra- / fond black sep na- / i. nap. / pink hat – rose, r ind. / brown hat – r. brun / ribbon rose. r. ind. blue / outrem- / hair & shadow – terre d’omb / black i ochre in pencil on the verso. 67 x 51 mm. (2 7/8 x 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist; By descent to the artist’s nephew, Edwin John; Anonymous sale, London, Phillips, 17 July 2001, lot 30; Anonymous sale, London, Bonham’s, 30 June 2010, lot 108; Anonymous sale, London, Roseberys, 11 February 2020, lot 10; Private collection, London.

EXHIBITED: London, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, Gwen John 1876-1939, March 1976, part of no.54; Chichester, Pallant House Gallery, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, 2023, unnumbered.

Datable to the 1920s, the present sheet was probably made in a small sketchbook while Gwen John attended services in the church at Meudon, which she did regularly following her conversion to Catholicism in 1913. Her drawings of the congregation are usually back or side views of people seated in front or near her, usually in small groups or as single figures. As one of the artist’s biographers records, ‘Louise Roche, a neighbour in Meudon, remembered a vespers service around 1923 when a woman in a broad-brimmed felt hat and a long dark cloak slid discreetly to the back of the church and there, instead of kneeling, commenced to draw in a sketch-book throughout the service. When Madame Roche heard that the strange creature was a convert, and an English one at that, she thought no more of the matter. Gwen John was in fact making what she called ‘the little drawings in colour I do.’1

A more recent biography has added that ‘The Meudon Curé was shocked by her appearing with her sketchbook to draw the other churchgoers and instructed her that what she was doing was wrong…Gwen John was unmoved. In a draft letter to [her friend Véra] Oumançoff she wrote: ‘When I told you I am going to continue to draw at Vespers, evening services and retreats I wanted to vex you, I don’t know why. I regret having told you that because I’m going to carry on, I think…Like everyone else I like to pray in church, but my spirit is not able to pray for a long time at a stretch…The orphans with those black hats with white ribbons and their black dresses with little white collars charm me, and the others charm me in church. If I cut off all that there would not be enough happiness in my life.’…The watercolour and gouache paintings of the Meudon congregants – nuns, orphans and others – that emerged from Gwen John’s refusal to obey the Curé cannot but make one relieved that she did not listen. They have a deftness and wit about them, a wonderful clarity and simplicity of line and colour.’2

As yet another writer has pointed out, ‘The church pictures reflect the circumstances of their production. They are small in scale – small enough to have been drawn on the pages of pocket sketch-books – and most are done in watercolour or gouache over an underdrawing in pencil…It seems improbable that she would have encumbered herself in church with the paraphernalia of the watercolour artist and the pictures themselves suggest that the colour was added in the studio. Almost every subject is repeated several times over…Sometimes there is only the slightest of variations between one of these repetitions and the next; at other times the repetitions incorporate important changes in tone, in colour, and in composition. In other words, many of these little pictures, for all their lively observation of fact, are reflective experiments in form and structure.’3 The John scholar Cecily Langdale adds, ‘The church drawings are both reticent and intimate; their subjects, usually seen from behind, are captured in an essentially private moment. In design, palette, scale and subject, these drawings are in the French intimiste tradition.’4

Among closely related works is a slightly larger gouache drawing of a girl and a woman with prayer books in church, which was sold at auction in 20185, and a very similar gouache and watercolour study of two women wearing hats that appeared at auction in 20176

actual size

CHRISTOPHER WOOD

Knowlsey 1901-1930 Salisbury

A Reclining Female Nude

Pencil on buff paper. Signed and dated Christopher Wood / 1928 in pencil at the lower right. 292 x 480 mm. (11 1/2 x 18 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 11 November 1988, lot 395; Peter Nahum, London; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 23 June 1994, lot 131; David Bowie, London and New York.

EXHIBITED: London, Peter Nahum, British Art from the Twentieth Century, 1989, no.12.

Born near Liverpool, Christopher Wood was largely self taught as an artist. In 1921, at the age of twenty, he arrived in Paris and from there wrote to his mother, ‘You ask me what I am going to be: – I have decided to try and be the best painter that has ever lived...I want to paint everything that touches the human being.’1 Among Wood’s earliest paintings were a range of still life subjects, and in later years the artist came to be admired in particular for his flowerpieces. One of Wood’s early patrons and supporters was a Chilean diplomat and socialite, José Antonio de Gandarillas, who became his friend, lover and travelling companion2. For the rest of his life Wood divided his time between London and Paris, where he enjoyed a close relationship with a number of figures of the European avant-garde, including Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau (with whom he briefly shared a studio) and the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. For the remainder of his career he continued to spend much of his time in France, working in Paris, the Côte d’Azur and Brittany.

In 1926 Wood created designs for a production of Romeo and Juliet for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, although they were never used, and in the same year exhibited with the London Group and became a member of the Seven and Five Society. It was at this time that Wood met the artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, who were to become lifelong friends and travelling companions. The three artists worked together in Cornwall, and in 1927 shared a joint exhibition at the Beaux-Arts Gallery in London. Wood had his first one-man exhibition in London in 1929. The last two summers of his life were spent mostly in Douarnenez and Tréboul in Brittany, where he produced landscapes and genre scenes, characterized by a consciously ‘naive’ or primitive style. In May 1930 he shared a joint exhibition with Ben Nicholson in Paris. Just over three months later, in August 1930, Wood died – apparently a suicide – when he was hit by a train at Salisbury railway station. He was just twenty-nine years old, and his brief career had only lasted around eight years. A retrospective exhibition of his work, numbering around five hundred paintings and four hundred drawings and watercolours, was held in London in 1938, and was visited by around fifty thousand people.

Wood received a thorough grounding in life drawing as a young student in Paris, where he took classes at the Académie Julian and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Although the artist used several models for his figure drawings from life, the model for the present sheet might be Frosca (or Froska) Munster, a married Russian emigré whom Wood met in in the spring of 1928. Munster became his lover and was his closest companion in the last two years of his life. The influence of Picasso, who Wood first met in 1923 and got to know well over the next few years, is evident in the younger artist’s female nudes of the late 1920s, and particularly in the depictions of Frosca Munster. As Katy Norris has written, ‘the solid and harmonious proportions of Munster’s body recall the colossal figures from Picasso’s neo-classical phase of the early 1920s in which he explored the traditional mother and child motif as a metaphor for his love for his own wife and baby. The strength of emotion expressed in Picasso’s innocent family groups has obvious resonances with Wood’s intense personal feelings for Munster.’3 That Wood greatly admired the economy of line in the draughtsmanship of Picasso and Cocteau is seen in drawings such as the present sheet4.

DUNCAN GRANT

Doune, nr. Aviemore 1885-1978 Aldermaston

Provençal Landscape

Oil on canvas. Signed and dated DGrant 128 in black ink at the lower right. A partly torn label from The London Artists’ Association, inscribed Duncan GRANT and numbered 2, and further stamped 22 within an oval LAA stamp, pasted onto the stretcher bar. A price £ 75-0-0 written in black ink on the stretcher bar. A frame-maker’s stamp A LA PALETTE D’OR / J. PENCE / MARSEILLE stamped onto a stretcher bar. 21.8 x 32.8 cm. (8 5/8 x 12 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The London Artists’ Association at The Cooling Galleries, London; Probably acquired from them by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, Dartington Hall, nr. Totnes, Devon; Given by Dorothy Elmhirst to Wyatt Rawson in c.1931; Thence by descent.

EXHIBITED: Possibly London, London Artists’ Association at The Cooling Galleries, Recent Paintings by Duncan Grant, 1931.

Born in the Highlands of Scotland, Duncan Grant was educated in London and trained in Paris, studying with the painter and draughtsman Simon Bussy and finding inspiration in the work of such artists as Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. The work of the Post-Impressionist painters, whose paintings were championed in England by the art critic and artist Roger Fry, was to have a profound effect on the young Grant. Through his cousin Lytton Strachey, he was introduced to Fry and the other members of the Bloomsbury Group, notably the painter Vanessa Bell and her husband, the art critic Clive Bell, as well as her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf. In October 1912 Grant showed several works at the Second PostImpressionist Exhibition, organized by Fry at the Grafton Gallery in London, which aimed to exhibit the work of modern British painters alongside that of artists such as Picasso and Matisse. In 1913, Fry, Grant and Vanessa Bell established the Omega Workshops, a design collective that produced textiles, furniture, ceramics, murals and household goods for domestic interiors. In 1916, at the height of the First World War, Grant, his lover, the novelist David (‘Bunny’) Garnett, Vanessa Bell and her two young sons left London for the country, eventually settling at Charleston Farmhouse, near Firle in East Sussex. For much of the next half century this isolated house, which was extensively decorated by Grant and Bell, remained a rural outpost and meeting place for members of the Bloomsbury circle.

In February 1920 Grant had his first one-man exhibition at the Paterson-Carfax Gallery in London, with twenty-four of the thirty-one paintings finding buyers, while towards the end of that year a group of his watercolours was shown, alongside watercolours by Bell, at Percy Moore Turner’s newly opened Independent Gallery in London. Grant showed his work at the Independent Gallery over the next few years, working between studios in London, Charleston and Paris, while continuing to receive commissions for interior decorations in private homes. In 1924 a small monograph on his work was published, with an introductory essay by Roger Fry. Within a few years Grant’s paintings – landscapes, portraits, still life subjects and interior scenes – were being shown at other galleries in London, as well as in America, France and Germany.

Grant and Bell often worked alongside each other, both in England and in France, and also travelled, together and with friends, throughout much of Europe. The pair collaborated on a number of interior decorations, most significantly in the country home of Lady Dorothy Wellesley at Withyham in Sussex, begun in 1928 and completed in 1931. Between 1932 and 1934 they also collaborated on a fifty-piece dinner service decorated with portraits of famous women, a commission from the museum curator Kenneth Clark, a prominent supporter and collector of their work. In 1935 Grant was one of several artists tasked with providing works of art for the ocean liner RMS Queen Mary. Despite spending about a year designing and painting several large murals, carpets and curtains intended for the first-class lounge, his work was rejected by the directors of the Cunard-White Star Line and was never installed. Grant and Bell also worked together, alongside Bell’s son Quentin, on the extensive mural decoration of the small rural church at Berwick, a few miles from Charleston, which was completed in 1943. The

postwar period found Grant at the height of his success and fame. Later public commissions included the decoration of the Russell Chantry of Lincoln Cathedral, completed in 1958, while the following year a retrospective exhibition of Grant’s paintings and drawings was mounted at the Tate Gallery. After Vanessa Bell’s death in 1961, Grant continued to live and work at Charleston until his own death in 1978. The two painters are buried next to each other in the nearby churchyard of St. Peter’s Church in West Firle.

Some of Grant’s finest landscapes were painted on the annual trips to France and Italy that he and Bell took from the late 1920s onwards. This small landscape was probably painted in the south of France, near the coastal town of Cassis, several kilometres to the east of Marseille. As Grant’s biographer has noted of the artist’s first visit to the region in 1927, ‘Cassis in the spring captivated him…he began thinking of building a studio in the area. He was seized with the idea that Cassis should from now on become an annual refuge from the darkness and gloom which, like a metal dish-cover, descended every winter over cold, grey London.’1 Later that year Grant and Bell began renting La Bergère, a small farm cottage just outside Cassis. Surrounded by the vineyards of the Château de Fontcreuse, La Bergère – described by one modern writer as ‘Charleston in France’ – was visited by Grant and Bell every year between 1927 and 1938.

As Richard Shone has noted, ‘Grant made several paintings and drawings of the farmhouses and cottages around the Château de Fontcreuse, its surrounding vineyards and olive groves…Grant’s first prolonged stay in Cassis [in 1928] was highly productive, giving him a new range of subject matter and uninterrupted peace. Much of his work from this stay is in a fluent, calligraphic manner, the paintings carried out in a loose web of turpentine-thinned brushwork, the drawings and pastels in heightened colour…and with vigorous passages of rhythmic cross-hatching.’2 Landscapes such as the present example, executed with vibrant colours applied with loose brushstrokes, reveal the influence of French Post-Impressionist painting on Grant. (As can be seen from a stamp on the stretcher, the artist purchased the blank canvas from a frame-maker in nearby Marseille.) Among closely comparable landscapes by Grant is a small painting of a farmhouse among trees, likewise dated 1928, in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh3 Other stylistically similar views of the South of France include an oil sketch on paper of a view near Cassis in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford4 and a Provençal Landscape of 1929 in the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle5

The stretcher of this small oil sketch also bears a label of the London Artists’ Association, established in 1926, at the suggestion of Roger Fry, by John Maynard Keynes and the collector Samuel Courtauld to support young artists. Grant was one of a select group of seven artists, also including Bell, Fry and the sculptor Frank Dobson, invited to join the Association6. These artists would be provided by the LAA with a guaranteed income of £150 a year, offset by sales of their works at exhibitions organized by the Association, the proceeds of which would go to the artists after a commission had been deducted. The inaugural London Artists’ Association exhibition, held at the Leicester Galleries in 1926, was a critical and commercial success, with Grant regarded by many critics as the most gifted member of the group. In April 1927 the LAA organized a small exhibition of Paintings by Duncan Grant, in which seven of the eleven works on view sold quickly. Many of the LAA exhibitions were held at the Cooling Galleries at 92 Bond Street, where Grant presented solo shows of recent work in 1929 and 19317

This Provençal Landscape was probably acquired from an LAA exhibition at the Cooling Galleries by the wealthy American heiress, philanthropist and social activist Dorothy Payne Whitney Elmhirst (18871968). With her second husband, Yorkshireman Leonard Knight Elmhirst, she had acquired the late 14th century Dartington Hall, a country house and estate in Devon, in 1925. The Elmhirsts developed Dartington Hall into a rural estate, establishing a progressive co-educational boarding school (whose alumni included Lucian Freud) and providing support for local artists and craftsmen, so that by the 1930s Dartington was a gathering place for numerous artists, writers and intellectuals. This oil sketch was presented by Dorothy Elmhirst to Wyatt Rawson (1894-1980), a member of the progressive New Education Movement who helped to set up the Dartington Hall School in 1926 and taught there until 1931, and thence passed by descent to the present owner.

PERCY WYNDHAM LEWIS

Amherst, Nova Scotia 1882-1957 London

Tut

Pencil with stumping and pale brown wash, heightened with white, on buff paper. Signed and dated Wyndham Lewis. 1931. in brown ink at the lower left.

284 x 240 mm. (11 1/8 x 9 1/2 in.) [image]

330 x 286 mm. (13 x 11 1/4 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: The Piccadilly Gallery, London; Bought from them by Mrs. Stephen Raphael on 9 May 1967; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 6 November 1992, lot 52; Valerie (Mrs. T. S.) Eliot, London; Her posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 20 November 2013, lot 364; Private collection.

LITERATURE: John Rothenstein, ‘Great British Masters’, Picture Post, 25 March 1939, unpaginated, illustrated (‘Few artists to-day capture the lovely simplification of this little drawing.’); Manchester Evening Chronicle, 4 September 1956; Walter Michel, Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971, p.396, no.730, pl.98, fig.730; Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, Painter and Writer, New Haven and London, 2000, pp.394-395, fig.222; Paul Edwards et al, Wyndham Lewis (18821957), exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 2010, p.229, no.138; Richard Humphreys, ‘Wyndham Lewis and The Role of Line in Art’, Master Drawings, Summer 2025, pp.230-231, fig.15.

EXHIBITED: London, Ernst Brown & Phillips Ltd. (The Leicester Galleries), Painting and Drawings by Wyndham Lewis, December 1937, no.30; London, Tate Gallery, and elsewhere, Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism, 1956, no.92 (as Tutsi, lent by the artist); London, Olympia, Fine Art, Design & Antiques Fair, Wyndham Lewis 1882-1957: an exhibition of paintings and drawings, March 2005, no.129 [excatalogue]; Madrid, Fundación Juan March, Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), 2010, no.138.

This delightful drawing is a study of Wyndham Lewis’s black and white Sealyham terrier ‘Tut’1, who appears – often depicted rolling around on the floor – in a handful of charming drawings of the early 1930s. With the onset of the Second World War, Lewis and his wife Froanna took Tut with them to America and Canada, where the dog died of a tumour in 1944. The Lewises were left devastated by his death, with the artist writing of Tut to a friend, ‘Like the spirit of a simpler and saner time, this fragment of primitive life confided his destiny to her [Froanna], and went through all the black days beside us.’2

In his catalogue raisonné of Lewis’s work, Walter Michel lists a total of seven drawings of Tut3. As he writes of the present sheet, ‘In sketching his dog Lewis responded to nature as the Chinese did…Casting geometry aside, he drew an outline as feathery as a ball of fluff…Tut is composed of ears, muzzle, black paws and touches of pencil shading for the fur, all set off against a flat light-brown wash. Lewis liked this picture. He intended to include it in a volume of colour reproductions planned for the thirties but never issued…In pictures of Tut, Lewis makes out of nature a surprising design…’4 A similar pencil and wash drawing of a frisky Tut, also dated 1931, belongs to the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust and is on longterm loan to the Courtauld Institute of Art in London5.

Included in the 1956 Arts Council exhibition Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism6, and more recently in the major retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work in Madrid in 2010, the present sheet may be counted among the most spirited of Lewis’s studies of his beloved dog. In the catalogue of the Madrid exhibition, it was noted that ‘Lewis shows great sympathy with animals in this drawing, which focuses on the legs, belly and head and at one level is simply a virtuoso exercise in linear invention. However, Lewis also evokes the furry warmth of his pet and its simple enjoyment of physical life.’7 Drawings such as this, by their very intimacy and charm, remain somewhat apart from much of the artist’s output. As another recent scholar has noted, these ‘carefree and playful sketches...provide a valuable antidote to the more commonly told tale of Lewis’s notorious aggression, polemic and biting satire.’8

ALBERT MOULTON FOWERAKER

Exeter 1873-1942 Swanage

Old Harry Rocks, Dorset

Watercolour and gouache, laid down on board. Signed and dated AM Foweraker. / 6/31.W. in brown ink at the lower left.

285 x 234 mm. (11 1/4 x 9 1/4 in.) [image]

285 x 260 mm. (11 1/4 x 10 1/4 in.) [sheet]

A painter and watercolourist, Albert Moulton Foweraker earned a degree in applied science in 1893 and worked as an engineer and journalist in his native Exeter before taking up art as a full-time profession in 1898. In 1902 he was admitted to the Royal Society of British Artists, and the same year settled in the village of Lelant, near Carbis Bay in western Cornwall. He produced a number of views of the Cornish landscape and coastline and taught watercolour painting at Algernon Talmadge’s Cornish School of Landscape and Sea Painting in St. Ives. Foweraker exhibited regularly in London – showing over fifty works at the Royal Society of British Artists between 1902 and 1912 – and in a number of provincial galleries. His exhibition pictures were mainly landscapes and views in Devon and Cornwall, as well as Dorset, where he settled in the 1920s. Foweraker also travelled to Spain, France and North Africa, and exhibited numerous paintings and watercolours of views in these locations. From around 1905 onwards he spent several winters in Andalucia in southern Spain, where he organized painting classes, holding regular sessions in Málaga in January and February, Córdoba in March and Granada in April. Foweraker also contributed illustrations to Leonard Williams’s Granada: Memories, Adventures, Studies and Impressions, published in 1906, and Charles Marriott’s A Spanish Holiday, published in 1908.

Foweraker’s landscape paintings and watercolours are characterized by a particular interest in light effects, especially moonlight, and many of his finest works are dominated by an intense blue tonality. As one modern scholar has noted, ‘Collectors would, without hesitation, describe Albert Moulton Foweraker... as primarily a watercolourist, and his twilight depictions of Spanish and English towns and villages are highly regarded...For watercolour subjects, Foweraker unsurprisingly painted a number of semi-rural scenes in the locality of his home in Carbis Bay…but he was also fond of exploring the coastline, capturing reflections in pools in the sand underneath craggy cliffs. However, he developed a special talent for twilight scenes...These mood pieces must have tapped into the same market as the moonrises of his oil painting colleagues and clearly proved popular, as Foweraker concentrated on such twilight scenes to a significant degree.’1

Old Harry Rocks is the name given to three chalk sea stack formations at Handfast Point, at Studland Bay on the south coast of Dorset. The Rocks, which mark the easternmost point of the Jurassic Coast of East Devon and Dorset, were once part of a long stretch of chalk running between the Purbeck peninsula in Dorset and the Isle of Wight to the east, but were left as headlands by the effects of coastal erosion during the last ice age. As noted by a late 19th century geologist, ‘The “Old Harry” Rocks, off the Point, afford a good illustration of the “stacks” that result from marine denudation, and it is interesting to note that it is due to this long-continued action that the Chalk no longer stretches across the channel to the Needles, off the Isle of Wight, as once it did. Looking towards the land when off the “Old Harry”, we may see the pretty village of Studland nestling in the bay.’2

A moonlit view by Foweraker of the nearby coastal village of Studland, on the Isle of Purbeck, is also with Stephen Ongpin Fine Art.

Budapest 1869-1937 London

Head of a Moroccan Girl

Black chalk. Laid down. Signed, dated and inscribed marrakesh / 1934 march 27 de laszlo in pencil at the lower left.

392 x 278 mm. (15 1/2 x 11 in.) [image]

406 x 305 mm. (16 x 12 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: Cluff & Co. (Holdings) Ltd.; New Place Hotel, Shirrell Heath, Southampton.

The Hungarian painter Fülöp László began his career initially as a genre painter but soon became known in particular as a gifted portraitist. By the turn of the century, at the age of thirty, he was firmly established as the most successful painter in Hungary. A few years after his marriage in 1900 to the Anglo-Irish socialite Lucy Guinness, László left Budapest to settle first in Vienna and then, in 1907, in England. As the artist later recalled of his decision to make his home in England, he believed that ‘here indeed I could make my life, in this home of the art to which I was devoted, and that I might aspire to become a link, however humble, in the great chain of foreign artists who had been received and treated by England as her own sons.’1 Anglicizing his first name to Philip, László soon became the leading society portrait painter in Edwardian Britain, succeeding John Singer Sargent, who had largely given up portraiture in 19072. Ennobled by the Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria in 1912, the artist thereafter was known as de László.

Much in demand as a portraitist, de László painted members of the Royal families of England, Germany, Spain, Austria, Greece, Egypt and Japan, as well as numerous statesmen, military officers, financiers, writers, academics, clerics and countless members of the aristocracy of England and Europe. Indeed, it is thought that de László painted some five thousand portraits over the course of the fifty years of his career. The 1920s and 1930s found de László at the peak of his fame and productivity. Although never a member of the Royal Academy, where he only occasionally showed his work, de László was appointed president of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1930. The artist remained active, with numerous important commissions, right up until his death of a heart attack in 1937. After the Second World war, however, de László’s reputation fell into something close to obscurity. He was equally forgotten in his native Hungary, whose postwar Communist government had little regard for society portraiture.

Relatively few drawings by de László are known. While he made drawn studies for his early genre pictures, as a portraitist he tended not to work from preparatory drawings but to draw directly on the canvas. The artist did, however, produce several finished portrait drawings, in pencil, charcoal or coloured chalks.

Philip de László and his wife visited Morocco in March 1934, staying for three weeks at the Hotel La Mamounia in Marrakesh and stopping at Tangiers on their way back to England. The artist’s diary account of his brief time in Morocco reveals that he found the experience discouraging: ‘We drove through the moorish quarter – which terribly disappointed us – poor – miserable people…it is a great blow to us all – especially to me – as I looked forward to paint interesting subjects.’3 Nevertheless, he was invited to lunch by the powerful Pasha of Marrakesh, Thami El Glaoui, and also met the French painter Jacques Majorelle through a mutual friend, Camille Mauclair. Majorelle invited de László to paint in his famous garden in Marrakesh and also allowed him to make use of his adjoining home studio, in which he painted two of Majorelle’s Berber models. During his Moroccan stay, de László produced two landscapes and two paintings of nudes4, as well as an oil sketch of a young girl holding an urn that may depict the same sitter as the present sheet5

This drawing is listed in the de László studio inventory as no.186, Study of a Marakeesh. A comparable watercolour study of a Berber, of the same date, is in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford6

AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE

London 1886-1956 London

Self-Portrait

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

PROVENANCE: Maas Gallery, London; Acquired from them in 2002 by a private collection.

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

EXHIBITED: Possibly London, 56-58 Walworth Road, Austin Osman Spare: Exhibition of Paintings, Autumn 1938, no.171 (‘Self (1935)’, priced at £3, 3s.).

Throughout his life, Austin Osman Spare was recognized as an outstanding draughtsman. As an obituary of the artist noted, ‘Mr. Austin Spare, an artist of unusual gifts and attainments and even more unusual personality, died yesterday in hospital in London…He worked chiefly in pastel or pencil, drawing rapidly, often taking no more than two hours over a picture…His minute draughtsmanship may have owed something to the Pre-Raphaelite influence, though in general his art was much more human and full-blooded than that of the “brethren”. Of his technical mastery there can be no manner of doubt. The collection of his drawings may yet become a cult.’1 Works by Spare are today in the collections of the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the South London Gallery and the Imperial War Museum in London, as well as the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Manchester Art Gallery and the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.

This striking self-portrait is typical of many of Spare’s portraits in its unsettling intensity. Always interested in achieving and expressing a heightened self-awareness, the artist produced a number of powerful self-portrait drawings, pastels and paintings throughout his career. The present sheet may be closely compared to another, slightly larger self-portrait drawing, also dated 1935 and likewise on tinted paper, in the Victoria and Albert Museum2. A self-portrait drawing of 1936, in a private collection3, is also akin to the present sheet in medium and technique. The appearance of the artist at around this time is recorded in a painted self-portrait of 19354. A slightly later self-portrait in pastel, dated 1937 and somewhat larger in scale (fig.1), is closely related to the present sheet in pose and composition 5

GLYN PHILPOT RA

London 1884-1937 London

The Head of a North African Woman

Watercolour and gouache over a pencil underdrawing. A study of plants and water lilies, drawn in grey wash with blue and green watercolour, on the verso. 312 x 216 mm. (12 1/4 x 8 1/2 in.) [sight]

PROVENANCE: The Redfern Gallery, London; Purchased from them in November 1937 by William Henry Smith, 3rd Viscount Hambleden, London; Thence by descent to a private collection; Anonymous sale, London, Bonham’s Knightsbridge, 4 December 2018, lot 40; Private collection, London.

LITERATURE: Simon Martin, Glyn Philpot: Fresh and Spirit, exhibition catalogue, Chichester, 2022, p.174, illustrated p.172, fig.186 (where dated 1936).

EXHIBITED: London, The Redfern Gallery, Figure-Pieces, Portraits, Landscapes & Flower-Pieces in Oil & Watercolour by Glyn Philpot, November 1937, no.43 (as Negro Ikon, priced at 20 gns.); Warsaw, Instytut Propagandy Sztuki, Helsinki, Kunsthalle Helsinki and Stockholm, Liljevalchs konsthall, British Council Exhibition of Contemporary British Art: Tour of Northern Capitals, 1939, no.52; Chichester, Pallant House Gallery, Glyn Philpot: Fresh and Spirit, 2022.

Glyn Warren Philpot studied at the Lambeth School of Art and at the Académie Julian in Paris, and in 1904 first showed a picture at the Royal Academy. Working from a series of studios in Chelsea, he exhibited at the Modern Society of Portrait Painters, and in 1910 had his first significant one-man exhibition in a London art gallery, which was a modest critical and commercial success. Aptly described by one friend who met him at around this time as a young man of brilliant powers who nevertheless was a traditionalist from the start and not a revolutionary 1, Philpot counted among his early accomplishments a portrait of a Spanish bullfighter, painted in 1909, that received much critical praise, and a painting of The Marble Worker of 1911, which won the Gold Medal at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh two years later.

In 1912 Philpot became a member of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, exhibiting with them for the next twelve years. Seen by many as the heir to John Singer Sargent, he developed a highly successful career as a society portrait painter, earning between ten and twelve commissions a year and sending paintings to the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy. He also painted mural decorations for the dining room of Port Lympne in Kent for Sir Phillip Sassoon. Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1915, Philpot became the youngest Royal Academician on his full election to the institution in 1923, the same year that he was the subject of a large exhibition at the Grosvenor Galleries. Much admired for his refined draughtsmanship, sense of colour and confident technique, Philpot earned a considerable income from his portrait commissions and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. In 1927 he painted a mural for St. Stephen’s Hall in Westminster, and in 1930 produced another for the home of Lord and Lady Melchett in London. The same year he had a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale and joined Henri Matisse on the jury for the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.

In 1931 Philpot moved to Paris, which was to prove a turning point in his career. His style changed dramatically under the influence of Picasso and Matisse and the art that he encountered in the French capital. Bored by portraiture, he began to experiment with new techniques and subjects in paintings which he first showed at the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1932. His newer work found much less acceptance with critics and collectors, however, and many were quite scathing in their assessment of it. Philpot lost several of his former clients, who were unhappy with his new, more ‘modern’ style of painting. During the 1930s, exhibitions of his paintings and sculptures were held at the Leicester and Redfern Galleries, and he also began producing still life compositions and watercolours. After his sudden death from heart failure in December 1937, at the age of just fifty-three, a memorial exhibition was held at the Tate Gallery the following summer. The subsequent turmoil of the Second

World War meant that his work was largely forgotten in later years, despite a handful of museum exhibitions. As one critic, writing on the occasion of an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in 1976, noted, Philpot’s unerring skill both in drawing and handling of paint, the wide-ranging originality of his subject pictures, and the careful yet sensitive characterisation of his portraits all compare favourably with the half dozen or so early twentieth-century British artists who have become household names. How is it, then, that with these qualities, one of the most sought-after society portrait painters of his time…can have slipped so quickly from the public mind?’2 In 1984 a large retrospective exhibition of Philpot’s work was held at the National Portrait Gallery in London, while more recently a major exhibition of his oeuvre, in which the present sheet was included, was shown in 2022 at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.

This fine watercolour was drawn on one of Philpot’s visits to North Africa, where he travelled on various occasions between 1920 and 1936. As the artist’s biographer has written of a visit to Morocco in 1934, ‘Five days spent in Spain enabled him to do as many watercolours, a medium he had only recently taken up. In Morocco, where he stayed for a month, he was more prolific. ‘Doing masses of work & very happy,’ he told [his sister] Daisy; ‘Shall not return just yet unless necessary.’…In another letter, he wrote, ‘I am working better and better & hope to have a wonderful lot of watercolours.’ Indeed, he did twenty or thirty in Morocco. His subjects were not the touristic sights such as the magnificent mosques, but rather the people, the shops, the courtyards, the scenes of daily life…These are mostly rapid sketches, very delicate in colour, and full of North African sunlight.’3 Many of Philpot’s North African watercolours from that trip were exhibited at the interior designer Syrie Maugham’s new shop on Bruton Street in London in March 1935; this was the first exhibition to be devoted to the artist’s watercolours.

The present sheet was probably drawn during a return trip to the Maghreb in 1936, when the artist travelled around Morocco, visiting Fez, Casablanca, Moulay Driss Zerhoun, Marrakesh and Tangier. The drawing of water lilies on the verso of the sheet can be related to two similar watercolour studies of the same subject of c.1937 (fig.1), exhibited at the Redfern Gallery that year and later in the collection of Philpot’s niece Gabrielle Cross4

This Head of a North African Woman was included in what was to be Philpot’s final one-man show, at the Redfern Gallery in London in November 1937, a few weeks before his death. The exhibition included twenty-five paintings and forty-six watercolours and was a commercial and critical success, with some £2,000 worth of pictures sold in the first week alone. A newspaper review of the exhibition noted, ‘The water-colours are all wonderfully accomplished, but here again Mr. Philpot’s line is almost too elegant and his colour almost too refined. Can work with so little sense of struggle behind it be quite satisfying? Or is it that this kind of aristocracy in painting has been spoiled for us by the modern fashion for stammering incoherence that passes itself off as sincerity?’5 This watercolour was acquired from the 1937 Redfern exhibition by William Smith, 3rd Viscount Hambleden (1903-1948), and remained with his descendants for the next eighty years.

GRAHAM SUTHERLAND OM

London 1903-1980 London

Teeming Pit, Steelworks, Cardiff

Charcoal, black ink, watercolour, gouache and pastel on paper laid down on board. 510 x 385 mm. (20 1/8 x 15 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 October 1972, lot 121 [catalogue untraced]; Anonymous sale (‘A Collection of Works by Graham Sutherland, O.M.’), London, Sotheby’s, 5 April 2000, lot 95; Peter Nahum, London; His sale (‘The Poetry of Crisis: The Peter Nahum Collection of British Surrealist and Avant-Garde Art 1930-1951’), London, Christie’s South Kensington, 15 November 2006, lot 196; Private collection, London.

LITERATURE: Roberto Tassi, Sutherland: The wartime drawings, Milan, 1979, p.127, fig.122, as ‘Steel works, ladles of molten metal (with incorrect dimensions); Colin Harrison et al, Great British Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, 2015, p.258, under no.100, note 3.

EXHIBITED: London, Olympia, Graham Sutherland: Olympia Loan Exhibition, 2003, no.188.

In 1921, after a brief and unsuccessful apprenticeship as a railway engineer, Graham Sutherland enrolled at the Goldsmith’s College of Art in London. He made a particular specialty of printmaking, publishing his first etching in 1923, the same year that he first exhibited at the Royal Academy. In 1925 he had his first solo exhibition at the XXI Gallery in London, which published many of the prints produced by Goldsmith’s artists. Although Sutherland began his career as a successful engraver, teaching printmaking at the Chelsea School of Art between 1928 and 1932, the collapse of the market for prints after the economic crisis of 1929 led him to expand his activities to include poster and fabric designs, as well as painting. Living in Kent and inspired by the English landscape, he also spent much time in Sussex and Dorset, and made the first of many visits to Wales in 1934. From 1935 onwards painting became Sutherland’s main activity, and the experience of seeing Picasso’s Guernica when it was exhibited in London in 1937 had a profound effect on him and led him to look more closely at artistic trends in Europe. The following year an exhibition of his landscape paintings was held at the Rosenberg & Helft Gallery in London, with a catalogue introduction written by Sir Kenneth Clark, who was among the first significant patrons and scholars to recognize Sutherland’s talent and champion his work.

When the Second World War began, Sutherland was thirty-six years old and considered too old for active duty. Clark, who had been appointed head of the War Artists Advisory Committee, engaged Sutherland as an official War Artist, a role he fulfilled from 1941 to 1945. He first depicted scenes of bomb damage in London, then turned his attention to studies of industrial production on the home front; tin mining in Cornwall, blast furnaces in South Wales, open cast coal mining and limestone quarrying. Most of his works from this period were acquired by the War Artist’s Advisory Commission and later presented to museums around the country. Sutherland also produced book illustrations, set designs, tapestries and a large Crucifixion for the church of St. Matthew in Northampton, completed in 1946. After the war the artist divided his time between Kent and the South of France. He produced a number of portraits, and also painted a large canvas entitled The Origins of the Land for the Festival of Britain in 1951. At the Venice Biennale the following year the British Pavilion was devoted to Sutherland’s work, with the selection later shown in Paris, Amsterdam, Zurich and London. Another major public commission was for a large tapestry for the new Coventry Cathedral, begun in 1952 but not completed until ten years later. Despite several other commissions for religious works, Sutherland remained, by and large, a painter of nature.

At the end of September 1941 Sutherland was sent to make studies of the large blast furnaces at the Guest, Keen and Baldwin Steel Works in Cardiff. The production of steel had taken on a new

urgency during the war, since Britain was cut off from foreign imports and urgently needed to produce armaments. The artist was fascinated by the almost alchemical processes in steel manufacturing, and by the huge furnaces and crucibles, the molten steel and the red and yellow glow of the huge flames. As Malcolm Yorke has noted, ‘Now all his sunset colours could be deployed again in the flow of molten iron, flames belching from furnace doors, glowing crusts of slag and the plop and seeth of boiling metal...In this dramatic black and red inferno the steel-men risked their lives teeming super-heated metals, feeding the voracious furnaces and tapping the outflow.’1 The overwhelming combination of extreme heat, noise and smells in a steelworks, as well as the sheer scale of the equipment and the operation, must have had quite an impact on the artist. Many years later, in 1971, Sutherland recalled the sight: As the hand feeds the mouth so did the long scoops which plunged into the furnace openings feed them, and the metal containers pouring molten iron into ladles had great encrusted mouths.’2 The artist’s early training as an engineer gave him some insight into the workings of the machinery, and allowed him to study and understand the processes involved.

Executed in a rich combination of different media and techniques, this vibrant drawing depicts the process of ‘teeming’ in steel manufacture, namely, the pouring of molten steel into ingot moulds. A very similar composition, drawn in watercolour, wax crayon and black ink and entitled The Smelting Works: Twin Ladles, was presented by the War Artists Advisory Committee in 1947 to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford3. A recent description of the Ashmolean drawing is also relevant to the present sheet: ‘The vivid egg-yolk yellow, carmine and sooty black recalls the work of William Blake...[and] evokes the intense heat and acrid atmosphere of the factory – a visceral assault on all the senses. The bold geometry of the design, emphasised by the grid of the ceiling and the parallel rails in the foreground, is countered by the swirl of the raging flames and the murky smoke.’4

Another related composition by Sutherland, Twin Ladles: A Furnace Scene, appeared at auction in 19725, while a similar drawing of Teeming Steel into Moulds, sharing the same provenance as the present sheet, was sold at auction in 20006. An associated subject also occurs in a gouache drawing of a Teeming Pit: Tapping a Steel Furnace, dated 1942, in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London7. Other paintings and drawings of the Cardiff steelworks are today in the Tate in London, the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery and the Manchester Art Gallery.

Some of Sutherland’s drawings of steelworks were reproduced in one of the small series of books entitled War Pictures by British Artists, published in 1943. In his introduction to the book, Cecil Beaton noted that ‘In those Vulcan forges, our eyes become attuned, unlike the camera lens, to the nuances of darkness amid a strange world that is spasmodically suffused by flashes of green, magenta, puce and golden light. In this world of molten metals, of glowing furnaces, soot and firework sparks, that only the painter can interpret, Graham Sutherland has reverently seized his opportunity to capture this fleeting phenomenon of sequined brilliance, of mystery, of glowing magic. 8

In later years, Sutherland recalled, ‘I think my war paintings did have a very big effect on me. I was suddenly faced with certain subjects which, as far as painting was concerned, had had no previous knowledge, and I was, in fact, frightened, simply because I didn’t know how I was going to react. It was a new field entirely and I had to make the best of what I could do, and it undoubtedly had an important effect on me, because clearly nothing one experiences fully is ever wasted. For example, I painted a lot of factory subjects –machinery and the rest – during the war...these vast machines, with violence in the air, later made me see correspondence with the forms in nature. I began to see a curious similarity between machine forms and nature forms. I have always liked and been fascinated by the primitiveness of heavy engineering shops with their vast floors. In a way they are cathedrals. Certainly they are as impressive as most cathedrals I’ve seen and a good deal more impressive than some. And yet the rite – a word I use carefully – being performed when men are making steel, is extraordinary; and how primitive it all really is in spite of our scientific age. 9

HENRY MOORE OM CH FBA

Castleford 1898-1986 Much Hadham

Group of Seated Figures

Pen and ink, wax crayon and charcoal over watercolour, heightened with white. Signed and dated Moore / 42 in black chalk at the lower left.

332 x 559 mm. (13 1/8 x 22 in.)

Henry Moore Foundation archive number HMF 2100a.

PROVENANCE: Private collection (W. D. Alder?), Ruvigliana, Canton Ticino, Switzerland, in 1989; Anonymous sale, Bern, Galerie Kornfeld, 24 June 1994, lot 96; Galerie Kornfeld, Bern; Eberhard Kornfeld, Bern (Lugt 913b), with his collector’s mark on the verso; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: David Mitchinson, Henry Moore, exhibition catalogue, Martigny, 1989, illustrated p.146; Ann Garrould, ed., Henry Moore: Complete Drawings. Vol.3: 1940-49, Much Hadham and London, 2001, p.173, no.AG 42.212 (HMF 2100a).

EXHIBITED: Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Henry Moore, 1989, unnumbered.

Drawing was at the centre of Henry Moore’s artistic practice. Over the course of his long career, he made over seven thousand drawings, many of these as part of sketchbooks (though the artist preferred the term ‘notebooks’). Moore’s myriad drawings – studies from life, copies after the work of earlier artists, studies of objects from nature and, most significantly, studies and ideas for sculptures – seem to have always been regarded by the artist, as well as by contemporary scholars and artists, as significant works of art in their own right. They were included in exhibitions of his work from the very start of his career; indeed, his first solo exhibition, at the Warren Gallery in London in 1928, included fifty-one drawings alongside forty-two sculptures. (Several drawings from the exhibition were acquired by the curator and art historian Kenneth Clark – who was to become one of Moore’s most fervent supporters – as well as the artists Jacob Epstein, Henry Lamb and Augustus John.) Moore’s second one-man show, at the Leicester Galleries in 1931, included thirty-four sculptures and nineteen drawings. In later years, a number of gallery and museum exhibitions were devoted solely to Moore’s drawings, the first being held at the Zwemmer Gallery in London in 1935. As further evidence of his desire to have his drawings regarded as autonomous works of art, Moore often unbound his sketchbooks and sold the individual drawings to collectors.

During much of the early part of the Second World War, when commissions were few and materials for stone or wood sculpture hard to come by, Moore poured his energy into drawing. The most significant of these works, and certainly the best known, were the so-called shelter drawings, made in London in the early 1940s. Depicting people taking refuge in London Undergound stations during the nightly bombing of London during the Blitz, they were mostly drawn from memory on the basis of sketches and notes made on the spot. Moore continued to produce these shelter drawings when he left London for the village of Perry Green, near Much Hadham in Hertfordshire, when his home in Hampstead in north London was damaged during the Blitz. The shelter drawings soon came to the attention of Kenneth Clark, by then the Director of the National Gallery, as well as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and Chairman of the War Artists Advisory Committee. Clark commissioned Moore to create a series of shelter drawings as an official War Artist, and several were exhibited at the National Gallery in London in 1941. They are today regarded as among the artist’s greatest achievements as a draughtsman.

Moore returned to sculpture in 1943, and continued to generate most of his ideas through the practice of drawing. As Andrew Causey has noted, ‘He did not use drawing to resolve parts of sculptures he planned to make: his drawings for sculptures are always of finished objects, and he rarely seems to have

worked on sculptures with drawings around him, as if, once he had decided on the result he was looking for, drawing was no longer useful. To that extent drawing and sculpture were separate practices: one began where the other ended.’1 In the 1950s, Moore’s growing international success, and the increasing number of commissions he received, led to a considerable decline in the amount of drawings he produced. He began to concentrate on sculpture, using drawings mainly to develop ideas for specific works rather than as a means of experimentation. (He also created designs for sculpture in the form of clay or plaster maquettes.) With the exception of the shelter drawings he produced during the Second World War, however, Moore rarely gave specific or descriptive titles to his drawings, preferring to exhibit them under generic titles such as ‘Drawings for Sculpture’, Drawings for Carving’, ‘Ideas for Sculpture’, and so forth.

In his recent monograph on Henry Moore’s drawings, Causey points out that ‘There is a wealth of fantasy and imagination in Moore’s drawings that was never realised in sculpture. As a sculptor Moore was austere and quite cautious...As a draughtsman...[he] was able to work fast with ideas flooding onto the paper, ideas related to sculpture but which he established and embellished with detail that was essentially pictorial...Sculpture for Moore was a highly considered and perfected art, and he seems to have found, especially during the 1930s and 1940s, that pictorial art gave free range to his imagination more readily than sculpture did.’2 Moore himself once stated that ‘My drawings are done mainly as a help towards making sculpture, as a means of generating ideas for sculpture, tapping oneself for the initial idea; and as a way of sorting out ideas and developing them.’3

Drawn in 1942, the present sheet can be associated with a series of drawings of groups of seated or standing draped figures that derive from Moore’s shelter drawings made during the first years of the war, in 1940 and 1941. As Clark noted of the drawings produced by Moore during this fertile period, ‘he showed not only insight and compassion, but marvellous graphic skill. Since circumstances kept him from his sculpture, he became in effect a painter…but, as was to be expected, his renderings of the human body are given weight and substance, and related to each other like great sculpture. Many of the poses and groups that he discovered were made into full-size drawings, but practically all of them occur in the two notebooks5that are, to my mind, among the most precious works of art of the present century…By 1941 he began to feel the need of turning his recorded experiences back into forms that seemed to him grander and more durable, and are certainly more in keeping with the general line of his development. The resulting drawings are perhaps the finest things in all his graphic work.’6

Among the most significant of Henry Moore’s wartime drawings, this very large sheet has remained relatively little-known, having been kept in two private collections in Switzerland since at least the 1980s, and has been exhibited just once, in Martigny in 1989. While not a shelter drawing itself, it was almost certainly inspired by the groups of figures that the artist had studied in the Underground stations and at Tilbury, a vast shelter in Whitechapel in the East End that was the single largest air-raid shelter in London. Drawn in a rich combination of media, including wax crayons, stumped charcoal and watercolour washes, it may be compared with a small number of similarly large and highly finished drawings completed the previous year, such as Tilbury Shelter: Group of Draped Figures, in the Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum in Japan7, Group of Shelterers During an Air Raid in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto8 and Group of Draped Figures in a Shelter in the collection of the Henry Moore Foundation9

As Moore once stated, in a note to Kenneth Clark written in the early 1970s, ‘the experience and struggle in the exploring of form that one has continually tried to make in sculpture, as well as the way of thinking three-dimensionally…has usually been the aim in most of my drawings…If for any reason I’m unable to go on doing sculpture – then I know that drawing could satisfy me for the rest of my days. 10

JOHN MINTON

Great Shelford 1917-1957 London

The Hop Pickers, Kent

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, pencil and watercolour. Signed and dated John Minton 1945 in brown ink at the upper right. 635 x 520 mm. (25 x 20 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Rowland, Browse & Delbanco, London, in 1945; The Fine Art Society, London, in 1984-1985; Acquired from them by Alexander Andrew ‘Derry’ Irvine, Baron Irvine of Lairg.

LITERATURE: George Orwell, The English People, London, 1947, illustrated in colour between pp.8 and 9 (as ‘Hop Picking near Maidstone, Kent’); Frances Spalding, John Minton: Dance till the Stars Come Down, Aldershot, 1991 [2005 ed.], illustrated in colour pl.IV.

EXHIBITED: Rowland, Browse & Delbanco, London, in 1945; London, The Fine Art Society, Spring ’85, 1985, no.29.

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

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

Minton’s interest in landscape painting took root in the early 1940s, during his military service. As he wrote to one friend in September 1942, ‘More and more landscape interests me’3, while to the artist Michael Ayrton a few months later he noted that working on landscape subjects was ‘more straightforward and direct a thing than the tenacious line of neo-romanticism: I feel happier finally in the English tradition.’4 As Spalding has noted of Minton, ‘He never entirely abandoned his neo-romantic style, but as his career developed and he began to work more as an illustrator, he kept a sweeter version of it for landscape subjects. In his many drawings of the Kent countryside he continued to reflect upon the romantic landscape tradition, bringing to it his superb control of the medium of pen and ink. 5

Executed in 1945, this large and impressive sheet is a superb example of Minton’s landscape drawing at the height of its power. The artist here depicts a group of farm labourers harvesting hops in the autumn, creating a Romantic vision of the Kent landscape and the activities of the local people. The present

sheet was executed during a period when Minton often visited ‘Marshalls’, the home of his friends Edie and Newton Lamont in the village of Chart Sutton in Kent. Minton had met Edie Lamont in the 1930s when both were students at the St. John’s Wood Art School, and they remained good friends for many years afterward. Between 1945 and 1954 Minton would occasionally escape London to stay with the Lamonts at ‘Marshalls’, with its view over the Weald of Kent, and make sketching trips with Edie around the countryside, at places such as Forstall, Frittenden, Little Chart and Tenterden.

As Spalding recounts, ‘From [Edie’s] diaries we know that Minton made between two and four visits to ‘Marshalls’ every year up until 1954, staying usually a couple of nights and returning to London with sheaves of drawings…His Kent landscapes had contributed significantly to the success of his 1945 Rowland, Browse and Delbanco exhibition, soon after which he tried to interest the same gallery in Edie Lamont’s work… Minton’s friends were aware that Edie Lamont was an important figure in Minton’s life, but most knew little or nothing about her. He deliberately kept the Lamonts in a separate compartment, their home providing him with a place to refuel in company he enjoyed and in countryside he loved. 6 On one of Minton’s visits to ‘Marshalls’, in December 1946, he was accompanied by his friend and fellow artist Keith Vaughan.

The present sheet was almost certainly among a number of Minton’s Kent drawings that were included, the same year it was drawn, in an exhibition at the newly-opened Rowland, Browse and Delbanco Gallery in London. As Spalding writes, ‘Meanwhile [Minton’s] landscape drawings had become much sought after. He held two one-man exhibitions in 1945: one in the top floor gallery at the recently opened Roland, Browse and Delbanco of drawings of Kent and Cornwall; the other at the Lefevre Gallery. Both shows sold well, Minton’s drawings at this time fetching between ten and twenty guineas.’7 This drawing was later reproduced, with the caption ‘In the Country: Hop Picking near Maidstone, Kent’, as one of eight colour plates in George Orwell’s The English People of 1947, part of the Britain in Pictures series of books published between 1941 and 1950 and intended to boost morale during the war years.

A much smaller and less finished variant of this composition, of horizontal format and focussing on the three main figures (fig.1), appeared at auction in London in 2010 and is today in the Ingram Collection in London8.

KEITH VAUGHAN

Selsey 1912-1977 London

Under Canvas: Night Orderlies Tent

Gouache, ink and mixed media on paper laid onto board. Signed and dated Keith Vaughan 1945 in brown ink at the lower right. Titled Under Canvas – Night Orderlies Tent in pencil in the lower left margin.

373 x 540 mm. (14 3/4 x 21 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist by a private collector in the 1950s; Thence by descent to a private collection, Virginia.

Born in Sussex, Keith Vaughan moved with his family to North London around the start of the First World War. He showed a gift for the arts from a very young age, earning a Royal Drawing Society certificate at the age of seven, but received almost no formal artistic education and was mostly selftaught. While at boarding school, Vaughan was given a special entitlement to study art, since he was the first student to specialize in it, and it was at the Christ’s Hospital school that he mounted his first exhibition of landscapes. At the age of nineteen, Vaughan began work as a trainee in the art department of an advertising firm, where he remained until just before the start of the Second World War. In 1939 he left the firm and moved to the country, intending to paint for a year; this would be the first consistent time Vaughan would spend as a fine artist since his school days. It was also at around this time that he began keeping a written journal, a practice he maintained until his death, and which eventually amounted to some 750,000 words contained in sixty-one volumes.

During the Second World War, Vaughan declared himself a conscientious objector, and was conscripted into the Non-Combatant Corps (NCC), initially working as a labourer in Wiltshire and Derbyshire. It was during the war that, through the collector Peter Watson, Vaughan was introduced to such contemporaries as Graham Sutherland, who was to be highly influential on the artist’s developing career, as well as John Minton and John Craxton. It was also during this time that Vaughan began exhibiting his work, first in a group exhibition of War Artists at the National Gallery in London in 1943, followed by a small show of drawings – of army subjects, landscapes and figures – at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery in London at the end of the following year.

After the war Vaughan began to work consistently in oil paint. Leaving the army in 1946, he taught part-time at the Camberwell School of Art and held the first exhibition of his paintings and gouaches at the Lefevre Gallery. The same year he moved into a house and studio in Maida Vale that he shared with Minton for the next six years. Vaughan’s postwar style was very different from that of the 1930s, with the artist focussing on oil painting and more fully finished compositions and turning away from the English Neo-Romanticism of his earlier work. He produced designs for book jackets, magazine illustrations and advertisements, and received an important commission for a fifty-foot-long mural for the Dome of Discovery, a temporary building erected on the South Bank for the 1951 Festival of Britain, which is now lost. While focussing on the nude male form, Vaughan’s work also became more abstract; in 1952 he saw an exhibition of the work of Nicolas De Staël and came away impressed with the French artist’s abstractions. Although today regarded as perhaps the pre-eminent painter of the male nude of the postwar period, Vaughan’s concurrent interest in landscape painting, inspired by his travels around Britain, Ireland, France, Italy, Greece, Spain and Morocco, is such that almost half of his extant paintings are landscapes.

By the first half of the 1950s Vaughan was exhibiting regularly at the Lefevre, Redfern and Leicester Galleries in London, and also at the Durlacher gallery in New York. In his later years he taught at the Central School of Art and the Slade School of Art, as well as at Iowa State University in America. The peak of Vaughan’s success came in the 1950s and early 1960s, culminating in a major retrospective exhibition

of his work, numbering over three hundred paintings, gouaches and drawings, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1962. The exhibition was a critical success, one reviewer commenting that ‘One remains in no doubt, within five minutes of entering the retrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings by Keith Vaughan, that one is in the presence of a very considerable artist and a very consistent one.’1 Not long after this, however, the artist began to fear that his works were being overshadowed by newer movements in art, notably British Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, though he continued to have successful exhibitions in galleries in Britain and America, notably at the Waddington Galleries in London. His health began to worsen and he underwent a series of major operations that sapped him of his energy and exacerbated a tendency to depression. On the morning of 4 November 1977, suffering from terminal cancer, Vaughan committed suicide with a fatal overdose of pills, writing in his journal to the very end.

While serving in the NCC during the Second World War, and since there was a limited range of media that could be carried in a regulation army knapsack, Vaughan became adept at expressing himself through the graphic mediums of Indian ink, pencil, crayon and gouache, usually in dark military colours of green and ochre. As he wrote in the foreword to his first gallery exhibition of drawings in 1944, in which several of his army drawings were included, ‘On New Year’s Day 1941, the first thing that went into my brand new army haversack was the largest drawing book it would accommodate and an unbreakable bottle of black ink…I now spent my off-duty hours with a pad on my knee on my bed in a barrack room. For a year I drew the raw material that was in front of me. By 1942 I had done all I wanted of this…To accommodate my slightly increased ambitions, I added to my materials one or two more bottles of ink, two pots of gouache and a few crayons. With these I hoped to be able to recover something of the solidity and depth of oil, while satisfying the requirements of intermittent work and total concealment of the result.’2 The early 1940s found Vaughan executing numerous drawings of his surroundings, the barracks and fellow soldiers and labourers, some in sketchbooks and some on much larger paper and filled out with gouache. Dated 1945, the present sheet is an exceptional example of the latter and can be counted among the very finest of Vaughan’s rare wartime drawings.

This large, signed and dated composition, almost certainly intended as an autonomous work of art, is likely to have been drawn at Eden Camp, a prisoner of war detainment centre near Malton in North Yorkshire, midway between York and Scarborough, where the artist was stationed in the summer of 1943. As a biography of Vaughan notes of his time at Eden Camp, ‘At first he lived in the huts with the other men, and made a few more of the barrack-life sketches he had done [earlier], but he soon volunteered to go on almost permanent night-duty, sleeping in the office in case the telephone should ring. He wrote [to his friend Norman Towne]…‘For nearly 12 hours each day, from 7pm to 7am, I am alone and undisturbed and quiet by the fire in the Company office, where I sleep, and think.’ It was the nearest thing you could get to being in a twentieth-century monastery, he told Towne…Eden Camp was a safe haven from the war so the sufferings of Europe could be forgotten for weeks at a time.’3 Vaughan remained at Eden Camp, working as a clerk and occasional German interpreter, until his demobilisation from the Pioneer Corps in March 1946.

Although Vaughan began to focus on oil painting from 1946 onwards, he continued to work in the water-based medium of gouache throughout his career, usually for highly finished, independent works. As has been noted, ‘Between 1941 and 1946 Vaughan had produced well over 400 works in gouache… which relied for their effects on the quick-drying qualities of gouache and the way it could be washed over water-resistant crayon or drawn over in ink when dry. He continued to work prolifically in this medium throughout the 1940s and 1950s.’4 In 1943 the War Artists’ Advisory Committee purchased twelve of Vaughan’s wartime gouaches, a number of which were included in an exhibition of war art organized by Kenneth Clark at the National Gallery in 1943. By the 1950s Vaughan’s gouaches were being regularly exhibited at galleries in London and New York, and were much in demand among collectors.

JOHN CRAXTON RA

London 1922-2009 London

Greek Water Jug

Black and white conté crayon on brown packing paper. Signed and dated Craxton. 46. in pencil at the lower right.

491 x 348 mm. (19 3/8 x 13 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection; Edward Clark, London, and David Wade, Harrogate, in 2013; Private collection, London.

Born into a large family, John Craxton displayed a talent for drawing and painting from an early age. In 1939, at the age of seventeen, he enrolled at the Atelier de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, taking life drawing classes there before having to return to England with the outbreak of war. Encouraged by the painter Eric Kennington, the father of a school friend, who admired his drawings, Craxton completed his studies at the Westminster School of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Rejected from active service on the grounds of pleurisy, he served as a fire warden in London. Among his earliest patrons was the wealthy art collector and benefactor Peter Watson, publisher of the literary magazine Horizon and a co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, who also supported artists such as Francis Bacon, Robert Colquhoun, Lucian Freud, Robert MacBryde and Keith Vaughan. Craxton and Freud soon became inseparable friends, sharing an apartment in London and studying together at Goldsmith’s College. During this period the two artists worked in a very similar style; as Craxton’s biographer has noted, ‘The pair became so interwoven that it was unclear whose art was being influenced and how. John seemed the more proficient draughtsman. He certainly worked with greater speed and spontaneity, yet each had an original wit that spurred the other to fresh imaginative flights and feats of invention.’1

Craxton sold his first painting at the age of twenty and spent the proceeds on a print of Satan Exulting over Eve by William Blake which, many years later, he sold to the Tate Gallery. Watson introduced Craxton to the older painter Graham Sutherland, with whom he travelled to Pembrokeshire in 1943, and also to Paul Nash and John Piper. In May 1944 the twenty-one year old Craxton had his first solo gallery exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London, which was a great success, with over thirty works sold to such prominent collectors as Colin Anderson, Kenneth Clark, John Lehmann and Peter Watson. After the end of the war Craxton, always keen to travel abroad, visited Paris, Zurich and Milan before making his first visit to Greece in 1946. Soon after he arrived in Athens in May, he met the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who suggested that he visit the small island of Poros, in the Saronic Gulf. As has been noted, Poros was to be his first real contact with the Greek landscape. Craxton found on Poros, and by extension in Greece, what he had always been looking for. He felt as though he was returning home. It was not only the colour and the light of the Greek landscape which charmed him, but the temperament of the people suited his own philosophy of life. He could live on very little money, mix with simple people, enjoy moments of everyday life and set down a record of these in his works.’2

Craxton developed a lifelong attachment to Greece. As he was later to recall, ‘Greece was more than everything I had imagined and far more than I had expected. As my first contact with the Mediterranean and the discovery of the actions of light and shadow, the way light behaves, the arrival in Greece was astonishing.’3 Freud soon joined Craxton in Poros, where the two young painters rented a pair of small rooms with a view of the harbour and worked there very productively for several months. The works produced by Craxton during this period on Poros were exhibited in a solo show at the British Council in Athens in December 1946 and in a joint exhibition with Freud at the London Gallery the following year. In 1948 a small monograph on Craxton was published by Horizon magazine.

Although Freud was to spend only a few months in Greece before returning to London, Craxton fell in love with the country and never really left. In 1947 he visited the island of Crete, returning there several times in the following decade before eventually settling for good in the island’s capital city of

Chania. He was to live in Crete for most of his life, becoming an indelible part of Greek cultural life and enjoying friendships with such prominent artists as Nikos Ghika. Apart from painting and drawing, Craxton produced a number of fine book illustrations, particularly for works by Leigh-Fermor, and designed sets and costumes for Frederick Ashton’s ballet Daphnis and Chloe at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1951, as well as a 1968 production of Igor Stravinsky’s Apollo at the Royal Opera House. Dividing his time between Chania and London, he showed regularly at galleries in both England and Greece. In 1967 a large retrospective exhibition of Craxton’s work was mounted at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, and in 1993 he was appointed a Royal Academician.

Drawn in 1946, the year that Craxton first came to Greece, this large drawing is closely related to a painting, executed three years later in 1949 (fig.1), which was sold at the auction of the Evill/Frost collection in London in 20114. The same jug or amphora is also found, alongside a potted plant, in a still life drawing of 1946, dedicated by Craxton to Freud (fig.2), in the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery (now The Higgins) in Bedford5. A comparable still life composition of the same date, drawn on blue paper and depicting a jug and a potted plant by a window, is in a private collection6. Common to each of these drawings is a simplicity of design and clarity of draughtsmanship. As Sir David Attenborough has noted of Craxton, ‘Line was, from the beginning, crucially important in his painting. He didn’t care for the smudgings of other styles. He liked to know where an object began and ended. The lines in his early drawings, which he drew with both brush and pen, already had an extraordinary incisiveness and eloquence. 7 Characteristic of Craxton’s drawings is his use of conté crayon (a supply of which he had discovered while studying at Goldsmiths) whose effect is here further emphasized in the use of a simple brown packing paper as a support.

Apart from the Evill/Frost canvas of 1949, Craxton depicted this jug or amphora in a handful of other later works. It appears prominently in the painting Galatas of 1947, today in the collection of the British Council8, and in a large pencil and gouache drawing of a Water Pot in a Window of the same year, in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London9. A related, monochromatic gouache drawing of the same jug, signed and dated 1948, was formerly in the collection of Richard Attenborough and has appeared twice at auction in recent years10.

DAVID BOMBERG

Birmingham 1890-1957 London

Middle Temple

Charcoal on light brown paper. Inscribed Authenticated by Lilian Bomberg. / London Series. / Possibly [crossed out] SOUTH Middle Temple. / by David Bomberg / LB in blue ink on the verso. 475 x 622 mm. (18 3/4 x 24 1/2 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: Marlborough Fine Art, London, in c.1967; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 May 1983, lot 142; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 18 January 1984, lot 208; Redfern Gallery, London; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 8 March 1995, lot 121 (bt. Bowie); David Bowie, London and New York.

LITERATURE: London, Piano Nobile, Bomberg/Marr: Spirits in the Mass, exhibition catalogue, London, 2017, pp.32-33, no.11 (entry by Sean Ketteringham).

EXHIBITED: London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., David Bomberg 1890-1957: Drawings and watercolours, n.d. (1967?), no.29; London, Piano Nobile, Bomberg/Marr: Spirits in the Mass, London, 2017, no.11.

The son of a Polish immigrant, David Bomberg was apprenticed to a lithographer as a youth, but was determined to establish himself as an artist. He took evening classes with Walter Sickert at the Westminster School and also studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. In 1911 he was admitted into the Slade School of Art, aided by a loan from the Jewish Education Aid Society. A gifted draughtsman, he benefitted from the school’s emphasis on drawing technique, and won a prize for a portrait drawing. Like many of his fellow students, Bomberg was fascinated by the works of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso shown at Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist exhibitions in London in 1910 and 1912, as well as such artistic movements as Cubism and Futurism. In the summer of 1913 he was expelled from the Slade for his radicalism, and undertook a trip to Paris that resulted in encounters with Picasso, Modigliani and Derain.

In 1914 the young Bomberg was given a large one-man exhibition at the Chenil Galleries in Chelsea, which generated much critical comment. He was also invited by Wyndham Lewis to exhibit with the Vorticist Group in London. After a period of military service in the First World War, Bomberg completed a major painting of Sappers at Work for the Canadian War Memorials Fund in 1919. In the 1920s he began to travel to Spain and Palestine, producing a number of superb landscape paintings and drawings. A period in the 1930s found Bomberg living in the mountains of the remote and isolated Spanish province of Asturias, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War forced him to return to London at the end of 1935. During the Second World War, a commission from the War Artists Advisory Committee took Bomberg to a bomb store in a disused mine near Burton-on-Trent, where he made numerous drawings and oil sketches in 1942. Between 1945 and 1953 Bomberg worked as an art teacher at the Borough Polytechnic, where among his students were Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. He was a gifted and much admired teacher, and several of his pupils formed the Borough Group, with Bomberg as its figurehead and leader.

Despite his early successes before the First World War, Bomberg struggled for recognition as an artist throughout his later career, as he lacked a dealer who could champion and promote his work. Indeed, the only significant survey exhibition devoted to Bomberg to be held after the First World War was a relatively modest show of thirty-seven works at the Heffer Gallery in Cambridge in 1954. In the same year the artist returned to Spain, hoping to set up an art school in the mountaintop city of Ronda in Andalusia, although this never came to fruition. It was not until just after his death, when the Arts Council organized a retrospective exhibition, that Bomberg achieved a measure of recognition, and only in the 1980s, with the publication of an important monograph and a major exhibition at the Tate Gallery, was his reputation firmly established. Bomberg is today regarded, both as an artist and a teacher, as a highly significant figure in 20th century British art.

Executed in 1947, this impressive charcoal study is one of several large-scale drawings Bomberg made of the cityscape of London during and after the Second World War. As the Bomberg scholar Richard Cork has noted of these powerful works, ‘He reduced his draughtsmanship to its most skeletal in order to convey the gutted, sooty wreckage of a metropolis battered almost beyond recognition by Nazi bombingraids. Charcoal was the ideal medium for the purpose.’1 The artist had begun making these charcoal drawings around 1944, when he served as a firewatcher in Kensington. As his biographer William Lipke has written, ‘While standing watch on long dark nights, he became more and more intrigued with the monumental buildings that had withstood many centuries. Deciding at last to begin that series of sketches that would record London’s historic monuments blackly silhouetted against the sky, he turned to his favourite drawing medium, charcoal. With its rich, velvety texture the artist drew out the firmness of the architecural forms, yet rubbed in the pervading darkness like a thin haze covering the inky night...This experience left an indelible stamp on his mind, and later he would return to examine the architectural heritage of London more closely after peace was restored. 2

The artist had envisaged publishing a book of these drawings, and wrote to the Ministry of Works in October 1945: ‘I am working on a series of drawings that will form when co-ordinated a panorama of London – to be reproduced and published in London.’3 However, as Cork notes, ‘Like so many of Bomberg’s projects, the scheme never reached fruition: his style was too stark to attract publishers interested in topographical surveys of the city. But the drawings themselves remain, testifying to the compassion with which he surveyed the battered remains of a city whose skeletal structure lends itself well to Bomberg’s defining line.’4

Bomberg’s charcoal drawings of this type led to his appointment to teach a weekly drawing class at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. The artist had shown some of his cityscape drawings to the eminent architect Sir Charles Reilly, who recommended him to the Bartlett as a teacher: ‘I have been looking at Mr David Bomberg’s drawings of great masses of buildings, and feel he has something valuable to convey to the young architectural student. He has extraordinary powers of giving a sense of mass and it is on its mass and volume a modern building so much relies. He could help therefore the young architect... If I had charge of a school still I should like Mr Bomberg to take a sketching class for me, feeling he would help the student to get at the meaning of the mass composition of the building rather than of their detail, and that is what is wanted.’5

The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, generally known as Middle Temple, is one of the four Inns of Court in the City of London, along with the adjoining Inner Temple, Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn. The Middle Temple is the western part of the 12th century ‘Temple’; the building that served as the English headquarters of the Knights Templar until the order was dissolved in 1312. This sizeable drawing depicts the bomb-damaged main church at Middle Temple. As it has recently been described, ‘The architectural mass almost entirely fills the sheet, recalling Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s eighteenth-century etchings depicting imagined subterranean spaces. Incomplete walls and empty windows, undarkened by Bomberg’s furious shading, eliminate the solidity that defined [a drawing of the same site made] three years earlier. Now the walls of Middle Temple appear wavering and skeletal, more akin to scaffolding than centuries old stone. Bomberg invites contemplation of the monumental and deeply historic made fragile to deliver an unexpected poignancy only heightened by the brusque handling.’6 Bomberg also produced a handful of charcoal drawings of the Round Church at Middle and Inner Temple – a building based on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which the artist would have known from his travels in Palestine in the 1920s – that are closely comparable to the present sheet, and are of similar dimensions7

This large drawing is one of around a dozen works by Bomberg acquired by the singer, musician and actor David Bowie (1947-2016) for his personal collection. As Bowie once stated, I’ve always been a huge David Bomberg fan. I love that particular school. There’s something very parochial English about it. But I don’t care.’8

JOHN MINTON

Great Shelford 1917-1957 London

The Wheel (Derelict Farm Machine)

Pen and black ink and watercolour, with touches of white heightening, on paper laid down on board. Signed and dated John Minton 1948 in brown ink at the upper left. Inscribed by the artist John Minton / THE WHEEL / Watercolour 1948 in brown ink on a label pasted onto the verso. 280 x 381 mm. (11 x 15 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Lefevre Gallery, London, in 1949; Purchased from them on 18 May 1950 for £21 by a Mrs. Edwards, Gayton, Northamptonshire.

EXHIBITED: London, The Lefevre Gallery, New Paintings and Water Colours by John Minton, February 1949, no.41 (as The Wheel).

Many of John Minton’s drawings and watercolours of the late 1940s depict farms and record farming practices that were soon to be mechanized. This large sheet can be associated with a handful of watercolours by Minton of pieces of farm machinery that were no longer in use, all dating from 1948 and of similar dimensions. A comparable watercolour of Derelict Farm Machinery, signed and dated 1948 (fig.1), was with Stephen Ongpin Fine Art in 2015 and is today in the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California1

Among several other comparable studies of farm machinery by Minton is a watercolour of a Farm Machine, of similar dimensions to the present sheet, which was on the London art market in 20062. A related drawing of Farm Machinery from 1948, also similar in scale, was in the Oliver Brown collection3, and another of a Derelict Farm Machine was, like all of these drawings, at one time with the Lefevre Gallery in London4.

Related to these watercolours, although earlier in date and without colour, is a pen and wash drawing of Agricultural Implements of 1945, in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London5. Also slightly earlier in date is an oil painting of farm machinery in front of a barn of c.1944, probably painted in Cornwall, in a private collection6

WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM CBE

St. Andrews 1912-2004 St. Andrews

Gurnard’s Head, Cornwall, in Winter

Watercolour, gouache, ink and coloured chalk on paper, laid down. Signed and dated W. Barns Graham 1949. in black ink at the lower right. Inscribed Gurnards Head, (Winter) / W. Barns-Graham 1949 / 11 1/8” x 20 1/4”. / CAT NO. 11/49/0 in black ink and pencil, and further inscribed exhibited Castle Inn St Ives 1949 in pencil on the backing board. 255 x 452 mm. (10 x 17 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Gordon Hepworth Fine Art, Exeter; Belgrave Gallery, London, in 1989; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s South Kensington, 13 June 1997, lot 392; Porthmeor Gallery, St. Ives; Acquired from them by Paul Myners, Baron Myners, London and Falmouth; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Scottish Art Council and City of Edinburgh Museums and Art Galleries, W. BarnsGraham: Retrospective 1940-1989, exhibition catalogue, Newlyn and elsewhere, 1989-1990, p.20, no.11.

EXHIBITED: St. Ives, Castle Inn, St. Ives Society of Artists: Winter Collection, January 1949; Newlyn, Newlyn Art Gallery, Edinburgh, City Art Centre, Perth, Perth Museum and Art Gallery, St. Andrews, Crawford Arts Centre, and Ayr, Maclaurin Art Gallery, W. Barns-Graham: Retrospective 1940-1989, 1989-1990, no.11.

The Scottish painter, draughtsman and printmaker Wilhelmina (always known as ‘Willie’ to friends) Barns-Graham was born in St. Andrews in Fife and studied at the Edinburgh College of Art between 1931 and 1937, her tenure sometimes interrupted by recurring health issues caused by weak lungs. While at the College she earned several awards and travel scholarships, and had her work included in the annual Summer Exhibitions of the Royal Scottish Academy. In March 1940 the twenty-sevenyear-old artist moved to St. Ives in Cornwall, partly for health reasons, and there met Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, as well as the local ‘primitive’ painter Alfred Wallis and the potter Bernard Leach. Barns-Graham was to maintain a studio in St. Ives for the rest of her long career, which lasted almost eight decades. In 1942 she became a member of the St. Ives Society of Artists and the Newlyn Society of Artists, exhibiting paintings influenced by Cornish landscapes at both institutions between 1942 and 1949.

After participating in numerous group exhibitions in Cornwall and Edinburgh, Barns-Graham had her first solo exhibition in 1946 at the Downing Gallery in St. Ives, followed by a second show there two years later. In 1949 she left the St. Ives Society of Artists and became a founding member of the Penwith Society of Arts, a more progressive breakaway group where she was to exhibit for the next fifty years. Her work began to be included in group shows in London and she also spent some time in Grindelwald in Switzerland, inspiring a series of paintings, drawings and gouaches of glaciers, executed between 1948 and 1952. In 1950 Barns-Graham’s painting Upper Glacier was acquired by the British Council, and the following year her large painting Porthleven won the St. Ives Festival of Britain prize for painting. Also in 1951, her work was included in Herbert Read’s book Contemporary British Art

In 1952 Barns-Graham had her first solo exhibition in London, at the Redfern Gallery. Her travels took her to Paris, Venice and Tuscany, and by 1956 her work was regularly being exhibited in London. Although she was fully integrated into the modernist milieu of St. Ives, with the arrival of artists such as Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton, Terry Frost and Bryan Winter, Barns-Graham often felt at a disadvantage in the competition for recognition and contacts with dealers in London and abroad. She was also unfairly regarded, by some critics and scholars, as a relatively minor member of the St. Ives school. (This imbalance was confirmed when the Tate Gallery’s major 1985 exhibition St. Ives 1939-64: Twenty-

Five Years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery included only three works by Barns-Graham, while Lanyon and Hilton were represented by nineteen and twenty paintings, respectively.) In 1960 Barns-Graham began to divide her time between Cornwall and Scotland, having inherited a house near St. Andrews, while in 1963 she moved into a studio on Porthmeor Beach in St. Ives. By the middle of the 1960s she had begun to work in a severely geometrical mode of abstraction.

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s Barns-Graham’s paintings were shown widely in galleries in Cornwall, London and Scotland, as well as in touring group exhibitions organized by the Arts Council. Although by this time her reputation was largely established as an abstract artist, she continued to paint representational subjects, notably the Cornish landscapes that had been the subject of her first solo exhibitions. (The artist’s landscapes, which later included views of Scotland, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, often in turn led to more abstract compositions.) The late 1980s found Barns-Graham producing a vast array of freely-painted, colourful abstract paintings, usually executed on paper rather than canvas, as well as screenprints, which introduced her work to a new audience and market. In 1989 a retrospective exhibition comprising fifty years of her work travelled to museums in Penzance, Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Perth and Ayr, followed three years later by another touring exhibition on the occasion of the artist’s eightieth birthday. As she stated in 2001, the same year that she was awarded a CBE and a major monograph on her work appeared, ‘In my paintings I want to express the joy and importance of colour, texture, energy and vibrancy, with an awareness of space and construction. A celebration of life.’ Barns-Graham continued to produce vibrant paintings and screenprints until her death in January 2004, at the age of ninety-one.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was a draughtsman of considerable talent. Her drawings were admired by Ben Nicholson, with whom she shared a similar approach to the depiction of landscape in her works on paper, and the two artists often went on sketching expeditions together. As an obituary of BarnsGraham claimed, ‘As a draughtsman she was second only to Nicholson himself, and was more versatile. Her crisp drawings of rocks, landscapes and buildings continued to underpin all her other work.’1 As the artist herself stated in 1989, ‘I have always been interested in drawing and have spent considerable time constructing my compositions…After sessions of drawing, I turn my back on the experience and return to painting in the abstract, where there is a meeting point of abstracted ideas. This swing between outward observation and inward perception, or vice versa, has always increased my awareness.’2 A few years later, she added, ‘There is a great excitement and tension before beginning a drawing. The element of shock from the blank paper, the choice of medium, different kinds of pencils on various makes of paper, use of charcoal or chalk, pen and ink or a stick dipped in indian ink. I have always been interested in drawing – it is a discipline of the mind.’3

Drawn in 1949, the year that Barns-Graham became one of the founders of the Penwith Society of Arts, the present sheet depicts the 17th century coaching inn known as the Gurnard’s Head, situated near the rocky promontory of the same name on the north coast of the Penwith peninsula in Cornwall, just north of Porthmeor and about six miles west of St. Ives. (The name apparently derives from the headland’s resemblance to the head of a gurnard fish.) A comparable gouache study of the Gurnard’s Head, dated two years earlier in 1947 and of slightly larger dimensions, was recently acquired for the Penlee House Gallery and Museum in Penzance4. An oil painting of Gurnard’s Head, also dated 1947, is in the collection of the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust in Edinburgh5.

A recent owner of the present sheet was the Cornish businessman, Labour politician and collector Paul Myners, Baron Myners CBE (1948-2022). Myners served as a trustee of the Tate, the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Academy, and assembled a fine collection of paintings, sculptures and ceramics by artists who worked in St. Ives and Cornwall.

DUNCAN GRANT

Doune, nr. Aviemore 1885-1978 Aldermaston

Nerissa Garnett Reading at Charleston

Oil, chalk and pastel on paper, laid down on board. Signed DGrant in pencil at the lower left. Further signed with initials and inscribed DG / Nerissa in black ink on the reverse of the board. 468 x 629 mm. (18 3/8 x 24 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The Bloomsbury Workshop, London, in 1998; Private collection.

LITERATURE: The Charleston Magazine, Spring / Summer 1998, illustrated inside front cover (incorrectly titled Fanny Reading, Charleston) [advertisement]; Hermione Lee, ‘Images of Virginia Woolf’, in Tony Bradshaw, ed., A Bloomsbury Canvas: Reflections on the Bloomsbury Group, Aldershot, 2001, illustrated p.49 (where dated c.1962 and incorrectly titled Fanny Reading).

Lifelong artistic and emotional partners, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell worked side by side and shared their lives until her death in 1961. The two were lovers for a brief period, despite Bell’s (by now failed) marriage and Grant’s homosexuality, and on Christmas Day 1918 their daughter Angelica was born at Charleston. Raised by Clive and Vanessa Bell, she did not learn who her true father was until she was eighteen. When she was in her early twenties Angelica developed a romantic attachment to the much older David Garnett, who had been Grant’s lover at one time, and in due course the two were married. Both of her parents disapproved of the relationship, however, and were not invited to the wedding.

David and Angelica Garnett had four daughters, the youngest of whom were the twins Nerissa and Frances, known as Fanny. As a schoolfriend later recalled, ‘The twins were total tomboys without a vestige of femininity. The minute they got home they’d change out of their school uniform into trousers. When I asked [their elder sister] Amaryllis what they wore to parties, she said, “They have masses and masses of new trousers.” No girl in those days ever wore trousers or jeans to parties but being Garnetts, they were given special dispensation in many areas. The twins were also into martial arts, then very new in the West and Nerissa once broke a school record for throwing the discus, the only Garnett who showed a vestige of sporting prowess. Because the twins had each other, they had less need to make friends with other girls, and kept much to themselves.’1

As children, the four Garnett sisters all spent time at Charleston, and sat for paintings and drawings by both Bell and Grant. As Grant’s biographer has written, ‘Still more welcome at Charleston were the grandchildren. Duncan shared Vanessa’s delight in their different characters and unexpected behaviour… They were no trouble to look after, as they spent much of the day reading and were often taken for a walk by Clive [Bell] after tea. Later on it pleased Duncan that one of the twins, Nerissa, showed a talent for painting.’2 The present sheet is a portrait of Nerissa Garnett (1946-2004), who would grow up to be a painter, photographer and ceramicist after studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, and was drawn sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s. (It was at around this time that the sitter’s mother noted that the fourteen-year old twins Fanny and Nerissa ‘take eight-and-a-half shoes, and will be terrifying young women if they continue to practise judo.’3) Nerissa is here depicted sitting on a 1930s bentwood chair in Grant’s studio; the chair, one of two purchased by Virginia Woolf from the furniture store Heal’s in London and given by her to her sister Vanessa Bell, remains at Charleston today4

A painted portrait by Grant of a slightly older Nerissa Garnett, wearing a white shirt and trousers and seated in an armchair with her arms crossed, was painted at Charleston in 1965 and still hangs in Vanessa Bell’s bedroom there5

SIR MATTHEW SMITH CBE

Halifax 1879-1959 London

Fruit on a Blue Plate

Watercolour. Laid down.

226 x 294 mm. (8 7/8 x 11 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London; Acquired from them by a private collector; Thence by descent.

Described by Augustus John as ‘one of the most brilliant and individual figures in modern English painting’, Matthew Smith came to art only when he was in his twenties. After studying at the Manchester School of Art and at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, he made his first trip to France in 1908. He remained in France for the next few years, taking a studio in Paris and exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants of 1911 and 1912. Smith also spent time in the town of Grez-sur-Loing, south of Paris, which had long hosted a thriving community of foreign artists. In 1914 he visited England on what was intended to be a brief visit, but the outbreak of the First World War prevented his return to France. Smith exhibited with the London Group from 1916 onwards, although he did not become a formal member of the Group until 1920. After the war he returned to Grez and there befriended the Irish artist Roderic O’Conor, who was to exert a profound influence on his work. He also met Vera Cuningham, a fellow artist who became his model and lover, and inspired a major series of paintings of nudes over the next few years. Smith continued to work between England and France, painting in Cornwall, Somerset, Brittany, Grez and Paris.

Smith’s exposure to contemporary French art as a young painter led him to adopt the vibrant colour palette that characterizes much of his work; as John Russell points out, it was in France that he learned to liberate and intensify his colour at a time when most English painting was darkened and congested.’1 He had his first one-man show at the Mayor Gallery in London in 1926, and soon afterwards began to achieve both commercial and critical success2 Smith spent the Second World War mainly in London, although he seems to have painted very little, having been devastated by the death of both of his sons in the early years of the war. The first monograph devoted to his work appeared in 1944, by which time he had begun painting again, and in 1950 he had a second exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Three years later a major retrospective was mounted at the Tate Gallery, and soon after this he received a knighthood. Although his poor health meant that he largely stopped painting in oils after 1955, he continued to produce works on paper in pencil, pastel and watercolour. Smith died in 1959, and a memorial exhibition was held at the Royal Academy the following year.

Smith’s work was much admired by his fellow artists. As his friend Francis Bacon wrote of him, ‘He seems to me to be one of the very few English painters since Constable and Turner to be concerned with painting – that is, with attempting to make idea and technique inseparable…I think that painting to-day is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down, and in this game of chance Matthew Smith seems to have the gods on his side.’3 Similarly, the artist Patrick Heron praised Smith as ‘Easily the most important English painter of his generation…he understands, as few other English painters living do, the true potentialities of colour, which he is able to use at once with scientific accuracy and an exciting emotional effect. 4

In an account of a visit to Smith’s studio in London in 1957, a journalist wrote, ‘How joyously the red and blues of his later still-lifes sing together! How interesting is the combined impression of the artist’s personality, surroundings and works! These were my thoughts after a recent visit to Sir Matthew Smith…to the visitor’s eye [the studio] was full of atmosphere, with its easels and rows of canvases and the ‘properties’ – jugs, bowls – there was one asymmetrical fruit dish of French manufacture, a basket in porcelain which he handled with particular affection – oranges, lemons and quinces…These solids of nature occupy him more, nowadays, than the flowers he used to paint so well.’5 By this time Smith was working almost exclusively on paper, producing works aptly described by his biographer as ‘marvelously rhythmic and joyful.’6

LUCIAN FREUD OM CH

Berlin 1922-2011 London

An Illustrated Letter from the Artist to Caroline Blackwood Pen and black ink.

202 x 127 mm. (8 x 5 in.) [sheet]

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

LITERATURE: David Dawson and Martin Gayford, Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud 1939-1954, London, 2022, pp.339-340; Stephen Smith, ‘Paper trail: Lucian Freud’s revealing, charming letters’, The Art Newspaper, November 2022, p.69 (illustrated).

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

Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (1931-1996) first briefly met Lucian Freud in 1949 at a party given by the socialite Ann Rothermere. It was at another of her parties that Freud and Blackwood met again, in late 1951. As the artist later recalled, ‘[Ann Rothermere] asked me to one of those marvellous parties, semi-royal, quite a lot of them were there, and she said, “I hope you find someone you’d like to dance with”, and that sort of thing. And suddenly there was this one person and that was Caroline… She was just exciting in every way and was someone who had taken absolutely no trouble with herself…I went up to her and I danced and danced and I danced and danced...I don’t really think of myself in a dramatic romantic way. I just thought of what I wanted to do, you know, take her home alone, that sort of thing. That night I went home and started painting her.’5 In an interview published in 1995, when she was sixty-three, Caroline Blackwood recalled that ‘“Lucian was fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie-star way…I remember he was very mannered, he wore these long side whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers, deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did.”’6

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

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

Blackwood were married in London a few weeks later, on December 9th, 1953, a day after the artist’s thirty-first birthday.

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

This love letter dates from the early months of the couple’s courtship. The genesis of the pen and ink drawing that illustrates the present sheet is found in Freud’s close friendship with his fellow artist Francis Bacon. For much of their relationship, Lucian and Caroline spent a considerable amount of time with Bacon, and after their wedding and their move to a house in Dean Street in Soho, they saw him almost daily. (As Caroline was later to recall, ‘I had dinner with [Bacon] nearly every night for more or less the whole of my marriage to Lucian.’13) It was during a weekend spent with Bacon and his lover Peter Lacy, possibly at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, that this tender image of the two lovers embracing had its origins. As Freud told the previous owner of this illustrated letter, he was with Caroline in Bacon’s studio when Francis pulled out a camera he had just bought, pointed it at them and called out to Lucian to ‘kiss her’. Freud further recalled that he had recently received the photograph from Bacon in the mail, and it was sitting on his desk when he wrote this letter to Caroline. As David Dawson and Martin Gayford have noted of the present sheet, in their recently published catalogue of Freud’s early letters, ‘It is therefore an example of an initiative from Bacon leading Freud into attempting a subject out of his normal range.’14

Some fifty years later, seeing this letter for the first time since he had written it, Freud remarked to its previous owner that it was a very good likeness of her15, but that he found his own demeanour somewhat awkward. Perhaps this reaction was due to the uncharacteristic display of vulnerability evident in the image of the artist kissing his lover while he is lost in the moment, his eyes firmly closed. The letter itself underscores the intense nature of this early stage of their relationship. (Caroline and Lucian were separated for lengthy stretches during this time, partly due to the machinations of her scheming mother, thus necessitating written correspondence.) This letter serves as a testament to the fact that Caroline Blackwood was one of Freud’s great loves, the subject of an all-consuming passion at the time this letter was written. Seeing it again, half a century later, Freud may also have regarded it as an uncomfortable reminder that Caroline was the only woman who had ever left him.

It has been suggested that the ‘Mrs. Mac’ referred to in this letter may be Jean Howard MacGibbon, a children’s book author and wife of the publisher James MacGibbon. The MacGibbons were neighbours of Freud and his first wife Kitty Garman at Clifton Hill in St. John’s Wood, where they had moved in 194816. As Dawson and Gayford point out, as an author of children’s books, Jean MacGibbon was ‘therefore a person likely to hold views on A. A. Milne (which Lucian obviously regarded as too ridiculous for comment).’17 They further note of this letter that ‘One can only guess what the bill that he enclosed with his tender love letter, apparently as an afterthought, was for. But there is evidence that at the beginning of 1952 Lucian was (as so often) seriously short of money. At this point, he had a family to support, a new aristocratic lover, a position in high society to maintain, and a gambling habit.’18

AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE

London 1886-1956 London

Figures at Night Under a Moon (Incident at the Witches’ Sabbath?)

Pencil and watercolour on board. Signed with initials aos in pencil at the lower right. 451 x 287 mm. (17 3/8 x 11 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Seymour Stein, London, New York and Los Angeles; Anonymous sale, West Sussex, Bellmans, 21 November 2023, lot 56; Private collection, London.

EXHIBITED: Possibly London, Mansion House Tavern, Exhibition of Paintings by Austin Osman Spare, June-July 1952.

In May 1941 Austin Spare’s studio was completely destroyed by a German bomb, resulting in the loss of everything he owned, including several hundred works. His right arm was severely injured, so that he was unable to draw for several months, and he also suffered from memory loss. Soon afterwards he was living in a tiny basement room in Brixton in abject poverty, dressed in tattered clothes and sleeping on two chairs since he had no bed. Nevertheless, he continued to draw, filling sketchbook after sketchbook. An exhibition at the Archer Gallery in Westbourne Grove in 1947 was a success, and from 1949 onwards Spare began to hold exhibitions in a series of South London pubs; The Temple Bar in 1949, The Mansion House in 1952 and The White Bear in 1953. He remained quite impecunious, however, largely due to his refusal to produce commercial portraits. Spare remained intensely prolific until the end of his life, and his final exhibition, at the Archer Gallery in 1955, included over 220 works.

The present sheet may probably be dated to the early 1950s, when Spare produced a number of works devoted to the theme of witchcraft and magic. In this he is likely to have been influenced by his friend and acolyte Kenneth Grant; as Spare’s biographer has noted, ‘Grant’s especial influence on Spare was to whip up his interest in witchcraft, orgiastic sabbaths, and lascivious old women.’1 A very similar drawing, entitled Incident at the Witches’ Sabbath (fig.1), was one of five works with the same title exhibited at the Mansion House pub in London in 19522, and it is possible that the present sheet was included in the same exhibition.

A number of drawings of similarly contorted, devilish figures were later used to illustrate a book entitled The Witches Sabbath / Axiomata, published in 1992, many years after Spare’s death. The book was a compendium of writings by Spare and Grant from the early 1950s, accompanied by drawings by the artist from private collections. As the writer and graphic novelist Alan Moore has noted, ‘In his relation to both art and occultism, Austin Osman Spare stands out as a strikingly individual and even unique figure in fields that are by their very nature brimming with strikingly individual figures.’1

The American music executive Seymour Stein (19422023) owned several works by Austin Osman Spare, including a similarly fantastical drawing of four tormented figures, also with Stephen Ongpin Fine Art.

FRANK AUERBACH

Berlin 1931-2024 London

Recto: Study after J. M. W. Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander Verso: A Building Site

Pencil, with stumping, with touches of oil paint. The verso in pencil. The verso squared for transfer in pencil and numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4 on all four sides. Inscribed dark in pencil on the verso. 254 x 365 mm. (10 x 14 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Marlborough Gallery, London, in 1988; Private collection.

LITERATURE: Barnaby Wright, ‘Creative Destruction: Frank Auerbach and the Rebuilding of London’, in Barnaby Wright, ed., Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62, exhibition catalogue, London, 2009-2010, pp.29-31, fig.13 (where dated c.1952); Catherine Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London, 2015, p.56, illustrated p.57 (where dated c.1953).

EXHIBITED: London, Marlborough Fine Art, Works on Paper by Contemporary Artists, 1988, no.7 (where dated c.1958).

Throughout much of his career, beginning in the late 1940s, Frank Auerbach made drawings after Old Master paintings in the collection of the National Gallery in London. He entered the Saint Martin’s School of Art in 1948, and its close proximity to the National Gallery meant that he was able to make weekly visits to the museum; a practice he maintained until the late 1980s. As Robert Hughes has written, ‘Auerbach’s attachment to the National Gallery in London is deep and almost fanatical; throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s he and his friend [Leon] Kossoff kept up what struck other artists and students as the quaint habit of going to Trafalgar Square at least once a week to make drawings from certain paintings there.’1 Among the paintings Auerbach copied in the National Gallery were works by Caravaggio, Claude, Constable, Degas, Gainsborough, Goya, Hals, Poussin, Rembrandt, Rubens, Seurat, Tiepolo, Titian, Turner and Veronese.

Referring to his frequent trips to the National Gallery, Auerbach once stated that ‘it reminds me of what is required. All the great painters: there’s a unity like a great wind blowing everything together, you get a glimpse of that.’2 In another interview, he noted, ‘My most complimentary and my most typical reaction to a good painting is to want to rush home and do some more work. When the bus services were better I used to go to the National Gallery more frequently, just go and come back. And I find that towards the end of a painting I actually go and draw from pictures more to remind myself of what quality is and what’s actually demanded of paintings. Without these touchstones we’d be floundering.’3 And, in another conversation, he added, ‘I have hardly ever drawn from a modern picture – I know how it’s made. When it is one by an old master, I know they are marvellous, but I can’t see what is the secret that makes them so. 4

Datable to the early 1950s, this large double-sided drawing is one of relatively few surviving youthful drawings by Auerbach. The recto of the sheet contains a very free and spirited copy after J. M. W. Turner’s monumental painting of The Parting of Hero and Leander (fig.1), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1837 and in the collection of the National Gallery in London5. As Auerbach himself has noted, the landscape paintings of the 18th and early 19th century British School – notably the works of Turner, Constable and Gainsborough – had a profound effect on him: ‘I think I have a sort of penchant for the whole of English painting. It is as though it isn’t held up by a scaffolding of theory or of philosophy...that it was arrived at empirically, as though there is a sort of fresh wind blowing through a room of English painting, that is nowhere else in the National Gallery. I find myself at home here.’6

The verso of this sheet, which is squared for transfer, depicts a building site in London; a subject that occupied the artist for much of the 1950s. Auerbach was fascinated by the intense programme

of building and reconstruction being undertaken in post-war London in the late 1940s and 1950s, following the devastation caused by the Blitz. As he recalled in 2007, ‘It was almost fortuitous that just after the war, when I did these things, London was a ruin, and so I painted bomb sites and building sites and so on, which looked absolutely marvellous: grand mountain landscapes all over London.’7 Auerbach painted an important series of building site pictures between 1952 and 1962, and, in keeping with his practice, often turned to the study of Old Master paintings to help him work through his ideas and resolve problems in his own compositions. As he once said, ‘I’m not copying a picture, I’m trying to gain some sort of inspiration from the fact that somebody’s succeeded in grasping something that seems relevant, where have at that point failed to grasp it in my own picture.’8

Both sides of this large drawing can, in fact, be related to the artist’s interest in painting building sites in London. As Catherine Lampert has noted of the present sheet, ‘Auerbach’s Study after Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander (c.1953), which is a drawing based on a work in the National Gallery, puts emphasis on the grand buildings of Abydos, with spectators lined up on the dock, and the storm over the Hellespont in which Leander drowned. A gridded building-site sketch on the verso curiously transports the eye into deep space; the ideal architecture and the lightning bolt in Turner’s painting is here a diagonal stroke that we read as a huge beam being cantilevered into position. 9

Another scholar has commented on the relationship between the recto and verso of this drawing: ‘Auerbach’s exploration of London’s building sites was entwined at a more profound level with his experience of Old Master and Romantic painters in the National Gallery. In a surviving sketchbook page from this period we find a sketch of a building site on the verso of a study after Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander, which makes the connection explicit. Undoubtedly there would have been many other comparable studies from different paintings and building sites in sketchbooks that he has destroyed. Turner’s painting conjoined the motifs and painterly effects that contemporary viewers, when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art in 1837, would have associated with an expression of the sublime. Dramatic storms breaking over a turbulent sea are set amidst a treacherous-looking mountain landscape. A fantastical city (based upon the study of classical ruins) is stacked precariously upon the rocks, stretching up into the hazy mists of the sky. This all speaks of the sublime, ineffable experience of overwhelming terror and excitement that gripped the later eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century imagination. The energy of Auerbach’s study suggests that it also gripped him. It is clear that he understood the painting to be a battle between the structuring geometric forms of the architecture and the wild destructive forces of the storm-possessed elements... For Auerbach, the building sites were a contemporary equivalent of a sublime landscape – one that could inspire the fear, excitement and strangeness of an uncharted mountain terrain.’10

verso

KEITH VAUGHAN

Selsey 1912-1977 London

Figure: June 21 1961

Oil pastel and gouache on thin paper. Signed Keith Vaughan in pencil and indistinctly dated June 21 / 61 in faded brown ink at the lower right.

499 x 365 mm. (19 5/8 x 14 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Humphrey Whitbread, Southill Park, Southill, Bedfordshire and Howard’s House, Cardington, Bedfordshire; John Weston, Palm Desert, California; Private collection, Los Angeles; Private collection.

EXHIBITED: London, Whitechapel Gallery, and elsewhere, Keith Vaughan: retrospective exhibition, 1962, no.319 (lent by the artist); London, Matthiesen Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings 1937-1962, 1962, no.741

In the catalogue of the 1962 Whitechapel retrospective exhibition, it was noted that ‘Keith Vaughan’s painting is about the human figure in, usually, an outdoor environment (more specifically, the male nude in landscape), and about the reconciliation within the artist himself of classical and romantic impulses in the exploration of this one theme…This theme, and the consistent way it has always occupied him, are the characteristics that most obviously set Vaughan apart from other British artists. The figure-in-landscape has an honourable tradition in British painting, but not the nude-in-landscape – that is a classical, Mediterranean theme – and certainly not the nude that dominates the landscape…Vaughan, in this respect, is outside the whole “romantic” modern British tradition. His stylizations or distortions of the figure are either purely pictorial in origin…or else they are emphasizing some aspect of a stance or an action…In other words, they are formal, not expressionist or metaphorical distortions.’2

A rich blue tonality is a particular characteristic of Vaughan’s works of the 1960s and 1970s. As Andrew Lambirth has pointed out, ‘The emphasis on outline and flat pattern began to change as he developed more of an interest in the plastic properties of oil paint and its formal possibilities. This led in the 1960s to a new fluidity of paint handling and brighter colour. Increasing lucidity was matched by a new excitement frequently bordering on lyricism. Brushwork, rather than drawing, was now the driving force. Colour was used more abstractly, in a seemingly casual way but actually instinctively and with flair, and there was movement apparent.’3 The artist here builds an abstract arrangement of rectangular, tessellated blocks – in shades of cobalt blue, indigo and azure, alongside blacks, browns and greys – around and over the outlines of a standing figure. As has been noted, ‘especially in the later gouaches, Vaughan introduced geometric features such as rectangles and rhomboids, seemingly floating about in space. These characteristic squared-off coloured slabs are woven into the compositional fabric of his gouaches to strengthen their formal construction; it was a fine-tuning formula that helped him achieve pictorial resolution. His precisely calibrated block forms, made with opaque gouache or later with dense coats of oil pastel, supplied flat areas of colour that contrasted with meandering lines and textured surfaces. They also provided Vaughan with an innovative way to suggest pictorial space.’4

Drawn on 21 June 1961, the present sheet is executed in what was, for Vaughan, the relatively new medium of oil pastel. It was in 1959, during his period of teaching in Iowa, that he first discovered oil pastels, which he continued to use for the remainder of his career. He appreciated the density of colour that he could achieve with oil pastels, which could be applied quickly and, unlike chalks or wax crayons, were not fugitive and did not smudge5. As the Vaughan scholar Gerard Hastings has noted, oil pastels ‘came in a rainbow range of colours, and were subtler and more succulent than their semi-transparent waxy cousins; [Vaughan] found them to be a highly obliging medium. He eagerly exploited their pictorial value… Oil pastels could create broad slabs of colour with little effort or, after using a pencil sharpener on them, could tease out fine contours and other delicate details…Vaughan could significantly enhance the impact of a gouache by the application of a shrewdly placed block of vibrant colour or a pulsating hue that would sing out from the painted surface.’6

DAVID HOCKNEY RA OM CH

Born 1937

Coloured Curtain Study

Pencil and coloured chalks on white paper. Signed with initials, titled and dated coloured curtain study / DH. 63. in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed (in a different land) Lambeth(?) in pencil on the verso. 447 x 320 mm. (17 5/8 x 12 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Paul Kasmin, London; Ronald Alley, London, in 1970; Erich Sommer, London, by 1978; His posthumous sale, London, Christie’s, 9 June 2006, lot 18; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 11 February 2010, lot 133; Jack Kirkland, London; Acquired from him by a private collector in 2013.

LITERATURE: David Hockney, 72 Drawings by David Hockney, New York, 1971, unpaginated, no.6; Nikos Stangos, ed., David Hockney by David Hockney: My Early Years, London, 1976, p.80, fig.85.

EXHIBITED: London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, David Hockney: Paintings, prints and drawings 19601970, exhibition catalogue, 1970, no.D9; New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, and elsewhere, David Hockney: Prints and Drawings, 1978-1980, no.11.

Long recognized as one of the finest draughtsmen of his generation, David Hockney began drawing from a very early age and has continued to do so throughout his long career. Indeed, it may be argued that drawing has always been his primary medium, lying as it does at the heart of his artistic process. As he has stated, ‘It is the most immediate thing you can do as an artist. It is direct. Drawing gives you a confidence and it opens your eyes.’1

This large drawing is related to Hockney’s seminal painting Still Life with Figure and Curtain (fig.1) of 1963, formerly in the collection of the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation2. The painting, one of the artist’s most significant works of the early 1960s, has been described as ‘an exercise in abstraction. The pictureplane is filled with a hanging patterned curtain in front of which stands a mannikin-like figure, some fruit, and [a] vase of flowers.’3

As Hockney has recalled, ‘Immediately after The Hypnotist I painted Still Life with Figure and Curtain, which was done in a very formal way. Soon after I began it, I went in the National Gallery one day and had a very rare experience of seeing. I thought I knew the National Gallery and all the pictures very well, but in 1963 they’d bought a group of paintings by the seventeenth-century artist Domenichino. I wandered in and found them in a room and they thrilled me, because they were things I could use. I suddenly saw what they were about. The moment these pictures revealed themselves, I realized my ideas were far from being new. It wasn’t their subject matter from Greek mythology that interested me, but the fact that they really seemed like trompe-l’oeil painting. They were paintings made to look like tapestries made from paintings, already a double level of reality. All of them had borders round and tassels hanging at the bottom and perhaps an inch of floor showing, making the illusionistic depth of the picture one inch. In one of them, Apollo Killing Cyclops, the tapestry was folded back a little…and in front of this was a dwarf. don’t really know who he is or what it was meant to be about but the doubling back from the spectator interested me.’4

The motif of a curtain appears in a number of Hockney’s paintings during the first half of the 1960s. As has been noted, ‘In a seemingly perverse way Hockney began to turn formalist principles to theatrical ends. The quintessentially theatrical image of a curtain…began to assume prominence around 1963 in such pictures as Still Life with Figure and Curtain and The Hypnotist 5 The artist seems to have been particularly interested in the theatrical concept of a curtain in his compositions: ‘From 1963 until 1965 the curtain is used more fully in all sorts of ways – for decoration, for composition, for narrative and for showing different types of reality. In general what attracted the artist about curtains was that “they are always about to hide something, or about to reveal something.”’6

Other paintings with a curtain motif from 1963 include Seated Woman Drinking Tea, Being Served by a Standing Companion, recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York7, as well as Play within a Play9 and Closing Scene9, both in private collections. On the subject of curtains, Hockney has further commented that ‘The form of the curtain first made me interested in it as a subject, and then it dawned on me that it could be even more interesting because it was flat – the magic word again. A curtain, after all, is exactly like a painting; you can take a painting off a stretcher, hang it up like a curtain; so a painted curtain could be very real. All the philosophical things about flatness, if you go into it, are about reality, and if you cut out illusion then painting becomes completely ‘real’. The idea of the curtains is the same thing.’10

The first owner of this drawing was the pioneering curator Ronald Alley (1926-1999), who worked at the Tate Gallery for thirty-five years and was its first Keeper of the Modern Art collection, holding the position between 1965 and his retirement in 1986. Alley joined the Tate in 1951 and during his tenure there was particularly instrumental in acquiring Modern American art for the museum, including works by Carl André, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko. He also curated exhibitions of, among others, Barbara Hepworth, Patrick Heron, Victor Pasmore, William Roberts, Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon, of whom he also wrote the first catalogue raisonné, published in 1964. Alley lent this drawing to the important retrospective exhibition of Hockney’s early works at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1970.

The present sheet was later in the collection of Erich Sommer (1921-2004), who assembled a fine group of 20th Century British works over a period of some twenty years. Sommer lent Coloured Curtain Study to the 1978-1980 travelling exhibition David Hockney: Prints and Drawings. Most recently, this drawing belonged to another prominent collector, the businessman and philanthropist Jack Kirkland.

BEN NICHOLSON OM

Denham 1894-1982 London

Italian Columns (1965)

Pen, ink, watercolour and gouache on paper, laid down on the artist’s prepared etched grey board. Signed, titled and dated NICHOLSON / 1965 / (Italian columns) in pencil on the backing board.

248 x 121 mm. (9 3/4 x 4 3/4 in.) [sheet]

317 x 248 mm. (12 1/2 x 9 3/4 in.) [board]

PROVENANCE: Galerie Beyeler, Basel; Private collection; Galerie Eric Coatalem, Paris; Private collection, France.

The son of the painters William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, Ben Nicholson spent a brief period at the Slade School of Art in London but was otherwise without formal artistic training. It was not until 1920 and his marriage to the painter Winifred Dacre that he began to paint seriously, producing mainly still life and landscape paintings throughout the following decade. In 1932 he and his second wife Barbara Hepworth travelled to France, where they met and befriended Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp, and later Piet Mondrian. It was also at this time, in the 1930s, that Nicholson began to work in a more Cubist manner, creating paintings and reliefs made up of abstract geometrical forms, and producing a series of carved and painted white reliefs that have become icons of 20th century English modernism. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Nicholson and Hepworth and their children moved to the town of St. Ives in Cornwall, where they became the nucleus of a vibrant artistic community. Nicholson’s reputation grew significantly after the war, and he won several artistic prizes in America and elsewhere. In 1954 a retrospective exhibition of his work was held in the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale, followed a year later by one at the Tate. In 1958 he left St. Ives and settled in Switzerland, having annulled his marriage to Hepworth in 1951 and remarried. A second Tate retrospective in 1968 was accompanied by the awarding of the Order of Merit.

Drawing was an important part of Nicholson’s artistic process throughout his career. His drawings were, however, not made as studies for carved reliefs or paintings, and it has been noted that ‘more than simply preparatory or exploratory tools, drawings were to him full-blown works of art…His drawings are characterized by a strong continuous line, which sinuously defines form and space without a break. Shading is used sparingly and any illusion of volumetric mass simply suggested by the interweaving lines. 1 Furthermore, as another scholar has written of the artist, ‘From the early 1950s his drawing becomes more assured, achieves an even greater clarity and élan, and moves from a subordinate to a privileged place in his work… The drawings and reliefs executed by Ben Nicholson between 1950 and 1975…stand as his most assured, most characteristic achievement, and, with the white reliefs of 1934-9, are the works by which he himself wished to be judged…The drawings have mistakenly been treated as somehow subsidiary to the paintings and reliefs when in fact they have qualities of wit, poetry and spontaneity quite special to themselves – qualities which, added to their variety and sheer virtuosity, entitle them to fully equal status… they are perhaps Nicholson’s most personal expressions.’2

In 1950 Nicholson made his first visit to Italy since the end of the Second World War, and over the next few years began to take a new interest in landscape. He produced a number of drawings of favourite views, sites and buildings throughout the provinces of Tuscany, Lazio and Umbria. As Peter Khoroche has noted of these drawings, He might spend the morning wandering around a town, then be struck by some architectural feature or grouping and feel moved to draw it. Laying no claim to a technical or historical knowledge of architecture, what interested him was the shape, the proportion, the lie of a building – its inner essence or personality would spark off an idea for a free variation upon it. Buildings, like still life objects, were a starting point only: naturally there was no point in mere imitation. On the contrary, Nicholson realized that he had to dare to be free when creating one work of art out of another. Architecture in landscape offered an opportunity to combine his love of precise structure with his feeling for poetry and acute sensitivity to the spirit of place. 3

As the artist’s inscription on the verso notes, this drawing was made in 1965. Nicholson’s Italian drawings reveal his fondness for local buildings; as the artist’s third wife Felicitas Vogler has written, ‘‘When I draw an Italian cathedral’, says Ben Nicholson, ‘I don’t draw its architecture, but the feeling it gives me.’...I have often observed on our travels how B.N. will sit rapt for an hour or two before his subject, usually motionless, but sometimes walking around it to view it from all angles...His landscapes and architectural drawings... are to my mind distinguished from a very early stage by clarity and the great art of omission. They have a delicacy combined with mastery in their strokes, which seem to become more and more economical with the passage of time. For all their fineness they are often of an almost palpable plasticity.’4

As Norbert Lynton has pointed out, Columns and arches fascinated B[en] N[icholson], forms that repeat yet to his eye were never quite the same twice, because they truly are not identical or because his angle of view was not the same or there was some other form nearby that (as Cézanne had taught before Einstein) would affect our reception of both.’5 A gouache drawing of a very similar composition and of the same year, but with a different arrangement of black and red colours, appeared on the art market in London in 20036. Also closely related are a small series of etchings entitled Urbino, produced between 1965 and 1966 in collaboration with the Swiss printmaker François Lafranca, which are among Nicholson’s final efforts at printmaking. Some of these etchings of columns were used as the printed bases of a series of drawings executed in pen and ink and gouache, such as 1965 (Urbino. 4 variations on a theme), which is close to the present sheet in composition7.

KEITH VAUGHAN

Selsey 1912-1977 London

Landscape with Sunset

Paper collage on one side of a folded white card. Inscribed by the artist in German Glückliche Weinachtsfest / und alle freundliche / Denken von dein alte / Freund Jivie(?) / Ifawndike (?) in pencil on the inside of the folded card.

147 x 121 mm. (5 3/4 x 4 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to (Klaus) Peter Adam, London and Sèvres; Thence by descent; Sale (‘Property from the Collection of the Late Peter Adam’), London, Chiswick Auctions, 26 March 2024, part of lot 30; Harry Moore-Gwyn, London and Gloucestershire.

Throughout much of his mature career Keith Vaughan’s work embraced both figuration and abstraction. Yet Vaughan never saw himself as a purely abstract painter, stating that ‘Painting has always been a representational art and if you remove the representational element from it, as a great many painters do, then you simply impoverish it. Even if you can’t see the representational element in the finished product it must be there to begin with; for me painting which has not got a representational element in it hardly goes beyond the point of design.’1

Collaged compositions by Vaughan are quite rare2. The present sheet, which can likely be dated to the first half of the 1970s, was sent as a Christmas greeting card to the artist’s friend Klaus Peter Adam (1929-2019), a German-born filmmaker and television producer. Born in Berlin, Peter Adam settled in England at the age of thirty and joined the BBC in the late 1960s, becoming a British citizen in 1965. He worked at the BBC for twenty-two years, during which he made over a hundred documentaries on arts and culture, and also published a biography of the designer and architect Eileen Gray. Adam was a close friend of several artists, notably Vaughan and Prunella Clough, and carried on an extensive correspondence with both. He had been introduced to Vaughan in 1958 and the two remained close until the artist’s death in 1977. Adam served as one of the executors of Vaughan’s estate, and later curated a number of exhibitions of his work.

As Peter Adam recalled in his autobiography, published in 1995, ‘My other painter friend was Keith Vaughan, a stocky, slightly balding man of about fifty. Hailed in the 1950s as one of the great white hopes of British painting, his fame had been slightly eclipsed by the younger generation. We drove in an old and immaculate Morris Minor to the country or we spend the evening in his London home reading Rilke or Rimbaud, whose verses he had illustrated. He spoke very good French and German, having worked as an interpreter for German prisoners during the war…Despite his success he had little confidence in himself. He was very critical, often too critical for many: his wide knowledge of literature, music and the visual arts, as well as an acute sense of observation, often made him harsh in his judgement of others. Everything about Keith – his manners, his flat and his appearance – was orderly in an almost old-maidish way, but underneath ran a dangerous self-destructive current...It became my role to free him from some of his strictures and to make him laugh…People writing about Vaughan have always concentrated on his darker side, but in over twenty years I saw much light and a great capacity for friendship, even laughter. He could be very funny and he had great wit.’3

As Adam wrote elsewhere of Vaughan, ‘a melancholic dignity surrounded everything he did [but] the man I learned to love and to value was also a man of many joys and much humour.’4 In his private journals, Vaughan usually refers to Adam by his initials KP or KPA, and in one reference to him, written in 1976, notes about having received a ‘Long letter from KPA about death having some meaning & living beautifully & how much he loves me. A letter which must have been difficult to write & acutely embarrassing to read. Poor dear, he tries so hard & means well but emotionally we are on different wave lengths.’5

actual size

ELIOT HODGKIN

London 1905-1987 London

Seven Little Baskets

Pencil, pen and brown ink and brown wash, and watercolour, with touches of white heightening, on paper laid down on board.

423 x 329 mm. (16 5/8 x 13 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist; Mimi (Mrs. Eliot) Hodgkin, London, in 1989; Jack (later Sir Jack) Baer, London, by 1990; By descent to his wife, Diana, Lady Baer, in 2019; Her sale (‘The Joy of a Lifetime: The Estate of Sir Jack and Lady Baer’), Stansted Mountfitchet, Sworders, 4 October 2022, lot 80; Benjamin Peronnet Fine Art, Paris.

LITERATURE: Adrian Eeles, ed., Brought to Life: Eliot Hodgkin Rediscovered, exhibition catalogue, Aylesbury, 2019, pp.146-147, no.86.

EXHIBITED: London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, Eliot Hodgkin, Painter & Collector, 1990, pp.82-83, no.76; Aylesbury, Waddesdon Manor, Brought to Life: Eliot Hodgkin Rediscovered, 2019, no.86.

Eliot Hodgkin studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and, for a very brief period, at the Royal Academy Schools, where he learned not only to paint in oils but also in tempera, influenced by the work of Joseph Southall and Maxwell Armfield in this medium. Hodgkin began his career as a mural painter and fashion illustrator, publishing a book on the subject in 1932, but by the middle of the 1930s was established as a painter of still lives and landscapes, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy. Within a year or two of his first one-man exhibition, held in a London gallery in 1936, Hodgkin had begun working in egg tempera, and many of his finest works were painted in this demanding medium.

During and after the Second World War, Hodgkin painted a number of views of plants growing amid the bombed wreckage of London, exhibiting some of these works at the Royal Academy. He also regularly exhibited his work at the Leicester Galleries, the Reid Gallery and Agnew’s in London and with Durlacher Brothers in New York. Although he turned down the opportunity of becoming an Academician in 1959, Hodgkin continued to show at the Royal Academy throughout his career, exhibiting a total of 113 paintings at the Summer exhibitions between 1934 and 1981. His subject matter remained largely confined to still life compositions and landscapes, generally on a small and rather intimate scale. Owing to worsening eyesight, Hodgkin gave up painting in 1979, and a sale of the contents of his studio was held in London in 1983, four years before his death.

In 1957, in response to an enquiry from the editors of The Studio magazine, Hodgkin provided a succinct description of his lifelong interest in still life painting: In so far as I have any conscious purpose, it is to show the beauty of natural objects which are normally thought uninteresting or even unattractive: such things as brussels sprouts, turnips, onions, pebbles and flints, bulbs, dead leaves, bleached vertebrae, an old boot cast up by the tide. People sometimes tell me that they had never really ‘seen’ something before I painted it, and I should like to believe this…For myself, if I must put it into words, I try to look at quite simple things as though I were seeing them for the first time and as though no one had ever painted them before. 1

This large drawing was included in the two most comprehensive exhibitions of Hodgkin’s work to date; Eliot Hodgkin, Painter & Collector at the Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox gallery in London in 1990, and, more recently, Brought to Life: Eliot Hodgkin Rediscovered at Waddesdon Manor in 2019. As Adrian Eeles noted of the present sheet, in the catalogue of the latter exhibition, ‘Unusually for Eliot, this drawing is not signed or dated…A guess would be the early 1970s. The three open baskets are filled with gooseberries and cherries. One of the baskets has survived in the Hodgkin family collection. 2 A related tempera study of four of the same wicker baskets, signed by the artist but likewise undated, is in a private collection3.

RORY McEWEN

Greenlaw 1932-1982 London

Mushroom

Watercolour on vellum. Signed and dated Rory McEwen Feb 23-26 1972 in pencil at the lower right. Inscribed For Marina with kind regards – 20/7/74 in pencil at the lower left. 165 x 201 mm. (6 1/2 x 7 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to Marina Vaizey, later Lady Vaizey CBE, in July 1974; Anonymous sale, Cirencester, Dominic Winter, 14 July 2010, lot 346; Private collection, London.

LITERATURE: Grey Gowrie et al, Rory McEwen: The Colours of Reality, Surrey, 2015 [2023 ed.], illustrated p.107.

EXHIBITED: Edinburgh, Royal Botanic Garden, and elsewhere, Rory McEwen 1932-1982: The Botanical Paintings, 1988-1989, no.32.

One of the finest botanical artists of the 20th century, Rory McEwen grew up in Scotland and was introduced to flower painting at the age of eight by a French governess. At Eton College he came under the tutelage of the art master Wilfrid Blunt, a historian of botanical art who instilled in the young McEwen an appreciation of the history of botanical painting1. His time at Eton was the only period of formal artistic training that McEwan received, however. He began painting botanical illustrations on vellum while studying at Cambridge in the early 1950s, ‘something hardly anyone else of his generation would have dreamt of doing’2. In 1952, McEwen was commissioned to provide a series of watercolours for C. Oscar Moreton’s Old Carnations and Pinks, published in 1955, and a few years later completed seventeen large watercolours for the same author’s The Auricula, Its History and Character, which appeared in 1964. By this time McEwen had had his first solo exhibition, at the Durlacher Bros. gallery in New York in 1962. The exhibition brought him to the attention of two notable patrons, Rachel Lambert ‘Bunny’ Mellon and Jacqueline Kennedy, and McEwen’s watercolours soon hung in the private rooms of the White House. Later exhibitions of botanical studies were mounted during the 1960s and 1970s at galleries in Paris, New York, Edinburgh, London and Tokyo. McEwen’s last exhibition in his lifetime was at the Redfern Gallery in London in 1981, the year before his untimely death from cancer at the age of fifty.

Much of McEwen’s work is painted in watercolour or vellum, which endowed his works with a particular luminosity. As the British botanist and plant collector Martyn Rix has noted, ‘Rory McEwen’s unique talent was to combine botanical accuracy, artistic elegance and superb technique in the same painting. He never made plants too formal, stylized or unnaturally perfect, yet he never compromised with perfection in technique nor in careful examination and understanding of the details of the subject. In these qualities he will be seen as the equal, if not the superior, of the great botanical artists of the past. 3 McEwen worked for long hours with deep concentration, often wearing surgeon’s eyeglasses with magnifying lenses attached to them to enable him to study his subjects more closely.

Martyn Rix has opined that ‘The paintings of single vegetables have been one of Rory’s most enduring and influential legacies...a series of vegetables, peppers, mushrooms and especially onions…were observed carefully in various stages of sprouting and decay.’4 Drawn in February 1972, this detailed watercolour study of a mushroom depicts its structure and texture with astonishing accuracy. The artist has chosen to show the mushroom from underneath, noting the intricate gills beneath the surface of the cap. The present sheet was presented by McEwen to the art critic and writer Marina Vaizey (b.1938) in July 19745

SIR HOWARD HODGKIN CH CBE

London 1932-2017 London

Composition: Design for the Drop Cloth for the Ballet Pulcinella Gouache and collage on paper, laid down on board. 444 x 825 mm. (17 1/2 x 32 1/2 in.) at greatest dimensions.

PROVENANCE: Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London; Acquired from them by a private collector.

LITERATURE: John-Paul Stonard and Anthony d’Offay, Howard Hodgkin: Stage Designs, exhibition catalogue, Aldeburgh, 2002, illustrated p.45.

EXHIBITED: Aldeburgh, Peter Pears Gallery, Howard Hodgkin: Stage Designs, 2002.

The British painter and printmaker Howard Hodgkin is said to have decided to become an artist at the age of five. A pupil of Wilfrid Blunt at Eton College, where among his fellow pupils was Rory McEwen, Hodgkin was unhappy there and ran away from school twice, as he also did at his next school, Bryanston in Dorset. Between 1949 and 1950 he studied at the Camberwell School of Art before moving on to the Bath Academy of Art. Hodgkin first exhibited his work at a group show at the Bath Art Gallery in 1952, and the following year produced his first print. In 1962, at the age of thirty, he had a joint exhibition, with Allen Jones, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and later that year was given his first solo exhibition at the Arthur Tooth & Sons Gallery in London. Although the exhibition was not a commercial success, the gallery continued to show his work for several years, while later exhibitions were at Kasmin Ltd. in London and Knoedler in New York. Having collected Indian miniatures and drawings for some time, Hodgkin made his first trip to India in 1964, and was to return there regularly for many years, the landscape of the country inspiring a series of colourful screenprints.

By the 1970s Hodgkin had become established as one of the major British artists of his generation, with solo shows in London, Germany, Paris and New York and a first retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1976, the same year that he was appointed CBE. In 1981 his work was included in the exhibition A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy and three years later he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale with a display of twenty-four works; the exhibition later travelled to Washington D.C., New Haven, Hannover and London. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he continued to exhibit widely in Europe and America, winning the second annual Turner Prize in 1985. Knighted in 1992, Hodgkin was given a major retrospective of his paintings in New York, Düsseldorf and London in 1995, followed by others in Edinburgh in 2002, Dublin, London and Madrid in 2006, New Haven and Cambridge in 2007, Oxford in 2010 and Toulouse in 2013. In his last years the artist would spend the winter months living and working in India.

Howard Hodgkin’s first foray into theatrical scenography came in 1981, when he designed both the sets and costumes for the dance Night Music for the Ballet Rambert in London. The director of the company, Richard Alston, has noted that it was ‘the sense of theatre – of toy theatre, really – in Howard’s pictures that commended him as the man for this kind of job. They often come with a sort of prosceniumarch shape around them: a strong sense of the frame, even when the paint spills over it. And of course, they’re rich in colour, which is one way of being effective on stage. 1 Between 1981 and 2016 Hodgkin produced set designs (as well as, occasionally, designs for costumes) for several ballets, operas and dances; for the Ballet Rambert, the Royal Ballet, the Smithsonian Institute and the Mark Morris Dance Group. As John-Paul Stonard has observed, ‘Many of [Hodgkin’s] works have an enclosed, intimate and magical quality that evokes the space of the theatre, thick swathes of paint suggesting scenery drops, curtains or the proscenium arch. His sensibility and his particular touch, his very personal manner of putting paint on wood, seem to transfer naturally to the stage.’2

Hodgkin seems to have found the process of producing set designs quite challenging, and at times frustrating. As he once stated, ‘Designing for the theatre is a completely different activity from making your

own work. You are following a brief not of your own making, and you can’t have the same quality control over the end result. You don’t even know what you’ve made until you see it on stage, by which time it’s too late anyway.’3 Nevertheless, as he stated elsewhere, ‘I like working for the stage because it’s the opposite of working alone in the studio. 4

This large sheet is a design for the front drop cloth for a production of the ballet Pulcinella, with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Richard Alston, staged by the Ballet Rambert in 1987. Hodgkin provided several designs for the drop cloth and backdrops for the production, and also designed the costumes worn by the dancers5. Stonard has noted that, ‘For both works made for the Ballet Rambert, Night Music (1981) and Pulcinella (1987), and for the Royal Ballet production Piano (1989), Hodgkin had a close working relationship with the production team as the work developed. The collaboration with Richard Alston and Ballet Rambert was particularly close and fruitful…For both productions Hodgkin designed costumes after attending rehearsals and seeing the way that the dancers moved and the way they communicated the story. His designs for these are characterised by their unmistakeably Hodgkinesque colour…Hodgkin’s work for Pulcinella comprises perhaps the most strongly referential of his stage designs…His designs evoke both the light and colour of Naples and the excitement and sense of the story.’6 Of his work on Pulcinella, Hodgkin pointed out that ‘The real problem for me was to find some kind of visual language which was not literally representational, did not refer to the Commedia dell’arte and which did evoke Naples. The act drop and the costumes were the most difficult – also Picasso was always lurking over my shoulder, but, in so far as we all succeeded, it was Stravinsky that got us through.’7 The Ballet Rambert production of Pulcinella toured around Britain in 1987 and 1988 before its final performances at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London.

The use of elements of collage in the present work is a feature of several of Hodgkin’s stage designs, although it is not generally found in his other works on paper. As Stonor points out, ‘When hung in a gallery, Hodgkin’s paintings need a great deal of space to themselves in which to glow and live their distinct lives. Sets by comparison, exist at very close quarters with all manner of other expressive activities, and therefore require, to a degree, the effacement of artistic personality; a delicate and diplomatic holdingback, a mutual respect…But what is held back is held back in the interests of a greater good: personality is transmuted into something more valuable. This distinction is an important one, and one which Hodgkin is very aware of. His use of collage in certain designs, a ‘de-personalised’ technique found very rarely in his work, underlines the difference.’8

Most of Howard Hodgkin’s relatively few designs for the stage are today in private collections, although a design for the back cloth for Night Music of 1981 is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London9 Hodgkin’s collaged design for the poster of Pulcinella appeared at auction in 201810, while a different design for the Pulcinella poster was sold at auction in 202211

No.1

John Varley

1. Richard and Samuel Redgrave, A Century of Painters of the English School London, 1866, Vol.I, p.498.

2. Inv. 1977.33. An image of the watercolour, which measures 704 x 564 mm., is visible online at https://www.themorgan.org/drawings/ item/123467 [accessed 14 July 2024].

No.2

Henry Fuseli

1. The majority of Fuseli’s extant drawings date from the 1770s onwards, since much of his earliest output was lost in a fire at the home of his friend and patron Joseph Johnson in 1770. Around 1,400 drawings by the artist are known today, of which the largest single group, amounting to over six hundred sheets, is in the Kunsthaus in Zurich.

2. Paul Ganz, The Drawings of Henry Fuseli, London, 1949, p.12.

3. Frederick Cummings and Allen Staley, Romantic Art in Britain: Paintings and Drawings 1760-1860, exhibition catalogue, Detroit and Philadelphia, 1968, pp.121-122.

4. Kathryn Long, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Henry Fuseli’s Nibelungen Series and Drawings of Courtesans’, James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal 2022-2023, p.72.

5. Klemm in Lentzsch et al, op.cit. p.158.

6. Klemm in Lentzsch et al, op.cit. pp.161-162.

7. In wenigen Monaten schafft er, meist auf dem Landsitz von Joseph Johnson, eine Folge von Nibelungenblättern, die zu seinen besten Leistungen gehören; wäre sie nicht Fragment geblieben, so hätte diese Folge sein Meisterwerk werden können.’; Schiff, op.cit. p.315.

8. Ketty Gottardo, ‘Tracing, Revising and Mirroring: Fuseli’s Pleasure in Drawing’, in Lentzsch et al, op.cit., pp.82 and 87-89.

9. Long, op.cit. pp.73-74.

10. Ganz, op.cit. p.22.

11. David H. Solkin, ‘Drawing in an Age of Luxury: Fuseli’s Women in their Time’, in David H. Solkin, ed., Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism, exhibition catalogue, London and Zurich, 2022-2023, p.19.

No.3

John Linnell

1. Linnell was eventually invited to join the Royal Academy in the 1860s, when he was much more successful, but refused.

2. John Linnell, ‘Autobiographical Notes’, unpublished MS, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, p.13; Quoted in Katharine Crouan, John Linnell: A Centennial Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge and New Haven, 1982-1983, p.xiv.

3. Cummings and Staley, op.cit., p.238, no.157; Paris, Petit Palais, op.cit., p.165, no.164 (not illustrated); Madrid, Museo del Prado, Pintura Británica de Hogarth a Turner exhibition catalogue, 1988-1989, pp.242-243, no.60; David Linnell, Blake, Palmer, Linnell and Co.: The Life of John Linnell, Lewes, 1994, p.359, no.77 (not illustrated); Sale (‘Property Formerly in the Collection of the Late Sir Lawrence Gowing, C.B.E., R.A.’), London, Christie’s, 15 December 2022, lot 133 (sold for £20,160). The painting is listed in Linnell’s account book: 1824-25 Southampton from the River near Netley Abbey Painted for Mr. Hall of Southampton 25 Gns. Canvas 1 ft 6 x 3 ft.’. The painting, together with the present watercolour, was later in the collection of the English painter, scholar, writer and museum curator Sir Lawrence Gowing RA CBE (1918-1991).

4. Quoted in Crouan, op.cit., 1982-1983, p.23, under no.61. Hall added My real ambition is now the Itchen Ferry (morning) as a companion to the sunset.’, and he commissioned a second painting from Linnell, The Ferry of Itchen, which was likewise painted in 1825.

5. Katherine Crouan, John Linnell: Truth to Nature (A Centennial Exhibition) exhibition catalogue, London and New York, 1982, pp.VIII-IX.

No.4

William Henry Hunt

1. Ruskin hung a watercolour still-life by Hunt alongside several by his idol, J. M. W. Turner, in his bedroom at Brantwood.

No.5

William Henry Hunt

1. William Cosmo Monkhouse, ‘Hunt, William Henry’, Dictionary of National Biography, Vol.28, New York and London, 1891, p.282.

2. Witt, op.cit., pp.24 and 28.

No.6

David Cox

1. ‘Sketch of the Life of the Late David Cox’, Illustrated London News, 9 July 1859, p.42.

2. Joseph Farington, The Farington Diary, London, 1923, Vol.II, p.5 (entry for 30 August 1802).

3. Stephen Duffy, The Discovery of Paris: Watercolours by Early Nineteenth-Century British Artists, exhibition catalogue, London, 2013, p.77, under no.29.

4. Wilcox, op.cit., p.175, under no.46.

5. The posthumous Reitlinger sale (‘Property from the Estate of Henry S. Reitlinger, dec’d’), London, Sotheby’s, 26 March 1975, lot 186; London, Spink-Leger Pictures, op.cit., no.30; Gérald Bauer, David Cox 1783-1859: Précurseur des Impressionists?, Arceuil, 2000, illustrated p.147; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 20 November 2003, lot 89; Lowell Libson Ltd., op.cit. illustrated p.114. The drawing measures 315 x 220 mm.

6. Wilcox, op.cit., p.176, under no.47.

7. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 3 July 2024, lot 241. An image of the watercolour, which measures 282 x 200 mm. and was with the Manning Gallery in London in 1966, is visible online at https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6491718 [accessed 2 March 2025].

No.7

William Roxby Beverley

1. Frank L. Emanuel, ‘William Roxby Beverley: Artist, Scene-Painter, Actor, Actor-Manager and Theatre-Proprietor’, Walker’s Quarterly January 1921, p.5.

2. Ibid. p.18.

3. Henry J. E. Carter, ‘Illusion and Atmosphere. The Work of William Roxby Beverly’, Country Life 22 June 1978, p.1798.

No.8

Peter De Wint

1. Walter Armstrong, Memoir of Peter De Wint London and New York, 1888, p.47.

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

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

4. Gilbert R. Redgrave, David Cox & Peter De Wint, London, 1891, pp.79-80.

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

6. Inv. 2007.650; Suzanne Folds McCullagh, ed., Dreams & Echoes: Drawings and Sculpture in the David and Celia Hilliard Collection exhibition catalogue, Chicago, 2013-2014, pp.84-85, no.31.

7. Eric Shanes, The Golden Age of Watercolours: The Hickman Bacon Collection, exhibition catalogue, Dulwich and New Haven, 2001-2002, p.100, no.63 (where dated c.1839).

No.9

J. M. W. Turner

1. H. M. Cundall, ed., William Callow R.W.S., F.R.G.S.: An Autobiography, London, 1908, pp.66-67.

2. A. J. Finberg, In Venice with Turner, London, 1930, p.vii.

3. Martin Butlin, ‘Turner’s Venetian Watercolours’, in London, Christie’s, Old Master and British Drawings and Watercolours, London, Thursday 10 July 2014, p.109.

4. Evelyn Joll, Martin Butlin and Luke Herrmann, ed., The Oxford Companion to J. M. W. Turner, Oxford, 2001, p.362.

5. Lindsay Stainton, Turner’s Venice New York, 1985, p.27.

6. Inv. TB CCCXV. Almost all of these are illustrated in colour in Ian Warrell, Turner and Venice, exhibition catalogue, London and Fort Worth, 2003-2004. A number of late Venetian watercolours are also found in three other sketchbooks in the Turner Bequest.

7. ‘Appendix: The papers used for Turner’s Venetian Watercolours’, in Warrell, ibid. 2003-2004, p.258, where it is further suggested that ‘Perhaps the volume was left with Turner’s agent, Thomas Griffith, who offered them for sale after the artist’s death.’

8. Ibid. p.25.

9. Stainton, op.cit., p.54, under no.43.

10. Warrell, op.cit., 2003-2004, p.233.

11. Ian Warrell, Venice with Turner London, 2020, p.117.

12. Finberg, op.cit. p.125.

13. Inv. 1915,0313.50; Andrew Wilton, The Life and Work of J. M. W. Turner, Fribourg and London, 1979, p.463, no.1354; Stainton, op.cit. pp.6465, no.87, pl.87; Andrew Wilton, Turner in his Time London and New York, 2006-2007 [reprinted 2024], illustrated p.187; Warrell, op.cit. 2003-2004, p.177, fig.188, no.109; Warrell, op.cit. 2020, illustrated p.109.

14. Warrell, op.cit., 2003-2004, p.171.

15. Inv. 1958,0712.443; Wilton, op.cit. 1979, p.463, no.1359; Warrell, op.cit., 2003-2004, p.172, fig.181.

16. Inv. B1977.14.4652; New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, English Drawings and Watercolors 1550-1850 in the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, exhibition catalogue, 1972, pp.78-79, no.108, pl.108; Wilton, op.cit. 1979, p.463, no.1360; Warrell, op.cit. 2003-2004, p.175, fig.184, no.111; Tim Barringer et al, Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin exhibition catalogue, New Haven and Compton, 20192020, pp.131-132, no.11; Ian Warrell, Turner New Haven, 2025, p.104, pl.64.

17. Turner was one of several artists, including Copley Fielding, Clarkson Stanfield and David Roberts, who presented Griffith with a piece of silver plate in gratitude for his services in 1840. Although named by the artist as an executor of his estate, Griffith chose to resign from this role after Turner’s death over the potential conflict with his activities as an art dealer.

18. Wilton, op.cit. 1979, p.464, no.1368 (not illustrated); Stainton, op.cit., p.66, no.94, pl.94; Warrell, op.cit. 2003-2004, p.174, fig.183, no.112.

No.10

J. M. W. Turner

1. John Russell, ‘Turner and Switzerland’, in John Russell and Andrew Wilton, Turner in Switzerland, Zurich, 1976, p.14 and p.19.

2. Ibid., p.21.

3. John Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism 1851; Reprinted in E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, ed., The Works of John Ruskin, Vol.XII: Lectures on Architecture and Painting (Edinburgh, 1853) with Other Papers 1844-1854 London, 1904, pp.391-392.

4. Andrew Wilton, Turner in his Time London and New York, 2006-2007 [reprinted 2024], pp.195 and 202.

5. Cook and Wedderburn, ed., op.cit., p.190.

6. Various early descriptions of this watercolour described it as a view on the Rhine, or of either Lake Brienz or Lake Lucerne.

7. New York, Christie’s, Remastered: Old Masters from the Collection of J. E. Safra 25 January 2023, unpaginated, under lot 65.

8. Inv. D36129, Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 280; Warrell, op.cit. 1995, pp.66-67, no.28; Ian Warrell, ed., J. M. W. Turner exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, 2007-2008, pp.218-219, no.157.

9. Inv. D36053, Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 208; Warrell, op.cit., 1995, pp.67-68, no.29.

10. Inv. D36055, Turner Bequest CCCLXIV 209; Warrell, op.cit., 1995, pp.82-83, no.40.

11. Inv. 69.154.59; Wilton, op.cit., 1979, p.482, no.1516. The work is visible in colour online at https://risdmuseum.org/art-design/collection/passst-gotthard-switzerland-6915459?return=%2Fart-design%2Fcollection%3Fsearch_api_fulltext%3Dturner%26field_type%3DAll%26op%3D [accessed 10 October 2023].

12. Inv. D NG 863; Wilton, op.cit. 1979, p.478, no.1487; Christopher Baker, English Drawings & Watercolours 1600-1900: National Gallery of Scotland Edinburgh, 2011, pp.356-357, no.D NG 863.

13. I have seen fifteen new sketches of Turner to-day and believe I shall get him to do some which makes me happy.’; Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse, ed., The Diaries of John Ruskin, Oxford, 1956, p.275.

14. Inv. 980-1900; Wilton, op.cit., 1979, pp.487-488, no.1562 (as Lake Brienz); Shanes, op.cit., 2000-2001, pp.238-239, no.110; David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Sam Smiles, ed., Late Turner: Painting Set Free, exhibition catalogue, London, Los Angeles and San Francisco, 2014-2015, pp.238-239, no.170. The dimensions of the watercolour are 377 x 545 mm.

15. Andrew Wilton, ‘Turner’s Swiss Watercolours’, in Russell and Wilton, op.cit. pp.27-28.

16. John Ruskin, Catalogue of Turner Sketches in the National Gallery, pt.1, London, 1857; Reprinted in E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, ed., The Works of John Ruskin, Vol.XIII: Turner: The Harbours of England. Catalogues and Notes London, 1904, pp.189-190.

No.11

Peter De Wint

1. Walter Armstrong, Memoir of Peter De Wint London and New York, 1888, p.41.

2. Smith, op.cit., p.70.

3. London, W/S Fine Art Ltd., Peter De Wint: Colourist and Countryman, exhibition catalogue, 2005, unpaginated, under no.10.

No.12

John Martin

1. Martin Myrone, ed., John Martin: Apocalypse, exhibition catalogue, London, 2011, p.185.

2. ‘Fine Art Gossip’, The Athenaeum, 27 May 1854, p.657.

3. William Feaver, The Art of John Martin, Oxford, 1975, p.154.

4. Among Martin’s proposals to improve London’s water and drainage systems, he suggested that a reservoir be built in Richmond Park.

5. Saturday Magazine, 13 November 1841, p.186; Quoted in Myrone, ed., op.cit., p.190, under nos.107-109.

6. Inv. B1977.14.6222; New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, English Drawings and Watercolors 1550-1850 in the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon exhibition catalogue, 1972, p.93, no.131, pl.131; Feaver, op.cit. p.173, pl.130; Twickenham, Marble Hill House, Alexander Pope’s Villa, exhibition catalogue, 1980, p.51, no.53, illustrated p.56; Myrone, ed., op.cit., pp.190-193, no.107. The dimensions of the watercolour are 298 x 603 mm.

7. Inv. FA.535; Mary L. Pendered, John Martin, Painter: His Life and Times, New York, 1924, illustrated between pp.48 and 49; Christopher Johnstone, John Martin London, 1974, illustrated p.90; Feaver, op.cit. p.178, pl.136; London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, John Martin 1789-1854. Loan Exhibition: Oil Paintings Watercolours Prints, exhibition catalogue, 1975, p.43, no.44, pl.45; Myrone, ed., op.cit. pp.190-193, no.108. A later watercolour view of Richmond Park, dated 1850, is also in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Inv.1035-1873; Johnstone, op.cit. illustrated pp.104-105; London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, op.cit. p.44, no.47, pl.48; Myrone, ed., op.cit. pp.190-193, no.109).

8. Inv. P.600; Evelyn Joll, Cecil Higgins Art Gallery: Watercolours and Drawings Bedford, 2002, p.174, no.P.600.

9. A watercolour of Richmond Park, signed and dated 1850, was sold at auction at London, Sotheby’s, 4 July 2012, lot 186.

No.13

John Frederick Lewis

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

2. Quoted in Michael Lewis, John Frederick Lewis, R.A. 1805-1876, Leigh-on-Sea, 1978, p.33.

3. The posthumous Lewis studio sale (‘Catalogue of the Remaining Works of That Distinguished Artist, John F. Lewis, R.A., Deceased’), London, Christie’s, 4-7 May 1877, lot 169; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 18 March 1980, lot 124; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 5 July 2017, lot 202.

4. Lewis, op.cit., p.84, no.421; The posthumous Lewis studio sale (‘Catalogue of the Remaining Works of That Distinguished Artist, John F. Lewis, R.A., Deceased’), London, Christie’s, 4-7 May 1877, lot 135 (‘Sheikh El Belled, Kom Ombos, 1850’); J. & W. Vokins, London; The Fine Art Society, London; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 2 April 1996, lot 102; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 21 June 2000, lot 56; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 28 November 2000, lot 183; Anonymous sale (‘Property from a Princely Collection’), London, Christie’s, 4 June 2024, lot 42. The dimensions of the work, which is signed and dated 1850, are 386 x 549 mm.

No.14

George Richmond

1. When Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria sent for Richmond to draw the prince on his deathbed. The artist, who was something of a hypochondriac, refused the commission on the grounds of poor health, and from then on lost the Queen’s favour. It is thought that may have been the reason that the artist was never given a Baronetcy.

2. Raymond Lister, George Richmond: A Critical Biography, London, 1981, p.70 and pp.138-139.

3. Susan Sloman, Missing Pages. George Richmond R.A. 1809-1896: Drawings, Watercolours, Letters, Journals & Notebooks, exhibition catalogue, London, 2001, unpaginated, no.66, pl.XXXVI (where dated c.1848).

4. Inv. PD 43-1971; Lister, op.cit. pl.XVII, fig.33; Andrew Wilton and Anne Lyles, The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880 exhibition catalogue, London and Washington D.C., 1993, no.121, pl.157. The watercolour is inscribed by Richmond Norbury Woods – from the Garden of Cowslip Cottage Mickleham, Surrey.’.

5. Inv. FDA-D.434-2010; Lister, op.cit. pl.XVII, fig.34. A colour image of the work, which is inscribed by the artist Sketched in company with my dear Friend Saml. Palmer.’, is visible online at https://catalogue.etoncollege.com/object-fda-d-434-2010 [accessed 11 April 2025].

6. Inv. T08272; Anne Lyles and Robin Hamlyn, British Watercolours from the Oppé Collection, exhibition catalogue, London and elsewhere, 19971999, pp.230-231, no.98.

No.15

Alfred William Hunt

1. More than two hundred of the artist’s sketchbooks are today in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

2. Andrew Wilton, ‘Alfred William Hunt’ [exhibition review], The Burlington Magazine May 2005, pp.354-355. Hunt and Ruskin were to enjoy a friendship from the mid-1850s onwards, with Ruskin often praising the works which Hunt exhibited.

3. F. G. Stephens, ‘Mr. A. W. Hunt’s Pictures’, The Athenaeum 19 January 1884, p.94. More recently, Andrew Wilton has noted that a lifelong dialogue with the protean Turner.’ (Wilton, ibid., p.354).

4. Christopher Newall, ‘Alfred William Hunt: The Parabola of Pre-Raphaelitism’, in Christopher Newall, The Poetry of Truth: Alfred William Hunt and the Art of Landscape exhibition catalogue, Oxford and New Haven, 2004, p.33.

5. Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, Oxford, 1973, p.145.

6. Allen Staley and Christopher Newall, Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature, exhibition catalogue, London, 2004, p.154, under no.87.

No.16

John Dawson Watson

1. Forrest Reid, Illustrators of the Sixties London, 1928, p.166.

2. George and Edward Dalziel, The Brothers Dalziel, London, 1901, p.174.

3. Inv. T0858. The drawing is visible online at http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/watson-the-trunk-of-a-birch-tree-t08258 [accessed 12 April 2025].

No.17

John Ruskin

1. Letter of 24 August 1845; Reprinted in E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, ed., The Works of John Ruskin, Vol.IV: Modern Painters, Vol.II London, 1903, p.xxvi.

2. Paul H. Walton, Master Drawings by John Ruskin: Selections from the David Thomson Collection Yelvertoft Manor, 2000, p.19.

3. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol.1, 1843; Reprinted in E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, ed., The Works of John Ruskin, Vol.III. Modern Painters, London, 1903, p.343.

4. Robert Hewison, Ian Warrell and Stephen Wildman, Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites exhibition catalogue, London, 2000, p.269, no.254; Kevin Jackson, The Worlds of John Ruskin, London, 2010, illustrated in colour p.135. The watercolour is today in the collection of the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University.

5. John Ruskin, ‘The Two Paths. Lecture IV: Influence of Imagination in Architecture’, 1857 (pub.1859); Reprinted in E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, ed., The Works of John Ruskin, Vol.XVI. “A Joy for Ever” and The Two Paths, London, 1905, p.371.

6. John Ruskin, ‘The Laws of Fésole’, 1879; Reprinted in E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, ed., The Works of John Ruskin, Vol.XV. The Elements of Drawing, The Elements of Perspective and The Laws of Fésole London, 1904, p.62.

7. John Ruskin, ‘Notes on Educational Series’, 1878; Reprinted in E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, ed., The Works of John Ruskin, Vol.XXI. The Ruskin Art Collection at Oxford: Catalogues, Notes and Instructions London, 1906, p.106.

8. Walton, op.cit., p.134, under pl.17.

9. Jeanne Clegg, John Ruskin, exhibition catalogue, Sheffield and elsewhere, 1983, p.85.

10. Christopher Newall, John Ruskin: Artist and Observer, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa and Edinburgh, 2014, p.305, under no.106.

11. Inv. 46; Clegg, op.cit., p.84, no.246, illustrated in colour p.8; Jackson, op.cit., illustrated in colour p.121. The watercolour measures 255 x 375 mm.

12. Walton, op.cit., pp.134-141, pl.17; Newall, op.cit. pp.304-305, no.106.

13. Inv. AH01159/73; Hewison, Warrell and Wildman, op.cit., p.266, no.247; Suzanne Fagence Cooper and Richard Johns, ed., Ruskin, Turner & the Storm Cloud exhibition catalogue, York and Kendal, 2019, p.113, fig.85.

14. Inv. HF021P. An image of the watercolour is visible online at https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/vevey-sunrise-262130/search/actor:ruskinjohn-18191900/page/2 [accessed 7 May 2025].

15. Inv. WA.RS.ED.003 and WA.RS.ED.005; Hewison, Warrell and Wildman, op.cit. p.267, no.250; Newall, op.cit., pp.306-307, no.107.

No.18

William Linnell

1. The present sheet was formerly in the collection of Joan Linnell Burton (1909-1997), the great-granddaughter of John Linnell.

2. William’s sister Mary Ann, known as Polly, cared for his three children when the artist and his children moved into their home at the Redhill estate in November 1870, shortly after the death of Isabelle.

3. Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus”, London, 1863, p.352.

4. James Dafforne, ‘British Artists: Their Style and Character. No. CVII: James Thomas Linnell’, The Art-Journal, October 1872, pp.250-251.

5. William Sharp, The Nineteenth Century Series. Progress of Art in the Century, London and Edinburgh, 1906, p.63.

6. Inv. 1983,1001.16. An image of the work is visible at https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1983-1001-16 [accessed 9 November 2022].

7. Inv. TO5815. An image of the work is visible online at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/linnell-on-the-road-from-betws-y-coed-todolwyddelan-t05815 [accessed 14 September 2024].

8. Images of the two works are visible online at https://images.memorix.nl/cia/thumb/640x480/ec776f67-331b-a9c9-6813-c1089b21f936.jpg and https://photocollections.courtauld.ac.uk/sec-menu/search/detail/039ab058-249a-11ee-83f0-ac1f6ba5d150/media/40525cd3-8187-070def2e-06da432821b8?mode=detail&view=horizontal&rows=1&page=25&fq%5B%5D=search_s_folder_name:%22Courtauld_001626_ Witt_023602%20%2F%20Linnell,%20William%20%2F%201826-%5C%3F1906%22&sort=order_s_accession_number%20 asc&filterAction [accessed 9 March 2025].

9. Inv. TO5816. An image of the work is visible online at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/linnell-near-red-hill-t05816 [accessed 9 March 2025].

No.19

Frederick Sandys

1. Douglas E. Schoenherr, ‘The Spectacular Rise – and Sad Decline – of Frederick Sandys’, in Elzea, op.cit. p.15.

2. Ibid. p.10.

3. The drawing was signed, dated and inscribed May & Winnie Gillilan: 1882 / F. Sandys at the upper right corner of the sheet, and its original dimensions were 724 x 540 mm. An image of the drawing in its previous state, showing the two sisters dressed in identical white dresses with lace collars, is illustrated in Elzea, op.cit., p.267, no.4.27.

4. The photograph is visible online at https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/photos/item/BL10754 [accessed 13 April 2025].

5. The two oil paintings are untraced, but a finished drawing for the portrait of William Gillilan (Elzea, op.cit., pp.273-274, no.4.53, illustrated in colour p.76, pl.62) was formerly in the collection of Philip Rieff and Alison Douglas Knox in Philadelphia and appeared at auction there in 2008 (Sale, Philadelphia, Freeman’s, 7 December 2008, lot 56), while a preparatory sketch for the head of the portrait of Mary Gillilan is today in the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery (Inv. 872.06; Elzea, op.cit., p.272, no.4.44).

6. Elzea, op.cit., p.275, no.4.59.

No.20

Hubert von Herkomer

1. Vincent van Gogh was particularly enamoured of Herkomer’s illustrations for The Graphic and owned several prints of them.

2. A. L. Baldry, Hubert von Herkomer R.A.: A Study and Biography London, 1901, p.75.

3. Helen Zimmern, ‘Preface’, in London, Fine Art Society, op.cit. p.1.

No.21

Edward John Poynter

1. In 1886 Poynter was invited to join a committee of artists assembled by the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colour for the purpose of a scientific study of the effect of light on watercolours, and to prepare a report on the matter

2. Isabel G. McAllister, ‘Some Water-Colour Paintings by Sir Edward Poynter, P.R.A.’, The Studio, December 1917, p.90 and 94.

3. Lewis Lusk, ‘Sir E. J. Poynter as a Water-Colourist’, The Art Journal, June 1903, p.190.

4. Kim Sloan, ed., Places of the Mind: British watercolour landscapes 1850-1950, exhibition catalogue, London, 2017, p.57.

5. Inv. B1990.2.2; Scott Wilcox and Christopher Newall, Victorian Landscape Watercolors exhibition catalogue, New Haven and elsewhere, 19921993, pp.184-185, no.120.

6. Inv. 2011,7030.1; Sloan, ed., op.cit., illustrated p.72, no.58.

No.22

Walter Sickert

1. Robert Upstone, Sickert in Venice exhibition catalogue, London, 2009, p.9.

2. Baron, op.cit., p.31.

3. In a letter written in the autumn of 1895; Robert Emmons, The Life and Opinions of Walter Richard Sickert, London, 1941, p.107.

4. Upstone, op.cit. p.57.

5. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 May 1983, lot 94 (as Santa Maria Formosa, sold for £4,840); Sale (‘Works by Walter Richard Sickert from the Collection of Sir Tristan Antico, Sydney, Australia’), London, Sotheby’s, 22 June 1994, lot 51 (as A Quiet Canal, Venice); Private collection; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 9 June 2006, lot 60 (as A Quiet Canal, Venice); Baron, op.cit., p.275, no.181 (where dated c.1903). The painting measures 19 x 14.5 cm. An image of the work is also visible online at https://x.com/ahistoryinart/status/1435273335588499460 [accessed 14 April 2025].

6. Lillian Browse, Sickert, London, 1960, p.69, no.32, pl.32 (incorrectly titled Santa Maria Formosa), where dated c.1901; Baron, op.cit. p.275, under no.181, no.2 (not illustrated). The painting measures 24.8 x 14.3 cm.

7. Browse, ibid. p.69, no.32.

8. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 19 July 1968, lot 35, not illustrated (bt. Grunfeld for 190 gns.); Baron, op.cit., p.275, under no.181, no.3 (not illustrated). The drawing measures 310 x 222 mm.

9. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 4 June 1971, lot 7 (as Santa Maria Formosa, Venice), not illustrated (bt. Leese for 340 gns.); Baron, op.cit. p.275, under no.181, no.4 (not illustrated); Anonymous sale, Newbury, Dreweatts, 19 October 2022, lot 28. Drawn in pen and ink over pencil on brown paper, squared for transfer, and signed Sickert and inscribed Maddalena – Venice the drawing measures 305 x 222 mm. An image of the drawing is visible online at https://auctions.dreweatts.com/past-auctions/drewea1-10311/lot-details/6fabf731-9298-4e99-9738af1100b7d682 [accessed 14 April 2025].

10. Browse, op.cit. pp.19-20.

11. ‘Obituary’, The Burlington Magazine, March 1918, p.120.

12. R[andolph] S[chwabe], ‘Judge William Evans’s Collection of Contemporary Pictures’, The Burlington Magazine May 1918, p.205.

No.23

John Singer Sargent

1. Although seventy-five watercolours were included in the artist’s studio sale in 1925, a further two hundred sheets were retained by his sisters Emily Sargent and Violet Sargent Ormond.

2. Letter of 8 February 1909 to Edward Boit; Quoted in Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, Sargent: The Watercolours, exhibition catalogue, London, 2017, p.23.

3. Herdrich and Weinberg, op.cit., p.21.

4. Quoted in Ormond and Kilmurray, op.cit., 2010, p.288. The following year, 1897, Sargent and the Playfairs were again in Scotland but did not return to Eilean Shona, instead staying at Glen Morvern, slightly further south.

5. Lilias Playfair, in a letter of 1953; Quoted in Ormond and Kilmurray, op.cit., 2010, p.288.

6. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 8 June 2000, lots 144 and 145; Ormond and Kilmurray, op.cit., 2010, pp.293-294, nos.988 and 989, pp.359-360, nos.988 and 989. Both watercolours measure 248 x 343 mm. The first of these is signed, dated and dedicated to my friend Mrs. Playfair Xmas 1896 John S. Sargent and the second is inscribed to Mrs. Playfair / Souvenir(?) of Schona [sic] John S. Sargent’.

7. Ormond and Kilmurray, op.cit., 2010, pp.290 and 295.

8. Inv. 50.130.30 and 50.130.81c; Herdrich and Weinberg, op.cit., p.290, no.257 and 258; Ormond and Kilmurray, op.cit. 2010, p.297, no.992 and p.299, no.994, p.360, nos.992 and 1994.

9. Ormond and Kilmurray, op.cit., 2010, pp.291-292, nos.986-987, p.296, no.991 and p.298, no.993.

10. Ormond and Kilmurray, op.cit., 2010, p.290. The watercolours produced by Sargent in Scotland were, however, the last significant watercolours that he was to paint in Britain.

No.24

William Fraser Garden

1. Charles Lane, The Fraser Family, London, 2010, p.75.

2. Scott Wilcox and Christopher Newall, Victorian Landscape Watercolors, exhibition catalogue, New Haven and elsewhere, 1992-1993, p.172, under no.108.

3. Charles Lane, ‘Art as a Family Affair: The Paintings of the Fraser Brothers’, Country Life 28 June 1979, p.2108.

4. A photograph of the bridge chapel with four storeys, as Garden drew it, is illustrated in Royal Commission on Historical Monuments: An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Huntingdonshire, London, 1926, frontispiece and pl.121, no.3, and in William Page et al, The Victoria History of the County of Huntingdon, Vol.II, London, 1932, illustrated facing p.212.

5. A photograph of the bridge at St. Ives as it appears today is found in Page et al, ibid., facing p.213, and also in Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Bedfordshire and the County of Huntingdon and Peterborough, 1968, pl.2.

6. Inv. 2000.342; London, Christopher Wood Gallery, The Year of the Watercolour: 16th Annual Exhibition of English Watercolours and Drawings of the 18th and 19th Centuries, 1993, no.14; London, Christie’s, The Fuller Collection of Victorian Landscape Watercolours, 7 April 2000, lot 116; Lane, op.cit., 2010, illustrated p.34. The drawing, which is signed and dated 1895, measures 462 x 578 mm.

No.25

Muirhead Bone

1. Campbell Dodgson, Etchings & Dry Points by Muirhead Bone, Vol.I: 1898-1907, London, 1909, p.16.

2. Sylvester Bone, Muirhead Bone: Artist and Patron, London, 2009, p.69.

3. Many of his drawings were published as The Western Front: Drawings by Muirhead Bone which appeared in monthly instalments throughout 1916 and 1917, eventually amounting to some 30,000 printed copies. In 1918 Bone published The Western Front, a series of one hundred drawings of military life.

4. Campbell Dodgson, ‘The Art of Muirhead Bone’, Country Life, 30 December 1916, p.773.

5. During his time in Italy Bone produced thirty-two copper plates and several fine drawings, some of which were sent from Italy to London and Glasgow to be sold by his dealers. A number of his drawings of Italy were also exhibited at the Colnaghi and Obach gallery in London in 1914, to very positive reviews.

6. Dodgson, op.cit., 1916, p.774.

7. Now replaced by a copy, Matteo di Ugolino’s sculpture of Saint Michael and the Dragon is today in the Museo del Opera del Duomo in Orvieto (Gerardo De Canio, ‘Il ciclo scultoreo nel duomo di Orvieto. Innovazione nella conservazione’, in Piero Cimbolli Spagnesi, ed., Studi sull’architettura del Duomo di Orvieto, Rome, 2020, p.109, fig.6).

No.26

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

1. Horace Brodzky, ed., Gaudier-Brzeska Drawings, London, 1946, unpaginated. The same author further noted of Gaudier-Brzeska that As a draughtsman…he will remain among the élite for his sinuous and vital contour. For as a draughtsman he was fully developed, but to reach his full stature as a stone-carver required more years than Brzeska was allowed to live. (Horace Brodzky, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska 1891-1914 London, 1933, p.116).

2. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 14 November 1984, lots 62 and 63; London, Browse & Darby, Gaudier-Brzeska 1891-1915, exhibition catalogue, 2002, unpaginated, nos.12 and 58, both illustrated in colour. The dimensions of the drawings are given as 25 x 20 in. and 25 1/4 x 20 1/4 in. It has been suggested that the second of these, a study of the torso of a male nude in profile, is a portrait of the sculptor Ossip Zadkine and was possibly drawn on his brief visit to London in 1913. Like the present sheet, both drawings once belonged to the bookseller Alan G. Thomas and were included in his 1963 catalogue.

3. Inv. 1339; Orléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts and Toulouse, Musée d’Art Moderne, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska exhibition catalogue, 1993, p.128, no.62 (where dated c.1912).

4. Inv. NPG 4814; Brodzky, op.cit., 1933, illustrated between pp.148-149; Brodzky, ed., op.cit., 1946, pl.3; Roger Cole, Burning to speak: The life and art of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Oxford, 1978, illustrated p.25; Malcolm Rogers, Master Drawings from the National Portrait Gallery, exhibition catalogue, Tulsa and elsewhere, 1993, pp.156-157, no.80; Roger Cole, Gaudier-Brzeska: Artist and Myth, Bristol, 1995, illustrated p.62; Evelyn Silber and David Finn, Gaudier-Brzeska: Life and Art, London, 1996, p.6, fig.3; H. S. Ede, Savage Messiah: A biography of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Cambridge and Leeds, 2011 ed., illustrated p.106.

5. Brodzky, op.cit., 1933, p.38. Brodzky adds, Brzeska was always busy; if not for himself, then for others. He found time to decorate Fraser’s studio, painting the staircase and other woodwork in primitive colours.’ (p.40). Lovat Fraser acquired several drawings from Gaudier-Brzeska; one of these, a head of a Japanese woman in coloured chalks, is today in the British Museum.

No.27

Eric Kennington

1. As the artist wrote, in a letter of 29 September 1917 to an official at the Department of Information, ‘a portrait draughtsman is welcomed out here, everybody wanting to be drawn from Generals to Privates and, consequently, am treated magnificently’; Quoted in Jonathan Black, ‘‘A Heroic Truth’: The War Art of Eric Kennington’, in Jonathan Black, The Graphic Art of Eric Kennington exhibition catalogue, London, 2001, p.4.

2. Inv. JP 191 P, D.994.4.23; Bruno Gaudichon, ‘Roubaix. Préfiguration du Musée d’Art et d’Industrie. Nouvelle dépôts. Nouvelle présentation’, Revue du Louvre, June 1995, illustrated p.26; ‘Invitation à la visite. La collection de Sir Edmund Davis’, 48/14: La revue du Musée d’Orsay Spring 1999, p.41, fig.2; Black, ibid., 2001, p.2, fig.2; Anne Gray, The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires, exhibition catalogue, Canberra and Adelaide, 2004, p.181, no.62, illustrated p.49, fig.44. The painting, which is signed and dated Eric H. Kennington 1914 and measures 132 x 122.3 cm., is on loan to the Musée d’Art et d’Industrie André Diligent – La Piscine in Roubaix.

3. Jonathan Black, ‘Neither Beasts, nor Gods, but Men.’ Constructions of Masculinity and the Image of the Ordinary British Soldier or ‘Tommy’ in the First World War Art of: C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946); Eric Henri Kennington (1888-1960) and Charles Sargeant Jagger (1885-1934), Unpublished Ph.D thesis, University College, London, 2003, p.37.

4. Sir Claude Phillips, ‘Grosvenor Gallery. International Society’, The Daily Telegraph, 17 April 1914, p.15.

5. The Daily Chronicle, 20 April 1914; Quoted in Gray, op.cit., p.181, under no.62.

6. Randall Davies, ‘The International’, The New Statesman 25 April 1914, pp.85-86.

7. Black, op.cit., 2001, p.34, under no.2.

8. The Edmund Davis donation also included works by Edward Burne-Jones, Frederick Cayley Robinson, William Holman Hunt, Augustus John, John Everett Millais, William Orpen, Glyn Philpot, Arthur Rackham, Walter Sickert, William Strang and George Frederic Watts.

9. An photograph of the drawing is in the Witt Collection at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and is visible online at https://photocollections.courtauld. ac.uk/sec-menu/search/detail/1b8188c0-b31b-1b2a-499b-18805f6b8d6d/media/88e8f284-42a1-bc29-c4cf-1e37c1b3a201?mode=detail& rows=1&page=32&fq%5B%5D=search_s_folder_name:%22Courtauld_031078_Witt_044152%20~2F%20Kennington,%20Eric%20 H.%20~2F%20Paintings%20%5C%26%20drawings,%20misc.%22&sort=order_s_accession_number%20asc [accessed 5 March 2025].

10. Black, op.cit., 2001, p.34, no.2. The dimensions of the drawing are 730 x 320 mm.

No.28

Rudolf Sauter

1. Sauter’s letters to his wife, describing the conditions in the camp, are today in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London.

2. Rudolf Sauter, Galsworthy the Man: An Intimate Portrait, London, 1967, pp.16-17.

3. In January 1917, after just over a year in an internment camp, Georg Sauter was repatriated to Germany. Rudolf Sauter refused to volunteer for national service and risked being interned himself, which he eventually was in March 1918.

No.29

Frederick Cayley Robinson

1. Alfred Lys Baldry, ‘An “Original” Painter: Mr. F. Cayley Robinson’, The Magazine of Art, 1896, p.471.

2. James Greig, ‘Frederic Cayley Robinson, A.R.A.’, in Randall Davies, ed., The Old Water-Colour Society’s Club 1927-1928: Fifth Annual Volume London, 1928, p.63.

3. William Schupbach, Acts of Mercy: The Middlesex Hospital paintings by Frederick Cayley Robinson (1862-1927), London, 2009, p.8. The artist likewise provided the drawings for an illustrated edition of The Blue Bird, published in 1911; the drawings were exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in London the same year.

4. The mural paintings remained in situ until the Middlesex Hospital was demolished in 2008, when they were acquired by the Wellcome Library in London.

5. Charlotte Gere, ‘Introduction’ in London, Fine Art Society, op.cit. 1969, unpaginated.

6. David Brown, ‘Introduction’, in London and Edinburgh, The Fine Art Society, Frederick Cayley Robinson A.R.A 1862-1927 1977, unpaginated.

7. Cecil French, ‘The Later Work of F. Cayley Robinson, A.R.A.’, The Studio June 1922, illustrated p.297 (as in the collection of E. Drage, Esq.); Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 10 June 2003, lot 85.

8. MaryAnne Stevens, ‘Frederick Cayley Robinson’, The Connoisseur September 1977, p.31, fig.12; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 7 June 1995, lot 167; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 6 June 2001, lot 97.

9. Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 9 May 2013, lot 65.

10. Stevens, ibid. p.34.

11. At his death French left his collection to several museums, including the British Museum, the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, the Guildhall Art Gallery in London and the Fulham Library.

12. French, op.cit., p.293.

No.30 Wyndham Lewis

1. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, London, 1937; 2nd edition, London, 1967, p.3.

2. As a recent scholar has noted, drawing functioned, in a sense, as painting for Lewis...The drawings stand as substitutes for paintings when means, materials or the creative will was not there, or at times when Lewis was so taken up with his written work, as in much of the 1920s and ‘30s, that more significant production would have been unfeasible.’; Jacky Klein, ‘Things of a Minor Kind’? Wyndham Lewis and the Art of Drawing’, in Jacky Klein, ed., The Bone Beneath the Pulp: Drawings by Wyndham Lewis, exhibition catalogue, London, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, 2004-2005, p.26.

3. Wyndham Lewis produced several drawings of Edith Sitwell, as well as a painted portrait, begun in 1923 but not completed until 1935.

4. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 12 October 1988, lot 39. The drawing is signed and dated 1921.

5. Michel, op.cit. p.379, no.498, illustrated pl.48.

6. Charles Handley-Read, ed., The Art of Wyndham Lewis, London, 1951, pp.94-95, pl.32 (as location unknown); Michel, op.cit. p.378, no.476, illustrated pl.48. Several years later, Lewis utilized a pose similar to that of this drawing for a three-quarter length painted portrait of a Pensive Woman of 1937, again likely depicting Froanna Lewis, which is today in the collection of the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery in Carlisle (Inv. 1978.108.151; Michel, op.cit. p.343, no.P85, pl.137; Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer, New Haven and London, 2000, p.464, fig.270; Paul Edwards and Richard Humphreys, Wyndham Lewis Portraits exhibition catalogue, London, 2008, illustrated p.97).

7. Handley-Read, ed., ibid. p.71.

No.31

Austin Osman Spare

1. Evening News, 15 May 1956; Quoted in Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist London, 2011, p.257.

2. London, The Maas Gallery, Borough Satyr: The Life and Art of Austin Osman Spare London, 2005, no.34, illustrated as frontispiece; Robert Ansell, ed., The Exhibition Catalogues of Austin Osman Spare, London, 2012, p.215, fig.54. The dimensions of the drawing, which is signed and dated 1923 AOS ONE are 400 x 510 mm.

3. William Wallace, The Catalpa Monographs: A Critical Survey of the Art and Writings of Austin Osman Spare, London, 2015, pl.16.

4. Baker, op.cit. p.139.

5. Austin Osman Spare, The Focus of Life: The Mutterings of Aaos, London, 1921 [2012 ed.], illustrated facing p.11. The drawing was with Alister Mathews, Bournemouth, in c.1977.

6. Anonymous sale (‘A Collection of Watercolours and Drawings by Austin Osman Spare’), London, Christie’s South Kensington, 12 May 1994, lot 30.

7. Baker, op.cit. p.135.

No.32

Gwen John

1. Alicia Foster, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, London and New York, 2023, p.208.

2. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s South Kensington, 19 December 1999, lot 41 (as House at Twilight). The dimensions of the drawing are 228 x 305 mm.

3. Inv. 2005.143.12; Cecily Langdale, Gwen John, New Haven and London, 1987, p.200, no.222, illustrated in colour p.114, pl.178 (where dated to the 1910s).

4. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s South Kensington, 9 December 2015, lot 72.

No.33

Gwen John

1. Susan Chitty, Gwen John 1876-1939, London, 1981 p.171. Louise Roche was to become a neighbour and close friend of Gwen John’s at Meudon, and in the 1940s wrote an unpublished memoir of the artist.

2. Alicia Foster, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, London and New York, 2023, pp.199-200. Gwen John’s letter to Véra Oumançoff is datable to July 1927.

3. Mary Taubman, Gwen John, London, 1985, p.21.

4. Cecily Langdale, Gwen John New Haven and London, 1987, p.65.

5. Ibid. pp.224-225, no.319, pl.360 (where dated to the 1920s); Sale, London, Sotheby’s, 20 March 2018, lot 128.

6. London, Matthiesen Ltd., Gwen John Memorial Exhibition, 1946, no.171; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 12 June 2017, lot 155.

No.34

Christopher Wood

1. Letter of 7 June 1922; Quoted in Katy Norris, Christopher Wood, exhibition catalogue, Chichester, 2016, p.32.

2. Gandarillas also introduced the young artist to opium, to which Wood was to remain addicted for the rest of his life.

3. Norris, op.cit., p.53.

4. Comparable studies of female nudes by Wood are in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and elsewhere.

No.35

Duncan Grant

1. Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant: A Biography, London, 1988, p.277.

2. Richard Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, exhibition catalogue, London and elsewhere, 1999-2000, p.270, under no.188.

3. Inv. GMA 2144. An image of the painting is visible online at https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/farmhouse-among-trees-211844/search/2025-makers:duncan-grant-18851978/page/7 [accessed 2 May 2025].

4. Inv. WA1940.1.5; Colin Harrison, Catherine Casley and Jon Whiteley, ed., The Ashmolean Museum: Complete Illustrated Catalogue of Paintings, Oxford, 2004, p.92.

5. Inv. TWCMS: A16. An image of the painting is at https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/provencal-landscape-36807/view_as/grid/search/2025-makers:duncan-grant-18851978/page/12/tagger/add [accessed 2 May 2025].

6. In later years the London Artists’ Association counted William Coldstream, Paul Nash, Victore Pasmore, William Roberts and Christopher Wood among its members, while Matthew Smith exhibited with the group but was not an official member.

7. Later in 1931, however, both Grant and Bell resigned from the LAA and signed contracts to sell their work through the Agnew’s and Lefevre galleries in London. The London Artists’ Association was eventually disbanded at the end of 1933, with a final retrospective exhibition held at the Cooling Galleries in 1934.

No.36 Wyndham Lewis

1. Sometimes also called ‘Tutsi’; the dog’s name was apparently an abbreviation of ‘Tutankhamun’.

2. W. K. Rose, ed., The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, London, 1963, p.376.

3. Michel, op.cit., pp.396-400, nos.730, 742, 744, 745, 768, 780 and 794; four of these illustrated on pl.98. Of these drawings, one is dated 1931, six are dated to 1932 and only one is dated 1933; a now-lost study of horizontal format. A handful of other drawings of Tut have been identified since the publication of Michel’s catalogue.

4. Michel, op.cit. p.113. As Michel points out, Lewis had planned to include a colour image of the present sheet in a book: ‘The book, to be called The Role of Line in Art, was to be brought out by Lord Carlow in a hand-printed edition on special paper…It was to have had six colour reproductions, of which three – the final state of Girl Sewing Portrait of the Artist’s Wife…and Tut… – are extant in colour proof. The text was to have been by Lewis. (p.157, note 22).

5. Jacky Klein, ed., The Bone Beneath the Pulp: Drawings by Wyndham Lewis, exhibition catalogue, 2004-2005, p.64, no.30. The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust also owns another drawing of the terrier (Michel, op.cit., p.398, no.768, not illustrated; Klein, ed., op.cit., p.64, no.29).

6. The appeal of Lewis’s studies of the dog is reflected in a newspaper review of that exhibition, which noted of the present sheet, Don’t miss Tutsi...the impudent pup...is an oasis in a stormy sea.’; Manchester Evening Chronicle 4 September 1956; Quoted in Paul O’Keefe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis London, 2000, p.623.

7. Edwards et al, op.cit., 2010, p.229, under no.138.

8. Jacky Klein, ‘Things of a Minor Kind’?’, in Klein, ed., op.cit., p.28.

No.37

Albert Moulton Foweraker

1. David Tovey, Pioneers of St. Ives Art at Home and Abroad (1889-1914) Tewkesbury, 2008, p.256.

2. C. Carus-Wilson, ‘Scientific Aspects of Health Resorts. VIII – Bournemouth’, Research: A Monthly Illustrated Journal of Science December 1889, p.125.

No.38

Philip de László

1. Owen Rutter, Portrait of a Painter: The Authorized Life of Philip de László London, 1939, p.233.

2. As Richard Ormond has noted of de László and his predecessor Sargent, who retired from portrait painting the same year that the Hungarian artist arrived in London, Both were cosmopolitan, international in outlook, and masters of high style and painterly panache…Portraits by Sargent and de László are marked by flowing brushwork and scintillating effects of light and colour that bring their subjects vividly to life. At the same time their sitters are invested with the aura of wealth and glamour, power and prestige, through the devices of grand design and pictorial invention.’; Richard Ormond, ‘De László and Sargent’, in Suzanne Bailey et al, A Brush with Grandeur: Philip Alexius de László (1869-1937) London, 2010, p.41.

3. Diary entry of 12 March 1934; Quoted in Duff Hart-Davis and Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, Philip de László: His Life and Art New Haven and London, 2010, p.251.

4. One of these is illustrated in Bailey et al, op.cit. p.198, no.129.

5. An image of the painting is visible online at https://www.delaszlocatalogueraisonne.com/catalogue/the-catalogue/marrakesh-a-native-girlholding-an-urn-9461/search/keywords:marrakesh/page/4 [accessed 28 April 2025].

6. Christopher Wood, ‘Philip de László in England’, in Bailey et al, op.cit. p.29, fig.16.

No.39

Austin Osman Spare

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

2. Inv. E.32-1997. An image of the drawing can be viewed online at https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O79290/self-portrait-drawing-spare-austinosman/ [accessed 16 January 2025].

3. Gary Sargeant, The Memoirs of an Artist: Friends & Influences, London, 2013, illustrated p.15.

4. Robert Ansell, ed., The Exhibition Catalogues of Austin O. Spare London, 2012, illustrated in colour p.233, fig.81.

5. Self-Portrait: Dream Content, 1937, in a private collection; Sargeant, op.cit., illustrated p.19; Mark C. O’Flaherty, ‘Austin Osman Spare – occultist, avant-gardist and ‘Britain’s first pop artist’’, The Financial Times, 28 September 2023.

No.40 Glyn Philpot

1. J. G. P. Delaney, ‘Gerald Heard’s memoir of Glyn Philpot c.1945’, The British Art Journal, Summer 2003, p.87.

2. Robin Gibson, ‘Glyn Philpot, R.A. at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford’ [exhibition review], The Burlington Magazine, November 1976, p.791.

3. J. G. P. Delaney, Glyn Philpot: His life and art Aldershot, 1999, p.141.

4. London, The Fine Art Society, Glyn Philpot RA: Paintings, drawings and sculptures from the Estate of Gabrielle Cross 1997-1998, nos.51-52, one illustrated p.43. One of these later appeared at auction in 1999 and 2001 (Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 30 September 1999, lot 70 and Anonymous sale, London, Phillips, 20 March 2001, lot 28).

5. ‘Paintings by Mr. Glyn Philpot’, The Manchester Guardian, 6 November 1937, p.7.

No.41

Graham Sutherland

1. Malcolm Yorke, The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic artists and their times New York, 1988, pp.125-126.

2. The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 10 September 1971, pp.27-28; Quoted in Martin Hammer, Graham Sutherland: Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits 1924-1950, exhibition catalogue, London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2005, p.104.

3. Inv. WA 1947.416; Hammer, ibid. p.128, no.57; Paul Gough, Sally Moss and Tehmina Goskar, Graham Sutherland: From Darkness into Light. Mining, Metal and Machines exhibition catalogue, Penzance and Swansea, 2013-2014, illustrated in colour p.62; Harrison et al, op.cit., pp.258259, no.100. The drawing measures 568 x 387 mm.

4. Harrison et al, op.cit. p.258, under no.100.

5. Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 October 1972, lot 121. The drawing is signed and dated 1942.

6. Anonymous sale (‘A Collection of Works by Graham Sutherland, O.M.’), London, Sotheby’s, 5 April 2000, lot 97; Tassi, op.cit., p.128, fig.123.

7. Inv. LD 1770; Ronald Alley, Graham Sutherland, exhibition catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, 1982, pp.96-97, no.98. The composition is repeated in a drawing formerly in the collection of Kenneth Clark; Tassi, op.cit. p.129, fig.124; Hammer, op.cit. p.126, no.55.

8. Cecil Beaton, ‘Introduction’, War Pictures by British Artists. Second Series, No.2: Production, London, 1943, p.6.

9. Noel Barber, Conversations with Painters, London, 1964, pp.47-48.

No.42

Henry Moore

1. Andrew Causey, The Drawings of Henry Moore Farnham, 2010, illustrated p.7.

2. Causey, ibid., pp.7-9.

3. Quoted in Alan Wilkinson, ‘Drawings for Sculpture’, in Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Henry Moore: Drawings Watercolours Gouaches, exhibition catalogue, 1970, unpaginated.

4. Henry Moore, ‘The Sculptor Speaks’, The Listener, 18 August 1937; Quoted in Alan Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Aldershot, 2002, pp.193-198.

5. These are the so-called First and Second Shelter Sketchbooks, which are today in the collections of the British Museum and the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green, Hertfordshire, respectively.

6. Kenneth Clark, Henry Moore Drawings, London, 1974, p.150.

7. Clark, ibid. pl.156; Garrould, ed., op.cit., p.98, no.AG 41.71 (HMF 1817), illustrated in colour pl.XI; Julian Andrews, London’s War: The Shelter Drawings of Henry Moore Aldershot, 2002, p.100, pl.45; Causey, op.cit. illustrated p.113, pl.102. The dimensions of the drawing are 381 x 559 mm.

8. Garrould, ed., op.cit. p.95, no.AG 41.62 (HMF 1808); Andrews, ibid. p.138, pl.80. The dimensions of the sheet are 380 x 555 mm.

9. Garrould, ed., op.cit. p.95, no.AG 41.61 (HMF 1807); Andrews, op.cit., p.139, pl.81. The dimensions of the drawing are 324 x 565 mm.

10. Clark, op.cit., p.292.

No.43

John Minton

1. Spalding, op.cit., 1991, p.93.

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

3. Letter to Michael Middleton, 25 September 1942; quoted in Spalding, op.cit., 1991, p.55.

4. Letter to Michael Ayrton, 6 January 1943; quoted in Spalding, op.cit. 1991, p.55.

5. Spalding, op.cit. 1991, p.80.

6. Spalding, op.cit. 1991, pp.127-128.

7. Spalding, op.cit. 1991, p.81.

8. Anonymous sale, London, Bonham’s, 17 March 2010, lot 59; Frances Spalding, ‘John Minton and Neo-Romanticism’, in Simon Martin and Frances Spalding, John Minton: A Centenary exhibition catalogue, Chichester, 2017, p.31, fig.25; Bath, Victoria Art Gallery and Falmouth, Falmouth Art Gallery, Freud Minton Ryan: Unholy Trinity exhibition catalogue, 2021, p.27, fig.15. Executed in watercolour, gouache and pen, and measuring 260 x 335 mm., the drawing is signed and dated 1945.

No.44

Keith Vaughan

1. Eric Newton, ‘Keith Vaughan Exhibition’, The Guardian, 23 March 1962, p.11.

2. Keith Vaughan, ‘Foreword’, in London, Alex Reid and Lefevre, Keith Vaughan: Gouaches and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1944, pp.9-11.

3. Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan: His Life and Work, London, 1990, p.85 and pp.99-100. The letter from Vaughan to Towne is dated 16 January 1944.

4. Ibid., p.139.

No.45

John Craxton

1. Ian Collins, John Craxton: A Life of Gifts New Haven and London, 2021, p.93. Craxton and Freud made portraits of each other and often exchanged drawings, although Freud later sold his works by Craxton to settle gambling debts.

2. Ioanna Moraiti, with Ian Collins and Michael Llewellyn-Smith, ‘The Early Years’, in Evita Arapoglou, ed., Ghika – Craxton – Leigh Fermor: Charmed Lives in Greece, exhibition catalogue, Nicosia, Athens and London, 2017-2018, p.38.

3. ‘Dialogue with the Artist’, in London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings 1941-1966, exhibition catalogue, 1967, p.7.

4. Sale (‘The Evill/Frost Collection’), London, Sotheby’s, 16 June 2011, lot 180 (sold for £181,250). The dimensions of the painting, which is signed and dated 1949, are 54 x 36 cm.

5. Inv. P.574; Evelyn Joll, Cecil Higgins Art Gallery: Watercolours and Drawings Bedford, 2002, p.84, no.P.574. The drawing, which measures 324 x 476 mm., is dated 5.7.46 and inscribed To Lucian from John Craxton’.

6. Ian Collins, John Craxton, Farnham, 2011, p.90, pl.107; London, Osborne Samuel, John Craxton in Greece: The Unseen Works exhibition catalogue, 2018, pp.42-43.

7. David Attenborough, ‘A Kind of Arcadia’, in Collins, op.cit. 2011, p.9.

8. Inv. P63; Geoffrey Grigson, John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings London, 1948, pl.21; Collins, op.cit., 2011, p.24, pl.19; Arapoglou, ed., op.cit., p.41, fig.43; Chichester, Pallant House Gallery, John Craxton: A Modern Odyssey exhibition catalogue, 2023-2024, p.59, fig.53.

9. Inv. CIRC.291-1959. An image of the drawing, which measures 585 x 457 mm., is visible online at https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/ O1036346/water-pot-in-a-window-drawing-john-craxton/ [accessed 1 May 2025].

10. Sale (‘Richard Attenborough: A Life Both Sides of the Camera’), London, Bonham’s, 21 October 2015, lot 205; Arapoglou, ed., op.cit. p.116, fig.8; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 17 November 2020, lot 401.

No.46 David Bomberg

1. Richard Cork, ‘Bomberg’s Odyssey’, in Richard Cork, David Bomberg, exhibition catalogue, London, 1988, p.38.

2. William Lipke, David Bomberg London, 1967, p.86.

3. Quoted in Richard Cork, David Bomberg, London, 1987, p.256.

4. Cork, op.cit., 1988, p.115.

5. In a letter of December 1944; Quoted in Cork, op.cit., 1987, pp.258-259.

6. London, Piano Nobile, op.cit. p.32, under no.11.

7. These include a drawing of The Round Church at Middle Temple (Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 May 1983, lot 144), another with Fischer Fine Art in 1988 (Norwich, Norwich School of Art Gallery, Rocks and Flesh: An argument for British Drawing, selected by Peter Fuller exhibition catalogue, 1985, p.73, no.59; Cork, op.cit., 1987, pl.331; Cork, op.cit. 1988, p.164, no.160 (where dated 1944); London, Fischer Fine Art Ltd., Bomberg: An Exhibition of Major Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1988, illustrated p.44), as well as a third large sheet which was on the London art market in 2017 (London, Piano Nobile, op.cit. pp.30-31, no.10).

8. Michael Kimmelman, ‘Talking Art with: David Bowie. A Musician’s Parallel Passion’, The New York Times 14 June 1998, p.35.

No.47

John Minton

1. Inv. 2015.2; London, W/S Fine Art Ltd., British Watercolours and Drawings 1750-1950 2007, no.70; New York and London, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Master Drawings 2015, no.52.

2. London, The Maas Gallery, British Pictures, exhibition catalogue, 2006, p.19, no.19. The watercolour measures 10 1/2 x 14 1/2 in.

3. Photograph in the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London. The watercolour, which measured 10 1/2 x 14 3/4 in., was lent by Mrs. Oliver Brown to the Arts Council’s retrospective travelling exhibition of Minton’s work in 1958.

4. Photograph in the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art.

5. Inv. E.5772-1958; London, Royal College of Art, and elsewhere, John Minton: 1917-1957. A Selective Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, 19931994, no.46. An image of the drawing is also visible online at http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O585362/watercolour-minton-john/ [accessed 25 April 2025].

6. Frances Spalding, ‘John Minton and Neo-Romanticism’, in Simon Martin and Frances Spalding, John Minton: A Centenary exhibition catalogue, Chichester, 2017, p.30, fig.23.

No.48

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

1. Douglas Hall, ‘Radiant and versatile artist active in St Ives and Scotland’ [obituary], The Guardian 29 January 2004.

2. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, ‘Collected Thoughts’, in Scottish Art Council and City of Edinburgh Museums and Art Galleries, op.cit., p.12.

3. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, ‘Some Thoughts on Drawing’, in St. Andrews, Crawford Art Centre, 1992, W. Barns-Graham: Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1992, unpaginated.

4. Edinburgh and elsewhere, op.cit., p.18, no.7a (‘Gurnard’s Head, no.2’); Sale (‘The Art Collection of Pep and John Branfield’), Penzance, Lay’s Auctioneers, 29 February 2024, lot 46 (acquired by the Penlee House & Gallery Museum for £23,000). The dimensions of the work are 360 x 510 mm.

5. Inv. BGT3284; Gurnard’s Head, no.1’. An image of the painting is visible online at https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/gurnards-head-226349 [accessed 8 May 2025].

No.49

Duncan Grant

1. Liz Hodgkinson, ‘Poisoned legacy of the Bloomsbury set’, Daily Mail 23 May 2012. The full unedited text is online at https://www.lizhodgkinson. com/pages/journalismArticle/the_garnett_girls [accessed 22 September 2024].

2. Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant: A Biography London, 1988, pp.421-422. In the early 1970s Nerissa Garnett painted some of the walls at Charleston, under Grant’s supervision.

3. In a letter from Angelica Garnett to Clive Bell of 26 January 1962, quoted in Spalding, ibid., p.440.

4. A photograph of the chair in Grant’s studio – which also served as his sitting room, since it was one of the warmest rooms in the house – is reproduced in Quentin Bell and Virginia Nicholson, Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden 2018, p.72 and on the cover. The chair was apparently much disliked by the painter Walter Sickert when he saw it in Vanessa Bell’s London studio in 1938.

5. Inv. CHA/P/181. Photographed in situ in Bell and Nicholson, ibid. p.70, an image of the painting is also visible online at https://artuk.org/ discover/artworks/nerissa-in-a-white-blouse-73840/search/2025--makers:duncan-grant-18851978/page/16 [accessed 2 May 2025].

No.50

Matthew Smith

1. John Russell, ‘Matthew Smith in France’, Apollo, July 1962; Reprinted in London, Barbican Art Gallery, Matthew Smith, exhibition catalogue, 1983, p.29. Smith spent much of his career in France, and, in many respects, may be regarded as a Continental artist as much as a British one.

2. In 1928 the Tate Gallery acquired its first work by the artist, a flower piece.

3. Francis Bacon, in the introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of Smith’s work at the Tate Gallery in 1953; Reprinted in London, Barbican Art Gallery, op.cit., p.42.

4. Patrick Heron in The New Statesman, 19 November 1953; Reprinted in London, Barbican Art Gallery, op.cit., p.46. Heron added, ‘With Matthew Smith the means of expression are as articulate and fluent as those of any British painter since Constable, and they are perfectly adjusted to his ends – which are not strange, or ambitious, or grandiose, but humble and in the most exciting sense, materialistic – concerned to praise the actual and the everyday.’ In later years, the sculptor Henry Moore similarly expressed his opinion that Smith stood alongside John Constable, J. M. W. Turner and Walter Sickert as the best painters England had produced, while the sculptor Jacob Epstein came to assemble a fine collection of Smith’s work. Among other admirers were the influential art critics P. G. Konody and Roger Fry, who acquired Smith’s paintings for the Contemporary Art Society.

5. Anon. (‘A Correspondent’), ‘Things Seen. In the Studio of Sir Matthew Smith’, The Times, 17 September 1957, p.11.

6. Alice Keene, The Two Mr Smiths: The Life and Work of Matthew Smith, London, 1995, p.81.

No.51

Lucian Freud

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

2. Gayford, ibid. illustrated p.198.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. Schoenberger, op.cit. p.94. Following the divorce, Caroline Blackwood – who never seems to have spoken badly of Freud throughout the rest of her life – became a gifted writer, and in later years was married to two equally brilliant men; the composer Israel Citkowitz and the poet Robert Lowell. In January 1996, when she had been diagnosed with an inoperable cancer and had checked into the Mayfair Hotel in New York to spend her final weeks, Freud phoned her from London and they had a long conversation. Caroline’s daughter Ivana Lowell, listening to her mother speaking on the telephone to Freud, some forty years after the end of their relationship, recalls being struck by how youthful and girlish her mother’s voice became as she spoke to the artist for the final time.

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

13. Steven M. L. Aronson, ‘Sophisticated Lady’, Town & Country September 1993, p.147. Caroline remained friendly with Bacon long after the breakup of her marriage to Freud.

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

15. wide-eyed and perhaps a little startled by the impromptu photo shoot’, as noted in Dawson and Gayford, op.cit., p.340.

16. That same year, James and Jean MacGibbon, together with their friend Robert Kee, set up the publishing firm of MacGibbon and Kee, and a few months later Freud was commissioned by them to provide illustrations for Rex Warner’s book Men and Gods. Freud’s illustrations were, however, rejected by James MacGibbon, and were never used.

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

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

No.52

Austin Osman Spare

1. Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist London, 2011, p.238.

2. London, Mansion House Tavern, op.cit., nos.42-46 (not illustrated); Anonymous sale (‘A Collection of Watercolours and Drawings by Austin Osman Spare’), London, Christie’s South Kensington, 12 May 1994, lot 62; Robert Ansell, ed., The Exhibition Catalogues of Austin Osman Spare London, 2012, p.246, fig.108.

3. Baker, op.cit., p.vii.

No.53

Frank Auerbach

1. Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p.7.

2. Pilar Ordovas, ed., Raw Truth: Auerbach – Rembrandt exhibition catalogue, London and Amsterdam, 2013-2014, p.30.

3. Catherine Lampert, ‘A Conversation with Frank Auerbach, 1978’, in London, Hayward Gallery, Frank Auerbach exhibition catalogue, 1978; Reprinted in Catherine Lampert, ed., Frank Auerbach exhibition catalogue, London and Bonn, 2015-2016, p.155.

4. Lampert, op.cit., 2015, p.62.

5. Inv. NG 521; Andrew Wilton, J. M. W. Turner: His Art and Life, New York, 1979, p.283, no.P370, illustrated p.203, fig.219; Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London, 1984, Vol.I, pp.221-222, no.370, Vol.II, illustrated in colour pl.374; Judy Egerton, National Gallery Catalogues. The British School London, 1998, pp.296-305, no.NG 521; David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Sam Smiles, ed., Late Turner: Painting Set Free, exhibition catalogue, London, Los Angeles and San Francisco, 2014-2015, pp.134-135, no.79. Auerbach almost certainly saw Turner’s painting of The Parting of Hero and Leander – part of the Turner Bequest to the National Gallery in 1856 – at the Tate Gallery, where the work was on loan between 1929 and 1961.

6. Colin Wiggins, Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working after the Masters, exhibition catalogue, London, 1995, p.16.

7. ‘Frank Auerbach in conversation with William Feaver’, in William Feaver, Frank Auerbach New York, 2009, p.229.

8. Wiggins, op.cit., p.10.

9. Lampert, op.cit., 2015, p.56.

10. Wright, op.cit., pp.29-30.

No.54

Keith Vaughan

1. Lent by the artist, the present sheet was one of eighteen oil pastels selected by Vaughan for inclusion in the major retrospective of his work at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1962. However, due to the limitations of space, many of the works he had chosen could not be hung, and some, including the present sheet, were shown at the Matthiesen Gallery in London later the same year.

2. David Thompson, ‘Introduction’, in London, Whitechapel Gallery, op.cit. p.17.

3. Andrew Lambirth, ‘The Creative Mind’, in London, Osborne Samuel, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 2007, p.23.

4. Gerard Hastings, ‘Painting with Gouache’, in Philip Vann and Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan, Farnham, 2012, p.161, pp.165-166.

5. As [oil pastels] were rare in England, he explained to [his friend and fellow artist] Prunella Clough that they were ‘waterproof, impervious to everything, can be rolled, stamped on, eaten.’’; Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan: His Life and Work, London, 1990, p.189. Prunella Clough came to own at least one of Vaughan’s oil pastels, a work from 1959 that she lent to the 1962 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition.

6. Hastings in Vann and Hastings, op.cit., p.168. When Vaughan exhibited his oil pastels in London, after his return from America, they were offered for sale at prices between £30 and £40 apiece.

No.55

David Hockney

1. “Drawings are the top: they are just magical”. David Hockney in Conversation with Thomas Williams’, Master Drawings Spring 2009, p.15.

2. Alan Bowness, Recent British Painting. Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Collection, London, 1968, illustrated in colour p.147, no.85; London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, op.cit., pp.32 and 38, no.63.11; Stangos, ed., op.cit., p.80, fig.84; Christopher Knight, ‘Composite Views: Themes and Motifs in Hockney’s Art’, in Maurice Tuchman and Stephanie Barron, ed., David Hockney: A Retrospective exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, New York and London, 1988-1989, p.27, fig.5; David Hockney, ed., Hockney’s Pictures: The Definitive Retrospective, New York and Boston, 2004, illustrated p.40. The painting was acquired by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Collection from Kasmin Ltd. in May 1966.

3. Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, London, 1988, p.56.

4. Stangos, ed., op.cit., p.90.

5. Knight in Tuchman and Barron, ed., op.cit., p.26.

6. London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, op.cit. p.32.

7. Inv. 639.2005; London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, op.cit., pp.32 and 35, no.63.10; Stangos, ed., op.cit., p.82, fig.88; Tuchman and Barron, ed., op.cit., p.129, no.18; Hockney, ed., op.cit., 2004, illustrated p.41; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 22 June 2005, lot 23.

8. London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, op.cit., p.37, no.63.9; Stangos, ed., op.cit., 1976, p.85, fig.93; Kenneth E. Silver, ‘Hockney on Stage’, in Tuchman and Barron, ed., op.cit., p.66, fig.1, also illustrated p.86, fig.17; Sarah Howgate and Barbara Stern Shapiro, David Hockney Portraits, exhibition catalogue, Boston and elsewhere, 2006-2007, no.10, pl.10; Helen Little, David Hockney, London, 2017, p.36, fig.28.

9. London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, op.cit., pp.32 and 38, no.63.12; Stangos, ed., op.cit., 1976, p.85, fig.94; Knight in Tuchman and Barron, ed., op.cit., p.27, fig.6; Hockney, ed., op.cit., 2004, illustrated p.45.

10. Stangos, ed., op.cit., 1976, p.89.

No.56

Ben Nicholson

1. Chris Stephens, ed., A Continuous Line: Ben Nicholson in England, exhibition catalogue, London, 2008, p.79.

2. Peter Khoroche, Ben Nicholson: drawings and painted reliefs, Aldershot, 2002, pp.70 and 7.

3. Ibid. pp.61-62.

4. Felicitas Vogler, in Maurice de Sausmarez, ed., Ben Nicholson, a Studio International Special, London and New York, 1969, p.21.

5. Norbert Lynton, Ben Nicholson, London, 1993, p.352.

6. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s South Kensington, 3 July 2003, lot 653 (as Greek Columns).

7. Zurich, Galerie Gimpel & Hanover, Ben Nicholson: recent work, exhibition catalogue, 1966, no.60. See also Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 13 December 2012, lot 198 (as Greek Columns (Variations on a Theme)); this was a set of four works, all executed on printed bases and each measuring 365 x 315 mm., of which two are also similar in composition to the drawing here exhibited.

No.57

Keith Vaughan

1. Noel Barber, Conversations with Painters London, 1964, p.80.

2. Another collage composition by Vaughan given as a Christmas card to Peter Adam was on recently the art market; London, Guy Peppiatt, Harry Moore-Gwyn and Freya Mitton, One Hundred Drawings and Watercolours from the 18th to the 21st Centuries, exhibition catalogue, 2024, p.84, no.58a (as Palm Tree).

3. Peter Adam, Not Drowning but Waving: An Autobiography, London, 1995, pp.205-207.

4. Gerard Hastings, Drawing to a Close: The Final Journals of Keith Vaughan, 2012, p.196.

5. Entry of 13 August 1976; Hastings, op.cit. 2012, p.196. The letter from Adam to Vaughan referred to is transcribed on pp.197-198.

No.58

Eliot Hodgkin

1. Eliot Hodgkin, ‘Painter’s Purpose’, The Studio, July 1957, p.6.

2. Eeles, ed., op.cit., p.146, under no.86.

3. London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, op.cit. pp.82-83, no.77. An image of the work, which measures 110 x 253 mm., is also visible online at https:// www.eliothodgkin.com/work/little-wickerwork-baskets/ [accessed 17 April 2025].

No.59

Rory McEwen

1. McEwen later wrote to Blunt that, have never really been interested in botanical illustration per se, but rather in that moment when painting starts to breathe poetry.’; Quoted in Robin Lane Fox, ‘Beauty in a dying leaf’, The Financial Times, 9-10 November 2024, p.12.

2. ‘Mr. Rory McEwen’ [obituary], The Times 20 October 1982, p.16.

3. Martyn Rix, ‘Rory McEwen and the Tradition of Botanical Art’, in Rory McEwen 1932-1982: The Botanical Paintings, op.cit. unpaginated.

4. Martyn Rix, ‘Rory McEwen as a Botanical Painter’, in Gowrie et al, op.cit. p.104.

5. A few months earlier that year, a work by McEwen had been included in an exhibition curated by Vaizey at the Arthur Tooth & Sons Gallery in London, entitled Critic’s Choice: 1974 Selection by Marina Vaizey. Works by living British artists. In her introduction to the catalogue, Vaizey wrote, Rory McEwen explores with zest the complexities of ordinary observable things, underlining the strangeness of what we may take for granted.

No.60

Howard Hodgkin

1. Michael White, ‘On Designing for the Stage’, The Daily Telegraph 12 June 2012.

2. Stonard and d’Offay, op.cit. p.10.

3. Jann Parry, ‘An Eye for the Dance’, The Observer 16 July 1989.

4. White, op.cit

5. Five of Hodgkin’s designs for the drop and back cloths for the various acts of Pulcinella (two of which were not used in the final production), as well as the show’s poster, are illustrated in Stonard and d’Offay, op.cit. pp.45-48.

6. Stonard and d’Offay, op.cit. p.11 and p.18.

7. Quoted in Howard Hodgkin: Working on Paper, London, Sotheby’s, 1 June 2018, p.56.

8. Stonard and d’Offay, op.cit. pp.10-11.

9. Inv. S.1142-1984; illustrated in Stonard and d’Offay, op.cit. p.44. An image of the work is also visible online at https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/ O65472/set-design-hodgkin-howard-sir/ [accessed 23 January 2025].

10. Stonard and d’Offay, op.cit. illustrated p.47; Anonymous sale (‘Howard Hodgkin: Working on Paper’), London, Sotheby’s, 1 June 2018, lot 256.

11. Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 20 October 2022, lot 172.

AUERBACH, Frank; No.53

BARNS-GRAHAM, Wilhelmina; No.48 BEVERLEY, William Roxby; No.7 BOMBERG, David; No.46

BONE, Muirhead; No.25

CAYLEY ROBINSON, Frederick; No.29 COX, David; No.6 CRAXTON, John; No.45

DE LASZLO, Philip; No.38 DE WINT, Peter; Nos.8, 11

FOWERAKER, Albert Moulton; No.37 FRASER GARDEN, William; No.24 FREUD, Lucian; No.51 FUSELI, Henry; No.2

GAUDIER-BRZESKA, Henri; No.26 GRANT, Duncan; Nos.35, 49

JOHN, Gwen; Nos.32-33

HERKOMER, Hubert von; No.20

HOCKNEY, David; No.55

HODGKIN, Eliot; No.58

HODGKIN, Howard; No.60 HUNT, Alfred William; No.15

HUNT, William Henry; Nos.4-5

KENNINGTON, Eric; No.27

INDEX OF ARTISTS

LEWIS, John Frederick; No.13

LEWIS, Percy Wyndham; Nos.30, 36

LINNELL, John; No.3

LINNELL, William; No.18

MARTIN, John; No.12

McEWEN, Rory; No.59

MINTON, John; Nos.43, 47

MOORE, Henry; No.42

NICHOLSON, Ben; No.56

PHILPOT, Glyn; No.40

POYNTER, Edward John; No.21

RICHMOND, George; No.14

RUSKIN, John; No.17

SANDYS, Frederick; No.19

SARGENT, John Singer; No.23

SAUTER, Rudolf; No.28

SICKERT, Walter Richard; No.22

SMITH, Matthew; No.50

SPARE, Austin Osman; Nos.31, 39, 52

SUTHERLAND, Graham; No.41

TURNER, Joseph Mallord William; Nos.9-10

VARLEY, John; No.1

VAUGHAN, Keith; Nos.44, 54, 57

WATSON, John Dawson; No.16

WOOD, Christopher; No.34

No.9 Turner

Fig.1

J. M. W. Turner

Lauerzersee with the Mythens, c.1848 Watercolour, pen and red ink.

No.13 Lewis

Fig.1

John Frederick Lewis

Sheikh el Belled, Kom Ombo, 1850

Pencil and watercolour, heightened with white.

No.19 Sandys

Fig.1

The Dining Room at 6 Palace Gate, 8 May 1891

Photograph.

The Historic England Archive BL10754

No.38 Spare

Fig.1

Austin Osman Spare

Self Portrait (Dream Content) 1937 Pastel on paper. Private collection.

Photo: Bridgeman Images

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

No.43 Minton

Fig.1

John Minton

The Hop Pickers, 1945 Watercolour, pen, gouache and chalk on paper.

No.47 Minton

Fig.1

John Minton

Derelict Farm Machinery, 1948 Pen and black ink and watercolour.

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California

No.53

Auerbach

Fig.1

Joseph Mallord William Turner

The Parting of Hero and Leander, 1837 Oil on canvas.

London, The National Gallery Turner Bequest, 1856 Inv. NG521

No.56 Nicholson

Albert Foweraker (1873-1942)

Old Harry Rocks, Dorset No.37

SOFA British Catalogue 2025

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

TWO CENTURIES OF BRITISH DRAWINGS, WATERCOLOURS AND OIL SKETCHES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

TWO CENTURIES OF BRITISH DRAWINGS, WATERCOLOURS AND OIL SKETCHES

ONGPIN

SIR EDWARD JOHN POYNTER, BT. PRA

SIR MUIRHEAD BONE

HENRI GAUDIER-BRZESKA

RUDOLF SAUTER

DUNCAN GRANT

PERCY WYNDHAM LEWIS

DUNCAN GRANT

AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE

No.19

No.31

INDEX OF ARTISTS

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS