Stephen Ongpin - Drawing Inspiration Catalogue 2016

STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART

Front cover: Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) A Standing Moroccan Man No.4

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Arthur Charles Kemp (1906-1968) Red Sky over Loch Harray, Orkney No.56

DRAWING INSPIRATION Sketches and Sketchbook Pages of the 19th and 20th Centuries

2016 An exhibition at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art Riverwide House 6 Mason’s Yard Duke Street St. James London SW1Y 6BU

20th June to 27th July, 2016

STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART in association with Camu Art Ltd.

INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Artists have been making sketches and preliminary studies for centuries. For many artists, drawing becomes an extension of their work as a painter or sculptor; a sketch can solve the problem of a composition or capture a fleeting moment in time. It requires very little preparation and is often the first step in recording an image from their imagination. It is often a private record – like a diary – and can be spontaneous and personal.

This exhibition does not aim to cover the history of the sketch, but instead focuses on the transition from academic drawing to a fluid expression of ideas pioneered by the Realists and Impressionists in the 19th century and developed over the next 150 years. The 19th century was pivotal in the transformation of the sketch from an academic exercise to a spontaneous means of recording ideas, nature and movement. French artists such as Millet and Delacroix led the way with the informal realism of their draughtsmanship. They turned away from academic teaching in the studio towards studying directly from nature, using the sketch to record the immediacy of what they saw around them.

Artists began to carry sketchbooks with them, in order to capture everyday moments as and when they happened.

The Impressionists took this a step further, and sketching was central to the development of their new style of recording nature, light and human activity. Drawing became more experimental and fluid; the speed of execution was important, and finish was of less concern. The Impressionists frequently exhibited sketches and studies alongside their paintings, elevating them to an independent art form. In the 20th century, Vuillard, Redon, Klimt, Modigliani and Picasso, among others, drew obsessively throughout their lives as a means of exploring new styles and subject matter. These developments are also evident in British art of the last century; in the sketches of Moore, Freud and Auerbach. The 20th century and beyond has shown us that the vital tool of sketching can be continuously and freshly interpreted, and remains very much alive and central to the work of many artists.

We are greatly indebted to the indefatigable Julie Frouge for her support and invaluable assistance in all aspects of preparing this catalogue and its attendant exhibition, and also to Sarah Ricks and Dean Hearn at Healeys for their hard work in producing this fine catalogue. Stephen is, as ever, very grateful to Laura for her advice, forbearance and constant support. We would further like to thank the private collectors who have kindly lent works to this exhibition, as well as the following people for their help and advice in the preparation of this catalogue and exhibition: Kate Agius, George Babbington, Deborah Bates, Rebecca Beach, Julian Brooks, Anthony Brown, Toby Campbell, Polly Checker, Mathias Chivot, Glynn Clarkson, Rowan Cope, Megan Corcoran, Barbara Cortina, Edith Eustis, Louie Fasciolo, Cheryl and Gino Franchi, Anne-Claire Gallet, Jennifer Gimblett, Reinhard Haider, Ellis Kelleher, Daragh Kenny, Yvonne Koerfer, Thomas Le Claire, Alexander Lindsay, Victoria Sancho Lobis, Suz Massen, Teresa Meucci, Ellida Minelli, Mireille Mosler, Alexandra Murphy, Nick Nicholson, Anna Ongpin, William O’Reilly, Caroline Palmer, Tanya Paul, Guy Peppiatt, Roberta Reeder, Sophie Richard, Mel Becker Solomon, William Summerfield, Betsy Thomas, Todd-White Photography, Jack Wakefield, Michiel van der Wal, Offer Waterman, Joanna Watson, Jenny Willings and Claire Wrathall.

Sophie Camu Stephen 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 are available on request.

All enquiries should be addressed to Stephen Ongpin, Julie Frouge or Sophie Camu at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art 6 Mason’s Yard Duke Street St James’s London SW1Y 6BU Tel. [+44] (20) 7930-8813 or [+44] (7710) 328-627 Fax [+44] (20) 7839-1504 e-mail: info@stephenongpinfineart.com or sophie.camu@camuart.com.

DRAWING INSPIRATION Sketches and Sketchbook Pages of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Presented by

STEPHEN ONGPIN in association with

SOPHIE CAMU

2016

1 JOSEPH MICHAEL GANDY, A.R.A. London 1771-1843 Plympton Near Southwick, Shoreham, West Sussex Watercolour, with scratching out, over an underdrawing in pencil. Colour beginnings in watercolour and a compass diagram in grey ink on the verso. Inscribed 31 Aug 22 in pencil at the upper left and 8 o/c / S in pencil at the upper right. Further inscribed near Southwick / Shoreham / 31 Aug 22 8 o/c SE in brown ink on the verso.

109 x 184 mm. (4 1/4 x 7 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist by Richard Westmacott and placed into an album; The album given to his daughter, Maria Poole, née Westmacott; Thence by descent until sold, London, Christie’s, 20 November 2003, lot 7; Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York; Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva.

EXHIBITED: New York, Richard L. Feigen & Co., Joseph Gandy: Visionary Views of England, 2004, no.37.

An architect by profession, Joseph Gandy was trained in the office of James Wyatt from 1786 onwards, before enrolling in the Royal Academy Schools in 1789. Following a period of three years spent in Rome, he returned to London where he was employed as a draughtsman by the architect Sir John Soane, for whom he began working in 1798. Although long regarded by scholars as merely an employee of Soane, translating the latter’s architectural designs into full-scale watercolours, it is now known that Gandy often produced drawings after his own inventions1. He maintained a modest architectural practice of his own, and regularly exhibited large-scale architectural history watercolours and capriccios – grandiose subjects inspired by Ancient Greece and Rome – at the Royal Academy between 1789 and 1833. In 1803, Gandy was admitted as an Associate of the Royal Academy, largely on the strengths of his undoubted skills as an architectural draughtsman, and despite the fact that at the time he had not received any commissions as a practicing architect. (Indeed, he achieved no further promotion within the Academy, and was never elected an Academician.) Gandy also produced a number of designs for stage sets, and contributed drawings to the antiquarian topographer John Britton’s The Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain, published between 1807 and 1826, and The Cathedral Antiquities of England, which appeared between 1814 and 1835.

Gandy’s topographical drawings and watercolours serve as a form of diary and travelogue, a practice he had begun during his period of study in Italy between 1794 and 1797, when he went on sketching expeditions in the Campagna. According to the artist’s annotations on the present sheet, this watercolour was drawn at 8 o’clock on the 31st of August, 1822, on the beach at Shoreham in West Sussex, on the south coast of England.

This and the following two watercolours were part of a group of landscape sketches by Gandy dating from the 1820s which were acquired from him by his friend, the Neoclassical sculptor Sir Richard Westmacott (1775-1856). Westmacott had studied in Rome with Gandy, and sometimes purchased works from his often impecunious friend. He later assembled the watercolours into two albums which he gave to his daughter Maria Poole. One of these albums is today in the Sir John Soane Museum in London, while the other album was broken up and the drawings dispersed in 20042. The album contained 97 watercolours of landscapes and studies from nature – variously inscribed and dated between the 15th of July 1820 and the 5th of July 1826 – drawn in London and its outskirts, as well as in Surrey, East and West Sussex, and Kent3, together with studies of skies, clouds, sunsets, storms and nocturnal views.

2-3 JOSEPH MICHAEL GANDY, A.R.A. London 1771-1843 Plympton 2. Near New Haven, East Sussex Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil. Inscribed [?] 26 3 o/c / SW near New Haven in pencil at the upper left.

116 x 181 mm. (4 3/4 x 7 1/ 8 in.)

3. Sunset Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil. A sketch of a large church (St. Paul’s Cathedral, London?) in pencil on the verso.

117 x 201 mm. (4 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist by Richard Westmacott and placed into an album; The album given to his daughter, Maria Poole, née Westmacott; Thence by descent until sold, London, Christie’s, 20 November 2003, lot 7; Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York.

EXHIBITED: New York, Richard L. Feigen & Co., Joseph Gandy: Visionary Views of England, 2004, no.69 and 87; Little Rock, Arkansas Art Center, 43rd Collectors Show and Sale, 2011, no.28 (Sunset).

These two watercolours, like the previous example, were part of the second Westmacott album1. Many of the watercolours – which appear to have come from one or more sketchbooks used by the artist – were inscribed by Gandy with the location, date and time that they were made, as well as the compass direction of the view chosen. As the Gandy scholar Brian Lukacher has written of the drawings from the two Westmacott albums, ‘[Gandy’s] acute responsiveness to landscape topography and the transient conditions of nature is also revealed in over 175 small-scale watercolor sketches from the late 1810s and 1820s that have no apparent relation to antiquarian publications. The inscriptions on these drawings allow us to chart Gandy’s travels around the outskirts of London, along the Thames, through Sussex, and down to the southeast coast. Some sequences of watercolours document an afternoon’s worth of topographic sketching. Although many of the landscapes focus on the quintessentially picturesque aspects of English village scenery, a large number also depict urban, suburban, and industrial topography...Whatever the larger purpose behind Gandy’s topographic sketches of castle ruins and working landscapes around Great Britain, they were never to be incorporated into a systematic publication under his direction.’2 According to the artist’s annotation on the first sheet, the watercolour was drawn at 3 o’clock in the afternoon near Newhaven, East Sussex. As Lukacher has noted, ‘Gandy’s drawings often bear notations indicating the time of day or night that the view was observed and rendered: a twilit landscape of the enclosed commons at Milton, a late afternoon stormy landscape rent by a flash of lightning, or unidentified nocturnes with distinctive atmospheric phenomena seen in the scarlet dyeing of early evening clouds or in the moon encircled by a hazy pink numbus. The science and poetry of meteorology is often the primary focus of these optically alert drawings.’3 Elsewhere, Lukacher has pointed out that ‘Many of these watercolours are also quintessentially picturesque in both style and imagery. Serpentine country lanes and undulating streams guide the eye through scenographically composed landscape masses that frame an unsettled sky, a setting sun, or a rising moon...A rapt mood of contemplative isolation permeates the twilit and nocturnal landscapes. A picturesque lens persistently intervened between Gandy and the topography he was surveying. The site specificity and documentary pretexts of these watercolors did not preclude them from containing poetical microcosms of picturesque Britain – more a byproduct of imaginative fabrication than naturalistic observation.’4

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4 FERDINAND-VICTOR-EUGENE DELACROIX Charenton-Saint-Maurice 1798-1863 Paris A Standing Moroccan Man Watercolour, over a pencil underdrawing.

323 x 242 mm. (12 3/4 x 9 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Walter Pach, New York1; Thence by descent until 2011; Sale (‘Property from the Collection of the Late Walter Pach’), London, Christie’s, 5 July 2011, lot 103.

LITERATURE: Walter Pach, ‘Delacroix Speaks for Himself’, Art News, 1-14 November 1944, illustrated p.10; Walter Pach, ed., The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, New York, 1948, illustrated in colour between pp.64 and 65; Agnes Mongan, ‘Souvenirs of Delacroix’s Journey to Morocco in American Collections’, Master Drawings, Summer 1963, p.27.

EXHIBITED: New York, Wildenstein & Co., Eugène Delacroix 1798-1863; Loan exhibition in aid of the Quaker Emergency Service, 1944.

Eugène Delacroix has long been recognized as one of the finest draughtsmen of the 19th century in France. Adept in a variety of techniques – notably pen, pencil, watercolour, charcoal and pastel – he produced a large and diverse number of drawings of all types. As Arlette Sérullaz has noted, ‘For their number, variety and importance he attached to them, drawings are an essential, if not fundamental part of Delacroix’s oeuvre…they represent the most faithful testimonies of the man and the artist with his foibles but his greatness as well.’2 However, Delacroix’s output as a draughtsman remained almost completely unknown and unseen by scholars, collectors and connoisseurs until the posthumous auction of the contents of his studio held in February 1864, six months after the artist’s death, which included some six thousand drawings in 430 lots. The sale included not only preparatory compositional sketches and figure studies for Delacroix’s paintings and public commissions, but a myriad variety of drawings by the artist, including studies of wild animals, landscapes, copies after the work of earlier masters, costume studies, scenes from literature, still life subjects and the occasional portrait, as well as finished pastels. In the words of the Delacroix scholar Lee Johnson, ‘It came as a surprise to many that an artist who had been so consistently criticized throughout his career for incompetence as a draughtsman and laxity in composition was revealed by the many hundreds of graphic works, the fifty-five sketchbooks, and scores of oil sketches at his sale to have been a draughtsman of extraordinary versatility and one who went to infinite pains to elaborate the compositions of his paintings through preliminary studies of many kinds, from the inchoate scribbles of an idea in germ, to more articulate designs, to detailed drawings of pose and gesture.’3 The largest single collection of drawings by Delacroix, numbering almost three thousand individual sheets and twenty-three sketchbooks, is today in the Louvre.

In the first half of 1832, Delacroix spent six months in North Africa as part of a French diplomatic mission, led by Comte Charles-Edgar de Mornay, to Sultan Moulay Abd al-Rahman of Morocco. Delacroix spent most of his time in Tangier, and documented his time in Morocco with a large number of sketches and watercolours done on the spot. The artist filled at least seven sketchbooks with pencil and watercolour drawings of the people he saw and the places he visited, often adding descriptive texts to his drawings.

(He also produced a special album of eighteen finished, signed watercolours for the Comte de Mornay, as souvenirs of the journey.) The numerous studies the artist made in Morocco provided inspiration for paintings throughout the remainder of his career. Indeed, the few months that he spent in Morocco in 1832 were to be of lasting importance for Delacroix’s artistic development.

Delacroix kept his Moroccan sketchbooks in his studio until his death. Four of these sketchbooks have remained intact – three in the Louvre and one in the Musée Condé in Chantilly – while the others have been broken up, with the individual drawings, of which the present sheet is one of the finest, sold and dispersed. The drawings and sketches Delacroix brought back from Morocco amounted to almost a sixth of the total of the works on paper sold at the posthumous sale of the contents of his studio in Paris in 1864. These works were aptly described by Philippe Burty, in the preface to the auction catalogue, as a ‘series of unique studies, both brilliant and scrupulously precise, of styles and costumes, of events and landscapes, notes that he made daily either against the pommel of his saddle or in an Arab’s tent, in the streets of Meknes or in Abd al-Rahman’s palace...’4 It is thought that Delacroix may have intended to eventually publish an illustrated account of his journey to a country that few Europeans had visited, but none ever appeared.

Among the facets of Moroccan life and culture that particularly interested Delacroix were local costumes and dress. As he noted in a letter from Tangier in February 1832, a month after his arrival in Morocco, ‘The people of this country are a people apart; in many ways they are different from other Mohammedan peoples. Their dress is quite uniform and very simple, and yet the various ways of arranging it confer on it a kind of beauty and nobility that leaves one speechless. I intend to bring back enough sketches to give an idea of how these gentlemen are dressed.’5 Apart from making numerous drawings of Arab costumes, Delacroix also purchased several examples to bring back with him to Paris.

Arlette Sérullaz has tentatively identified the subject of this drawing as one Caddour, the guardian of the French consulate in Tangiers. As one recent scholar has noted, this young man has ‘something of that haughty refinement that Delacroix saw and admired among the Arabs.’6 Certainly this Moroccan youth – with his white tunic, turban and knee-length trousers, red belt, yellow slippers and a dagger attached by a plaited cord – must have been someone whom Delacroix was able to study at length, as he appears in a handful of other drawings and watercolours by the artist, three of which were in the posthumous studio sale of 18647. These include a watercolour showing two studies of the same young man (fig.1), now in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art8, as well as a smaller watercolour study of the same figure, but seen from the back (fig.2), in a private collection in London9. The fact that Delacroix produced several drawings of this young Moroccan, including a portrait study, would suggest that the artist intended to use this figure in a painting, but no related work is known today.

A line study for the present sheet, drawn in ink alone (fig.3), was once part of an album of Moroccan drawings and watercolours by Delacroix belonging to the collector Baron Joseph Vitta (1860-1942), and is today in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris10.

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5 PAUL HUET Paris 1803-1869 Paris Coastal Landscape with Cliffs Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil. Inscribed (in a modern hand) Paul Huet (1803-1869) / “Falaises et nuages ensoleillés” / (Mme Paul Huet et la femme de pêcheur) / (26-19) in black ink and numbered No.14 in blue chalk on the old backing board 176 x 259 mm. (7 x 10 1/ 8 in.)

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

As a young boy and only child, Paul Huet spent his summers drawing and sketching on the Ile Séguin, near Paris, and after leaving school decided to take up studies as an artist. In 1820, while training in the studio of Baron Gros at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he befriended a fellow student, the Englishman Richard Parkes Bonington, from whom he learned the English manner of watercolour technique; indeed, his rapid command of the medium has meant that works by the two artists have sometimes been confused. At around the same time, he also came into contact with another young painter, Eugène Delacroix, who shared a studio with Bonington. Delacroix had earlier admired Huet’s watercolours in a shop window, and was to remain a lifelong friend. In 1826, Huet assisted Delacroix by painting the landscape background of his full-length portrait of Louis-Auguste de Schwiter, now in the National Gallery in London. Another early influence were the landscapes of John Constable, which were a revelation to the young artist when they were exhibited at the Salon of 1824.

The year after his own Salon debut in 1827, Huet went on a tour of Normandy that was to be the first of his extensive travels throughout France. The artist was to return often to Normandy, usually in the company of Bonington, Delacroix or Eugène Isabey, and also visited the regions of the Auvergne and Provence, as well as forests of Compiègne and Fontainebleau, closer to Paris. Huet also made several visits to the South of France between 1833 and 1845, and travelled to Italy in 1841. Wherever he went, he made numerous drawings and sketches sur le motif in pencil, watercolour and pastel, all imbued with a remarkable feeling for light and colour. As he once wrote, ‘The landscapist is, of all artists, the one who communicates most directly with nature, with the veritable soul of nature.’1 Despite receiving a commission in 1838 from the Duc d’Orléans for a series of finished watercolours of the major cities of France, for which he was paid two thousand francs, Huet received relatively little recognition in his lifetime. Much of his work remained with his family after his death, and only a part of this studio inventory dispersed at auction in Paris in 1878.

The present sheet is likely to depict a view in Normandy, a region Huet returned to throughout his career. In May of 1828 he had embarked on a sketching tour of the Normandy coast, where he found himself captivated by the scenery. As he wrote the following month in a letter to his sister from Honfleur, he wished ‘to make at least a few studies of all the beautiful things that surround me.’2 According to the inscription on the old backing board, one of the two women in this drawing (presumably the seated figure) is the artist’s wife, while the other is the wife of a fisherman. The difficulty of dating Huet’s watercolours with any accuracy, however, means that it cannot be determined if the woman depicted is Huet’s first wife, his niece Céleste Richomme, who died in 1839, or his second wife, Claire Sallard, whom he married in 1843 and was the mother of his two children.

6 PAUL HUET Paris 1803-1869 Paris A Distant View of Paris from Montmartre Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil. Inscribed note aquarellée de Paul Huet. (époque 1845-47) in black ink, and Vue sur Paris qui semble prise de Montmartre (avec le Panthéon avant le Val de grâce) in pencil, on the verso. Numbered 1174C in pencil on the verso.

101 x 170 mm. (4 x 6 3/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: In the artist’s studio at the time of his death, with the atelier stamp (Lugt 1268) at the lower right; By descent in the family of the artist.

At the Salon of 1831 Paul Huet’s work was praised by the critic Gustave Planche, who noted that ‘M. Paul Huet is today placed at the head of the new school of landscapists...[he] has wanted, and still wants, after numerous and purely personal reflections, to take landscape painting back to nature, and that to get there he has sensed the imperious necessity of breaking violently and brusquely with currently adopted principles.’ Victor Hugo, who wrote a poem to accompany one of Huet’s paintings at the same Salon of 1831, once noted of the artist that ‘he understood nature as it should be understood, imprinted with reality and penetrated with the ideal.’1 This appreciation of Huet’s abilities was also shared by his friend Eugène Delacroix. Following a visit to Huet’s studio in 1858, Delacroix noted in his journal that ‘I was greatly impressed with his pictures. They are uncommonly vigorous. There are still some vague passages, but that is characteristic of his talent...Altogether great progress in his good qualities. And that is enough with pictures that stick in the memory, as his do in mine. All this evening I have been thinking about them with pleasure.’2 This charming plein-air watercolour is typical of Huet’s more atmospheric studies in the use of a limited palette of a few tones. As has been noted of the artist’s watercolours, ‘they represent, unlike his paintings, lithographs, and etchings, the more private aspects of his oeuvre. Like drawings, these studies have the freshness of first thoughts and records of first impressions. But, however spontaneous and rapid these records may be – and there are relatively elaborate landscapes among them – they have the imprint of Huet’s style. They are usually panoramic in scope...The technique is not as fluid as Bonington’s, not as facile as Isabey’s, not as instinctive as Delacroix’s. Its particular virtue is the exploitation of the full range of colors and transparencies of watercolor...The watercolors of Huet best illustrate the particular virtues of the French manner in watercolor, especially its functional, modest role as the vehicle of a muted, sometimes gentle and sometimes intense, dialogue with nature.’3 Similarly, the scholar Alexandra Murphy has noted of Huet that ‘His watercolors...mix the spontaneity necessary to their medium with a directness of observation that seems to belong to another era of landscape art entirely...Whether weaving a surprising amount of regional detail into an eccentrically composed cottage scene or distilling a familiar coastal view to an audaciously simple sweep of colors, Huet manipulated the watercolor medium with suavity and great originality.’4 A larger and more finished watercolour of a similar View of Paris from Meudon of c.1823 is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago5.

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7 KARL-ERNEST-RODOLPHE-HEINRICH-SALEM LEHMANN, called HENRI LEHMANN Kiel 1814-1882 Paris Four Studies of a Female Nude Pencil on buff paper, backed.

253 x 193 mm. (10 x 7 5/ 8 in.)

Born in Germany, Henri Lehmann settled in Paris in 1831. The following year he entered the studio of Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, and soon became one the master’s favourite pupils and assistants.

Although as a German citizen he was not permitted to compete for the Prix de Rome, he nevertheless travelled to Italy at his own expense in 1838, rejoining his master Ingres, who had been appointed director of the Académie de France three years earlier. Lehmann lived in Rome until 1842, often assisting Ingres in his studio. On his return to France he won a commission for mural paintings for the Parisian church of Saint-Merri, completed in 1844, and began to establish a reputation as a painter of historical and religious subjects and genre scenes. Lehmann became a naturalised French citizen in 1847. During the Second Empire he painted a number of public decorative schemes, notably a series of more than fifty allegorical paintings for the Galerie des Fêtes of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, completed in 1852 but destroyed by fire during the Commune of 1871, as well as works for the Palais de Luxembourg in the 1850s and the Palais de Justice in the 1860s. Like many of Ingres’s pupils, Lehmann was also in great demand as a portrait painter. Appointed a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1875, he devoted the last years of his career to teaching; among his students was the young Georges Seurat.

This fine drawing is a preparatory study for one of the central figures in Lehmann’s large painting of The Despair of the Oceanids at the Base of the Rock upon which Prometheus is Enchained (fig.1), commissioned in 1849 by the State, for the sum of 6,000 francs, for the Musée du Luxembourg.

Completed in 1850, the monumental painting – over two and a half metres in height – was exhibited at the Salon of that year, and is today in the Musée départemental des Hautes-Alpes in Gap1.

The drawing shows the artist working out the pose of the central oceanid in the final painting, and gives some idea of the care with which Lehmann prepared his compositions. He would produce many individual studies for each of the figures in his paintings, often studying the pose first with a nude model; a legacy of his training with Ingres. Two more highly finished studies for the same floating nymph, drawn in black, red and white chalk, are in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans2.

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8 FERDINAND-VICTOR-EUGÈNE DELACROIX Charenton-Saint-Maurice 1798-1863 Paris A Lioness Asleep Pencil, drawn on a page from a sketchbook.

212 x 180 mm. (8 3/ 8 x 7 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly Jean-Baptiste Pierret, Paris, and thence by descent; Henri Bénézit, Paris; Thence by descent until 2015.

Eugène Delacroix had an abiding interest in the study and representation of wild animals, inspired by such earlier works as the paintings of lion hunts by Rubens and the drawings and prints of George Stubbs and James Ward. In the late 1820s and 1830s, he began to make regular visits, often in the company of the animalier sculptor and draughtsman Antoine-Louis Barye, to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and the menagerie at Saint-Cloud. There he made numerous studies of animals, and in particular the wild animals and beasts of prey that were kept there. (In the summer of 1829, the two artists were also given permission to draw from the carcass of a dead lion at the Jardin des Plantes.) Delacroix continued to make study drawings of wild animals from life well into his later career. These studies of felines became the basis for a number of lithographs, as well as for the paintings of lions and tigers that began to occur frequently in his work from the 1840s onwards, culminating in the remarkable large hunting scenes of the 1850s.

As one scholar has written, ‘Delacroix’s animal drawings range from synoptic studies to more finished renderings...He was responsive to the full range of feline behavior, from the almost humanly affectionate interaction of a lioness playing with her cubs...to the predatory beast stalking and attacking its prey.’1 The present sheet may be likened stylistically to such drawings by Delacroix as a pencil study of A Struggle Between a Lion and Tiger of c.1854, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York2, and a drawing of Heads of Roaring Lions and Lionesses in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon3. A similarly posed lioness at rest appears in a pen and ink drawing of Two Studies of a Lioness in the collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA4, and in a sheet of studies, formerly in the Barye collection, which was on the art market in New York in 19605.

The present sheet, drawn on a page from a sketchbook, does not bear the Delacroix studio stamp, and must have left his possession in his lifetime. It was part of a small collection of drawings and sketches by Delacroix, all previously unpublished and unknown to most scholars, assembled by the French artist Henri Bénézit (c.1904-1998). A number of Bénézit’s drawings were acquired from the heirs of Delacroix’s childhood friend Jean-Baptiste Pierret (1795-1854), who had assembled a number of albums of drawings by the master. Delacroix was a frequent dinner guest at Pierret’s, and on each visit would give his host some drawings, which would then be mounted into albums. These albums were broken up after Pierret’s death in 1854 and some of the drawings – none of which bear the artist’s studio stamp, since they left his studio well before his death – were in turn acquired by Bénézit.

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9 VICTOR HUGO Besançon 1802-1885 Paris Landscape with a Bridge, Guernsey Pencil, brown ink, brown and grey wash, on laid paper from a sketchbook.

86 x 147 mm. (3 3/ 8 x 5 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Part of a sketchbook used by Victor Hugo in Guernsey in the summer of 1856; Private collection, France; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 25 November 1992, lot 9; Galerie Aittouarès, Paris, in 1993; The sketchbook broken up in the mid-1990s and the present sheet acquired in 2001 by Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva.

LITERATURE: Venice, Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ca’ Pesaro, Victor Hugo pittore, 1993, p.220, under no.33 - F.25, illustrated p.130 (entry by Marie-Laure Prévost); Marie-Laure Prévost, “caos en el pincel...”

Victor Hugo dibujos, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 2000, pp.383-384, no.167, illustrated p.220; MarieLaure Prévost, du chaos dans le pinceau...Victor Hugo dessins, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2000-2001, p.381, no.167, illustrated p.220; Raphael Rosenberg and Max Hollein, ed., Turner Hugo Moreau: Entdeckung der Abstraktion, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt, 2007-2008, no.125; Felix Krämer, ed., Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt, 2012-2013, no.59, illustrated p.118; Gerhard Kehlenbeck, Victor Hugo: Visions of a Poet-Draughtsman, Hamburg, 2015, unpaginated, no.3.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Aittouarès, Victor Hugo dessins, 1993, no.2; Venice, Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ca’ Pesaro, Victor Hugo pittore, 1993, part of no.33; Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, “caos en el pincel...” Victor Hugo dibujos, 2000, no.167; Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo, du chaos dans le pinceau...Victor Hugo dessins, 2000-2001, no.167; Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, Turner Hugo Moreau: Entdeckung der Abstraktion, 2007-2008, no.125; Frankfurt, Städel Museum, Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst, 2012-2013, no.59; Paris, Musée d’Orsay, L’Ange du bizarre: Le romantisme noir de Goya à Max Ernst, 2013, no.47.

The outstanding literary figure in 19th century France, Victor Hugo was also an accomplished and prolific draughtsman. He produced over three thousand drawings, the principal groups of which are today in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris. He began to draw seriously around 1825, but relatively little of this early work survives and it was not until some twenty years later that he was to develop his distinctive personal graphic idiom. As a draughtsman, Hugo seems to have been most productive during periods when he was writing less, for example between 1848 and 1851. Conversely, there are very few drawings from the period between 1852 and 1853, when he was engaged on a spell of intense literary activity. His drawings achieved a height of expression during the years of his political exile from France on the Channel Islands of Jersey, where he and his family lived from 1852 to 1855, and Guernsey, where he settled in October 1855 and remained until 1870. In the last ten years of his life, however, Hugo drew much less, a decline mirrored in his literary output.

Hugo valued his drawings, and often framed them and hung them on the walls of his homes. The act of drawing, however, remained for him a largely private occupation; as he wrote in 1863, ‘these scribbles are for private use and to indulge very close friends.’ Although he often gifted drawings as presents to family, friends and colleagues, and allowed several sheets to be reproduced as engravings, Hugo seems not to have intended his drawings to be sold or exhibited, at least in his lifetime. On his death, however, he bequeathed over a thousand drawings remaining in his possession to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The first exhibition of his drawings was held in 1888, three years after his death, at the Galerie

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Georges Petit in Paris, and since then his drawings have remained popular with collectors and artists; indeed, Picasso is known to have owned several drawings by Hugo.

As a draughtsman, Hugo relied primarily on brown or black ink, with washes applied with a fluidity and transparency that allowed for striking tonal and atmospheric effects. His idiosyncratic working methods have been described by his grandson, Georges Hugo: ‘I sometimes saw him drawing: they were only quick little sketches, landscapes, caricatures, profiles drawn at a single stroke, which he made on any little scrap of paper. He scattered the ink haphazardly, crushing the goose quill which grated and spattered trails of ink.

Then he sort of kneaded the black blot which became a castle, a forest, a deep lake or a stormy sky; he delicately wet the barb of his pen with his lips and with it burst a cloud from which rain fell down onto the wet paper; or he used it to indicate precisely the mists blurring the horizon.’1 Hugo also experimented with different techniques and media, including inkblots (taches), folded paper, stenciled cut-outs, gold leaf and impressions taken from various objects, including leaves and lace.

The present sheet was once part of a small pocket sketchbook of sixty-one pages, used by Victor Hugo between the 17th of June and the end of August or beginning of September 1856, during his fifteenyear period of exile in Guernsey. Of British manufacture2, the sketchbook measured approximately 9 x 15 cm. and was dated and inscribed by Hugo on the inside front cover: ‘17 juin 1856 / (pris mon premier bain à Guernesey, à Fermain-bay, le vendredi / 27 juin 1856)’ together with a list of dates, including ‘21 juillet ma fête’, referring to his saint’s name day.

Since his arrival in Guernsey in 1855, Hugo had adopted the practice of carrying with him two types of small notebooks, or carnets. The first was a carnet de comptes, used mainly for accounts and household affairs, and was akin to a diary. The other type of notebook was mainly used for drawings and sketches, as well as for jotting down bits of verse, quotations and poetry, and it is from this sort of carnet that the present sheet derives3. The pages of this small sketchbook were comprised of landscape sketches, marine subjects, taches, automatic drawings of fantastical heads and creatures, lace impressions and rubbings, as well as some scenes at Hauteville House in Guernsey, the home which Hugo had purchased in May 1856, together with sketches of furnishings for the new house4.

Several of the pages in this 1856 Guernsey sketchbook contain drawings that are the result of experiments with taches, or inkblots, wherein the artist allowed his imagination free rein with whatever form the inkblot took. As Florian Rodari has noted, ‘Either he allowed the tache to expand by itself, modified only by the quantity of water, the quality of the paper and the obstacles it encountered in the course of its haphazard journey; or he guided it deliberately, steering it along paths opened up by chance more or less intentionally in the direction of recognizable forms or suggestive scenes...Most of the manipulations to which Hugo subjected the hazards of the tache resulted in landscapes or figures. Excess water caused the taches to expand, suggesting new solutions, new ways forward for the eye. This is what the artist liked; he would oversee the different possibilities.’5 To these inkblots, Hugo would then add lines in pen or pencil, further developing the compositional idea created by the serendipitous flow of ink wash.

In the case of the present sheet, the artist seems to have first applied ink to the sheet by rolling a cylindrical object coated with brown ink across the paper. The resulting jagged shapes appear to have suggested the piers of a stone bridge to the artist, who then enhanced the form of the structure with pencil and grey wash. While the bridge itself may have been the result of Hugo’s imaginative transposition of the visual effect of the tache, the overall composition may also have been inspired by the rugged coastline, wooden breakwaters and rock formations of Guernsey, which so often provided the artist with a variety of dramatic motifs for his drawings. Hugo spent a considerable amount of time wandering over the island, at all times of the day and night, and taking a large number of photographs of the island’s scenery.

Four pages from the same 1856 Guernsey sketchbook as the present sheet are today in the collection of the Musée Victor Hugo in Villequier6, while several others are in private collections7.

10 HILAIRE-GERMAIN-EDGAR DEGAS Paris 1834-1917 Paris The Head of the Virgin, after Perugino Pencil on coarse, flocked pale grey paper. Stamped with the Degas vente stamp (Lugt 658) in red at the lower left.

280 x 207 mm. (11 x 8 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, Paris; The fourth Vente Degas, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 24 July 1919, lot 113c (‘Tête de jeune fille’)1, bt. Vignier for 1,120 francs; Charles Vignier, Paris2; His sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 21 May 1931, lot 93 (‘Tête de jeune fille’), sold for 520 francs to Peyrent); Bernard Chappard, Paris and Venezuela; His sale (‘Vente au profit de la Fondation Daniela Chappard’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Cornet de Saint-Cyr], 13 March 2000, lot 22; Private collection; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 8 February 2007, lot 514.

LITERATURE: John Walker, ‘Degas et les maîtres anciens’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, September 1933, p.185; Franco Russoli and Fiorella Minervino, L’opera completa di Degas, Milan, 1970, pp.86-87, no.3; Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey, ‘Da David a Picasso, il Perugino e la Francia’, in Laura Teza, ed., Pietro Vannucci il Perugino: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di studio, 25-28 ottobre 2000, Perugia, 2004, p.378, p.394, fig.15; Caterina Zappia, ‘La sfortuna di Perugino nella Francia dell’Ottocento’, in Vittoria Garibaldi and Francesco Federico Mancini, ed., Perugino, il divin pittore, exhibition catalogue, Perugia, 2004, p.415, note 54; Annette Haudiquet et al., De Delacroix à Marquet: Donation Senn-Foulds – Dessins, 2011, pp.115 and 118 (‘Lots convoités par Olivier Senn dont les enchères ont dépassé les limites qu’il s’était fixées’); Oliver Kase, ‘>>Wo aller Lärm der Leidenschaft entfernt ist<<: Zur Popularität Peruginos im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Andreas Schumacher, ed., Perugino: Raffaels Meister, exhibition catalogue, Munich, 2011, pp.164-165; Andreas Schumacher, ed., Perugino: Raffaels Meister, exhibition catalogue, Munich, 2011, pp.278-279, no.38 (entry by Oliver Kase); Alexander Eiling, ed., Degas: Klassik und Experiment, exhibition catalogue, Karlsruhe, 2014-2015, pp.97-99, no.16 (entry by Alexander Eiling).

EXHIBITED: Munich, Alte Pinakothek, Perugino: Raffaels Meister, 2011-2012, no.38; Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Degas: Klassik und Experiment, 2014-2015, no.16.

Aptly described as ‘one of the most passionate and convinced copyists of his time’3, Edgar Degas spent much of the early years of his career engaged in a serious study of Renaissance art, resulting in a significant number of drawn and painted copies by the artist. He first registered as a copyist at the Louvre in April 1853, and soon began making drawings after Old Master paintings in the museum’s collection, with a particular emphasis on Italian art of the 15th and early 16th centuries. (At the same time he also began copying Old Master prints in the Bibliothèque Nationale, as well as works in the collection of the École des Beaux-Arts.) Degas maintained the practice during his three-year stay in Italy between 1856 and 1859, drawing numerous copies after works in Florence, Rome and Naples. This was a task in which he was also encouraged by his father; in a letter of January 1859, written to his son in Florence, Auguste De Gas advised the young artist that ‘the masters of the fifteenth century are the only true guides; once they have thoroughly made their mark and inspired a painter unceasingly to perfect his study of nature, results are assured.’4 On his return to Paris, Degas carried on copying works of art in the Louvre, and in fact continued to register as a copyist in the museum until 1862. Among the Quattrocento and Cinquecento paintings copied by the young Degas were works by Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Filippino Lippi, Mantegna, Lorenzo di Credi, Vittore Carpaccio, Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Giovanni Bellini, Perugino, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian and many others. As the artist himself said, ‘One must copy and

recopy the masters, and only after having given every proof of being a good copyist can one reasonably be expected to paint a radish from nature.’5 Most of the drawn and painted copies by Degas may be dated to the formative years of the artist’s career, between 1858 and 1861, and several of the motifs and figures he copied were later integrated into his own paintings. As Theodore Reff has noted, ‘The interest in older art…was indeed so extensive in Degas’s early career, and at the same time so pervasive an influence on his own art, that his activity throughout the 1850s may be described as essentially that of a copyist’6, while another scholar has written that ‘Through copying Degas acquired at a very early stage that sureness and maturity which always astonished critics.’7 In many of these early drawings Degas used a soft pencil and a coarse, flocked greyish paper, as in the present sheet.

This recently rediscovered drawing is a copy after the head of the Virgin in a panel painting of The Virgin and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Catherine of Alexandria (fig.1) by the Umbrian artist Pietro Perugino (c.1450-1523) in the Louvre8. Painted around 1493, at the height of Perugino’s career, this small devotional picture was acquired by the Louvre in 1821. The present sheet is typical of Degas’ copies after Renaissance masters, and his own particular interest in individual studies of heads and figures, isolated from a more crowded composition. As one scholar has noted, ‘In loose drawings, and more rarely in oils, [Degas] recorded memorable portraits as he encountered them…Sometimes he singled out individual heads in altarpieces or frescos and treated them as portraits…His liking for the precision, for the unadorned purity of early portraits persisted for decades.’9 Among stylistically comparable drawings by Degas, for example, is one in the Baltimore Museum of Art10, which copies a head of a single youth from Raphael’s large and crowded fresco of The School of Athens in the Vatican.

Studies such as this were of particular importance to Degas’s development as a portrait painter: ‘The young portraitist was making himself conversant with the prototypes in the history of the genre, in all its many variants, as they had been formed at the time of the Italian Renaissance. In copying he was laying out his imaginary portrait gallery. He was primarily concerned with artistic questions rather than physiognomy.

His interest as a copyist was directed primarily to the composition, from head only to full length, from profile to full face.’11 Degas copied a number of other paintings by Perugino, including figures from an Ascension of Christ in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, in a sketchbook now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris12. It was perhaps thinking of Renaissance paintings such as those by Perugino that Degas is said to have once remarked: ‘So there is no bias in art? What about the Italian Primitives, who express the softness of lips by imitating them with hard lines, and make eyes come to life by cutting off the eyelids as if with a pair of scissors?’13

1.

11-12 EUGÈNE BOUDIN Honfleur 1824-1898 Deauville 11. Study of a Seated Woman and Man on a Beach Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil. A sketch of a coastal view and a pair of legs in pencil on the verso. Stamped with the atelier stamp E.B. (Lugt 828) in blue ink at the lower right and dated 1865 in pencil at the upper right. Numbered 9 in pencil on the verso.

104 x 148 mm. (4 1/ 8 x 5 3/4 in.)

12. Crinolines Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil. Stamped with the atelier stamp E.B. (Lugt 828) in blue ink and dated 1865 in pencil at the lower right. Variously inscribed with colour notes (rouge, bleu, gris, violet, etc.) in pencil.

136 x 244 mm. (5 3/8 x 9 5/8 in.) [sight] PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist (Lugt 828); Probably the Boudin atelier sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 20-21 March 1899.

Throughout his career, Eugène Boudin visited the seaside resort towns of Trouville and Deauville, on the Normandy coast. Originally a fisherman’s village, Trouville had been transformed into a resort destination around 1848. With the opening of rail connections in 1860, the town grew to accommodate the crowds of bourgeoisie who flocked to the seaside from Paris and elsewhere, with the establishment of luxury hotels, villas, casinos and a racecourse. Boudin rented a house in Trouville each summer and painted countless pictures of people on its beaches, as well as views of the quay, the fish market and the outskirts of the town.

Boudin’s depictions of elegant city dwellers as holidaymakers on the beach of Trouville, with a particular emphasis on fashionable women in crinoline dresses, date mainly from the 1860s. He painted some three hundred canvases of this subject throughout his career; works which proved very popular with collectors. As the artist wrote to a friend in 1863, ‘They love my little ladies on the beach, and some people say that there’s a thread of gold to exploit there.’1 As the critic Jules Castagnary noted, in a review of one of the Paris Salons to which Boudin had sent his paintings, ‘M. Boudin has made the Norman coast his speciality. He has even invented a genre of marine that belongs only to him and which consists of painting, as well as the beach, all the beautiful, exotic society that foregathers in the summer in our seaside towns. It is seen from far away, but what delicacy and vivacity there is in these tiny figures. How well they look in their picturesque milieu, and how this, gathered together, forms a picture: the sky rolls its clouds, the swell rumbles as it rises, the breeze that blows teases the frills and skirts, this is the sea, and one can almost breathe the salty air.’2 The artist’s biographer Gérard Jean-Aubry has written that ‘Boudin executed a number of pencil sketches of elegant women and fashionable people on the beach. The colours are indicated by watercolour washes, or simply by written notes. These charming sketches...constitute as artistically valuable a documentation of the fashions of an epoch as those of Constantin Guys. It is regrettable that all these sketches have been scattered, since a choice of them would have composed a charming album of feminine fashion on the beaches during the heyday of the Second Empire.’3 Many of Boudin’s watercolours of beach scenes were sold to collectors – mainly during a period of seven years in the 1860s – and relatively few such studies were left in his studio at his death.

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12.

13 JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET Gruchy 1814-1875 Barbizon Landscape near Vichy Watercolour, pen and grey ink. Inscribed by the artist Vichy in grey ink near the lower left. Faintly inscribed with notes ciel lourd, bleu gris, prairie and chaumes in pencil by the artist. Stamped with the studio stamp (Lugt 1460; Herbert 1875A) near the lower left of the sheet. Indistinctly inscribed (by Mary, widow of the artist’s son Charles) (Environs de Vichy) / Attestation de Mme Vve Charles Mary Millet / bru du maître in brown ink on a label attached to the old backing board.

219 x 307 mm. (8 5/ 8 x 12 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s studio, Barbizon; By descent to the artist’s wife, Catherine Lemaire; Possibly her sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 24-25 April 1894; By descent to the artist’s son, Charles-Louis-Emile Millet; Alfred Bourzat, Fontainebleau; By descent in the Bourzat family; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 2 December 2005, lot 2.

One of the founders of the Barbizon school of painting, Jean-François Millet studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In the 1840s Millet became associated with a group of landscape painters who were to become part of the Barbizon circle, including Théodore Rousseau, Constant Troyon, Narcisse Diaz de la Peña and Charles Jacque. Although Millet’s early career was dominated by portraits, by the 1850s he had begun to paint pastoral subjects, many of which were acquired by his first patron and future biographer Alfred Sensier. Millet established his public reputation as a painter of peasant life with three seminal paintings; The Sower, exhibited in 1850, The Gleaners, painted in 1857, and The Angelus, completed in 1859. By the 1860s Millet enjoyed a highly successful career, receiving numerous commissions for paintings and, from the Parisian architect and collector Emile Gavet, for a series of highly finished pastel drawings. Honoured with an exhibition of his work at the Exposition Universelle in 1867, Millet was elected to the jury of the Salon in 1870, but by this time was already beginning to suffer from poor health. Four months after the artist’s death in January 1875, the contents of his studio were dispersed at auction.

Millet was an inveterate draughtsman, whose work ranged from quick sketches to study the pose of a figure in a painting, to landscape studies in pen and watercolour, to highly-finished pastel drawings sold as independent works of art, often for considerable sums of money. (Indeed, for much of his career, Millet earned his living from his drawings, rather than his paintings.) In the last decade of his life, landscape began to assume a more important role in his art, inspired in part by his travels beyond Barbizon.

Although he lived in Barbizon from 1849 until the end of his life, he often spent summers elsewhere, such as his native Normandy and the Auvergne.

The present sheet belongs to a distinctive group of landscape drawings and sketches resulting from Millet’s stay in the spa town of Vichy, in the Allier département of central France, in the summers of 1866, 1867 and 1868. Accompanying his wife to the spas of the resort town, to which she had been sent for her health, Millet made dozens of drawings of the hills and farmland around Vichy – in pencil, pen and watercolour – which were worked up into finished paintings and pastels upon his return to his studio in Barbizon. Most of Millet’s Vichy drawings can be dated to either 1866 or 1867, since during his third and final visit in 1868 he was apparently too ill to work.

Soon after his arrival in Vichy on his first visit in June 1866, Millet wrote to his patron, the architect Emile Gavet, in Paris, ‘I have become acquainted with some of the environs of Vichy and have found several very pretty subjects. I make as many sketches as I can, and hope they will supply me with drawings of a different

kind from those you already have…I want to provide myself with as large a store of documents [ie. sketches] as possible, and I have to look about me, since I do not know the country well.’1 Characterized by a particular freedom of handling, the pure landscapes Millet drew in Vichy were to be critical in the development of his watercolour technique.

Millet often rented a carriage and explored the surroundings of Vichy, in particular the hilly landscape above the nearby town of Cusset. He seems to have been attracted to the scenery around Vichy and the Auvergne region, which reminded him of the landscapes of his childhood in Normandy, and in particular the way in which the undulating features of the landscape would partially hide the farms and buildings beyond them. Typical of Millet’s Vichy landscapes is a subtle tonal palette and a complete focus on the elements of the view, with an absence of human figures or animals. It has also been suggested that the composition of these landscape drawings at Vichy, characterized by high horizon lines, bare foregrounds and a precise but spare use of ink lines, may have been inspired by Japanese colour woodcut prints, which Millet had been studying and collecting with enthusiasm since 1863.

Millet’s practice in making these landscape drawings varied relatively little during his visits to Vichy. Using sketchbooks of various sizes, he would begin a landscape composition with a quick sketch in pencil overlaid with pen and ink, to which he would add colour notes lightly written in pencil. On his return to his hotel room he would sometimes go over the drawing with washes of pale watercolour, often ‘with a sort of straw colour, varying from pinkish-grey to yellow for light areas of ground, used in juxtaposition with a variety of greens for vegetation, ranging from bright green for deciduous trees to the darkest olives and blues for evergreens.’2 The washes were laid over the artist’s handwritten colour notes which, however, often remain visible, as in the present sheet.

Although he sometimes complained, in his letters back to Barbizon, that the hot weather and the strict schedule of the spas prevented him from devoting as much time to his drawings as he would have liked, these summers in Vichy were, in fact, to be Millet’s most productive as a landscape draughtsman since the 1850s, and resulted in ink and watercolour drawings that have been described as ‘the greatest in all his oeuvre.’3 It was these summers in Vichy that may be said to have led Millet from being a painter of peasant subjects, albeit placed within a landscape setting, to a painter of pure landscapes. The artist never parted with, or exhibited, any of his Vichy drawings and watercolours, which only came to light after his death, when many examples were acquired by fellow artists and collectors.

The attribution of the present sheet has been confirmed by Alexandra Murphy, who suggests that the drawing may have been completed in Barbizon, based on earlier pen or pencil sketches made in Vichy.

A drawing such as this, with evidence of colour notes, seems to have been intended as a working study rather than an independent watercolour, and indeed it has been estimated that up to a quarter of the drawings produced by Millet at Vichy were later developed into finished compositions for sale. As Murphy has noted of Millet’s drawings of this period, ‘the nearly two hundred sketches and polished watercolor drawings that can be connected with his Vichy visits cover an unexpected range of ambition; perhaps as many as fifty of them were turned into completed paintings and pastels at greater leisure in his Barbizon studio.’4 The J.F.M. stamp at the bottom of the sheet was applied to the unsigned drawings in Millet’s studio at the time of his death in 1875. Most of these drawings were dispersed in the Millet atelier sale held in Paris in May 1875, or at the sale of the collection of the artist’s widow in April 1894. The present sheet, however, seems to have been retained by the artist’s son Charles (b.1857) before coming into the possession of his friend Alfred Bourzat, an art dealer active in Fontainebleau between 1889 and 1936.

14 EDUARD BENDEMANN Berlin 1811-1889 Düsseldorf Recto: A Young Boy Reading at a Table Verso: The Head of a Young Boy Pencil on paper. Inscribed and dated Df. July 68 in pencil at the lower left.

191 x 227 mm. (7 1/ 2 x 8 7/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly Richard Schöne, Berlin; Friedrich Schöne, Essen and Berlin (Lugt 3622), his stamp on the verso.

Eduard Julius Friedrich Bendemann received his initial artistic training in the studio of Wilhelm Schadow around 1826. Two years later he exhibited a portrait at the Akademie in Berlin, and in 1830-1831 he visited Italy with his teacher Schadow and fellow pupils Theodor Hildebrandt and Carl Ferdinand Sohn, spending most of his time in Rome. On his return to Düsseldorf, Bendemann painted his first major work, a canvas of The Captive Jews in Babylon, which was exhibited to considerable acclaim in Berlin in 1832. In 1834 he received a commission from the Prussian crown prince (later King Friedrich Wilhelm IV) for a large painting of Jeremiah on the Ruins of Jerusalem, completed the following year and widely exhibited throughout Germany, as well as at the Paris Salon of 1837. In 1837 Bendemann painted an allegorical fresco for the house of the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow, his future father-in-law, in Berlin. The following year he was appointed a professor at the Dresden Akademie, and soon afterwards received a commission for the fresco decoration of three large rooms in the royal palace in Dresden, a project that was to occupy the artist for the better part of fifteen years.

In 1859 Bendemann was appointed Director of the Akademie in Düsseldorf, succeeding his master Wilhelm Schadow, and was soon established as a leading figure among the cultured elite of the city. He received several commissions for mural paintings and also painted a number of fine portraits, as well as providing illustrations for several books, notably an edition of the Nibelungenlied, published in 1840. He remained the director of the Düsseldorf Akademie until 1867, when he resigned on the grounds of poor health. The year after his death in 1889, a large retrospective exhibition of Bendemann’s work was held at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. A sizeable group of drawings by the artist is held today in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, while other significant examples are in the collection of the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf.

Dated July 1868, this charming, informal drawing bears the collector’s mark of the lawyer Friedrich Schöne (1882-1963), part of whose collection of 19th century German drawings may have been inherited from his father, the archaeologist and museum director Richard Schöne (1840-1922)1.

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15 JAMES (JACQUES) JOSEPH TISSOT Nantes 1836-1902 Buillon A Seated Young Woman Brush and black wash, watercolour and gouache, over an underdrawing in pencil, on blue-grey paper.

145 x 199 mm. (5 3/4 x 7 7/ 8 in.)

LITERATURE: New York, Christie’s, Impressionist and Nineteenth Century Art, 19 November 1998, p.40, under lot 138 (as location unknown); Jon Whiteley, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, Volume VII: French School, Oxford, 2000, Vol.I, p.419, under no.1451; New York, Sotheby’s, Property from the Estate of Brooke Astor, 24-25 September 2012, p.82, under lot 94.

Trained in Paris, Jacques-Joseph (known as James) Tissot settled in London in 1871, working there for eleven years and developing a distinctive and commercially successful style of painting that married French elegance with the English taste for genre subjects. This drawing can be related to a small group of ten gouache drawings on blue paper, each depicting single figures of women in contemporary dress, which were produced by Tissot as studies for his first London paintings in the early 1870s. As Michael Wentworth has noted, ‘The novelty and charm of English life inspired a series of pictures with English subjects that achieved the greatest success as they appeared at the Royal Academy exhibitions in the first half of the decade and are still generally considered to be his finest works. The handful of gouache studies he made for some of them have perhaps an even greater sense of excitement. Poised between the immediacy of first-hand experience and total artistic control, the nine gouache studies known today are unique in his oeuvre and are surely to be considered his most important drawings in terms of both technique and artistic quality.’1 The recent rediscovery of the present sheet brings the number of gouache drawings by Tissot in this group to ten, of which six are today in museum collections2.

Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, who has confirmed the attribution of the present sheet to Tissot, has compared it in particular to a gouache study of a seated woman, apparently the same model, in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford3. Also stylistically comparable is a gouache drawing of the same woman, wearing an identical bonnet and holding a pair of binoculars, which appeared at auction in 19984, while a more finished gouache of the same model, standing and wearing the same bonnet and cape, was sold at auction in 19895. A gouache and watercolour study of a seated woman, in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney6, may also be likened to the present sheet. The model for each of these gouache drawings was Margaret Freebody (née Kennedy), who posed for a number of Tissot’s Thames-side paintings of the early 1870s. Margaret was the wife of a sea captain named John Freebody, whom Tissot befriended soon after his arrival in London7.

Like three or four others from this small group of gouache studies by Tissot, the present sheet cannot be related to a finished painting by the artist. As Matyjaszkiewicz has noted of a gouache drawing of a woman seated in a rocking chair, also posed by Margaret Freebody, in the Smith College Museum of Art8, ‘Tissot made a number of gouache studies like this in the early 1870’s, perhaps choosing the medium for its proximity in effect to the surface of his paintings.’9 It has also been suggested that Tissot’s use of gouache in these drawings may have been inspired by his work as a portrait caricaturist for the magazine Vanity Fair in the late 1860s and early 1870s, since the technique of gouache on blue-grey paper was common among illustrators.

The gouache drawings related to Tissot’s earliest London paintings, drawn between 1871 and 1873, are ‘among the most brilliant of his works...His mastery of the medium was as rapid and his use of it as brief as it was absolute. The...studies that have been located are all single figures of women, drawn from life...They are brushed in with a freedom that does nothing to negate the marvelous attention to the details of costume and the precision of gesture and expression that lie at the heart of his art.’10

16 CAMILLE PISSARRO Charlotte Amalie (St. Thomas) 1830-1903 Paris Three Studies of Peasant Women Pencil. Signed with initials C.P. in pencil near the upper right corner.

137 x 217 mm. (5 3/ 8 x 8 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: The artist’s son, Paul-Émile Pissarro, Lyons-la-Fôret; JPL Fine Arts, London; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; Private collection; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 October 1995, lot 8; Private collection, London.

Along with Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro was the most prolific draughtsman among the Impressionists, with a surviving corpus of drawings far greater than those of Manet, Renoir, Monet or Cézanne. As he once wrote to his son, ‘It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something of its true character.’1 As Richard Brettell and Christopher Lloyd have noted, from the early 1870s onwards, Pissarro ‘began to draw compulsively, ceaselessly recording the figures and landscapes before him, even if he did not intend to develop them further.

Sketchbooks, often of small dimensions, are reserved for this task, and the artist seems to have used several contemporaneously. Many of the sheets from these sketchbooks...have an immediacy and freshness...[and] are independent graphic exercises.’2 Although the brief inventory of the contents of Pissarro’s studio at Eragny, compiled after his death, lists twenty-two sketchbooks, there are likely to have been several more. Unfortunately, Pissarro’s sketchbooks were broken up after the artist’s death, and none have survived wholly intact.

This sheet of studies of peasant women asleep or at rest is closely related to a study of four women, drawn in black chalk with touches of watercolour, that is one of eight drawings from a dismembered sketchbook in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford3. Of similar dimensions to the Ashmolean drawings, the present sheet may have come from the same sketchbook, which appears to have been used mainly in Montfoucault and Pontoise between 1874 and 1879.

Lloyd and Brettell have noted of the sketchbook pages in the Ashmolean Museum that, ‘Although none of the drawings can be directly related to a finished composition, they contain a multiplicity of ideas that Pissarro began to use during the second half of the 1870s and was to reuse during the 1880s – interiors and rural subjects most probably drawn at Foucault, landscapes made at Pontoise, nude studies, and a visual record of daily peasant toil...The style spans the years 1874-9 and reveals a greater awareness of J[ean]-F[rançois] Millet than Pissarro had shown so far in his work.’4 Of the similar studies of recumbent peasant women in the related Ashmolean drawing in particular, Lloyd and Brettell have written, ‘The studies...are important and anticipate the figure drawings of the 1880s...The two reclining figures...may have been suggested to Pissarro by J.-F. Millet...’5 The study of a seated woman at the lower left of the present sheet may have been later used by Pissarro for a similar figure in a painting of a Seated Peasant Woman of c.18836.

As John Rewald has written of Pissarro as a draughtsman, he ‘worked with ease and freshness, though not with a sometimes almost awkward naïveté. His drawings owe their originality to the directness with which he translates his visual experiences rather than searching for “style”. His lines are simple, his forms robust, his shadings vary from subtle to forceful, but there is always, in the way he approaches his subject, a tenderness and humility that show that drawing for him was not merely an exercise to gain skill or dexterity; it was his way of appropriating what he observed and of communicating intensely with the world around him.’7

17 JOHAN BARTHOLD JONGKIND Lattrop 1819-1891 La Côte-Saint-André A Farm near Pupetières Watercolour over a pencil underdrawing on paper; a page from a sketchbook. A sketch of a man and a dog on a path, in watercolour and pencil, on the verso. Stamped with the atelier stamp (Lugt 1401) at the lower right and dated 27 Oct 77 in pencil at the lower right. Numbered 6 9 in brown ink at the lower right. Numbered 5878 in pencil on the verso.

118 x 289 mm. (4 5/ 8 x 11 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Possibly the ventes Jongkind, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 7-8 December 1891 or Hôtel Drouot, 16 March 1893; Henri-Edmond Canonne, Paris1; His sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 28 May 1930, lot 6; Mrs. Stephen Millet; Anonymous sale, New York, Doyle’s, 12 June 1963, lot 50.

LITERATURE: Victorine Hefting, Jongkind: Sa vie, son oeuvre, son époque, Paris, 1975, p.272, fig.691 (as Ferme près de Pupetières); To be reproduced in the Jongkind Catalogue Critique being prepared by the Comité Jongkind, Paris and The Hague, under no.G00006A-H691.

A brilliant and gifted watercolourist, Johan Barthold Jongkind’s work in the medium, as well as his interest in the study of various weather and atmospheric conditions and working en plein-air, was highly influential on the Impressionist painters. Writing in 1877, his friend Eugène Boudin noted of Jongkind that, ‘The more one looks at his watercolours, the more one wonders how they are done! It is with almost nothing, and yet the fluidity and density of the sky and clouds are rendered with unbelievable precision.’2 The present sheet – a page and a half from a small sketchbook3 – is a fine example of Jongkind’s watercolour technique. During the 1870s the artist tended to prefer an extended horizontal format for his watercolours, often using a double-page spread of a rectangular sketchbook, as here. The scene depicted is a farm near the Château of Pupetières, close to Châbons in the valley of the river Bourbre, in the Dauphiné region of France. Jongkind first came to the area in 1873 with his companion Joséphine Fesser, when they came to visit her son, who was working as a chef at the château. The artist came to love the landscape of the Dauphiné, and returned to the area nearly every summer thereafter.

Jongkind’s landscape watercolours have long been prized by collectors. In his monograph on the artist, published in 1927, the painter Paul Signac, who admired and collected his work, observed that ‘Jongkind’s drawings and watercolors represent the most characteristic aspect of his oeuvre, the one that enables us best to understand and appreciate it. It is also the one that he favored, guarding it jealously in portfolios, reserving it for friends rather than dealers. It was the joy of his life.’4

verso

18 HILAIRE-GERMAIN-EDGAR DEGAS Paris 1834-1917 Paris Horse and Rider (Cheval se cabrant (La courbette)) Charcoal. Stamped with the Degas vente stamp (Lugt 658) in red at the lower left. Inscribed with the Durand-Ruel stock numbers Pb 1372 and 2461 in blue chalk on the verso. Numbered 3 and inscribed Ph 1372 in pencil on the verso.

248 x 270 mm. (9 3/4 x 10 5/ 8 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, Paris; The fourth Vente Degas, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 24 July 1919, lot 208c1; Purchased at the sale by Henri Cottevieille, Paris; Thence by descent until 1999; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 29 June 1999, lot 230.

Although Edgar Degas is unlikely to have ever ridden a horse himself, he had an abiding interest in equestrian themes. Between 1860 and around 1900, he produced around twenty pastels and forty-five paintings of equestrian subjects, as well as seventeen sculptures and some two hundred and fifty drawings of horses, almost all of which remained in his studio until his death in 1917. However, as Richard Kendall has noted, ‘Despite the fame of Degas’s racing pictures and his attachment to the subject for much of his career, almost nothing is known of the circumstances in which he made his equestrian drawings. Apart from some references in his letters and elsewhere to racetrack visits and trips to the country, there is not a single account of him drawing directly from a live horse. Adding to the mystery is the huge technical and conceptual challenge of fixing the position of an animal in rapid movement, especially one in such unstable, unpredictable action...Degas apparently created these works from vivid recollections of the turf and the stable and a limited number of on-the-spot sketches, all reinforced by knowledge gleaned from other sources.’2 In fact, many of Degas’s drawings and sculptures of horses evince the artist’s close study of the pioneering stop-motion photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, whose photographs of horses in motion were first widely published, under the title Animal Locomotion, in 1887. Degas is known to have made several drawings and pastels after individual photographs from Muybridge’s book3, and these he often counterproofed, to record the horse’s position from both sides.

The pose of both horse and rider in this drawing is close to, and may have been inspired by, a number of individual frames in several sequences of photographs by Muybridge of a bay horse named Daisy jumping a hurdle4, as well as one or two photographs of unmounted horses rearing5. Aaron Scharf has noted of Degas’s drawings after Muybridge’s photographs that, ‘Whereas painters like Meissonier, Detaille and Morot (all of whom had subscribed to Animal Locomotion) made use of the more dramatic positions of horses in the photographs, Degas seems to have preferred (as he did with his dancers) those positions in which a more subtle implication of movement is suggested and which, in the light of pictorial convention, appeared the least natural.’6 Degas’s study of Muybridge’s photographs also had an impact on his first bronze sculptures of horses in motion, and indeed the pose of the horse in this drawing is close to that of a bronze of a Rearing Horse (Cheval se cabrant)7.

The present sheet provides an insight into Degas’s working process, and his practice of transferring one charcoal drawing onto another sheet to study the image in reverse. This was often done with his equestrian subjects; another example of such a transfer drawing is in the Art Institute of Chicago8. Such counterproofed drawings ‘shows how determined he was to recreate real life in the studio, not, like the Impressionists, to catch real life on the move.’9 Furthermore, as Christopher Lloyd has written of these studies of horses and their riders, ‘they provided Degas with a portfolio of images that could be referred to or reworked over an extensive period of time. The rhythmic actions associated with riding are captured by flurries of lines and frequently redrawn outlines.’10

19 ADOLPH VON MENZEL Breslau 1815-1905 Berlin A Man Drinking Graphite (carpenter’s pencil), with stumping. Signed with initials and dated A.M. / Oct. 84 in graphite at the lower right.

226 x 147 mm. (8 7/ 8 x 5 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, in 1976; Joey and Toby Tanenbaum, Toronto; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 12 October 1994, lot 326; Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London, in 1995.

LITERATURE: Heidi Ebertshaüser, Adolph von Menzel: Das graphische werk, Munich, 1976, Vol.II, p.1192.

A supremely gifted draughtsman, Adolph von Menzel was also an immensely prolific artist; over four thousand drawings, together with 77 sketchbooks, are today in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin alone. He was never without a sketchbook or two in his pocket, as noted by his friend Paul Meyerheim: ‘In his overcoat he had eight pockets, which were partially filled with sketchbooks, and he could not comprehend that there are artists who make the smallest outings without having a sketchbook in their pocket…an especially large pocket was installed…to hold a leather case, which held a pad, a couple of shading stumps and a gum eraser.’1 Together with his widowed sister and her family, Menzel made annual summer visits to the spa town of Bad Kissingen, near Würzburg in Franconia, in the 1880s and 1890s. He found in Kissingen numerous subjects that captured his attention, and these resulted in a series of small gouache paintings of genre scenes, painted between 1884 and 1893. Dated October 1884, this drawing is a study for one of the earliest of these small gouaches, Spa Guests at the Warm Kettle in Kissingen (Kurgäste am Wärmekessel in Kissingen), depicting people drinking warm mineral water served by a vendor. Painted in 1884, the small gouache (fig.1) was last recorded in a private collection in Berlin in 1905 and is now lost2. Another study for the same drinking figure appears in a sketchbook used by Menzel between 1884 and 1892, today in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, while a study of a woman drinking, preparatory for the same painting, was in a German private collection in 19823.

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20 ADOLPH VON MENZEL Breslau 1815-1905 Berlin A Bearded Man in Profile Graphite (carpenter’s pencil) and black chalk, with stumping. Signed with initials and dated A.M. / 91 in graphite at the lower left.

206 x 130 mm. (8 1/ 8 x 5 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Moritz Edler von Kuffner, Vienna1; Thence by descent to Vera von Kuffner Eberstadt, New York.

Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel began his career working in his father’s lithography shop, and a brief period of study at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1833 seems to have been the sum total of his formal training. At the start of his career he worked as an illustrator, producing a series of some four hundred designs for wood engravings to accompany an illustrated history of Frederick the Great, published between 1840 and 1842, while during the later 1840s and 1850s he was occupied mainly with a cycle of history paintings illustrating the life of the same Frederick the Great. In 1861 he received his most important official commission, a painting of The Coronation of King William I at Königsberg, on which he worked for four years. During the following decade, Menzel painted what is arguably his masterpiece as a painter; the large canvas of The Iron Rolling Mill, completed in 1875 and immediately acquired by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The last three decades of his career found Menzel established as one of the leading artists in Germany, a prominent figure in Prussian society and the recipient of numerous honours, including elevation to the nobility in 1898. In the late 1880s he began to abandon painting in oils in favour of gouaches, although these in turn were given up around the turn of the century. Yet he never stopped drawing in pencil and chalk, always able to find expression for his keen powers of observation.

As a draughtsman, Menzel was equally adept at watercolour, pastel, gouache and chalk. (He was also able to draw with either hand, although he seems to have favoured his left.) Before beginning a painting, he would make many separate studies of individual figures or objects. As his fellow artist Max Liebermann recalled of him, he ‘made no cartoon, no sketch or any other preparatory work for his painting besides his drawings. Likewise, he never painted after nature in his canvas but only with the aid of his drawn studies.’2 The use of a soft carpenter’s pencil, which allowed Menzel to modulate the dark tones in his drawings, is a typical feature of the artist’s drawings of the 1880s and 1890s. Menzel was widely admired as a draughtsman by his contemporaries, both in Germany and abroad; Edgar Degas, for example, is known to have owned at least one drawing by him.

In his later years Menzel developed an interest in depicting people at close range, with a particular emphasis on studies of heads. His friend Paul Meyerheim stated that at the height of his career Menzel preferred to use ordinary people as models, and would choose his subjects from a line of people that would assemble at his studio door. As one scholar has noted of these studies, of which the present sheet is a particularly fine example, ‘almost all of these drawings show ordinary people with strong individual features; they are not portraits of artists, intellectuals or members of the fashionable Berlin society who tried to intrude into the artist’s stubbornly defended privacy. The bust- or half-length portraits depict no activity.

Menzel isolated his sitters from their setting and imbued them with a sense of permanence that stands in stark contrast to the movement and momentary effect captured in his earlier images.’3 Menzel’s late ‘portrait’ drawings of this type were equally admired in his own lifetime. As one contemporary of the artist noted, ‘The best legacy among his later works are these drawings…His dominating skill is to take the great drama of gesture and facial expression by surprise and to render it in all the force of vitality.’4

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21 FRANZ SKARBINA Berlin 1849-1910 Berlin The Beach at Marina Piccola in Capri Watercolour and gouache. Signed, dated and inscribed F. Skarbina / Capri 83 in reddish-brown ink at the lower left.

244 x 332 mm. (9 5/ 8 x 13 1/ 8 in.)

Franz Skarbina studied at Akademie der bildenden Künste in Berlin, as well as in Paris, before setting up his first studio in Berlin in 1869. In 1871 he travelled around Germany and Austria, and some six years later journeyed to Holland, Belgium and France, painting landscapes, genre scenes and city views. In 1878 Skarbina had his first public success with a large and somewhat macabre painting of a recent suicide, rope still around his neck, returning to life and waking up among the corpses in the Berlin morgue. Appointed a professor of anatomical drawing at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in Berlin in 1881, he eventually resigned in 1893 due to conflicts with the conservative director of the school, Anton von Werner. Skarbina enjoyed an extended stay in Paris in 1882, and the following year exhibited for the first time at the Salon. He continued to show his paintings in the French capital throughout his career, winning a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in 1900, and his paintings of Parisian streets are fine examples of the interest in urban life that would carry through into his paintings of Berlin in later years. Appointed a Professor at the Akademie in Berlin in 1888, he also taught a number of students privately. In 1891 his painting Promenade in Karlsbad won a gold medal at the Internationalen Kunstaustellung exhibition in Berlin. Skarbina joined the Berlin Secession movement in 1899, exhibiting with the group between 1899 and 1901.

Writing in 1901, one German critic and art historian noted of Skarbina that ‘he [has] become one of the finest painters of light Germany can boast of. Changing from subject to subject, full of variety in technique, he has remained true to himself in that one point – hence his great success...Whatever he has learned in Paris he turned to account afterwards in his native town, in his numerous pictures of Berlin street-life and Berlin interiors.’1 A memorial exhibition of Skarbina’s work was held shortly after his death in 1910, and paintings and drawings by the artist are today in the collections of museums in Berlin, Bremen, Dresden, Hamburg, Hanover, Kiel, Munich and Potsdam.

The influence of his older contemporary Adolph von Menzel is evident in much of Skarbina’s work.

Like Menzel, he was particularly interested in depictions of city life in Berlin and at fashionable resorts, and his work is characterized by a keen observation of figure types and settings. A gifted draughtsman, Skarbina prepared his paintings with individual figure studies in chalk and charcoal, much like Menzel. He was a superb watercolourist, and was arguably the finest master of the medium in the Berlin of his day.

In the middle of the 19th century, the Italian island of Capri was very popular with artists. As one scholar has noted, ‘The views around the island were favored by both European and American artists...Capri had become popular in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when rugged nature alone, rather than landscapes with ruins or landscapes with allusions to past art became, for the first time, desirable subjects for the artist’s brush.’2 Skarbina visited Capri in 1883, and, like many German artists, stayed at the Hotel Pagano, the first hotel established on the island. This watercolour depicts a beach on the small, sheltered bay of Marina Piccola, on the south side of Capri. Facing the three sea stacks known as the Faraglioni, the beach was a favourite bathing spot in the 19th century and continues to be very popular today.

Only a handful of watercolours by Skarbina from this brief stay in Capri are known, notably a double portrait of The Painters Alessandro Altamura and Othmar Brioschi in the Hotel Pagano in Capri, in an English private collection3.

22 GIOVANNI BOLDINI Ferrara 1842-1931 Paris A Parisian Theatre Audience Pencil, drawn on a page from a small sketchbook. Partially inscribed no 104le at. B. E. [indistinct] in black ink in the lower left margin. Numbered 104 le and 138-35652/23 in pencil on the verso.

151 x 93 mm. (5 7/ 8 x 3 5/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Among the contents of Boldini’s studio at the time of his death; The artist’s widow, Emilia Cardona Boldini, Ferrara; By descent to her nephew, Mario Murari; Private collection, Italy.

LITERATURE: Tiziano Panconi, ed., Boldini Mon Amour: opere note e mai viste, nuove scoperte, fotografie e documenti inediti, exhibition catalogue, Montecatini Terme, 2008, illustrated p.434; Bianca Doria, I disegni di Giovanni Boldini. Catalogo generale: Disegni dagli Archivi Boldini, Bologna, 2011, unpaginated, no.1462.

EXHIBITED: Florence, Istituto Francese, Boldini e Parigi, 1959, no.67; Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, Boldini, 1963, no.150.

A gifted and compulsive draughtsman, Giovanni Boldini filled numerous sketchbooks with drawings.

(He would also use whatever paper came to hand, and there are examples of quick sketches drawn on menu covers, receipts, ledger paper, postcards, hotel stationery, pages torn from auction catalogues, and so forth.) His drawings are characterized by a restless energy and a spirited technique wholly in keeping with the bravura brushwork of his oil paintings, and range from quick sketches of figures, landscapes, buildings and objects to more elaborate studies of these same motifs. As Richard Kendall has written, ‘Evident in almost all of [Boldini’s drawings] is a vivid engagement with the pleasures of looking and with the nervous exuberance of the drawing process, irrespective of the chosen subject…Some of these drawings would have taken only minutes or even seconds to complete, while others are the work of hours of concentrated labor…This engagement was vividly physical and sensuous, as his hand erupted in wild flourishes of pencil, pen and ink, crayon, and charcoal, or opted for extreme delicacy as the situation demanded.’1 From the time of his arrival in Paris in 1871, Boldini made countless drawings of the people, buildings, cafes, streets and sights of the sprawling city, including a number of spirited pencil sketches of Parisian theatre audiences, mainly in the 1880s. The present sheet – a page from one of the artist’s many small sketchbooks2 – is a preparatory study for a large, unfinished pastel (fig.1) in the Museo Boldini in Ferrara3. As has been noted, ‘The subject of spectators clearly fascinated Boldini, as the large number of pencil and painted sketches suggest’4, and other examples of such drawings are today in the Museo Boldini5 and elsewhere6.

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23 JEAN-LOUIS-ERNEST MEISSONIER Lyon 1815-1891 Paris Venice: The Entrance to the Grand Canal, with Santa Maria della Salute and the Punta della Dogana seen from the Casa Fumagalli Watercolour and gouache, over an underdrawing in pencil, on buff paper. Signed with the artist’s monogram EM and inscribed by the artist facendo questo disegno non fui mai più contento / ora, amica mia, accetatelo, è un ricordo di felice tempo in brown ink at the lower right. Dedicated and dated alla signora Elisabetta Bezanson / 1 Janvier 1887 in brown ink on the verso. Further inscribed en sepbre 1886 = au bas de [word missing] demeure = Casa Fumagalli = 2 entrées une sur le [word(s) missing] on a strip of brown paper pasted onto the reverse of the old frame.

190 x 303 mm. (7 1/ 2 x 11 7/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to Elisabeth Bezanson, later Mme. Ernest Meissonier, in January 1887.

LITERATURE: Valéry C. O. Gréard, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier: ses souvenirs, ses entretiens, précédés d’une étude sur sa vie et son oeuvre , Paris, 1897, illustrated p.291, and p.430 (where dated 1884); ‘Catalogue of Meissonier’s Works’, in Valéry C. O. Gréard, Meissonier: His Life and his Art, London, 1897, p.385 (‘The entrance to the Casa Fumagalli, where Meissoner lived in Venice.’), where dated 1884.

‘The incontestible master of our epoch’, as Eugène Delacroix described him, gives some indication of the esteem in which Ernest Meissonier was held by his contemporaries, critics and the public. Enjoying a career of more than fifty years, he was one of the most famous painters of the 19th century, renowned both in France and abroad. Largely self-taught as an artist, he began his career as a designer of wood engravings for book illustrations. Although he exhibited paintings regularly at the Salon from 1834 onwards, winning several medals in later years, Meissonier’s first taste of international fame came at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, when his painting of A Brawl was bought by Napoleon III as a present for Prince Albert of England. Much of his work was on a very small and intimate scale, and reveals the influence of the Dutch genre painters of the 17th century that he had studied as a young apprentice. His favoured subject matter included genre scenes of 17th and 18th century life, as well as more contemporary depictions of men at leisure, all painted on small panels and executed with a meticulous attention to detail.

Meissonier enjoyed considerable financial success as a painter, with his paintings often fetching very high prices, and in 1846 was able to buy a large house and estate in Poissy, to the west of Paris, where he built two separate, large studios. From the late 1840s onwards, he devoted much of his time to military subjects, basing his paintings on drawings and oil sketches of soldiers, their horses, uniforms and equipment, mostly taken from life. Meissonier also had a particular talent for portraiture, although this accounted for only a relatively small part of his output. Most of his sitters were family members or close friends, and he seems not to have received or accepted many portrait commissions. He also produced a handful of self-portraits, both painted and drawn, in which he generally shows himself without the attributes of a painter and, with his long white beard and melancholy expression, looking more like a philosopher or sage. Meissonier was a fine landscapist, although this was very much a secondary interest.

Nevertheless, as one early biographer noted, ‘He would have made a delightful landscape painter. He painted many exquisite views of Venice, Antibes, Evian and Poissy.’1 He also made a small number of wax sculptures of horses, intended primarily as aids for his paintings and not cast or publicly exhibited until after his death. From 1876 onwards Meissonier stopped exhibiting at the Salons, preferring instead to show his work in the annual exhibitions of the Cercle de l’Union Artistique. In 1889, he became the first artist to be awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour.

Meissonier was much admired by his contemporaries for his skill as a draughtsman. As one American critic, writing a few years after the artist’s death, noted, ‘Meissonier was a wonderfully accurate draftsman.

His drawing is composed of equal parts of astonishingly clear and accurate vision and of deep scientific acquirement. It is not the drawing of the great stylists, the masters of beautiful and significant line, but it is marvelously forceful and just.’2 He was particularly fond of working in watercolour and gouache; as he once stated, ‘Sometimes I feel I have lost my affection for oil paints; nothing is so pleasant as water-colour.

Body colour one can always go back to, whenever one likes. Whites do not change, so one is certain of what is done.’3 Ernest Meissonier first visited Venice in 1860, and returned there annually after 1879. As he recalled, ‘Ah, Venice! The pleasure of revisiting it is more intense each time. There everything appeals to the soul. There is only one thing to regret, – the impossibility of recording all that soothes and enchants one.’4 Drawn in 1886, this watercolour shows the view of the Grand Canal from the entrance to the Casa Fumagalli, where Meissonier stayed when he was in Venice5. It can be closely related to the large canvas of The Grand Canal, Venice (fig.1), painted two years later in 1888 and today in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris6. As Valéry Gréard has described the composition of the large painting, in his magisterial monograph on Meissonier, published in 1897: ‘Grand Canal, Venice. View from the entrance of the Casa Fumagalli, occupied by Meissoner. His gondola (with an awning) waits at the steps; other gondoliers hang about for customers. On the post a figure of the Virgin, where a lamp burns at night. A gondola crosses the canal towards the Dogana; on the left, the Church of the Salute and the pink buildings of the Seminary; the masts of ships in the Giudecca beyond.’7 A closely related watercolour of the same view, which is closer in composition to the final painting and is likely to date from 1888, is in the Louvre8. Among stylistically comparable watercolours of Venetian subjects by Meissonier is a study of Gondoliers, also in the Louvre9.

The present sheet bears the artist’s dedication, in Italian, to his close friend and neighbour in Poissy, Elisabeth Bezanson (1840-1898), whom he was to marry in July 1889. Meissonier’s inscription may be translated as ‘I was never more content than when working on this drawing, therefore, dear friend, accept it as a memento of happy hours.’10

1.

24 GEORGES-PIERRE SEURAT Paris 1859-1891 Paris La Zone (Fillette dans la neige, la Grève) Conté crayon on Michallet laid paper. Signed(?) de Seurat (fig.1) in blue chalk on the verso. Numbered 195 in red chalk on the verso.

240 x 314 mm. (9 1/ 2 x 12 3/ 8 in.)

Watermark: MICHALLET PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist, Paris; Léon Appert, Paris; Probably Maurice Appert, Paris; M. Knoedler & Co., Paris; Galerie Gérard Frères, Paris; Gustave Goubaux; Etienne Bignou, Paris; Félix Fénéon, Paris; His posthumous sale (‘Collection Fénéon’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Bellier], 30 May 1947, lot 40; Alex Loeb, Paris; Galerie Max Kaganovitch, Paris; Acquired from them by Nehama Jaglom, New York; By descent to a private collection, New York; Anonymous sale (‘Property from the Estate of Nehama Jaglom’), New York, Sotheby’s, 3 May 2005, lot 48; Private collection, London.

LITERATURE: Gotthard Jedlicka, ‘Die Zeichnungen Seurats’, Galerie und Sammler, October-November 1937, pp.147-150, illustrated p.149; Germain Seligman, The Drawings of Georges Seurat, New York, 1947, p.23, p.68, no.32; César M. de Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, Paris, 1961, Vol.II, pp.114-115, no.521 (where dated c.1883), also illustrated p.521; Robert L. Herbert, Seurat’s Drawings, New York, 1962, p.189, no.165, illustrated p.186 (where dated 1882-1883); John Russell, Seurat, London, 1965, p.90, illustrated p.93, fig.85; André Chastel and Fiorella Minervino, L’opera completa di Seurat, Milan, 1972, p.114, no.D128; Jodi Hauptman, ‘Medium and Miasma: Seurat’s Drawings on the Margins of Paris’, in Jodi Hauptman, Georges Seurat: The Drawings, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2007-2008, p.116, illustrated p.128, pl.62 (as The Zone (Outside the City Walls)).

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Georges Aubry, Aquarelles, pastels et dessins des maîtres du XIXe siècle, 1931, no.75 (as La Grève); Paris, Galerie Paul Rosenberg, Exposition Seurat, 1936, no.102; London, Wildenstein & Co., Seurat and his Contemporaries, 1937, no.67; Zurich, Galerie Aktuaryus, Le NeoImpressionnisme, 1937, no.13; London, The Leicester Galleries, “Artists Who Died Young”, 1938, no.31; Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Le dessin de Toulouse-Lautrec aux Cubistes, 1954, no.191; Paris, Galerie Max Kaganovitch, les 30 ans de la Galerie Max Kaganovitch: Dessins, aquarelles, tableaux, sculptures des XIXe et XXe siècles, 1966, no.93; New York, Museum of Modern Art, Georges Seurat: The Drawings, 2007-2008, no.62.

A pupil of Henri Lehmann, Georges Seurat enjoyed a career of only about eleven years, before his early death at the age of thirty-one. Around 250 paintings and twice as many drawings by him are known today; a remarkable figure considering the brevity of his career. Seurat has always been highly admired for his drawings, which were shown alongside his paintings in several exhibitions held during his lifetime.

In one of the first significant critical studies of Seurat as a draughtsman, Germain Seligman rightly noted that, ‘almost every drawing done by the artist is a complete picture in itself and needs but a frame. He brought to the execution of these perfect small chefsd’oeuvre such care and attention as is seldom found. They are not like those in the sketchbooks of most artists, a few haphazard lines quickly drawn anywhere on a sheet of paper...On the contrary, each of the subjects, whether a human being, a still life, a detail of a landscape or of the human body, is carefully centered and methodically carried out to completion.’1 1.

For Seurat, drawing took up particular importance after 1881, when he began to depict the contrasts between black and white, and the rich scale of tonalities that exist between the two. By the age of twenty-one or twenty-two he had perfected his mature, evocative manner of drawing, in which line is replaced by velvety areas of dark tones, enlivened by highlights of white, often where the paper was left blank. His preferred medium was Conté crayon; a stick of compressed powdered graphite or charcoal in a metallic cylinder which was available in different grades of hardness. In his drawings, Seurat invariably used watermarked Michallet paper (sometimes called Ingres paper); a handmade French laid paper that had a grainy surface texture which allowed the artist to achieve greater depth and richness of tone with the Conté crayon.

As the Seurat scholar Robert L. Herbert has described the artist’s choice of medium and drawing surface, ‘With only two or three exceptions, [Seurat] used conté crayon on Michallet paper for his mature drawings...Conté is a medium hard and greasy crayon which has certain advantages over charcoal. It is easier to handle, since it does not crumble or smudge, and the degree of darkness is directly proportionate to the pressure used. It is nonetheless soft enough to leave its mark no matter how lightly applied. In the original its more opaque and lustrous blacks distinguish it from the matte and chalky blacks of charcoal.

Michallet...is a thick rag paper, milk-white when fresh but a creamy off-white after exposure to the air. Under a microscope its myriad tufts can be seen to project from the surface in little comma-shaped hooks. When Seurat lightly stroked the surface, the hooks caught the crayon here and there, leaving the valleys between them untouched. As a result, his greys are truly three-dimensional, with the white showing between the touches of dark, and no matter how smooth when viewed from a distance, they are full of wisps and irregularities which are a joy to discover when close to the eye.’2 And, as another scholar has written of Seurat’s use of Conté crayon, ‘the black of this special pencil has a warmth, a depth that the ordinary one is far from possessing, and by applying layer upon layer, the artist gave it a gloss and vitality...The conté crayon in light touches next to the “dark” black looks grey, and the addition of new strokes to the ones already put down reinforces the masses to the extent that they are given a plastic quality.’3 Drawn when the artist was in his early twenties, this superb landscape drawing depicts ‘La Zone’; the term given to ‘that strange no-man’s-land which existed around the fortifications of Paris.’4 La Zone was a strip of land directly in front of the city walls, on which it was forbidden to build anything in order to keep the area clear for military purposes. A ‘grim region on the outskirts of Paris which is neither town nor country’5, the wasteland of La Zone was home to an indigent population living in little more than slums, and an area of rampant crime. Seurat made a handful of drawings set in La Zone in the early 1880s, notably The Ragpicker (fig.2); a drawing formerly owned by his disciple Paul Signac, and stylistically very close to the present sheet6.

2.

Robert Herbert has pointed out that drawings such as La Zone and The Ragpicker may well have been inspired by the work of such contemporary French writers as J.-K. Huysmans, who, one or two years earlier in 1880, had written of the area outside the city walls of Paris in terms apposite to the present drawing: ‘From the ramparts one sees the marvelous and terrible view of the plains which lie exhausted at the feet of the city. On the horizon, against the sky, tall brick chimneys vomit into the clouds their boiling soot...A great silence covers the plain, since the rumbling of Paris has quieted little by little and the noise of the factories in the distance arrives only hesitantly...Towards dusk, in these moments when the smoky clouds roll over the dying day, the landscape becomes indefinite and still more sad; the factories show only blurred outlines, inky masses sopped up by a livid sky; the women and children have gone home, the plain seems even larger and, alone, along the dusty path, the beggar...returns to shelter, sweating, exhausted, down-andout, painfully mounting the slope...And it is especially then that the doleful charm of the suburbs has its effect; it is especially then that the all-powerful beauty of nature glows, because the site is in perfect harmony with the profound distress of the families who people it.’7 The area of La Zone was eventually demolished in the first half of the 20th century, and the land used to build the Boulevard Périphérique around Paris.

This drawing of La Zone was included in several early exhibitions of Seurat’s paintings and drawings, notably at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg in Paris in 1936 (fig.3). Most recently, it was shown in the seminal exhibition of Seurat’s drawings held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2007-2008. As the exhibition’s curator Jodi Hauptman wrote of this drawing, ‘Let us think of the fillette – the young girl – in The Zone (Outside the City Walls) as our mirror image, as a spectator surveying...the grand desolation that is the Zone. What does she see? A snowy hill cascading into a darkness that resembles murky water (perhaps the ditch surrounding the fortifications); a horizontal footpath cutting across the foreground; a town in the distance with structures reaching for the sky (a church steeple? a smokestack?); vapors rising from the village; jagged lines familiar from The Ragpicker resembling desiccated brush or debris; a dark, ominous sky...Seurat’s melding of conté and Michallet and its resultant vapor, the Zone and its inhabitants, the murky conditions of the banlieue, the flux and change that is modernity itself – their correspondence comes in offering, Bridget Riley so beautifully articulates, “an experience just beyond our visual grasp”. In his drawings, Seurat replaces dazzle with ambiguity, beguilement with blur, definition with indeterminacy.’8 As Seurat’s close friend and colleague Paul Signac noted of the elder artist’s drawings, ‘These are the most beautiful painter’s drawings that ever existed. Thanks to Seurat’s perfected mastery of values, one can say that his “black-and-whites” are more luminous, and even more full of colour than many a painting in oils.’9 The first owner of this drawing seems to have been the artist’s brother-in-law, Léon-Alfred Appert (1837-1935). The drawing is likely to have then passed to his son, the artist’s nephew Maurice-Adrien Appert (1869-1941) who, as a child, had posed for one of Seurat’s best-known figure drawings. The present sheet later belonged to the scholar and critic Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), a champion of the Neo-Impressionist movement.

3.

25 PAUL CÉZANNE Aix-en-Provence 1839-1906 Aix-en-Provence Forest Scene (Sous-bois) Watercolour and pencil on white paper; a page from a sketchbook. Numbered 7 in pencil on the verso.

207 x 127 mm. (8 1/ 8 x 5 in.)

PROVENANCE: Paul Cézanne fils, Paris; Possibly Adrien Chappuis, Tresserve; Valentine Dudensing (Valentine Gallery), New York; L. McKim, New York; By descent to Charlotte B. McKim, Palm Beach; Her estate sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 17 May 1979, lot 422; Richard L. Feigen, New York, in 1983; Graphisches Kabinett Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner, Bremen; Private collection; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 10 February 2011, lot 402; Private collection, Britain.

LITERATURE: John Rewald, Paul Cézanne. The Watercolours: A Catalogue Raisonné, London and New York, 1983, p.126, no.168, illustrated fig.168; To be included in the forthcoming online Catalogue raisonné of Paul Cézanne’s Watercolors, under the direction of Walter Feilchenfeldt, David Nash and Jayne Warman.

One of the great watercolourists of the 19th century, Paul Cézanne used the medium throughout his career, but with particular emphasis from the 1880s onwards. Over six hundred watercolours by the artist are known, ranging from quick studies in his sketchbooks to highly finished works. Most of Cézanne’s watercolours were not intended as preparatory studies for his oil paintings, but served as a means of recording his impressions. As Christopher Lloyd has pointed out, ‘Cézanne seems to have favoured watercolour...as a viable alternative to painting, allowing for a more thorough and prolonged analysis of motifs. In fact, by the early 1880s Cézanne only very rarely used watercolour as part of the preparatory process and had instead begun to regard it as a medium in which he could capture the effects of nature more definitively than perhaps in his paintings.’1 Yet the artist himself seems not to have thought too much of his watercolours, and there are accounts of them strewn carelessly on the floor of his studio and, indeed, sometimes in the fields beyond. In the last part of Cézanne’s career, from around 1895 until his death in 1906, the medium of watercolour came to occupy more of his time, and the resulting landscapes, still-life subjects and portraits of this period are characterized by a noticeably more vibrant tonality.

Many of Cézanne’s larger, independent watercolours of landscape and still life compositions were only discovered among the contents of his studio after his death, when nearly two hundred examples were acquired from the artist’s son, Paul Cézanne fils, by the dealers Ambroise Vollard (who had earlier mounted the first exhibition of Cézanne’s watercolours in his Paris gallery in 1905) and Gaston and Josse Bernheim-Jeune. In 1907, a year after the artist’s death, a large exhibition of his watercolours was mounted at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris and the Galerie Paul Cassirer in Berlin, to considerable acclaim. Indeed, within a few years of his death, Cézanne’s watercolours had become something of a cult among his admirers and collectors, with such artists as Renoir and Degas owning prized examples.

Nearly all of Cézanne’s pencil drawings and smaller watercolours, such as the present sheet, were once part of sketchbooks that he used over long periods of time. It has been estimated that some eighteen or nineteen sketchbooks, of various sizes, were in Cézanne’s estate when he died. These were inherited by the artist’s wife and son, who began to remove individual sheets, in particular the watercolours and more finished pencil drawings, which were then sold to collectors or dealers. Several sketchbooks were later owned by the dealer Paul Guillaume before being acquired in the 1930s by the art historian Adrien Chappuis, who completed the process of dismantling the sketchbooks in the course of his lifelong study of the artist’s drawn oeuvre, culminating in his catalogue raisonné of Cézanne’s drawings, published in 1973.

Only seven of Cézanne’s sketchbooks remain intact today, although each of these have missing sheets.

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Cézanne’s sketchbooks were filled with portrait studies of his family and friends, views of his studio, landscape and figure studies, copies after antique or Old Master paintings and sculptures, and still life subjects. As one scholar has noted, ‘Cézanne’s sketchbooks are among the most evocative and touching works of their kind to come down to us. They are full of copy notes, compositional studies, casual observations of objects or figures, as well as lists and notations on all sorts of matters.’2 Furthermore, as Christopher Lloyd has pointed out, ‘Cézanne used his sketchbooks randomly and even within each one there is a disregard for the sequence of the pages. It is as though he constantly picked up the nearest one to hand, regardless of previous usage...Although Cézanne did make many drawings on single sheets of larger dimensions, especially watercolours dating from the 1890s, the pages in the sketchbooks reveal the essence of Cézanne’s draughtsmanship. They show him to have been an intensely private man, but at the same time someone deeply committed to perfecting the process of making art in order to record the world as he saw it with the greatest verismilitude and probity.’3 A characteristic of the watercolours of Cézanne is the striking balance the artist was able to achieve between the pencil drawing itself, the delicate touches of watercolour laid over this, and the areas of the paper left in reserve, untouched by pencil or paintbrush. As the German poet Raineer Maria Rilke described Cezanne’s watercolours, after having seen an exhibition of them in 1907, ‘the watercolors are very beautiful. Just as confident as the paintings, and as light as the paintings are heavy. Landscapes, very light pencil outlines and here and there, as if just for emphasis and confirmation, there is an accidental scattering of color, a row of spots, wonderfully arranged and with a security of touch: as if mirroring a melody...’4 Studies of trees form one of the largest subgroups of Cézanne’s landscape watercolours. The subject allowed the artist to divide the scene into lines and dabs of colour, with the white areas where the paper was left in reserve used for the sunlight filtered through the canopy of trees, branches and leaves, depicted with thin washes of watercolour. As Götz Adriani has written of such works, ‘watercolors proved to be almost ideal for recording the most fleeting natural phenomena on the spot. As he gained assurance in the niceties of watercolor technique, Cézanne was able to register his ideas instantly. Isolated treetops, blossoming tendrils, or simple patterns formed of branches and leaves that would scarcely have been of sufficient interest for long and tedious work on canvas reveal, when depicted in watercolor, a remarkably lyrical aspect of the painter. The most trivial things are presented with great care, and ephemeral impressions not normally associated with him – the barely perceptible motion of small branches in the wind, or the diaphanous reflection of clusters of trees in the water – are captured and given permanence.’5 Although dated to c.1882-1884 by John Rewald in his catalogue of Cézanne’s watercolours, the present sheet was dated by Lionello Venturi to c.1895-1900 in his notes for the unpublished, revised edition of his 1936 catalogue raisonné. As Rewald further noted of this watercolour, ‘the distribution of color accents brings the motif into sharp focus and provides the tree trunks with great plasticity.’6 Rewald compares the present sheet stylistically with two pencil studies of the early 1880s; a study of trees and a roof, in the Boijmans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam7 and a drawing of a house surrounded by trees, in the Art Institute of Chicago8.

As the artist’s early biographer Georges Rivière has noted, ‘In their transparency, Cézanne’s watercolors call to mind the sumptuous stained-glass windows that once decorated the aisles of dark cathedrals and gave so much richness to the naves they illuminated with a flamboyant glow. These watercolors give off light, it seems, as if the sun had penetrated them.’9 And, in the words of the Cézanne scholar Adrien Chappuis, who may have owned the present sheet, ‘a few touches of watercolor evoking the play of light on the branches of a tree will have the power to convey to us, if the hour is propitious, the emotion of the artist in the presence of beauty.’10

26 HILAIRE-GERMAIN-EDGAR DEGAS Paris 1834-1917 Paris After the Bath (La toilette après le bain) Charcoal, with stumping, on light brown papier calque, mounted on card. Stamped with the Degas vente stamp (Lugt 658) in red ink at the lower left. Inscribed with the Durand-Ruel stock number Pb 576 in blue chalk and numbered 1220 in blue chalk on the reverse of the card.

260 x 323 mm. (10 1/4 x 12 3/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, Paris, with the atelier stamp (Lugt 657) in red ink on the reverse of the card; The third vente Degas, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 7-9 April 1919, part of lot 1771 (bt.

Stettiner); Mme. Pichard (Stettiner), Paris; Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris; Acquired in Paris in c.1937 by Karl Arnold, Munich; Thence by descent to a private collection, Germany.

LITERATURE: Douglas Druick and Peter Zegers, ‘Degas and the Printed Image, 1856-1914’, in Sue Welsh Reed and Barbara Stern Shapiro, Edgar Degas: The Painter as Printmaker, exhibition catalogue, Boston, Philadelphia and London, 1984-1985, p.lxvi, fig.43, note 48; Reed and Shapiro, op.cit., p.241, under no.65, note 1; Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Ottawa and New York, 1988-1989, p.502, under no.297, note 1.

Much of Edgar Degas’s late work was devoted to a series of paintings, drawings, pastels and lithographs of the female nude. Indeed, in the catalogue of the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition of 1886, a large group among the works shown by Degas were described simply as ‘Suite de nus de femmes se baignant, se lavant, se séchant, s’essuyant, se peignant ou se faisant peigner.’

This drawing can be related to a series of six lithographs of nude women after a bath, executed by Degas in the early 1890s2. In a letter to his old friend, the painter Evariste de Valernes, dated the 6th of July 1891, Degas refers to these prints, writing that ‘I am hoping to do a set of lithographs, a first series of nude women at their toilette, and a second on nude dancers.’3 Degas had often been attracted to the motif of a woman stepping out of a bathtub and drying herself while her long, wet hair hangs down in front of her, and produced several paintings, drawings and pastels on this theme. The suite of lithographs of 1891-1892 have been described by one scholar as ‘Degas’s last great enterprise as a printmaker…technically immensely audacious and complex’4, while another has noted that ‘In the series, Degas displayed his mastery of the lithographic medium, which he used not only to produce diverse visual effects but also to integrate a single figure into variously composed pictorial contexts.’5 Two of the lithographs show the nude bather facing left, while the other four depict her facing right.

Similarly, in four of the prints the nude is depicted alone, while in the other two she is faced by a maid who holds out a towel or robe. As Ronald Pickvance has described this series of prints, ‘The bathers form a coherent sequence, each a subtle variation on a set pose: a figure seen from the back, her body arched, her long hair hanging loosely as she dries her hip. They rely on the familiar interplay of reversal and subterfuge: an altered format, an elegant upright against a squat horizontal; of variations in staffage, with or without a chaise longue and mirror, with or without a maid who patiently holds a towel as she waits for her mistress to finish drying herself.’6 The present sheet is a preparatory study for the first state of After the Bath III (Après le bain III), one of the lithographs of a bather accompanied by her maid7. In the first state of the print (fig.1), Degas included the figure of the maid about to wrap her mistress in a towel, as in this drawing. In the second state of the print, however, he removed most of the narrative detail, erasing the maid entirely, as well as the back of the chaise longue and much of the background, to focus solely on the bather, who now ‘stands

isolated against a light field, once more reflecting Degas’s preoccupation at this time with a single sculptural figure.’8 It was this second and final state that was published in an edition of around twelve impressions, of which about half were signed by the artist.

Around two dozen extant drawings by Edgar Degas may be related to this important suite of lithographs9, including examples related in particular to the present sheet in the British Museum in London10, the Burrell Collection in Glasgow11 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York12. Like many of these drawings, and indeed most charcoal drawings of the artist’s late career, the present sheet is drawn on thin papier calque, or tracing paper. As George Shackelford has noted, ‘In the 1890s…Degas turned to a new shortcut for transferring a successful idea from one surface to another. For this purpose, he used tracing paper – papier calque – through which he could see a drawing below. The smooth, uniform surface of the hard-milled paper provided an unusual but ideal foil for the charcoal sticks that he favored as drawing tools, allowing him both to obtain very smooth, continuous lines unbroken by the tooth of rougher papers and also to smudge and wipe the charcoal, or even to erase it, to create shadow or to correct a misplaced contour. Such tracings could stand on their own as independent sheets are were sometimes signed and sold

by Degas, but the vast majority of them remained in the studio, to be discovered at the time of his death.’13 Degas’s bather lithographs of 1891-1892 were to be his final achievements as a printmaker. As Douglas Druick and Peter Zegers have observed, ‘Degas brought to lithography a technical inventiveness that had not seen its equal...the lithographs reveal Degas’s willingness to explore to the limit a variety of technical possibilities...Yet these lithographs of 1891-92 mark the end of Degas’s career as a printmaker. Just as the lithography revival was hitting its stride, and the medium attracting ever more artists, young and old, Degas turned his back on it.’14 Little known to scholars and not previously exhibited, this drawing was acquired in Paris in the 1930s by the German illustrator Karl Arnold15, and has been in a private collection since that time. Until recently, it had only been known from a photograph in the catalogue of the third vente Degas of 1919.

1.

27 PAUL GAUGUIN Paris 1848-1903 Atuona (Hiva Oa, The Marquesas) The Head of a Breton Woman Black chalk, charcoal and watercolour, on buff paper. A study of legs in pencil on the verso. Inscribed Fran 2627 and numbered 70 in pencil on the verso.

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

PROVENANCE: Francisco (Paco) Durrio, Paris, by c.1895; Sir John Clermont Witt, London; His posthumous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 19 February 1987, lot 362; Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva.

SELECTED LITERATURE: Denys Sutton and Ronald Pickvance, Gauguin and the Pont-Aven Group, exhibition catalogue, London, 1966, p.28, no.61; Ronald Pickvance, The Drawings of Gauguin, 1970, p.39, pl.97; Alexander Dückers, ed., Linie, Licht und Schatten: Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 1999, pp.230-231, no.108; Philip Rylands, ed., The Timeless Eye: Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne KrugierPoniatowski Collection, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1999, illustrated p.401.

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

A gifted draughtsman, Paul Gauguin seems to have regarded the practice of drawing as largely a personal and private act. In his correspondence, he frequently referred to his drawings as ‘documents’, and appears to have intended them to be kept private, rarely exhibited or shown to others. As he wrote in 1903, shortly before his death, ‘A critic at my house sees some paintings. Breathing heavily, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets.’1 While a handful of drawings were given to such artist friends as Charles Laval, Maxime Maufra, Emile Schuffenecker and Vincent van Gogh, and a few others were sold to the dealer Theo van Gogh, for the most part Gauguin’s work as a draughtsman remained unseen by friends, critics and scholars throughout his career, and for many years thereafter.

Writing in 1960, Jean Leymarie noted of the artist, ‘Many of his drawings have been lost or destroyed; others still await discovery. But his sketchbooks, though often dismembered, the illustrations in his numerous manuscripts and on many isolated sheets – not to mention his engravings – suffice to reveal an artist whose magnitude and originality have not received full recognition.’2 Gauguin was not a prolific draughtsman, and, excluding sketchbook pages, less than a hundred independent drawings survive from a career that lasted some three decades. While a number of drawings may have been lost or destroyed, particularly towards the end of his career when he was living in French Polynesia, it seems that Gauguin’s working method laid less emphasis on preparatory drawings than was the case for many of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, as has been noted, ‘Drawing was fundamental to Gauguin’s artistic process, forming the basis of his work in every other medium and imparting a distinct correspondence between them. Throughout his life he continually turned to his sketchbooks, filled with summary studies in graphite, ink, crayon, and watercolor.’3

In the latter half of the 1880s, Gauguin made several trips to Brittany, working mainly around Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu. As he wrote to his friend Schuffenecker in 1888, ‘I like Brittany. I find a certain wildness and primitiveness here. When my clogs resound on this granite soil, I hear the dull, matt, powerful tone I seek in my painting.’4 The Breton people held a fascination for him, and he painted and drew them frequently.

In October 1889 he wrote to Vincent van Gogh from Le Pouldu that, ‘I try to put into these desolate figures the savageness I see in them and that is also in me. Here in Brittany, the peasants have a medieval air about them and do not for a moment look as though they think that Paris exists and that it is 1889.

Everything here is harsh, like the Breton language, and impenetrable – for all time it would seem.’5 This fine drawing may be dated to Gauguin’s fifth and final visit to Brittany in 1894, following his first stay in Tahiti, and, as Ronald Pickvance has noted, ‘shows how the influence of his Tahitian stay affected Gauguin’s vision of Brittany in 1894.’6 This head does not appear in any surviving work by Gauguin, although Pickvance has suggested a tentative relationship with the right-hand figure in the painting Two Breton Peasant Girls, signed and dated 1894, in the Musée d’Orsay7. Works from Gauguin’s final stay in Brittany in 1894 are relatively rare, as the artist produced very little work during the six and a half months that he was there. A fight with some local sailors in the port of Concarneau left him with a fractured leg and, in severe pain, he was confined to his bed for two months, during which he was unable to paint. Able only to work on a small scale in his room, he produced mainly woodcuts and transfer drawings in watercolour, gouache and pastel, mostly of Tahitian subjects.

The woman in this drawing wears a Breton headdress typical of the women of Pont-Aven, and also seen in a pastel drawing of the heads of two Breton women of the same date, dedicated by Gauguin to Maxime Maufra, in the collection of the Musée de Pont-Aven8. It would appear to be a flat Breton working cap, of the sort worn under a more elaborate white coiffe. Gauguin had written to Van Gogh of the Breton coiffe ‘with which the women cover their heads, like so many nuns. It makes their faces look almost Asian, yellow, triangular and severe...’9 A similar Breton cap is seen in an etching of a Nude Woman with her Hands Behind her Head by the Pont-Aven artist Armand Seguin, executed in 189210.

The facial features of the woman in this drawing – in particular the high, prominent forehead and full lips – are similar to those of a local Breton woman who posed several times for Gauguin, as well as for other Pont-Aven artists, including Paul Serusier and Charles Laval. She appears in a small Portrait of a PontAvennoise by Gauguin of c.188811, and has been tentatively identified as one Marie Louarn, who was apparently the only woman in Pont-Aven willing to pose nude for Gauguin, although she is said to have always insisted on keeping her coiffe on her head12. Marie Louarn was also likely the model for two gouache drawings by Gauguin of a semi-nude Breton woman, one in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the other in the collection of Jean Bonna in Geneva13, which are in turn related to the painting In the Hay (The Pigs) of November 1888.

verso

The present sheet was part of the substantial collection of works by Gauguin belonging to expatriate Spanish sculptor and ceramicist Francesco (Paco) Durrio (1868-1940). Durrio met Gauguin in 1886 and became a devoted friend, particularly during the latter’s stay in Paris from 1893 to 1895, after his first trip to Tahiti. The two shared a workshop in Paris, and Gauguin even invited Durrio to accompany him back to Tahiti, although he declined the opportunity. Before Gauguin departed France for the last time in 1895, he entrusted Durrio with an important group of his paintings and drawings. After Gauguin’s death, Durrio became one of his foremost champions, lending works from his collection to various exhibitions in Spain and France – notably the Gauguin retrospective at the Salon d’Automne of 1906 – and introducing his work to fellow Spaniards in Paris, notably the young Pablo Picasso.

28 GEORGES LACOMBE Versailles 1868-1916 Alençon Recto: Portrait of Mme. Gabrielle Wenger at Camaret-sur-Mer Verso: Portrait of the Seaman Piriou Black chalk on blue-grey paper. Stamped with the Lacombe studio stamp (Lugt 4390) at the lower right, and with the studio stamp (Lugt 4390) and Lacombe family estate inheritance stamp (Lugt 4391) on the verso. Further stamped with the 1974 Shepherd Gallery Lacombe exhibition stamp SG in a circle (ref.

Lugt 4390), with associated catalogue number 28 written in blue ink, on the verso.

315 x 236 mm. (12 3/ 8 x 9 1/4 in.)

Watermark: EDC. PROVENANCE: Once part of a sketchbook of mainly Breton subjects by Georges Lacombe, with some sheets removed after 19651; Shepherd Gallery, Associates, New York, in 1974; Acquired from them in 1974 by Mr. and Mrs. Arthur G. Altschul, New York; Galerie Hopkins-Custot, Paris; Acquired by the Triton Collection Foundation, The Netherlands, in 2003.

LITERATURE: Joseph Downing, Georges Lacombe 1868-1916: Drawings, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1974, unpaginated, no.28, recto illustrated pl.XII; Joëlle Ansieau and Catherine Puget, Georges Lacombe 1868-1916, exhibition catalogue, Pont-Aven, 1998, p.68, no.49; Joëlle Ansieau, Georges Lacombe 1868-1916: catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1998, p.203, under Album VIII, recto illustrated; Sjraar van Heugten, Avant-gardes 1870 to the present: The Collection of the Triton Foundation, Brussels, 2012, recto illustrated p.115.

EXHIBITED: New York, Shepherd Gallery, Georges Lacombe 1868-1916: Drawings, 1974, no.28; Pont-Aven, Musée de Pont-Aven, Georges Lacombe 1868-1916, 1998, no.49; The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Klaroenstoot voor de moderne kunst: De Nabis in de collectie van de Triton Foundation, 2008.

Active as a painter and sculptor, Paul Georges Lacombe received his first lessons in drawing from his mother Laure, who was a painter and printmaker of some talent. He completed his training as a pupil of Alfred Roll and Henri Gervex at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he met Emile Bernard. Between 1889 and 1897 Lacombe spent his summers at Camaret-sur-Mer, in the Finistère département on the west coast of Brittany, where he encountered a number of artists, including Maxime Maufra, Charles Cottet and Henri Rivière. In 1892 he met Paul Sérusier and soon afterward joined the Nabis; a group of young artists united by a passionate interest in the work of Paul Gauguin and a desire to develop a new, more expressive pictorial language, in which form and colour were as important in their own right as subject matter. Taking their name from the Hebrew word for prophet, the Nabis artists included Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton, among others. Lacombe painted Breton figure scenes and somewhat artificial, stylized seascapes, in which the influence of Japanese landscape prints is evident. Around 1893 he met Gauguin, and was inspired by his carved wooden sculptures to begin sculpting in wood himself, creating Symbolist works characterized by a naive technique, and soon becoming widely known as ‘Le nabi sculpteur’.

Of independent means, Lacombe did not need to make a living from his art, and seems to have chosen not to sell his work. Nevertheless, he exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne, as well as with the Nabis group at the galleries Le Barc de Boutteville and Durand-Ruel, as well as with Ambroise Vollard. He also commissioned mural decorations from both Sérusier and Paul

recto

Ranson. Shortly after his marriage in 1897, Lacombe settled in a house called l’Ermitage, in the Ecouves forest near Alençon in Normandy. His isolation from the artistic milieu in Paris, as well as his wooded surroundings, had an effect on his style, with his landscapes becoming more naturalistic. In the early years of the 20th century, Lacombe met and came under the influence of Théo van Rysselberghe, and began painting landscapes in a pointillist manner, later moving to a more Impressionistic style. He carried on working as a sculptor in wood, producing several busts of fellow artists which were shown at the Salon d’Automne of 1911.

Lacombe’s reticence in selling his work during his lifetime has meant that, for many years after his death in 1916, at the age of just forty-eight, his oeuvre remained relatively obscure. Apart from a retrospective exhibition of his paintings, drawings and sculptures at a Parisian gallery in 1924, his work was not widely shown in public until a major Nabis exhibition in Paris in 1955. Works by Lacombe are in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and in several provincial French museums, as well as in the Musée du Petit Palais in Geneva and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. As a draughtsman, Georges Lacombe’s work was also little known until recently, since most of his drawings were retained by the artist, mounted into thirty-two albums and kept in his studio. These albums remained with the artist’s descendants until 1974, when some of them were broken up and the drawings dispersed. As Bernard Dorival wrote at the time, ‘Lacombe cultivated in his sculpture and more particularly in his drawings an expressionism which predated that of Munch and Barlach, and which has an intensity, a dynamism, equal to that of Van Gogh...To his art the problems of rhythm and balance, of composition and harmony are never foreign. The branches of trees lend a cadence to his skies, as much as the border of foam on waves to the sea. A landscape, people are placed on the paper with a success that reveals his innate sense of composition in an ever increasing way the more his drawings are spontaneous.’2 This drawing depicts Gabrielle Wenger, née Questroy (1854-1944), the mother of the artist’s future wife Marthe, seated on the cliffs above Camaret-sur-Mer, on the Crozon peninsula overlooking the sea.

When Lacombe made this drawing in 1895, Gabrielle was a widow; her first husband Adolphe Wenger had died two years earlier. (In 1903 she was married for the second time, to the inventor Gustave Philippart.) Gabrielle Wenger shared with Lacombe an interest in music; she hosted musical soirées and concerts at her home in Versailles, which the artist regularly attended, and was herself a talented pianist.

She was also one of Lacombe’s patrons, commissioning from him a series of decorative wall paintings for her house in Versailles in 1893.

Lacombe made several drawings of Gabrielle Wenger. One such example, drawn in coloured chalks and probably executed a year earlier than the present sheet, is in a private collection3, while a large, full-length pastel portrait by Lacombe of Mme. Wenger seated at a piano, dated 1896, is today in the collection of the Musée Lambinet in Versailles4.

The drawing on the verso is a portrait of a Breton sailor named Piriou, who helped Lacombe sail the Greska, the boat which the artist kept at Camaret. Lacombe produced a number of drawings of Piriou5, whose wife and daughter were also the subject of drawings that were originally in the same Breton sketchbook as the present sheet. This sketchbook was made up of sheets of blue paper, with most of the drawings datable to 1895 and depicting Breton subjects. Several drawings were removed from this sketchbook in the 1970s, including the present sheet, and the remainder of the now-unbound Breton sketchbook entered the collection of the Louvre in 19836.

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29 CLAUDE-EMILE SCHUFFENECKER Fresne-Saint-Mamès 1851-1934 Paris The Cliffs at Etretat, Normandy Pastel on buff paper. Stamped with the atelier monogram1 (not in Lugt) at the lower left.

244 x 314 mm. (9 5/ 8 x 12 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist; Probably by descent to his daughter, Jeanne Schuffenecker, Paris; Possibly Jacques Fouquet, Galerie Les Deux Iles, Paris.

Born in Franche-Comté, Emile Schuffenecker studied with Paul Baudry in Paris and met Paul Gauguin when both worked at a stock brokerage firm. He remained close friends with Gauguin throughout his life, and an extensive correspondence between the two artists survives. The stock market crash of 1882 led Schuffenecker to abandon his career as a stockbroker, and to support himself as an art teacher; a career he maintained until 1914. In 1884 he was one of the founders of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. Among the artists exhibiting at the inaugural Salon des Indépendants was Georges Seurat, whose work greatly impressed Schuffenecker. Two years later, Seurat’s painting of A Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte was exhibited at the Indépendants to immense popular interest and critical attention, alongside works by Paul Signac, Henri-Edmond Cross and other Neo-Impressionists. Schuffenecker, who himself briefly painted in a pointilliste manner, was invited to take part in the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886. He began to achieve some commercial success around 1888, after Theo van Gogh held an exhibition of his work, alongside that of Gauguin and Federico Zandomeneghi, at the Galerie Boussod & Valadon in Paris. The following year Schuffenecker organized an exhibition of paintings by the Groupe Impressionniste et Synthésiste, including works by himself, Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Louis Anquetin and others.

The present sheet is a fine example of Schuffenecker’s use of pastel, a medium he favoured and which he used with considerable skill throughout his mature career. As Jill Grossvogel has noted, ‘The suitability of this medium to Schuffenecker’s particular vision cannot be overstated: pastel enabled Schuffenecker to establish the nuanced tonality, the forms softened by layers of light and shadow…The pastels of Degas were no small contribution to the development of Schuffenecker’s technique…Like the master he so respected, Schuffenecker felt that the medium of pastel allowed him to retain luminous color without sacrificing the linear control which, again like Degas, he believed to be crucial.’2 This drawing may be dated to the 1880s or early 1890s, when Schuffenecker produced a number of paintings and pastels of coastal views in Brittany and Normandy, particularly near Yport and Etretat. The pastel landscapes of this period are among the artist’s finest works in this demanding medium. In the words of Grossvogel, ‘The lightness of pastel, its own evanescence, was especially appropriate to Schuffenecker’s landscapes and seascapes – its transparent qualities and the ease with which it could be manipulated were ideally suited to capturing movement, setting down images whose essence was literally fleeting, changing, inconstant in appearance at any given moment.’3 As another scholar has opined, ‘In his pastels from Normandy, the world appears as ephemerally fleeting reflections of an intensity that is matched only by the later works of Claude Monet. But Schuffenecker’s light is significantly cooler than Monet’s.

Everything is enveloped in an atmospherically scintillating haze created by mixing white into the pigments.’4 The cliffs at Etretat were among Schuffenecker’s favourite subjects. Similar pastel drawings of coastal cliffs are in the collections of Tate Modern in London5 and the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen6, as well as in several private collections7.

30 CLAUDE-EMILE SCHUFFENECKER Fresne-Saint-Mamès 1851-1934 Paris Portrait of the Artist’s Brother, Amedée Schuffenecker Pencil. Studies of heads of two bulls in pencil on the verso. Signed C. Schuffenecker in pencil at the lower right centre and inscribed portrait de Amedée Schuffenecker in pencil at the lower left. Stamped with the atelier monogram (not in Lugt) at the lower right. Indistinctly inscribed (colour notes?) in pencil on the verso.

222 x 148 mm. (8 3/4 x 5 3/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist; By descent to his daughter, Jeanne Schuffenecker, Paris; Jacques Fouquet (Galerie Les Deux Iles), Paris; Anonymous sale, Morlaix, 7 August 1995, lot 175.

LITERATURE: Jill Grossvogel, ‘Margin & Image’, in Jill Grossvogel, Claude-Emile Schuffenecker, exhibition catalogue, Binghamton and New York, 1980-1981, p.8, fig.3; René Porro, Claude-Emile Schuffenecker: Une oeuvre mélodieuse, Combeaufontaine, 1992, p.26, fig.10; Jill-Elyse Grossvogel, Claude-Emile Schuffenecker: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol.I, San Francisco, 2000, p.188, no.506; Daniel Wildenstein, Sylvie Crussard and Martine Heudron, Gauguin: A Savage in the Making. Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings (1873-1888), Paris and Milan, 2002, Vol.I, p.222.

EXHIBITED: Pont-Aven, Musée de Pont-Aven and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Musée Départemental Maurice Denis ‘Le Prieuré’, Emile Schuffenecker 1851-1934, 1996-1997 [ex-catalogue].

The only solo exhibition of Emile Schuffenecker’s work to be held in his lifetime took place at the Librairie de l’Art Indépendant in Paris in 1896, and included seventeen paintings, twenty-one pastels and three drawings. As an artist, Schuffenecker remains relatively little known today in comparison to Paul Gauguin and some of his contemporaries, and only a handful of exhibitions have been devoted to him outside of France. Indeed, he remained relatively obscure even in his lifetime, once describing himself as a man who, ‘placed in the margin, made himself at home there, without bitterness, without desire.’ Although by no means wealthy, Schuffenecker was able to support the careers of Gauguin, Emile Bernard and other artists, whose works he purchased. In time he came to own a large number of works by Gauguin, notably The Yellow Christ, as well as seven paintings each by Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh, together with prints and drawings by Odilon Redon (Schuffenecker was one of the first collectors of Redon’s work) and Charles Filiger.

The present sheet is a portrait of the painter’s younger brother, Léon Paul Amédée Schuffenecker (1854-1936), who worked as a wine merchant in Meudon, and later became a dealer in paintings, furniture and musical instruments. In 1903, shortly before the artist’s divorce, Amédée agreed to purchase almost the entirety of his brother’s collection of avant-garde paintings by Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Redon and other artists. Although this was apparently done in order to keep them in the family and to prevent the paintings being sold by the artist’s wife after the divorce, in fact many of the works in the collection were later sold by Amédée, mainly through other dealers, and often in Germany.

He is also known to have himself acquired a number of works by Van Gogh from the artist’s sister-inlaw, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, in 1906. At Amédée Schuffenecker’s death, the remainder of his collection was inherited by Emile’s daughter, Jeanne.

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31 MAXIME MAUFRA Nantes 1861-1918 Poncé-sur-Loire Coastal Landscape in Brittany Gouache, watercolour, black chalk and pencil, on buff paper. Signed and dated Maufra. 1903. in pencil at the lower right. Faintly inscribed with mounting and framing instructions in pencil on the verso.

220 x 284 mm. (8 5/ 8 x 11 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Paris.

A native of Brittany, Maxime Maufra was not formally trained as an artist and at first worked in commerce, painting only in his spare time. Although he submitted two paintings to the Salon of 1886, which were singled out for praise in a review by Octave Mirbeau, he did not take up painting as full-time profession until 1890. In that year he made his first visit to Pont-Aven, where he met Paul Gauguin and Paul Sérusier.

Two years later he settled in Montmartre in Paris, with a studio at the Bateau-Lavoir. He continued to spend a considerable amount of time in Brittany throughout the early 1890s, meeting several of the other painters working at Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu. Like Gauguin, Sérusier and Charles Filiger, he contributed to the decoration of the inn of Marie Henry at Le Pouldu. Unlike many of these artists, however, Maufra preferred to depict quiet, almost Symbolist landscapes devoid of figures. For an exhibition of his work at the Le Barc de Boutteville gallery in 1894, he divided his landscapes into three different types, which he titled ‘Les effets’, ‘Les phénomenes’ and ‘Synthèses de la Bretagne’. Though the exhibition was well received by some critics, it did not result in many sales.

In 1896, however, Maufra’s fortunes rose when he was given his first exhibition at the Galerie DurandRuel, who soon had the artist under contract. His friendship with Gauguin remained a close one until the latter’s departure for Tahiti, and the elder artist continued to encourage him in his work. (On a visit to his studio, Gauguin is said to have told Maufra, “I know you defend my art, and I am grateful. Our ways are totally different; yours is good, and you must go with it.”) Maufra spent his summers working in Brittany, a practice he maintained throughout his career, although he soon found Pont-Aven too crowded with artists and chose instead to live and work in more isolated communities, among fishermen and peasants.

As Caroline Boyle-Turner has noted, ‘throughout his life, he retained his love of Breton subjects, exploring them again and again.’1 Maufra worked along the entire southern coast of Brittany, from his home town of Nantes to the Pointe de Raz. He was particularly fond of the landscape around Quiberon, and bought a house there in 1903. In 1912 he spent some time in the Midi, and the following year visited Algeria.

Like several artists of the Pont-Aven circle, Maufra was also active as a printmaker, working in etching and lithography. He died in 1918, at the age of fifty-seven.

In his monograph on the artist, published in 1926, Arsène Alexandre aptly described Maxime Maufra as ‘a poet of the sea’. Always working en plein-air and intent on depicting the stormy seas of the Breton coast, he often painted during the most violent weather, with his easel supported against the wind by the artist’s long-suffering wife. As Maufra once wrote of his approach to painting landscapes and marine subjects: ‘I work relentlessly, I try to express the strong sensations, the strange aspects of nature, the cosmic effects, in a gale, under moonlight, the tempests, shipwrecks, tormented landscapes, floods, waterfalls; in other words, everything which can be rendered not in a fleeting impression of an effect but on the contrary in condensing all that this effect carries in itself, this with a preoccupation of the picture and its subject.’2

32-33 HENRI-EDMOND CROSS Douai 1856-1910 Saint-Clair 32. Studies of Waves Pencil and watercolour. Laid down. Inscribed toutes les vaguettes beaucoup pl. claires. / octogone plus [?] que vaguette / comme un réseau in pencil at the upper left.

101 x 169 mm. (4 x 6 5/ 8 in.)

33. A Design for a Dish Brush and blue-grey wash, over an underdrawing in pencil. Inscribed Ancienne collection Félix Fénéon in pencil at the lower left and projet de plat / Henri Edmond Cross. in pencil at the lower right. Further inscribed ancienne collection Felix Fénéon. in pencil on the verso.

249 x 325 mm. (9 3/4 x 12 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, Saint-Clair (Lugt 1305a); Félix Fénéon, Paris1 [No.33 only].

Little is known of the work of Henri-Edmond Cross2 before 1884, when he first exhibited with the Société des Artistes Indépendants. Cross did not, however, adopt the Neo-Impressionist techniques of his colleagues Georges Seurat and Paul Signac until the early 1890s, after Seurat’s death. One of his first paintings in the pointillist technique was a portrait of his wife, exhibited at the Indépendants in 1891. At around the same time he left Paris for the south of France, eventually settling in the village of Saint-Clair, near Le Lavandou and Saint-Tropez, and the Mediterranean landscape of the Côte d’Azur was to become his preferred subject matter for the remainder of his career. From 1892 onwards Cross participated in all the exhibitions devoted to the Neo-Impressionist movement. His style became less rigid as his career progressed, with his paintings gradually adopting a greater freedom of brushwork than the more rigidly pointillist scenes of his close friend Signac. He also developed a brighter palette; the colours of his paintings reflecting the light of the South. Never very productive as a painter, from 1900 onwards Cross painted relatively little, due to a combination of failing eyesight and severe arthritis.

Towards the end of his career, Cross had largely stopped painting out of doors, preferring to make small watercolours from nature which were then developed into finished paintings in the studio. In March 1900 he wrote to his fellow painter Charles Angrand that he was concentrating his activities on watercolours, adding that ‘It’s fun. The absolute necessity to be quick, bold, even insolent, has brought a kind of beneficial feverishness into my work after the months spent languishing on my paintings...’ 3 As Patrick Offenstadt has noted, ‘His technical mastery and sure hand allowed him to be bold, while his chronic arthritis drew him to the medium because it forced him to work ‘light’. Watercolour was therefore the result – and great beneficiary of both his physical suffering and his genius.’4 Several comparable drawings akin to the Studies of Waves are found in a small sketchbook used by Cross, which was published in a facsimile edition in 1959. As John Rewald noted of the drawings in that sketchbook, ‘For Cross, the birth of a work of art started at the moment a scene or an object caught his attention, when he recognized the need to record, even in a few quick strokes, the aspect that had struck him. In this way, his sketches lead us to the source of his art and reveal to us a man observing nature without posturing and without any definite intention. This is why the pages in this little sketchbook are precious, these more or less fugitive notations, of an intimate nature, through which the artist seems to grasp the image of his fortuitous encounters with nature.’5 As the artist himself once said, ‘If I draw a little haphazardly on a rectangle of paper, searching for a harmony of values rather than a preoccupation with form, it may be that the unexpected gives birth to forms which I can then define through my experience. The unexpected has played its role and my little knowledge has defined the forms of my subconscious.’6

32. actual size

33.

34 HERBERT JAMES DRAPER London 1863/4-1920 London Study of a Young Woman: Study for Halcyone Black and white chalk on blue-grey paper, the edges of the large sheet folded over on two sides. Squared for transfer in black chalk. A sketch of a man’s trousers (probably by another hand) drawn in black chalk on the verso. Inscribed by the artist Ruth / lying in big armchair / lots of cushions / self standing quite close in black chalk at the upper left. Further inscribed S in white chalk at the upper right. Inscribed and dated Ruth T 1914 in white chalk on the verso.

322 x 503 mm. (12 3/4 x 19 3/4 in.) [image] 482 x 635 mm. (19 x 25 in.) [full sheet, including overlap] PROVENANCE: Among the contents of the artist’s studio at the time of his death, and stamped with the studio stamp H.J.D. (not in Lugt) on the overlap; By descent in the family of the artist; Julian Hartnoll, London, in 2001; Private collection, Madrid.

LITERATURE: Simon Toll, Herbert Draper 1863-1920: A Life Study, Woodbridge, 2003, p.159 and p.197, No. HJD171.iv.

EXHIBITED: London, Julian Hartnoll, A Second Exhibition of Drawings by Herbert Draper (1864-1920), 2001, no.30.

Among the last of the Victorian painters, Herbert Draper studied at the St. John’s Wood Art School before he entered the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1885, winning a silver medal for life drawing the following year. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1887, and in 1888 won a travelling scholarship which allowed him to spend time in Paris, where he completed his studies at the Académie Julian under Jules-Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. In 1889, Draper won the Royal Academy Gold Medal and another scholarship, and spent much of 1890 travelling around Europe, visiting Spain and Italy. On his return to England, he began working as a painter and illustrator, with a particular penchant for mythological subjects. Although Draper was never an associate or member of the Royal Academy, despite being proposed several times, he exhibited there regularly until shortly before his death, showing large narrative paintings of Classical or romantic themes.

Draper was a particularly fine painter of nudes, and in 1894 his painting The Sea Maiden attracted considerable attention and praise, while three years later the painting The Foam Sprite was acquired by a museum in Australia. The Lament for Icarus, painted in 1898, was later acquired by the Tate Gallery and won the gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. Other museums to purchase paintings by the artist included the Manchester City Art Gallery and galleries in Bradford, Hull, Preston, Truro and Liverpool. In 1887 he decorated the nurse’s canteen at Guy’s Hospital, but his most significant public commission came in 1901, when, on the recommendation of Sir Edward Poynter, he was tasked with the monumental ceiling decoration of Prospero Summoning Nymphs and Deities for the Livery Hall of the Drapers’ Company in the City of London, completed in 1903. In later years Draper produced a number of society portraits, for which he became quite well known. He died, somewhat in obscurity, at the age of fifty-seven.

A talented draughtsman, Draper worked in a manner akin to that of most Victorian artists, such as his friend Lord Leighton, producing individual figure studies in chalk for each of his paintings. Most of his extant drawings are preparatory studies for paintings, and he seems to have only rarely made drawings for their own sake. In 1904 an exhibition of sixty-five of his drawings and oil sketches was held at the Leicester Galleries in London.

Drawn in 1914, the present sheet is a study for the sea nymph at the lower right of Halcyone (fig.1), one of the largest and most ambitious of Herbert Draper’s late paintings. Completed in 1915 and exhibited at the Royal Academy that year, the painting, which measures over two metres in length, was acquired from the Academy exhibition by the collector John Hall, one of Draper’s loyal patrons, for his home in Eccleshall in Staffordshire. The large painting remained almost completely unknown to scholars until its reappearance at auction in London in 2000, and is today in a private collection1.

When Draper’s Halcyone was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1915, it was accompanied by some lines written by the artist: ‘How Halcyone in her bereavement was transformed by water nymphs, and rejoined her mate in eternal summer in the form of the bird that bears her name.’ The subject is taken from the legend of Ceyx and Halcyone. One of the daughters of Aeolus, the god of the winds, Halcyone (or Alcyone) was distraught over the loss of her husband, King Ceyx of Thessaly, who had drowned while on a sea voyage. Draper’s painting shows Halcyone preparing to throw herself into the sea to join her husband in death. However, the water nymphs took pity on her and transformed her and Ceyx into kingfishers, the birds seen in the painting above the head of Halcyone. Kingfishers (known as halcyones, or halykon, in Greek) were said to have the power to calm the wind and waves while they nested on the sea during the winter solstice.

As Simon Toll has noted of the painting, ‘It is not surprising that Draper chose the incident when Halycone came to the water’s edge to end her life as he saw the ocean and women as a reflection of each other’s fertility, beauty and destruction. It is also not unusual to find the shore inhabited by the nymphs who had enticed Draper for over two decades. However, never before had the nymphs been so plentiful or the bond between themselves and nature so strong. They emerge from crevices in the rock, amid the vegetation that grows beside the waters and from the torrents of the water itself...The painting is striking for its melancholic pathos and iridescent colouring, which are both equal in their intensity.’2 The model for this drawing was a young girl named Ruth Torr, who was about sixteen years old at the time.

She wasan artist’s model from Clerkenwell who, with her elder sister May, posed several times for Draper3.

Three further studies of female nudes, preparatory for other figures in Halcyone, were on the art market in 20034, while a study for another nymph, once with Christopher Wood, is in a private collection5.

1.

35 SAMUEL JOHN PEPLOE, R.S.A. Edinburgh 1871-1935 Edinburgh Study of Peggy Macrae with a Hat Pencil on buff paper. Signed Peploe in pencil at the lower left. Inscribed with mounter’s measurements in pencil on the verso.

277 x 193 mm. (10 7/ 8 x 7 5/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Wyndham T. Vint, Bradford, Yorkshire1.

Born and raised in Edinburgh, S. J. Peploe studied at the Edinburgh School of Art, as well as the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi in Paris. It is not known precisely when he met his close friend and fellow painter John Duncan Fergusson, who was three years younger, but the influence of one upon the other is noticeable in their works of the early years of the new century, in particular the still life compositions. Peploe and Fergusson spent the summer months painting together in Normandy, and eventually both artists settled in Paris, where Peploe’s work underwent a significant change in style and tonality. Living amid the international artistic community of Montparnasse, he met several artists, including Picasso, whose work he admired, and sent works to the Salon exhibitions. Back in Edinburgh by 1912, he worked in Scotland for the remainder of his career, although he continued to make painting trips to France over the next several years. His work began to be exhibited in London as well as in Scotland, and he became close to another young Edinburgh painter, F. C. B. Cadell, who would become a lifelong friend and sketching companion. Peploe’s work – comprised mainly of still-lifes, each carefully composed, as well as landscapes in Scotland and France – began to be acquired in depth by a number of important Scottish collectors. In the 1920s and 1930s Peploe came to be regarded as the leader of a group of four painters, along with Fergusson, Cadell and George Leslie Hunter, that became known as the Scottish Colourists, who transposed the colours of modern French painting into a distinctive Scottish idiom.

Peploe was a gifted draughtsman, working easily in pencil, ink, charcoal and pastel. As his grandson and biographer has noted, ‘Drawing was enormously important to him. It was the cutting edge of his skill and he practised incessantly...He would carry a sketchbook with him wherever he went, making quick, sharply observant drawings of street life in Edinburgh and Paris.’2 This drawing depicts Peggy Macrae, a professional model who appeared in Peploe’s work between 1906 and 1910, and also posed for several of his contemporaries in Edinburgh, including Cadell. As his friend and fellow artist Stanley Cursiter recalled of Peploe, who had moved into a new studio in 1905, ‘He had a new model, Peggie MacRae, a charming, witty, and attractive girl, who had the rare gift of complete grace which made her every movement interesting; she dropped naturally into poses which were balanced and harmonious and, better still, she immediately impersonated the figure she was asked to represent. She selected the artists for whom she sat with some discrimination...Peggie MacRae fitted perfectly into the pale grey, polished black and the white sofa of Peploe’s new setting, and she was the original of many of the figure pictures in pink, grey, and black, and the pale pictures in muted whites, that he painted at this time.’3 As a later biographer has written, the artist ‘found a new, inspirational model in Peggy Macrae...She had a poise and grace which suggested many poses to Peploe.’4 A closely related pencil drawing by Peploe, of similar dimensions, is in the collection of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow5. Peggy Macrae also wears a similar wide-brimmed hat in Peploe’s painting The Yellow Dress of c.1910, in a private collection6.

36 ODILON REDON Bordeaux 1840-1916 Paris Profils de Hollandaises Watercolour and pencil. Signed OdR in brown ink at the lower left and numbered 12 in pencil at the lower right.

178 x 252 mm. (7 x 9 7/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Armand Parent, Paris, by 19231; John Augur Holabird, Chicago, by 1928; Thence by descent until 1990; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 5 December 1990, lot 317; Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 7 May 2008, lot 104; Private collection.

LITERATURE: André Mellerio, Odilon Redon: Peintre, Dessinateur et Graveur, Paris, 1923, illustrated in colour between pp.106 and 107; ‘Notable Works of Art Now in the Market’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1963, unpaginated, under pl.XIV; : Klaus Berger, Odilon Redon: Fantasy and Colour, New York, 1965, p.220, no.518; Alec Wildenstein, Odilon Redon: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint et dessiné.

Vol.I: Portraits et figures, Paris, 1992, p.116, no.272; Marie-Pierre Salé, ‘Redon et ses collectionneurs’, in Rodolphe Rapetti, ed., Odilon Redon: Prince du Rêve, 1840-1916, exhibition catalogue, Paris and Montpellier, 2011, p.51.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Bernheim-Jeune & Cie., Paysages d’après nature (peinture à l’huile), aquarelles et dessins par Odilon Redon (1840-1916), 1917, no.41 (as Cinq têtes embéguinées); Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Odilon Redon: Exposition rétrospective de son oeuvre, 1926, part of no.161 (‘Quatre aquarelles, vers 1915. A M. Armand Parent.’); New York, De Hauke & Co. Inc., Exhibition of Paintings, Pastels, Drawings, Water Colours, Lithographs by Odilon Redon, 1928, no.45; Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Paintings, Pastels and Drawings by Odilon Redon 1840-1916, 1928-1929, no.35; New York, Museum of Modern Art, Tenth Loan Exhibition: Lautrec Redon, 1931, no.83 (as Dutch Girls).

Towards the end of the 19th century Odilon Redon began to move away from working mainly in charcoal and black chalk in favour of a new emphasis on colour, in the form of watercolours and pastels.

Although he had worked in watercolour as a youth at the beginning of the 1860s, it was not until some thirty years later that he began again to work seriously in the medium. His watercolours reflect a more reserved side of his experiments with colour, however, and his work in this fluid medium seems to have been done largely for his own pleasure. ‘Indeed, the watercolors seem to have had a somewhat more private role in his oeuvre than his work in other media. Although he discussed his noirs, or fusains (charcoal drawings), his prints, pastels, and paintings in his correspondence – and in his posthumously published writings on art – watercolor is never discussed. The mature watercolors, however, treat themes that concerned the artist throughout his career, and some...are complete and accomplished works of art.’2 Redon’s late watercolours were not exhibited in his lifetime and were retained by the artist until his death. They were first seen by the public in posthumous exhibitions of Redon’s work, such as that held at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in April 1917, in which the present sheet was included.

This watercolour may be related to a number of late works by Redon in which a female profile wearing a similar cap appears, such as a large pastel of A Woman with a Blue Bonnet in the Louvre3. Similar bowed or downcast heads in profile are, however, almost a leitmotif of Redon’s oeuvre, and appear throughout his work4. Last exhibited in 1931, the present sheet may have come from the same sketchbook or sketchbooks as several stylistically comparable watercolours, of similar dimensions, which are today in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay5 and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris6.

37 PABLO PICASSO Málaga 1881-1973 Mougins Seated Nude with a Cat (Nu avec un chat) Pen and black and brown ink, on half of a double-page spread of a small sketchbook. Inscribed by the artist Girieud. 37 rue Lamarck in pencil on the verso. Numbered 35 in pencil at the lower left.

142 x 173 mm. (5 5/ 8 x 6 3/4 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: Part of a small sketchbook, with provenance as follows: The estate of the artist (Inv.3196); By descent to the artist’s granddaughter, Marina Picasso, Cannes, Geneva and New York; Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva; The sketchbook broken up and sold (‘Pablo Picasso: Works from an Important Sketchbook of 1905’), London, Sotheby’s, 8 February 2006, the present sheet as lot 123; Thomas Le Claire, Hamburg; Private collection, London.

LITERATURE: Giovanni Carandente, Picasso: Opere dal 1895 al 1971 dalla Collezione Marina Picasso, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1981, illustrated p.183, fig.29, under no.49; Werner Spies, ed., Pablo Picasso, Eine Ausstellung zum hundertsten Geburtstag: Werke aus der Sammlung Marina Picasso, exhibition catalogue, Munich and elsewhere, 1981-1982, illustrated p.46, fig.29, under no.43; Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art, Picasso: Masterpieces from Marina Picasso Collection and from Museums in U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., exhibition catalogue, 1983, illustrated p.186, fig.29, under no.24; E. A. Carmean, Jr., ‘The Saltimbanques Sketchbook No.35, 1905’, in Arnold Glimcher and Marc Glimcher, ed., Je suis le cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso, exhibition catalogue, London, 1986, pp.15-16, illustrated p.40, fig.29; Marilyn McCully, ‘Picasso: The Spanish Period’, in London, The Lefevre Gallery, Picasso. Works on Paper: Barcelona, Blue and Pink Periods, From the collection of Marina Picasso, exhibition catalogue, 1988, unpaginated, recto illustrated twice and verso illustrated once, under no.20; Núria Rivero et al., Picasso 1905-1906: From the Rose Period to the Ochres of Gósol, exhibition catalogue, Barcelona and Bern, 1992, illustrated p.187, under no.50; Alexander Dückers, ed., Linie, Licht und Schatten: Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Berlin, 1999, p.262, no.124; Philip Rylands, ed., The Timeless Eye: Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1999, p.298, under no.142; Tomàs Llorens, ed., Miradas sin tiempo: Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Colección Jan y MarieAnne Krugier-Poniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Madrid, 2000, pp.374-377, no.171, the present sheet illustrated p.377; Klaus Albert Schröder and Christine Ekelhart, ed., Goya bis Picasso: Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, exhibition catalogue, Vienna, 2005, pp.294297, no.126, the present sheet illustrated p.297; The Picasso Project, Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 1885-1973. The Rose Period – 19051906, Paris, Holland and Gôsol, San Francisco, 2012, p.136, no.1905-494.

EXHIBITED: Munich, Haus der Kunst, and elsewhere, Pablo Picasso, Eine Ausstellung zum hundertsten Geburtstag: Werke aus der Sammlung Marina Picasso, 1981-1982, part of no.43; Venice, Centro di Cultura di Palazzo Grassi, Picasso: Opere dal 1895 al 1971 dalla Collezione Marina Picasso, 1981, part of no.49; Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art, and Kyoto, Kyoto Municipal Museum, Picasso: Masterpieces from Marina Picasso Collection and from Museums in U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., 1983, part of no.24; Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, and Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Picasso: Works from the Marina Picasso Collection, 1984, no.169; London, The Lefevre Gallery, Picasso. Works on Paper: Barcelona, Blue and Pink Periods, From the collection of Marina Picasso, 1988, part of no.20; Barcelona, Museu Picasso and Bern, Kunstmuseum, Picasso 1905-1906: From the Rose Period to the Ochres of Gósol, 1992, part of no.50; Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Linie, Licht und Schatten: Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, part of

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no.124; Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, The Timeless Eye: Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, 1999, part of no.142; Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin tiempo: Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Colección Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, part of no.171; Vienna, Albertina, Goya bis Picasso: Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, part of no.126.

As the Picasso scholar Brigitte Leal has noted, ‘sketchbooks form an integral part of the whole of Picasso’s creative activity’1. Some 175 sketchbooks by the artist are known, dating between 1894 and 19672; the earliest known example dates from when the artist was thirteen years old, and he continued the practice of using sketchbooks throughout almost the whole of his career. He often carried a small notebook in his pocket for making quick sketches, while larger sketchbooks or notebooks were used in the studio.

Many of Picasso’s carnets have survived – notably twenty-nine examples today in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris – but many sketchbooks have been broken up, while others are known only from a handful of individual pages2.

The present sheet comes from a small sketchbook of fifty-one pages of perforated sheets – containing a total of thirty sketches variously drawn in pen and ink, coloured pencils, watercolour and gouache – used by Picasso in Paris in 1905, during the height of his Rose period. (One of the pages of the sketchbook bears the date ‘3 de Mayo 1905’, inscribed by the artist.) Several of the drawings in the sketchbook depict harlequins, acrobats and circus performers, which in turn can be related to the important large canvas The Family of Saltimbanques of 1905, today in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The dimensions of this small Paris sketchbook suggest that it was usually kept in the artist’s pocket, and also served as a sort of notebook and diary, with several pages filled with notes, jottings, calculations, addresses, lists of paint colours and two laundry lists. The sketchbook – generally known as Carnet 24 – was retained by the artist until his death, when it was inherited by his granddaughter, Marina Picasso.

One of seven extant sketchbooks that may be dated to the years of Picasso’s Rose period, Carnet 24 was exhibited widely until it was eventually broken up and the drawings dispersed in 20063.

Drawn on page 29 of the sketchbook, this is one of six studies of female nudes in Carnet 24, which may all depict the same model4. As Brigitte Leal has noted, ‘As intimate diaries, the albums reflect [Picasso’s] love life exteriorised in the form of feminine nudes...drawings undoubtedly inspired by studio models.’5 This particular drawing depicts a nude woman seated and arranging her hair in front of a mirror, while being observed by a cat on the floor. Writing of the present sheet, Alexander Dückers has opined that ‘the pronounced eroticism of the nude looking in the mirror...recalls the femme fatale of the fin de siècle.’6, while E. A. Carmean noted that the motif of a nude woman adjusting her coiffure in a mirror is found in such Rose period works by Picasso as the ink and gouache drawing The Harlequin’s Family of c.1905, in a private collection7. Apart from other studies of nudes in the same sketchbook, the present sheet may be compared stylistically with two linear pen and ink drawings of female nudes of the same year8.

The inscription ‘Girieud. 37 rue Lamarck’ in Picasso’s handwriting on the blank verso of this doublepage spread from Carnet 24 refers to the artist’s friend Pierre Girieud (1876-1948). A painter of modest talent and a popular figure known around Montmartre as ‘L’Abbé’, Girieud was one of several artists whose work was shown alongside Picasso’s at a group exhibition at the Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris in 1904.

As the artist’s son has written of Picasso’s sketchbooks, ‘They are, from one page to the next, an adventure – a diary of the painter...They are the notes working up to something or bouncing off something else, perhaps a sculpture onto a painting and back. The pages of the notebooks are the sketches for paintings but they are also often the afterwords. Sometimes they stand as elaborate works on their own. Picasso’s notebooks are stepping-stones to trampolines for somersaults.’9

38 AMEDEO MODIGLIANI Livorno 1884-1920 Paris Standing Nude in Profile (Nu debout de profil) Charcoal and black ink on paper; a page from a large sketchbook. Inscribed with the Alexandre inventory number 20,1 in pencil at the lower right.

427 x 263 mm. (16 3/4 x 10 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Dr. Paul Alexandre, Paris (his collection stamp, not in Lugt, faintly stamped at the lower right); Private collection, Paris, in 1963; Berggruen and Cie., Paris; Jocelyn Fielding Gallery, London; Acquired from them in 1968 by David Anthony and Evelyn Jacobs, later Baron and Lady Jacobs, London.

LITERATURE: Ambrogio Ceroni, Amedeo Modigliani: Dessins et sculptures, Milan, 1965, p.32, no.94, pl.94; Franco Russoli, Modigliani Drawings, London, 1969, no.10, pl.10; J. Lanthemann, Modigliani 18841920. Catalogue raisonné: Sa vie, son Oeuvre complet, son art, Barcelona, 1970, p.138, no.481, illustrated p.287, fig.481; Christian Parisot, Modigliani. Catalogue raisonné: Dessins aquarelles, Vol.I, Livorno, 1990, p.243, no.44/10; Osvaldo Patani, Amedeo Modigliani: Catalogo generale. Sculture e disegni 1909-1914, Milan, 1992, p.93, no.64.

EXHIBITED: Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Amedeo Modigliani, 1963, no.36.

Never without his sketchbook, Amedeo Modigliani drew with incredible speed and assurance, tearing off the finished drawings and giving them to onlookers and friends, or sometimes crumpling them up and throwing them away. His art was invariably about the human form, and, typified by a precise economy of line, his drawings are rendered with a sinuous, graceful effect. Although often ravaged by alcohol and drugs, his extraordinary control of the pencil never suffered1. As Franco Russoli has noted, in his monograph on the artist’s drawings, ‘Modigliani in his drawings attempts different effects of proportion and relief: now the line disintegrates into almost miniscule dashes to render the vibration of contours and surfaces, now it is supple and firm to show the unfolding of pure volumes in space. Or it becomes sharp, almost like silverpoint, accompanied by soft shadings, to restore a sense of the crystalline clarity of stone and polished wood. Cleanly inscribed on the white of the page or set off by strong vibrant borders, the drawings seem ever-changing and alive.’2 Gifted, prolific and intensely focused, Modigliani was a draughtsman of the highest calibre.

The present sheet was part of a significant collection of works by Modigliani assembled by his first, and arguably most significant, patron and supporter, Dr. Paul Alexandre (1881-1968). The young physician met Modigliani in 1907, when the artist was twenty-three and Alexandre just three years older. The deep friendship that developed between the artist and his patron between 1907 and 1914 led to Alexandre amassing a substantial collection of twenty-five paintings and nearly five hundred drawings by Modigliani.

In a letter written when he was in his seventies, Alexandre recalled of Modigliani: ‘From the day of our first meeting I was struck by his remarkable artistic gifts, and I begged him not to destroy a single sketchbook or a single study. I put the meagre resources I could spare at his disposal, and I possess almost all his paintings and drawings from this period3. The preparatory sketches and finished drawings allow one to follow his developments step-by-step, stroke by stroke, during those decisive years. It is extraordinary to have been able to assemble the successive states (like the states of an engraving) of the remarkably active mind of an artist searching for a style of his own, which did, in fact, very soon emerge.’4 The drawings acquired by Alexandre included examples of the full range of Modigliani’s draughtsmanship: nudes, caryatids, sculptural heads, portraits and studies for paintings. Most of these drawings remained almost completely unknown to scholars and were unseen by the public until a quarter of a century after Paul Alexandre’s death in 1968.

Drawn between 1910 and 1911, in the midst of the five-year period when Modigliani was working as a sculptor, this drawing can be related to his only full-length sculpture, the limestone Standing Nude of c.1912, today in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra5. The largest extant sculpture by Modigliani, the Standing Nude (figs.1-2) is characterized by ‘straight, narrow features and geometric forms [that] compete with sensuous curves in a long, narrow column which could have served as an architectural support or caryatid taking the place of a column or pillar. The folded arms are reminiscent of prehistoric figurines and Greek idols; the elaborate coiffure recalls Egyptian art; and there may be an echo of Cambodian or Khmer sculpture in the suggestion of earrings and a necklace.’6 Several drawings by Modigliani can be related to the Standing Nude sculpture. The present sheet is closely related to a drawing of the same subject, dimensions and date, formerly in the collections of Mariska Diederich and Sydney Biddle7, as well as another study of a nude in profile from the collection of Paul Alexandre8. Also among the cache of drawings assembled by Alexandre are several studies of caryatids with folded arms, seen from the front, which can likewise be related to the limestone Standing Nude sculpture in Canberra9.

It has recently been proposed that a number of Modigliani’s busts and caryatid drawings – including the present sheet – are portraits of the Russian modernist poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1965), or were inspired by her. Akhmatova met Modigliani in Montparnasse in 1910, when she was twenty-one and on her honeymoon. In May 1911 she returned to Paris on her own for a few months, and it was then that she and Modigliani probably had an affair. The artist was captivated by this nearly six-foot tall, elegant Russian woman – with her slender body, aquiline nose and short fringe with her hair tied up in a knot – and made a number of drawings of her. As Akhmatova recalled in later years, ‘You see, it was not likeness that interested him. It was the pose. He made some twenty drawings of me...I didn’t pose for his drawings of me...he did them at home and gave them to me later.’10 As a recent biography of Modigliani has noted, ‘Modi and Anna met at the height of their physical beauty and creative powers, and at the threshold of their careers...Anna was, along with Picasso, the only real genius in Modi’s life. She was his ideal love – never again to be realized – the only woman with whom, despite the undertones of sadness, he had a joyful and harmonious attachment.’11 Drawings such as this underline Modigliani’s skill as a draughtsman. As Paul Alexandre recalled of the artist, ‘In his drawings there is invention, simplification and purification of form...The intensity of his attention to forms and colours was extraordinary. When a figure haunted his mind, he would draw feverishly with unbelievable speed, never retouching, starting the same drawing ten times in an evening by the light of a candle, until he obtained the contour he wanted in a sketch that satisfied him. This is what gives his most beautiful drawings their purity and extraordinary freshness.’12

1.

2.

39 JAN TOOROP Poerworedjo 1858-1928 The Hague The Dream of the Seven Hills (De Droom der Zeven Heuvelen) Pencil, black chalk and wax crayon on wove paper from a sketchbook. Laid down. Signed JTHToorop in black chalk at the lower left and numbered No.3 in brown ink at the upper right.

147 x 248 mm. (5 3/4 x 9 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Hendricus Peter Bremmer, The Hague; By descent to a private collection, Holland; Anonymous sale (‘The Property of a Descendant of H. P. Bremmer’), Amsterdam, Christie’s, 1 December 1998, lot 211; Kunsthandel Studio 2000, Blaricum; Acquired from them in 2004 by the Triton Collection Foundation, The Netherlands.

LITERATURE: Cornelis Easton, J. E. Heeres and A. van der Valk, Het boek der koningin, Amsterdam, 1919, illustrated facing p.8; Hans Janssen, Têtes Fleuries: 19e en 20e-eeuwse portretkunst uit de Triton Foundation / 19th and 20th Century Portraiture from the Triton Foundation, The Hague, 2007, p.17, illustrated; Sjraar van Heugten, Avant-gardes 1870 to the present: The Collection of the Triton Foundation, Brussels, 2012, p.127, illustrated p.132; To be included in the forthcoming Toorop catalogue raisonné

by Gerard van Wezel.

EXHIBITED: The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Têtes Fleuries: 19e en 20e-eeuwse portretkunst uit de Triton Foundation / 19th and 20th Century Portraiture from the Triton Foundation, 2007; Rotterdam, Kunsthal, 15 jaar Marlies Dekkers /15 Years Marlies Dekkers, 2008.

Born and raised in Java in the Dutch East Indies, Jan (Johannes) Theodoor Toorop settled in Holland in 1872, at the age of fourteen. He studied in Delft, Amsterdam and Brussels, where he lived between 1882 and 1886. There he met James Ensor, with whom he travelled to Paris. In 1884 he became a member of the Belgian artistic and literary group Les XX (Les Vingt), formed the previous year and centred on Ensor, and proceeded to exhibit with the group for several years thereafter. His early work saw the artist working in a variety of styles, sometimes concurrently, ranging from Realism to Impressionism to Neo-Impressionism; the latter in particular was used for a series of brightly-coloured pointillist landscapes, as well as portraits and genre scenes, until 1907. Toorop had his first exhibition in 1885, and the same year visited England, where he met James McNeill Whistler and discovered the work of the Pre-Raphaelite painters and William Morris. After his marriage to an Englishwoman in 1886, Toorop divided his time between England, Brussels and The Hague, as well as the artist’s colony in the seaside resort of Katwijk aan Zee in Holland, where he lived from 1890.

In the early 1890s, Toorop began to work in a Symbolist vein, producing a number of large, complex and highly finished drawings which are among his most famous works. Perhaps the best known of these impressive Symbolist drawings – densely drawn and iconographically mysterious works in which the influence of Aubrey Beardsley and the Pre-Raphaelites is evident – are O Grave, Where is Thy Victory? of 1892, today in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and The Three Brides of 1892-1893, in the KröllerMüller Museum in Otterlo. Toorop’s work began to be exhibited abroad, notably at the first Salon de la Rose + Croix in Paris in 1892 and at the Vienna Secession in 1900, where it was a particular influence on the work of a slightly younger artist, Gustav Klimt. By the turn of the century Toorop was established among the leading avant-garde artists in Holland, and influential in the development of the International Art Nouveau style.

Among Toorop’s first significant public commissions were three large ceramic murals for the Beurs van Berlage, the stock exchange building in Amsterdam, completed in 1903. In 1905 Toorop, together with

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his daughter Charley, converted to Roman Catholicism, which would have a profound impact on his work for the remainder of his career. He began to produce a large number of often overtly religious works, many of which were reproduced as prints and displayed in private homes throughout the Low Countries. Among the few official commissions he received from the Catholic Church in Holland were designs for stained glass windows in the Sint Jozefskerk in Nijmegen, executed in 1913, as well as a series of paintings of the Stations of the Cross for the church of St. Bernulphus in Oosterbeek, begun in 1916 and completed in 1919. By this time he was in poor health, however, and by 1920 was largely confined to a wheelchair, with his left leg paralyzed. Nevertheless, he continued to work effectively, producing numerous drawings and prints.

As a draughtsman, Jan Toorop was extremely accomplished, both in his use of a range of materials and also in the effects he was able to achieve with them. As has been noted of his monumental drawings of the early 1890s in particular, ‘His Symbolist work, chiefly executed in pencil, black crayon and coloured chalk, was dominated by powerful draughtsmanship.’1 Toorop produced designs for posters, book illustrations and covers, and postage stamps. He also made around fifty prints, mainly drypoints, for which he perferred to use zinc plates instead of the harder copper plates, which meant that only a few impressions of each print could be made. Toorop was also a superb portraitist, and produced a large number of drawn and painted portraits of family, friends and fellow artists, as well as many portraits – usually in the form of highly finished drawings – of some of the leading Dutch writers, poets, clergymen, politicians, lawyers, musicians, composers and intellectuals of his day. Indeed, Toorop may justifiably be claimed as one of the finest Dutch portraitists of the early 20th century.

The title given to this drawing, De Droom der Zeven Heuvelen (The Dream of the Seven Hills) is found in the caption of a reproduction of the work in the book Het boek der koningin, published in 1919. The title may perhaps refer to a dream about the city of Rome, the capitol of the Catholic faith, which was built on seven hills, but this must remain conjectural.

Datable to c.1913-1914, this drawing depicts the poet and painter Miek Janssen (1890-1953), who was to be Toorop’s devoted friend and muse for the last decade and a half of his life. A native of Oosterbeek, Wilhelmina Martha Catharina Maria Theresia (known as ‘Miek’) Janssen met Toorop in his Nijmegen studio in April 1912 (a meeting she later described as ‘one of the greatest moments of my life’) and soon became very close to the artist. While it is certain that they had some kind of relationship, it was kept largely secret, and the extent of it remains a mystery. Toorop illustrated a number of Janssen’s works of poetry, notably Aan der einder (On the Horizon), which was published in 1915. Janssen was deeply religious and her relationship with Toorop had strong religious overtones; the two made a pilgrimage together to Lourdes in 1919, when the artist’s health was failing. Devoted to Toorop even after his death, Janssen published several books about the artist between 1915 and 1933, many tinged with a degree of hagiography. Toorop produced several portrait drawings of Miek Janssen, notably a black chalk drawing, of the same date as the present sheet, in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague2. Janssen also modelled for such works of this period as The Prayer (Het Gebed) of 1914, a large drawing in pastel and black chalk in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam3.

The first owner of this drawing was the Dutch art historian, painter, lecturer, critic and publisher H. P. (‘Henk’) Bremmer (1871-1956), who may have received the drawing as a gift from the artist. One of the foremost art critics and connoisseurs of his day, Bremmer played a significant role in introducing contemporary art to a wider audience. In his role as an art advisor, Bremmer worked closely with Helene Kröller-Müller, one of the wealthiest women in Holland, whose substantial art collection – including a number of important works by Toorop – became the nucleus of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. Bremmer’s own collection included works by Auguste Herbin, Piet Mondrian, Odilon Redon and Vincent van Gogh, as well as both Jan and Charley Toorop. In 1894 Toorop portrayed Bremmer, as a young man of twenty-three, in a pencil drawing now in the Kröller-Müller Museum, while a later portrait of Bremmer by Toorop, executed in 1927, is in the Stedelijk Museum ‘De Lakenhal’ in Leiden.

40 GUSTAV KLIMT Vienna 1862-1918 Vienna Portrait of a Woman Pencil, with touches of red chalk. Inscribed (by the artist’s sister Hermine Klimt) Nachlass meines Bruders Gustav / Hermine Klimt in brown ink at the lower right.

565 x 370 mm. (22 1/4 x 14 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist, with the Nachlass Gustav Klimt estate stamp (Lugt 1575) at the lower right; Possibly Gustav Nebehay, Vienna; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 19 April 1984, lot 64; Private collection, London.

LITERATURE: Alice Strobl, Gustav Klimt: Die Zeichnungen. Vol.III: 1912-1918, Salzburg, 1984, pp.131132 and p.140, no.2663 (as location unknown).

This large drawing is closely related to an unfinished, bust-length oil portrait by Gustav Klimt of an unknown woman (fig.1), painted around 1917-1918, towards the end of the artist’s life. One of several incomplete canvases found in Klimt’s studio at the time of his sudden death in February 1918, the painting is today in the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, Austria1. The Linz painting has been described as ‘one of [Klimt’s] most striking portraits of women. The ghostly blue skin tint and the intense gaze of pale yellow irises under arched brows give a disturbing Expressionist exaggeration to her features...Initially, Klimt uses the brush like a pencil or crayon on paper, freely sketching the broad outlines of the figure on canvas before turning in more detail to the facial features.’2 The painting sheds some insight into Klimt’s working process, notably the way in which he seems to have begun by painting the sitter’s face, while leaving much of her dress and the background only briefly worked in3. The identity of the sitter of the portrait, and likewise of this drawing, however, has thus far remained a mystery.

In her catalogue raisonné of Klimt’s drawings, Alice Strobl identified a handful of drawings as preparatory studies or first ideas for the Linz portrait, of which the present sheet offers perhaps the most direct comparison. Another drawing related to the Linz painting is today in the Albertina in Vienna4, while another was formerly in the Serge Sabarsky collection and was recently on the art market5, and four others are in private collections6. These drawings all show an unidentified woman wearing a hat, fur stole and a long dress. Some of the drawings depict the sitter either standing or sitting, which would suggest that Klimt may have originally intended the Linz painting as a fulllength composition.

As has been noted, ‘Like many of the paintings begun in the last year of Klimt’s life...the Linz Portrait of a Woman is unfinished, yet appreciated as an autonomous work of art today...Indeed, Portrait of a Woman is sufficiently realized to reflect a move by Klimt toward expressive freedom in his late portrait painting, perhaps influenced by the younger artist Egon Schiele.’7

1.

41 PABLO PICASSO Malaga 1881-1973 Mougins Reclining Woman (Femme allongée) (Olga) Pencil.

236 x 340 mm. (9 1/4 x 13 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist (Inv. 2696); By descent to the artist’s granddaughter, Marina Picasso, Cannes, Geneva and New York.

LITERATURE: Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso. Vol. III: Oeuvres de 1917 à 1919, Paris, 1949, p.39, pl.111; The Picasso Project. Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 1885-1973. From Cubism to Neoclassicism 1917-1919, San Francisco, 1995, p.99, no.18-006.

EXHIBITED: Munich, Galerie Thomas, Picasso bei Thomas, 1986, unnumbered; New York, Jan Krugier Gallery, The Presence of Ingres: Important Works by Ingres, Chassériau, Degas, Picasso, Matisse and Balthus, 1988, no.55.

Beginning in 1914, Pablo Picasso began to experiment with a Neoclassical style that was radically different from the explorations in Cubism he had been engaged in for the previous seven years. Over the next decade, while continuing to work in a Cubist vein, Picasso began to concurrently explore a more classical mode of expression, inspired by the paintings and drawings of the 19th century French master JeanAuguste-Dominique Ingres, whose work was to be a lifelong touchstone for the Spanish artist. To begin with, this new manner was largely reserved for portraiture. As one scholar has noted, ‘During the remainder of the second decade of the twentieth century, portraiture would be the focus of Picasso’s germinating Neoclassicism, until it expanded to encompass the full variety of his subjects, and Cubism temporarily abated...Certainly, Picasso’s Neoclassicism became almost synonymous with portraiture during the years 1915 to 1920.’1 Probably drawn in Picasso’s studio in Montrouge in 1918, this refined drawing is a portrait of the artist’s first wife Olga Khokhlova (1891-1955), a dancer with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Picasso and Olga met in Rome in February 1917; Picasso had been commissioned by Diaghilev to create designs for the one-act ballet Parade, and he was in Rome, where the Ballets Russes were performing, to start work on the project. The daughter of a colonel in the Corps of Engineers of the Russian army, Olga Khokhlova had joined the Ballets Russes in 1911, at the age of twenty. Although never rising to the position of prima ballerina, she had significant roles in several of the company’s productions, including Parade, which premiered in Paris in May 1917. Picasso and Olga (fig.1) were engaged by the end of that summer, and were married in July 1918.

As might be expected, Olga appears in a significant number of Picasso’s drawings of this period, ‘ranging in style from the polished and academic to the highly abstracted: some are executed as contrasting pairs, which suggests he was using them as an exercise to test out the expressive potential and limitations of each style.’2 (One sketchbook used by the artist mainly in the years 1917 and 1918 contained sixteen pencil portraits of Olga, some representational and others abstract.) As the artist’s biographer John Richardson has pointed out, ‘Her cool, melancholy beauty and lithe dancer’s body would prove a perfect vehicle for his emergent classicism.’3 Most of Picasso’s early portrait drawings of Olga display the strong influence that Ingres’s classical draughtsmanship had on his style at the time. Furthermore, as Douglas Cooper has noted, ‘in many paintings and drawings executed by Picasso between 1917 and 1919 – the first portraits of Olga, some self-portraits and many other compositions – the pure linear idiom, the smooth handling of form and the regular well-defined contours indicate an evident desire to test his ability in friendly rivalry with Ingres.’4

Although drawn in 1918, the present sheet repeats the pose of Olga found in two pencil drawings made the previous year in Barcelona, both of which depict her lying on a couch with a teddy bear on her lap; one of these is part of a sketchbook in the Musée Picasso in Paris5, while the other is in the collection of the artist’s granddaughter Marina Picasso6. It would appear that Olga was often to be found resting in this relaxed manner (fig.2), and was portrayed by Picasso accordingly. A very similar pose is also found in a later pencil drawing of Olga lounging on a divan, drawn at Juan-les-Pins and dated the 23rd of September 1920, which is today in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris7.

The motif of a reclining woman was to be one of Picasso’s major themes throughout his later career. The languid pose of Olga in the present sheet, however, may also be due to an event about which relatively little is known; a serious injury which she had sustained, and from which she took five months to recover.

In April 1918, shortly before Picasso and Olga were due to be married, she gravely damaged her foot, possibly aggravating an earlier ballet injury, and was unable to move her leg. An operation was required, and for a few weeks her right leg was encased in plaster, which was only removed shortly before the postponed wedding on July 12th. For several weeks afterwards, Olga required a cane to walk around, and she was not fully recovered until late September. As Richardson has noted of this period, ‘Since Olga was confined most of the time to an armchair or a chaise longue, Picasso could draw her all he wanted. She enjoyed this ritual; it calmed her when she was upset. However, she always keeps her distance in these portrayals, and he always keeps his libido buttoned. Sometimes he depicts Olga as a noble, Ingresque beauty; sometimes less formally, as a soulful young wife; sometimes as a cubist construction.’8 Perhaps as a result of her injury, Olga never danced on stage again.

Writing of the drawings Picasso made of Olga in the early months of their relationship, John Richardson notes, ‘Charming drawings in the pages of Picasso’s sketchbooks reflect their ever increasing intimacy...And yet, for all their love and warmth, these drawings reveal no trace of the predatory physicality that would make Picasso’s images of Olga’s successor, Marie-Thérèse, so insidiously sexy.’9 Some five years after their marriage, however, Picasso’s artistic obsession with Olga began to fade, and, apart from a few drawings made in 1928, she disappears almost entirely from the artist’s work after 1923.

1.

2.

42 HENRY SCOTT TUKE, R.A., R.W.S. York 1858-1929 Falmouth Study of Sea, Sky and Clouds Watercolour. Signed H.S.T. in pencil at the lower right.

139 x 214 mm. (5 1/ 2 x 8 3/ 8 in.)

Born in Yorkshire in 1858, Henry Scott Tuke settled with his family in Falmouth in Cornwall two years later, in 1860. He enrolled in the Slade School of Art in London in 1875, at the age of seventeen, and exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in 1879. After spending the winter of 1880-1881 in Florence, Tuke studied with Jean Paul Laurens in Paris between 1881 and 1883, when he also met and came under the influence of Jules Bastien-Lepage. On his return to England he joined the little artists’ colony, led by Stanhope Forbes, in the Cornish fishing village of Newlyn. By 1885 Tuke had settled for good in Falmouth, where for over forty years he lived in a small cottage on the cliffs south of the town.

There he painted on the secluded beaches below the cliffs, where his favoured subjects were of nude youths bathing and swimming, his models depicted with a relaxed and unselfconscious manner. Tuke was also an avid sailor, and many of his paintings depict fishermen and sailors at work, as well as ships and port scenes. In 1886 he purchased an old French brigantine, the Julie of Nantes, which he converted into a floating studio, and in the same year became a founder member of the New English Art Club.

In 1889 Tuke’s painting All Hands to the Pumps was purchased for the Nation by the Tate Gallery’s Chantrey Fund; this was followed in 1895 by a second purchase by the Fund for the Tate, of the painting August Blue. Elected an Associate Member of the Royal Academy in 1900, Tuke became an Academician in 1914. For much of his career, Tuke would spend each winter in London, and would travel to Europe – usually to Italy or the South of France – in the early spring, before spending the summer and autumn months in Cornwall. In 1923, in a change from this usual routine, he was invited to travel to the West Indies, resulting in several fine watercolours. The largest extant collection of Tuke’s work is today in the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society in Falmouth, while another significant group is in the collection of the Falmouth Art Gallery.

Tuke worked in watercolour throughout his career, and his skill in the medium was recognized by many of his peers. In 1904 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Watercolour Society (alongside John Singer Sargent, whose work as a watercolourist he much admired) and became a full member seven years later; in all, he exhibited a total of 220 watercolours at the Society between 1904 and 1927. As a recent scholar has noted, ‘It was in the medium of watercolour that Tuke showed his real spontaneity and natural impressionism...Like Sargent, Tuke was mainly interested in using watercolour to capture light, in particular light on water. His trip to the Mediterranean in 1892 and to Venice in 1899 produced watercolours that capture the rich colours and brilliant light he saw there. Also they were predominantly executed in a bold, impressionist style.’1 Most of Tuke’s watercolours – for the most part drawn in small sketchbooks – are individual studies of boats and sailing ships, or port scenes and seascapes with shipping. Pure seascapes like the present sheet are relatively rare in his oeuvre, however. Among a handful of similarly atmospheric watercolours by the artist is a seascape study, of identical dimensions to this watercolour and possibly from the same sketchbook, which was sold at auction in London in 20142, as well as a slightly larger view of the coast of North Berwick in Scotland, datable to c.1891, in the collection of the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society in Falmouth3.

43 ALETHEA GARSTIN Penzance 1894-1978 Zennor The Moroccan Bride Black chalk on paper; a page from a sketchbook. A slight sketch of a standing youth drawn in pencil on the verso. Numbered 403 in pencil at the bottom and (8) in pencil on the verso.

300 x 229 mm. (11 3/4 x 9 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: By descent in the family of the artist.

The daughter and pupil of the painter Norman Garstin, Mary Dochie Alethea Garstin began painting seriously at the age of sixteen, and two years later had a work accepted by the Royal Academy Summer exhibition; at the time the youngest artist ever to be so honoured. She often accompanied her father when he undertook the summer schools of painting that he held almost every year in Brittany and Northern France between 1899 and 1927. The Garstin family settled first in the artists’ colony at Newlyn in Cornwall, later moving to Penzance, where Alethea lived for most of her life. She exhibited widely at group shows in galleries and at open exhibitions in England and elsewhere, until just before her death. Her first gallery exhibitions were joint shows with her father, held in London in 1921 and 1924, and she only had her first solo gallery exhibition in 1940. Garstin travelled widely throughout England, Ireland, and Scotland, often using her small red Morris Eight car as a mobile studio, and producing paintings of the sites she visited. She also made trips to France, Belgium, Italy, Morocco, Kenya, Tanzania, Australia and elsewhere. Among her close friends were the artists Dod Proctor (with whom she often travelled) and Alfred Wallis. She remained very active well into old age, with her final painting trip abroad – a journey around Brittany – undertaken at the age of eighty-two. In 1978, the year of her death, a large retrospective exhibition of work by both Norman and Alethea Garstin was held in St. Ives, Dublin and London.

Alethea Garstin’s paintings, almost always on a small, intimate scale, are characterized by a lightness of touch and a freedom of execution. Her pictures have been likened to the intimiste paintings of Edouard Vuillard by the artist Patrick Heron, who championed her work. As he wrote, shortly before her death, ‘I say Vuillard in view of the basic means employed by Alethea throughout sixty years of painting small, delectable, ever-different pictures…and that basic means is the small, blunt-ended hoghair brush which stippled, stroked, dragged and drew good old-fashioned oil paint, depositing it with an infinite variety of tonal colours upon tiny panels of wood…I have taken Vuillard as a peg – and if there are for some time to come those who think the comparison with such a master is simply a gratuitous gift to Alethea Garstin… – I shall have no reply, save only to invite contemplation of her output as prolonged and intent as that devoted to her by her smallish band of intense admirers.’1 The present sheet, a page from one of the artist’s sketchbooks, is a preparatory study for the larger painting The Moroccan Bride (fig.1), which was until recently in the possession of the artist’s descendants and appeared at auction in Cornwall in 20142.

Alethea Garstin first visited Tangier in 1928, and returned there each year for the next three years3.

1.

44 PIERRE BONNARD Fontenay-aux-Roses 1867-1947 Le Cannet Landscape on the Seine near Vernon Pencil, on a page from a small sketchbook.

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

Watermark: partial [VAN GELD]ER ZONEN. PROVENANCE: By descent from the artist to his nephew, Charles Terrasse, Paris; Thence by descent to his son, Antoine Terrasse, Fontainebleau; Thence by descent.

LITERATURE: Antoine Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard, Paris, 1967, p.127; Antoine Terrasse and Hans R. Hahnloser, Pierre Bonnard, exhibition catalogue, Geneva, 1969, p.27, no.36, illustrated p.23; Lisbon, Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, Pierre Bonnard, 2001, illustrated p.59.

EXHIBITED: Milan, Palazzo Permanente, Pierre Bonnard, 1955 [ex-catalogue]; Munich, Haus der Kunst, and Paris, Orangerie des Tuileries, Pierre Bonnard: Centenaire de sa naissance, 1966-1967, no.203; Tokyo, National Museum of Western Art, and Kyoto, National Museum of Modern Art, Bonnard, 1968, no.113; Geneva, Galerie Krugier & Cie., Pierre Bonnard, 1969, no.36; Rome, Villa Medici, Académie de France à Rome, Bonnard (1867-1947), 1971-1972, no.54; Milan, Palazzo Reale, Pierre Bonnard, 1988-1989 [unnumbered]; Lisbon, Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, Pierre Bonnard, 2001 [unnumbered]; Giverny, Musée des Impressionnistes, Bonnard en Normandie, 2011, no.61.

A compulsive draughtsman, Pierre Bonnard made use of whatever paper came to hand, including lined or squared pages of cheap paper, but in general he favoured small sketchbooks, generally of a small enough size to fit into his pocket, as well as yearly pocket diaries or agendas. As his great-nephew Antoine Terrasse has described them, Bonnard’s surviving sketchbooks or diaries, most dating from the 1920s, contain ‘innumerable quick sketches of figures, landscapes, nudes, or seascapes, all incredibly lively in spite of their small size.’1 He tended to use a pencil for his sketches; as his friend George Besson recalled, ‘he had a predilection for an indescribably blunt pencil that was so short that a landscape or a nude seemed to spring from the ends of his three fingers around an invisible point.’2 As Raymond Cogniat has written, ‘Clearly drawing was not an end in itself for Bonnard, but just an amusing way of taking notes. Nowhere can one detect the effort behind a carefully applied stroke, because he usually drew as he painted, in tiny touches and indications. His drawings are...executed more like jottings in a private language, as though just for his own eyes. In most cases one has a feeling that Bonnard’s drawings were not intended for the public gaze, and when he did agree to part with some of them he did it out of kindness, because he had found enthusiasts who wanted to have them and whom he did not know how to refuse.’3 In 1910 Bonnard began renting a house known as ‘Ma Roulotte’ (‘my gypsy caravan’) in the village of Vernonnet, just across the river Seine from the larger town of Vernon, near Giverny in Normandy. He bought the house outright in 1912, and worked there for the next sixteen years. Ma Roulotte enjoyed splendid views of the Seine, and Bonnard painted several views from its wooden balcony and windows.

As Nicholas Watkins has written, ‘He got to know the river extremely well on his daily walks and often explored it in his boat, kept on the little tributary, the Bras de ma Campagne, running between the Île SaintPierre and the bottom of his garden.’4 Bonnard also made countless drawings of the views from Ma Roulotte, many of which do not relate to a finished painting. Vernon was only three kilometres from Giverny, where Claude Monet lived and worked for thirty years, and the two artists became close friends. Bonnard sold the house in 1939, when he moved permanently to the South of France.

actual size

45 PIERRE BONNARD Fontenay-aux-Roses 1867-1947 Le Cannet View of the Town and Bay of Saint-Tropez Pencil, on a page from a small sketchbook. Inscribed 2 chemises de couleur / 2 paires chaussettes fil / 5 mouchoirs in pencil on the verso. Stamped with the Bonnard studio stamp (Lugt 3887) and the Antoine Terrasse vente stamp (not in Lugt) at the lower right.

105 x 157 mm. (4 1/ 8 x 6 1/ 8 in.)

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

Pierre Bonnard rarely parted with his drawings, which were never intended to be exhibited and, indeed, were not regarded by him as independent works of art. As a result his drawings remain less well known than those of many of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, the artist’s work as a draughtsman is crucial to an understanding of his approach to painting. As Jack Flam has written, ‘Bonnard’s drawings are often very small, and as a result they are frequently overlooked in discussions of modern drawing. But their formal variety and sensitivity of touch are remarkable, as is the often fluctuant nature of their imagery. Although many of Bonnard’s drawings seem like shorthand notations of visual information recorded for later use in paintings, they are nonetheless effective as independent entities precisely because of the intensity of perception they incorporate. They also demonstrate an extraordinary sensitivity to the nature of the medium itself, unadorned by elaborate technical procedures.’1 In 1904 Bonnard made his first visit to the South of France. Together with Edouard Vuillard, he visited their fellow Nabis artist Ker-Xavier Roussel in Saint-Tropez, and also met Louis Valtat and Paul Signac.

Captivated by the light and landscape of the Midi, which was different from anything he had painted before, Bonnard returned to Saint-Tropez for a longer stay in the summer of 1909 as the guest of Henri Manguin. From then on he was to spend a large part of his career in the South of France, painting yearly on the Côte d’Azur; in Saint-Tropez, Antibes, Grasse and at Le Cannet, in the hills above Cannes, where he purchased a villa in 1925.

This drawing comes from a small sketchbook used by Bonnard in 1921, which included other drawings of Saint-Tropez and the French coastline, as well as several views of Rome (some of which relate to a large painting of the Piazza del Popolo, Rome, painted in 1922). The artist spent the period between December 1920 and March 1921 staying with Manguin at Saint-Tropez, before spending a fortnight in Rome at the end of March with his mistress, Renée Monchaty. The verso of this sketch includes part of a packing or shopping list (‘2 chemises de couleur / 2 paires chaussettes fil / 5 mouchoirs’) that is perhaps related to this trip.

As Bonnard told a visitor to his studio in 1937, ‘I do these sketches outdoors as soon as I find a light effect, landscape, or atmosphere that moves me...It’s a matter of noting down whatever strikes you as quickly as possible. Then afterward you take a single color as a point of departure and compose an entire painting around it. Color has a logic as exact as that of form. One must not give up before capturing the first impression.’2

actual size

46 EDOUARD VUILLARD Cuiseaux 1868-1940 La Baule Annette at Vaucresson Pastel and charcoal on buff paper. Signed E Vuillard in red ink at the lower left 303 x 235 mm. (11 7/ 8 x 9 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection; Giraud Pissarro Ségalot, New York and Paris; Private collection, Paris.

LITERATURE: Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Vuillard: The Inexhaustible Glance. Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, Milan, 2003, Vol.III, p.1305, No.XI-13 (where dated c.1920).

From around 1900 onwards Edouard Vuillard used mainly pastel for his drawings, and soon came to master this challenging medium. As the critic and art historian Claude Roger-Marx wrote, in one of the first monographs on the artist, ‘Vuillard often found expression by means of pastels’1, and indeed he made more extensive use of the medium than perhaps any French artist since Degas in the previous generation. Pastel was to become an essential part of Vuillard’s working process until the end of his career, used for landscape and figure studies, compositional drawings and still-life subjects, as well as in preparatory studies for portraits.

Between 1917 and 1924 Vuillard spent some part of each summer at the Closerie des Gênets, a small house rented by him and his mother at Vaucresson, just to the west of Paris. This pastel drawing depicts the artist’s niece, Annette Roussel, seated on the balcony at the Closerie des Gênets, ‘framed by the French windows, against a background of foliage. On the left is Madame Vuillard; at the bottom right, a third woman of whom only the lower part of a brown dress is visible.’2 Born in 1898 to Vuillard’s sister Marie and the painter Ker-Xavier Roussel, Annette Roussel was, since her infancy, the subject of paintings, drawings, pastels and photographs by the artist, who was very fond of her. As a young woman, Annette spent much time at the home of her uncle, to escape the tensions caused by the unhappy marriage of her parents. During the First World War, when her father was largely confined to a sanatorium in Switzerland, she was left in the care of Vuillard and his mother in Paris. She had ‘blossomed into an elegant and stylish young woman’3, and continued to appear in many of Vuillard’s paintings.

Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval have described Annette Roussel, who would have been in her early twenties when this drawing was made, as ‘a beautiful but often melancholy young lady...Vuillard was something of a second father to her, particularly during the First World War, and he never lost a chance to show how highly he thought of her...Vuillard also became Annette’s confidant. In her letters she wrote to her father, she would reel off a string of news in a rather humdrum manner. With her ‘dear little uncle’, on the other hand, she would tackle more general considerations...On countless occasions, she talks to the painter about her melancholy feelings: ‘I haven’t set foot outdoors[.] I spend my days reading and daydreaming of countries where there is no war and sunshine. I have just told myself that this is very bad for one’s health, but I have no courage[,] I am thoroughly sick of myself and of everyone else too. Luckily there is always hope, without it I would soon be in a state to drown myself in the lake.’’4 Even after her marriage to the young painter Jacques Salomon, one of Vuillard’s most devoted admirers, uncle and niece continued to correspond regularly.

Domestic interior scenes such as this, which often include members of Vuillard’s family and close friends, ‘are not intended as portraits, nor are they genre paintings in the true sense of the term. Rather, they are evocations of the private world of the artist’s personal experience...[and] provide a tantalizing view into a cloistered and rarefied world occupied almost entirely by women...Vuillard’s women are perpetually absorbed in their occupations and, with only rare exceptions, remain totally unconscious of the presence of the artist and the gaze of the viewer.’5

47 EDOUARD VUILLARD Cuiseaux 1868-1940 La Baule The Interior of a Room, with a Small Bookcase Pencil. Inscribed with colour notes Jaune citr(?) and rouge in pencil at the lower left centre and lower right.

Stamped with the atelier stamp E.V. (Lugt 909c) at the lower right.

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

PROVENANCE: Galerie AB, Paris, in 1998; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 2001; Private collection, London and California.

As a student at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, Edouard Vuillard met his best friend and future brotherin-law, Ker-Xavier Roussel, who convinced him to give up plans for a military career and instead take up painting. In 1887, after failing the entrance exams three times, Vuillard gained admittance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and by 1890 had joined a group of young artists – including Roussel, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Paul Sérusier – who called themselves the Nabis. Along with Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Félix Vallotton, Vuillard provided prints and illustrations for the art and literary magazine La Revue Blanche. In the early 1890s, he also began to receive commissions for wall panels to decorate the rooms of private houses; between 1892 and 1901 he painted a significant number of these large-scale panneaux décoratifs, almost all as the result of the patronage of a small group of mutual friends and enlightened collectors. In the early years of the new century, Vuillard began expanding his repertoire of decorative panels and small, intimiste domestic interiors to include portraits and landscapes.

He also received a handful of public commissions, including the decoration of the foyer of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in 1912. The later years of his career found Vuillard working mainly as a fashionable portrait painter.

The most prolific draughtsman among the artists who were members of the Nabis group, Vuillard was also, as one scholar has written, ‘in many ways the supreme graphic artist among the Nabis.’1 He drew almost daily throughout his career, and was never without a small sketchbook. As his nephew by marriage Jacques Salomon recalled, ‘Vuillard hardly ever painted from nature. His paintings almost always come out of a preliminary pencil sketch. When among his friends, he drew continually. Throughout his life, he filled sketchbook after sketchbook. From minute to minute, he noted down whatever took his fancy: his mother at the breakfast table, a bunch of flowers, the view from his window, a street corner, a patch of garden, the look of the city at night, and the vaulting of the Parisian subway stations. Often these drawings were so summary as to amount to a kind of private shorthand.’2 Most of Vuillard’s drawings are small in scale and intimate in nature. Belinda Thomson has noted of the artist that ‘He observed and recorded assiduously, not just, one senses, with a view to accumulating studies that would be of possible use at a later date, but also as a function of the role he played in the society in which he moved, and an essential expression of the pleasure he took in his day-to-day surroundings.’3 The present sheet is drawn on a page from a small sketchbook, and can be dated to the first half of the 1920s. With its colour notes and lively manner, it is typical of Vuillard’s drawings made in preparation for a painted portrait or interior. The artist would diligently assemble a large number of these small sketches of various details and motifs, from which he would develop a final, complete composition.

It has been suggested that this drawing depicts a small revolving bookcase in the living room of Clos Cézanne, the country home of Vuillard’s close friends, Jos and Lucy Hessel, at Vaucresson, near Paris4.

What appears to be the same bookcase appears in a handful of paintings and pastels by Vuillard of the interior of Clos Cézanne5. So-called because it was purchased by Jos Hessel with the proceeds of the sale of a Cézanne painting in 1920, Clos Cézanne was close to Closerie des Gênets, the house that Vuillard and his mother rented at Vaucresson.

actual size

48 HENRI LE SIDANER Port Louis (Mauritius) 1862-1939 Versailles The Artist’s House at Gerberoy (Les Volets clos, Gerberoy) Black chalk, with green and yellow chalk and touches of blue chalk. Stamped LE SIDANER (not in Lugt) in black ink on the verso.

230 x 287 mm. (9 x 11 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, Gerberoy; Private collection; P. & D. Colnaghi, London, in 2001; Private collection, London and California.

LITERATURE: Yann Farinaux-Le Sidaner, Le Sidaner: L’oeuvre peint et gravé, Paris, 1989, p.383, no.1243.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Musée Galliera, Rétrospective Henri Le Sidaner, 1948.

Around 1903 Henri Le Sidaner settled in the small village of Gerberoy, in the Oise on the border of Normandy and Picardy, where he worked until the end of his life. As a painter, he delighted in capturing transient effects of light, and would paint scenes in bright sunshine, twilight, moonlight or even artificial light. While he often made sketches and drawings sur le motif, his paintings themselves were generally painted from memory rather than direct observation. He was able to achieve remarkable effects of solitude and serenity in his pictures, and chose his compositions carefully to heighten the poetic mood.

The contemporary critic Roger Marx aptly described the artist’s paintings as redolent of a ‘feeling of peace, of silence and of mystery’.

This drawing is a preparatory study for Le Sidaner’s large painting Les Volets clos, Gerberoy (fig.1) of 1933, in a private collection1, and depicts one of his favourite subjects; his house at Gerberoy, which he once described as his ‘haven of peace’. The artist had first visited the village of Gerberoy in 1901, at the suggestion of Auguste Rodin, and purchased a house there a few years later, creating a studio and a large garden that provided him with a myriad of subjects and motifs for his paintings. Le Sidaner often depicted the gardens and the façade of the house, studying the tonal effects and play of light at various times of day and in different seasons. The house at Gerberoy became the dominant subject of his late work. Like most of his landscapes and town scenes, however, these views of Gerberoy are almost always devoid of figures. As the painter Paul Signac noted of Le Sidaner, ‘his entire work is influenced by a taste for tender, soft and silent atmospheres. Gradually, he even went so far as to eliminate from his paintings all human figures, as if he feared that the slightest human form might disturb their ruffled silence.’2 Stylistically comparable drawings of the same period by Le Sidaner include The Entrance to the Village of 1930, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Valenciennes3, and The House of the Blind Man in Moonlight of 1933, in a private collection4.

1.

49 PAUL SIGNAC Paris 1863-1935 Paris View of Calvi, Corsica Pencil and watercolour. Laid down. Inscribed by the artist a P Basset(?). amicalement in pencil at the lower left and signed P. Signac in pencil at the lower right.

210 x 263 mm. (8 1/4 x 10 3/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to P. Basset(?), according to the dedication at the lower left; Galerie de l’Elysée, Paris; Private collection, Paris; Thence by descent.

A painter, draughtsman, writer and collector, Paul Signac was one of the leading artists of the NeoImpressionist movement. He became a close friend of Georges Seurat, whose work he first encountered at the inaugural exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1884, and between them the two painters formed the nucleus of the group of artists known as the Neo-Impressionists.

Signac would spend the winters working in his Parisian studio, while the summer months were spent painting at a coastal resort, and he eventually settled in Saint-Tropez from 1892 onwards. In 1908 Signac became the president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, in which role he remained active for over a quarter of a century, until the year before his death.

Signac painted around six hundred canvases as well as a significant body of works on paper, mainly watercolours. Probably inspired to work in the medium through the suggestion of Camille Pissarro, he began seriously working in watercolour in 1892. Within a few years watercolour had taken over from oils whenever the artist was working outdoors, with oil painting on a larger scale reserved for the studio.

He exhibited his first watercolours (described as ‘notations à l’aquarelle’) at the Indépendants in 1893, and the following year chose a group of forty watercolours for his first solo exhibition, at a gallery in Paris.

By the turn of the century watercolour had become one of Signac’s favoured modes of artistic expression. As Marina Ferretti Bocquillon has noted, ‘For him, watercolor was a seductive alternative to the demanding labor of studio painting, a zone of freedom that suited his restless temperament and love of the outdoors. It gradually took over from his work in oil...’1 As she has also written elsewhere, ‘Signac’s earliest watercolors indicate that he quickly showed an amazing aptitude for the medium and was immediately capable of exploiting its possibilities…Signac had found a new means of expression, which he was able to take to a high level of perfection and which was to occupy a major place in his work. He began systematically to exhibit his watercolors alongside his oil paintings and his drawings; indeed he often insisted that his works on paper be shown alongside his paintings on canvas.’2 Signac was a keen sailor, and between 1929 and 1931 worked on a project that he had long been considering; a series of watercolours of the ports and harbours of France.

This luminous watercolour depicts the coastal town of Calvi in Corsica. Signac only made two trips to Corsica, both in 1935, the last year of his life, having earlier written to his wife Berthe that ‘I should like to go and see this island and work there before I die...It would renew my repertoire of pictures, and I could use it.’3 In February 1935 Signac visited the towns of Calvi, Ajaccio, Propriano, Bonifacio and Bastia. He returned in May and June, travelling south along the east coast of the island from Saint-Florent and L’lleRousse towards Calvi, Ajaccio and Propriano4. As Ferretti Bocquillon has written of this trip to Corsica, which was to be the final journey of Signac’s career, ‘Travelling from one harbor to the next with the energy of a young man, he made his last Mediterranean notes. Only two months before his death on August 15 he had been working without respite on a dazzling series of watercolors.’5

50 PIERRE BONNARD Fontenay-aux-Roses 1867-1947 Le Cannet Bather Brown and black chalk and pencil on buff paper. Stamped with the large version of the Bonnard estate stamp (Lugt 3886) at the lower left.

321 x 503 mm. (12 5/ 8 x 19 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist (Lugt 3886); Daniel Wildenstein, Paris and New York; Private collection, Pennsylvania.

LITERATURE: Michel Terrasse, Bonnard: du dessin au tableau, Paris, 1996, illustrated p.254; Sarah Whitfield, Bonnard, exhibition catalogue, London and New York, 1998, p.202, fig.114, under no.75; Emily Braun et al., New York Collects: Drawings and Watercolors 1900-1950, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1999, p.38, note 3, under no.3 (entry by Jack Flam).

Pierre Bonnard relied on his studies and sketches extensively in the preparation of his pictures. Most of his drawings seem to have been made in the process of developing the composition of a painting, and indeed he seems to have preferred to work from drawings rather than relying on direct observation.

He almost always used a hard or soft pencil and only very rarely applied colour to his drawings, relying on the strength and shading of the pencil strokes to suggest tone and colour. In a conversation with his nephew Charles Terrasse, Bonnard noted that ‘I am drawing incessantly – after drawing comes the composition which must have a perfect equilibrium, a well constructed picture is the battle half won, the art of composition is so powerful that with only black and white – a pencil, a pen or a lithographic pencil, one arrives at results as complete and of a quality nearly as beautiful as with a whole arsenal of colours.’1 Although the nude female figure occurs frequently in Bonnard’s sketchbooks, as well as in paintings and photographs, this interest only began around 1900, a few years after he had met his muse and future wife Marthe. She was to be his companion and model for nearly thirty years before she and Bonnard were married in 1925. Marthe would become the dominant female presence in his late work, and Bonnard continued to portray her as a young woman, with a slight, delicate body, even well into her later years.

Like Edgar Degas, Bonnard often depicted women at intimate moments of their daily toilette. Around 1924 he began painting several canvases devoted to the subject of a nude bather in a bathtub or bathroom, a theme also found in several lithographs of the same period. The model for many of these paintings was Marthe, and the theme occupied the artist throughout the 1930s and for much of the later period of his long career. As one scholar has written of these works, ‘Bonnard’s nudes at their toilette reflect the evolution of a highly personal vision, replete with references to the artist’s own art, his external experiences, and the long and complex artistic tradition in which they are located. The model is most often Marthe – Marthe at her bath, Marthe caught unaware before her dressing table, Marthe partially glimpsed through a mirror. Yet, while the paintings refer to a specific woman, they are about Bonnard’s way of seeing.’2 And, as his fellow Nabis artist Maurice Denis further noted, ‘These intimate scenes by Bonnard, these young women dreaming, doing their hair, undressing, these women sewing, or reading, these bathers with their lissom bodies and pink thighs, all are imbued with tenderness, with optimism, and, in a word, poetry.’3

The present sheet may be related to Bonnard’s large painting Nude in the Bath (fig.1), painted in 1936, in the collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris4. This was one of a series of superb late paintings treating the subject of a nude woman lying full-length in a bathtub; a theme that came to preoccupy the artist throughout the last two decades of his career. Although the composition of the drawing is in reverse, the present sheet is likely to be a first idea for the Petit Palais painting. As Sasha Newman has written, with particular reference to the 1936 painting, ‘Bonnard’s later women in the bath evolved into something wholly original and are among the greatest nudes painted in the twentieth century.

Bonnard’s nudes at their toilette always remain apart – yet, their separateness is most powerfully expressed in the bathtub series. The woman is enclosed, as if in a shell or a womb. She floats in the water which surrounds her, in the manner of a Monet waterlily or a drowning Ophelia...Neither dead nor alive, she exists in her self-enclosed realm, collecting all of the light and color refractions that bounce off the tiles and water and play on her flesh...The pose of the model relates directly to notations in Bonnard’s diaries – head against the back of the tub, arms and legs fully extended, suspended in her white porcelain-like shell.’5 A later variant of the Paris canvas, painted between 1937 and 1939, is in a private collection6.

Bonnard’s obsessive treatment of the particular theme of a female nude floating in a bathtub – first seen in the painting The Bath of 1925, today in the collection of Tate Modern in London7 – was repeated in several paintings of the late 1930s and early 1940s, culminating in a Nude in a Bathtub and a Small Dog, begun in 1941 and completed five years later, in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh8. The subject of Marthe immersed in a bath is also found in over twenty drawings in Bonnard’s sketchbooks and diaries from the 1920s onwards; one of these, a pencil drawing from one of the artist’s small sketchbooks9, is particularly close to the composition of the present sheet, and must have preceded it.

As the scholar Marina Ferretti Bocquillon has stated, ‘The great recumbent nudes are to Bonnard’s art what the Nymphéas are to Claude Monet’s oeuvre, the triumph of a light that transfigures reality. The model’s body melts into a play of tints, and the clarity of the Midi dissolves even the oval of the bathtub...It is not Marthe’s body that disintegrates into the bathwater, but all of reality that vanishes into the orchestrated iridescence.’10 Nevertheless, as the artist commented while working on a painting from this groundbreaking bathtub series, ‘I would never again dare engage upon such a difficult theme. I can’t make it come out as I wish. I have been at it for six months and I still have several months’ work to do.’11

1.

51 CHARLES MAHONEY, A.R.A. London 1903-1968 London Iris Pen and black ink and watercolour, on a page from a large sketchbook.

321 x 305 mm. (12 5/ 8 x 12 in.) [sheet] PROVENANCE: By descent to the artist’s daughter, Elizabeth Bulkeley.

Born in 1903 to a family of modest means, Cyril Mahoney defied his parent’s wishes in order to pursue a career as an artist, and in 1922 won a scholarship in drawing to the Royal College of Art. (It was here that he met his friend Barnett Freedman, who renamed him Charles, and it was by this name that he was to be known for the rest of his life.) It was also at the Royal College that Mahoney developed a particular interest in mural painting and stage design. He went on to devote his career to a combination of painting, drawing and teaching, and by 1928 had returned to the Royal College of Art as a tutor.

Mahoney received several commissions for mural decorations, and exhibited occasionally at the New English Art Club and, in later years, at the Royal Academy. In 1953 Mahoney left the College and went on to teach at various schools, before joining the Royal Academy School. It was not until 1961, however, that he became an Associate of the Royal Academy, having turned down an earlier offer of membership since he felt it was undeserved.

In 1937 Mahoney bought Oak Cottage in Wrotham, Kent, which provided him with the perfect setting to explore his other great love, namely plant life and gardening. This was the first time he had his own garden and he relished being able to grow and study a large variety of plants and flowers. Mahoney was an amateur botanist and would swap notes and cuttings with friends, and this scientific approach can be detected in his plant sketches. According to the artist’s wife, ‘Charles delighted in plant life, its richness, strength, grandeur, colour, form and infinite textural qualities…[he] showed uncompromising vigour in recording the structure, detail and above all the total feeling of the plant, each growing and bearing fruit in its particular way.1 Nature came to dominate all of Mahoney’s paintings and murals, regardless of their subject matter.

A page from a large spiral-bound sketchbook, this study of an iris perfectly illustrates Mahoney’s knowledge and understanding of plant life. As his friend and fellow painter Bernard Dunstan recalled, ‘Charles was doing a number of quite large drawings of plants…with the pressure of teaching, and the continual travelling by train that it incurred, he concentrated his energies on these superb drawings…They have great directness and objectivity and yet great warmth of feeling. They make most drawings of plants, seem by comparison, weak or merely botanically accurate…I can think of very few recent artists who have drawn plants with the vigour and understanding that Mahoney brought to them.’2 Dunstan added that, ‘Anyone who watched him draw will remember the concentrated deliberation and thoughtfulness of his line.

His eye absorbed in the growth and structure, his pencil would remain poised over the paper until the precisely ‘right’ line flowed from it…There is no gestural ‘freedom’, no flourish; the curvature of a leaf or a stem is too subtle and strong to be described by mere approximate curves. Every curve is different and changes subtly through its length…These studies seem to me to be drawing on the highest level – they are drawings which, by deeply felt and particularized observation, expose the natural rhythms, the forces underlying the structure, and set them out in a constant whole.’3 Mahoney died in 1968 after battling with emphysema. At his memorial service the painter Sir Thomas Monnington fittingly said of him, ‘he found in nature the manifestation of his belief in an ultimate or superior order, and I think he tried to confirm this belief in his honest attempt, to translate this reflection of ultimate truth he found in nature, into the simplest terms of painting and drawing.’4

52 HENRY MOORE OM CH FBA Castleford 1898-1986 Much Hadham Ideas for Sculpture Pencil and coloured crayon. Signed and dated Moore / 37 in pencil at the lower left. Numbered 36 and inscribed Ideas for Sculpture / 1937 / 11” x 7 1/2” / Pencil & Red & Blue crayon in pencil on the verso.

278 x 191 mm. (10 7/ 8 x 7 1/ 2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Galerie Beyeler, Basel, in 1970; Private collection, Switzerland.

LITERATURE: Ezio Gribaudo and David Mitchinson, Henry Moore: Unpublished Drawings, Turin, 1971, no.130; David Mitchinson and Ezio Gribaudo, Henry Moore: unpublished drawings, New York, 1972, pl.130; Alan G. Wilkinson, The Drawings of Henry Moore, Ph.D thesis, London, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1974, published New York and London, 1984, p.285, under L.H. 190, illustrated pl.204; Ann Garrould, ed., Henry Moore: Complete Drawings. Vol.2: 1930-39, London, 1998, pp.194-195, no.AG 37.62 (HMF 1337); Andrew Causey, The Drawings of Henry Moore, Farnham, 2010, p.91, illustrated p.93, pl.81.

EXHIBITED: Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Henry Moore: Drawings Watercolours Gouaches, 1970, no.36.

Drawing was at the centre of Henry Moore’s artistic practice. Over the course of his long career, he made over 7,000 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, when several drawings from his first solo exhibition in 1928 were acquired by, among others, Kenneth Clark (who was to become one of Moore’s most fervent supporters) and the artists Jacob Epstein, Henry Lamb and Augustus John. Indeed, a number of gallery and museum exhibitions have been 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 the early years of the Second World War, Moore was not actively involved in making sculpture, and instead poured much of his energy into drawing. The most significant of these works, and certainly the best known, were the so-called shelter drawings, made in London during the Blitz in 1940 and early 1941. Depicting people taking refuge in London Undergound stations during the nightly bombing of London, and mostly drawn from memory, the shelter drawings were exhibited at the National Gallery in London in 1941.

Moore returned to sculpture in 1943, and, as he had before the war, continued to generate most of his ideas through the practice of drawing. Yet, 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, however, 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 work out ideas for specific works, rather than as a means of experimentation. He also began to develop designs for sculpture in the form of clay or plaster maquettes.

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 Furthermore, as he stated in 1937, the year this drawing was made, ‘sculpture compared with drawing is a slow means of expression, and I find drawing a useful outlet for ideas which there is not enough time to realise as sculpture.’4 With the exception of the shelter drawings produced during the Second World War, 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. As Causey has explained, however, ‘When Moore titled a sheet ‘drawing for sculpture’ or ‘ideas for sculpture’, he did not mean a ‘working drawing’. His drawings do not indicate stages of sculptural work or processes and they were not aids to making (as opposed to conceiving) sculpture...there are likely to be many images on the page, each showing a notionally finished object...Even if the sketches are only a few pen or pencil lines, they are complete ideas.’5 Drawn in 1937, this fascinating sheet of sketches has been characterized as containing ‘some of the most innovative designs that were never made’6 by the sculptor. As with many of Moore’s drawings for sculptures, ideas and motifs in one sheet of studies are often repeated and developed in other drawings.

The central form on the uppermost row in the present sheet – ‘an abstracted image of a copulating couple’, as it has been described7 – reappears in two other important drawings of the same date. The same form is found towards the left foreground of a large composition entitled Drawing for Metal Sculpture, in a private collection8, and again at the right of the large drawing Five Figures in a Setting in the Henry Moore Family Collection9. Similarly, three other elements studied in this drawing – the righthand form in the top row, as well as the second and fourth forms from the left in the middle row – are further developed in a larger and more finished Drawing for Metal Sculpture, drawn in chalk, watercolour and crayon, which was executed the following year.10 Despite the wealth of sculptural ideas expressed in this drawing, none of these elements appear to have been translated into actual finished works. This is often the case with Moore’s drawings of studies for sculptures, which, as one scholar has pointed out, when taken together contained ‘[a] profusion of ideas which would require a dozen lifetimes to realise in three dimensions.’11 Nevertheless, as Andrew Causey has noted of Henry Moore’s drawings of 1937 in particular, ‘at no other point in Moore’s work are there so many strange, imaginative shapes that have independent circulation in drawing without emerging into sculpture.’12 In her comprehensive catalogue raisonné of Henry Moore’s drawings, the artist’s niece Ann Garrould noted of the present sheet that it is ‘the first of many drawings dated between 1937 and 1940 bearing a pair of punched holes along one edge, whose significance has not been determined; some are single pages of approximately 280 x 190 mm....others are double this size with a fold down the middle...Another group of drawings are double page in size but without the centre fold...Many of these drawings can be linked stylistically but no attempt has been made to reconstitute them as sketchbooks.’13 A sheet of studies such as the present sheet provides a valuable insight into Moore’s creative process, and the way in which he developed his motifs and designs. As the sculptor once stated, ‘If an idea really means something to you, it returns and if it returns two or three times you do something about it. If you begin drawing in a sketchbook with the idea of tapping yourself for ideas, sometimes they come so many and so easily that to judge them would be silly. One must let them happen and then judge them in a week, a month, or two months and then pick out from that little set of suggestions those that still mean more than any of the others.’14

53 HENRY MOORE OM CH FBA Castleford 1898-1986 Much Hadham Madonna and Child Studies Pen and black ink, watercolour, coloured wax crayons and pencil. Signed and dated Moore / 43 in brown ink at the lower left. Inscribed top lighting in pencil at the upper centre.

184 x 175 mm. (7 1/4 x 6 7/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Pierre Loeb Gallery, Paris; Lee Kolker, New York; Pita Kapnek, Johannesburg; Her posthumous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 16 December 1964, lot 127; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 13 December 1967, lot 185; Vanderwoude Tananbaum Gallery, New York; Acquired from them by a private collector in January 1986.

LITERATURE: Ann Garrould, ed., Henry Moore: Complete Drawings. Vol.3: 1940-49, London, 2001, pp.194-195, no.AG 43.102 (HMF 2185).

During much of the Second World War, when commissions were few and materials for stone or wood sculpture hard to come by, Henry Moore concentrated his energies on drawing. This fine sheet is, however, related to Moore’s first significant sculptural commission of the war years; the over life-size sculpture of the Madonna and Child (figs.1-2) in the parish church of St. Matthew in Northampton1.

This was, in fact, to be Moore’s first sculptural work since before the start of the war.

The present sheet comes from a dismembered sketchbook used between April and June 1943, known as the Madonna and Child Sketchbook, with which a total of twenty-six drawings have been associated2.

The drawings in the sketchbook contained studies for the Northampton Madonna and Child, commissioned from Moore in 1942 by Canon Walter Hussey to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of St. Matthew’s Church. Hussey had been inspired to commission a Madonna and Child from Moore after seeing an exhibition at the National Gallery of his shelter drawings, in which he noted similar maternal themes3. Moore visited St. Matthew’s Church in 1942, but did not begin work on the project until the following year. In early March 1943 he wrote to Hussey that ‘I’ve not forgotten the scheme and I’m very keen to begin thinking seriously about it and I think that in a couple of weeks’ time I shall get the chance to

1.

2.

actual size

begin playing about making note-book sketches to get ideas for it.’ At the end of the following month he wrote again to Hussey that he had ‘begun notebook sketches for it’, and in June he added, ‘I was able to begin 4 or 5 days ago, translating some of the small note-book drawings I’d made, into small clay models and now I’ve got 4 clay models (each about 4” high) on the go...there are 4 or 5 small drawings in the notebook which I want to try out in solid forms in clay too, so its going to be another 2 or 3 weeks, I’m afraid.’4 The Madonna and Child was carved in brown Hornton stone in the latter half of 1943 and early 1944.

Nearly a meter and a half in height, it was installed in the church in February 1944.

One of Moore’s concerns, after accepting the commission, was how to translate his longstanding interest in the theme of the mother and child into a Madonna and Child form. As he wrote, ‘When I was first asked to carve a ‘Madonna and Child’ for S. Matthew’s, although I was very interested I wasn’t sure whether I could do it, or whether I even wanted to do it. One knows that Religion has been the inspiration of most of Europe’s greatest painting and sculpture, and that the Church in the past has encouraged and employed the greatest artists; but the great tradition of religious art seems to have got lost completely in the present day, and the general level of church art has fallen very low...Therefore I felt it was not a commission straightaway and light heartedly to agree to undertake, and I could only promise to make note-book drawings from which I would do small clay models, and only then should I be able to say whether I could produce something which would be satisfactory as sculpture and also satisfy my idea of the ‘Madonna and Child’ theme as well.

There are two particular motives or subjects which I have constantly used in my sculpture in the last twenty years; they are the ‘Reclining Figure’ idea and the ‘Mother and Child’ idea. (Perhaps of the two the ‘Mother and Child’ has been the more fundamental obsession.) I began thinking of the ‘Madonna and Child’ for S. Matthew’s by considering in what ways a ‘Madonna and Child’ differs from a carving of just a ‘Mother and Child’ – that is, by considering how in my opinion, religious art differs from secular art. It’s not easy to describe in words what this difference is, except by saying in general terms that the ‘Madonna and Child’ should have an austerity and a nobility, and some touch of grandeur (even hieratic aloofness) which is missing in the everyday ‘Mother and Child’ idea. Of the sketches and models I have done, the one chosen has I think a quiet dignity and gentleness. I have tried to give a sense of complete easiness and repose, as though the Madonna could stay in that position for ever (as, being in stone, she will have to do). The Madonna is seated on a low bench, so that the angle formed between her nearly upright body and her legs is somewhat less than a right angle, and in this angle of her lap, safe and protected, sits the Infant. The Madonna’s head is turned to face the direction from which the statue is first seen, in walking down the aisle, whereas one gets the front view of the Infant’s head when standing directly in front of the statue.

In sculpture, which is related to architecture, actual life-size is always confusing, and as S. Matthew’s is a large church, spacious and big in scale too, the ‘Madonna and Child’ is slightly over life-size. But I did not think it should be much over life-size as the sculptor’s real and full meaning is to be got only by looking at it from a rather nearer view, and if from nearby it seemed too colossal it would conflict with the human feeling I wish to express.’5 Other preparatory drawings for the Northampton sculpture, all from the 1943 Madonna and Child Sketchbook, are in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, MA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Northampton Central Museum in Northampton and the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, NH, as well as in several private collections. Moore also produced a total of twelve clay maquettes for the sculpture6, some of which were later cast in bronze.

As Christa Lichtenstern has written, ‘The representation of the Mother and Child in Moore’s Northampton Madonna has a rare nobility, dignity and spirituality. By now it would be impossible to imagine twentiethcentury sculpture without it. In this piece Moore reached new heights in his mastery of the art of stone sculpture...With the war still continuing unabated, it seems that Moore poured all his longing for peace into this work.’7

54 PABLO PICASSO Málaga 1881-1973 Mougins Recto: A Mother Nursing a Child Verso: Four Sketches for a Landscape Composition with the Square du Vert-Galant, and Another Study of a Mother and Child Pen and black ink, on a page from a large sketchbook. Dated 10 / f/ 44 in black ink at the lower right.

Further dated 10 / f/ 44 in black ink on the verso.

406 x 307 mm. (16 x 12 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist; By inheritance to Marie-Thérèse Walter, Paris and Juan-les-Pins; Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva, in 1973; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 8 December 1998, lot 164; Private collection, London.

LITERATURE: Valentina Anker and Florens Deuchler, ‘Picasso für Maiä’, Du, June 1974, p.24, illustrated p.24; The Picasso Project. Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 1885-1973. Nazi Occupation 1940-1944, 2nd ed., San Francisco, 2013, p.336, nos.44-016b (recto) and 44-016c (verso).

EXHIBITED: Geneva, Galerie Jan Krugier, Une collection Picasso: Oeuvres de 1937 à 1946, 1973, nos.104 (recto) and 105 (verso).

During almost the entire period of the German occupation of Paris during the Second World War, Pablo Picasso remained in the city. He lived and worked mainly in his large studio on the Rue des GrandsAugustins on the Left Bank, ‘which was to be his sole space through the dark years till 1944. After his years of travels to the Côte d’Azur, or lengthy sojourns at Royan on the Atlantic coast, he was now compelled to lead an unsatisfying life in occupied Paris, cut off from an arts scene with any life to it, and confronted every day with the troubles of wartime, such as the impossibility of heating in winter.’1 Named as a ‘degenerate artist’ by the Nazis, Picasso was banned from exhibiting or publishing his work. Nevertheless, his international fame meant that he was, for the most part, untroubled by the Germans. Despite his difficult living conditions, he refused any special treatment offered by the Nazis (including extra supplies of coal for his stove) and tried to remain, in public at least, neutral. Picasso produced relatively little work during the first few months of the Occupation in the latter half of 1940, and it is only from the beginning of 1941 that he began to be highly productive again, painting portraits, landscapes and still life compositions.

Dated 10th February 1944, this study of a woman sitting on a bench and suckling a child is drawn on a page from a large spiral-bound sketchbook used by the artist during the Occupation. Two days later – on a pair of pages in the same sketchbook – Picasso drew a total of twenty-nine small studies of the same subject of a breastfeeding mother; both of these drawings, of the same dimensions as the present sheet, were formerly in the collection of Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, and one of them is today in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne2.

Picasso treated the theme of a mother nursing her child several times in the month of February 1944, although he seems to have produced no finished painting of this subject. Closely related to this drawing is a slightly smaller study of the same subject and composition, dated three days earlier on 7th February 1944, in the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris3. In all of these drawings, as has been noted, ‘The basic theme remains largely unchanged...The woman is always shown frontally, leaning forward to suckle the baby, the foreshortening of her inclined body being almost caricature-like in manner...The Nursing Woman theme provided one of Picasso’s many opportunities to experiment with the motif of the forwardbending woman.’4

recto

Also related to the present sheet is a watercolour composition, dated two days earlier on 8th February 1944, which was also owned by Marie-Thérèse Walter and is now in the Museum Ludwig5. The watercolour depicts the Square du Vert-Galant, near the tip of the Ile de la Cité in Paris, in which the nursing mother and child appear in the middle ground at the left of centre. On February 12th, two days after the present sheet was drawn, Picasso produced a variant of the theme, with several studies of a mother holding a urinating baby, in a drawing that appeared on the art market in 19936.

Picasso had first studied the idea of a nursing mother and her child the previous year, as can be seen in a gouache drawing of a similar composition, dated 7th October 1943, in which the mother and child are seated on the same bench7. A compositionally similar theme of mothers bending over their babies, although not breastfeeding, is also found in several pages of a sketchbook dating from 19438. Such drawings of children have sometimes been seen as the artist’s response to the tribulations of life in occupied Paris: ‘Just as [the painting of] the tomato vine, potted and growing in a window, and turning to the sun, was a symbol of endurance and survival in those years, so Picasso frequently turned to childhood themes for renewal...what could be freer than those unstudied studies of the child and nursemaid in the park...?’9 It should also be noted that Picasso was often in the presence of a young child during this period. His lover Marie-Thérèse and their five-year old daughter Maya had settled in Paris in the spring of 1941, living in an apartment on the boulevard Henri IV, across the Seine, where the artist would visit them regularly.

The verso of the present sheet depicts four studies for a landscape composition – with the Square du Vert-Galant and the western end of the Ile de la Cité in the foreground, and the equestrian statue of Henri IV (known as ‘Le Vert-Galant’) and the Pont-Neuf in the background – together with a single line study of the nursing mother and child studied on the recto. During the war years, Picasso often visited the small triangular park of the Square du Vert-Galant, a short walk from his studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins. Accompanied by his Afghan hound Kazbek, he would stroll daily along the Seine on the Quai des Grands-Augustins to the Pont-Neuf, cross the bridge to the Ile de la Cité and walk down the steps to the Square du Vert-Galant, then as now a popular park among Parisians.

The artist seems to have started bringing a sketchbook to the Square du Vert-Galant in the summer of 1943, and proceeded to make numerous studies of the people he saw there, as well as views of the park looking back from the tip of the island. Three drawings by Picasso of the Square du Vert-Galant are dated six days earlier than the present sheet, on 7th February 1944, but are different in composition to the studies on the verso of this sketchbook page10. The Square du Vert-Galant is also the subject of four pencil drawings and two paintings, each dating to the previous summer of 194311, as well as a colourful gouache composition, drawn on a page from a sketchbook and dated 12th December 194312.

Picasso’s paintings and drawings of the Square du Vert-Galant were, in fact, the first outdoor subjects he had attempted since August 1940. Writing a decade after the end of the war, Wilhelm Boeck noted of Picasso that, ‘While he has treated landscape motifs in all his periods, he had done so, for the most part, intermittently and without any specific objective. He became much more interested in such motifs during the last war: being confined to Paris, he felt an urge to re-create the city in the period of its greatest distress.’13 In May 1945, just a few days after the end of the war in Europe, André Malraux and the photographer Brassaï visited Picasso’s studio and were shown his small paintings of the Square du Vert-Galant and other views of Paris. As the artist told Malraux, ‘You’re surprised, eh? I’ve never been considered a “landscape artist”. And that’s sort of true. I haven’t painted many landscapes in my life. But they came on their own. Since I was unable to travel during the Occupation, I often took walks with Kazbek along the Seine and I became steeped in the Pont-Neuf, the Pont Saint-Michel, the trees along the quays. One day, all those things that had permeated me unbeknownst to myself began to seep out. I tried to create a kind of synthesis of them.’14

verso

55 HUMPHREY JENNINGS Walberswick 1907-1950 Poros, Greece a. Study for The Purple Yacht Pencil, black chalk and watercolour on oatmeal paper. Stamped with the Jennings studio stamp (not in Lugt) on the verso.

314 x 240 mm. (12 3/ 8 x 9 1/ 2 in.) b. The Purple Yacht Oil on canvas. Signed and dated H. Jennings 1949-50 in blue oil paint on the overlap. Stamped with the Jennings studio stamp (not in Lugt) on the stretcher bar.

30.7 x 23 cm. (12 1/ 8 x 9 in.)

Described by film director and critic Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as ‘the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced’, Humphrey Jennings was one of the leading documentary filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s. Born in the Suffolk fishing village of Walberswick, he gained a First Class degree in English at Cambridge. After completing his studies at Cambridge, where he designed sets and costumes for a number of amateur theatrical productions, he continued to work as a stage designer and began also to paint. In 1934 he began working as a director of short documentary films at the GPO Film Unit in London, and two years later joined André Breton, Herbert Read and Roland Penrose on the Organizing Committee of the International Surrealist Exhibition, held at the New Burlington Galleries, to which he contributed six works. Around the same time Jennings also became a founder member of the anthropological and social research movement known as Mass Observation.

With the outbreak of war, Jennings continued to work for the GPO Film Unit, now known as the Crown Film Unit and under the direction of the Ministry of Information, creating such inspirational documentary films as London Can Take It, Heart of Britain and Words for Battle. Later in the war Jennings scripted and directed the films Fires Were Started, about the National Fire Service, and The Silent Village, about the massacre of the citizens of a Czechoslovakian village by German troops in 1942. In July 1943 he filmed the invasion of Sicily, and in 1944 wrote and directed a documentary film on the song ‘Lili Marlene’. At the end of the war he travelled throughout Germany shooting a film about life in the country under the Military Government, released in 1945 as A Defeated People. Jennings’s postwar films included The Cumberland Story, a depiction of the mining industry, and Dim Little Island, about life in postwar Britain.

He died in 1950 from a fall, while scouting locations for a new film on the Greek island of Poros, and is buried in Athens. Begun in the 1930s and almost completed at the time of his death, his book Pandaemonium 1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, a study of the impact of modernization and industrialization on Britain over a period of over two hundred years, was published posthumously in 1985.

Although by far best known as a filmmaker, Jennings was also active as a painter, draughtsman, photographer and poet. As early as 1929, before he had started working at the GPO Film Unit, Jennings had written in a letter to his wife, ‘I should hate doing films really…simply I want to draw.’1 After graduating from Cambridge, Jennings remained in the city and, together with artist Julian Trevelyan, opened an art gallery on the ground floor of his small apartment. As Trevelyan later recalled of this period in the early 1930s, ‘Humphrey’s was a prodigious intelligence...he introduced us all to contemporary French painting through the medium of Cahiers d’Art and through various books on Picasso...His enthusiasm was immense; I remember his waking me up at eight in the morning to show me a picture he had painted during the night.

At his best his work had the purity that one associates with Ben Nicholson but without the sometimes dehydrating good taste. But his output was erratic; he had, so to speak, to talk himself into a picture.’2

a.

In 1937 a one-man exhibition of Jennings’s paintings was held at the London Gallery, while in 1951, the year after his untimely death, a retrospective exhibition of his work was mounted at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Writing in the catalogue of the exhibition, Kathleen Raine, an old friend of the artist, noted of him that, ‘He always regarded himself as, before everything, a painter; film-making was of secondary importance and the writing of poems an occasional mode of expression; and it is significant that Humphrey himself said, early last year, that he had just begun to be sufficiently satisfied with his work to feel that the time had come for an exhibition. He had mastered his style.’3 As two modern scholars have written, ‘Jennings wanted to be remembered for work as an artist – in paint and in poetry (literally written verse) rather than celluloid.’4 Relatively few paintings and drawings by Humphrey Jennings are signed, dated or titled, and only a handful of his works are today in public collections, notably three works in the Tate. The postwar years found Jennings painting a great deal more than he had during the War, and his later paintings and drawings, characterized by a spare, almost Oriental, use of line, display some similarities to the work of the Italian Futurists. As Kathleen Raine recalled of Jennings, ‘Sometimes he would paint some apparently naively simple, realistic object – like a matchbox; or, approaching the problem from another point of view, only a few brushmarks, of infinite delicacy of touch and subtlety of colour, on canvases largely left bare – so left because every brushmark must be made with meaning, deliberately placed according to a complex imaginative operation, involving both conscious thought and instinctive sensibility…French in visual perception, English in his sense of the poetic image, Chinese in his philosophy of how an action (painting in particular) should be performed, he sought simultaneously for three kinds of truth; in his mature work, so it seems to me, all these are achieved.’5 Humphrey Jennings’s watercolour Study for The Purple Yacht is here reunited with the painting – of identical dimensions, and signed and dated ‘1949-50’ – for which it served as a preparatory study. Both works were made at the end of the artist’s career, shortly before his untimely death.

a.

b.

56 ARTHUR CHARLES KEMP Kings Heath 1906-1968 Birmingham(?)

Red Sky over Loch Harray, Orkney Watercolour. Numbered AK 192 in pencil on the verso.

191 x 279 mm. (7 1/ 2 x 11 in.)

PROVENANCE: By descent in the artist’s family to his adopted son, Jeremy Raynham-Kemp.

Born into a Quaker family, Arthur Kemp had wished to study art but, facing the disapproval of his father, was instead trained as a musician, studying the cello at the Midland Institute in Birmingham. In the mid1920s he joined the City of Birmingham Orchestra, where he met his future wife. Shortly after their marriage in 1934, Kemp entered the Birmingham School of Art, winning an award for excellence in arts and crafts at his graduation in 1936. He was also qualified as an art teacher, and was thus employed for the next few years, while continuing to work as a painter, as well as a silversmith. In the early 1940s the Kemp family moved from Kings Norton in Worcestershire to the town of Rugby in Warwickshire.

Kemp spent much time travelling around Wales, where he would often find subjects to paint, and had a second home at Llanystumdwy, on the river Dwyfach. One of his few public commissions was a very large mosaic for the Rugby College of Technology, while a second mosaic of The Virgin and Child proposed for the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral never progressed beyond preparatory drawings. In 1960 Kemp suffered the second of two strokes, which left him without the full use of his left arm, though he continued to draw and sketch as often as possible.

This vibrant watercolour is one of a series of sky studies painted by Kemp during his family’s summer holiday in 1961, when the artist, his wife Irene and son Jeremy were staying in a cottage in Skeabrae on the Orkney Islands, and father and son rowed across the nearby Loch of Harray. As his son recalled many years later, ‘1961 saw more improvement in Dad and for the first time ever the three of us went away for a holiday to the Orkney Islands. I had hired a rowing boat and Dad and I would go off together where he would be quite content to sit and sketch while I did a spot of fishing. Other days we would go off around the headlands and find a suitable subject to paint. I remember one day the wind was so strong that I had to hold the paper down on his board for him to paint or the lot would have been blown away to sea. He still had no use of his left arm and could not walk very well. His speech was affected as well so things were not at all easy for him but we all seemed to manage reasonably well.’

A related, although more finished, sky study is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art of Wales in Machynlleth, Powys, which houses a large number of works by Arthur Kemp.

57 FRANK AUERBACH Born 1931 Recto: Study after 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).

Frank Auerbach made drawings after Old Master paintings in the collection of the National Gallery in London throughout much of his career, beginning in the late 1940s. He had entered St. Martin’s School of Art in 1948, and its close proximity to the National Gallery meant that he was able to make daily or weekly visits to the museum to draw after the Old Masters; 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 has copied in the National Gallery are 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 has said 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 around 1952-1953, the present sheet, once part of a large sketchbook, is one of relatively few surviving early drawings by Frank Auerbach. The recto of the sheet contains a very free and spirited copy after J. M. W. Turner’s painting of The Parting of Hero and Leander (fig.1), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1837 and today in the National Gallery in London5. The landscape paintings of the 18th and early 19th century British School – notably the works of Turner, Constable and Gainsborough – seem, of all the paintings in the National Gallery, to have had the most profound effect on Auerbach. As he has said, ‘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

recto

The verso of this drawing, which is squared for transfer, depicts a building site in London; a theme that occupied the artist for much of the 1950s, at the start of his career. Auerbach was fascinated by the intense program 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 for much of his later career, often turned to the study of paintings in the National Gallery to help him work through his ideas and resolve problems in his own compositions. As he has 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 I have at that point failed to grasp it in my own picture.’8 Both sides of this drawing can 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 recently commented at length on the relationship between the recto and verso of this large 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 stormpossessed 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

1.

recto

verso

58 LUCIAN FREUD OM CH Berlin 1922-2011 London Portrait of Lady Anderson Pencil on paper. Signed with initials L.F. in pencil at the upper right centre.

374 x 233 mm. (14 3/4 x 9 1/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: With Crane Kalman Gallery, London, in 1969; The sitter, Lady Anderson, London; Her posthumous sale (‘The Property of the Estate of the late Lady Anderson, sold by order of the Trustees’), London, Christie’s, 6 March 1987, lot 197; James Kirkman, London; Michael Hue-Williams, London and Little Milton; Jay Jopling Fine Art, London; Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London, in 1990; Brooke Alexander, New York; Acquired from them by a private collector; With Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; Private collection.

EXHIBITED: London, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, Modern English Masters, 1990, no.35 (as Head of a Woman).

The early years of Lucian Freud’s career were largely devoted to drawing, which would remain a vital part of the artist’s development throughout the 1940s and early 1950s. As he recalled, many years later, ‘I would have thought I did 200 drawings to every painting in those early days. I very much prided myself on my drawing. My work was in a sense very linear.’1 This period of sustained activity in drawing saw Freud creating an important series of self-contained works in charcoal, ink, watercolour, coloured crayons, pencil and chalk. By the middle of the 1950s, however, he had largely abandoned drawing altogether, as he felt that the predominantly linear, graphic quality of his paintings was impeding his brushwork.

Since that time he produced drawings only infrequently, and it was the medium of etching that took the place of drawing as his preferred means of graphic expression.

On Freud as a draughtsman, Nicholas Penny has written that ‘What makes the [early] drawings...most remarkable is the tension in them between Freud’s extreme sophistication, the cunning and wit of his line, and his determination to present, often with bluntness and force, images with all their essential idiosyncrasy intact. The grotesque is often considered preferable to an easy elegance. Freud speaks with keen admiration for the early drawings of peasants by Van Gogh, as well as for the work of Ingres.’2 Freud’s approach to portraiture was always based on intense observation of his sitters. As he noted in a 2009 interview, ‘I only did heads of people in the early days so I probably felt I should get the most out of them. I sometimes looked so hard at a subject that they would undergo an involuntary magnification.’3 In the same conversation, he added, ‘I never put anything into a picture that I don’t actually see when I’m painting a subject. However, I’m not trying to make a copy of the person. I’m trying to relay something of who they are as a physical and emotional presence...I don’t try to represent what I think about them. I would rather learn something new. Doing a portrait is about seeing what you didn’t see before. It can be extraordinary how much you can learn about someone, and perhaps about yourself, by looking very carefully at them, without judgement.’4 Drawn in c.1952, this striking pencil drawing is a portrait of the Australian-born Morna Campbell MacKormick (1906-1982), the daughter of the surgeon Sir Alexander MacKormick. In 1932 she married Colin Anderson (1904-1980), director of the P & O Shipping Line and later a prominent art collector.

The couple settled in London; first in Kensington and later in Hampstead. A friend of Kenneth Clark from their days at Oxford, Colin Anderson was to become a great patron of 20th century British art. He was a member of the Contemporary Art Society from 1945 and its chairman from 1962, and was also Chairman of the Trustees of the Tate Gallery between 1960 and 1967, and Chairman and Provost of the Royal College of Art. He was knighted in 1950.

Colin Anderson was an early patron and supporter of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, both of whom would occasionally borrow significant amounts of money from him in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

(In one letter, written in 1952 – the approximate date of this drawing – Freud wrote, ‘PLEASE could you lend me two hundred pounds...I don’t want you to think that I am imposing on you as a friend, so could you consider it a business arrangement as if I were a firm or a company’, to which Anderson replied, ‘My dear Lucian, How rash of you – how unwise – to ask me ‘to think of you as a firm or company’. As such you would be turned down flat, as being unable to provide any security for such a loan. Luckily for you I know so much more of those extraordinary creatures, firms and companies, than you ever will, that I cannot even begin to think of you in terms of them. So I must think of you, as you forbid me to do so in terms of friendship, as Lucian Freud, just a person of that name, with certain talents and habits and commitments and potentialities.

Looked at in that cold way the commitments seem rather large. Is Lucian Freud living with proper frugality?

Is he flesh potting, like some bloated shipowner?...I enclose a cheque for £200. I promise you it gives me no kick as a pleasant exercise in power-patronage. Rather the reverse, I feel somewhat ashamed of being able to afford it and yet, at the same time, not giving it sweetly without all this lecturing.’5) In gratitude for his financial support, Freud gave Colin Anderson a collaborative notebook of texts by Stephen Spender accompanied by Freud’s drawings, done in Wales several years earlier in 1939, which Anderson eventually returned to the artist in 1968.

As collectors, Sir Colin and Lady Anderson (fig.1) assembled a fine collection of Art Nouveau works of art, which was bequeathed to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Among contemporary artists, as well as three drawings by Freud (bought in 1948, 1952 and 1969), the Andersons owned works by Edward Ardizzone, Francis Bacon, Prunella Clough, Robert Colquhoun, John Craxton, Barbara Hepworth, David Jones, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Ceri Richards, Matthew Smith and Graham Sutherland.

In pencil drawings such as this portrait of Lady Anderson (fig.2) can be seen the lifelong influence on Lucian Freud of the portrait drawings of the great 19th century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. This is especially true of Freud’s portraits of the late 1940s and 1950s, leading to Herbert Read’s celebrated and perceptive description of the artist as ‘the Ingres of existentialism.’ Freud’s appreciation of Ingres’s skill as a draughtsman remained undimmed throughout his career. Indeed, as he once said of Ingres, ‘His drawing is evocative in a way that forces us to believe in it. A line, any single line, of his drawings is worth looking at.’6

1.

2.

59 FRANK AUERBACH Born 1931 Drawing for Mornington Crescent Felt-tip pen and pencil on paper; a page from a sketchbook.

234 x 346 mm. (9 1/4 x 13 5/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Marlborough Gallery, London, in February 1971; Private collection.

Throughout his career, most of Frank Auerbach’s urban landscape subjects have been views in the immediate vicinity of his studio in north London; a relatively small area from Camden Town and Mornington Crescent to Primrose Hill. As he noted in a recent interview, ‘I’ve been painting my street and my house, and so on, by the studio because it’s easier, it’s about twenty-five minutes walk to Primrose Hill. Familiarity matters a great deal to me, painting another location wouldn’t mean anything to me.’1 Auerbach has returned repeatedly to painting the same, familiar urban views, in different seasons and at different times of day, and indeed sometimes at intervals of several years. Drawings made in a sketchbook on the spot are worked up in the studio into large paintings on canvas or board. As the artist noted, in an interview published in 1998, ‘I’ve been wandering around these streets for so long that I have become attached to them, and as fond of them as people are of their pets. This part of London is my world.

I used to travel further for my subjects, to the cinema up the road, to Euston Station and St. Pancras Station.

And 40 years ago I worked from building sites at St. Paul’s, in Victoria Street and in Oxford Street. But in those days I would work from five or six drawings; now I get through 200 sketches for a painting.’2 In its composition, the present sheet relates most closely to a painting of Mornington Crescent of 1969, in a private collection3. Mornington Crescent is a curving Georgian terrace, north of Euston Station, where Walter Sickert (one of Auerbach’s artistic heroes) once had a studio. In 1954 Auerbach took over Leon Kossoff’s studio near Mornington Crescent, and he has lived and worked there ever since, for over sixty years.

Recently asked if he consciously searches for new landscape compositions around his studio in Camden Town, the artist replied ‘Sometimes when I finish a picture, I just wander around with a sketchbook and ideas and some of them I don’t like. Then I find something that seems attractive...It was very different at the beginning. I was looking for compositions. I know I was. The drawings I did for early paintings seem to me to have a composition, and now...I very much look for things that are not compositions at all, that don’t seem like art. I see whether I can try and paint them, something that for some reason or other is not a fitting material for any particular sort of picture but a piece of undigested reality. I try to find a way of making something of it.’4 As Auerbach has also stated, in a 1986 interview, ‘It’s the job of painting to capture the wild element in life that hasn’t yet been captured. This is why I paint London because it seems to me that this amazing city, immensely full of chaos and suggestiveness and an atmosphere of its own has largely been painted by visitors,

by Monet, Pissarro, Kokoschka, Derain and Doré. The city is full of painters but it’s only been nibbled at. I haven’t painted London to ally myself with some Camden Town Group but simply because I feel London is this raw thing that hasn’t been painted, and for what I feel about London. This extraordinary, marvellously unpainted city where wherever somebody tries to get something going they stop halfway through, and next to it something incongruous occurs...Since London will never be Paris anyway, we might as well get it as rich and varied as we can, this higgledy-piggledy mess of a city.’5

60 DAVID HOCKNEY OM CH RA Born 1937 Henry in Candlelight Pencil. Signed with initials and dated DH 1975 in pencil at the lower right.

430 x 355 mm. (16 7/ 8 x 14 in.)

PROVENANCE: Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris; Acquired from them in 1975 by Willem Peppler, Sweden and Montagnola, Lugano.

LITERATURE: Nikos Stangos, ed., David Hockney by David Hockney, London, 1976, p.278, fig.398; New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, David Hockney: Travels with Pen, Pencil and Ink, exhibition catalogue, 1978, unpaginated, illustrated; Marco Livingstone and Kay Heymer, Hockney’s Portraits and People, London, 2003, pp.104-105; Olle Granath, Sean Kelly and Willem Peppler, A Collector and his Oeuvre, 2008, illustrated p.114.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Claude Bernard, David Hockney: dessins et gravures, 1975, no.27; London, Offer Waterman and New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, David Hockney: Early Drawings, 2015, no.44.

Although David Hockney made his first portraits and self-portraits as a teenager, it was not until the mid1960s that he began to seriously apply himself to portraiture, inspired by a new relationship with a young lover, Peter Schlesinger. Since that time, he has continued to produce portraits in the form of paintings, drawings, prints and photographs throughout his long career. Portraiture has, indeed, been a central theme in much of his work. His sitters, with few exceptions, have been made up of friends, family, and lovers; people whom he knew well, and with whom he felt comfortable. As he himself has said, ‘Naturally I’ve always liked drawing people, so one tends to draw one’s friends and the people one knows around you – anybody does…I think the way I draw, the more I know and react to people, the more interesting the drawings will be. I don’t really like struggling for a likeness. It seems a bit of a waste of effort, in a sense, just doing that. And you’d never know, anyway. If you don’t know the person, you don’t really know if you’ve got a likeness at all. You can’t really see everything in the face. I think it takes quite a lot of time.’1 Furthermore, as a recent scholar has noted, ‘the intensity of drawing meant that Hockney tended only to make portraits of friends who were sufficiently patient and understanding, and with whom he was sufficiently familiar to be able to capture the changes and variation in their appearance.’2 Hockney’s portraits have been executed in almost every medium in which he has worked, including oil paint and acrylic, pencil, pen and ink, charcoal, coloured crayons, pastel and watercolour, as well as in the form of etchings, lithographs, Polaroid photographs and photographic collages. Whatever the medium or technique, however, Hockney’s portraiture is invariably characterized by the artist’s close observation of his subject. As Marco Livingstone has noted, ‘All of the artist’s portrait drawings were made in the presence of the sitter, for in Hockney’s view a portrait by definition has to be done from life or very soon after. This, however, by no means excludes the possibility of incorporating elements from memory, since previous knowledge of how someone behaves or looks can alter one’s apprehension of that person on a later occasion. Hockney is convinced that having recourse to information gathered from past experience, in conjunction with the evidence of the moment, has allowed him to make livelier and more animated faces than might otherwise have been possible.’3 Drawn in Paris in the early months of 1975, this drawing is a portrait of a lifelong friend of the artist, and one of his favourite subjects over a period of three decades. The American museum curator and art historian Henry Geldzahler (1935-1994) was the inaugural curator of 20th Century Art at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and is perhaps best known for the seminal exhibition New York Painting and Sculpture 1940-1970, held at the museum in its centenary year of 1969, which featured a highly personal selection of some four hundred works. In 1966 Geldzahler briefly left the museum to become the first director of the visual arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts, while between 1977 and 1982 he served as Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of New York.

Geldzahler and Hockney first met in New York in 1964, and soon became close friends and travelling companions. Of similar ages, ‘they shared a love of opera, good food and travel. Hockney’s total obsession with painting was paralleled by Geldzahler’s enormous enjoyment in collecting both art and artists.’4 In addition, ‘Their frequent travels together provided the artist with ample opportunities to make use of a trusted and experienced model who, in turn, made no attempt to disguise the pleasure he received from being drawn or painted...Henry understood that being drawn – knowing how to strike an interesting but natural pose, staying still without looking pained or stilted – is something of an art in itself.’5 Geldzahler remained one of Hockney’s closest friends until his death from cancer in 1994; indeed, the artist made several poignant drawings of Geldzahler at the end stage of his illness.

As Marco Livingstone has noted of the present sheet, ‘There is something almost Whistlerian about the wispy strokes and soft illumination of this sensitively observed study of Henry in an intimate interior.’6 A fine example of Hockney’s superb draughtsmanship, Henry in Candlelight underscores the artist’s devotion to the art of portraiture; a characteristic of his work over the many years of his career. Geldzahler’s close friendship with Hockney is reflected in the intimacy with which the artist has drawn him, and in the affection with which he is portrayed.

A common denominator in much of David Hockney’s portraiture is the almost obsessive focus placed on the sitter, and the relationship established between the artist, his model and the viewer. As has been noted, Hockney ‘always makes his portraits from direct observation, letting his models assume an important role. Their individuality seems to take preference over details of form, style and execution. Hockney’s so-called ‘naturalism’ is characterized by a detached mode of drawing and painting that has been called ‘cold’ by many observers. The traces of the artist’s hand tend to be eliminated, and a clear, transparent space is established, putting people and things firmly into their places. His people do not move, and communication and interrelation take place through looking rather than acting. And while these portraits are essentially private, intimate images, the privacy has its roots in the technical.’7 The present sheet was one of a handful of recent portraits of Henry Geldzahler that were included in a small exhibition of Hockney’s drawings and prints, mostly done during the artist’s two-year stay in Paris between 1973 and 1975, held at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris in April 1975. The drawing was acquired at that time by the German-born collector Willem Peppler (1923-2014), and remained in his collection for nearly forty years.

As has been noted in the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition of his portraiture, ‘David Hockney has a profound affection for drawing and painting on paper and there is no question that his expertise in creating a multitude of portraits on varied sheets is as powerful as his representations on canvas….Many of these portraits reveal his capacity for innovation and experimentation. Indeed, some feel that Hockney will be remembered primarily for his portraits on paper. Certainly, his graphic work lies at the heart of his oeuvre.’8

61 AVIGDOR ARIKHA Radauti (Bukovina) 1929-2010 Paris Blue Bottle Watercolour. Signed and dated Arikha 75 in pencil at the lower centre.

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

PROVENANCE: Marlborough Galleries, New York; Acquired from them in the late 1970s by Eugene Istomin, New York and Washington, D.C.; His posthumous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 4 May 2005, lot 209; Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Poniatowski, Geneva.

LITERATURE: Richard Channin et al, Arikha, Paris, 1985, illustrated p.53, pl.40.

EXHIBITED: Zürich, Marlborough Galerie AG, Avigdor Arikha: Ölbilder – Aquarelle – Zeichnungen, AprilMay 1977, no.32; London, Marlborough Fine Art, Avigdor Arikha: Oil Paintings – Watercolours – Drawings, May – June 1978, no.26.

One of the finest draughtsmen of the second half of the 20th century, Avigdor Arikha was born to German-speaking Jewish parents in Romania in 1929. The drawings he produced as a thirteen-year old boy while imprisoned in a Ukrainian labour camp brought him to the attention of the International Red Cross, who rescued him and sent him to a kibbutz in Palestine in 1944. After studying art at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem, Arikha went to Paris in 1949, where he completed his training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He eventually settled in Paris in 1954, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne and establishing lifelong and intimate friendships with Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti.

Arikha began his career as an abstract painter, but in 1965 abandoned painting completely, and spent the next eight years working on black and white drawings from life, as well as a series of monochromatic etchings. By the time he returned to painting in 1973, he had become a committed figurative painter, producing portraits of family and friends, interior scenes and still life subjects. As the critic Robert Hughes wrote of the artist in 1973, ‘Arikha draws in order to see, as a writer might write in order to think. There is probably not an artist of his generation who has shown so vividly the questions and feedbacks that beset the strange activity known as drawing from life.’1 Arikha’s drawings, invariably made from life and almost always in a single session, have always been much admired. In the words of Hughes, ‘He gives us back a sense of the possibility of drawing. Arikha is, to my mind, the best draftsman of his generation, perhaps the best to have emerged in Europe since the death of Giacometti.’2 And, as has been noted elsewhere, ‘Arikha’s drawings take their place alongside those of some of the masters, from Rembrandt to Géricault, and are scarcely to be equalled among his contemporaries.’3 As a draughtsman, Arikha employed a range of media and techniques, including pencil, pen, brush, ink, charcoal, chalk, pastel, metalpoint and watercolour. A collection of over 110 drawings and prints by Arikha, the vast majority presented by the artist in 2004, is in the collection of the British Museum.

The medium of watercolour was used by Arikha primarily in the middle and late 1970s, and accounts for a relatively small part of his drawn oeuvre as a whole. Among stylistically comparable watercolours by the artist is a study of a Leek, also dated 1975, in a private collection in Paris4. What may be the same blue bottle reappears in a still life painting of Three Bottles of 1978, in a private collection5.

The present sheet formerly belonged to the American concert pianist Eugene Istomin (1925-1993), who was a close friend of the artist for many years. Arikha made several drawings of Istomin playing the piano; one of these is now in the British Museum6.

62 DAVID HOCKNEY OM CH RA Born 1937 Still Life: Cotton Wool Swabs with Iron Perchlorate on a Glass-Topped Wicker Table Black ink. Signed, dated, titled and dedicated cotton wool swabs with iron perclorite / on a glass topped wicker table / for Maurice with love / from David H / August 1976 in black ink at the upper right.

430 x 350 mm. (16 7/ 8 x 13 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Given by the artist to Maurice Payne in 1976.

EXHIBITED: London, Offer Waterman and New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, David Hockney: Early Drawings, 2015, no.49.

This large still life drawing bears a dedication to the master printer Maurice Payne, who worked closely with Hockney on his etchings for over thirty years, notably in the late 1960s and 1970s, and who also posed for a large number of portrait drawings and prints by the artist. As Hockney recalled in 1975, ‘Maurice has printed my etchings for twelve years or so now, he’s a very, very good printer – there aren’t many about. Printing etchings is quite a difficult job.’1 For some time Payne worked as Hockney’s full-time studio assistant before eventually establishing his own etching studio in New York. Apart from Hockney, Payne has worked with Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, Eric Fischl, Howard Hodgkin, Jasper Johns, William Kentridge and Donald Sultan, among others.

The presence in this still life of iron perchlorate (a word the artist has spelled incorrectly in the title), together with the dedication to Maurice Payne, would suggest that the subject can be related to Hockney’s experimentation with a new etching process three years earlier, in 1973. Iron perchlorate, also known as iron chloride or ferric chloride (FeCl3), can be used in place of acid in the etching of copper plates, since it is less corrosive and does not emit fumes, and does not affect the brush itself as quickly as acid would. The use of ferric chloride for etching ‘allowed the use of a brush to apply the bite either to a bare [copper] plate or to a plate with an aquatint ground...It also allows the slower biting of plates with the advantage that soft etching-grounds can be watched carefully so that they do not break up.’2 Hockney learned the use of ferric chloride from the printer Aldo Crommelycnk in Paris in 1973, when the artist spent some weeks with him working on an etching in memory of Picasso, who had recently died.

Before working with Crommelycnk, who had been Picasso’s etching printer, Hockney had always made etchings with acid. As he later recalled, ‘But Aldo doesn’t use acid, he uses ferric chloride, which works on the copper plate and eats some of it away, which means you can use the brush because it doesn’t rot in the ferric chloride, so you can just keep painting the plate. The more ferric chloride you put on, the darker it gets, so you can have light and dark. These were techniques I’d never used before. In my three months there, I found out so many things...I was very excited about learning all these techniques because it widened the scope of etching a bit, and I told Maurice Payne about them over the phone, told him how they were done.

He understood immediately how it all worked...then I came to England and showed him, and told him he had to use ferric chloride to etch the soft ground because you can watch it working; it doesn’t take long, only two minutes, but you have to watch it that it doesn’t break down. He got the ferric chloride and we tried it, and it worked very well. Aldo knew I was telling Maurice – it’s not a trade secret or anything. Maurice was staggered; it was quite a revelation.’3

63 FRANK AUERBACH Born 1931 To the Studios Felt-tip pen and pastel on paper. Signed and dated Auerbach / 1977 in pencil on the verso.

253 x 294 mm. (10 x 11 5/ 8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Acquired directly from the artist by a private collector; Their (anonymous) sale, London, Sotheby’s, 22 February 1990, lot 445.

Drawing is a vital part of Frank Auerbach’s working process. This is particularly true when the artist is working on a landscape composition, when he repeatedly makes sketches of the particular view or motif he is working on, usually early in the morning. As he noted, in a 1998 interview, ‘I go out each morning and draw. I can’t really start a painting in the morning until I’ve done a drawing...I feel dissatisfied with what I’m doing, so I go out and try and notice some fact I haven’t seen before, and once I’ve been provided with a reason for changing my picture, I can come back to the studio and change it. I can go on doing this for many months. Noticing something that no one else has paid any attention to seems to be a motive. I’ve lived here for 40 years, but when I look at certain things around here I can’t think of any way of painting them. I looked at the Camden Theatre for twenty years before I did pictures of it. I looked at the chimney in Mornington Crescent for 35 years before I found a way of painting it. I think I’m speaking for all painters when I say that I get a sense of pleasure out of pinning something down that I’ve seen, as it were, out of the corner of my mind for years.’1 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Auerbach painted a number of canvases entitled To the Studios, depicting a view looking downhill towards the entrance to the artist’s studio, between a red-brick Victorian house at the left and a newer building at the right, with a North London skyline at the top of the composition. In his 1990 monograph on the artist, Robert Hughes described Auerbach’s studio at length: ‘a brown cave in north-west London...It is one of a line of three studios in an alley that runs off a street in Camden Town, a rootedly lower-middle-class area between Mornington Crescent and the park of Primrose Hill. They were built around 1900, with high north-facing windows...You enter the alley through a wicket gate, set between a liver-brick Victorian semi-detached villa on the left and on the right a decayed block of 60s maisonettes. A roughly lettered sign says TO THE STUDIOS.’2 The advent of the To the Studios paintings, begun in 1977, seems to have been the result of the painter’s anxiety that he would be evicted from his studio; a situation eventually resolved when he was able to purchase the building.

The present sheet may be related to a series of four paintings entitled To the Studios, painted in 1977 and early 1978; one of these is today in the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester3, while the others are in private collections4.

When working on this series of paintings, Auerbach often pinned several drawings and sketches of the subject, like the present sheet, to the wall of his studio (fig.1) as an aidemémoire5.

1.

64 DONALD SULTAN Born 1951 Black Roses Charcoal on paper. Signed with initials and dated July 16 1988 DS in pencil along the bottom edge, and titled Black Roses in pencil at the lower right.

441 x 356 mm. (17 3/ 8 x 14 in.)

PROVENANCE: Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago.

Donald Sultan came to prominence as a contemporary artist in the 1980s, painting large-scale still life subjects, as well as landscapes and urban scenes. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he had his first one-man exhibition in New York in 1977, and since then has been the subject of numerous gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide. Sultan works in a slow and methodical manner, and only paints fifteen or so large paintings a year, as well as a number of drawings, prints and small-scale canvases. Also active as a printmaker and sculptor, he lives and works in New York.

The present sheet may be associated with a series of large charcoal drawings of flowers – tulips and irises in particular – in which the rich, velvety blackness of the medium was essential to the artist’s conception of the whole. As the art historian and critic Roger Bevan has noted, ‘In charcoal, Sultan conjures magnificent forms on large sheets of smooth, heavy etching paper…Boldly carved with sticks of charcoal which splinter and crumble under the pressure which he applies, these elemental shapes are provocatively sensuous, their contours softly dusted with powder…his masterly fusion of a deposit of charcoal upon the surface of a crisp, clean sheet of paper recalls those incomparable drawings of Seurat whose control of crayon as it caressed the paper’s tufts has never been surpassed. The common thread which binds these artists to a galaxy of other European masters is a love of the colour of blackness and nobody has explored its special characteristics as obsessively as Sultan.’1 This drawing may also be related to a later series of three aquatints of Black Roses, executed by Sultan in December 1989 and published in 19902. In a survey of the artist’s printmaking, Barry Walker wrote that ‘Any consideration of Sultan’s unique work is incomplete without an examination of his drawings. They are also essential in any discussion of his aquatints, the most innovative aspect of his printed oeuvre, as the development of technique in each is inextricably related to the other. The drawings comprise an independent body of work rather than studies for paintings; they are mostly large-scale and highly finished. In the earlier ones he employed some graphite with charcoal, but the more recent ones, those executed since late 1983, are done in pure charcoal on paper.’3 Sultan was inspired to use the aquatint process as a way of approximating the appearance of his charcoal drawings. As the artist has recalled, ‘I got the idea of making the prints from the charcoal drawings. I worked the charcoal a lot as powder, let it spread out over the paper, and then fixed it. One day I thought, ‘Aquatint is already powder, so if you work it dry and don’t melt it until you’ve made the images, instead of doing the reverse, you won’t have hard edges…I realized that I couldn’t get the charcoal drawings as powdery as I wanted them. With charcoal you’re adding, so you develop a technique to get your whites clean and your edges fuzzy. It gets really fussy. But with the prints it’s the reverse. In the aquatints, I solved the problem of how to make mysterious, intimate drawings without having to fuss with the damn thing.’4 Donald Sultan’s interest in still life subjects is a characteristic of his artistic process. As he has said, ‘I paint still life because I thought it was the perfect vehicle for advancing art. If I was going to be involved in abstraction and painting and figuration, still life was perfect because it could be very abstract and I could put a lot of things back into abstract paintings that had been removed, like space and volume and light.’5

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

No.4 Delacroix

No.40 Klimt

Fig.1 Eugène Delacroix Two Views of a Young Arab Watercolor over graphite on cream wove paper 297 x 345 mm.

Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art

Fig.1 Gustav Klimt Portrait of a Woman Oil on canvas 67 x 56 cm.

Linz, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Photo: Reinhard Haider

No.10 Degas

No.50 Bonnard

Fig.1 Pietro Perugino The Virgin and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Catherine of Alexandria Oil on panel 81 x 63 cm.

Paris, Musée du Louvre Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski

Fig.1 Pierre Bonnard Nu dans le bain Oil on canvas 97 x 147 cm.

Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / Agence Bulloz

No.23 Meissonier

No.57 Auerbach

Fig.1 Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier The Grand Canal, Venice, from the Entrance to the Casa Fumagalli Oil on canvas 93 x 129.5 cm.

Paris, Musée d’Orsay Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

Fig.1 Joseph Mallord William Turner The Parting of Hero and Leander 146 x 236 cm.

London, The National Gallery Turner Bequest, 1856 Photo © The National Gallery, London

No.38 Modigliani Figs.1-2 Amedeo Modigliani Standing Nude, c.1912 Limestone 162.8 x 33.2 x 29.6 cm.

Canberra, National Gallery of Australia Purchased 1976

NOTES TO THE CATALOGUE

No.1 Joseph Gandy 1.

That Gandy was held in high regard by Soane is shown in the comments made by the architect in a lecture presented at the Royal Academy in 1813: ‘A superior manner of Drawing is absolutely necessary, indeed it is impossible not to admire the beauties and almost magical effects in the architectural drawings of a Clérisseau, a Gandy, or a Turner.’

2.

A selection of pages from the two Westmacott albums is illustrated in Brian Lukacher, Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England, London, 2006, pp.81-83, figs.85-92, p.124, fig.138 and p.183, fig.189. Others are illustrated in New York, Richard L. Feigen & Co., op.cit., no.37.

3.

Among the landscapes depicted were views of Dorking, Box Hill, ‘near Southend’, ‘near Leatherhead’, ‘Leith Hill from Cobham Park’, Epsom, Brighton, ‘between Brighton and Shoreham’, ‘from Holingbury Hill’, Hove, ‘near Shoreham’, ‘Southwick near Shoreham’, Devil’s Dyke, Ramsgate, Rottingdean, ‘near Lord Cavendish’s’, Eastbourne, ‘Chalk pit, near Eastbourne’, Beachy Head, ‘near Peckham Rye’, ‘London from Hill above Peckham Rye’, Purfleet, Kensington Garden, ‘near Newhaven’, ‘near Norwood’, Yeovil, Devonshire Hill and Hampstead.

Nos.2-3 Joseph Gandy 1.

The album was titled ‘GANDY / VOL II / LANDSCAPE’ on the spine, and inscribed by Richard Westmacott ‘Gandy’s sketches / I give / Maria’ on the inside cover.

2.

Brian Lukacher, Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England, London, 2006, pp.79-82.

3.

Lukacher, op.cit., p.80.

4.

Brian Lukacher, in New York, Richard L. Feigen & Co., op.cit., unpaginated.

No.4 Eugène Delacroix 1.

The first recorded owner of this drawing was the art historian Walter Pach (1883-1958), who first translated Delacroix’s Journals into English.

2.

Arlette Sérullaz, “Delacroix’s drawing is to that of Ingres as fire is to ice”, in Arlette Sérullaz, Drawing Gallery: Delacroix, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2004, p.12.

3.

Lee Johnson, ‘The Art of Delacroix’, in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eugène Delacroix: Paintings, Drawings and Prints from North American Collections, exhibition catalogue, 1991, p.11.

4.

Paris, Catalogue de la Vente Eugène Delacroix, 17-29 February 1864, p.XIII; Quoted in translation in Arlette Sérullaz, ‘Chronicle of an Adventure’, in Paris, Institut du Monde Arabe, Delacroix in Morocco, exhibition catalogue, 1994-1995, p.130.

5.

‘Le peuple de ce pays–ci est un peuple à part; à beaucoup d’égards ils sont différents des autres peuples mahométans. Le costume est trèsuniforme et très simple, cependant par la manière diverse de l’ajuster, il prend un caractère de beauté et de noblesse qui confond. Je compte rapporter assez de croquis pour donner une idée de la tournure de ces messieurs.’; Letter from Tangier to Charles-Edmond Duponchel, 23 February 1832; quoted in Maurice Arama, Le Maroc de Delacroix, Paris, 1987, p.161.

6.

David P. Becker et al, The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas, exhibition catalogue, Baltimore and elsewhere, 20052006, pp.196-199, under no.44 (entry by Simon Kelly). The same Caddour is known to have lent his thoroughbred horse to the French envoy, Comte de Mornay, for the overland journey from Tangier to Meknes.

7.

Paris, Catalogue de la Vente Eugène Delacroix, op.cit., lot 530 (‘Jeune arabe, vêtu de blanc, avec une ceinture rouge et les jambes nues, vu de dos. Le même assis. Deux études sur la même feuille’: one of these is probably the same drawing as that in a private collection in London (see note 9 below), lot 531 (‘Le même, vu de face, debout. Deux études sur la même feuille’; today in the Baltimore Museum of Art (see note 8 below) and lot 532 (‘Portrait de même’).

8.

Inv. BMA 1976.27; Alfred Robaut, L’oeuvre complet de Eugène Delacroix, Paris, 1885, p.414, no.1590 (not illustrated); Victor Carlson and Carol Hynning Smith, Master Drawings and Watercolors of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, exhibition catalogue, Baltimore and elsewhere, 1979-1980, pp.26-27, no.6; Paris, Institut du Monde Arabe, op.cit., pp.152-153, no.18; Becker et al, op.cit., pp.196-199, no.44 (entry by Simon Kelly). The watercolour measures 297 x 345 mm.

9.

London, Yvonne Tan Bunzl, Old Master Drawings, 1984, no.46. The watercolour measures 300 x 170 mm.

10. Arama, op.cit., illustrated p.29.

No.5 Paul Huet 1.

Quoted in translation in Carol Forman Tabler, L’Amour du Beau. French Nineteenth-Century Landscapes: Drawings and Paintings from the Tabler Collection, exhibition catalogue, Brookville, 2015, p.78.

2.

A sketchbook of views of Normandy, drawn on a later tour of 1860, is in the Louvre (Inv. RF 2038; Arlette Sérullaz and Valentine de Chillaz, ed., Souvenirs de voyages, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1992, p.129, no.125).

No.6 Paul Huet 1.

Quoted in translation in Carol Forman Tabler, L’Amour du Beau. French Nineteenth-Century Landscapes: Drawings and Paintings from the Tabler Collection, exhibition catalogue, Brookville, 2015, p.100.

2.

Eugène Delacroix, The Journal of Eugène Delacroix: A Selection, London and New York, 1995, p.407.

3.

Alain de Leiris, ‘From Delacroix to Cezanne’, in Alain de Leiris and Carol Hynning Smith, From Delacroix to Cezanne: French Watercolor Landscapes of the Nineteenth Century, exhibition catalogue, College Park, and elsewhere, 1977-1978, pp.44-45.

4.

Alexandra Murphy, ‘Introduction’, in New York, Galerie Antoine Laurentin at Bob P. Haboldt & Co., Paul Huet (1803-1869), exhibition catalogue, 1997, p.6.

5.

Inv. 1973.61; de Leiris and Smith, ibid., p.144, no.81, illustrated p.140 (as Paris, View from Montmartre).

No.7 Henri Lehmann 1.

Inv. RF 100; Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Henri Lehmann 1814-1822: Portraits et décors parisiens, exhibition catalogue, 1983, pp.142-143, no.289; Marie-Madeleine Aubrun, Henri Lehmann 1814-1882: catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre, Nantes, 1984, Vol.I, pp.125-127, no.347, Vol.II, p.98, pl.347; Slaven Perovic, Henri Lehmann: Crtez Studija i Skica Oceanida iz Muzeja Mimara / Henri Lehmann: The Drawing Study and Sketch of Oceanids from the Mimara Museum, Zagreb, 2010, p.8, fig.3. Lehmann had treated the same theme in an earlier painting of 1844, exhibited at the Salon in 1846 but now lost (Aubrun, op.cit., Vol.I, pp.110-111, no.269, Vol.II, p.79, pl.269; Perovic, op.cit., illustrated p.7, fig.2).

2.

Inv. 851 B1 and 851 B2; Paris, Musée Carnavalet, ibid., pp.143-145, nos.292-293; Aubrun, op.cit., Vol.I, p.128, nos.D.354 and D.355, Vol.II, pp.100-101, pls.D.354 and D.355; Perovic, op.cit., illustrated pp.10-11, figs.4-5. Several studies for other figures in the painting, as well preparatory drawings and oil sketches as for the entire composition, are known.

No.8 Eugène Delacroix 1.

Frank Anderson Trapp, Delacroix and the Romantic Image: Oriental Themes, Wild Beasts, and the Hunt, exhibition catalogue, Amherst, 1988, p.31.

2.

Inv. 1980.21.13; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, op.cit., p.122, no.53; Arlette Sérullaz et al, Delacroix: The Late Work, exhibition catalogue, Paris and Philadelphia, 1998-1999, p.91-92, no.8, also p.354, no.8.

3.

Arlette Sérullaz et al, ibid., p.84, no.3, also p.352, no.3 (where dated c.1850).

4.

Inv. 1955.1417; Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, Standish D. Lawler and Charles W. Talbot, Jr., Drawings from the Clark Art Institute: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Robert Sterling Clark Collection of European and American Drawings, Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries, at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, New York and London, 1964, Vol.I, p.90, no.176, Vol.II, pl.71 (where dated 1850-1860).

5.

With M. R. Schweitzer, New York; The Art Journal, Winter 1960-1961, p.103 [advertisement].

No.9 Victor Hugo 1.

Quoted in translation in Florian Rodari, ‘Victor Hugo, a Precursor a posteriori’, in Florian Rodari et al., Shadows of a Hand: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1998, p.25.

2.

The sketchbook was printed Henry Penny’s / Metallic / Memorandum Books / No.43. On the inside back cover was stamped: S. BARBET JUNR / -25- / HIGH ST / GUERNESEY.

3.

A total of twenty-seven carnets dating from Hugo’s Guernsey years, of both types, are in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Apart from the one from which the present sheet was taken, three other small sketchbooks used by Hugo in the year 1856 are known; one used between the 15th of March and the 18th of April, another bought on the 19th of April and used until June, and a third purchased on the 19th of August.

4.

The entire carnet is illustrated and described in full in Venice, Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ca’ Pesaro, op.cit., pp.219-221 and pp.126-137.

5.

Rodari, op.cit., p.48.

6.

Inv. V 93-12, V 93-20, V 93-21 and V 93-22; Rodari, op.cit., p.76, nos.40-41, p.130, no.83; Prévost, op.cit., 2000-2001, p.364, nos.108109, illustrated p.172, figs.108-109 and p.377, no.150, illustrated p.201, fig.150; Marie-Laure Prévost, Victor Hugo: l’homme océan, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2002, p.187, no.148.

7.

Prévost, op.cit., 2000-2001, p.364, no.110, pp.376-378, no.147-149 and 151-153 and p.402, no.243, illustrated p.173, fig.110, pp.202205, figs.147-153 and p.300, fig.243; Lausanne, Fondation de l’Hermitage, Victor Hugo: Dessins visionnaires, 2008, no.1, illustrated p.26.

No.10 Edgar Degas 1.

At the fourth and final Degas studio sale in July 1919, the present sheet was sold framed together with two other drawings after Italian Renaissance works; one a Head of Christ and the other a study after the figure of an executioner in Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael’s Massacre of the Innocents.

2.

The poet, writer and Oriental art scholar Charles Vignier (1863-1934) owned a large and significant group of around sixty paintings, pastels and drawings by Degas.

3.

Emil Maurer, ‘Degas’s Copies’, in Felix Baumann and Marianne Karabelnik, ed., Degas Portraits, exhibition catalogue, Zurich and Tübingen, 1994-1995, p.151.

4.

In a letter to Degas in Florence of 4 January 1859; Quoted in translation in Jean Sutherland Boggs et al, Degas, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Ottawa and New York, 1988-1989, p.88, under no.27.

5.

‘Il faut copier et recopier les maîtres, et ce n’est qu’après avoire donné toutes les preuves d’un bon copiste qu’il pourra raisonnablement vous être permis de faire un radis d’après nature.’; quoted in Ambroise Vollard, Degas, Paris, 1924, p.64.

6.

Theodore Reff, ‘New Light on Degas’s Copies’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1964, p.250.

7.

Maurer, op.cit., p.156.

8.

Inv. 720; Carlo Castellaneta and Ettore Camesasca, L’opera completa del Perugino, Milan, 1969, p.93, no.35; Pietro Scarpellini, Perugino, Milan, 1991, p.87, no.57, p.183, fig.90; Vittoria Garibaldi, Perugino: Catalogo completo, Florence, 1999, p.114, no.34, illustrated in colour p.36.

9.

Maurer, op.cit., pp.152-153.

10. David P. Becker et al, The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas, exhibition catalogue, Baltimore and elsewhere, 20052006, pp.184-187, no.39 (entry by Victor Carlson).

11. Emil Maurer, ‘Portraits as Pictures: Degas between Taking a Likeness and Making a Work of Art (Tableau)’, in Baumann and Karabelnik, ed., op.cit., p.101.

12. Dupuy-Vachey, op.cit., p.397, figs.24-26; Théodore Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar Degas, Oxford, 1976, Vol.I, p.40 [Notebook 2, pp.47, 49 and 51].

13. Daniel Halévy, Degas parle…, Paris and Geneva, 1960, p.56; Quoted in translation in Maurer, ‘Degas’s Copies’, op.cit., p.154.

Nos.11-12 Eugène Boudin 1.

Gérard Jean-Aubry, Eugène Boudin, Paris, 1922, new ed., London, 1969, p.50.

2.

Jules-Antoine Castagnary, Salons (1857-70), Paris, 1892, Vol.I, p.375; quoted in translation in Jean-Aubry, ibid., p.232.

3.

Jean-Aubry, op.cit., p.50.

No.13 Jean-François Millet 1.

Letter of 17 June 1866; Quoted in translation in Alexandra R. Murphy et al, Jean-François Millet: Drawn into the Light, exhibition catalogue, Williamstown and elsewhere, 1999, p.103, under no.67.

2.

Bruce Laughton, ‘J.-F. Millet in the Allier and the Auvergne’, The Burlington Magazine, May 1988, p.347.

3.

London, Hayward Gallery, Jean-François Millet, exhibition catalogue, 1976, p.183.

4.

Alexandra R. Murphy, Jean-François Millet, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 1984, p.177. Drawings by Millet of Vichy and its surroundings are today in the collections of the Louvre, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Kunsthalle in Bremen, and elsewhere.

No.14 Eduard Bendemann 1.

Another drawing by Bendemann from Friedrich Schöne’s collection, a pen and ink Landscape with Washerwomen at Gorbio of 1867, was on the art market in Germany in 2010 (Frankfurt am Main, H. W. Fichter Kunsthandel, Gezeichnete Kunst, 2010, pp.11-12).

No.15 James Tissot 1.

Michael Wentworth, in New York, Christie’s, 19th Century European Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors and Sculpture, 24 May 1989, p.234, under lot 340.

2.

Three are in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, one is in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, another is in the Smith College Museum of Art in Massachusetts, and a sixth is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Two further examples have appeared recently at auction and are today in private collections (see notes 4 and 5 below).

3.

Inv. 1942.108; Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, ed., James Tissot, exhibition catalogue, London and elsewhere, 1984-1985, p.110, no.62; Whiteley, op.cit., Vol.I, pp.418-419, no.1449, Vol.II, pl.1449; Jon Whiteley, Poussin to Cézanne: French drawings and watercolours in the Ashmolean Museum, exhibition catalogue, London, 2002, pp.106-107, no.50. The drawing is a study for the painting of The Captain and the Mate of 1873, in the collection of Lord Lloyd-Webber.

4.

Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 19 November 1998, lot 138 (sold for $79,500). The drawing is a study for Tissot’s painting The Captain’s Daughter of 1873, in the Southampton City Art Gallery.

5.

Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 24 May 1989, lot 340 (sold for $198,000). The drawing is a study for Tissot’s painting The Return from the Boating Trip of 1873.

6.

Peter Raissis, Prints & Drawings: Europe 1500-1900, from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, exhibition catalogue, Sydney, 2014, pp.150151, unnumbered, illustrated in colour.

7.

The artist appears to have painted on board two or three ships captained by John Freebody; the Warwick Castle, the Arundel Castle and the Carisbrooke Castle. Margaret’s brother, Captain Lumley Kennedy, also appears in a number of Tissot’s paintings of this period.

8.

Inv. 1967:2; Matyjaszkiewicz, op.cit., p.109, no.56, illustrated p.73, fig.29; Wentworth, 1984, op.cit., pl.85; Ann H. Sievers, Linda Muehlig and Nancy Rich, Master Drawings from the Smith College Museum of Art, New York, pp.150-152, no.36. The drawing is a study for Tissot’s painting The Last Evening of 1873, in the Guildhall Art Gallery in London.

9.

Matyjaszkiewicz, op.cit., p.109, under no.56.

10. Wentworth in New York, Christie’s, op.cit., 1989, p.234, under lot 340. As Wentworth has noted elsewhere, such drawings ‘have a grace of spirit and a painterly distinction which places them directly in the tradition of the eighteenth-century French water-colour painters.’

(Wentworth, 1984, op.cit., p.105).

No.16 Camille Pissarro 1.

Quoted in John Rewald, Camille Pissarro, New York, n.d. (1963), p.49.

2.

Richard Brettell and Christopher Lloyd, A Catalogue of the Drawings by Camille Pissarro in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Oxford, 1980, p.17.

3.

Inv. WA1952.6.123; Ibid., pp.125-126, no.85H verso.

4.

Ibid., p.123.

5.

Brettell and Lloyd, op.cit., p.126, under no.85H.

6.

Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Catalogue critique des peintures / Critical Catalogue of Paintings, Milan, 2005, Vol.II, p.473, no.709.

7.

Rewald, op.cit., p.49.

No.17 Johan Barthold Jongkind 1.

This watercolour belonged to the pharmacist and collector Henri Canonne (1867-1961), who was the inventor of the throat lozenge.

Canonne owned several watercolours by Jongkind, alongside works by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Bonnard, Vuillard, Matisse and others.

Nine watercolours by Jongkind from the Canonne collection are illustrated in Arsène Alexandre, La collection Canonne, Paris, 1930, between pp.8 and 9.

2.

‘Plus on regarde ses aquarelles, plus on se demande comment cela est fait! C’est avec rien, et pourtant la fluidité et la densité du ciel et des nuages y sont traduites avec une précision inimaginable.’

3.

In the catalogue of the 1930 Canonne sale, in which this drawing was included, the present sheet was illustrated as two full sketchbook pages, with the left half of the left-hand page blank. At some point since then, the sheet has been trimmed to the border of the drawn composition at the left, discarding the blank area of the left-hand page.

4.

Paul Signac, Jongkind, Paris, 1927, p.61; Quoted in translation in Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, ‘Impressionist Drawings’, in Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Andrew Robison, ed., Color, Line, Light: French Drawings, Watercolors, and Pastels from Delacroix to Signac, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 2012-2013, p.77.

No.18 Edgar Degas 1.

At the fourth and final Degas studio sale, held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in July 1919, the present sheet was sold framed together with three other drawings of horses, two with riders, for a total of 600 francs.

2.

Sarah Campbell et al, Degas in the Norton Simon Museum. Nineteenth-century Art, Vol.II, New Haven and London, 2009, p.178, under no.21.

3.

For example, a red chalk study of Horse and Jockey in Profile of c.1888 in the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam (Inv. FII22; Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Ottawa and New York, 1988-1989, pp.459-460, no.279; Ronald Pickvance, Degas, exhibition catalogue, Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, 1993, p.53, no.23) and a pastel drawing of a similar subject (Boggs et al, ibid., p.460, fig.257).

4.

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 1887, IX, pls.636-640 (‘“Daisy”, jumping a hurdle, saddled’); Eadweard Muybridge, Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion, New York, 1979, Vol.III, pp.1288-1297, pl.636-640.

5.

Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, ibid., pl.652 (‘Horses rearing, etc.’); Muybridge, Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion, ibid., pp.1320-1321, pl.652.

6.

Aaron Scharf, ‘Painting, Photography, and the Image of Movement’, The Burlington Magazine, May 1962, p.192.

7.

John Rewald, ed., Degas: Works in Sculpture. A Complete Catalogue, London, 1946, no.XXIII, illustrated pp.48-51; John Rewald, Degas Sculpture, London, 1957, no.XIII, illustrated pl.15-19; Campbell et al, op.cit., pp.251-254, no.40; Roubaix, La Piscine-musée d’art et d’industrie André Diligent, Degas sculpteur, exhibition catalogue, 2010-2011, no.29, illustrated p.120.

8.

Inv. 1954.329; Richard R. Brettell and Suzanne Folds McCullagh, Degas in the Art Institute of Chicago, New York, 1984, p.126, no.61.

9.

‘Notable Works of Art Now in the Market’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1963, unpaginated, under pl.X.

10. Christopher Lloyd, Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels, London, 2014, p.191.

No.19 Adolph von Menzel 1.

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

2.

Hermann Knackfuß, Menzel, Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1895, p.102, fig.109; Hugo von Tschudi, Adolph von Menzel: Abbildungen seiner Gemälde und Studien, Munich, 1905, pp.420-412, no.645; Max Jordan, Das Werk Adolf Menzels, Munich, 1905, illustrated p.93; Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Menzel – der Beobachter, exhibition catalogue, 1982, illustrated p.226, fig.87, under no.141. The painting, which measured 18 x 12 cm., was in the collection of Kommerzienrat Kopetzky in Berlin in 1905.

3.

Ebertshaüser, op.cit., Vol.II, p.1193; Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle, op.cit., pp.226-227, no.141. The drawing, dated 1884 and measuring 220 x 140 mm., was in the Reemtsma collection in Hamburg in 1965.

No.20 Adolph von Menzel 1.

Moritz Edler von Kuffner (1854-1939), a brewer and property developer in Vienna, assembled a fine collection of drawings by Menzel.

Such was the renown of the Menzel drawings in the Kuffner collection that at one point thirteen sheets were earmarked for acquisition by the Albertina, although all but one were eventually returned to the family in 1938, shortly before the family were forced to emigrate, following the Anschluss.

2.

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

3.

Forster-Hahn, ibid., p.274.

4.

Jarno Jessen, ‘The Later Work and Studies of Adolf von Menzel’, The Magazine of Art, 1902, pp.50-51.

No.21 Franz Skarbina 1.

F. Servaes, ‘Modern Berlin Painters’, The Artist: An Illustrated Monthly Record of Arts, Crafts and Industries, August 1901, p.142.

2.

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

3.

Hamburg, Dr. Moeller & Cie., Arbeiten auf Papier / Works on Paper, 2012, no.67. A watercolour of A Young Woman on a Terrace in Capri, also dated 1883, appeared at auction in Germany in 2004 (Anonymous sale, Berlin, Villa Grisebach, 12 June 2004, lot 107).

No.22 Giovanni Boldini 1.

Richard Kendall, ‘Drawing Paris: Boldini as a Draftsman in the 1870s’, in Sarah Lees, Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris, exhibition catalogue, Ferrara and Williamstown, 2009-2010, pp.70-71.

2.

Two further drawings of theatre audiences from the same sketchbook, sharing the provenance of the present sheet but preparatory for a different work, were acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010 (Inv. 2010.343 and 2010.344; New York and London, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Master Drawings, 2010, nos.28a and 28b).

3.

Andrea Buzzoni and Marcello Toffanello, Museo Giovanni Boldini: Catalogo generale completamente illustrato, Ferrara, 1997, illustrated p.165; Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Giovanni Boldini 1842-1931: Catalogo ragionato. Vol.III: Catalogo ragionato della pittura a olio con un’ampia selezione di pastelle e acquerelli, pt.2: Addenda al catalogo ragionato, Turin, 2002, pp.244-245, no.443.

4.

Sarah Lees, ‘Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris’, in Lees, op.cit., p.46.

5.

Buzzoni and Toffanello, ibid., illustrated pp.206-207, pp.314-316 and p.421.

6.

Six other pencil sketches of theatre audiences by Boldini were exhibited in Bologna in 1999 (Bologna, Bottegantica, Giovanni Boldini: Il dinamismo straordinario delle linee, 1999, illustrated pp.82-87 and pp.100-101), while other comparable drawings include three pages from a similar small sketchbook, each depicting the composer Giuseppe Verdi and his second wife, the former soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, in the audience at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris (Dini and Dini, op.cit., Vol.IV, p.693, no.1384; Francesca Dini, ed., Boldini, Helleu, Sem: Protagonisti e miti della Belle Epoque, exhibition catalogue, Castiglioncello, 2006, pp.104-105, part of no.18).

No.23 Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier 1.

Gréard, op.cit., London, 1897, p.79.

2.

Kenyon Cox, ‘The Paintings of Meissonier’, The Nation, 24 December 1896; reprinted in Kenyon Cox, Old Masters and New: Essays in Art Crtiticism, New York, 1908, p.188.

3.

Quoted in Gréard, op.cit., London, 1897, p.212.

4.

Quoted in Gréard, op.cit., London, 1897, p.292.

5.

As an 1872 guidebook to Venice noted, ‘We recommend to stangers [sic] the Furnished roms [sic] in Casa Fumagalli calle del Ridotto N.1362. Beatiful [sic] situation upon the Grand Canal opposite the church della ‘Madonna della Salute (French Spoken)’’; Carlo Moretti, Venice. Her Art-Treasures and Historical Associations, Venice, 1872, p.202.

6.

Inv. RF 1246; Gréard, op.cit., London, 1897, illustrated p.289 (as then in the collection of Mme. Meissonier), and also listed in the ‘Catalogue of Meissonier’s Works’ on p.377; Isabelle Compin and Anne Roquebert, Catalogue sommaire illustré des peintures du musée du Louvre et du Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 1986, Vol.IV, p.78, no. RF 1246.

7.

Gréard, op.cit., London, 1897, p.377.

8.

Inv. RF 2394; Philippe Durey and Constance Cain Hungerford, ed., Ernest Meissonier: Rétrospective, exhibition catalogue, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1993, p.159, no.87. The watercolour measures 314 x 398 mm.

9.

Inv. RF 2395; Gréard, op.cit., Paris, 1897, illustrated p.290; Gréard, op.cit., London, 1897, illustrated p.309; Arlette Sérullaz and Valentine de Chillaz, ed., Souvenirs de voyages, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1992, pp.71-72, no.57; Dominique Brachlianoff, ‘“Heureux les paysagistes!”’, in Durey and Hungerford, ed., ibid., p.149, fig.3.

10. Meissonier’s dedication on this watercolour is translated in Gréard, op.cit., London, 1897, p.385.

No.24 Georges Seurat 1.

Seligman, op.cit., pp.16-17.

2.

Herbert, op.cit., pp.46-48.

3.

Seligman, op.cit., p.17.

4.

Seligman, op.cit., p.23.

5.

Russell, op.cit., p.90.

6.

de Hauke, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.114-115, no.520 (where dated c.1883); Herbert, op.cit., p.83, fig.78; Robert L. Herbert at al, Georges Seurat 1859-1891, exhibition catalogue, Paris and New York, 1991-1992, illustrated p.33; Hauptman, op.cit., pp.114-116, illustrated p.129, pl.63.

7.

Joris-Karl Huysmans, ‘Vue des remparts du Nord-Paris’, in Croquis parisiens, Paris, 1880, pp.67-69; Quoted in translation in Herbert, op.cit., pp.82-83.

8.

Hauptman, op.cit., p.117.

9.

Quoted in translation in Russell, op.cit., London, pp.65-66.

No.25 Paul Cézanne 1.

Christopher Lloyd, Paul Cézanne: Drawings and Watercolours, London, 2015, p.64.

2.

Joseph J. Rishel, Cézanne in Philadelphia Collections, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia, 1983, p.51, under no.23.

3.

Lloyd, op.cit., p.11.

4.

Letter of 28 June 1907 to the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker; Quoted in translation in Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, London, 1988, pp.52-53, note 1. Rilke had gone to see the exhibition at Modersohn-Becker’s suggestion.

5.

Götz Adriani, Cézanne Watercolors, New York, 1983, p.18.

6.

Rewald, op.cit., p.126, under no.168.

7.

Inv. F II 6; Adrien Chappuis, The Drawings of Paul Cézanne, London, 1973, Vol.I, p.213, no.878, Vol.II, pl.878.

8.

Inv. 65.14; Chappuis, ibid., Vol.I, p.213, no.879 bis, Vol.II, pl.879 bis.

9.

Georges Rivière, Le maître Paul Cézanne, Paris, 1923, p.120; Quoted in translation in Matthew Simms, Cézanne’s Watercolors: Between Drawing and Painting, New Haven and London, 2008, p.82.

10. Quoted in translation in Theodore Reff, ‘Cézanne’s Watercolors and Modern Taste’, in New York, M. Knoedler and Company, Cézanne Watercolors, exhibition catalogue, 1963, p.18.

No.26 Edgar Degas 1.

At the third Degas studio sale in April 1919, the present sheet was framed together with a charcoal drawing of a maid combing a woman’s hair. The two drawings sold for 1,750 francs.

2.

Reed and Shapiro, op.cit., pp.220-252, nos.61-66.

3.

‘Je compte faire une suite de lithographies, une première série des nus de femmes à leur toilette et une deuxième sur des nus de danse.’; Quoted in translation in Jean Sutherland Boggs et al, Degas, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Ottawa and New York, 1988-1989, p.499.

4.

Ronald Pickvance, Degas, exhibition catalogue, Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, 1993, p.152.

5.

Richard Brettell, in Richard R. Brettell and Suzanne Folds McCullagh, Degas in the Art Institute of Chicago, New York, 1984, p.170.

6.

Pickvance, op.cit., pp.151-152.

7.

Reed and Shapiro, op.cit., pp.241-243, no.65.

8.

Reed and Shapiro, op.cit., p.241, under no.65. Both states of the lithograph of After the Bath III (Après le bain III) are illustrated in Reed and Shapiro, op.cit., pp.241-243, no.65 and Jane Kinsman and Michael Pantazzi, Degas: The Uncontested Master, exhibition catalogue, Canberra, 2008-2009, pp.224-225, nos.114-115.

9.

A composite photograph of twenty-two drawings by Degas related to the 1891-1892 lithographs are illustrated in Druick and Zegers, op.cit., p.lxvi, fig.43.

10. Inv. 1925,0314.1; Reed and Shapiro, op.cit., pp.244-245, no.66a; Richard Thomson, The Private Degas, exhibition catalogue, London, 1987, p.126, no.87, fig.173.

11. Reed and Shapiro, op.cit., pp.245-246, no.66b; Boggs et al, op.cit., p.500, fig.286, under no.295.

12. Inv. 61.101.18; Boggs et al, op.cit., pp.501-502, no.297.

13. George T. M. Shackelford and Xavier Rey, Degas and the Nude, exhibition catalogue, Boston and Paris, 2011-2012, p.173.

14. Druick and Zegers, op.cit., p.lxix.

15. One of the leading caricaturists and illustrators active in the first half of the 20th century in Germany, Karl Arnold (1883-1953) was closely associated with the satirical magazine Simplicissimus for much of his career. Arnold’s graphic work began to be recognized again in the 1970s, with a retrospective of his drawings and caricatures held in Berlin and elsewhere in 1975, and an exhibition dedicated to Simplicissimus at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 1977.

No.27 Paul Gauguin 1.

Paul Gauguin, Avant et après, MS, 1903; translated in Belinda Thomson, ed., Gauguin by Himself, London, 1993, p.279.

2.

Jean Leymarie, ed., Paul Gauguin: Water-colours, pastels and drawing in colour, London, 1961, p.7.

3.

Marjorie Shelley, ‘Gauguin’s Works on Paper: Observations on Materials and Techniques’, in Colta Ives et al., The Lure of the Exotic: Gauguin in New York Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2002, p.199.

4.

In a letter of February 1888 from Pont-Aven; Quoted in translation in Thomson, op.cit., p.84.

5.

In a letter of October 1889 from Le Pouldu; Quoted in translation in Thomson, op.cit., p.106.

6.

Pickvance, op.cit., 1970, p.39, under pl.97.

7.

Inv. RF 1973-17; Georges Wildenstein, Gauguin, Paris, 1964, p.213, no.521; Michel Hoog, Paul Gauguin: Life and Work, London, 1987, p.223, pl.155; Françoise Cachin, Gauguin, Paris, 1990, p.206, fig.255; Thomson, op.cit., p.242, pl.199.

8.

Inv. 2004-3-1; John Rewald, Gauguin, London and Toronto, 1939, illustrated p.85; Pickvance, op.cit., 1970, pl.25; René Huyghe, Gauguin, Naefels, 1988, illustrated p.40; Paris, Musée du Luxembourg and Quimper, Musée des Beaux-Arts, L’Aventure de Pont-Aven et Gauguin, exhibition catalogue, 2003, pp.316-317, no.118; Catherine Puget, ‘Un pastel de Gauguin acquis par le musée de Pont-Aven: Deux têtes de Bretonnes’, Revue du Louvre, June 2004, p.17; Le Nouveau Musée de Pont-Aven: Un écrin pour Gauguin et l’École de Pont-Aven [L’Objet d’Art, hors-série], 2016, p.30, illustrated p.30 and on the cover.

9.

In a letter of October 1889 from Le Pouldu; Quoted in translation in Thomson, op.cit., p.106.

10. Caroline Boyle-Turner, Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven: Prints and Paintings, exhibition catalogue, London and Edinburgh, 1989-1990, p.102, nos. S.2a and S.2b. The print was published in 1895. The model for this etching may possibly be identified as the Breton woman Marie Louarn (see notes 11 and 12 below).

11. Daniel Wildenstein et al, Gauguin: A Savage in the Making. Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings (1873-1888), Paris and Milan, 2002, Vol.II, pp.408-411, no.293. The painting appeared at auction in New York in 1992.

12. Marie Louarn (or Louarin) is said to have become a prostitute by 1892, two years before the date of this watercolour, although she may also have posed for the 1892 etching by Seguin noted above (see note 10). Another possible model for the present sheet is a Breton woman who had posed for a small painting by Gauguin six years earlier, in 1888; a Portrait, Presumed to be Marie Lagadu (Wildenstein, op.cit., Vol.II, pp.402-403, no.290), for which a preparatory drawing is in the Art Institute of Chicago (Inv. 1955.1023R; John Rewald, Gauguin Drawings, New York and London, 1958, p.24. no.8. pl.8; Wildenstein et al, op,cit., p.402, under no.290). Marie Lagadu (Marie ‘Black Eyes’) is thought to have been a serving girl at the pension Gloanec in Pont-Aven, where Gauguin stayed in 1894.

13. Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, exhibition catalogue, Chicago and Amsterdam, 2001-2002, p.199, figs.56-57; Nathalie Strasser, ed., De Raphaël à Gauguin: Trésors de la collection Jean Bonna, exhibition catalogue, Lausanne, 2015, p.239, no.145, pl.145.

No.28 Georges Lacombe 1.

In the ‘Liste des albums de dessins’ included in her 1998 Lacombe catalogue raisonné, Joëlle Ansieau notes that the present sheet was once part of a now-unbound sketchbook of studies of Breton subjects by Lacombe in the Louvre. The Louvre sketchbook was originally made up of 33 sheets of blue paper of the same size as the present sheet. Several sheets, including the present drawing, were removed from

this sketchbook sometime after 1965, when Ansieau had catalogued them. The remainder of the sketchbook was acquired by the museum in 1983.

2.

Bernard Dorival, ‘Exhibition of the Drawings of Georges Lacombe: Preface to the Catalog’, in Downing, op.cit., unpaginated.

3.

Gilles Genty, ‘Symbolismes’, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Musée départemental Maurice Denis, and Versailles, Musée Lambinet, Les Univers de Georges Lacombe 1868-1916, exhibition catalogue, 2012-2013, p.110, fig.99.

4.

Inv. 88.10.1; Ansieau, op.cit., no.37; Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Versailles, ibid., p.178, no.137. Two preliminary chalk studies for this portrait, in which the sitter faces to the left, are in the Musée Lambinet in Versailles and a private collection (Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Versailles, ibid., p.182, nos.141-142).

5.

One of these, showing Piriou resting against the mast of a boat, is illustrated in Blandine Salmon and Olivier Meslay, Georges Lacombe: Sculptures – Peintures – Dessins, Paris, 1991, p.148, no.267.

6.

Inv. RF 39022; Ansieau, op.cit., p.203, Album VIII.

No.29 Claude-Émile Schuffenecker 1.

Schuffenecker’s studio stamp, which he designed in 1890, represents a stylized lotus flower, flanked with tendrils made up of the artist’s initials E and S.

2.

Jill Grossvogel, ‘Margin & Image’, in Jill Grossvogel, Claude-Emile Schuffenecker, exhibition catalogue, Binghamton and New York, 19801981, p.19.

3.

Ibid., p.19.

4.

Jan Würtz Frandsen, Drawn Toward the Avant-Garde: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century French Drawings from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, exhibition catalogue, 2002, p.130, under no.38.

5.

Inv. T3640, T3641 and T3642.

6.

Inv. H.M. 1976-369 (Tu 35h, 4) and H.M. 1976-366 (Tu 35h, 1); Frandsen, op.cit., pp.128-131, nos.37-38.

7.

René Porro, Claude-Emile Schuffenecker: Une oeuvre melodieuse, Combeaufontaine, 1992, pp.172-173, figs.145-147 and p.199, figs.223224, and in Pont-Aven, Musée de Pont-Aven and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Musée Départemental Maurice Denis ‘Le Prieuré’, Emile Schuffenecker 1851-1934, exhibition catalogue, 1996-1997, pp.72-74, nos.49-51 and p.79, no.57.

No.31 Maxime Maufra 1.

Caroline Boyle-Turner, Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven: Prints and Paintings, exhibition catalogue, London and Edinburgh, 1989-1990, p.162.

2.

Quoted in translation in London, Gimpel Fils, Maxime Maufra (1861-1918): A Marine & Landscape Painter, exhibition catalogue, 1951, unpaginated.

Nos.32-33 Henri Edmond Cross 1.

The scholar and critic Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), a devotee of the Neo-Impressionist artists, owned a large number of paintings and watercolours by Cross. In 1907 he organized a retrospective exhibition of Cross’s work at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, of which he was a director, and following the artist’s death three years later assisted Cross’s widow and Signac with making a proper inventory of the artist’s studio.

2.

Born Henri Edmond Delacroix, early in his career he changed his surname to Cross, an Anglicized version of croix, to avoid comparisons with the famous Romantic painter and confusion with a contemporary artist named Henri Eugène Delacroix.

3.

Quoted in translation in Patrick Offenstadt, ‘Cross aquarelliste / Cross the watercolourist’, in Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Cross et la néo-impressionisme: De Seurat à Matisse / Cross and Neo-Impressionism: From Seurat to Matisse, exhibition catalogue, p.192.

4.

Ibid., p.191.

5.

‘Chez Cross, la naissance de l’oeuvre part du moment où un spectacle ou une forme retiennent son attention, où il éprouve le besoin d’en fixer, ne serait-ce qu’en quelques traits hâtifs, l’aspect qui l’a frappé. Ainsi, ses croquis nous mènent justement à la source de son art et nous révèlent l’homme devant la nature sans pose aucune, puisqu’il l’approche ici sans intention définie. C’est à ce titre que les pages de ce petit carnet sont précieuses, ces notations plus ou moins fugitives, d’un caractère intime, où l’artiste semble saisir le reflet de rencontres fortuites.’; John Rewald, in Paris, Berggruen & Cie., Henri-Edmond Cross: Carnet de dessins, 1959, unpaginated.

6.

‘Si je dessine un peu au hasard dans un rectangle de papier, cherchant une harmonie de valeurs sans préoccupation de formes, il peut se faire que l’imprévu donne naissance à des formes que par mon savoir je peux définir. L’imprévu aura joué son rôle élevé et mon petit savoir fixera les formes de mon rêve.’; quoted in Rewald, in Paris, Berggruen & Cie., ibid., unpaginated.

No.34 Herbert James Draper 1.

Anonymous sale (‘The property of a gentleman’), London, Knightsbridge, Bonhams and Brooks, 6 December 2000, lot 96; Toll, op.cit., pp.157-159, illustrated in colour p.47, pl.49.

2.

Toll, op.cit., pp.157-158.

3.

The sketch on the verso, which is inscribed Ruth T, may have been drawn by Torr of Draper himself, who is known to have given drawing lessons to some of his models. As Simon Toll has noted, ‘Ruth had a talent for drawing and was encouraged by Draper to sketch. On the back of a drawing for ‘Halcyone’, Ruth began a sketch of Draper painting. Although she only got as far as Herbert’s upper legs, part of his jacket and palette, the way in which she sketched the shadows suggests that she had learned a great deal from Draper’s informal tuition.’ (Toll, op.cit., p.159).

4.

London, Julian Hartnoll, A Third and final Catalogue of Drawings by Herbert Draper (1864-1920), 2003, nos.36-38. One of these is also illustrated in Toll, op.cit., p.157, fig.111.

5.

Black and white chalk on grey paper, measuring 10 1/2 x 20 in. The drawing, once with Christopher Wood, was on consignment with the Maas Gallery in London in 2011.

No.35 S. J. Peploe 1.

The Yorkshire collector Wyndham Vint assembled a large and varied group of paintings and drawings by British artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Vint also owned a painted portrait of Peggy Macrae by Peploe, formerly with Peter Nahum in London and now in a private collection.

2.

Guy Peploe, S. J. Peploe, Farnham, 2012, p.23.

3.

Stanley Cursiter, Peploe: An intimate memoir of an artist and of his work, Edinburgh and elsewhere, 1947, p.17.

4.

Peploe, op.cit., p.56. Peggy Macrae eventually married and settled in California.

5.

Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, S. J. Peploe 1871-1935, exhibition catalogue, 1985, p.53, no.152 (where dated 1908, and entitled Sketch of a Woman). The drawing measures 276 x 184 mm.

6.

Peploe, op.cit., illustrated p.63, fig.72; Alice Strang, Elizabeth Cumming and Frances Fowle, S. J. Peploe, exhibition catalogue, Edinburgh, 2012-2013, illustrated p.60, pl.53 (lent from the Ellis Campbell Collection).

No.36 Odilon Redon 1.

The first owner of this watercolour was the Belgian violinist and composer Armand Parent (1863-1934). Parent was among a small group of early collectors of Redon’s work, and eventually came to own around twenty pastels, charcoal drawings and watercolours by the artist.

In 1900 Redon drew a portrait of Parent in red chalk, which he dedicated to the sitter several years later, in 1913. Parent’s collection, which also included works by André Derain, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Rouault and Edouard Vuillard, among others, was dispersed between 1920 and 1950. The drawing then entered the collection of the American architect John A. Holabird (1886-1945) in the 1920s.

2.

Ann H. Sievers, Linda Muehlig and Nancy Rich, Master Drawings from the Smith College Museum of Art, New York, 2000, p.207, under no.52.

3.

Roseline Bacou, Musée du Louvre: La donation Arï et Suzanne Redon, Paris, 1984, p.56, no.87, illustrated in colour before p.1.

4.

Similar heads are found, for example, a 1916 oil painting of the Virgin in the Musée d’Orsay, on deposit at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux (Inv. RF 1984-62; Rapetti, ed., op.cit., pp.422-423, no.180), and in such drawings as a Tête Mystique on the art market in London in 1963 (with Reid Gallery, London, in June 1963; ‘Notable Works of Art Now in the Market’, op.cit., unpaginated, pl.XIV) and a noir drawing of a Head Wearing a Phrygian Cap, on a Salver of 1881 in the Art Institute of Chicago (Inv. 1950.1416; Alec Wildenstein, Odilon Redon: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint et dessiné. Vol.II, Mythes et légendes, Paris, 1994, p.207, no.1145).

5.

Inv. RF 40528; Rapetti, ed., op.cit., pp.352-353, no.137 (where dated c.1905-1914).

6.

Inv. PPD0122, 01224, 01225, 01226, 01229, 01230, 01231 and 02029; Rodolphe Rapetti, ed., op.cit., pp.394-403, nos.162-169 (where dated c.1910-1914).

No.37 Pablo Picasso 1.

Brigitte Leal, ‘The Sketchbooks from the Rose Period’, in Rivero et al., op.cit., p.97.

2.

A comprehensive list of Picasso’s known sketchbooks is included in Glimcher and Glimcher, ed., op.cit., pp.303-347.

3.

The various pages of Carnet 24 are illustrated in their entirety in Glimcher and Glimcher, ed., op.cit., pp.20-50; Rivero et al, op.cit., pp.184-189, no.50, and The Picasso Project, op.cit., pp.130-137, nos.1905-472 to 1905-501.

4.

On pp.23-27 of the sketchbook; Glimcher and Glimcher, ed., op.cit., illustrated pp.36-38.

5.

Brigitte Leal, ‘The Sketchbooks from the Rose Period’, in Rivero et al., op.cit., p.101.

6.

Rylands, ed., op.cit., p.298, under no.142.

7.

Pierre Daix and Georges Boudaille, Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1900-1906, Neuchâtel, 1966, p.258, no.XII.6; Rivero et al, op.cit., pp.157-159, no.35 and illustrated on the cover; Carsten-Peter Warncke and Ingo F. Walther, Pablo Picasso 1881-1973, Vol.I, Cologne, 2007, illustrated p.130; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.58, no.1905-203.

8.

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso. Vol. XXII: Supplément aux années 1903-1906, Paris, 1970, p.66, pls.189 (inscribed ‘la Lola’) and 190 Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso: the Early Years, 1881-1907, Barcelona, 1985, p.420, nos.1142 (‘la Lola’) and 1143; Jean Clair, ed., Picasso Érotique, exhibition catalogue, Paris and elsewhere, 2001, p.187, nos.50 and 51 (‘la Lola’); The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.66, nos.1905229 (‘la Lola’) and 1905-230.

9.

Claude Picasso, ‘Foreword’, in Glimcher and Glimcher, ed., op.cit., pp.4-5.

No.38 Amedeo Modigliani 1.

One friend, Charles Douglas, recalled that ‘One evening, after dinner at my studio, Modi, who was full of drink and drugs, suddenly took it in his head that he wanted to draw me. He did so, producing his usual purity of line with a hand that was as steady as a machine. The sketch finished, he just toppled over and passed out.’

2.

Russoli, op.cit., p.XIII.

3.

Between 1908 and the early months of 1914. Alexandre also commissioned Modigliani to paint portraits of his father and brother, while he himself posed for three portraits in 1909.

4.

Paul Alexandre to Giovanni Scheiwiller, 2 May 1954; Quoted in translation in Noël Alexandre, The Unknown Modigliani: Drawings from the Collection of Paul Alexandre, exhibition catalogue, London, 1994, p.15.

5.

Inv. 1976.65; Lanthemann, op.cit., p.143, no.636, illustrated p.317, fig.636; Patani, op.cit., pp.65-66, no.25; Ron Radford, ed., National Gallery of Australia, Canberra: Collection Highlights, Canberra, 2014, p.294. The sculpture measures 162.8 x 33.2 x 29.6 cm.

6.

Radford, ed., ibid., p.294.

7.

Ceroni, op.cit., p.32, no.95, pl.95; Lanthemann, op.cit., p.138, no.482, illustrated p.287, fig.482; Parisot, op.cit., p.243, no.45/10; Patani, op.cit., p.93, no.63.

8.

Alexandre, op.cit., no.79, illustrated p.221, fig.143; Osvaldo Patani, Amedeo Modigliani: Catalogo generale. Disegni 1906-1920, con i disegni provenienti dalla collezione Paul Alexandre (1906-1914), Milan, 1994, p.389, no.926 (where dated 1912-1913).

9.

Alexandre, op.cit., nos.69-71, 76-78 and 80, illustrated pp.220-225, figs.142-149. Among a handful of other works that may be regarded as studies for the Standing Nude sculpture is a large oil sketch of the figure seen from the front, formerly in the Alexandre collection and today in the Nagoya City Art Museum in Japan (Ambrogio Ceroni, Amedeo Modigliani peintre, Milan, 1958, p.44, no.26, pl.26; Werner Schmalenbach, Amedeo Modigliani: Paintings Sculptures Drawings, Munich, 1990, pl.17; Rudy Chiappini, ed., Amedeo Modigliani, exhibition catalogue, Lugano, 1999, p.184, no.7, illustrated p.40). A smaller oil sketch by Modigliani of the same figure was also in the Alexandre collection (Ceroni, op.cit., 1958, p.44, no.25, pl.25).

10. Anna Akhmatova, My Half-Century: Selected Prose, Ann Arbor, 1992; quoted in Jeffrey Meyers, Modigliani: A Life, London, 2006, pp.88 and 91.

11. Meyers, ibid., p.94.

12. Alexandre, op.cit., pp.59 and 65.

No.39 Jan Toorop 1.

Anneke E. Wijnbeek, ‘Jan [Johannes] (Theodorus) Toorop’, in Jane Turner, ed., The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, Vol.31, p.147.

2.

Inv. T-470 OB; Miek Janssen, Jan Toorop, Amsterdam, n.d. (c.1915), facing page 21; The Hague, Haags Gemeentemuseum, Jan Toorop, exhibition catalogue, 1989, p.138, no.117; Peter van der Coelen and Karin van Lieverloo, Jan Toorop Portrettist, exhibition catalogue, Nijmegen, Museum Het Valkhof, 2003, p.93, no.22A. The drawing is dated 1914. A chalk and metalpoint drawing of Janssen by Toorop is in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (Inv. RP-T-00-0481).

3.

Inv. A2339; Harry J. Kraaij, ‘Jan Toorop. Het Late Symbolisme’, in Harry J. Kraaij and William Rothuizen, Jan Toorop (1858-1928): Het Late Symbolisme, exhibition catalogue, Katwijk aan Zee, 2001-2002, illustrated p.X; van der Coelen and van Lieverloo, op.cit., pp.93-94, no.22B.

No.40 Gustav Klimt 1.

Inv. 3; Fritz Novotny and Johannes Dobai, Gustav Klimt, with a Catalogue Raisonné of His Paintings, London, 1968, p.371, no.212 (where dated 1917-1918); Johannes Dobai and Sergio Coradeschi, L’opera completa di Klimt, Milan, 1978, pp.109-110, no.198; Strobl, op.cit., illustrated p.140; Tobias G. Natter and Gilbert Frodl, ed., Klimt’s Women, exhibition catalogue, Vienna, 2000-2001, pp.144-145; Colin B. Bailey, ed., Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa, 2001, pp.140-141, no.36 (entry by John Collins); Alfred Weidinger, ed., Gustav Klimt, Munich, London and New York, 2007, p.307, no.249; Tobias G. Natter, ed., Gustav Klimt: The Complete Paintings, Cologne, 2012, p.639, no.239, illustrated p.256. The painting measures 67 x 56 cm.

2.

Collins in Bailey, op.cit., p.141, under no.36. As the same writer has also noted of the painting, ‘Like many of the paintings begun in the last year of Klimt’s life...the Linz Portrait of a Woman is unfinished, yet appreciated as an autonomous work of art today...Indeed, [it] is sufficiently realized to reflect a move by Klimt toward expressive freedom in his late portrait painting, perhaps influenced by the younger artist Egon Schiele.’ (Collins in Bailey, op.cit., p.141, under no.36).

3.

Several scholars have noted a similarity to the working process of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and a correspondence to Lautrec’s paintings in visual effect.

4.

Inv. 29544; Strobl, op.cit., pp.140-141, no.2666a.

5.

Strobl, op.cit., pp.140-141, no.2665; Renée Price, ed., Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2007-2008, no.D122, illustrated p.352; Vienna, Wienerroither & Kohlbacher, Gustav Klimt: Drawings / Zeichnungen, Vienna, 2012, unpaginated, no.31 (entry by Maria Bisanz-Prakken).

6.

Strobl, op.cit., pp.140-141, nos.2664 and 2666, and Alice Strobl, Gustav Klimt: Die Zeichnungen. Vol.III: Nachtrag 1878-1918, Salzburg, 1989, pp.196-197, nos.3705 and 3705a; the last of these, formerly with Fischer Fine Art in London, is quite close to the present sheet.

7.

Collins in Bailey, op.cit., p.141, under no.36.

No.41 Pablo Picasso 1.

Michael C. Fitzgerald, ‘The Modernists’ Dilemma: Neoclassicism and the Portrayal of Olga Khokhlova’, in William Rubin, ed., Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, exhibition catalogue, New York and Paris, 1996-1997, pp.297 and 299.

2.

Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning, London and New York, 2002, p.321.

3.

John Richardson, A Life of Picasso. Volume II. 1907-1917: The Painter of Modern Life, London, 1996, p.432.

4.

Douglas Cooper, Picasso Theatre, London, 1968, pp.31-32.

5.

Inv. MP 1990-103; Zervos, op.cit., p.14, pl.39; Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso: From the Ballets to Drama (1917-1926), Cologne, 1999, p.68, no.162; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.58, no.17-199; Brigitte Léal, Musée Picasso. Carnets: catalogue des dessins, Vol.I, Paris, 1996, p.281, no.8 Ro.

6.

Giovanni Carandente, Picasso: Opere dal 1895 al 1971 dalla Collezione Marina Picasso, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1981, illustrated p.258, no.135; Palau i Fabre, op.cit., p.69, no.164; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.59, no.17-200; John Richardson, A Life of Picasso. Volume III. The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, London, 2007, illustrated p.58.

7.

Inv. MP 942; Michèle Richet, The Musée Picasso, Paris. Catalogue of the Collections, Vol.II: Drawings, Watercolours, Gouaches, Pastels, London, 1988, p.256, no.812; The Picasso Project, Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated Catalogue 1885-1973. Neoclassicism I – 1920-1921, San Francisco, 1995, p.133, no.20-430; Palau i Fabre, op.cit., p.233, no.859.

8.

Richardson, op.cit,, 2007, p.91.

9.

Richardson, op.cit,, 2007, p.60.

No.42 Henry Scott Tuke 1.

Catherine Wallace, Catching the Light: The Art and Life of Henry Scott Tuke 1858-1929, exhibition catalogue, Falmouth and elsewhere, 2008, pp.104 and 91.

2.

Anonymous sale, London, Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions, 24 July 2014, lot 139. The watercolour measured 135 x 205 mm.

3.

Inv. A242; Wallace, op.cit., p.63, fig.51. Also stylistically comparable is a watercolour view of a sunrise with shipping, signed and dated 1916 and formerly in the collection of Henry Smolden, which appeared at auction in 2000 (Anonymous sale, London, Phillips, 21 November 2000, lot 4).

No.43 Alethea Garstin 1.

Patrick Heron, ‘Introduction’, in St. Ives, Penwith Society of Art, and elsewhere, Norman and Alethea Garstin: Two Impressionists – Father and Daughter, exhibition catalogue, 1978, p.6.

2.

Anonymous sale, Penzance, David Lay Auctions, 31 July 2014, lot 206. The painting measures 79 x 60 cm.

3.

Another painting by Garstin of the same period is The Reverend Charles Francis Benthall on Holiday in Morocco, owned by the National Trust and on view at Benthall Hall in Shropshire (Inv. 509822; The Public Catalogue Foundation, Oil Paintings in National Trust Properties in National Trust II: The Midlands, London, 2013, illustrated p.189).

No.44 Pierre Bonnard 1.

Antoine Terrasse, ‘Bonnard’s Notes’, in Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late, exhibition catalogue, Washington and Denver, 2002-2003, p.246

2.

Quoted in Frances Mann, ‘Bonnard’s Drawing Materials’, in London, J.P.L. Fine Arts, Pierre Bonnard: Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1987, p.9.

3.

Raymond Cogniat, Bonnard, New York, 1979, pp.68-77.

4.

Nicholas Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, pp.139-140.

No.45 Pierre Bonnard 1.

Emily Braun et al., New York Collects: Drawings and Watercolors 1900-1950, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1999, p.36, under no.3.

2.

Ingrid Rydbeck, ‘Hos Bonnard i Deauville’, Konstrevy, 1937; Quoted in translation in Antoine Terrasse, Bonnard: The Colour of Daily Life, London, 2000, p.124.

No.46 Edouard Vuillard 1.

Claude Roger-Marx, Vuillard: His Life and Work, New York, 1946, p.185.

2.

Salomon and Cogeval, op.cit., Vol.III, p.1305, under No.XI-13.

3.

Belinda Thomson, Vuillard, Oxford, 1988, p.123.

4.

Salomon and Cogeval, op.cit., Vol.III, p.1245, under no.X-146. The quotation is taken from a letter from Annette Roussel to Vuillard dated 6 March 1916.

5.

Kimberly Jones in Guy Cogeval, Édouard Vuillard, exhibition catalogue, Washington and elsewhere, 2003-2004, p.131.

No.47 Edouard Vuillard 1.

Richard Brettell in Richard R. Brettell et al., The Robert Lehman Collection, Vol.IX: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century European Drawings, New York, 2002, p.298.

2.

Jacques Salomon, Auprès de Vuillard, Paris, 1953; quoted in translation in Elizabeth Easton, ‘The Nabis and Symbolists’, in Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Andrew Robison, ed., Color, Line, Light: French Drawings, Watercolors, and Pastels from Delacroix to Signac, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 2012-2013, pp.100-101.

3.

Belinda Thomson, ‘Vuillard as a Draughtsman’, in London, Wolseley Fine Arts, Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940): Pastels and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 2003, p.7.

4.

We are grateful to Mathias Chivot, who dates the present sheet to c.1921-1924, for this suggestion. Jos (Joseph) Hessel was the artist’s principal agent and dealer for the latter part of his career, while his wife Lucy was to be Vuillard’s muse, model and lover for almost forty years.

5.

Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Vuillard: The Inexhaustible Glance. Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, Milan, 2003, Vol.III, pp.1336-1337, Nos.XI-80 and XI-81 (where dated c.1921-1925).

No.48 Henri Le Sidaner 1.

Farinaux-Le Sidaner, op.cit., p.266, no.730; Josette Galiègue et al, Henri Le Sidaner en son jardin de Gerberoy 1901-1939, exhibition catalogue, Beauvais and Douai, 2001-2003, p.90, no.34; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 9 May 2007, lot 183 (sold for $384,000).

The painting is signed and measures 81 x 100 cm. Another, slightly smaller painting of the house, from a similar viewpoint, was on the art market in London in 2000 (Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 25 October 2000, lot 20).

2.

Quoted in translation in Farinaux-Le Sidaner, op.cit., p.31.

3.

Inv. D.47.10; Farinaux-Le Sidaner, op.cit., no.1222; Galiègue et al, op.cit., p.40, fig.2.

4.

Farinaux-Le Sidaner, op.cit., no.1242; Galiègue et al, op.cit., p.43, fig.6.

No.49 Paul Signac 1.

Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, ‘Neo-Impressionist Drawings’, in Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Andrew Robison, ed., Color, Line, Light: French Drawings, Watercolors, and Pastels from Delacroix to Signac, exhibition catalogue, Washington, 2012-2013, p.133.

2.

Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, ‘Signac: Drawings and Watercolors’, in Marina Ferretti Bocquillon et al, Signac 1863-1935, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Amsterdam and New York, 2001, pp.25-26.

3.

‘Chronology’, in Ferretti Bocquillon et al, op,cit., 2001, p.322.

4.

A small late sketchbook by Signac in the Louvre (Inv. RF 50857) contains a number of rapid pencil and watercolour sketches of coastal towns in Corsica, including views of Calvi, Saint-Florent and L’Île-Rousse.

5.

Ferretti Bocquillon, op,cit., 2001, p.32. The artist painted no finished canvases of any Corsican views.

No.50 Pierre Bonnard 1.

Quoted in translation in Antoine Terrasse, ‘Bonnard the Draughtsman’, in Arts Council of Great Britain, Drawings by Bonnard, exhibition catalogue, Nottingham and elsewhere, 1984-1985, p.6.

2.

Sasha M. Newman, ed., Bonnard: The Late Paintings, exhibition catalogue, Washington and elsewhere, 1984, p.114, under no.4.

3.

‘Ces intimités de Bonnard, ces jeunes femmes qui rêvent, se coiffent, se dévêtent, ces couseuses, ces liseuses, ces baigneuses au torse gracile et aux cuisses roses, elles sont toutes imprégnées de tendresse, d’optimisme et disons le mot, de poésie.’; Maurice Denis, ‘Pierre Bonnard’, Le Point: revue artistique et littéraire [a special issue devoted to Bonnard], 24 January 1943.

4.

Inv. AVMP 2520; Jean and Henry Dauberville, Bonnard: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint. Vol.III: 1920-1939, Paris, 1973, pp.436-437, no.1558; Newman, ed., op.cit., pp.212-213, no.53; Nicholas Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, illustrated pp.194-195, pl.148; Whitfield, op.cit., pp.202-203, no.75; Guy Cogeval and Isabelle Cahn, Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia, exhibition catalogue, Paris and elsewhere, 2015-2016, p.176, fig.121.

5.

Newman, ed., op.cit., p.212, under no.53.

6.

Dauberville, op.cit., pp.442-443, no.1566; Whitfield, op.cit., pp.212-213, no.80; Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late, exhibition catalogue, Washington and Denver, 2002-2003, p.232, pl.123; Cogeval and Cahn, op.cit., p.177, fig.122.

7.

Inv. NO4495; Dauberville, op.cit., p.271, no.1334; Whitfield, op.cit., pp.148-149, no.48; Turner, ibid., p.217, pl.109; Cogeval and Cahn, op.cit., p.174, fig.119.

8.

Inv. 70.50; Jean and Henry Dauberville, Bonnard: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint. Vol.IV: 1940-1947 et Supplément 1887-1939, Paris, 1974, pp.103-105, no.1687; Newman, ed., op.cit., pp.238-239, no.66; Whitfield, op.cit., pp.240-241, no.94; Turner, ibid., p.235, pl.127; Guy Cogeval and Cahn, op.cit., pp.160-161, no.110.

9.

Braun et al., op.cit., pp.38-39, no.4. The drawing, which measures 127 x 165 mm., was in the collection of Charlotte and Duncan MacGuigan in 1999.

10. Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, ‘Brushstrokes Straight to the Heart: Bonnard’s Nudes’, in Cogeval and Cahn, op.cit., p.162.

11. Ingrid Rydbeck, ‘Hos Bonnard i Deauville’, Konstrevy, 1937, pp.119-123; Quoted in translation in Newman, ed., op.cit., p.212, under no.53.

No.51 Charles Mahoney 1.

Elizabeth Bulkeley, ‘Charles Mahoney 1903-1968’, in Preston, Harris Museum & Art Gallery, and elsewhere, Charles Mahoney 1903-1968, exhibition catalogue, 1999-2000, p.14.

2.

Bernard Dunstan, ‘Colleague, Draughtsman and Friend’, in Preston, Harris Museum & Art Gallery, op.cit., p.22.

3.

Ibid., p.23.

4.

‘Appendix II: Sir Thomas Monnington’s Address at the Memorial Service for Charles Mahoney, St. James’s, Piccadilly, 18 June 1968’, in Preston, Harris Museum & Art Gallery, op.cit., p.71.

No.52 Henry Moore 1.

Causey, op.cit., p.7.

2.

Causey, op.cit., pp.7-9.

3.

Quoted in Alan Wilkinson, ‘Drawings for Sculpture’, in Basel, Galerie Beyeler, op.cit., 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.

Causey, op.cit., p.10.

6.

Causey, op.cit., p.91.

7.

Causey, op.cit., p.91.

8.

Garrould, op.cit., pp.190-191, no.AG 37.45 (HMF 1315); Causey, op.cit., illustrated p.92, pl.80.

9.

Garrould, op.cit., p.191, no.AG 37.47 (HMF 1319); Christa Lichtenstern, Henry Moore: Work – Theory – Impact, London, 2008, illustrated p.93, fig.117; Chris Stephens, ed., Henry Moore, exhibition catalogue, London and elsewhere, 2010, no.78, illustrated p.151; Causey, op.cit., illustrated p.92, pl.80. The drawing is executed in charcoal, pastel and crayon.

10. Garrould, op.cit., pp.210-211, no.AG 38.47 (HMF 1381), as in a private collection; Lichtenstern, op.cit., illustrated p.133, fig.157, as in the Henry Moore Foundation.

11. Alan Wilkinson, ‘Henry Moore. Vol.I, Complete Drawings 1916-29’ [book review], The Burlington Magazine, January 1999, p.44.

12. Causey, op.cit., p.91.

13. Garrould, op.cit., p.194, under no.AG 37.62.

14. Quoted in Alan Wilkinson, ‘Drawings for Sculpture’, in Basel, Galerie Beyeler, op.cit., unpaginated.

No.53 Henry Moore 1.

David Sylvester, ed., Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture. Vol.1: Sculpture 1921-48, 5th ed., London, 1988, p.14, no.226, illustrated pp.139142; Christa Lichtenstern, Henry Moore: Work – Theory – Impact, London, 2008, illustrated p.165, fig.203.

2.

Garrould, ed., op.cit., pp.190-195, nos.AG 43.79 (HMF 1771) to AG 43.104 (HMF 2186).

3.

Hussey had also commissioned a cantata from Benjamin Britten and a painting of the Crucifixion from Graham Sutherland.

4.

Moore’s letters to Hussey are quoted in Walter Hussey, Patron of Art: The Revival of a Great Tradition Among Modern Artists, London, 1985, pp.26-28.

5.

Henry Moore, in Church of S. Matthew, Northampton, 1893-1943, Northampton, 1943; quoted in Alan Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Aldershot, 2002, pp.267-268.

6.

Sylvester, ed., op.cit., pp.12-13, nos.215-225. Eleven of these are illustrated on p.138.

7.

Lichtenstern, op.cit., p.162.

No.54 Pablo Picasso 1.

Carsten-Peter Warncke and Ingo F. Walther, Pablo Picasso 1881-1973, Vol.II, Cologne, 2007, p.441.

2.

Anker and Deuchler, op.cit., pp.24-25, illustrated p.25; Geneva, Galerie Jan Krugier, op.cit., unpaginated, nos.106-107; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.337, nos.44-016d and 44-016e. The Ludwig drawing is also illustrated in Evelyn Weiss and Maria Teresa Ocaña, ed., Picasso: The Ludwig Collection, exhibition catalogue, Barcelona and elsewhere, 1992-1993, unpaginated, no.53. Both drawings measure 300 x 400 mm., and come from the same sketchbook as the present sheet.

3.

Inv. MP 1238; Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso. Vol. XIII: Oeuvres de 1943 et 1944, Paris, 1962, p.114, pl.231; Michèle Richet, The Musée Picasso, Paris. Catalogue of the Collections, Vol.II: Drawings, Watercolours, Gouaches, Pastels, London, 1988, p.377, no.1215; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.336, no.44-016. Drawn in black ink on brown paper, the drawing measures 325 x 253 mm.

4.

Weiss and Ocaña, ed., op.cit., unpaginated, under no.53.

5.

Anker and Deuchler, op.cit., pp.22-23, illustrated in colour p.23; Basel, Kunstmuseum, Picasso aus dem Museum of Modern Art New York und Schweizer Sammlungen, exhibition catalogue, 1976, pp.148-149, no.75; Geneva, Galerie Jan Krugier, op.cit., unpaginated, no.16, illustrated in colour; Weiss and Ocaña, ed., op.cit., unpaginated, no.52; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.336, no.44-016a.

6.

Stanley J. Seeger sale (‘The Stanley J. Seeger Collection of Works by Picasso’), New York, Sotheby’s, 4 November 1993, lot 458; Werner Spies, Picasso’s World of Children, Munich and New York, 1994, illustrated p.91; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.337, no.44-016f. The drawing, executed in a combination of pen, ink, watercolour and gouache, also once belonged to Marie-Thérèse Walter.

7.

Geneva, Galerie Jan Krugier, op.cit., unpaginated, no.11; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.287, no.43-254a.

8.

Zervos, op.cit., pp.7-8, pls.16-18 and pl.20 (dated 31 August 1943), pp.64-65, pl.112 (dated 1 September 1943) and pls.113-120; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.239, nos.43-134 to 43-136, and p.275, nos.43-222 (dated 31 August 1943) and 43-223 (dated 1 September 1943) and pp.334-335, nos.44-105a to 44-015h.

9.

Helen Kay, Picasso’s World of Children, London, 1965, p.164.

10. Zervos, op.cit., pls.214, 213 (both drawn in crayons) and 230 (drawn ink); The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.333, nos.44-013 to 44-015.

11. The drawings are illustrated in Zervos, op.cit., pp.30-31, pls.59-62; The Picasso Project, op.cit., pp.258-259, nos.43-176 to 43-179. Two finished paintings of the Square du Vert-Galant, both dated 25 June 1943, are known; one in the Marina Picasso collection (Zervos, op.cit., p.32, pl.63; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.259, no.43-180) and the other in the Musee Picasso in Paris (Inv. MP 190; Zervos, op.cit., p.33, pl.64; Marie-Laure Besnard-Bernadac et al, Musée Picasso. Catalogue of the Collections, Vol.I: Paintings, Papiers collés, Picture reliefs, Sculptures, Ceramics, London, 1986, p.100, no.164; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.260, no.43-181).

12. Zervos, op.cit., pl.212; Geneva, Galerie Jan Krugier, op.cit., unpaginated, no.17; Gary Tinterow, Master Drawings by Picasso, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge and elsewhere, 1981, pp.206-207, no.88, illustrated in colour p.23; The Picasso Project, op.cit., p.305, no.43-303.

13. Wilhelm Boeck and Jaime Sabartés, Picasso, New York, 1955, p.244.

14. Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso, Chicago and London, 1999, p.221.

No.55 Humphrey Jennings 1.

Quoted in David Mellor, ‘Sketch for an Historical Portrait of Humphrey Jennings’, in Mary-Lou Jennings, ed., Humphrey Jennings: Film-Maker, Painter, Poet, London, 1982, p.66.

2.

James Merralls, ‘Humphrey Jennings: A Biographical Sketch’, Film Quarterly, Winter 1961-1962, p.32

3.

Kathleen Raine, ‘Humphrey Jennings’, in London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Humphrey Jennings, 1907-1950: Memorial Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, n.d. [1951]; reprinted in Jennings, ed., ibid, p.50.

4.

Ben Jones and Rebecca Searle, ‘Humphrey Jennings, the Left, and the Experience of Modernity in mid twentieth century Britain’, History Workshop Journal, Spring 2013, p.207.

5.

Raine, op.cit., p.50.

No.57 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 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. Part of the Turner Bequest to the National Gallery, the painting has usually been on loan to Tate Britain.

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.58 Lucian Freud 1.

Quoted in Sebastian Smee, Lucian Freud: Drawings 1940, exhibition catalogue, New York, Matthew Marks Gallery, 2003, p.16.

2.

Nicholas Penny, ‘The Early Works 1938-1954’, in Nicholas Penny and Robert Flynn Johnson, Lucian Freud: Works on Paper, London, 1988, p.10.

3.

‘Lucian Freud in Conversation with Michael Auping’, in Sarah Howgate, Lucian Freud Portraits, exhibition catalogue, London and Fort Worth, 2012, p.208.

4.

Ibid., pp.208-210.

5.

Adrian Clark, ‘Two British art patrons of the 1940s and 1950s. Sir Colin Anderson and Peter Watson’, The British Art Journal, Autumn 2004, p.76.

6.

Quoted in Robert Hughes, Lucian Freud: paintings, London, 1987, p.16.

No.59 Frank Auerbach 1.

Pilar Ordovas, ed., Raw Truth: Auerbach – Rembrandt, exhibition catalogue, London and Amsterdam, 2013-2014, p.27.

2.

Michael Peppiatt, ‘Frank Auerbach’, Tate, Spring 1998, p.40.

3.

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York, 2009, p.266, no.268. The painting, in oil on board, measures 101.6 x 152.4 cm.

4.

Catherine Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting, London, 2015, pp.181-182.

5.

Judith Bumpus, ‘Frank Auerbach’, Art & Artists, June 1986, p.27.

No.60 David Hockney 1.

Marco Livingstone, ‘A Life in Portraits’, in David Hockney, Faces 1966-1984, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, 1987, unpaginated.

2.

Kay Heymer, ‘Ways of Looking’, in Livingstone and Heymer, op.cit., p.11.

3.

Livingstone, op.cit., 1987, unpaginated.

4.

Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, London, 1988, p.63. Apart from appearing in many of Hockney’s drawings, prints and paintings, Geldzahler was also the subject of portraits by Alice Neel, Larry Rivers, George Segal, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

5.

Marco Livingstone, ‘Lovers & Friends I: 1960-1977’, in Livingstone and Heymer, op.cit., pp.98 and 103.

6.

Ibid., p.104.

7.

Kay Heymer, ‘Ways of Looking’, in Livingstone and Heymer, op.cit,, p.11.

8.

Barbara Stern Shapiro, ‘Hockney Works on Paper’, in Sarah Howgate and Barbara Stern Shapiro, David Hockney Portraits, exhibition catalogue, Boston and elsewhere, 2006-2007, p.62.

No.61 Avigdor Arikha 1.

Robert Hughes, ‘Feedback from Life’, Time, 7 May 1973, p.38.

2.

Robert Hughes, ‘Avigdor Arikha’, in London, Marlborough Fine Art, Avigdor Arikha: Inks, Drawings and Etchings, exhibition catalogue, 1974, p.7.

3.

Jane Livingston, ‘Arikha: New York Drawings’, in New York, Marlborough Gallery, Avigdor Arikha: New York Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1984.

4.

Channin et al, op.cit., illustrated p.52, pl.39. The watercolour measures 227 x 560 mm.

5.

Channin et al, op.cit., illustrated p.91, pl.76. The painting was with Janie C. Lee in Houston, Texas, in 1985.

6.

Inv. 2004-9-29-36; Duncan Thomson and Stephen Coppel, Avigdor Arikha: From Life. Drawings and Prints 1965-2005, exhibition catalogue, London, 2006-2007, p.97, no.75. Drawn in New York, the drawing is dated 21 November 1983. Another pencil drawing of the same period, showing Istomin seated at the piano in rehearsal at Carnegie Hall, is illustrated in Channin et al, op.cit., p.164, pl.138.

No.62 David Hockney 1.

Nikos Stangos, ed., David Hockney by David Hockney, London, 1976, p.294.

2.

Craig Hartley, ‘David Hockney Printmaking and Technique – I’, Print Quarterly, September 1988, p.250.

3.

Stangos, ed., ibid., pp.288 and 293.

No.63 Frank Auerbach 1.

Michael Peppiatt, ‘Frank Auerbach’, Tate, Spring 1998, p.39.

2.

Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p.13.

3.

Inv. CHCPH 0098; William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, New York, 2009, p.280, no.388.

4.

Feaver, ibid., p.281, nos.389-391. The present sheet also displays compositional similarities with a later group of To the Studios paintings of 1982, all in private collections (Feaver, ibid., p.293, nos.479-481).

5.

A photograph of eighteen similar drawings and sketches for To the Studios paintings of 1977 is illustrated in London, Hayward Gallery and Edinburgh, Fruit Market Gallery, Frank Auerbach, exhibition catalogue, 1978, p.18.

No.64 Donald Sultan 1.

Roger Bevan, ‘Introduction’, in London, Runkel-Hue-Williams Ltd., Donald Sultan: Works on Paper, exhibition catalogue, 1989, p.5.

2.

Barry Walker, Donald Sultan: A Print Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Coral Gables and elsewhere, 1992-1994, unpaginated, nos.5658.

3.

Ibid., p.9.

4.

Walker, op.cit., pp.11-12.

5.

Barbara Rose, Sultan: An Interview with Donald Sultan by Barbara Rose, New York, 1988, pp.77-78; quoted in Michelle Meyers, Sean Scully/Donald Sultan: Abstraction/Representation: Paintings, Drawings and Prints from the Anderson Collection, exhibition catalogue, Stanford University Art Gallery, 1990, p.14.

INDEX OF ARTISTS

ARIKHA, Avigdor; No.61 AUERBACH, Frank; Nos.57, 59 & 63 BENDEMANN, Eduard; No.14 BOLDINI, Giovanni; No.22 BONNARD, Pierre; Nos.44-45 & 50 BOUDIN, Eugène; Nos.11-12 CÉZANNE, Paul; No.25 CROSS, Henri-Edmond; Nos.32-33 DEGAS, Edgar; Nos.10, 18 & 26 DELACROIX, Eugène; Nos.4 & 8 DRAPER, Herbert James; No.34

LACOMBE, Georges; No.28 LEHMANN, Henri; No.7 LE SIDANER, Henri; No.48 MAHONEY, Charles; No.51 MAUFRA, Maxime; No.31 MEISSONIER, Jean-Louis-Ernest; No.28 MENZEL, Adolph von; Nos.19-20 MILLET, Jean-François; No.13 MODIGLIANI, Amedeo; No.38 MOORE, Henry; Nos.52-53 PEPLOE, Samuel John; No.35 PICASSO, Pablo; Nos.37, 41 & 54 PISSARRO, Camille; No.16

FREUD, Lucian; No.58 REDON, Odilon; No.36 GANDY, Joseph; Nos.1-3 GARSTIN, Alethea; No.43 GAUGUIN, Paul; No.27 HOCKNEY, David; Nos.60 & 62 HUET, Paul; Nos.5-6 HUGO, Victor; No.9 JENNINGS, Humphrey; No.55 JONGKIND, Johan Barthold; No.17 KEMP, Arthur Charles; No.56 KLIMT, Gustav; No.40

SCHUFFENECKER, Claude-Emile; Nos.29-30 SEURAT, Georges; No.24 SIGNAC, Paul; No.49 SKARBINA, Franz; No.21 SULTAN, Donald; No.64 TISSOT, James Joseph; No.15 TOOROP, Jan; No.39 TUKE, Henry Scott; No.42 VUILLARD, Edouard; Nos.46-47

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Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891) Venice: The Entrance to the Grand Canal, with Santa Maria della Salute and the Punta della Dogana seen from the Casa Fumagalli No.23

Back cover: Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) Standing Nude in Profile (Nu debout de profil) No.38

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