SOFA Christmas 2025

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

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Please note that some drawings are sold mounted but not framed.

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WINTER CATALOGUE 2025-2026

A Selection of Old Master, 19th Century and Modern Drawings

Catalogue by Stephen Ongpin with Antonia Rosso and Emma Ricci

CENTRAL OR NORTH ITALIAN SCHOOL

c.1500

a. The Virgin and Child

b. Christ Supported by Angels

Two drawings mounted together on a 19th century album page, inscribed B. Luini in the lower right margin:

a. Pen and brown ink over an underdrawing in pencil. 145 x 114 mm. (5 3/4 x 4 1/2 in.)

b. Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white, on brown paper. 59 x 75 mm. (2 1/4 x 3 in.) at greatest dimensions.

PROVENANCE (a only): The Commendatore Vittorio Genevosio, Turin (Lugt 545); Sold in 1794 with the rest of the Genevosio collection of drawings to the Marchese Giovanni Antonio Turinetti di Priero, Turin; M. de Bourguignon de Fabregoules, Aix-en-Provence, until c.1840; Charles-Joseph-Barthélémy Giraud, Aix-en-Provence and Paris; Prosper Flury-Hérard, Paris (Lugt 1015), with associated number 376; Probably the anonymous Flury-Hérard sale, Paris, Hôtel des Commissaires-Priseurs, 13-15 May 1861; (a + b): Private collection; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 28-29 March 2023, lot 276; Private collection, London.

Executed with a delicate pen and ink technique, the study of The Virgin and Child recalls the handling of certain Florentine artists of the late 15th and very early 16th century, such as Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448-1494), but also some artists of the Umbrian school around Pietro Perugino (1446-1523). The artist has employed continuous hatching to model the forms, while the subtle modulation of lines adds grace to the figures. Despite its apparent simplicity, the handling of the pen demonstrates great control and sensitivity. The smaller drawing of Christ Supported by Angels is almost certainly by another, possibly Venetian or Sienese hand.

The Virgin and Child was once part of a rich and varied collection of 16th and 17th century Italian drawings assembled in Turin by the 18th century connoisseur and nobleman Vittorio Luigi Modesto Bonaventura Genevosio (1719-1795), who also collected paintings and antiquities. (In 1783 Genevosio was described by the writer François Gaziel as ‘one of the greatest art lovers known to man, with a superb collection of excellent paintings and the most precious drawings by the most famous masters, a library filled with the finest books, a collection of precious stones and everything that natural history has to offer in terms of rarities.’) In March 1794, shortly before Genevosio’s death, he sold the 330 drawings in his collection to his fellow Turinese collector Marchese Giovanni Antonio Turinetti di Priero (1750-1801), for the sum of 11,500 lire. In 1803, two years after Turinetti’s death, the Genevosio collection was sold off in a series of four auctions.

Later in the 19th century, the drawing was in the collection assembled by the magistrate M. de Bourguignon de Fabregoules in Aix-en-Provence, who sold his drawings, around 1840, to a fellow Provençal collector, Charles-Joseph-Barthélémy Giraud (1802-1882). Giraud pledged the collection as collateral to the banker and consul Prosper Flury-Hérard (1804-1873), by whom it was sold and dispersed at auction in Paris in 1861.

£ 4,500

FLORENTINE SCHOOL

16th Century

The Head of Christ

Red chalk. The sheet partially silhouetted at the right edge. Made up at the lower right corner. 208 x 152 mm. (8 1/8 x 6 in.)

This finely executed red chalk study of the head of Christ reflects the refined sensibility characteristic of some of the artists of the Florentine school active in the early part of the 16th century. The soft modulation of tones and the delicately inclined head reveal an intimate, devotional conception characteristic of Florentine draughtsmanship following the period of Andrea del Sarto (1486-1520), whose influence is evident in the present sheet. At the same time, the gentle modelling and atmospheric softness of the line are suggestive of the refined manner of Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572), court painter to the Medici ducal court throughout the 1540s and 1550s and the foremost exponent of the Florentine maniera

Among the less than thirty autograph drawings by Bronzino that survive today are a number of somewhat comparable works, albeit executed in black chalk. These include a study of the head of a bearded man in profile to the right, datable to c.1550-1553, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and another study of the head of a bearded young man, looking up to the right, which appeared at auction in 1998 and 2003. Similarly, the physiognomy of the head in the present sheet is quite close to that of Christ in Bronzino’s Noli me tangere altarpiece, painted in 1560-1561 for a chapel in the Florentine church of Santo Spirito and today in the Louvre.

Catherine Monbeig Goguel, who has tentatively dated the present sheet to around 1535, has likewise noted a sensitivity of handling akin to the drawings of Bronzino, while further pointing out that the softness of the expression shows some similarities with the work of Giovanni Antonio Sogliani (1492-1544).

£ 11,000

GHERARDO CIBO

Genoa 1512-1600 Rocca Contrada (Arcevia)

Recto: Landscape with a Monastery Verso: View of Rocca Contrada

Pen and brown ink. Inscribed and dated romita d[i] sto.girmo. ricavata m o sotto la via sti va [illegible]...lacquan (?) d[i] [crescent] 17 d[i] luglio 1564 at the top and numbered 42 at the lower right. Further inscribed Orto di S. Francesco, 1564 and finestre(?) di [illegible] on the verso.

211 x 284 mm. (8 1/4 x 11 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Thomas Borges, England, until 1996; P. & D. Colnaghi, London; Mr. and Mrs. Phillip Swinstead, Newbury.

LITERATURE: Christiane Denker Nesselrath, ‘Rocca Contrada: La Città di Gherardo Cibo’, in Arnold Nesselrath, Gherardo Cibo alias Ulisse Severino da Cingoli: disegni e opere da collezioni italiane, exhibition catalogue, San Severino Marche, 1989, pp.70-71, figs.43 and 44 (as location unknown).

Born into the Genoese nobility, Gherardo Cibo studied in Rome and Bologna, receiving a fine humanist education and becoming a soldier and diplomat attached to the papal court in Rome. In 1540, aged just twenty-eight, Cibo appears to have retired from his duties and settled in the small town of Rocca Contrada (today called Arcevia) in the Apennines. He dedicated the rest of his life to the study, collection and illustration of the plants and flowers of the Marchigian region. A gifted artist, he produced a large number of colourful and scientifically accurate botanical illustrations, as well as autonomous landscape drawings.

As an amateur landscape draughtsman, Cibo worked mainly in the provinces of Ancona, Pesaro, Macerata and Perugia. His landscapes can be divided into two types; views of actual sites in the Marches and purely imaginary landscapes. His drawings also show a distinct influence of the Northern landscape tradition; indeed, Cibo travelled to France and Germany in the late 1530s and to Flanders in the 1540s. While Cibo sent some of his drawings to family members and fellow botanists, most seem to have been done for his own pleasure, and were assembled into albums, as were his botanical studies. Having lived most of his life in the relative isolation of Rocca Contrada, Cibo died there at the age of eighty-eight.

Around 150 independent landscape drawings by Cibo are known today, some bearing dates between 1560 and 1593. The landscape drawings made on the spot are often inscribed with the location depicted and the date, the artist at times using planetary symbols to denote specific days of the week; hence the crescent (signifying Luna, or Monday) in the inscription on the present sheet, which was drawn on the 17th of July 1564 and depicts a romita, or hermitage, dedicated to Saint Jerome. Another drawing made near the same romita of San Geronimo, dated May 1567, was formerly in the Baer collection in Atlanta. On the verso of the present sheet is a sketch of the cloister of the church of San Francesco in Rocca Contrada, with the campanile of San Medardo behind. These were the two principal churches in Rocca Contrada. A similar view of Rocca Contrada is in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.

£ 16,000

FRANCESCO ALBERTI

c.1600

Design for an Elaborate Decorative Scheme, with an Armed Male Figure Holding a Laurel Wreath Above an Allegorical Female Figure of Flora(?) Surrounded by Winged Putti

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in red chalk. Faint traces of an erased figure of a flying putto at the upper centre of the composition. Inscribed DE FRANCESCO ALBERTI at the bottom. Laid down on a backing sheet. 383 x 246 mm. (15 1/8 x 9 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Königstein, Reiss & Sohn, 29-30 October 2019, part of lot 611.

The present sheet was inserted, in place of a missing engraved title page, into a copy of the first edition of the 16th century architect Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s Le due regole della prospettiva pratica, posthumously published, with commentary by Ignazio Danti, in Rome in 1583. Vignola’s treatise, filtered through Danti’s commentary, was a great success, and the book was reprinted at least ten times over the next two hundred years. The most striking feature of the richly illustrated publication of 1583 was the use of two different techniques, woodcuts and copperplate engravings, to visually translate Vignola’s original theories.

The author of this fine and interesting drawing, which is boldly signed or inscribed ‘DE FRANCESCO ALBERTI’, may be the 16th century painter Francesco Alberti, known as Fiumana, about whom, however, almost nothing is known. Alberti was active in Bologna in the 1550s, working at the cathedral of San Petronio and the church of San Giovanni in Monte. According to the 17th century Bolognese art historian and biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Fiumana also worked in Venice.

Another possible author of the present sheet is the early 17th century painter and engraver Pietro Francesco Alberti (1584-1638), who was born into a family of artists from the town of Sansepolcro in Tuscany. The son of the artist Durante Alberti, whose two daughters are also documented as painters, Pier Francesco Alberti is best known for his illustrations in the first printed edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s treatise on painting, the Trattato della pittura, published in 1651, long after the master’s death.

It is interesting to note that the same 1583 first edition of Vignola’s Le due regole della prospettiva pratica included an engraved title page, depicting a portrait bust of Vignola set within an arcaded loggia, by Cherubino Alberti (1553-1615), an older member of the Alberti family of artists of Sansepolcro and a cousin of Durante Alberti. As noted above, the present sheet was bound into a copy of Vignola’s 1583 treatise in place of the printed frontispiece by Cherubino Alberti.

£ 7,000

5

FLEMISH SCHOOL

Late 16th Century

Christ before Pontius Pilate, after Raffaellino da Reggio

Pen and brown ink and grey wash, heightened with white, with partial framing lines in brown ink, on blue paper. Some of the figures numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, and the verso inscribed with corresponding colour notes: 1. gialo / 2. torigno(?) / 3. rossi / 4 …one(?) / 5 bianco

Numbered 18 on the verso. Inscribed with an old attribution Cagniassi(?) on a tab of paper attached to the verso.

368 x 256 mm. (14 1/2 x 10 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Walter L. Strauss, Scarborough, New York; Thence by descent until 2022.

This large drawing is a copy after a fresco of Christ before Pilate by Raffaellino Motta da Reggio (1550-1578) in the Oratorio del Gonfalone in Rome. The Oratorio del Gonfalone was decorated between 1569 and 1576 with a cycle of frescoes of scenes from the Passion executed by a team of Mannerist painters including Livio Agresti, Jacopo Bertoia, Cesare Nebbia, Marco Pino, Raffaellino da Reggio and Federico Zuccaro. Raffaellino’s fresco of Christ before Pilate, described by the painter and biographer Giovanni Baglione as a ‘pittura di gran maniera’, may be dated to around 1572-1574. As one modern scholar has described the scene, ‘Amid a crowd, the humble Christ is brought before Pilate, who with flamboyant gesture demands what fault can be found in him. The focused attention of the arresting soldiers contrasts, on the one hand, with the bored and elegantly posed one who ceremonially holds the fasces, symbol of Roman authority, and on the other, with the friends of Jesus at the lower left. A young man with long hair, perhaps the Apostle John, looks solicitously to the woman who clasps her hands in fervent prayer. Perhaps she is Mary Magdalene. In sharp contrast again are the half-naked men next to them, soon to be called to perform their job as flagellants, who muse sadistically, one chewing on his instrument of torture, the other gesturing toward the next scene [ie. Federico Zuccaro’s neighbouring fresco of the Flagellation] with a grotesque enthusiasm of anticipation.’

Another drawing by the same hand – a copy after a fresco of Moses and the Brazen Serpent by Ferraù Fenzoni (1562-1645) in the Scala Santa in Rome – shared the same provenance as the present sheet until recently. That drawing is dated 1591, only a few years after the date of Fenzoni’s fresco, which was completed in 1587. The author of these two fine copy drawings remains unknown, although the old attribution to the 16th century Genoese artist Luca Cambiaso is certainly untenable. It has been noted that the draughtsmanship is similar to that of the Flemish painter Hans Speckaert (c.1540-c.1577), who worked for much of his brief career in Rome.

The present sheet once belonged to the German-born writer, art historian and publisher Walter L. Strauss (1922-1988), who emigrated to America in 1938.

£ 7,000

NORTH ITALIAN SCHOOL

Late 16th Century

The Head of a Woman with an Elaborate Hairstyle in Profile

Black chalk. A small sketch of the head and shoulders of a woman drawn in black chalk on the verso.

293 x 197 mm. (11 1/2 x 7 7/8 in.)

Watermark: Crossbow (similar to Briquet 728; Ferrara 1586, Briquet 729; Reggio Emilia 1588 and Briquet 737; Ferrara 1598).

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 8 December 1976, lot 77 (as School of Fontainebleau); Hans and Kate Schaeffer (Schaeffer Galleries), New York; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 14 January 1987, lot 23 (as School of Modena, 16th Century); Anonymous sale, New York, Christie’s, 11 January 1994, lot 281 (as School of Fontainebleau); Private collection, New York.

This refined drawing depicts the profile of a woman facing left, her hair elaborately arranged and adorned with pearls, ribbons and a jewelled headdress. Executed with delicate precision in soft black chalk, the sheet combines firm contour lines with subtle internal modelling. The sitter’s delicate coiffure places the sheet within a long Renaissance tradition of elegant and idealised female head studies. These works reflect a fascination not only with female beauty, but also with the decorative potential of hair and costume design. Within this tradition, the present sheet shares affinities with certain French draughtsmen of the School of Fontainebleau, to which the drawing has been attributed in the past. Yet the watermark of a crossbow, which is found on papers produced in Modena and Ferrara around 1580, would suggest a North Italian origin for the sheet.

Paintings and drawings of ideal heads, or teste divine as Vasari called them, were particularly popular in Florentine art and found its greatest exponent in Michelangelo. Such drawings were usually drawn in either black or red chalk or pen and ink as well as, occasionally, metalpoint, and were typically studies of women adorned with fantastic and elaborate all’antica hairstyles, often seen in strict profile. This tradition continued well into the 16th century in Florence, as exemplified by, for example, the pen and ink heads of women by Jacopo Ligozzi and similar studies in chalk by Francesco Salviati.

Many of these drawings remain anonymous, however, such as a comparable metalpoint study of a Head of a Woman with an Elaborate Headdress in the Boijmans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, which has been dated to between 1490 and 1540. Another analogous drawing, an elaborate portrait of the Infanta Catherina of Spain attributed to a Northern Italian artist working around 1590, appeared at auction in 1996. Such drawings can sometimes be more complex in their headdress designs, like it is the case with certain studies by Antonio Campi and his circle; a black chalk half-length double portrait of Beatrice d’Este and Massimiliano Sforza by Campi, now in the British Museum, illustrates the intricate potential of these designs.

£ 7,500

ALESSANDRO CASOLANI

Mensano 1552-1607 Siena

Study of an Angel

Red chalk. Figure studies of a striding angel and a fragment of a Pietà drawn in red chalk on the verso.

156 x 99 mm. (6 1/8 x 3 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Hill-Stone, New York; Private collection.

Alessandro Casolani shares with Francesco Vanni and Ventura Salimbeni an important position in Sienese painting of the late Mannerist period. He received his first independent commission in 1576, for a painting for the Duomo in Siena, and among his later works of the 1580s in Siena is an Adoration of the Shepherds for the church of Santa Maria dei Servi and a Birth of the Virgin for San Domenico. Religious works continued to make up the bulk of Casolani’s oeuvre, in the form of church altarpieces and easel pictures for private patrons, as well as more elaborate projects, such as the decoration of the chapel of the Villa Bartalini at Monistero, near Siena. Casolani worked in and around Siena for most of his career, and in fact rejected a summons to Rome to work for Pope Clement VIII at St. Peter’s. Between 1599 and 1600, however, he was in Pavia, where he contributed to the decoration of the Sagrestia Nuova of the Certosa, working alongside his fellow Sienese artist Pietro Sorri. The two artists worked together again in Santi Quirico e Giulitta in Siena in the early years of the 17th century. Casolani also remained closely associated with both Vanni and Salimbeni, collaborating with the latter on the decoration of the Oratory of the church of Santissima Trinità. His last years were occupied with commissions for altarpieces and frescoes for Sienese churches, and some of his works were completed after his death by Francesco Vanni, Vincenzo Rustici and his son, Ilario Casolani.

As with his paintings, few of Casolani’s drawings have been published or exhibited. Nevertheless, he does not seem to have been as prolific a draughtsman as either Vanni or Salimbeni. This may have been because, as Flaminio Borghesi, Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici’s agent in Siena, noted in a letter of 1673, ‘by his very nature he was not (so they tell me) very fond of drawing, but instead made use of every little bit, correcting them and revising them as he painted.’ With his distinctive and idiosyncratic style as a draughtsman, as the scholar Marco Ciampolini has noted, ‘Casolani succeeded in creating a graphic language that was both very personal and powerfully striking...Moreover, his graphic art formed one of the fundamental strands of development in seventeenth-century Sienese drawing.’

The study of an angel on the recto of the present sheet does not seem to be related to any surviving painting by Casolani. The two studies of an angel on the verso, however, are preparatory studies for the angel Gabriel in a small lunette painting of The Annunciation of 1597, formerly in the church of San Giovanni Battista in Corsano and today in the Museo d’Arte Sacra Val d’Arbia in Buonconvento. A similar study of a Pietà is found on a red chalk sheet of studies of Christ and a Pietà with angels, which was with Colnaghi in 1989.

£ 12,000

AGOSTINO CARRACCI

Bologna 1557-1602 Parma

Recto: Studies of the Heads of Two Bearded Men

Verso: Studies of Five Heads

Pen and brown ink. Inscribed Bartolomeo Bandinelli / 1493 - 1560 on the old backing board. 76 x 178 mm. (3 x 7 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Italy.

Agostino Carracci has long been overshadowed by his more famous younger brother Annibale and cousin Ludovico. He is best known today as one of the finest Italian engravers of the 16th century, with an oeuvre of over two hundred prints executed from the early 1580s onwards. Soon firmly established as a successful printmaker, Agostino also received a handful of commissions for altarpieces, notably a Last Communion of Saint Jerome for the Bolognese church of San Girolamo alla Certosa. In the middle of the 1590s Agostino joined Annibale in Rome, collaborating on the decoration of the galleria of the Palazzo Farnese, with Agostino responsible for the design and execution of two prominent frescoes on the long walls of the room. In 1599 Agostino left Rome for Parma, where he was commissioned to paint frescoes for the Palazzo del Giardino, although he died before the project was completed.

A prolific draughtsman, Agostino worked mainly in pen and ink. A particular characteristic of his oeuvre of drawings are sheets of various studies drawn on a single page. As Rudolf Wittkower has noted of the artist, in his catalogue of the Carracci drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, ‘His unflagging efforts [as a draughtsman] are reflected in his sheets of studies, of which there are more at Windsor than in all other collections taken together. In spite of the medley of sketches on these sheets, they often show how tenaciously Agostino worked on the development of one idea, now the stance of a figure, now the minutiae of the pose of a foot…No other artist combines on one sheet, as Agostino does, odd jottings and caprices with studies that reveal his insatiable craving to clarify the same problem again and again. The sheets of studies also go to show the variety of idioms at Agostino’s disposal ranging from naive simplifications and idle doodles to precise classicizing outline drawings and subtly graded, almost finicky modulations of form…The artist filled his sheet, usually a fairly small one, with ideas for compositions, sketches of figures, studies of heads, etc., ranging from meticulously drawn details to caricatures, caprices and doodles…This was Agostino’s characteristic method of ‘taking notes’, and there must have been hundreds, possibly even thousands, of such drawings…The dating of these drawings is difficult; with a few exceptions they appear to belong to the 1590’s and the majority form a fairly coherent group of about 1595.’

Some of the heads on the verso can be related to Agostino’s particular interest in caricature. As Wittkower writes of such drawings by Agostino, ‘The assembling on one sheet of many heterogeneous heads derives from the tradition of physiognomical studies coming down from Leonardo…the heads here, partly no more than witty doodles, show the primitive technique and the reduction to bare essentials, on which the comic effect of modern caricature depends.’

The attribution of this drawing to Agostino Carracci is due to Paul Joannides and has also recently been confirmed by Babette Bohn.

£ 6,000

ANDREA BOSCOLI

Florence c.1560/64-1608 Florence

Erminia Tells Her Tale to the Shepherds

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Signed(?) Boscoli at the lower right centre. Inscribed Quindi versando da begli occhi fora / umor di doglia cristallino e vago in the upper margin and parte narro di sue fortune e intanto / il pietoso pastor pianse al suo pianto in the lower margin.

228 x 160 mm. (9 x 6 1/4 in.) [image]

257 x 178 mm. (10 1/8 x 7 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: Luca Fei, Filottrano, by c.1611; Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby’s, 3 July 1996, part of lot 114; Private collection, South Germany.

LITERATURE: Julian Brooks, ‘Andrea Boscoli’s “Loves of Gerusalemme Liberata”, Master Drawings, Winter 2000, pp.452-453, fig.8; Nadia Bastogi, ‘Episodi salienti della fortuna della Gerusalemme liberata nella grafica fiorentina tra Cinque e Seicento’ in Elena Fumagalli et al, ed., L’arme e gli amori: La poesia di Ariosto, Tasso e Guarini nell’arte fiorentina del Seicento, exhibition catalogue, Florence, Palazzo Pitti, 2001, pp.90-91, fig.8.

The late 16th century Florentine painter and draughtsman Andrea Boscoli worked primarily in Florence and Tuscany, but he was also active in the Marches and in Rome. Although few paintings by him survive today, his drawings were highly praised by his biographer Filippo Baldinucci and were avidly collected. The present sheet is part of a series of twenty finished drawings by Boscoli, of both horizontal and vertical format, depicting episodes from Gerusalemme Liberata, Torquato Tasso’s epic poem of the late 16th century. Each of the drawings in this group have inscriptions in the upper and lower margins with the relevant lines from Tasso’s text. However, as Julian Brooks has noted, ‘The purpose of the set of Boscoli drawings taken from Tasso subjects is not clear; they might conceivably be related to a series of designs of ‘tales of love’ which Boscoli made to decorate his bedroom towards the end of his life. Alternatively they could have been made as designs for one of Boscoli’s numerous literary friends. That Ludovico Cigoli saw them and praised them grandemente suggests that they were made or at least known in Florence or Rome; they certainly date to the last few years of Boscoli’s short life.’

As Brooks has further noted, the drawings from this series, which are datable to between 1604 and 1608, ‘were highly innovative in the way in which they extracted the romantic episodes from Tasso’s martial epic.’ The provenance of Boscoli’s Gerusalemme Liberata drawings can be traced back to the early 17th century, when they are recorded as a group in an inventory, compiled around 1611, of works belonging to an obscure Marchigian collector, Luca Fei of Filotranno, near Ancona. The Fei inventory describes the drawings as ‘storiette di chiaro scuro ’ (‘little stories in light and shadow’) and specifies that the series numbered twenty sheets and depicted romantic episodes from Tasso’s poem. Drawings from this series are today in museums in Berlin, Chicago, London, Oxford, Paris, Rome and St. Petersburg.

£ 6,500

ABRAHAM BLOEMAERT

Gorinchem (Gorcum) c.1565-1651 Utrecht

A Sheet of Animal Studies: An Eagle, a Stork, a Goat and a Donkey

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. 177 x 144 mm. (7 x 5 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Paul Eeckhout, Ghent (Lugt 824a); His (anonymous) sale, London, Phillips, 7 December 1994, lot 90; W. M. Brady & Co., New York and Thomas Williams, London, in 1995; Private collection, Massachusetts.

LITERATURE: Jaap Bolten, Abraham Bloemaert: The Drawings, Leiden, 2007, Vol.I, p.400, no.1323, Vol.II, p.415, fig.1323 (as location unknown, and dated 1605-1610).

EXHIBITED: Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Classic Taste: Drawings and Decorative Arts from the Collection of Horace Brock, 2000; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection, 2009, no.109.

ENGRAVED: By Frederik Bloemaert [Hollstein 22].

Abraham Bloemaert was a gifted and prolific draughtsman, praised by his biographer Karel van Mander, who noted that the artist ‘has a clever way of drawing with a pen, and, by adding small amounts of watercolour, he produces unusual effects’. He produced numerous studies for paintings and engravings as well as several landscape drawings and many sheets of studies of heads, hands and arms. Some of the latter were reproduced as engravings by his son Frederik and published in the 1650s as the Konstryk Tekenboek, a sort of model-book for students. The Tekenboek proved very popular and was reprinted several times, serving to perpetuate Bloemaert’s influence on later generations of artists. The bulk of Bloemaert’s enormous corpus of drawings appears to have been retained by his descendants for over fifty years, and it is not until the first half of the 18th century that they began to be sold and dispersed.

The study of a standing goat in this drawing is a preparatory study for the engraving Two Goats and a Goatherd, which was plate 7 of the Beesten en Vogelen series of fourteen prints of animals, designed by Bloemaert sometime between 1610 and 1615 and engraved and published by his son Frederik in the 1640s or 1650s. A closely related, pen and ink drawing with three studies of a goat is in the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, while a comparable sheet of studies of goats is in the Art Institute of Chicago; both drawings are studies for later prints. Another similar study of goats, drawn in red and black chalk and likewise preparatory for an engraving, is in the Courtauld Gallery in London. Although none of the other animals depicted in this drawing appear to be studies for engravings, similar storks appear in a handful of prints designed by Bloemaert.

This drawing bears the collector’s mark of Paul Eeckhout (1917-2012), a Belgian architect, draughtsman and printmaker who served as a curator at the museum in Ghent between 1948 and 1982.

£ 9,500

ISIDORO BIANCHI

Campione 1581-1662 Campione

The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, extensively heightened with white, on blue-grey paper, backed with thin Japan paper. Traces of squaring in black chalk. A large made up area in the upper left quadrant, and two smaller made up areas at the lower right edge. 359 x 255 mm. (14 1/8 x 10 in.)

PROVENANCE: Giovanni Morelli, Milan; Francesco Dubini, Milan; Ulrico Hoëpli, Milan; Anonymous sale, Milan, Finarte, 27-28 November 1974, lot 140; Rossella Gilli, Milan; Private collection, Italy.

LITERATURE: Jacopo Stoppa, Il Morazzone, Milan, 2003, pp.217-218, under no.39, fig.39f.

Born in the Lombard town of Campione (now named Campione d’Italia), on the border with Switzerland, Isidoro Bianchi has long been regarded as a pupil or follower of his fellow Lombard painter Pier Francesco Mazzuchelli, known as Morazzone (1573-1626). Yet they were only eight years apart in age, and it is perhaps more likely that the relationship was more of a general influence and sometime collaboration. Little is actually known of Bianchi’s artistic training. In 1605 he is recorded as working in Prague, but by 1614 was in Turin, working as court painter to Duke Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy. He painted decorations, now lost, for the Palazzo Reale, and worked alongside Morazzone on the decoration of the Castello di Rivoli. Bianchi painted a vault fresco for a chapel in the church of San Fedele in Como, completed in 1623, and for several years in the 1630s he was engaged on the extensive decoration, in both fresco painting and stucco, of the church of Santa Maria dei Ghirli in Campione. Another Savoy commission was for the fresco decoration of several rooms in the Castello del Valentino in Turin, on which he worked in the 1630s. In 1642 Bianchi settled in his native Campione, while also working in Como, Cressogno, Monza and at the Sacro Monte at Varese. Sometime in the 1640s he painted an extensive fresco cycle in the church of Santa Maria della Rovana in Cevio, in Canton Ticino in Switzerland.

Only a very few drawings by Isidoro Bianchi have survived, most of which display the influence of Morazzone. A characteristic of the younger artist’s work is a preference for drawing with pen and brown ink and brown wash, combined with a precise application of white heightening, and often on dark, prepared paper of a greenish or bluish tone. The composition of the present sheet is derived from a large canvas of the same subject by Morazzone, painted in 1612 for the Cappella della Cintura in the church of Sant’Agostino in Como. While the two compositions are very close, the present sheet differs from Morazzone’s painting in a number of significant details, most notably the change of the figure at the extreme left from a man in the painting to a woman in the drawing.

A stylistically comparable drawing by Bianchi of The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, preparatory for a fresco of c.1645 in the church of Santa Maria della Rovana at Cevio, is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. Also close to the present sheet in style and handling, as well as the physiognomy of the figures and the figural types themselves, is a drawing of The Adoration of the Magi in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, which is a study for a fresco in Santa Maria dei Ghirli in Campione.

£ 9,000

REMIGIO CANTAGALLINA

Borgo San Sepolcro 1575-1656 Florence

Tuscan Landscape with a Traveller and his Dog

Pen and brown ink. Numbered 1. at the upper centre. Indistinctly inscribed (possibly a collector’s paraphe) on the verso.

166 x 243 mm. (6 1/2 x 9 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 20 January 1982, lot 101; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 28 January 2016, lot 130.

Said to be a pupil of the landscape draughtsman Giulio Parigi, Remigio Cantagallina produced his earliest known works, a series of landscape etchings, in 1603. Relatively little is known of his life and career, which was spent mostly in Florence, although a trip to Flanders between 1611 and 1613 is documented by drawings in a sketchbook today in the Musées Royaux des BeauxArts in Brussels. Described by the biographer Filippo Baldinucci as ‘famous for his landscape drawings in pen’ (‘celebre in disegnar paesi a penna’), Cantagallina was particularly influenced by the work of Northern artists such as Paul Bril. He was, in turn, to be an important influence on the later generation of landscape draughtsmen in Florence, including Ercole Bazzicaluva, Baccio del Bianco and Jacques Callot, whom Cantagallina seems to have befriended on his arrival in Florence in the early years of the 17th century, and may have helped to train. Among the few public works commissioned from him were the ephemeral decorations to celebrate the wedding in Florence of the Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici to Maria Maddalena of Austria, executed in collaboration with Parigi in 1608. Only one oil painting by Cantagallina is known; a very large canvas of the Last Supper painted in collaboration with his brother Antonio in 1604, intended for a monastery in his native town of Sansepolcro and now in the Museo Civico there.

A prolific artist, Cantagallina produced a large number of highly finished topographical views of Florence and other sites in Tuscany, drawn with warm brown washes, that are among his finest achievements. Many of these drawings, such as a remarkable large View of Siena in the Uffizi, were almost certainly intended as independent works of art. He also produced imaginary landscapes, of which the present sheet is a fine example. The largest extant collection of landscape drawings by the artist, numbering more than two hundred sheets, is in the Uffizi in Florence; one of these, a drawing dated 1655, is his last known dated work. Cantagallina’s draughtsmanship was closely related to his work as a printmaker, and he produced over sixty etchings, mostly of pastoral landscapes and festival scenes.

Probably made as an autonomous work of art, this landscape drawing is a fine example of the work for which Cantagallina was praised by Baldinucci. As Stefano Rinaldi has noted, ‘It is… with Cantagallina and the circle of draftsmen around Giulio Parigi that this kind of pen drawing achieved considerable success. Baldinucci, describing this phenomenon in a much-quoted passage, refers to “a beautiful, new way of drawing charming landscapes in pen.” Those artists, while clearly responding to the success of Callot’s etchings, contributed to the establishment in Tuscany of a new kind of finished drawing. Far from the traditional concept of disegno as the spontaneous transcription of artistic thought, their highly elaborate calligraphic drawings were clearly intended as finished collectibles to be framed and displayed on the wall in the ultimate paragone between drawing and painting.’

£ 7,000

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI, called GUERCINO Cento 1591-1666 Bologna

The Head of a Cleric

Pen and brown ink, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk. Inscribed Rembrandt in the lower right margin of the mount.

140 x 121 mm. (5 1/2 x 4 3/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Two unidentifiable collector’s marks stamped at the lower left and lower right corners; Private collection; Anonymous sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 28-29 March 2023, lot 286; Private collection, London.

The present sheet belongs with a group of genre studies, almost certainly drawn from life, which Guercino produced throughout his career. The result of the artist’s acute observation of the people he saw around him in his native town of Cento, these studies – of shopkeepers, peasants, labourers and others – may have been influenced by the example of the Carracci, who were among the first to recognize that peasants, village folk and similar mundane characters were interesting artistic subjects in their own right. Often sympathetic, Guercino’s genre drawings were not usually intended as studies for paintings but were produced as visual exercises and for his own pleasure. As one scholar has written, ‘For [Guercino], genre drawings were worth executing for their own sake and for their entertainment value. One cannot help but notice the sincere humanity and ‘down-home’ flavor of many of Guercino’s sketches...it is easy to understand why the artist left Rome in 1623 and returned to a ‘piccolo paese’ to continue his career. He seems genuinely to have enjoyed the provincial community where he grew up and learned to paint.’ As another scholar has further noted, ‘Given that Guercino travelled little and spent so much of his career in provincial Cento, it is no surprise that his caricatures and genre scenes reflect local life rather than political subjects. A gentle, sensitive humor and humanity characterize his work in this field and indeed pervade his entire graphic output.’

David Stone has suggested that the present sheet may be approximately dated to sometime between the late 1630s and the mid-1640s. Probably drawn from life, this drawing is typical of Guercino’s character studies and his interest in physiognomy. The emphasis here is on the man’s hair and face, with the application of numerous small dots of ink to capture the subject’s unshaven appearance. Although Guercino’s use of a stipple and line technique was first developed in drawings intended to be engraved, the artist continued to work in this socalled ‘gravure’ style in drawings of the late 1630s and 1640s, such as the present sheet, that are unconnected with prints.

Among stylistically comparable drawings by Guercino is a study of Cato of Utica Saying Farewell to his Son in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which is a study for a painting of 1637 in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille. Indeed, the physiognomy of the man in this drawing is close to that of one of the onlookers at the extreme right edge of the Marseille painting. Also comparable are two pen drawings – a Head of a Girl Wearing a Hat and a Necklace and A Franciscan Saint Looking Up – in the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, as well as a study of the head of a woman in the Goldman collection in Chicago, which has been regarded as a study for a now-lost painting of The Offering of Abigail of 1636.

£ 8,500

NORTHERN SCHOOL

17th Century

Landscape with a Castle on a Hill

Pen and brown ink and violet wash, with framing lines in black ink. Inscribed Scoffer and gall(?) in the lower margin.

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

PROVENANCE: Private collection, France.

£ 2,000

STEFANO DELLA BELLA

Florence 1610-1664 Florence

An Elephant

Pen and brown ink, with traces of an underdrawing in black chalk. Inscribed (by Gasc) Bella (Stephane della) ne el Florence en 1610 mort en 1664 / Dessin acheté 3 [?] le Mardi 12 juin 1860 à Londres / à la vente Woodburn / H = 0”,12 L = 0”,154 / (Collection Dijonval) (Collection Woodburn le Londres No.1120 / du catalogue) / C. Gasc on the verso.

118 x 152 mm. (4 5/8 x 6 in.)

PROVENANCE: Gilbert Paignon-Dijonval, Paris (according to Gasc); By descent to his grandson, Vicomte Charles-Gilbert Morel de Vindé, Paris; Sold with the rest of the PaignonDijonval collection of drawings to Samuel Woodburn, London, in 1816; The posthumous Woodburn sale, London, Christie’s, 12 June 1860, part of lot 1120; Charles Gasc, Paris (Lugt 544); Spink-Leger, London; Philip Uzielli, London; By inheritance to Isabelle de Waldner de Freundstein; Thence by descent.

A hugely talented and prolific printmaker and draughtsman, Stefano della Bella was active mainly in Florence, Rome and Paris, producing works of considerable energy and inventiveness. With an oeuvre numbering over a thousand etchings, and many times more drawings, his drawings and prints have remained popular with collectors since the 18th century.

The elephant depicted in this charming drawing is probably one named Hansken, who was well known throughout Europe in the middle of the 17th century. Born in Ceylon in 1630, the elephant arrived in Amsterdam three years later, as a young animal, aboard a Dutch East India Company ship. For the next twenty-one years – between 1634 and 1655 – Hansken was displayed in cities in Holland, Germany, Poland, Russia, Denmark, France, Switzerland and Italy. He died in Florence in November 1655, and his skeleton is today on display in the Museo di Storia Naturale ‘La Specola’ in Florence.

Hansken was depicted in a number of drawings by Rembrandt, done in Amsterdam in 1637, and in several studies by Stefano della Bella, who may have first seen the creature in Paris and possibly also later in Holland. Della Bella also made a number of drawings of Hansken at the time of his death in Florence; one of these, inscribed and dated ‘Elefante morto in Firenze addi 9 di novembre 1655’, is in the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, while two further studies of the lifeless creature are in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Other drawings of an elephant by Della Bella are in the Albertina in Vienna and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; the latter is a preparatory study for an etching published in the late 1640s. A handful of other studies of the elephant and his handlers were included in an important album of drawings by Della Bella assembled in the 18th century and dispersed at auction in 1975.

The present sheet is thought to have been part of the huge collection of prints and drawings assembled by the 18th century French collector Gilbert Paignon-Dijonval (1708-1792). The collection, which included a very large number of drawings and etchings by Della Bella, was inherited by Paignon-Dijonval’s grandson, Charles-Gilbert Morel de Vindé (1759-1842), who sold it en bloc to the English art dealer Samuel Woodburn (1753-1853). Some years after Woodburn’s death, his collection of drawings was dispersed in two auctions in London in 1860. This drawing was one of several works acquired from the 1860 Woodburn sales by the French collector Charles Gasc (1818-after 1869).

£ 16,000

JOHANN WOLFGANG BAUMGARTNER

Ebbs 1702-1761 Augsburg

A Guardian Angel and a Child

Pen and black ink and grey wash, heightened with white, on blue paper. Inscribed Joh: Wolfgang Baumgärtner 1712-1761. / /Kufstein./ and B on the album page to which the present sheet was formerly attached.

139 x 87 mm. (5 1/2 x 3 3/8 in.)

Born in the Tyrol, Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner was the son of a blacksmith and one of the leading artists of the Rococo in Southern Germany. He began his career in Salzburg as a Hinterglasmalerei; painting decorative compositions on the reverse of glass panels. Although they were highly prized, very few of these precious works have survived. After travelling in Italy, Austria, Hungary and Bohemia, Baumgartner settled in 1731 in Augsburg. At first, however, he was only permitted to work as a Hinterglasmaler, although as he was the sole artist working in this technique in the Swabian imperial city, he achieved some renown. It was not until 1745, when he became a citizen of Augsburg and joined the local guild of painters, that Baumgartner began working in oil painting and fresco. His earliest known fresco dates from 1754, when he decorated the ceiling of the church of St. Jakobus in Gersthofen, for which he also painted several altarpieces. Established as one of the leading artists in Augsburg, Baumgartner painted numerous ceilings and frescoes for churches there and elsewhere in Southern Germany. He also worked for the Prince-Bishop Cardinal Franz Konrad von Rodt at the Neue Residenz at Meersburg, on Lake Constance, although further work there was left unfinished by his death from tuberculosis in September 1761.

Baumgartner is best known today as a draughtsman and designer of prints – ‘one of the most gifted designers for the print trade that Augsburg produced in a fertile period of graphic invention’, in the words of one modern scholar – although unusually he does not seem to have worked as a printmaker himself. Some 220 of his drawings have survived, most of which served as designs for prints, book illustrations or calendars for the three leading publishing houses in Augsburg of Klauber, Engelbrecht and Kilian. Baumgartner’s model drawings for engravings include allegorical, mythological and religious subjects, genre scenes, hunting themes and elegant pastoral subjects, as well as designs for Thesenblätter, or thesis frontispieces. Among his significant commissions as a book illustrator, Baumgartner provided some three hundred designs for the devotional work Tägliche Erbauung eines wahren Christen; a calendar illustrating each of the days of the year with an engraving of a different saint.

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

£ 6,000

NICOLAS-MARIE OZANNE

Brest 1728-1811 Paris

a. A Fortified Island with Shipping

Pen and black ink, with double framing lines in black ink. Laid down. Signed N. Ozanne in. et del. in the lower left margin.

126 x 216 mm. (5 x 8 1/2 in.) [image]

148 x 239 mm. (5 3/4 x 9 3/8 in.) [sheet]

b. Coastal Scene with Shipping at Anchor and a Ship on Stocks

Pen and black ink, with double framing lines in black ink. Laid down. Signed N. Ozanne in. et del. in the lower left margin.

125 x 217 mm. (4 7/8 x 8 1/2 in.) [image]

149 x 241 mm. (5 7/8 x 9 1/2 in.) [sheet]

From a young age, Nicolas Ozanne displayed a remarkable talent for observation and accurate technical reconstruction of naval vessels. He was apprenticed to a naval engineer in his hometown, the port city of Brest, and as a result enjoyed a thorough understanding of ships and naval architecture that was made manifest in his work as a painter and engraver. In 1744 his father died and the sixteen-year-old Nicolas took it upon himself to guide his brothers and sisters toward the study of fine arts, particularly in the field of printmaking. The Ozanne family would become a prominent artistic household, made up of draughtmen and engravers dedicated to the Navy. The young Ozanne was commissioned by King Louis XV to record his visit to Le Havre in 1749, and in the succeeding decade he assisted Claude-Joseph Vernet in his great series of paintings of the ports of France, commissioned by the King in 1753. In 1751 Ozanne settled in Paris when he was appointed dessinateur de la marine, royal draughtman for the Naval Department and tasked with working on views produced during Louis XV’s voyage to Le Havre a few years earlier. Between Paris and Versailles, Ozanne also devoted himself to the nautical instruction of the Dauphin of France and his brothers. It was in his role as dessinateur de la marine that Ozanne created, between 1762 and 1765, a famous series of plates depicting the principal ports of France, probably inspired by his voyages with Vernet, entitled Recueil des vues des ports de France

Ozanne did not limit himself to the ‘truth’ of his royal commissions and naval works but also engaged in creative exercises featuring capricci and fantasy landscapes, which do not correspond to identifiable places. In these imaginative scenes, the landscapes are often populated with figures engaging in port activities, creating a kind of idealization of naval life. The first of these drawings, A Fortified Island with Shipping, is unusual in Ozanne’s drawn oeuvre in taking place offshore, far from the Continental coasts. Mixing medieval fortifications with picturesque architecture, it depicts a fortress rising on a rocky promontory, where several circular towers punctuate the ramparts overlooking the sea. Several vessels – a lateen-rigged galley, a three-masted sailing ship and smaller boats – bring the scene to life. The precise use of black ink accentuates architectural and nautical details, such as the sea’s waves, enhancing the legibility of the composition. The second scene depicts a shoreline where a ship is under repair or construction, a more typical view among the artist’s drawings. The hull of the vessel has already been erected, supported by sturdy stocks, while workers bustle around it.

£ 950 each

NICOLAS-MARIE OZANNE

Brest 1728-1811 Paris

a. A Naval Shipyard

Pen and black ink, with double framing lines in black ink. Laid down. Signed N. Ozanne in. et del. in the lower left margin.

125 x 217 mm. (4 7/8 x 8 1/2 in.) [image]

145 x 240 mm. (5 3/4 x 9 1/2 in.) [sheet]

b. Coastal Scene with a Tower and a Ship on a Beach

Pen and black ink, with double framing lines in black ink. Laid down. Signed N. Ozanne in. et del. in the lower left margin.

125 x 218 mm. (4 7/8 x 8 5/8 in.) [image]

145 x 237 mm. (5 3/4 x 9 3/8 in.) [sheet]

Thanks to his travels onboard naval vessels exploring the French and European coasts, Nicolas Ozanne’s work combined technical precision with artistic clarity, and bear witness to French maritime power during the Enlightenment. Influenced by the works of François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire, as well as of the English engraver resident in Paris John Ingram, Ozanne refined his manner, particularly with regards to the foregrounds of his compositions, which became richer and more animated.

These two marine scenes belong to the same series of fictive drawings as the previous pair, aligning within the same narrative of daily port life. The first drawing represents a naval shipyard, in which a large cloud of smoke surrounds one of the ships under construction, possibly linked to woodworking for the vessel’s hull. The ships are depicted with a documentary precision, and indeed contemporary accounts of Ozanne praised his extensive knowledge of nautical art. This accuracy extends gracefully even to the reflections of the ships in the water.

The second landscape also depicts a coastal scene with a ship on the beach, while figures secure it to the ground in order to carry out repairs. Here too appears the same visual language as in the previous drawings, with persistent architecture and picturesque dimension, particularly noticeable in the treatment of the trees and the lightness of the figures animating the scenes.

£ 950 each

Attributed to CLAUDE-LOUIS DESRAIS

Paris 1746-1816 Paris

Study for a Frontispiece or Monument, with Allegorical Figures Surrounding an Oval Portrait of a Young Woman

Pen and black ink, over an underdrawing in black chalk, with framing lines in black ink. Laid down. Signed with the artist’s monogram LDR and dated 1767 at the lower centre, on the pedestal.

200 x 130 mm. (7 7/8 x 5 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Patrick Perrin, Paris (as Philibert-Benoît de La Rue); Private collection, Middlesex; Thence by descent.

The present sheet would appear to be a design for a monument in honour of a young woman, whose portrait is shown in an oval frame set on a pedestal, surmounted by angels and putti and flanked by, on the left, a male figure of Death and, at the right, an allegorical female figure with attributes that are, unfortunately, difficult to decipher. What appears to be the fragmentary ancient Greek marble statue known as the Belvedere torso appears at the lower right.

Drawings which bear a monogram of the three interlaced letters L, D and R have been traditionally thought to be by either the sculptor and engraver Louis-Félix de La Rue (17301777) or his elder brother, the painter Philibert-Benoît de La Rue (1718-1780), to whom the present sheet was formerly attributed. A pupil of Charles Parrocel, Philibert-Benoît de La Rue exhibited battle scenes, genre subjects, landscape and portraits at the Salons, and was agrée at the Académie Royale in 1754. Although the drawings of the two brothers have often been confused, an attribution of the present sheet to either Philibert-Benoît or Louis-Félix de La Rue is untenable when compared to autograph works by them. This drawing displays a freedom of line that differs from the more restrained linearity of studies by the de la Rue brothers.

The present sheet may instead be more plausibly attributed to another artist of the period, Claude-Louis Desrais, who employed a similar LDR monogram. A student at the Académie Royale from 1764, Desrais seems to have been active almost exclusively as a draughtsman. He received most of his artistic training in the studio of the battle painter Francesco Casanova, and between 1768 and 1772 exhibited his drawings at four of the annual Expositions de la Jeunesse, earning a measure of critical appreciation. After spending much of his early career working in a neoclassical style, he eventually abandoned this manner to become, as one scholar has noted, ‘one of the most sought-after illustrators of the last third of the eighteenth century, specializing, even under the Empire, in fashion plates, portraits of famous men and military and historical scenes.’

In an article published in 1984, Anne Leclair convincingly attributed nine drawings – each signed with a similar monogram LDR and variously dated between 1767 and 1769 – to Desrais, based on a stylistic comparison with a signed drawing of 1769. One of these drawings, an Allegory in Honour of King Stanislas Leczynski today in the Art Institute of Chicago, is particularly comparable to the present sheet in subject, style and execution. Both this drawing and that in Chicago may therefore be placed within an early and still relatively obscure period in the career of Claude-Louis Desrais.

£ 3,000

FRENCH SCHOOL

18th Century

An Offering in a Temple

Pen and brown ink and red wash. Circular. Laid down on a 19th century mount, with framing lines in black ink. Inscribed Schafers Cat. No 269 at the lower left of the mount. 140 mm. (5 1/2 in.) diameter.

PROVENANCE: Benjamin Wolff, Engelholm, Denmark (Lugt 420); Thence by descent in the Wolff-Sneedorf family until 2018.

This refined 18th century French drawing exemplifies the Neoclassical taste that dominated academic art in the later decades of the Enlightenment. Executed in pen and brown ink with a delicate reddish wash, the composition demonstrates linear control and tonal modulation. The subject matter, a solemn offering before an altar in a grand classical interior, aligns with the period’s fascination with antiquity and morality drawn from Greco-Roman history and mythology. The draped figures in idealized poses, within an architectural interior of columns and domed ceiling, evoke the splendour of ancient Rome.

The firm yet graceful contours, the sculptural modelling of bodies and the compositional balance recall the work of Augustin Pajou (1730-1809), one of the leading sculptors of the French Neoclassical movement. Pajou won the Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1748 and was agréé at the Académie Royale in 1759 and reçu the following year, at the age of thirty. He produced portrait busts, religious sculptures and funerary monuments, as well as small-scale terracotta statuettes and reliefs. A gifted teacher, he was appointed an assistant professor of sculpture at the Académie Royale in 1762 and a full professor in 1766.

Pajou was an exceptional draughtsman and produced highly refined drawings in red chalk for his sculptural works, as well as a number of finished composition drawings intended for collectors and sometimes shown at the Salons. (In a review of the 1773 Salon, his draughtsmanship was praised as ‘recalling the noble style of Poussin; the architecture is rendered with taste, the groups are well arranged and the general effect is finely expressed.’) In addition, during his period of study as a pensionnaire at the Académie de France in Rome between 1752 and 1756, Pajou made numerous pen and ink drawings after Greek and Roman antiquities in Rome and Naples, as well copies after works by Renaissance and Baroque masters.

The tondo framing of the present drawing echoes classical medallion formats, and is characteristic of preparatory drawings intended for commemorative medals and tokens. In the early 1770s, Pajou created a series of such designs for medals and tokens, the majority of which are in black chalk. Amongst these is a large sheet commemorating the royal visit to Cherbourg, in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and another design commemorating the birth of the Dauphin de France, which appeared at auction in 2003.

£ 4,000

Attributed to JEAN-JACQUES LAGRENÉE

Paris 1739-1821 Paris

An Angel in Mourning Before a Funerary Monument

Pen and black ink and grey wash, extensively heightened with white, on blue prepared paper. Inscribed in Latin and dated minibus Sororis dilectis / frater moereus hoc mon / monumentum fit anno / 1783 at the lower right. 408 x 262 mm. (16 1/8 x 10 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Paris.

A pupil of his elder brother, Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, called Lagrenée l’aîné, Jean-Jacques Lagrenée studied at the École Royale Des Élèves Protégés. In 1760 he accompanied his brother to Saint Petersburg, where Louis had been appointed painter at the court of the Empress Catherine the Great. The two brothers remained in Russia until 1762, when they returned to Paris. In 1765 Jean-Jacques left for Rome, where he spent four years and developed a particular love of classical art, making an intensive study of ancient Roman wall paintings and decorations. He produced a number of drawings of frieze-like compositions of antique vases, armour and objects, and several of these were published in 1765 as Fragments d’antiquités. He also established a reputation as a painter of decorative ceiling paintings, winning a commission in 1768 to decorate the Palazzo Senatorio.

Soon after his return to Paris in 1769, Lagrenée was tasked with a cycle of paintings for the abbey of Montmartre. He also painted history subjects and ceiling paintings for the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre and at the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Admitted into the Académie Royale in 1775, Lagrenée exhibited paintings and drawings of historical and Biblical subjects at the Salons between 1771 and 1804. His also served as the artistic director of the Sèvres porcelain factory between 1785 and 1800, for whom he created numerous designs, notably the Etruscan service for Marie-Antoinette’s dairy at Rambouillet. He also produced a large number of etchings. After 1805, however, Lagrenée seems to have stopped exhibiting, and he ended his career in relative obscurity. While comparatively few paintings by the artist are known today, a significant group of drawings is in the Louvre.

As Benjamin Peronnet has pointed out, Lagrenée ‘copied antiquity or rather reinterpreted it in his own way throughout his career...Lagrenée’s antiquity, like his mythological or historical scenes, is attractive and arranged in a picturesque and especially decorative way.’ In his drawings, Lagrenée was fond of applying highlights in gold, often on prepared paper washed brown or a deep blue. As Victor Carlson has noted, ‘One of the most delightful aspects of Lagrenée’s art is his chiaroscuro drawings on blue paper, where the support is tinted with gouache or watercolour... creating a ground against which the figures are defined with black ink and white highlights. This combination of media is used to evoke a scintillating play of light over surfaces...The fact that highly finished chiaroscuro drawings...can be found throughout Europe at this time is one aspect of the growing preference for drawings as independent works of art.’ Lagrenée rarely signed his highlyfinished drawings, which were nevertheless much sought-after by collectors.

The Latin inscription on the present sheet may be approximately translated as ‘To his beloved sister, a grieving brother erected this monument in the year 1783.’

£ 4,500

ALEXANDER POPE

Cork 1763-1835 London

Portrait of a Lady, possibly Sophia Raikes

Pencil, pen and black ink and watercolour, heightened with touches of white, with framing lines in pencil and within a fictive drawn mount. Signed and dated A. Pope / 1805 at the lower right.

280 x 206 mm. (11 x 8 1/8 in.) [image]

324 x 260 mm. (12 3/4 x 10 1/4 in.) [including drawn mount]

PROVENANCE: Agnew’s, London, in 1919; Private collection.

LITERATURE: R. R. M. See, ‘Alexander Pope’, The Connoisseur, November 1919, p.136 and illustrated p.139.

Alexander Pope was born into an Irish family of artists and by 1776 was enrolled at the Dublin Art School, exhibiting portraits at the Society of Artists in Dublin in 1777 and 1780. In his early 20’s he settled in London, exhibiting at the Royal Academy between 1785 and 1821. A talented portrait painter, draughtsman and miniaturist, Pope was a professional actor. As an early 20th century writer noted of Pope, ‘He was endowed with good looks and a graceful bearing, and had, moreover, a voice of fine quality…He continued his portrait work during this period, and many of his sitters were, naturally, his confrères of the stage…it may be said that his theatrical success in no way led him to abandon his career as a professional portraitist, but rather rendered more wide and varied the circle of acquaintances from whom he formed his clientele.’

As the scholar R. R. M. See has noted of this fine portrait drawing, in an article, published in 1919, in which it was reproduced as a full-page illustration, ‘There is a wistful charm, as well as great vitality, in the…drawing reproduced in these pages…[is] signed and dated 1805. The lady represented in the midst of the landscape is very possibly [Pope’s] friend, Mrs. Raikes.’ The sitter has been tentatively identified as Mrs. Thomas Raikes, née Sophia Maria Bayly (1771-1822), the daughter of Jamaican plantation owner Nathaniel Bayly. In May 1802, three years before the date of this sheet, Sophia had married the merchant banker and diarist Thomas Raikes the Younger (1777-1848). Raikes is mostly remembered as a dandy and as one of the most prominent social figures of the time, and his journal, edited and published after his death, is an interesting account of London in those years. Sophia Raikes bore four children before her death in April 1810, at the age of thirty-nine.

The present sheet is very similar in pose and composition, with its depiction of a woman standing against a column, to a full-length watercolour portrait by Pope of Lady Frances Herbert Ducie. Another stylistically comparable watercolour of the same year is a Portrait of a Mother and Child, signed and dated 1805, while also similar in pose and setting is an 1806 drawing of the businessman and corn merchant William Gillies. As See has pointed out, ‘Alexander Pope’s chief qualities lie in his delicacy of colour, his exact and pretty drawing, his elegant and refined composition. With his perfect understanding as to the handling or [sic] pencil and watercolour brush, he combined a keen perception of the surest method of pleasing his sitters and their friends, for it is obvious that he sets out not so much to convey an unflattering likeness as to give a pleasing picture, an end which he achieves to perfection...he undoubtedly occupies a very prominent position among the draughtsmen and portrait painters of his day.’

£ 7,000

Circle of GIUSEPPE CADES

Rome 1750-1799 Rome

Recto: The Struggle of Hercules and Apollo over the Tripod of Delphi, with Artemis, Leto and Athena

Verso: Prometheus Shaping a Man from Clay

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over traces of an underdrawing in black chalk. Inscribed Gius. Cades. and Joseph Cadese. Col de Spengler 1839 No. 76. on the old mount. 212 x 319 mm. (8 3/8 x 12 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Johan Conrad Spengler, Copenhagen (Lugt 1434); His posthumous sale, Copenhagen, 8 October 1839 onwards, lot 76; Benjamin Wolff, Engelholm, Denmark (Lugt 420); Thence by descent in the Wolff-Sneedorf family, until 2018.

The obscure subject of the recto of this double-sided drawing is the struggle between Hercules and Apollo over the Delphic tripod, a popular theme in ancient Greek vase painting. Hercules had journeyed to the oracle at Delphi to ask the priestesses there to help cure him of a painful disease. But when he was denied an oracle because he had recently committed a murder and was considered impure, in his anger he decided to steal the sacred tripod in order to use it to establish his own oracle elsewhere. Apollo, as patron and protector of the oracle at Delphi, intervened to prevent Hercules from stealing the tripod. The two began to wrestle over it, with Apollo aided by his twin sister Artemis and mother Leto and Hercules by his patron Athena. The struggle over the tripod became so violent that it had to be ended by Zeus, who threw a thunderbolt to separate the warring gods and demigods.

The verso of the present sheet depicts the Titan Prometheus shaping mankind out of mud and water and molding them in the form of the gods. The goddess Athena then breathed life into the clay figures, bringing the first humans to life.

Although the present sheet has long been attributed to the 18th century Roman painter Giuseppe Cades, Maria Teresa Carracciolo has rejected this attribution. The drawing bears the collector’s marks – both in form of drystamps – of two eminent Danish collectors of drawings. The curator and art historian Johan Conrad Spengler (1767-1839) succeeded his father as the director of the Royal Collection in Copenhagen. Spengler began buying drawings in 1819 and eventually assembling one of the largest private collections in Denmark. While his Danish drawings were left to the state, the rest of the collection, amounting to around 1,640 works by Italian, French, Dutch, German and English artists, was sold at auction a few months after his death. This drawing was acquired at the 1839 sale of Spengler’s collection by the collector Benjamin Wolff (1790-1866). Wolff studied law in Copenhagen before settling in Calcutta, where he worked for an English trading house. He returned to Denmark in 1829, and the following year purchased the large estate of Engelholm, southwest of Copenhagen. Over the course of some thirty years, Wolff assembled a collection of over two thousand drawings by Danish and European artists ranging in date from the 16th century to the 19th century. Following the collector’s death in 1866, his collection of drawings, largely unpublished and little known to scholars, remained with his descendants for over 150 years.

£ 9,000

PIETRO ANTONIO NOVELLI

Venice 1729-1804 Venice

Diana the Huntress

Pen and black ink and black and grey wash, with framing lines in black ink. 124 x 93 mm. (4 7/8 x 3 5/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Carlo Prayer, Milan (Lugt 2044); Juan and Felix Bernasconi, Milan; By descent to their sister Maria Bernasconi, Villa Argentina, Mendrisio, Canton Ticino, Switzerland; By family descent to Alfonso Bernasconi Peluffo, Buenos Aires; His wife, Marià Elvira Celia Méndez de Bernasconi, Buenos Aires, by 1977 (Lugt 5374), with her signature and the date 1977 on the verso; Hill-Stone, New York; Private collection.

The outlines of Pietro Antonio Novelli’s long career are known through his posthumously published memoirs, which appeared thirty years after his death. Trained in the studio of Giambattista Pittoni, he also came under the influence of Gaspare Diziani and Francesco Guardi, while his earliest paintings show the influence of Jacopo Amigoni. Among his early documented works are a set of illustrations for an edition of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and several plates for a complete edition of Carlo Goldoni’s Commedie. In 1768 Novelli was accepted as a member of the Accademia in Venice, submitting an Allegory of the Arts as a reception piece. Novelli painted frescoes in several Venetian palaces, including that of the Corniani-Tivan, Mangilli, Mocenigo and Sangiatoffetti families, and also painted altarpieces and decorative frescoes in Udine, Padua and Bologna, as well as in Venice. Among the artist’s patrons was Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. By 1779 Novelli had settled in Rome, where he worked for most of the next twenty years, and where he came under the influence of Neoclassicism. During his years in Rome he completed a ceiling painting of Cupid and Psyche for the Villa Borghese and received commissions for the decoration of several Roman palaces. The last years of his career were spent in Venice.

Novelli is best known today for his drawings. He was an inventive and versatile draughtsman, and, as one contemporary source noted, ‘The drawings and painted works by Novelli showed not just a profound knowledge, but also a supreme degree of fantasy, and I myself saw him change in ten and more ways the same subject.’ His many and varied drawings, executed in pen and ink, watercolour and, more rarely, red chalk, include studies for paintings and altarpieces, as well as a significant number of designs for book illustrations, prints and frontispieces.

Another drawing by Novelli of the goddess Diana – a more fully developed composition showing her seated full-length in a landscape and with a hunting dog at her side – was on the art market in New York in 2014. A larger drawing in pen and brown ink of a young woman in a similar pose, although without the attributes of the goddess Diana, appeared at auction in Paris in 2004.

The present sheet bears the mark of the 19th century Milanese collector Captain Carlo Prayer (1826-1900) and was later in the collection of the brothers Juan (1862-1920) and Felix Bernasconi (1860-1914), prominent Milanese industrialists who formed an impressive collection of paintings and drawings.

£ 2,500

MAURO GANDOLFI

Bologna 1764-1834 Bologna

An Elegantly Dressed Young Woman Wearing a Hat

Brush with grey ink and grey wash, on vellum.

311 x 254 mm. (12 1/4 x 10 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2003.

Unlike his father Gaetano and uncle Ubaldo, Mauro Gandolfi enjoyed a relatively brief career as a painter, and only a few paintings by him survive. In his manuscript autobiography, published posthumously in 1841, he noted that he learned to draw by copying his father’s drawings, and it remains as a draughtsman that he is best known. After training in his father’s studio, Mauro left Bologna for France in 1782, at the age of eighteen, returning to Italy five years later. He also spent a number of years in France later in his career. Indeed, his work can be seen to be a blend of the Bolognese tradition inherited from his father and uncle with the Neoclassical manner prevalent in late 18th century France. Mauro’s first independent works of any significance are two altarpieces painted in 1791 for the church of San Domenico in Ferrara. By 1794 he had been elected to the Accademia Clementina in Bologna, where he was later appointed professor of figure drawing. As the scholar Mimi Cazort has pointed out, however, ‘Mauro Gandolfi remains an enigma in the sense that he was clearly, on the basis of his little extant work and his extensive unpublished writing, a man of enormous talent, intelligence and sophistication…[However,] he was living in times not conducive to the making of original works of art. The art market was in severe decline when he was coming to maturity, and he tells us that from 1797 to 1799 he received not one commission for paintings.’

Mauro seems to have largely abandoned painting around the turn of the century in favour of working as a reproductive engraver. Many of his prints were after paintings by his father, although he also produced engravings after the work of such contemporaries as Pelagio Palagi as well as earlier artists like Guido Reni. In 1816 Mauro paid a visit to America, spending several months in New York and Philadelphia. His fame as a reproductive printmaker led to a commission to engrave John Trumbull’s painting of The Signing of the Declaration of Independence in the Capitol, though he turned it down. In an account of his travels in America, written in 1822, he notes that he brought with him finished drawings to sell. On his return to Italy Mauro worked briefly in Florence before settling in Milan. Much of his work was in the form of highly finished drawings and watercolours intended for sale to collectors, as well as designs for engravings. He returned to Bologna for good in 1823 and died there in impoverished circumstances in 1834.

As Cazort has noted, ‘the characteristic features of Mauro’s drawings [are] an elegant refinement of line, precision of detail, and certain stylistic conceits for the rendering of hands and faces.’ Drawn on vellum, the present sheet may be a study for a lithograph or engraving but is equally likely to have been done as an independent work of art for sale to a collector. It can be related to a handful of highly-finished drawings and watercolours, usually executed on vellum, that Mauro produced for a sophisticated clientele in the first quarter of the 19th century. In many of these late works, the artist adopted this sort of vignette composition, with large areas of paper left untouched on all sides.

£ 6,000

PAUL HUET

Paris 1803-1869 Paris

A Lake in the Mountains

Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil.

140 x 188 mm. (5 1/2 x 7 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: In the artist’s studio at the time of his death, with the Huet atelier stamp (Lugt 1268) at the lower right; By descent in the family of the artist; Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s South Kensington, 15 December 2000, lot 204; Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London, in 2001; Private collection.

In 1820, while training in the studio of Baron Gros at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paul Huet befriended a fellow student, the young Englishman Richard Parkes Bonington. Huet, who was engaged in the practice of plein-air sketching like all of Gros’s students, learned the English manner of watercolour technique from Bonington. At around the same time, he also came into contact with another young painter, Eugène Delacroix, who shared a studio in Paris with Bonington. Delacroix had admired Huet’s watercolours in a shop window and was to remain a lifelong friend. The landscape paintings of John Constable, which were a revelation to the young artist when they were first exhibited in France at the Salon of 1824, were to play a pivotal role as an early artistic influence for Huet. Following his Salon debut in 1827, Huet accompanied Bonington on a sketching tour of the Normandy coast. This was to be the first of his extensive travels throughout France, and the artist was to return often to Normandy, the Auvergne and Provence, as well as forests of Compiègne and Fontainebleau, closer to Paris. Wherever he went, he made numerous drawings and sketches in pencil, pastel and watercolour, all imbued with a remarkable feeling for light and colour. Much of Huet’s work remained with his family after his death, with only a part of this studio inventory dispersed at auction in 1878.

As one modern scholar has noted, ‘Less well known than his friends Delacroix and Bonington, Paul Huet was nevertheless a major force in French landscape. He had a long career and the support of the critics of his generation. Like Corot, he pursued his dream, never abandoning his early worship of nature, essentially unaffected by changing tastes and contemporary movements; yet these same movements, the Barbizon painters, the Impressionists, are indebted to him as a leader in the naturalistic landscape development…[Huet’s watercolours] represent…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… 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. The testimony of many of his contemporaries bears this out. They all agreed that Paul Huet was a poet.’

This atmospheric watercolour is likely to be a view of a lake in the valley of the Auvergne –possibly the Lac de Guéry in Puy-de-Dôme – and may be dated to around 1833. A landscape watercolour of what may be the same view is in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, while a further related watercolour was formerly in the Pierre Miquel collection and appeared at auction in Paris in 2004.

£ 3,000

PANCRACE BESSA

Paris 1772-1846 Ecouen

Snapdragons

Watercolour, with touches of gouache, over a pencil underdrawing. Numbered No 12 in pencil at the lower left. Signed P. Bessa on the verso.

434 x 306 mm. (17 1/8 x 12 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 21 January 2003, lot 106.

EXHIBITED: Los Angeles, L. A. Louver, The Flower Show, 2023.

Among the leading painters of flowers and fruit in the first half of the 19th century in France, Pancrace Bessa was a pupil of the Dutch floral painter, draughtsman and engraver Gerard van Spaendonck. He was also influenced by the work of his older contemporary, the noted Belgian botanical painter Pierre-Joseph Redouté, with whom he also studied. (Bessa was in fact one of only a handful of men to do so, since Redouté’s pupils were mostly women). Bessa probably accompanied Redouté as part of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 and later collaborated with him on the illustrations for François-André Michaux’s Arbres forestiers de l’Amérique septentrionale, published between 1810 and 1813, and Aimé Bonpland’s Description des plantes rares cultivées à Malmaison et à Navarre, which appeared in 1813. In 1808 Bessa published his first work under his own name alone; a series of twenty-four stipple engravings entitled Fleurs et Fruits gravés et coloriés sur les peintures aquarelles faites d’après nature. His most important commission, however, was for a series of 572 watercolours on vellum for JeanClaude-Michel Mordant de Launay’s Herbier général de l’amateur, commissioned by Charles X, King of France, and the most significant French flower periodical of the day. Published in eight volumes, the project was begun in 1816 and the artist worked on the series until 1827. Bessa’s beautiful watercolours were superbly reproduced for the book, in the form of handcoloured engravings by various printmakers.

As highly regarded in his day as both van Spaendonck and Redouté, Bessa was, however, less prolific than either. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the patronage and protection of the Duchesse de Berri, to whom he was appointed flower painter and drawing master in 1820, and also worked for the Empress Joséphine. In 1823 he was commissioned by the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle to produce studies of flowers on vellum, succeeding Redouté in this role. Bessa exhibited at the Salons between 1806 and 1831, when he retired to Ecouen.

Bessa’s works were in great demand among wealthy French, royal and foreign collectors. As the contemporary French writer on art Charles Paul Landon noted in 1810, ‘So far as flower and fruit pieces are concerned, there seems to be a strong competition between Redouté and Bessa, being both equally talented, hard-working and successful.’ A modern scholar adds, ‘[Bessa] stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries...his sense of floral structure and the vitality of his watercolours are no doubt due to Redouté’s teaching and influence...his sincere, straightforward approach qualifies him as an artist of considerable charm.’

£ 4,000

ISIDORE PILS

Paris 1813-1875 Douarnenez

A Young Man with a Hat

Watercolour, heightened with touches of white gouache, over a pencil underdrawing. Signed I Pils at the lower right.

275 x 216 mm. (10 7/8 x 8 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Annamaria Edelstein, London, in 1992; Private collection; Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 January 2007, lot 689A; Galerie de Bayser, Paris; Private collection, Paris.

Born into a family of artists, Isidore-Alexandre-Augustin Pils was a student of François-Edouard Picot at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He won the Prix de Rome in 1838 with a painting of Saint Peter Healing a Cripple and spent the next five years in Italy, until 1843. The early part of his career was taken up with mostly religious subjects, several of which were exhibited at the Salons, although after the Crimean war, in which he acted as an observer, he began to paint military scenes. His success as a military painter led to further commissions, including a number of paintings for Napoleon III. Pils was also interested in scenes from modern history, exemplified by his famous painting of Rouget de Lisle Singing the ‘Marseillaise’, exhibited to popular acclaim at the Salon of 1849. One of the artist’s most important paintings, Soldiers Distributing Bread and Soup to the Poor, was commissioned by the State for the sum of 4,000 francs and was exhibited at the Salon of 1852 but is now lost. In 1857 a large canvas of a major Crimean episode, The Passage of the River Alma, was commissioned for Versailles. Pils also executed a number of paintings for Parisian churches, notably the decoration of the chapel of Saint André in the church of Saint Eustache, painted between 1849 and 1852 and still in situ. In 1855 he began exhibiting watercolours at the Salons and was soon established as one of the foremost practitioners of the medium in France. At the Salon of 1861 his Battle of Alma won a grand medal, and in 1864 he was appointed a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, while four years later he was admitted to the Institut. The following year Pils was commissioned by the architect Charles Garnier to contribute to the mural decoration of the Opéra, where he painted the vast ceiling above the grand staircase, which was only completed shortly before his death.

Probably drawn in Italy, early in the artist’s career, this portrait of an unidentified young man speaks to the artist’s interest and sympathy for the common people. In many of his works, Pils paid particular attention to the representation of women, children and adolescents, something that firmly established him as one of the most prominent realist painters of his generation. Drawing played an important part in Pils’ creative process, as he made numerous drawings and oil sketches in preparation for each of his paintings and particularly for individual figures within each composition.

A previous owner of this drawing was Annamaria Edelstein, née Succi (1935-2024). Of Milanese origins, she began her career at Sotheby’s in London and subsequently established herself as a renowned dealer and collector of Old Master drawings. In 1974 she was given the task of innovatively beating inflation for the British Rail Pension Fund by investing £40m (some 3% of the total fund) in more than 2,400 artworks.

£ 4,500

ALEXANDRE HESSE

Paris 1806-1879 Paris

The Head of a Man Looking Down

Black and red chalk, with touches of white heightening, on blue paper. 130 x 100 mm. (5 1/8 x 3 7/8 in.) at greatest dimensions.

PROVENANCE: The studio of the artist, Paris; Galerie Pierre Gaubert, Paris, in 1979 (with the gallery’s Hesse studio stamp [Lugt 5768] on the verso); Arnold Klein Gallery, Royal Oak, Michigan; Frederick J. Cummings, Detroit and New York; Eric G. Carlson, New York.

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Pierre Gaubert, Alexandre Hesse 1806-1879: Quelques aspects du portraitiste et du dessinateur, 1979, no.9.

Jean-Baptiste-Alexandre Hesse received his artistic training from his father, the painter and miniaturist Henri Joseph Hesse, and Jean-Victor Bertin, before entering the Ecole des BeauxArts in Paris in 1821. In 1830 he made his first visit to Italy, and his experiences in Venice inspired his painting of The Funeral of Titian, which won a first-class medal at the Salon in 1833. In 1836 he received a State commission for a painting of The Body of Henry V Brought Back to the Louvre after his Assassination, intended for the Galerie d’Apollon of the Louvre and today at Versailles, as are two further paintings from French history commissioned for the Salle des Croisades. Hesse lived and worked in Rome between 1842 and 1847, and on his return devoted much of his career to providing paintings for Parisian churches, including SaintSéverin, Saint-Sulpice and Saint-Gervais. He also worked at provincial churches in Avranches and Chevry-en-Sereine, and between 1868 and 1870 decorated the ceiling of the Bourse de Commerce in Lyon. Hesse exhibited at the Salons until 1861, and in 1867 was nominated to the Institut de France. His last significant commission, for the decoration of a chapel in the church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, was left unfinished at his death in 1879.

The present sheet is a study for the head of a monk at the lower left corner of Hesse’s mural of Le Miracle des Ardents (The Miracle of the Burning) in the chapel of Sainte-Geneviève in the Parisian church of Saint-Séverin. The first of Hesse’s major church commissions, begun in 1850 when he was forty-four years old, the decoration of the chapel with four scenes from the life of Saint Geneviève was completed in 1852. The painting of Le Miracle des Ardents, on the upper register of the right-hand wall of the chapel, takes as its subject an episode in the medieval history of Paris. In 1129 an epidemic of a severe, burning fever – the mal des ardents (‘fire sickness’), also known as ‘St. Anthony’s fire’, which was often fatal – struck the population of the city. The Bishop of Paris and the Abbot of Sainte-Geneviève carried a reliquary with the mortal remains of Saint Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, in procession throughout the streets of the city, and whoever touched the reliquary were miraculously cured. The following year Pope Innocent II recognized the event as a miracle and established a feast day on the 26th of November each year to commemorate the event.

Five preparatory studies for various figures in Le Miracle des Ardents are among the large group of around five hundred drawings by Hesse left at his death to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Two further studies for figures in the same mural painting were exhibited alongside the present sheet in 1979.

£ 5,500

FRANÇOIS BONVIN

Vaugirard 1817-1887 Saint Germain-en-Laye

Still Life with Two Books and a Candle

Black chalk, with stumping, on buff paper. Signed f. Bonvin. 2 at the lower right and dated 3 Xbre 1879 at the lower left.

361 x 263 mm. (14 1/4 x 10 3/8 in.)

François Bonvin studied at the Ecole de Dessin in Paris between 1828 and 1830 but had to abandon his studies to begin work as a typesetter and printer. His earliest known works date from the late 1830s, by which time Bonvin was also working as a police clerk. He eventually returned to his studies at the Ecole de Dessin and in 1843 began attending life-drawing classes at the Académie Suisse. It was at around this time that he met the painter François-Marius Granet, who encouraged him to study 17th century Dutch and Flemish painting as a way of refining his approach to genre subjects. Perhaps with the support of Granet, who was on the jury, Bonvin made his Salon debut in 1847, and he continued to show there until 1880, earning a particular reputation as a painter of genre and interior scenes and still-lifes.

Bonvin rose to become one of the leaders of a group of Realist painters who found inspiration in subjects and scenes taken from contemporary urban life. In 1859 a number of his paintings were accepted at the Salon, though Realist works by such friends and colleagues as Henri Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legros, Théodule Ribot and James McNeill Whistler were rejected. As a result, Bonvin invited these artists to exhibit their rejected works at his studio, an offer repeated after the Salon of 1863. Later that year his wife left him, and he found it difficult to concentrate on his paintings, preferring instead to make drawings. In his final years Bonvin grew blind and suffered from paralysis. Although a retrospective exhibition of his work was held in 1886, followed a few months later by a benefit auction intended to raise funds for a pension for the artist, Bonvin died in impoverished circumstances in 1887.

In the last decade of his life, beset by poor health, Bonvin began to focus in particular on still life subjects. An accomplished still life painter, he preferred to depict humble household or kitchen objects in a manner inspired by the example of the 18th century painter Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, whose work he greatly admired. As a visitor to Bonvin’s studio noted, ‘When you penetrate into the interior, you think you have been transported into another world: furniture in rough wood, clay pitchers, copper cauldrons, frying pans – objects of all kinds were littered across the floor in the midst of vegetables and baskets of fruits: these were the artist’s props.’

Drawn on what was, for Bonvin, a fairly large sheet of paper, this still life is dated the 3rd of October 1879. That year was not a particularly productive one for the artist, who was often ill and overwhelmed by physical pain. The artist remained largely confined to his home and chose to depict the mundane objects that surrounded him. Only a handful of dated paintings and drawings, almost all of still life subjects and of modest dimensions, survive from this year. One of these, a small black chalk drawing of a similar subject of a candle and a book alongside a pair of scissors, today in a private collection, was drawn three days after the present sheet.

£ 9,500

FRANÇOIS CLÉMENT SOMMIER, called HENRY SOMM

Rouen 1844-1907 Paris

La Japonaise

Watercolour, with pen and black ink. Signed Hy. Somm at the lower right. 208 x 163 mm. (8 1/4 x 6 3/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s South Kensington, 3 June 1992, lot 25; Private collection.

After studying at the École Municipale de Dessin in Rouen, François Clément Sommier, known professionally as Henry Somm, settled in Paris in the late 1860s, where he trained briefly with Isidore Pils. He enjoyed a successful career as an illustrator and draughtsman, contributing to such popular journals as Le Monde parisien, Tout-Paris and L’Illustration Nouvelle, as well as supplying illustrations for books like Jacques Olivier’s Alphabet de l’imperfection et malice de femmes, published in 1876. Somm was also active as a graphic designer, providing menus, theatre programs, invitations and announcements for the many fashionable events of Belle Epoque Paris. He also produced visiting cards and bookplates, as well as designs for plates for the Haviland porcelain factory. At the invitation of Edgar Degas, Somm took part in the fourth Impressionist exhibition of 1879, showing two prints and a drawing. The 1880s found Somm among a group of artists associated with the cabaret Le Chat Noir in Paris, for whose eponymous journal he published reviews and articles. Somm’s finished drawings are often related to his more commercial work as an illustrator for magazines or books. In the latter part of his career, he was chiefly employed by the periodical Le Rire. Required to provide several drawings for each issue, his draughtsmanship became both more economical in line and more self-assured. A gifted and prolific draughtsman, Somm is thought to have produced over 7,500 drawings during a career that lasted some thirty years before his death in 1907.

Like several of his contemporaries, Somm developed a fascination with Japan. He studied the Japanese language and in the early 1870s had planned a trip to Japan that was abandoned with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. He was friendly with the pioneering ‘Japoniste’ art critic and collector Philippe Burty and often used oriental motifs in his work. Indeed, Somm became one of the earliest artistic exponents of Japonisme, his work in this genre first developed in his illustrations accompanying a series of articles by Burty under the general title of ‘Japonisme’, published in the magazine L’Art in 1875 and 1876.

The present sheet may be included among a group of vibrant watercolours by Somm of women in Japanese dress, several of which depict the subject in a nearly identical pose to that of the woman in this drawing. As the Somm scholar Elizabeth Menon has noted of the artist, ‘His fascination with Japanese art is manifested in countless drawings, watercolors, and etchings that depict Japanese geishas, street scenes, and gardens, as well as Oriental objets d’art…Several watercolors painted in the 1880s depict women in Japanese dress and some appear to be geishas – women trained to sing and dance for the pleasure of men. Somm’s fascination and glorification of the Japanese woman appears to be a reaction against the “modern female”, who emerged during the belle époque ’

£ 5,000

FRANZ SKARBINA

Berlin 1849-1910 Berlin

Sheet of Studies of a Ceremonial Uniform and Hat

Watercolour and gouache, heightened with touches of silver and gold. Extensively inscribed in German. Further inscribed and dated Zeichnung [?] Jahren 1888 / ob Franz Skarbina on the old mount.

209 x 251 mm. (8 1/4 x 9 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Weimar.

A painter of landscapes, genre scenes and city views, Franz Skarbina studied at Akademie der bildenden Künste in Berlin between 1865 and 1869. In 1878 he had his first public success with a large, sensational and somewhat macabre painting of a recent suicide, a rope still around his neck, returning to life and waking up among the corpses in the Berlin morgue. Around 1881 Skarbina was appointed a professor of anatomical drawing at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in Berlin, although 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 also spent a year in Paris between 1885 and 1886, and his paintings of Parisian streets are particularly fine examples of the interest in urban life that would carry through into his paintings of Berlin in later years. He was appointed a Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin in 1888 and in 1891 his painting Promenade in Karlsbad won a gold medal at the Internationalen Kunstaustellung exhibition in Berlin. The following year he became a founder member of the Gruppe der XI. Skarbina later joined the nascent Berlin Secession movement in 1899 and exhibited with the group between 1899 and 1901. In 1905 he won a gold medal in Berlin for an engraving of The Imperial Palace in Berlin on a Winter Afternoon

As the German critic and art historian Franz Servaes, writing in an English magazine in 1901, noted of Skarbina, ‘This artist is surprisingly versatile. There is no phase of modern painting which he has not tried with success...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.’ A memorial exhibition of Skarbina’s work – numbering over 220 paintings, watercolors, gouaches, pastels and prints – was held at the Königliche Akademie der Künste in Berlin a few months after his death in 1910. Much of the contents of the artist’s estate, however, were destroyed during the Second World War.

The influence of Skarbina’s fellow artist Adolph Menzel is evident in much of his work. Like Menzel, Skarbina was particularly interested in depictions of city life in Berlin and fashionable resorts, 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. He was also a superb watercolourist and may be said to have been arguably the finest master of the medium working in the Berlin of his day.

£ 3,000

EMILIE MEDIZ-PELIKAN

Vöcklabruck 1861-1908 Dresden

Park Landscape, Dresden

Pencil, black chalk and pastel, with touches of white heightening. Signed, dated and inscribed E. Pelikan 2 April 96 Dresden at the lower right. Further inscribed “Parklandschaft” / Dresden / N. 442 on the verso.

311 x 513 mm. (12 1/4 x 20 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of Karl Mediz and Emilie Mediz-Pelikan, Dresden; By descent to their daughter, Gertrude Honzatko-Mediz, Zurich; Probably Kurt Kalb, Vienna; Private collection.

In 1888 Emilie Pelikan visited the artists’ colony in Dachau, where she first met the younger Viennese painter Karl Mediz. The two artists were married in Vienna in 1891 and Emilie MedizPelikan worked closely alongside her husband, with whom she made regular sketching trips to the Tyrol, Northern Italy and the Adriatic coast. In one of the only contemporary accounts of their work to be published in English, the British-Austrian art historian Amelia Sarah Levetus wrote that ‘These two artists are man and wife; they have wandered in many places together, over the highest mountains and across glaciers, on the banks of deep rivers and on their pilgrimages have painted scenery and portraits and everything else between...Frau Mediz-Pelikan also has immense energy, combined with poetry of expression more delicate than that of her husband; she loves to paint lavenders and silver greys, to bring out the very depths of that which she is depicting.’ Both Emilie Mediz-Pelikan and Karl Mediz participated in the inaugural Vienna Secession exhibition of 1898, and Emilie’s reputation as a gifted landscape painter and watercolourist was soon established, with her work much praised by critics and colleagues. While her youthful paintings had been in an Impressionistic manner, her mature landscapes reflect a particularly distinctive Symbolist quality. In 1903 a joint exhibition of works by Mediz and Mediz-Pelikan was held at the Hagenbund, the Austrian artist’s association in Vienna, where her painting of Blossoming Chestnut Trees was acquired by the state for the newly-established Moderne Galerie in Vienna.

As Levetus, writing in 1905, noted of Mediz-Pelikan and Mediz, ‘In personal appearance these two are as different as their works; in nature they are one; he considers her the greater artist and she him…Of the two, Frau Mediz has the wider field. She has more tones and nuances, more delicacy and more variety…She is influenced by him, and also has nocturnes in blue and silver, such as Whistler might have painted…These two, both husband and wife, have a great future before them.’ Sadly, however, this was not to be, as Mediz-Pelikan died suddenly of a heart attack in 1908, at the age of forty-seven. After Karl’s death the couple’s daughter Gertrude refused to allow any exhibitions of their work to take place, and both artists fell into obscurity. It has only been in the past two decades that Mediz-Pelikan’s oeuvre has been rediscovered and her posthumous reputation established. In 2019 her work was included in the exhibition City of Women: Female Artists in Vienna 1900-1938 at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna. Large groups of drawings by Mediz-Pelikan are in the Albertina in Vienna and the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden, while others have recently been acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design.

£ 5,000

GEORGES ANTOINE ROCHEGROSSE

Versailles 1859-1938 El-Biar, Algiers

‘Vater Rhein’: An Allegory of the River Rhine

Watercolour over a pencil underdrawing. Inscribed Vater Rhein at the lower left. 126 x 282 mm. (5 x 11 1/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Rochegrosse studio sale, Toulouse, Marambat de Malafosse, 7 November 2019, lot 47; Private collection, Paris.

Abandoned by his father as a child, Georges Rochegrosse was the stepson of the poet and writer Théodore de Banville. He was a pupil of Alfred Dehodencq before entering the Académie Julian at the age of twelve. He later enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he was twice a finalist in the competition for the Prix de Rome. Rochegrosse made his debut at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1882, winning a third-class medal for his painting of Vitellius Dragged Through the Streets of Rome by the Populace, while at the Salon the following year his painting of Andromache was purchased by the State for the Musée de Rouen. His earliest exhibited works tended towards scenes from literature, legend and scenes from Egyptian, Roman and Byzantine history, often tinged with violence, seen in such paintings as The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar and The Death of Caesar, shown at the Salons of 1886 and 1887, respectively. The 1890s found Rochegrosse working in a more Symbolist vein, exemplified by his monumental painting The Knight of the Flowers, inspired by Wagnerian mythology and today in the Musée d’Orsay. In 1898 Rochegrosse decorated the staircase of the library of the Sorbonne with a mural of The Song of the Muses Awakening the Soul, one of several commissions for public decorations that he received; another such project was the decoration of the Salle des Fêtes for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900.

By the turn of the century, however, Rochegrosse had come to be best known as a fashionable painter of Orientalist and mythological subjects, finding inspiration for much of his work in his travels throughout North Africa. From 1900 onwards the artist spent the winter months in Algeria, where he maintained a studio in El-Biar, a suburb of Algiers. He frequently exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Algériens et Orientalistes and at the Union Artistique de l’Afrique du Nord. By the end of the first decade of the 20th century Rochegrosse was one of the leading exponents of Orientalism in France.

Rochegrosse grew up in a literary and artistic milieu. From an early age he made drawings that were reproduced in the journal La Vie Moderne, and his work continued to be featured in magazines throughout his career, particularly from the 1890s onwards. His friendships with writers and poets also meant that he was often asked to illustrate their books, and he produced drawings for Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, as well as books by his stepfather Théodore de Banville, Anatole France, Théophile Gautier, Pierre Louys and other writers. The artist’s original drawings for these illustrations were exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit and at the Salons de la Société des Aquarellistes Français. Rochegrosse also produced designs for posters, theatrical productions and Gobelins tapestries.

£ 5,500

EMIL PIRCHAN

Brno 1884-1957 Vienna

Composition in Violet, Red and Green Watercolour.

212 x 293 mm. (8 3/8 x 11 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist, and thence by descent to the Steffan/Pabst collection, Vienna.

One of the most creative and prolific artists of his day, working mainly in Munich, Berlin, Prague and Vienna, Emil Pirchan was a designer, scenographer, commercial graphic artist, costumer, book illustrator and architect. Born in Brno, in what is today the Czech Republic, he was a pupil of the architect Otto Wagner at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He was also much influenced by the work of his second cousin Joseph Hoffmann, an architect and designer who was a founder of both the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte. Pirchan began his independent career in Brno, working as a drawing teacher, before moving in 1908 to Munich and establishing a school for graphic design and applied arts. He undertook several projects for interior decorations and produced a number of drawings for architectural projects, which were strongly influenced by the example of his teacher Wagner. In 1912 an exhibition of his stage designs was held at the Moderne Galerie in Munich, and five years later he was appointed director of set design and costumes at the Bavarian State Theatre. Also in 1917, exhibitions of his work were mounted at the Landesgewerbemuseum in Stuttgart and the Museum August Kestner in Hannover.

After working in Munich for thirteen years, during which he won several prizes in national and international competitions, Pirchan moved to Berlin in 1921. There he worked as a scenographer at the State Theatre and oversaw numerous productions. He won a gold medal in the category of set design at the International Exposition in Barcelona in 1928, and in 1930 produced futuristic designs for a theatre in South America, a project about which little else is known. In 1932 Pirchan settled in Prague, where he was employed as the head of set design at the German Theatre. He returned to Vienna in 1936 and lived there for the remainder of his career. Appointed a professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, he served as director of the newly established school of set design, while also providing set designs for productions at the Burgtheater and the State Opera. Throughout his long and successful career Pirchan produced numerous designs for posters, advertisements, furniture, jewellery, arts and crafts objects and fabrics. In addition, he was a novelist and playwright, and published several books on art and artists, including one of the first biographies of Gustav Klimt. The full range of Pirchan’s oeuvre was only recently brought to light in a large retrospective exhibition held at the Museum Folkwang in Essen and the Leopold Museum in Vienna between 2019 and 2021, which established him as a leading figure of Central European Modernism.

Produced around 1907, the present sheet is among a group of drawings by Pirchan using a sort of marbling technique that he seems to have invented. Several such works on paper of this distinctive type can be seen in a 1907 photograph of the hallway of Pirchan’s home in Brno, for which the artist designed most of the furnishings. Two similar works on paper by Pirchan are in a private collection in Vienna, while another comparable work by the artist has recently been acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

£ 18,000

EDMUND STEPPES

Burghausen 1873-1968 Deggendorf

Studies of Flowers

Pen and grey-black ink on buff paper; a page from a sketchbook. Signed with a monogram and dated Ed St. 1915. in the centre.

282 x 196 mm. (11 1/8 x 7 3/4 in.)

The landscape painter Edmund Steppes studied at a private art school in Munich before entering the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in 1892. The following summer the young Steppes exhibited his work at the Munich Kunstverein, an honour usually only reserved for students at the Akademie who had been nominated as ‘Meisterschülern’, or master students, which he was not. Steppes exhibited at the Munich Secession from 1897 onwards, and his work was first acquired by a German museum in 1902. By the turn of the century he was enjoying the support of a number of influential figures in the German art world and selling his work to private collectors and museums in Berlin, Munich and Stuttgart.

As one English critic, writing just before the outbreak of war in 1914, noted of Steppes, ‘Evidences are present in his art that he is not averse to modern modes of expression, but he loves to persevere in his own style…he prefers to be considered a self-taught artist, as he learned most from nature and the old masters.’ Steppes made an intensive study of the art of German and Netherlandish Old Masters, particularly of the late Gothic period, and was drawn to the works of Albrecht Altdorfer and Matthias Grünewald. He seems to have largely ignored the religious aspect of such paintings, however, in favour of an appreciation of the often bizarre and fantastical landscapes in their backgrounds, which would find their way into his own drawings. After the First World War Steppes produced relatively few paintings, and began to devote himself to drawing, producing numerous small-scale studies with detailed observations of nature, made on sketching expeditions around southern Germany. These drawings – of flowers, plants and leaves, as well as trees and strange rock formations – account for some of his most distinctive works.

Steppes exhibited at the propagandic Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung exhibitions of the 1930s and 1940s in Munich. In January 1945 his studio was destroyed by an Allied bomb, which led to the loss of numerous drawings and around forty paintings. When the war ended, Steppes stood trial for his membership of the Nazi party but was judged to have joined the party for idealistic and financial reasons and not through political motivation, and thus only received a fine. He settled in Tuttlingen in Baden-Württemburg, where in 1963 a retrospective exhibition of his work was held.

Among the Old Master artists whose work Steppes examined was the 15th century painter and printmaker Martin Schongauer, who drew studies of plants. Like Schongauer, Steppes seems occasionally to have examined dried specimens for his studies of thistles and mosses. Most of his botanical drawings, however, suggest a more immediate study of fresh plants and meadow flowers, as recorded in several sketchbooks, with each sheet precisely dated and signed with the artist’s characteristic monogram. Both studies on the present sheet appear to be of wetland flowers, with the main flower at the right probably a marsh-marigold or kingcup (Caltha palustris). A comparable study of two thistle leaves, likewise signed and dated 1915, is in the Oberhausmuseum in Passau.

£ 3,000

MAURICE LANGASKENS

Ghent 1884-1946 Schaerbeek

Portrait of Karl Wielemans in the Role of ‘Baas Peeters’ in In de War

Pencil and black ink and black wash, black chalk and watercolour on a large sheet of buff paper from a sketchbook. Signed M. LANGASKENS. at the lower left. Inscribed Vlaamsche Tooneelkring / Munsterlager / Karl Wielemans / als / Baas Peeters / in “In de War” / 11-12-1915 / M. LAGACH- at the upper right.

307 x 259 mm. (12 1/8 x 10 1/4 in.)

PROVENANCE: Anonymous sale, Brussels, Cornette de Saint-Cyr, 27 May 2019, lot 22.

EXHIBITED: Antwerp, Districthuis van Deurne, Belgische Frontschilders Eerste Wereldoorlog, 2014.

The Belgian painter and printmaker Maurice (Maurits) Langaskens studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and began his independent career in 1907, when he showed three paintings at the Salon in Brussels. The following year he contributed six paintings to the annual exhibition of the Belgian artist’s association ‘Pour l’Art’ in Brussels, where he was to exhibit frequently over the course of his later career. Much of Langaskens’s early work was in a vibrant Art Nouveau or Symbolist style, a bold and colourful manner that also translated well into largescale mural commissions, and he became one of the leading painter-decorators of the early 20th century in Belgium. The outbreak of the First World War, however, brutally interrupted the artist’s career. Drafted into the Belgian army at the beginning of August 1914, Langaskens was captured by the Germans after less than a fortnight. He spent the next three and half years as a prisoner of war, at internment camps at Sennelager, Münsterlager and Göttingen. During his period of captivity, he produced numerous small-scale paintings and watercolours of his fellow prisoners, as well as scenes of daily camp life, which are regarded as among his finest works. It was also during this period that he painted two of his best-known pictures, the large canvas In Memoriam, painted in 1916 and depicting the burial of a Belgian soldier by his comrades, and the monumental triptych Repose en Paix, painted between 1915 and 1918. After his liberation and return to Belgium, Langaskens exhibited over eighty of his war works in Brussels in 1918.

After the Armistice and suffering from aphasia and nervous disorders brought about by his long confinement, Langaskens painted mainly easel pictures of winter landscapes, rustic genre scenes and floral subjects, as well as creating designs for tapestries, book illustrations and stained-glass windows. Within a few years, his health had recovered and he returned to undertaking largescale decorative mural commissions. He continued to exhibit throughout the 1940s, particularly at the yearly ‘Pour l’Art’ exhibitions, where he often showed his superb graphic work. After the artist’s death in 1946, the contents of his studio were sold at auction and dispersed.

During his period of internment, Langaskens made numerous studies of his fellow prisoners of war. Among the activities sanctioned by the Germans were musical and theatrical performances by the prisoners, and the present sheet depicts a soldier-prisoner playing a role in one such production; a humorous play entitled, in Flemish, In de war (Confused) and performed at the Münsterlager camp on December 11th, 1915.

£ 5,000

BERNARD BOUTET DE MONVEL

Paris 1881-1949 near the Azores

a. A Drunk Man Leaning Against a Wall and Holding onto a Handrail, Seen from the Front

Pencil on papier calque. Stamped with the artist’s posthumous studio stamp (not in Lugt) in black ink at the lower right.

260 x 128 mm. (10 1/4 x 5 in.)

b. A Drunk Man Leaning Against a Wall and Holding onto a Handrail, Seen from Behind

Pencil on papier calque. Stamped with the artist’s posthumous studio stamp (not in Lugt) in black ink at the lower left.

178 x 125 mm. (7 x 4 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: Among the contents of the artist’s studio in Paris at the time of his death; By descent to the artist’s daughter, Sylvie Boutet de Monvel, Paris, until 2016.

The son of the illustrator Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Bernard Boutet de Monvel was one of the finest painters, printmakers and illustrators of the Art Deco era. Beginning in the late 1890s, when he was still a teenager, Boutet de Monvel’s remarkable colour etchings first established the young artist’s reputation. Published in large editions and exhibited in galleries and museums in Paris, London and America, these colour prints account for a significant part of the artist’s output in the years leading up to the First World War. In 1919 Boutet de Monvel became a member of the Compagnie des Arts Français, established by the decorator André Mare and the architect Louis Süe, and in the 1920s received numerous commissions for paintings to decorate the homes of such clients as the couturier Jean Patou, Jane Renouardt and Mme. Jacques Edeline. A large and comprehensive exhibition of Boutet de Monvel’s work as a décorateur –amounting to over one hundred and fifty paintings and decorative panels – was mounted in New York in 1926. In the late 1920s he received several commissions from members of the Vanderbilt, Whitney, Frick and Mellon families, as well as the Maharajah of Indore.

Although he is perhaps best known as a painter of decorative panels and portraits, as well as urban views, Boutet de Monvel also produced book and fashion illustrations. The artist was himself a well-known dandy, admired for his innate style and elegant dress sense. (As the fellow illustrator Georges Lepape wrote, in a letter of November 1926 written from New York: ‘Since we arrived a week ago we’ve seen a lot of Bernard Boutet de Monvel and his brother Roger. We often go out or go to receptions together, and the other night at midnight Bernard and I were in topper and tails on a bus in Fifth Avenue; it was hilarious.’) A frequent exhibitor at the Salons in Paris, showing portraits, landscapes and nudes, Boutet de Monvel died in a plane crash near the Azores in 1949.

A somewhat similar drawing by Boutet de Monvel – depicting an inebriated, elegantly dressed man in a top hat attempting to fit a key into a door – was with Stephen Ongpin Fine Art in 2017 and is today in private collection in California. A photograph of a drawing of a closely related composition is in the files of the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

£ 900

BERNARD BOUTET DE MONVEL

Paris 1881-1949 near the Azores

Study of a Man with His Right Hand on his Head

Pencil on papier calque. Stamped with the artist’s posthumous studio stamp (not in Lugt) in black ink at the lower left.

249 x 215 mm. (9 3/4 x 8 1/2 in.)

PROVENANCE: Among the contents of the artist’s studio in Paris at the time of his death; By descent to the artist’s daughter, Sylvie Boutet de Monvel, Paris, until 2016.

Datable to the 1920s, this and the previous two drawings were part of a group of works by Boutet de Monvel that served as studies for magazine illustrations. Throughout his career the artist worked for such publications as La Vie Parisienne, Fémina, Le Journal des Dames et de Modes (Costumes parisiennes) and Le Rire. He also provided drawings for Harper’s Bazaar in the 1920s and 1930s, and contributed illustrations to the first French edition of Vogue, published in June 1920, for which he continued to illustrate the latest fashions. However, Boutet de Monvel is perhaps most notably associated with the Gazette du Bon Ton. Founded by Lucien Vogel in 1911 and first published in 1912, the Gazette du Bon Ton was an monthly illustrated magazine devoted to fashion, elegance and art. Boutet de Monvel had a long association with the magazine, for which he provided numeorus vignettes and illustrations.

As has been noted of his oeuvre as an illustrator, ‘Boutet de Monvel’s work...was striking for the pared back and rectilinear qualities that were so characteristic of the sleekness of his style. In place of sinuous curves, elaborate volutes and glistening golds, he preferred the pure, controlled lines of a pale outline...This productive economy of means led him to also make color subordinate to line.’

£ 800

FRITZ LACH

Linz 1868-1933 Vienna

A Willow Tree on the Shores of Lake Attersee

Pencil and watercolour on laid paper. Signed, inscribed and dated Fritz Lach / Weyregg 1927 at the lower left.

276 x 351 mm. (10 7/8 x 13 3/4 in.)

The Austrian landscape draughtsman and printmaker Friedrich (Fritz) Lach was born into an artistic family, being the nephew of the flower painter Andres Lach and the great-nephew of one the most significant painters of the Biedermeier period, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. Although he received his artistic training at the academies of Vienna and Munich, he worked for a Danube shipping company for several years in the 1890s before committing to an artistic career around the turn of the century and settling in Vienna. Lach was an active member of both the Austrian Artist’s Association and the Dürerbund, the German society of artists and writers, and won a number of awards, prizes and civic decorations. The artist exhibited his landscape watercolours, often in frames he designed himself, in Vienna and Linz. He died of a stroke in 1933 and was buried with honour in Vienna’s central cemetery.

Lach was particularly admired for his landscape watercolours, and in this field was regarded by contemporary critics as a worthy successor to Rudolf von Alt. Examples of the artist’s watercolours are today in the collections of the Albertina and the Wien Museum in Vienna, the Nordico Stadtmuseum and the Oberösterreichische Landesmuseum in Linz, as well as the Princes of Liechtenstein in Vaduz.

Executed in 1927, the present sheet was drawn at Weyregg am Attersee, on the eastern shores of Lake Attersee in Upper Austria.

£ 4,000

ERICH LINDENAU

Bischofswerda 1889-1955 Dresden

Reedmace

Watercolour, over a pencil underdrawing, on Fabriano paper. Signed with the artist’s monogram and dated EL. 29. at the lower left centre. Inscribed “Binsen” on the verso.

384 x 267 mm. (15 1/8 x 10 1/2 in.) [sheet]

Watermark: P M FABRIANO

A German painter of flower pieces and landscapes, Erich Lindenau studied under Carl Rade at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden between 1917 and 1921, but was otherwise largely selftaught. Working mainly in oil and watercolour, he was one of the chief exponents in Dresden of the German realist art movement known as Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’), which arose in the early 1920s as a reaction to the work of the German Expressionists. Lindenau exhibited paintings and large format watercolours – primarily landscapes and still life subjects, characterized by a clarity of atmosphere and precise draughtsmanship – at art exhibitions in the city from 1933 onwards. In addition, a solo exhibition of Lindenau’s work was held at Józef Sandel’s Galerie junge Kunst in Dresden in 1931. In February 1956, not long after Lindenau’s death the previous year, a retrospective exhibition of his work was mounted at the Albertinum in Dresden.

This study of great reedmace (Typha latifolia) – a wetland plant with long leaves and tall stems, sometimes inaccurately called the bulrush – is a fine example of Erich Lindenau’s exacting watercolour technique. The great reedmace is found extensively throughout Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa, and the cylindrical, brown flower heads of the plant appear between June and August.

£ 5,800

ROMAIN DE TIRTOFF, called ERTÉ

St. Petersburg 1892-1990 Paris

Le Journalisme

Gouache. Signed Erté at the lower right. Stamped with the artist’s stamp ERTÉ / ROMAIN DE TIRTOFF on the verso. Inscribed and dated by the artist N 4163 / “Journalisme” / Décor on the verso. Dated 1936 and numbered 16383 on the verso.

372 x 270 mm. (14 5/8 x 10 5/8 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist by a private collector; Thence by descent.

Arguably one of the best known artists of the Art Deco period, the Russian-born French artist Romain de Tirtoff, known as Erté, was renowned in particular for his drawings and illustrations of slim, elegant figures, exquisitely clad in imaginative and colourful costumes. Born in St. Petersburg to a military family named Tyrtov, with generations of naval officers in its lineage, he attended school at the naval base of Kronstadt, but at home was often surrounded by women who encouraged him in the decorative and creative arts. In 1900, at the age of eight, the young Tyrtov and his family visited the Exposition Universelle in Paris, which presented a comprehensive display of the Art Nouveau style. Determined to become an artist, Tyrtov studied under Russian portrait painter S. E. Repine, and by the age of fifteen was regularly contributing drawings to a fashion magazine in St. Petersburg. In 1912, at the age of nineteen, he moved to Paris. It was there that he adopted the pseudonym ‘Erté’ (from the French phonetic pronunciation of the initials R and T of his name), partly to avoid disgracing his family, who had objected to his rejection of a naval career in favour of one devoted to art.

In 1913 he began working for the fashion house of the couturier Paul Poiret, but with the outbreak of the First World War decided to look to America, specifically to the magazines Harper’s Bazar and Vogue. Not knowing which of the two to approach, the artist tossed a coin in order to decide to whom he should send samples of his work. Erté’s debut with Harper’s Bazar followed shortly thereafter, in January 1915, and he was to remain closely associated with the magazine until 1936, producing numerous covers and illustrations. For a brief period in 1916, Erté worked for both Harper’s Bazar and Vogue, but the owner of the former, William Randolph Hearst, soon offered the artist an exclusive contract.

By the 1920s, largely as a result of his work for Harper’s Bazar, Erté was famous in America. His work for the magazine marked the beginning of an aesthetic that would be the hallmark of Harper’s Bazar (‘Bazaar’ from 1929 onwards) throughout the 1920s and 1930s. For over two decades, almost every issue of Harper’s Bazaar included a striking cover illustration by the artist. Throughout his twenty-two year association with Harper’s, Erté contributed to 265 issues of the magazine, including 240 covers and over 2,500 drawings, comprising his own fashion designs, as well as sketches of accessories, shoes, stage costumes and interior design. He also wrote fashion pieces, autobiographical sketches, occasional ‘letters from France’ and a society column. Although after 1926 he stopped contributing fashion drawings to Harper’s, he continued to design its covers and illustrate some of the stories for another decade, becoming almost synonymous with the magazine. As the owner and publisher Hearst once admitted, ‘What would Harper’s Bazaar have been if it wasn’t for Erté?’

£ 3,000

ROMAIN DE TIRTOFF, called ERTÉ

St. Petersburg 1892-1990 Paris

Syncopation

Gouache. Signed Erté in the the lower right margin. A slight sketch of an unidentified object in pencil on the verso. Stamped with the artist’s stamp ERTÉ / ROMAIN DE TIRTOFF and Composition originale on the verso. Numbered and titled by the artist N 3223 / “Syncopation” / Décor on the verso. Numbered 10280 and dated 1945 on the reverse of the board.

146 x 136 mm. (5 3/4 x 5 3/8 in.) [image]

368 x 270 mm. (14 1/2 x 10 5/8 in.) [sheet]

PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist by a private collector; Thence by descent.

As an editorial in a 1917 issue of Harper’s Bazar noted, ‘To glance at an Erté drawing is amusing. To look at one is interesting. To study one is absorbing. That any human being can conceive – and execute – such exquisite detail is positively miraculous.’ Although perhaps best known for his magazine illustrations and covers, as well as his enormous influence on Art Deco graphics, Erté was also a successful and highly inventive fashion designer. While very few of Erté’s dresses survive today, the designs live on in the many thousands of sketches he made of them, for the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and elsewhere.

In 1925 Erté arrived in the United States to join Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and work in Hollywood. In the same year he held his first ever exhibition, at the Madison Hotel in New York, followed in 1926 by an exhibition in Paris at Galerie Charpentier in Paris, where his work was first purchased by the State. Although his fashion work lessened after the 1930s, his designs for the theatre continued to be in great demand. Apart from his work of Harper’s Bazaar, which continued until 1937, Erté also provided cover drawings and illustrations for the French magazines Art et Industrie, L’Illustration, Fémina, La Gaulois artistique and Plaisir de France, as well as The Sketch and the Illustrated London News in England. Erté’s reputation was reborn with the Art Deco revival of the 1960s, and exhibitions of his work were held throughout Europe and America. The artist lived until the age of ninety-seven, with a career that spanned some seventy-five years. As he once claimed, ‘Monotony engenders boredom and I have never been bored in my life.’

As has been noted of Erté, ‘In theatrical design much of his work during this period [the 1930s] was for the music hall, an arena that was then expriencing a brief, post-Depression resurgence, and one that offered its patrons balletic productions in lieu of former extravaganzas, which were underwritten by enormous budgets…With the onset of World War II and the German occupation of Paris, work for the foreign stage vanished completely…When the war ended and Paris was liberated, Erté was contracted to create the sets and costumes for a forthcoming production of Donizetti’s opera, Don Pasquale (1945). Throughout the late 1940s and into the 1950s, Erté devised the designs for a number of shows at the reopened Moulin Rouge, Narcissus and the Folies-Pigalle and leading revues in London, New York and Montreal.’

£ 3,000

MARCEL CAMIA

20th Century, died 1971

Squids, Crab and Algae

Gouache and black ink, with framing lines in black ink, on paper mounted on panel. Signed M. CAMIA in black ink at the upper right. Inscribed Calmar (Loligo Vulgaris) / Crabe (portunus Armatus) / et / Algues (himanthalia lorea) on the reverse of the panel.

360 x 110 mm. (14 1/8 x 4 3/8 in.)

Very little is known of the artist Marcel Camia, a native of Monaco, who seems to have specialized in drawings and watercolours of scenes of underwater creatures and plant life, alongside views of Monaco and Monte Carlo. An exhibition of his work, entitled Faune and Flore Marine, was held in Monaco in 1950, and his work is included in the collections of the Musée Océanographique de Monaco. More recently a painting by Camia – a canvas titled La Proie d’un Monstre (A Monster’s Prey) – was included in the exhibition Oceanomania: Souvenir des mers mystériueses, de l’expédition à l’aquarium, curated by the American artist Mark Dion at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco in 2011. The painting, which underscores Camia’s interest in the depiction of the oceans and its mysteries, is today in the collection of the Palais Princier de Monaco.

Given its shape, the present sheet may have been intended as a design for a stained glass window, which Camia is known to have made a number of studies for.

£ 2,500

RENÉ GRUAU

Covignano 1909-2004 Rome

Design for a Poster: A Man in a Suit Walking

Gouache and black (India) ink, with added strips of glossy striped paper inserted into the composition. Signed *Gruau at the lower right.

646 x 498 mm. (25 1/2 x 19 1/2 in.)

Born to an Italian nobleman and a French mother, Renato Zavagli Ricciardelli, Conte delle Camminate, enjoyed a life of luxury as a child, living between Rimini, Milan, Paris and Monte Carlo. He displayed a talent as a draughtsman from an early age and, adopting his mother’s maiden name of Gruau, embarked on a career as an illustrator while still in his late teens. Settling in Paris in the early 1930s, he soon found employment providing drawings of the latest fashions for the newspaper Le Figaro and the fashion magazine Femina. He also recorded the collections of such Parisian designers as Pierre Balmain, Jacques Fath, Jeanne Lanvin, Jean Patou, Elsa Schiaparelli, Cristobal Balenciaga and, in particular, Christian Dior. Gruau worked closely with the couturier, designing numerous advertisements and posters for the Dior atelier. Indeed, Gruau may be said to have shaped the public image of the house of Dior, particularly during the period of the designer’s brief independent career, between 1947 and his death ten years later.

After the Second World War Gruau’s reputation was firmly established and had spread beyond France. He lived for several years in America, working for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue in New York and in California for the short-lived magazine Flair. He produced numerous designs for the covers of fashion magazines, notably Vogue, International Textiles and L’Officiel de la Couture et de la Mode de Paris. Following the death of Dior in 1957, Gruau largely abandoned the field of fashion illustration and began providing designs for advertisements and theatre posters. In the 1980s he returned to fashion illustration, working for Vogue France, Elle and Madame Figaro

Gruau was an exacting draughtsman. As he once stated, ‘The idea for a drawing comes very gradually. You have to do a lot of sketches…The hardest thing is to do a very plain drawing. The perfect line, drawn in a single movement – but you have to work very hard before you’re ready. It may seem simple but it’s not. It takes an enormous amount of work that no one sees…It’s no good unless I’m completely satisfied. I make a preliminary drawing in charcoal or pencil. Then when I’m ready, I use gouache or acrylics or Indian ink.’ He added that, ‘When I do a drawing, I need a live model that I can have move around as much as I need to. I can’t work from a photo. I need to feel the presence of a person. If there’s no human raw material, the drawing has less personality.’

From the late 1940s through the 1960s Gruau produced drawings for covers of the men’s fashion magazines Club and Adam, as well as for Sir: Men’s International Fashion Journal, a quarterly trade publication devoted to male fashion published in Holland. Gruau produced many cover designs and illustrations for Sir magazine throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. As has been noted, ‘On the surface, crafted in gouache and felt tip pen, Gruau’s man is chiselled, groomed, suave and sophisticated. Suited and booted he is always dapper, sometimes depicted with a strategically dipped Trilby hat and occasionally accessorized with an umbrella or cigarette. He’s the picture of simmering machismo. He’s the man about town, a real-life James Bond in control of every situation he finds himself in.’

£ 6,500

ROBERT

LOUIS BANKS RIBA

Cheltenham 1911-2000 London(?)

The Corner of a Ryokan in Gion, Kyoto

Watercolour over a pencil underdrawing, laid down on board. Signed and numbered BANKS / 275 at the lower left, and faintly inscribed with colour notes (silvery, wood, etc.) in pencil throughout the sheet. Further inscribed for / Thia Nye(?) / from / Robert Banks / with best wishes – May ’67 on a label pasted onto the old backing board. Stamped Robert Banks / Drawn in Kyoto in Japanese in red ink on the backing board.

344 x 258 mm. (13 1/2 x 10 1/8 in.) [sheet]

344 x 262 mm. (13 1/2 x 10 3/8 in.) [board]

PROVENANCE: Presented by the artist to Thia Nye(?) in May 1967; Trafford Gallery, London (as ‘In a Ryokan: Gion 275’); Anonymous sale, Lewes, Gorringe’s, 21 November 2022, lot 706; Private collection, England.

An architect and artist, Robert Banks studied at the Architectural Association between 1928 and 1933. Following military service in the Second World War, during which he was awarded the Military Cross, he worked as a town planner until the 1950s, when he began to devote himself to painting. His watercolours are characterized by an attention to detail and an interest in structural forms, the legacy of his training as an architect. A fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Banks exhibited his work in London at the Leicester Galleries in 1959 and the Arthur Jeffress Gallery in 1961, and the Trafford Gallery and the Alwin Gallery in the 1970s. Banks travelled extensively around Italy – painting numerous views in Rome and Venice, as well as in Siena, Perugia, Lecce, Naples, Urbino and elsewhere – and also visited Spain, Greece and Japan.

The present sheet was drawn in a ryokan, a type of traditional Japanese inn, situated in the iconic Gion district of Kyoto, an area known for its geisha culture, bars, restaurants and teahouses. Another watercolour of Kyoto by Banks, a large sheet depicting the Taizo-In landscape garden created by the 16th century painter and calligrapher Kano Matonobu, was sold at auction in 2011, while a view of the interior of a Kyoto tea house appeared at auction in London in 2001. A watercolour by Banks of a similar subject to the present sheet, also exhibited at the Trafford Gallery, is recorded in a photograph in the Witt Library of the Courtauld Institute of Art.

£ 2,000

HORST JANSSEN

Hamburg 1929-1995 Hamburg

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

Pen and brown ink and grey wash. Dated 19/6/74 at the upper left, and extensively inscribed Liebe Tante / ich bin im Moment / etwas nervös / nicht sehr - aber doch / verzeih also bitte / dies + das / - wenn / danke. at the lower centre. Laid down.

197 x 162 mm. (7 3/4 x 6 3/8 in.)

The German draughtsman, illustrator and printmaker Horst Janssen produced a large number of drawings and prints characterized by dreamlike and often erotic imagery, creating a distinctive body of work – landscapes, still life subjects, portraits and self-portraits, often incorporating literary references and texts – that was quite unusual within the context of postwar European art. Janssen’s first retrospective exhibition of almost 180 drawings and prints was held in 1965 at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover, leading the director of that institution to describe the artist as ‘the greatest draughtsman apart from Picasso. But Picasso is a different generation.’ The exhibition later travelled to several cities in Germany and also to Basel, and led to Janssen’s work becoming much more widely known outside Hamburg. His output never slackened, and his intensely personal vision continued to find new avenues of expression. During his lifetime, Janssen won several important prizes and awards, including the first prize for graphic art at the Venice Biennale of 1968, and his work was widely exhibited throughout Europe, as well as in America, Russia and Japan. He published several portfolios of his prints and drawings, often centred around a particular theme. Janssen’s vast corpus of drawings, etchings, engravings, woodcuts and lithographs has continued to define the artist as one the most significant draughtsmen and graphic artists of post-war Germany.

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

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

‘Dear Aunt

I am currently a little nervous not very – but still so please forgive me for this + that

- if thank you.’

£ 9,000

VIVIAN SPRINGFORD

Milwaukee 1913-2003 New York

Untitled (Expansionist Series)

Acrylic on paper, laid down on board. 203 x 251 mm. (8 x 9 7/8 in.)

PROVENANCE: The estate of the artist; Pazo Fine Art, Washington, D.C.; Private collection, California.

The American abstract painter Vivian Springford studied at the Art Students League in New York and became loosely associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. What set her paintings apart from her contemporaries, however, was her interest in Chinese calligraphy, which had a profound effect on her visual language. Springford’s early paintings employed acrylic paints on rice or mulberry paper, which she would then mount onto canvas. By the early 1960s her work was becoming more colourful, though still painted in a highly calligraphic style on bright white rice paper. In 1965, on a visit to Yellowstone National Park, the artist became captivated by the park’s hot springs; pools made up of mineral deposits, characterized by intensely bright colours. Springford was inspired to create a group of vibrant concentric compositions, using poured, diluted acrylics on rice paper. The 1970s found the artist working on several other sequences of abstract paintings, based on natural phenomena and characterized by diaphanous washes of brilliant colour and overlapping layers of forms.

Although a few of her works were included in group and solo shows, Springford tried in vain to interest dealers, curators and collectors in her paintings. By the end of the 1980s, her failing eyesight had been diagnosed as macular dystrophy, and after 1986 she ceased to paint at all. Eventually becoming almost completely blind, Springford was, for the last two decades of her life, confined to a small apartment in New York. Her oeuvre remained mired in obscurity, and almost her entire body of mature abstract work – some two hundred chromatic paintings executed over a period of two decades – was left forgotten in a storage unit. It was not until the 1990s that Springford’s work was rediscovered. An exhibition of her paintings at a gallery in New York in 1998 was a revelation to collectors and critics alike and was almost completely sold out before it opened. Since her death, Springford’s paintings have been acquired by several museums, and most recently her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2023.

Datable to c.1976, the present sheet is part of Springford’s Expansionist series, which were painted in acrylic on high-quality Arches paper. As has been noted of these vivid abstract works, ‘The Expansionist works are divided between treatments of what [the artist] saw during the eruption of the Soufrière volcano on the island of Guadalupe in 1976 – intense reds, oranges and blues flow in every direction – and lunar studies, cool blues of the moon and clouds…Often they feature a curved bar of dark color, a high tide mark which resolves the composition into a form resembling a horizon, or wave top, that invokes the line of energy found in the composition of traditional Chinese painting.’ Another writer has added that ‘Springford’s Expansionist series… references the ever expanding universe. We can almost see this movement as Springford’s colors seem to seep outward, drawn out by the paper’s absorbent pulp…The Expansionist series reveals Springford’s remarkable dexterity with her chosen medium.’ Indeed, this small but luminous sheet attests to the fact that, as one critic has pointed out, ‘[Springford’s] works on paper, though modest in size, reveal a sophisticated balance of control and freedom.’ £ 16,000

DONALD SULTAN

Born 1951

Black Roses

Charcoal on paper. Signed with initials and dated July 16 1988 DS (upside down) along the bottom edge and titled Black Roses at the lower right edge.

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

PROVENANCE: Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago.

The American painter, sculptor and printmaker 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. He studied at the University of North Carolina and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and had his first one-man exhibition in New York in 1977. Since then has been the subject of numerous gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide. As an artist, Sultan worked in a slow and methodical manner, only painting fifteen or so large paintings a year, as well as a number of drawings, prints and small-scale canvases.

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 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.’

This large drawing can also be related to a later series of three aquatints of Black Roses, executed by Sultan in December 1989 and published in 1990. In a survey of Sultan’s printmaking, Barry Walker noted 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.’

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.’

£ 8,000

ANNE CONNELL

Born 1959

The Scheme of Things

Collage and gouache on hand-marbled paper mounted on panel. 255 × 255 mm. (10 × 10 in.)

Although the American artist Anne Connell lives and works in Portland, Oregon, she has spent much time in Italy, mainly in Rome and Florence, and her work reflects a keen interest in the art of the early Renaissance. Connell’s paintings, drawings and collages often sample images and patterns from Quattrocento sources, while at the same time representing these elements within a distinctively modern idiom, to create an expressive vocabulary. As a New York Times review of a 2001 exhibition of her work noted, ‘Borrowing patterns and fragmentary images from Italian Renaissance painting for her small, lovingly made panel paintings, Connell creates a quietly luminous symbolist poetry that seems as once antique and post-modern.’ Another feature of Connell’s work is the sheer craftsmanship involved in its creation, characterized by a painstaking technique of oil, silverpoint and, occasionally, gold leaf or collage on prepared panels or paper. Since 1990, Connell has had several solo exhibitions of her work, in galleries in Boston, Denver, New York and Portland. In 2009 Stephen Ongpin Fine Art in London mounted the first exhibition of her paintings to be held outside America, followed by a second solo exhibition in 2014. Connell’s work has also been included in several group exhibitions. Grants and awards she has received include a year in Italy as a Fulbright Scholar and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Ucross Foundation. A large loan exhibition of Connell’s paintings and works on paper, organized in association with Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, was held at the Chapel Art Center at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire in 2016.

Connell’s intimately scaled works demand, and ultimately reward, the quiet contemplation of the viewer. As the American writer and novelist Elizabeth Gilbert has so aptly noted, ‘Anne Connell invents worlds. Tiny, immaculate, and fascinating glimpses of worlds, to be precise. (And “precise” is the correct word to use here, because Anne paints with the detailed rigor of a master jeweler.) There is no actual place on earth that quite resembles her contrivances, but they have always evoked in me a deep sense of homesickness, nonetheless: a tangible longing to make myself very small and very quiet, so that I could slip somehow right into that world which does not – but which absolutely should – exist. That sense of enchantment, of magic, shimmers in every corner of this fabulist’s work, and it is not easily forgotten.’

Much of Connell’s work echoes her abiding love of early Renaissance painting. Executed in 2018, The Scheme of Things is part of a series of mixed-media collages which incorporate antique paper ephemera from Italian flea markets, handwork appropriations of architectural details from Quattrocento and Cinquecento paintings, and other idiosyncratic motifs. As the artist has commented, ‘In essence, just about everything I’ve ever made has been a collage of some sort or other. I always expect my literal collages – the paper and glue ones – to come together more easily than my paintings, yet they never do.’ The tiny villa in the present composition can be found in the landscape on the south wall of Benozzo Gozzoli’s Chapel of the Magi, painted around 1459 in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence. The ladder is an adaptation of that in the armorial bearings of the medieval tilers’ guild of Paris.

£ 5,500

INDEX OF ARTISTS

ALBERTI, Francesco; No.4

BANKS, Robert; No.46

BAUMGARTNER, Johann Wolfgang; No.16

BESSA, Pancrace; No.27

BIANCHI, Isidoro; No.11

BLOEMAERT, Abraham; No.10

BONVIN, François; No.30

BOSCOLI, Andrea; No.9

BOUTET DE MONVEL, Bernard; Nos.38, 39

CADES, Giuseppe (circle of); No.23

CAMIA, Marcel; No.44

CANTAGALLINA, Remigio; No.12

CARRACCI, Agostino; No.8

CASOLANI, Alessandro; No.7

CENTRAL OR NORTH ITALIAN SCHOOL, 16th Century; No.1

CIBO, Gherardo; No.3

CONNELL, Anne; No.50

DELLA BELLA, Stefano; No.15

DESRAIS, Claude-Louis (attr.); No.19

ERTÉ; Nos.42, 43

FLEMISH SCHOOL, 16th Century; No.5

FLORENTINE SCHOOL, 16th Century; No.2

FRENCH SCHOOL, 18th Century; No.20

GANDOLFI, Mauro; No.25

GRUAU, René; No.45

GUERCINO, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri; No.13

HESSE, Alexandre; No.29

HUET, Paul; No.26

JANSSEN, Horst; No.47

LACH, Fritz; No.40

LAGRENÉE, Jean-Jacques (attr.); No.21

LANGASKENS, Maurice; No.37

LINDENAU, Erich; No.41

MEDIZ-PELIKAN, Emilie; No.33

NORTH ITALIAN SCHOOL, 16th Century; No.6

NORTHERN SCHOOL, 17th Century; No.14

NOVELLI, Pietro Antonio; No.24

OZANNE, Nicolas; Nos.17, 18

PILS, Isidore; No.28

PIRCHAN, Emil; No.35

POPE, Alexander; No.22

ROCHEGROSSE, Georges-Antoine; No.34

SKARBINA, Franz; No.32

SOMM, Henry; No.31

SPRINGFORD, Vivian; No.48

STEPPES, Edmund; No.36

SULTAN, Donald; No.49