An Exhibition of
at
Adam Williams Fine Art Ltd.
24 East 80th Street, New York, NY 10075
Telephone: (212) 249-4987
18th January - 31th January 2008
Mondays-Saturdays 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
Sunday 20th January 1:00 - 5:30 pm
Monday 21st January 10.00 am - 8 pm
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people for their help and advice in the preparation of this catalogue: Bernard Aikema, Romano Binazzi, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Hubert Duchemin, Charlotte Duchemin-Chiche, David Ekserdjian, Pascale Heurtel, Catherine Johnston, Stephen Ongpin, Cristiana Romalli, Gregory Rubinstein, Julien Stock and Patrick Syz.
I would also like to thank Alexandra Chaldecott and Joanna Watson for writing a number of entries in the catalogue, and my daughter Novella for participating in the research and presentation of the drawings and paintings.
Last but not least, I am very grateful to my wife Cristina, for her patience and support.
Jean-Luc Baroni
Drawings are sold mounted but not framed. Paintings are sold framed. Dimensions are given in millimetres and inches, with height before width. Prices on application.
All enquiries should be addressed to Jean-Luc or Novella Baroni at Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., 7-8 Mason’s Yard, Duke Street, St. James’s, London, SW1Y 6BU Tel. +44 (20) 7930-5347 or Fax +44 (20) 7839-8151 or, only during the exhibition in New York (January 2009) at Tel. + (212) 249-4987 or Fax +1 (212) 755-0792.
e-mail: jlbaroni@jlbaroni.com or nbaroni@jlbaroni.com
© Copyright Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., 2009
Designed by Jean-Luc Baroni/Romano Binazzi - Printed in Italy by Fiorepubblicità - Florence - Tel. +39 055 65 80 428
Parma 1503 -1540 Casalmaggiore
Red chalk, over traces of black chalk, heightened with white. Bears inscription in black chalk: F.Parmigianino. The corners cut. 222 by 244 mm. (8 by 9 in.)
PROVENANCE: Sir Peter Lely (L.2092); Jonathan Richardson, Sr. (L.2184); Thomas Hudson (L2432); Timothy Clifford, his sale London, Sotheby’s, 3 July 1989, lot 17; Jak Katalan, his sale, London, Sotheby’s, 10 July 2002, lot 28.
EXHIBITED: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Italian Drawings, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, 1981, cat.5; The Katalan Collection of Italian Drawings, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Centre, Poughkeepsie, 1995, cat.8 (note by Mario di Giampaolo).
LITERATURE: David Ekserdjian, ‘Parmigianino and Michelangelo’, Master Drawings, 1993 , vol. 31, no.4, p.393-4, note 24; Sylvie Beguin, Mario di Giampaolo and Mary Vaccaro, Parmigianino, the Drawings, Turin/London, 2000, p.210, cat.117, illustrated p.261; David Ekserdjian,’Parmigianino and Michelangelo’, Reactions to the Master: Michelangelo’s Effect on Art and Artists in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Francis Ames Lewis, Aldershot 2003, p.58 and notes 36 and 41; Parmigianino e il manierismo europeo, exhibition catalogue, Galleria Nazionale, Parma, 2003, p.198, cat.2.2.11; David Ekserdjian, Parmigianino, New Haven and London, 2006, p.28 and note 122; Georg Himmelheber, Der Gesturzte Krieger. Anmerkungen zu Zeichnungen des Girolamo Sellari da Carpi, Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 69, 2006, 2, p.254, fig.6.
Vasari begins his life of Parmigianino with a description of his precocious talents, ‘born so to speak with brushes on his fingers’ and drawing ‘most marvelous things’ from an early age1. After training in Parma and an episode in Viadana to avoid the war then threatening his native city, Parmigianino returned there in 1522 to work on the decoration of sidechapels in the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista (where Correggio too was painting). According to Vasari, he then conceived a wish to go to Rome where he arrived in 1523 -4 bringing with him three pictures including the famous Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The quality of these works led to an introduction to Pope Clement from whom he was soon receiving commissions. Vasari describes a close escape during the Sack of Rome in 1527, from where Parmigianino fled to Bologna remaining in that city for four years before his return to Parma. The commission to fresco the interior of the Church of Santa Maria della Steccata ended acrimoniously with the artist being sued for breach of contract and the work unfinished – the result according to Vasari of Parmigianino’s increasing melancholy and his obsession with alchemy. Nevertheless masterpieces continued to appear during these last years; the Cupid with a Bow now in the Kunsthistorisches, the Madonna of the long Neck in the Uffizi, altarpieces, portraits of his compatriots, engravings and ‘many drawings of every kind … all most beautiful and highly finished…. (Vasari adds that he himself has many in his ‘Libro dei Disegni’). Described as being the reincarnation of Raphael2, Parmigianino was a prolific and sophisticated draughtsman, whose output, from the working studies to the virtuoso finished drawings, was cherished by his contemporaries and has been consistently upheld by collectors and curators ever since as some of the greatest and most admired work of the sixteenth century.
Owned in the past by three eminent seventeenth and eighteenth century English collectors, this drawing inevitably calls to mind Michelangelo’s great Pieta in St Peter’s, a work which Parmigianino must have seen and absorbed during his Roman sojourn. Along with a second Pieta drawing in the Pierpont Morgan Library3, it is always discussed in the context of the famous sculpture. The Morgan Library drawing, though
1. Amazonomachia, with Achilles and Penthesilea, Sarcophagus. Roman, first half of 3rd century A.D. Vatican, Belvedere.
1. Italian School, 17th Century, The Lamentation, Whereabouts unknown.
certainly an adaptation, particularly in the depiction of the grieving Mary, shows Parmigianino following the sculpture more precisely. The present work leaves only a suggestion of the Madonna’s knees and shows the figure of Christ in reverse but it does retain the sense of supported weight and grace which exists in the marble group.
It has been proposed that this drawing could be a first idea for a small painting of St Roch Seated in a Landscape4, in which the legs and left arm of the figure are indeed similarly posed but it is perhaps more likely that the painting echoes rather than actually follows the drawing. An interesting link has recently been pointed out to a pen and ink study of a fallen warrior by Girolamo da Carpi, one of a number of such sketches by the artist recording sections of a Roman sarcophagus depicting a Battle of the Amazons (fig.1) in the Vatican Museum5. Georg Himmelheber, who noticed the link with the present work, suggests that Parmigianino based his figure on da Carpi’s drawing and notes in passing the close relations between the two artists – though the influence is more usually considered to flow from the Parmese master not the other way round. As Professor David Ekserdjian has suggested, it is perhaps more likely that the two artists were simply looking at the same source. In which case this drawing is a fascinating illustration of Vasari’s description of Parmigianino setting himself the task ‘while studying in Rome … to examine all the ancient and modern works, both of sculpture and of painting, that were in the city…’ while holding ‘those of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Raffaello da Urbino in supreme veneration ... 7’. The fallen Roman warrior transformed into the dead Christ, the spear wound visible on his side, the nail wound on his foot, thereby becoming a confluence of these two sources, the magnificent ‘modern’ sculpture and a fragment from an antique sarcophagus, stored in what Professor Ekserdjian has described as the artist’s ‘elephantine memory’8 and used for Parmigianino’s own purposes. The head, drawn in a slightly different colour, appears to have been damaged, and is now only faintly visible. On this point, as Professor Ekserdjian has kindly remarked, it is worth paying attention to an Italian seventeeth century painting on copper of The Lamentation (fig.2) which appeared recently at auction9, wherein the figure of Christ is clearly the same as that in this drawing, and the slumped head and wide neck perfectly fit the proportions of the traces of the head that remain on the sheet. Interestingly, Ekserdjian also noted that the figure of Christ in both the painting on copper and the present drawing are very similar in size.
Antwerp c. 1475 - before 1528 Antwerp
Oil on panel.
240 x 425 mm. (9 7/16 x 16 3/4 in.)
PROVENANCE: The Burckhardt Collection, Basel.
LITERATURE: M. J. Friedländer, Die Altniederländische Malerei, Berlin, 1933, XI, p. 117, no. 17, as “die Enthauptung eines Königs”; M. J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, edited by H. Pauwels, Leiden, 1974, XI, pp. 68-69, no. 17, as “the Beheading of a King” p. 108, n. 39, as “ ... the beheading of the Persian king Chosroë by the Roman emperor Heraclius. In the background, the duel on the bridge ... “, illustrated on pl. 15, fig. 17 at bottom right, as “the Beheading of King Chosroë “; K. Demus, F. Klauner and K. Schütz, in Katalog der Gemäldegalerie. Vlämische Malerei von Jan van Eyck bis Pieter Bruegel D. Ä., Vienna, 198l, p. 46, as “Enthauptung des persischen Könings Chosroe durch Kaiser Heraclius”.
Antwerp Mannerism is a term invented by M. J. Friedländer to qualify a style of painting and drawing, practiced by, often anonymous, artists, working in that city between about 1500 and 1530. Despite its name, the movement shows no Italian influence, but is, instead, an expression of Late Gothic culture, and elements of its style are to be found in artistic production throughout the Netherlands at this time. The work of the so-called Pseudo-Bles - whose panel in Munich of the Adoration of the Magi served Friedländer as a starting point for his reconstruction of Antwerp Mannerism - illustrates the main features of this style: histrionic figural groupings; extravagant and rich costumes; elegant effects of colour; virtuosity for its own sake; and fantastical buildings which combine Gothic and Renaissance elements. Much of the Antwerp production, which appealed to wealthy merchants and churchmen alike, was intended for export, and, consequently, collaboration and standardized production, especially on the large retables, appear to have been common. A complex phenomenon, Antwerp Mannerism, at its best, is stylish, assured and alive, revealing a freedom of invention and technique that bears comparison with contemporary German Florid sculpture and Flamboyant Gothic architecture1
Jan de Beer is considered to be the most talented of the Antwerp Mannerists; he is one of the movement’s founding fathers, becoming a Master of the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke in 1504. (He is mentioned in documents as early as 1490 when he was registered as an apprentice to Gillis van Everen.) He held important positions within the Guild between 1509 and 1515 when he was its dean. De Beer participated in the preparations for the entry of Emperor Charles V to Antwerp in 1515, and helped with the booth for the Society of Rhetoricians in the competition held at Malines in that year. In 1510 and 1513, de Beer took on apprentices, and his son, Aert de Beer, became an Antwerp master in 1529. Lodovico Guicciardini included Jan de Beer in his 1567 list of famous Netherlandish painters. And, in fact, his work stands apart from that of his contemporaries because of its refined palette, greater emotional and psychological depth, and consistently high quality2.
1. Jan de Beer, Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, The Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
2. Jan de Beer, Martyrdom of St. Matthew, The Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
De Beer was rescued from oblivion in 1913 when Hulin de Loo published a signed sheet with nine male heads in The British Museum, London, which he had discovered in 1902. It was left, however, to Friedländer to reconstruct the artist’s oeuvre on the basis of The British Museum drawing. He proposed that de Beer was to be identified with the Master of the Milan Adoration from a triptych in Brera, and that the so-called Pseudo-Bles was, in fact, the young Jan de Beer3.
This Emperor Heraclius beheading Chosroes II of Persia is a remarkable example of de Beer’s art, emphasizing formality and glittering detail in order to create a lavish, if cruel, spectacle. It belongs to a group of four paintings of similar size, all of which formed part of the artist’s oeuvre as first assembled by Friedländer under the name of the “Putative Jan de Beer”4. As well as a Death of St. Dominic which, like the present picture, was in the Burckhardt Collection, Basel, and now belongs to a Spanish proprietor, the series includes the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian and the Martyrdom of St. Matthew (25.5 x 41.5 cm each) in The Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (figs.1 and 2 ). None of these panels are, however, in the superb condition of the present work.
Both M. J. Friedländer and L. Baldass (1937) associated a further panel with the martyrdom of a young saint in the Harrach Collection, which had been called Cornelis Engelbrechtsen5. The authors of the 1981 catalogue Flämische Malerei von Jan van Eyck bis Pieter Bruegel D.Ä. suggested that the paintings may have formed part of a predella for an altarpiece, although there seems to be little thematic unity between them6. L. Baldass proposed a late dating for this group because he saw the influence of Jan de Cock’s work of the mid-1520s in the narrative organization of the compositions and the importance of the romantically depicted landscapes7.
The present panel shows the recovery of the True Cross, as narrated in The Golden Legend with its mixture of the historical and the fabulous. After being discovered by the Empress Helen, a part of the Cross remained in Jerusalem until the year 615, when it was carried off by Chosroes [Khusraw] II of Persia whose armies had overrun the Holy Land, as the most precious treasure of the Christians. The Emperor Heraclius, who until that moment had been a worthless ruler, was roused by this act of sacrilege, and raised an army to fight the Persians. The issue was decided by single combat on a bridge. Heraclius was victorious over his enemies, and, when Chosroes refused to be baptized, he cut off his rival’s head, the episode which forms the main composition of this picture. The emperor brought back the Cross to Jerusalem, which he was allowed to enter after humbling himself by removing his crown and walking barefoot with the Cross on his shoulders. He placed the relic on Mount Golgotha8.
Bologna 1512-1597 Bologna
Pen and brown ink and wash over black chalk, heightened with white, on blue paper. 247 x 395 mm. (9 1/2 x 15 1/2 in.)
PROVENANCE: The Earl of Yarmouth (L.2858a), his mount, with attribution Peligrino Da Bolognia on the recto and verso of the mount; Charles Rogers (L.624); T. Philipe, sale, London, 15-23 April 1799, lot 459, (as Pellegrino Tibaldi of Bologna, The Feast of the Gods at the marriage of Cupid and Psyché, masterly pen and bistre, heightened); Francis Howard; with P. & D. Colnaghi, London.
An eclectic and well-travelled artist, famous in his lifetime as a portraitist and patronized by a succession of Popes, Fontana studied with Innocenzo da Imola before going to Genoa to work as one of Perino del Vaga’s assistants on the frescoes of the Palazzo Doria. Reaching Rome in 1550, he supervised the decorations of the Belvedere in the Vatican for Giulio III, re-joined Perino at the Castel Sant’Angelo and was given charge of the interiors of the Villa Giulia and the assistance of Taddeo Zuccaro. In 1560 he travelled to France at the request of Primaticcio; due to illness this was a short-lived episode though still a formative one. Safely back in Italy, Fontana went to Florence to work with Vasari in the Palazzo Vecchio and was elected to the Accademia Fiorentina del Disegno. Then followed the commission to decorate the palazzo of the Vitelli family in Sant’Egidio, near Citta di Castello, in Umbria. From there, Fontana returned definitively to Bologna for the last twenty years of his long career. He continued to work on various projects, both secular and religious, in palaces and churches around the city, until around 1590, when the commissions finally ran out, probably due to changing artistic fashions and the ascendancy of the Carracci school.
1. Prospero Fontana, The Banquet of the Gods, Palazzo Vitelli, Sant’Egidio.
This impressive sheet is a preparatory study for the fresco (fig.1), badly damaged by a fire in 1686, painted on the ceiling of the Sala degli Dei, in the Palazzo Vitelli in Sant’Egidio, near Città di Castello1. The decoration, commissioned by Paolo Vitelli, began in 1571 and was completed in 1574. This project, which included the decoration of the Sala di Giunone, the Sala Grande, and the Palazzina, a smaller building in the gardens of the palace, was a major commission for the Bolognese artist. Interestingly, Malvasia described Fontana’s achievement in decorating the Salone in just a few weeks, the artist having ‘tante fecondità di idee e coraggio di riuscire in opere complicatissime’. In fact, Fontana appears to have also had the assistance of both Vasari and Orazio Samacchini for the decoration of the Sala Grande, as well as the help of Niccolò Circignani, called Pomarancio, Il Fiammingo – this may be Stradanus or even Calvaert (Fontana’s pupil), Cesare Baglione, Gian Antonio Paganino, and Giambattista Castello, for the other rooms and the Palazzina2.
A second study related to the Banquet of the Gods, possibly by Fontana’s assistant, Niccolò Circignani, appeared at auction in 19983. Of identical composition, it lacks the boldness of execution and the numerous pentiments of the present sheet. Nevertheless, the fact that it is octagonal in shape like the fresco in the Palazzo Vitelli and that it includes an additional figure at the extreme left of the composition, make it likely that our drawing may have been cut down to its present shape, perhaps when it was mounted and decorated with the elaborate gold border, for Lord Yarmouth.
The grand impression created by this refined and fascinating sheet is emphasized by the massive appearance of the figures, echoing the work of Michelangelo. Delicately heightened with white on a blue background, the drawing also reveals Fontana’s knowledge of the draughtsmanship of Perino del Vaga and, seemingly, of the younger artist, Taddeo Zuccaro. A similarly large scale drawing on blue paper in the British Museum4 is a study for one of the frescoes executed by Fontana on the vaulted ceiling of the Villa Giulia, in Rome 5. It shows an intriguing and more bacchanalian version of the Banquet of the Gods, this time with the gods being disturbed by an overturned sidetable.
Verona c.1547-1627 Florence
Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with gold on yellowish brown prepared paper. A trompe-l’oeil border, the left and upper edges in brown ink, and the right and bottom edges in gold. Monogrammed with the initials J L joined by a bar and surmounted by a Latin cross, later retouched and transformed into H R, for Hans Rottenhammer. Dated 1590. 202 x 306 mm. (12 1/16 x 7 15/16 in.)
PROVENANCE: X. M. C. von Schönberg-Rothschönberg, according to the catalogue entry of the 1930 Boerner sale; K. E. Hasse (1810-1902), Leipzig, Zurich and Hanover, his drystamp EH impressed on the gold border, lower right, (Lugt 861) and stamped in purple ink on the verso (Lugt 860); by descent to his son-in-law E. Ehlers (-1925); His sale, Boerner, Leipzig, 9-10th May 1930, lot 222, plate XXIV; Probably acquired by Graupe Ehlers sale by the author of the illegibly signed, and dated 12th May 1930 inscription in black chalk on the backing1; Graupe sale, Berlin 12th October 1935 (according to a photograph in the Witt Library).
LITERATURE: C.G. Boerner, Handzeichnungen alter Meister des XV. Bis XVIII. Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, 9-10 May 1930, no.222, pl. XXIV; Françoise Viatte, Inventaire général des dessins Italiens, III, Dessins Toscans, XVIe – XVIIIe siècles, Vol. I, 1560 – 1640, Paris 1988, p.135, under no.235; Lucilla Conigliello, L’ombra del Genio: Michelangelo e l’arte a Firenze, 1537 – 1631, Florence and Milan, 2002, Exhibition catalogue p.312-3, under no.177; Lucilla Conigliello, Ligozzi, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2005, p.68, under no.6-7.
One of the most productive artists of 17th century Florence, Ligozzi came from a Veronese family of painters, weavers, embroiderers and armourers. Born and raised in Verona, in around 1576 the young Jacopo moved to Florence, where he began his lifelong service to the Medici Grand Dukes, executing numerous designs for tapestries, furniture, glass and metalwork. In 1578, the artist enrolled in the Accademia del Disegno and, in 1587, he was appointed court painter and had his workshop in the Casino Mediceo. According to the Medici Guardaroba, however, much of his work took the form of small-scale paintings. Ligozzi’s first important public commissions came in the 1590s, when he painted two historical scenes for the Salone dei Cinquecento of the Palazzo Vecchio. In the same period, the artist also became more active in the production of altarpieces and frescoes. In fact, his best-known works as a painter are a series of seventeen lunette frescoes of scenes from the life of Saint Francis executed for the Church of Ognissanti in Florence, and completed in 1600.
The Grand Duke Francesco 1, impressed by Ligozzi’s detailed draughtsmanship and skills as a miniaturist, employed the artist as a scientific draughtsman. His activity in this field led him to produce drawings in watercolour and tempera of birds, fish, plants and animals, some of which were to illustrate the treatises of the Bolognese naturalist, Ulisse Aldovrandi. The artist also made drawings of allegorical and religious scenes, which show an attention to detail and expressive content characteristic of Northern European art. These were often intended as independent works: they are highly finished, delicately executed in pen and brown wash on tinted paper, and beautifully highlighted with touches of gold, recalling the artist’s training as a miniaturist.
This magnificent and intentionally disturbing representation of Gluttony belongs to the famous series of the Seven Deadly Sins, of which, beside the present drawing, five are known: Lust and Sloth (Musée du Louvre, Paris), Pride and Envy (fig.1) (Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum, Hanover), Avarice (National Gallery of Art, Washington)2. In her biography of the artist, Lucilla Conigliello notes: ‘ Il est clair que notre artiste est un homme du maniérisme tardif international, dans ses manifestations les plus raffinées et les plus contreversées. Il est aussi le dévot tourmenté de la Contre-Réforme, obsédé par la notion du péché et la pensée de la mort. En ce sens, la série des Péchés capitaux est emblématique. Elle oscille entre le simple prétexte pour représenter des scènes d’un érotisme marqué et la plus violente obsession de la damnation.’ 3
In this sheet, Gluttony is depicted as a grotesquely haggard old woman, seated and naked. Her canine teeth bite rapaciously into a chicken leg, torn from the pullet she holds in her right hand. To her left, a naked young man sits perched atop a wine barrel, emptying a colossal glass of wine. A wild boar is seated between the two greedy figures. The scene is set within a vaulted room; there is a large aperture at the back, with countryside beyond. Game birds, in the form of a plucked turkey and a goose, hang from the ceiling. On the right wall, roundels of cheese are piled on a sharply foreshortened shelf.
All six drawings were executed in the same technique and are dated 1590, except for Sloth. They all bear the artist’s monogram. His initials J L, joined by a bar and surmounted by the characteristic Latin cross, have been retouched at a later date and transformed into H R, clearly with the intent of justifying an attribution to Hans Rottenhammer, a German contemporary of Ligozzi.
The present sheet, the two allegories in Hanover and the drawing in Washington show a hitherto unnoticed trompe-l’oeil border, approximately half a centimetre wide, which does not appear on the Paris examples. The latter drawings are, however, precisely half a centimetre smaller in both height and width than the other four allegories. This would seem to indicate that all six sheets were originally outlined with the same trompe-l’oeil border, but that the two sheets in Paris were probably trimmed at a later date.
Although the delicate and accurate draughtsmanship, as well as the gold heightening, suggest that Ligozzi’s Seven Deadly Sins might have been executed in preparation of a series of engravings, the actual purpose of the series is not known. Interestingly, the author of the sale catalogue of 1982 4, which included the Allegory of Avarice, noted that that drawing is inscribed in the artist’s hand with the words, cezin or ongavi, which refer to a Hungarian coin. This may be evidence of a connection with the School of Prague, indicating that the series of the Seven Deadly Sins was perhaps commissioned by the Emperor Rudolf II, whose collection certainly included a number of Ligozzi’s nature studies.
1. Jacopo Ligozzi, Allegory of Envy, Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum, Hanover.
Munich 1564 -1625 Augsburg
Oil on copper. 178 x 135 mm. (7 x 5 3/8 in.)
Apprenticed to a court painter in Munich, Hans Donauer, Rottenhammer travelled to Rome as a young artist in around 1589. In 1596 he moved to Venice, where he studied the works of Jacopo Tintoretto at the Scuola di San Rocco, as well as those of Paolo Veronese. During his ten-year stay in Venice, he executed a number of canvases for local churches, and achieved some success painting small-scale pictures of historical and mythological subjects. Rottenhammer travelled widely throughout Northern Italy and received important commissions from, among others, Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. In 1606 he returned to Germany and settled in Augsburg, where he remained until his death. During this period, his most important patron was the Emperor Rudolf II, for whom he acted as a buying agent and picture restorer. The extent of his reputation was such that many artists came to study with him, and he remained the leading painter in Augsburg until his death in 1625.
Ridolfi states that Rottenhammer painted small coppers for shopkeepers at the beginning of his career, but that as his reputation grew he began to make works of this kind for great men, including the Emperor Rudolf II1. Van Mander said that the artist’s small or medium-sized coppers of religious or mythological subjects were ‘…scattered to many countries and are in the possession of numerous collectors…, who greatly treasured them2. This aspect of Rottenhammer’s art was to exert a profound influence on the young Adam Elsheimer.
This Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John the Baptist is a particularly appealing example of the genre, and, as such, would seem to have enjoyed great popularity. There is a version with a rounded top, which belonged to Sir Robert Walpole, in the Hermitage3, and N. Ponce engraved another example with differences in the gestures of the Holy Children in 1781, when it was in the Poullain Collection4. There is also a version on amethyst – an unusual support and technique for Rottenhammer – in the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, where the properties of the mineral are used to suggest the colour of the Virgin’s dress5. Somol also recorded a further replica in Perugia with an attribution to the Bolognese School6.
Munich 1564 -1625 Augsburg
Pen and brown ink and wash, over black chalk. Inscribed 4H in brown ink on the verso. 217 x 311 mm. (81/2 x 121/4 in.)
Apprenticed to a court painter in Munich, Hans Donauer, Rottenhammer travelled to Rome as a young artist in around 1589. In 1596 he moved to Venice, where he studied the works of Jacopo Tintoretto at the Scuola di San Rocco, as well as those of Paolo Veronese. During his ten-year stay in Venice, he executed a number of canvases for local churches, and achieved some success painting small-scale pictures of historical and mythological subjects. Rottenhammer travelled widely throughout Northern Italy and received important commissions from, among others, Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. In 1606 he returned to Germany and settled in Augsburg, where he remained until his death. During this period, his most important patron was the Emperor Rudolf II, for whom he acted as a buying agent and picture restorer. The extent of his reputation was such that many artists came to study with him, and he remained the leading painter in Augsburg until his death in 1625.
Although the Muses are usually shown with Apollo on Parnassus, the visit of Minerva to the Muses on Mount Helicon was a subject particularly popular with Northern artists in the late 16 th and early 17th centuries. Rottenhammer treated the subject a number of times in both paintings and drawings, although none are directly related to the present sheet. A painting of this subject, although different in composition, is in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, and is signed and dated 16031; a further picture of the same subject but different in composition, is a private collection2 At least three other drawings of Minerva and the Muses by Rottenhammer are known: one formerly in the collection of Dr. C. R. Rudolf in London3, another in Dresden4, and a third in the Uffizi, in Florence5.
Florence 1535 -1607 Florence
Oil on lapis-lazuli. Signed and dated AD. M.DCII / AL.BR.ALL./ FAC Inscribed “ Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews” in Hebrew, Greek and Latin on the scroll above the cross. Further inscribed “LA MORTE CH’EI SOSTENE PERCHI VIVA” Death which He sustained for those who live”on the scroll held by the skeleton at lower left. Oval: 171 x 135 mm. (611/16 x 55/16 in.)
PROVENANCE: Commissioned by The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando I Medici, in 1602; recorded in the Guardaroba Medicea until 1629.
Following his father’s death in 1540, Alessandro Allori was adopted by Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) and became his pupil. An early stay in Rome between 1554 and 1560 not only established the artist as a portrait painter, but also brought Allori into contact with the later works of Michelangelo, by whom he was greatly influenced. This can be seen most clearly in Allori’s first documented work, The Last Judgement, an altarpiece executed in Florence in 1566 for the Montauti Chapel in the Church of SS. Annunziata. The artist was also involved in several projects relating to the Accademia del Disegno, founded in 1563. These commissions included the decorations for the funeral of Michelangelo in 1564, and those to celebrate the marriage of Francesco De’ Medici to Joanna of Austria. In 1570 and 1571 Allori participated in the embellishment of Francesco I De’ Medici’s studiolo in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, with the picture, The Pearl Fishers. This work is generally considered his masterpiece. It is a symbol of the Florentine Maniera: playful and full of artifice, it combines muscular nude figures inspired by Michelangelo, together with the spontaneity and rich enamelled colouring of his tutor, Bronzino. Between 1574 and 1580, Allori embarked on a cycle of frescoes illustrating scenes from the Odyssey for the Florentine palace of Jacopo Salviati. The artist was also commissioned to paint a fresco for the cupola of the Gaddi Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence. It was during this period that Allori’s religious paintings began to exhibit the influence of Andrea del Sarto and to evince the Pre-Mannerist aesthetic values epitomised in the work of Santi di Tito. Allori was also involved in a series of frescoes for the Salone Grande in the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano, near Florence, where he was primarily responsible for two historical allegories representing the Medici family’s diplomatic successes; Scipio Entertained by Syphax and the Oration of Titus Flaminius. From the 1590’s Allori’s painting style fluctuated from the devout works executed in Santi di Tito’s Counter-Reformation style, for example: St. Fiacre Healing the Sick in the Church of Santo Spirito, Florence, dated 1596, to the highly Mannerist style exemplified in the work of Bronzino and Vasari. An example of the latter influence can be seen in the Vision of St. Hyacinth, in the Church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, also datable to 1596.
Alessandro Allori’s style had a lasting influence on the development of younger artists. This can be seen most clearly in the work of Allori’s son, Cristofano, and in Ludovico Cardi, called Cigoli, and Matteo Rosselli. Throughout his lengthy career, Allori remained open to influences provided by the work of other artists. Such attitude is well illustrated by Petrarca’s inscription on the signed Sacrifice of Isaac, executed in 1601, and now in the Uffizi, Florence: Alessandro Bronzino Allori “ch’altro diletto ch’imparar non prova”(Alessandro Bronzino Allori who’s only pleasure was to learn).
The death, in 1587, of Francesco I, Gran Duke of Tuscany, prompted his brother, the Cardinal Ferdinand de’ Medici, to return to Florence. Secular life clearly agreed with Ferdinand, and by 1589 he had renounced his cardinalship and married Cristina di Lorena. His ecclesiastical origins were, however, evidenced through his patronage of the
arts in Florence. Whilst he continued to encourage the production of mosaics, intaglio works, and paintings on pietre dure, he chose to promote religious commissions rather than the Wunderkammer objects favoured by his brother Francesco. The present painting on lapis lazuli is one such example of Ferdinand’s preference for devotional subjects.
This hitherto unpublished oil painted on rare stone was commissioned by the Grand Duke Ferdinand I, and is recorded in the inventory of the Guardaroba Medicea on 26th October 1602, when a payment of 68 scudi was made for a copper depicting the Madonna and Child and for a lapis-lazuli oval of the Crucifixion: pagamento di 68 scudi per un quadro in rame con la “Madonna con il figlio piccolo” e per un ovato in lapislazzuli con un “Crocifisso” 1. The latter is also listed in the inventory of the Guardaroba Medicea for the years 1625-1629 - probably written after Maria Maddalena of Austria’s death in 1629 - where it is described as hanging in her private apartments, on the ground floor of the Villa at Poggio Imperiale, along with another small painting by Cigoli: Dua quadrettini di lapislazzaro a ovati, che in uno dipintovi il Nostro Signore nell’orto, del Cigoli e nell’altro uno Cristo in croce con Santa Maria Maddalena a’piedi con una morte e altre figurine, di mano di Alessandro Allori detto il Bronzino, con adornamenti d’ebano filettati d’avorio, n. 22. The present crucifixion is further recorded in the 1654-6 inventory as hanging in the ground floor Galleria of the Villa at Poggio Imperiale: Due quadretti di lapislazzero a ovati, ch’è in uno un Crocifisso e nell’altro Nostro Signore nell’orto, con adornamento d’ebano che li riquadra, filettati d’argento, alti braccia 1/3 larghi braccia 1/4 incirca, ch’è il Crocifisso del Bronzino e l’altro del figliolo, n. 2 3. It is not listed, however, in the later inventories of the Guardaroba Medicea. This suggests that the painting was probably dispersed along with a sizeable part of the collection, which were either taken or sold at auction, when the House of Lorraine came into power, following the death of the last Gran Duke of Tuscany, Gian Gastone de’ Medici, in 1737.
Given the relatively small size of this painting, the composition appears to be quite elaborate. Mary Magdalen kneels at the foot of the Cross, lamenting the Crucified Christ above her. To the left, a skeleton looks up towards Christ holding a scroll inscribed with the words “ LAMORTE CH’EI SOSTENE PERCHI VIVA”, a reminder to the viewer of Christ’s sacrifice for the salvation of mankind. To the right of the cross, Allori illustrates the scene of Christ in Limbo. Christ is depicted holding the banner of the Resurrection whilst turning to look at St. John the Baptist and other figures, with the flames and smoke of the Infernal City in the background.
The handling of this work, in which paint is delicately applied in short and luminous brush strokes, is characteristic of the small paintings of the 1600’s, such as the 1602 Christ on the Way to Calvary, in the Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome4, and the 1604 Preaching of St. John the Baptist, in the Galleria Palatina, Florence5. Furthermore, the facial type of the Magdalen in the present painting is typical of the artist and the figure recurs in similar poses in several other works by Alessandro Allori. Examples can be seen in Christ in the House of Martha and Mary in the Chapel of the Palazzo Salviati, Florence6, for which a drawing of Mary Magdalen is in the British Museum, London, and in the Resurrection of Lazarus in the Church of San Francesco al Prato, Pistoia7, and others8. Moreover, the pose of the Crucified Christ in this picture is identical to that of a black chalk Study for a Crucifixion in the Uffizi, Florence9, and the figure of death is in a very similar pose to that of a black chalk drawing of a Standing Skeleton in the Louvre, Paris10. Both the Uffizi and the Louvre sheets are part of a group of anatomical studies, which include drawings of skeletons, skulls and bones, as well as musculature and figures of écorchés. These were executed at an early stage of Allori’s career and represent an important aspect of his artistic training11.
Arpino 1568 -1640 Rome
Red chalk, over traces of black chalk. Inscribed Nicolò Posino in brown ink on the old backing. Inscribed W. Horn (?) in brown ink on another old backing. 211 x 129 mm. (85/16 x 51/16in.)
WATERMARK: A bird in a circle, the letter A above.
Son of a painter of votive offerings and a Roman mother of Spanish descent, Giuseppe Cesari was born in an impoverished town in the Kingdom of Naples. His parents took him to Rome at an early age to seek his fortune, as he had demonstrated a precocious talent as a draughtsman. Cesari first came to prominence under Gregory XIII Buoncompagni, who took the young boy under his personal protection. By 1600, under Clement VIII Aldobrandini, Cesari had reached the zenith of his career. From the Olgiati Chapel in S. Prassede to the grandiose frescoes of ancient Roman history in the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Campidoglio, from the decoration of the transept of S. Giovanni in Laterano for the Holy Year of 1600 to the preparation of the cartoons for the mosaics in the dome of St. Peter’s, and even farther afield to the frescoes in the church and sacristy of the Certosa di San Martino in Naples, there was not an official commission where Cesari and his studio had not been, or were to be, involved. Contemporaries commented on the degree of intimacy which the artist enjoyed with Clement VIII, and he often accompanied the Pope himself and other members of the Aldobrandini family on important diplomatic missions both in Italy and beyond the Alps. This ensured that his fame spread to all of Europe. Cesari was ennobled by Clement VIII, hence his title of the Cavaliere d’Arpino, and he often served as Principe of the Accademia di S. Luca. With the passing of the years and the shift of taste away from his manner of painting, Arpino became more and more unhappy, seeing personal slights and injuries everywhere, although he continued to receive important commissions, such as the direction of the fresco decoration in the monumental Borghese chapel in S. Maria Maggiore, where many emerging artists, including Guido Reni, worked under him.
This fine and characteristic drawing in red chalk by Arpino probably dates to the first decade of the seventeenth century. It shows an old, standing bearded man, partially wrapped in a cloak and clutching a staff with both hands. Although the drawing does not appear to be preparatory for a particular work by the artist, it could well represent a first idea for a St. Joseph in a painting of the Visitation or the Nativity. In fact, the St. Joseph in the Visitation of about 1605-06 in the Duomo, Reggio Emilia, though reversed and more upright, does show a foot in a like raised position1. The same leggings are found on the seated figure to the left of St. Stephen preaching in the Temple of c. 1604-05, one of the frescoes of the saint’s life in the Sannesi Chapel in S. Silvestro al Quirinale, Rome2.
Antwerp 1535 -1599 Hamburg
Oil on slate. 403 x 515 mm. (157/16 x 201/4 in.)
Gillis (Gilles) Coignet (who is otherwise known as Conget, Congnet, and Cogniet) was born in Antwerp in 1542, son of a like-named goldsmith. Registered as a painter’s apprentice in 1553, he was a member of the painter’s guild there from 1560. Coignet travelled in Italy during the 1560s, where he would have become familiar with the paintings of Titian and many other Italian painters. He is recorded as being present at a meeting of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno on 16 January 1568. Along with Karel van Mander and a group of other Netherlandish painters he was active in Terni, where Giovanna Sapori1 has suggested he may have executed a frescoe datable 1567 or 1568 in the Palazzo Giocoso together with a painter called Stello or Stella (probably Martin Stellaert). These two artists are documented as working under the direction of Federico Zuccaro in the Villa d’Este at Tivoli. By 1570 Coignet had returned to Antwerp, where he is registered as having apprentices: his best known pupil is Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem. Because of his religious beliefs (he was a Lutheran), Coignet left for Amsterdam in 1585. During the last years of his life Coignet lived in Hamburg, where he died in 1599; his painting of the Last Supper dated 1595 is still to be seen in the St. Peter’s Church there.
This fine painting on slate, representing a key moment from the story of Perseus and Andromeda, is a hitherto unknown work by the Flemish sixteenth-century artist Gillis Coignet. The story shown is best known from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (IV:670ff.) Perseus flies in from the upper right on the winged horse Pegasus to rescue Andromeda, the maiden chained to the rock at the left, from the monster by whom she was to be eaten.
Perseus and Andromeda is a familiar subject in Renaissance art, as seen in a famous painting by Titian (London, The Wallace Collection), whose impact is found throughout Coignet’s oeuvre; his first signed and dated picture is a copy of Titian’s Amor and Venus (Kassel, Hessisches Landesmuseum) from 15792. Coignet had also previously painted this theme in a lunette on the ceiling in the Palazzo Giocoso in Terni that has recently been assigned to him by Sapori3.
This slate is especially comparable to a painting of 1581 of St. George and the Dragon (Antwerp, Museum of Fine Arts)4. In this picture, whose subject and theme are also similar, elements such as the knight in dark armor, the dappled horse, and the fleshy maiden are treated much as they are in Perseus and Andromeda. The representation of wind-struck waves in Perseus and Andromeda resembles that found in a painting of the Rape of Europa (New York, Art Market), where a similarly ponderous nude is also depicted. The physiognomic characteristics of Andromeda’s face are also found in females in many paintings by Coignet, and her expression seems particularly close to that of Venus in a painting of 1598 (Saintes, Musée du Présidial)5. Thus the Perseus and Andromeda may be a late work by the master.
In his Schilderboek Karel van Mander reports (fol. 262 line 25) that Coignet was adept at painting night scenes; in his Grondt der Edelvrij Schilderkonst, he also praises the light effects found in nocturnal pictures by Coignet. One such painting is an allegory for a depiction of a lottery (1592/93, Amsterdam Historisch Museum), and another is Judith Presenting the Head of Holofernes (Antwerp, Art Market) but the dimensions of these pictures do not match the specific characterization of “little night scenes” (historikens in den nacht) that Van Mander makes in his Schilderboek 6. However, Perseus and Andromeda, a small painting where the slate is used to suggest a nocturnal setting, seems to exemplify the small nocturne; its reflective surface also acts to increase the contrasting light effects of the composition, particularly noticeable when played off against the white highlights, might also be regarded as displaying some of the qualities Van Mander praised in Coignet. Perseus and Andromeda is thus an important addition to this artist’s relatively small oeuvre.
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Kortrijk 1576 -1639 Utrecht
Black chalk and touches of white chalk and red chalk wash, on light brown paper. Indented with the stylus for transfer. Signed at lower left with monogram ‘RS’. 220 x 278 mm (85/8x 11 in.)
PROVENANCE: Charles Rogers, his stamp at the lower left (Lugt 624); Sir John Charles Robinson, his monogram in gold at the lower left (Lugt 1433); Paul Frantz Marcou (Lugt 1911b)
Roeland Savery began his artistic career in Amsterdam under the tuition of his brother Jacob (1565 -1603). In 1604, Savery travelled to Prague, where he became court painter to the Emperors Rudolph II and Matthias. Both Emperors had made their court a centre of Mannerist art; Rudolph’s galleries were the most impressive in Europe at the time, and he was patron to some of the best contemporary artists, including Bartholomaus Spranger, Hans von Aachen and Adrien de Vries. The Emperor also showed a strong interest in botany, science and philosophy. In 1606, he commissioned Savery to travel to Tyrol ‘to draw wonders’ which would reflect the beauty of the Tyrolean countryside; these were then to adorn the Emperor’s palace. During this period, Savery executed large landscapes embellished with meticulously rendered animals and plants, in the mannerist style of his court contemporaries. He also made numerous preparatory sketches of trees, waterfalls, mountains, and birds, which provided reference material for later paintings, for example, the Cascade of 1608. Savery returned to court in 1608, and began compiling an extensive repertory of figure studies. Drawn directly from life observed in the busy markets of Prague, these are inspired by Pieter Breughel I, whose work the Emperor had spared no expense in acquiring for his collection. In fact, until 1970, these drawings were attributed to Breughel1. Savery often inscribed these studies with the words ‘naer het leven’ (drawn from life); he would then return to the studio to further enhance them, before inserting them into paintings such as the Peasants Carousing of 1608. In 1618, Savery left court, settling in Utrecht, where he befriended the still-life painters Balthasar van der Ast and Ambrosius Bosschaert. During the 1620s he was one of the most successful painters in Utrecht, but by 1638, he was bankrupt, perhaps due to alcoholism. He died a half-year later.
1. Aegidius Sadeler after Roeland Savery, engraving. |
The present sheet is a superb example of Savery’s delicately rendered chalk drawings. Possibly sketched directly from nature, Savery has chosen to concentrate on a particular feature of the landscape. The rendering of the gnarled tree-trunk in thick, heavy black chalk serves to heighten the dramatic intensity of the scene. The tree is set close against the picture plane and this, combined with the lack of natural flowing light and contorted tree roots evokes an eerie sense of mystery to an otherwise naturalistic scene. The sketch is masterly drawn; particular attention is given to the minutely detailed bark of the tree trunk, executed with lively and expressive coloured chalk contours. The drawing was engraved in reverse by Aegidius Sadeler (fig.1)2 and can be compared with another sketch by Savery of Giant Trees,3 also engraved in reverse by Sadeler. Although the composition differs, there are similarities in the rendering of the contorted tree-trunk, in the leaves and in the surrounding landscape. Savery is known to have drawn views specifically for prints, and Sadeler’s assistant, Isaac Major, is also recorded as having made etchings after Savery’s drawings.
Amsterdam 1585 -1634 Kampen
Pencil, pen and ink and bodycolour on paper. 93 x 155 mm (311/16x 61/8in.)
PROVENANCE: Christie’s Sale, 7th July 1959, lot 14, where acquired by a Private collection, England; Thence by descent in the family.
Known by his contemporaries as ‘de Stomme van Kampen’ Hendrick Avercamp was born deaf and mute in Amsterdam in 1585 at a house situated next to the Nieuwe Kerk. Ayear later the family moved to Kampen, a quiet town on the eastern shore of the Zuider Zee. The artist returned to Amsterdam to study with the Danish portrait and historical painter, Pieter Isaacks but, by January 1614, he was back in Kampen, where he remained until his death in 1634. Whilst in Amsterdam, Avercamp came into contact with the work of contemporary Flemish painters, most notably the mannerist landscapes of Gillis van Coninxloo and David Vinckboons. His earliest works, however, demonstrate an individual style, and one that is more strongly associated with the work of the lesser Kampen artist, Gerrit van der Horst. The most famous protagonist of the winter landscape, Avercamp specialised in scenes executed in a predominantly narrative style, filled with intricate and carefully observed detail. Adelightful example of his daring and witty anecdotes can be seen in the Winter Landscape with Iceskaters, dated 1608, and now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, where we see a couple making love, the rendering of bare buttocks and a man urinating in the snow. Avercamp was an accomplished and prolific draughtsman. When composing these winter scenes, he drew on a large supply of rapidly executed sketches of individual figures drawn from life; these preliminary drawings also served for composing more developed coloured drawings back at his studio. Avercamp’s method was to first draw the contours of the figures in pen and then fill the intervening space with watercolour and bodycolour. Although the use of watercolour and gouache was not innovative – Jan Breughel the Elder, Jacob Savery and Hans Bol all used this media – Avercamp was, however, one of the first Dutch draughtsmen to develop this technique specifically as a separate, independent art form. His pen drawings, heightened with watercolour, were so carefully finished and richly detailed that they were highly sought after by connoisseurs, and kept, not in albums, but glued to panels and framed as independent works of art.
Given the rarity of Avercamp’s extant drawings, the present sheet is quite unique. It is a typical example of his busy winter scenes, full of lively figures enjoying the seasonal pursuits of skating and sledging. The two figures in the foreground playing kolf 1 against a pale wintry sky, observed by a spectator, recur in a number of other paintings by the artist, such as the Winterlandscape, in a private collection, and Skating on Ice, Allegedly near Kampen, dated 1620, also in a private collection2. In both style and composition, this exquisite drawing is similar to the latter picture, and perhaps belongs to the same period, that of 1615 -1620. Avercamp rarely dated his paintings; his early works are characterised by a high viewpoint, a colourful but light palette and by the positioning of either trees or architecture as a compositional device to create balance. In later works, however, atmosphere becomes more important; the viewpoint is lowered, the trees become less prominent and the artist concentrates on the meticulous rendering of the figures, vividly coloured in the foreground and lightened as they recede into the distance. In this example, by carefully placing pinks, reds, blacks, whites and touches of yellow, Avercamp applies his refined sense of colour to create delicate and subtle effects.
Florence 1616 -1687 Florence
Oil on copper. 280 x 229 mm. (11 x 9 in.)
PROVENANCE: this copper may be the “sacra conversazione in figure intere piccole con cornice intagliata e dorata di Carlino Dolci”, mentioned in the 1727 inventory of Gian Gualberto Guicciardini and inherited by his son-in-law the marchese Rinuccini the following year.
Carlo Dolci was the most important native painter of the Seventeenth Century in Florence, and, as such, established an international reputation in his own lifetime. A child prodigy, he was trained under Jacopo Vignali (1592 -1664), whose paintings in the late 1620s exercised a profound influence on him. According to Filippo Baldinucci, his biographer and friend, Dolci manifested the intensely religious sentiment which was to be the guiding force behind his art even as a child. He conceived many of his paintings as devotional works whose end, as in the Guardian Angel of about 1650 in the Methuen Collection, Corsham Court, was to inspire Christian piety in those who beheld them. Although he executed a number of large altarpieces, Dolci’s ideal was realized in paintings with a single half or three-quarter length figure, which confronts the spectator with striking simplicity, and shows that use of meticulous detail which Baldinucci called his ‘diligenza pratica, ovvero pratica paziente ’1. In this, he may have been influenced by the Dutch pictures in the Medici collections, and his work shows spiritual affinities with the sixteenth-century Spanish artist Luis de Morales.
This exquisite, highly wrought copper with The Two Trinities represents an important addition to Dolci’s adolescent oeuvre 2. In the early 1630s when he was fifteen or sixteen years old, the artist painted a number of works, such as the Portrait of Arnolfo de’Bardi (signed and dated 1632) in the Uffizi, Florence3, which both confirmed his prodigious powers and earned him the attention and patronage of the Medici4. Elements of style – the delicate, sensitive modelling of hands and faces, the crisp handling of the drapery and the bright, highly keyed palette – and figure type, especially that of St. Joseph, relate the present copper to a series of paintings of different sizes and supports which date to this period. These include the Adorations of the Shepherds on the London art market5, at Burghley House, Stamford6, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland7; the Adorations of the Magi in the Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow8, and at Blenheim Palace, Woodstock9; and the Flight into Egypt at Burghley House, Stamford10. Many of these pictures show borrowings from Dolci’s older contemporaries, especially, as might be expected, Jacopo Vignali11. The present Two Trinities is no exception: as Francesca Baldassarri has pointed out, the same figure of God the Father, hovering above the seated Holy Family, with one hand raised in blessing and the other resting on a globe appears to the left of Vignali’s altarpiece with the Baptism of Christ of 1627, and now in the Bigongiari Collection, Florence12.
Since the Middle Ages, it was a devotional commonplace in northern Europe, expressed also in art, that heaven and earth came together in the Holy Family at Nazareth13. This concept evolved during the Counter Reformation into the more complex imagery of the “Two Trinities”, the prototype being a print by Hieronymus Wierix (1553 -1619), which inspired the celebrated Murillo in the National Gallery, London14. Although usually associated with Flemish or Hispanic art, this subject-matter was used on occasion by Italians, such as Francesco Albani (1578 -1660) who used it for two important altarpieces, one of 1626 -28 with Sts. Thomas of Aquinas and Philip Neri for the church of S. Giacomo in Forlì and the other of 1627 -32 with the instruments of the Passion in S.ta Maria di Galliera, Bologna15. Simone Cantarini (1612 -1648) also painted an altarpiece with the theme of the ‘Two Trinities’, which was formerly on the Italian art market16. What distinguishes Dolci’s depiction of the Two Trinities from most other examples is that Christ is shown as an adult rather than as a child.
Bologna 1575 -1642 Bologna
Red chalk heightened with black, yellow and white chalk. Numbered on the verso: R No: 36’. 419 x 293 mm. (16 x 11 in.)
WATERMARK: A lion rampant, encircled.
PROVENANCE: German Private collection (acquired in Berlin in 1928)1
Guido Reni was a pupil of Denys Calvaert in Bologna and, like Domenichino and Francesco Albani, transferred in 1595 from the studio of the Flemish artist to the Carracci’s Accademia degli Incamminati. His earliest major work, a Coronation of the Virgin painted in 1595 and now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, shows the influence of both Calvaert and the Carracci. A number of altarpiece commissions for churches in and around Bologna followed before Reni moved to Rome in 1601. He remained there for some thirteen years and received several important commissions; unlike Albani and Domenichino, however, he did not join the Roman workshop of Annibale Carracci. Among Reni’s most important Roman works were the decoration of the chapel of the Annunciation in the Palazzo Quirinale, painted in 1610, and the ceiling fresco of the Triumph of Aurora for the Villa Borghese, completed in 1614. Reni returned to Bologna that year and was soon established as the city’s leading painter and the dominant figure in local artistic circles. Among the important works of this period are four large scenes from the legend of Hercules painted between 1617 and 1621 for Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua; these are now in the Louvre. In the late years of his career, his painting style became looser and broader with figures of a somewhat ethereal quality.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Reni does not seem to have made much effort to preserve his drawings and only around two hundred sheets survive today. His biographer Cesare Malvasia notes that the artist tended to leave his drawings lying around his studio where anyone could take them, and that at his death large groups of sketches were sold for minimal sums. The largest extant group of drawings by Reni, numbering around fifty sheets, is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.
This large and animated head study is a working drawing, with slight differences, for the Saint Petronius appearing in one of the artist’s most famous commissions, the votive standard or banner known as the Pala della Peste (fig.1), now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna2. Other drawings related to the composition are at Christ Church, Oxford (inv.0528): a comparably fine head study for the soldier Saint Proculus3; and in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid: a half length figure study preparatory for the St Ignatius Loyola4. The drawing at Christ Church belonged to Padre Resta and bears the customary form of inventory number: e.80.. It is described in Richardson’s transcription of the Resta catalogue (the Lansdowne manuscript MS 802, in the British Museum) as: Guido S. Proco nel famoso Stendardo della Citta di Bologna. Tantalizingly, the succeeding number, e.81 is listed as a S. Petronio but, since no Resta number is visible on the present sheet it can only be suggested that the two drawings have a shared provenance. The use of coloured chalk in this drawing is particularly unusual in Reni’s work. The head studies are more commonly executed in red, black and white. Here, the red and yellow chalk shading is applied and then stumped in a painterly manner as if to block out areas of lighter and darker coloration. Details of the ears, mouth and eyes are picked out with harder accents of red chalk. In describing this study, Catherine Johnston, who will include it in her forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Reni drawings, remarked particularly on the ‘vitality’ of execution ‘indicative of the master’s hand’ and compared it with other head studies of this later period such as that for the Sant’Andrea Corsini in the Louvre (inv. 8900)5. A drawing at Windsor, of the same head, is considered to be a copy after the painting by both Catherine Johnston and Veronika Birke6; in
1. Guido Reni, Pala della Peste, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna.
small details such as the Saint’s hairline and the shape of the mouth, the copy is closer to the finished painting than to the present preparatory study. Few documents relating to the commission survive and thus the present drawing and the two others mentioned above, are precious records of the project’s hurried evolution.
The Pala della Peste was commissioned from Reni, in the face of a devastating plague, to be a symbol of Bologna’s devotion to the Madonna and her Saints and to act as a plea for their intercession. The plague is recorded to have entered the city on 6 May 1630 and six months later roughly one quarter of the population had died from it. On 2 August the city Senate swore a solemn vow offering acts of collective piety to the Madonna of the Rosary, Francis Xavier and Ignatius of Loyola. This act expressed the desperation of a community witnessing the horrors of a disease they understood as an expression of God’s wrath. Chosen by the senators as the foremost painter in the city, Reni was asked to complete the banner in time for a public procession to be held on 27 December that same year, the feast of St John the Evangelist. Reni chose silk as the support for this massive banner or ‘pallione’, presumably for its light weight, although a story from Malvasia is often recounted in this context. The artist is said to have been convinced of that material’s strength and resilience after having witnessed the exhumation of a Roman body. On the instant the tomb was opened, both the skeleton and its linen shirt disintegrated leaving only the silk toga intact. The banner was to be carried at head height and reaches nearly four metres high. Reni filled the lowest part of this dignified and moving composition with a grim depiction of the city which would have been clearly visible to the processors and the gathered crowds. It shows the city walls, with prominent monuments and churches visible beyond. The scene is filled with the tiny figures of desperate onlookers watching the sick and dead being carried away. Above, is a heavenly vision of the Madonna and Child seated upon a rainbow, to which all eyes are guided by the earnest, interceding hands and expressions of Bologna’s patron saints, who are assembled beneath her: Petronius (who is given precedence as the city’s most venerated patron), Francis of Assisi and Francis Xavier, Dominic, Ignatius of Loyola, Florian and Proculus. Following its wintry presentation to the citizens at a time when the destructive power of the plague was beginning to wane, Reni’s life-affirming standard was carried through Bologna’s streets annually, warding off death for the next one hundred and fifty years until, deemed too precious to be moved, a copy was commissioned from Pier Francesco Cavazza to be carried in its place7.
Cento 1591-1666 Bologna
Red chalk. Inscribed Guercino in brown ink at the lower right. 211 x 163 mm. (81/4 x 6 3/8 in.)
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri was, by the second decade of the 17th century, one of the foremost painters in the province of Emilia. Born in Cento, a small town between Bologna and Ferrara, Guercino was, in his early work, strongly influenced by the paintings of Ludovico Carracci. In 1617 he was summoned to Bologna by Alessandro Ludovisi, the Cardinal Archbishop of Bologna, and there painted a number of important altarpieces, typified by the Saint William Receiving the Monastic Habit, painted in 1620 and now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna. When Ludovisi was elected Pope Gregory XV in 1621, Guercino was summoned to Rome to work for the pontiff and his nephew, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi. It was in Rome that Guercino painted some of his most celebrated works, notably the ceiling fresco of Aurora in the Casino Ludovisi and the large altarpiece of The Burial and Reception into Heaven of Saint Petronilla for an altar in Saint Peter’s. The papacy of Gregory XV was short-lived, however, and on the death of the Pope in 1623 Guercino returned to his native Cento, where he remained working in Cento for twenty years, turning down offers of employment at the royal courts in London and Paris. Following the death of Guido Reni in 1642, Guercino moved his studio to Bologna, where he received commissions for religious pictures of the sort that Reni had specialized in, and was soon established as the city’s leading painter.
Although it never really replaced pen and ink as his preferred medium, red chalk was a staple of Guercino’s draughtsmanship, wherein he was particularly influenced by the drawings of Correggio. After his return to Bologna from Rome in 1623, Guercino began to use red chalk regularly, usually to further study the pose of a figure once the initial composition drawings in pen and ink had been completed. As his career progressed, however, his use of red chalk became even more frequent, especially from the 1650s onwards. Although he remained very busy with commissions until his death in 1666, he seems to have drawn much less, and only a comparatively few drawings - many of which are in red chalk - survive from the last fifteen years of his career.
The present sheet may be grouped with a series of preparatory studies for a now-lost painting of Sisyphus painted by Guercino for Count Girolamo Ranuzzi of Bologna in 1636. The painting is described as ‘una figura di un Sisifo’ in the artist’s account book, the libro dei conti, which further notes the sum of 100 ducatoni paid by Ranuzzi on the 28th of October 16361. The price paid for the picture would suggest that the figure of Sisyphus was almost certainly depicted full-length.
Several other drawings of this subject by Guercino are known, all of which may be supposed to be studies for the lost Ranuzzi canvas. Closest in composition to the present sheet is a pen and wash drawing in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle2, which shows Sisyphus supporting the boulder on his back and moving towards the left. Other drawings of this subject show further variations in the pose and direction of Sisyphus. These include a pen and wash study in the Courtauld Institute of Art in London3, which alone among the other drawings of this subject does not show Sisyphus carrying the boulder on his back or pushing it up a hill, but rather lifting it from the ground with both hands. Another pen drawing, in the Suida-Manning Collection at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas4, shows Sisyphus turned to the right. A double-sided black chalk drawing, showing an unbearded figure of Sisyphus, is in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem5. Two further drawings of this subject appeared on the art market in London in the early 1970’s; a pen study exhibited at Colnaghi in 19706 and another sold at auction the following year7.
Guercino seems to have returned to this figure type some ten years later, in 1646, when he was commissioned to paint an Atlas for Don Lorenzo de’ Medici; the painting is now in the Museo Bardini in Florence8.
Cento 1591-1666 Bologna
Pen and brown ink and brown wash. The sheet cut along the bottom edge and laid down. 200 x 192 mm. (7 3/4 x 7 1/2 in.)
PROVENANCE: Baron de Malaussena (L.1887); Paul-Frantz Marcou (L.1911b) and another as yet unidentified mark or paraphe
The biographer Malvasia who knew Guercino in person reported that already at the age of six he showed a fierce desire to draw; he went on to become probably the most original, prolific and indeed influential draughtsman of the seventeenth century. Guercino seems to have been largely self-taught until his virtual adoption by the painter Benedetto Gennari. In 1612 Guercino met and was befriended by Padre Antonio Mirandola of Bologna who became his most loyal and effective patron. Works dating from this period register very clearly the influence of Ludovico Carracci; Guercino himself joked about his dependence on the Bolognese artist and interestingly, four years later in 1616, Guercino set up his own academy of drawing as if modelling himself on the standards of the Carracci family. By 1619 the pressures of conflicting demands from illustrious patrons were leading him to negotiate long contracts and to write letters of apology and excuse: he was showered with commissions, fees and even knighthoods, receiving two in one year. One of these patrons, the Bolognese cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi was elected Pope Gregory XV in 1621; thus Guercino’s career in Rome took off and the scale and ambition of his works escalated accordingly. But on Pope Gregory’s death, Guercino ‘the squinter’ as he was already known, returned to the rural and domestic pleasures of Cento where he preferred to be based though still very much in demand: he did travel to Modena but turned down the offer from Charles I to come to England, while the interest of Maria de Medici came to nothing due to political upheavals in France. After twenty years in Cento, the death of Guido Reni in 1642 led to Guercino’s immediate move to Bologna, perhaps to fill the shoes of the master with whom he had long been in rivalry for commissions. There followed a period in which he was indisputably the leading painter of the city, receiving all the prominent public commissions though still being courted by Regents abroad. In the last fifteen years of his life, Guercino suffered greatly from the loss of his brother, who had also acted as a form of manager, and from increasing ill health, but his work was in continual demand until his death.
Exceptionally spare in method, this clever, delicate portrait drawing compares most closely in technique with certain caricatures; though grotesquerie is entirely absent here, the lightness of touch both in the pale wash and the thin, fluent line is seen again in the caricatures of a Young Man Wearing a Hat and the Grotesque Head, both from the group at Windsor1. In terms of date, there are similarities with drawings considered to be typical of the mid 1630s, both in the use of a light, bistre ink and pale brown wash and a certain cool restraint in the supremely confident handling of the thread-like pen lines; see for example the St Jerome Reading and the Head of an Old Man, both from the Casa Gennari and Bouverie groups and still in private collections.2
Neither caricature nor exotic, the drawing describes a beady and serious looking figure, dark buttons of wash suggesting concentration in the eyes and a relative absence of penwork conveying the set mouth and stiffened jaw. Direct light shines on the almost bald head and the shadow cast from the nose extends across one shoulder. Here, as is often seen in Guercino’s drawings and again later in the works of another great master of the pen, Giambattista Tiepolo, it is to a great degree what is not there that delineates the object studied as much as the actual presence of pen or brush or chalk.
Verona 1578 -1649 Rome
Oil on circular copper. Diameter 250 mm. (9 7/8 in.)
The first of five children, Alessandro was born in 1578 to Silvestro Turchi, a ‘spartarius’ by profession, and Isabetta his wife. Blinded after an accident at work, Silvestro took to begging in order to support his family. Alessandro accompanied him on his rounds of the city, hence his nickname ‘Orbetto’ or the little blind boy. However, by 1597, the young man was employed with the title of ‘pittor domestico’ in the studio of Felice Brusasorzi, a late Mannerist painter with naturalistic tendencies, who dominated artistic life in Verona until his untimely death in 1605. Turchi completed an important altarpiece for the church of S. Anastasia in Verona left unfinished by Brusasorzi, and, when he applied for membership in the prestigious Accademia Filarmonica in 1609, declared that his style in painting was based on his Master’s. Turchi was, however, open to other influences, especially those of Bolognese artists whose style he would have known from works in Veronese collections or engravings after the Carracci. After a visit to Venice, Turchi was in Rome by 1616 -17 when he was paid for his part in the decoration of the Sala Regia in the Quirinal Palace. He was patronized by the great Scipione Borghese who acquired directly from the artist the two small pictures on stone – a technique favoured by Veronese painters - of Christ raising Lazarus and a Deposition with Mary Magdalen, which are now in the Galleria Borghese, Rome.1 In 1619, when he and his brother are mentioned in the Stati d’anime for S. Maria del Popolo, Turchi worked again for the Borghese family, this time in the chapel of ‘the new building at Montragone’. He also painted a magnificent altarpiece with St. Charles Borromeo and the Virgin for the Roman church of S. Salvatore in Lauro, which shows the influence of Carlo Saraceni, the Venetian caravagesque painter who was his friend. After a brief sojourn in his native Verona in the early 1620s, Turchi returned to Rome because he felt that city was a better ‘theatre’ for his talents.2 He was an esteemed member of the artistic community, becoming princeps, or president, of the Accademia di S. Luca in 1637 and joining the Accademia dei Virtuosi of the Pantheon. Turchi’s ‘... maniera vaga e delicata ...’ continued to find success in his native city; in fact, he sent fourteen paintings of mythological and religious subjects to the Marchesi Gherardini in about 1640, three of which were inherited by the Lechi family in Brescia.3 The fame of his art spread beyond the Alps during the 1640s when the celebrated French collector Louis II Phélipeaux de la Vrillière acquired the Death of Cleopatra, now in The Louvre, to hang in his palace along with works by Reni, Poussin, Guercino, and Pietro da Cortona, to which he added some years later two magnificent Marattas.4 Turchi died in Rome in 1649 within the parish boundaries of S. Lorenzo in Lucina.
This enamel-like copper of Eve tempting Adam is an outstanding example of Turchi’s mature production in Rome, when the classic attitudes and soft, sleek figures of his compositions reached a kind of exquisite perfection, especially in works on a small-scale.5 The figure of Eve in this copper is typical of the full, rounded forms of Turchi’s female personages in his mythologies, and is identical to the depiction of the same biblical character in Adam and Eve lamenting over the Body of Abel in the Musée de Grenoble, while Adam’s ballet-like stance is repeated in reversed form on the left of the small canvas.6
The scene of the Temptation in this copper is depicted in a traditional manner with the serpent twined round the trunk of an apple tree, imagery which may derive from the pre-Christian myth of the dragon guarding the tree in the Garden of the Hesperides. Eve has just plucked the fruit and is about to offer it to Adam who shows a moment’s hesitation. As a result of their act of disobedience, Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise and forced to toil in the outside world where death also awaited them.
Naples 1607-1656 Naples
Red chalk. Inscribed in pen and ink: Ribera. Crossed out and inscribed in another hand: Spagnoletto. Also crossed out and inscribed in a third hand: A. Falcone. 279 x 335 mm. (11 by 13 3/16 in.)
Falcone trained for a short time with Ribera but quickly developed his own specialization as a painter of battle scenes. He soon became known as ‘l’Oracolo delle Battaglie ’1, for the intensity of his compositions, the profusion of detail in weaponry and costume, and the powerful expressions of his figures. Falcone was championed and supported by a number of mostly secular patrons, and his workshop in Naples attracted fine students such as Micco Spadaro, Andrea di Lione and Salvator Rosa. Contrary to the commonly held view voiced by Passeri that ‘Neapolitan artists are not by nature much inclined to make a prolonged study of drawing...’ 2. Falcone’s earliest biographer, Bernardo de Dominici, notes that the artist organized a drawing academy in his house during the winter months for his pupils to study the nude. It is from De Dominici also that we know Falcone travelled to Rome, but apart from this, he appears to have worked entirely in and around Naples, sending out pictures to farther flung patrons such as Philip IV of Spain, for whom he executed a number of canvases for the Palace of El Buen Retiro in Madrid. The Roman trip may have provoked Falcone’s fascination with Poussin, but the rich colouring and warm light seen in his later work shows that his eye also absorbed the painterly qualities and palettes of Castiglione, Pier Francesco Mola and Andrea Sacchi.
An exceptionally fine addition to the known corpus of Falcone’s drawings, this large and impressive study has been identified as a preparatory work for one of Falcone’s three surviving fresco commissions. The warrior, just fallen, the cry fresh from his month and shield still held to his chest, can be found at the far left edge of Falcone’s fresco of the Battle of the Israelites and the Amalekites (fig.1) in a villa at Barra, an area to the east of Naples situated towards Mount Vesuvius. The villa, known variously as
1. Aniello Falcone, The Battle of the Israelites and the Amalekites, Barra, near Naples.
Villa Bisignano, Villa Roomer and now Villa di Rodino Miglione, was bought in 1634 by Gaspar Roomer, a successful Flemish banker, one of the richest men in Naples and Falcone’s most ardent patron. Afascinating ‘Shorter Notice’ in the Burlington Magazine3 describes Anthony Blunt’s fortuitous visit to the villa at the moment when renovations had revealed a deeply coved ceiling covered in frescoes, until then hidden by a remodeling of the rooms. Blunt attributed the work to Falcone immediately, likening the two battle scenes on the longer sides of the cove to his then better known oil paintings and recognizing, among other details, the profile head of a warrior from a ‘celebrated’ drawing in the Pierpont Morgan Library. He speculated that the frescoes showed scenes from the life of Moses taken from the Book of Exodus, supporting his intuition of Falcone’s authorship by the fact that Roomer had owned the villa. He also pointed out the importance of the ceiling’s re-discovery for establishing a third set of frescoes by the artist, after those already known to be his work in the Churches of the Gesù Nuovo and San Paolo Maggiore in Naples.
A more recent examination of the frescoes, published by Annachiara Alabiso, again in the Burlington Magazine4, confirmed Blunt’s identification of the subject matter, which, it was proposed, would have been suggested to Falcone by the highly cultivated Roomer. The learned patron appears to have retreated to the peace of the villa in 1647 in order to escape the political revolts and social upheavals happening in Naples at that time and the frescoes most probably date from then. Despite earthquake damage and extensive restoration, Alabiso has been able to identify the Battle of the Israelites and the Amalekites as the first scene of the cycle to be painted, and speculates that it would originally have been signed and dated, probably within the circumference of the drum visible at the right edge. Repeating Blunt, the author underlines the importance of the Barra frescoes given the barely legible condition of the two other series by Falcone already mentioned.
Blunt’s attribution to Falcone of the Barra frescoes was only briefly contested, by Magda Novelli Radicea5, who suggested that they, and indeed the Pierpont Morgan Library drawing, were by Andrea di Leone. Such uncertainties have since been dismissed and indeed the appearance of this drawing, so typical of Falcone, can be taken as further evidence of the artist’s identity. In addition to this drawing and the Morgan Library sheet, a small number of other studies for the same project are known. These are a red chalk and wash composition drawing for the Moses and the Brazen Serpent, frescoed on to one of the narrower sides of the coved ceiling 6; a chalk study of a group of female figures in the Finding of Moses, painted in the vault of the ceiling bearing the old inscription An. Falcone da Rafaele which indeed depends upon Raphael’s fresco of the same subject in the Vatican Logge7; and another fine study of a turbaned figure lying as if dead, which is a study for the fallen warrior on the left in the Battle between the Israelites and the Amalechites 8.
The exhibition catalogue Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli illustrates the range of Falcone’s drawing style which almost always depends on the use of red chalk9: from a beautifully lit head study in the Stiftung Ratjen; Collection Vaduz, to a more impressionistic chalk, brush and wash compositional sketch for a group of marching soldiers. Calm red chalk landscapes are followed by a lively and finely observed study for a watchful, mounted soldier. It may be noted that the present work, refined and severe, but highly expressive in character, has a classicized mood which is entirely in keeping with the profound interest in Poussin’s work, which Falcone had been exploring since the 1630s. On this subject, Alabiso points out various figures appearing in Falcone’s paintings of the mid- 1640s, which have been taken directly from Poussin, observing that, for example, the warrior fallen from his horse mentioned above in connection with the Copenhagen drawing, is actually adapted from the female figure lying at the centre of Poussin’s Plague of Ashod. More noticeably, the frieze-like, elegant and almost symmetrical composition of this Battle of the Israelites and the Amalekites is a clear response to the grand designs of the French artist dating from the 1630s10.
Arenella 1615 -1673 Rome
Black, red and white chalk on light brown paper. 221 x 179 mm. (83/4 x 7 in.)
The thrilling stories of brigands, revolutionaries and a hidden mistress combined of course with the fame of his thunderous, melancholic landscapes and brooding self portraits have led to Salvator Rosa becoming the archetype of the romantic artist figure. Indeed the brilliance and originality of his landscape paintings, which he himself dismissed as frivolous capricci, has in the past obscured from sight his learned and ambitious approach to painting. Rosa apprenticed himself to Aniello Falcone, and travelled to Rome for the first time in 1634. His landscape paintings met early success and the pursuit of other arts, music, poetry, acting and most famously the writing of verse satires and satirical plays bought him much attention. Moving between Rome, Naples and Florence his career progressed along an unconventional path; he was perhaps notorious rather than famous, had supporters and admirers rather than long-term patrons, is said to have refused to paint on commission or to agree a price before completion of the work, denied he had ever been anyone’s pupil and himself had no students. Rosa castigated the morals of all around him while himself living freely. On his deathbed, however, he married his devoted mistress Lucrezia and is supposed to have died in a contrite frame of mind leaving behind an extraordinary body of work: hundreds of picturesque landscapes peopled with shepherds, soldiers, bandits and philosophers, portraits, scenes of battles, history scenes, philosophical and biblical illustrations and a fascinating body of drawings.
Though Rosa clearly reached most readily for his pen, a small group of head studies has been described, to which the present sheet can be added, showing the artist working in a finished and refined manner with chalks1. Michael Mahoney categorised them as being ‘mostly idealised’ and in poor condition, though the last chalk head to appear before the present one was the exceptionally fine and well-conserved portrait of his mistress Lucrezia Paolino2. In general, as Mahoney notes, the heads are very like those Rosa is known to have painted for a variety of Florentine and Roman patrons over a period of twenty years, some described by Baldinucci as being in the manner of ‘pittori antichi’ 3. Grouped together with a few heads drawn in pen on wooden panels, Mahoney considers that they ‘were conceived as something apart from the artist’s ordinary sketches, perhaps intended as presentation pieces’4.
These heads are indeed mostly iconographical ‘types’ in a classical mood usually echoing more than one picture; Mahoney notes that the fine head in the British Museum known as ‘Belisarius’ may be a presentation ricordo of the eponymous picture dated to the mid 1650s formerly in the collection of Sir Osbert Sitwell; but the features of the turbaned man in a British private collection are extremely similar to those of both the Poet in his Study in the John and Mable Ringling Museum, Sarasota as well as to the figure of ‘La Menzogna’ in the Galleria Pitti, Florence5. The present depiction of a bearded man with a distinctive high forehead and forceful gaze is itself familiar from numerous paintings and drawings by the artist featuring philosopher figures and saints6.
Generally coherent as a group, these chalk portraits vary only in size and in the extent of colour used; the present work is one of four such heads restricted to the trois crayons palette while others include turquoise, pink, yellow and blue. This ‘special class of drawings in Rosa’s oeuvre’7 is impossible to date more precisely than to the 1640s and 1650s since the relatively careful and restrained approach precludes the more datable ticks and idiosyncracies of the artist’s freer pen style. For an artist so well known for his painterly approach and in his drawings for his hectic, improvisational and increasingly loose manner, this group of fine and masterful heads is a demonstration of Rosa’s ability to draw in completely different styles simultaneously and perhaps also an indication that he worked harder and more rigorously as a draughtsman than is usually considered.
Lyon 1596 -1657 Lyon
Gouache. Signed and dated J. Stella fecit 1655 (fig.1) in brown ink on the verso. 233 x 324 mm. (9 81/8 X 123/4 in.)
LITERATURE: G. Chomer and S. Laveissière, in Jacques Stella (1595-1657), exhibition catalogue [Lyon-Toulouse], Paris, 2006, p. 221 and p. 227, no. 163, illustrated in colour.
EXHIBITED: Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Jacques Stella (1596-1667), 2006, no. 163.
The son of a minor painter of Flemish origins, Jacques Stella spent the first part of his career in Italy. He travelled to Florence in 1616, working at the court of the Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, where he developed a reputation for small-scale cabinet paintings on marble or semi-precious stone. By 1623, he was in Rome, where he was soon established among the French artists active in the city, and, in particular, enjoyed a close friendship with Nicolas Poussin, from whom he is even known to have commissioned paintings. While in Rome, Stella produced a number of easel pictures, drawings, engravings and religious compositions, for Cardinal Barberini among others. By 1635 he had returned to France, where he gained the extensive patronage of Cardinal Richelieu, with an annual pension and lodgings at the Louvre. He painted numerous pictures for other important collectors, altarpieces for Parisian churches, such as Saint-Germain-le Vieux, and contributed a cartoon, now in the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, for the series of tapestries with the Life of the Virgin to be hung in the choir of Notre-Dame in Paris. An indication of the esteem in which Stella was held is seen by the fact that in 1645 he was awarded the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre de Saint-Michel, an honour usually reserved for the nobility and only rarely presented to a painter. Together with Laurent de La Hyre, Stella became one of the leading exponents of a style that has come to be known as Parisian Atticism, characterized by paintings that show refined, yet austere, classical compositions and a cool palette; such works were a reaction against the Baroque tendencies of Simon Vouet and his followers.
This superb landscape in gouache by Stella is the only extant work of this type by the artist. It is listed, along with another lost gouache and 98 drawings, in the artist’s inventory drafted by his niece Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella: ‘7. Another book of about 16 inches high by 10 wide [...] 98 sheets of grey paper, in which there are 98 drawings and two coloured landscapes. All of it in the hand of my uncle M. Stella. These drawings are more finished than the others ’1.
The promontory dominated by the group of buildings which resemble the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli in the background of this gouache, recurs, seen from a slightly different angle, in the sixth plate of the Pastorales, engraved by Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella in 1667, and now in a private collection2.
1. Stella’s signature and date on the verso of the sheet, actual size.
Milan 1661 -1715 Milan
Red chalk. The verso inscribed Lanfranco and numbered n.3. 410 x 270 mm. (16 1/4 x 10 3/4 in.)
PROVENANCE: Giuseppe Vallardi (L.1223); Pacini (19th century), his mark stamped in black ink on the verso (L.2011); collection of Dr Rudolf and Lore Heinemann, sale, London, Christie’s, 1st July 1997, lot 68.
LITERATURE: Angelica Poggi, ‘I disegni di Carlo Donelli, il Vimercati. Un esperienza accademica nella Milano tra Sei e Settecento’, in Nuovi Studi. Rivista di Arte Antica e Moderna, 2007, no.12, p.183, no.82.
Carlo Donelli, known as Il Vimercati after the town of Vimercate from which his family is thought to have originated, was a pupil of Ercole Procaccini the Younger. He was also strongly influenced by the work of other Lombard artists, notably Giulio Cesare Procaccini and Daniele Crespi, whose frescoes at the Certosa at Garegnano he studied. His first documented paintings date from the late 1690s, although none of these early works survive, with the exception of a large altarpiece of The Holy Family with God the Father, painted for the Sanctuary of the Madonna Addolorata in Rho, on the outskirts of Milan, and still in situ. In fact, despite his apparent contemporary fame and success (an 18th century Milanese scholar, Serviliano Latuada, described him as one of ‘the most renowned artists’ of his day), only a very few paintings by Vimercati survive today, of which a significant example is an oval Saint Sebastian Before the Roman Proconsul, painted in 1703 for the church of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan. A member of the Accademia Ambrosiana, and of the Accademia di San Luca, founded in 16881, Vimercati was active for most of his career in and around Milan, where he painted works for a number of churches. Amongst these are the Visitation painted in around 1700 for a church in Codogno and now in the Museo Diocesano, in Lodi; and the 1711 God the Father with St. John the Baptist and St. Charles Borromeo in the church of San Vittore in Stresa, Isola Bella. A series of four frescoes of Bacchic subjects decorating a room of the Palazzo Trotti in the town of Vimercate, dated to between 1705 and 1706, have also recently been attributed to the artist.
The paucity of surviving paintings by Vimercati has meant that he is much better known as a draughtsman. In her recent article on the artist’s work, Angelica Poggi lists eighty-eight autograph drawings by Vimercati 2, of which as many as sixty-nine are in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, in Milan3. With the exception of an oil on paper in the Pinacoteca Civica, in Pesaro, all of the artist’s drawings are executed in red chalk, and occasionally heightened with white chalk.
This impressive drawing depicts a statuesque male figure slumped, limbs loose and head resting to one side. Drawn in Vimercati’s characteristically bold and linear style, the contours of the legs, the definition of the chest, and the shadows behind the upper arms, knees and feet, are scored out as if by a sculptor’s chisel. Another drawing from the same provenance as the present sheet is in a private collection4. Also executed in red chalk and of similar dimensions, it shows the same male nude in an almost identical pose, albeit reversed, and with the addition of a halo around the head. This suggests that both drawings were intended as studies for the figure of the Dead Christ in a Pieta. In discussing Vimercati’s drawings, Poggi rightly makes a point of defining a small group of nude studies which stand out for their bold treatment and superior draughtsmanship5. Poggi’s selection lists this latter drawing and therefore, by extension, the present one may be included for its equally fine quality.
Watercolour over a black chalk underdrawing. Heightened with touches of gouache. Inscribed in brown ink TULIPA lutea, lituris quibusdam viridi- / bus et sanguineis distincta, flore maxi- / mo, laciniato. H. R. Par. Le monstre / jaune. Tourn. 376., at the lower left, and rubra, lituris, quibus- / dam viridibus et luteis distincta, / flore maximo, laciniato, et cri - / spo. Le Perroquet monstre rouge, at the lower right. 426 x 596 mm. (163/4 x 231/2 in.)
WATERMARK: Coat-of-arms with Rampant Lion, Nuremberg, early 18th century (Heawood, no. 3134.)
Tulips, which grow wild in Central Asia, were highly prized and cultivated in the Ottoman Empire for some hundreds of years before their introduction to Europe in the middle of the 16th century; indeed the name derives from the Turkish word for a turban; dulband or tulipand. The Dutch botanist Professor Carolus Clusius began experimenting with tulip bulbs in Leiden in 1593, first as a potential source of food but, as the extravagant varieties he produced caught the eyes of the wealthy Dutch, a market developed for the tulip as a symbol of luxury and status. By the early 17th Century, imports of bulbs from Turkey had vastly increased. As the Dutch established their own tulip nurseries breeding ever more flamboyant varieties, the margins for the Amsterdam merchants at the centre of this Golden Age of trade extended beyond all expectations; a single voyage could yield profits of up to 400%. Displaying their success by building large residences surrounded by magnificent flower gardens, the merchants inspired the sober and hardworking citizens of Holland to become caught up in an extraordinary trading frenzy which reached its peak in the winter of 1637. For almost a year rare bulbs changed hands up to ten times a day, for incredible and ever-increasing sums, until single flowers were being sold for more than the cost of a house. In his book about Tulipomania, Mike Dash tells of seven orphans who made a fortune from an auction of their only asset, the seventy tulip bulbs left to them by their father, during which a single rare bulb was bought for 5,200 guilders, at a time when the average yearly income was 150 guilders1.
The process of growing tulips was itself slower than the actual trade, therefore buying and selling was based on future market expectations, a situation similar to the trading in Futures in today’s stock exchange. This fragile balance was disturbed when for the first time, at another auction, a buyer failed to pay for and collect his purchase. This caused a panic in the market which soon spread across the whole country and despite all efforts to keep it going, the tulip trade evaporated as fast as it had originated. Historians would come to call it Tulip Mania and modern economists consider it to have been the first speculative bubble.
After the market crash, the tulip, nevertheless, continued to fascinate horticulturalists around Europe. As Dash explains, ‘It is impossible to comprehend the tulip mania without understanding just how different tulips were from every other flower known to horticulturists in the 17 th century. The colours they exhibited were more intense and more concentrated than those of ordinary plants.’ The most spectacular and desirable tulips were deliberately infected with a specific virus known as Tulip Breaking Potyvirus: this caused the flowers to develop vivid colours, jagged contours, and flame-like streaks on the petals. Aristocrats and the wealthy bourgeois grew tulips in their gardens and began recording the different species by employing artists to make drawings of the flowers. These were studies from life allowing the tulips to be shown and admired by their owners even out of season.
One of the most important collections of tulips was grown in Paris, in the Hortus Regius Parisiensis, the Jardin du Roi. Founded in 1626 as a medicinal herb garden, it was opened to the public in 1640, and had its heyday from 1693, when Colbert was appointed director of the garden by Louis XIV, until the French Revolution, when the Jardin du Roi adopted its present name, Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. Colbert surrounded himself with exceptional botanists, such as Joseph-Pitton de Tournefort, Antoine De Jussieu, and his son Adrien-Henri. Simultaneous with the foundation of the Jardin, was the commission to form a collection of watercolours of the flowers, mostly executed on vellum. This tradition has survived to the present day and there are now more than seven thousand extant sheets in the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle. Over the centuries, artists such as Nicolas Robert (1610-1684), Claude Aubriet (1665-after 1742), Gérard van Spaendonck (1746-1822), and Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759-1840) succeeded one another in the post of Royal Botanical Painter.
Besides the King’s botanical painters, there were other artists employed by wealthy collectors to make paintings of flowers from life. Madame Pascale Heurtel has suggested that the present sheet was probably part of an album of botanical watercolours, executed for one of these private patrons. This would seem to be confirmed both by the central fold in the paper and the mise-en-page of the sheet, in which a flower is painted on each side and its corresponding description written on the outer edge. Heurtel further pointed out the superb quality of the present sheet, noting in particular the unusually skilful handling of the wash and of the gouache highlights, as well as the great attention to detail. Heurtel also explained that these botanical watercolours were, however, rarely signed and that identification of the different artists can therefore prove extremely difficult.
The inscription which appears below the yellow tulip in this watercolour refers to page 376 of Tournefort’s Latin edition of the Institutiones Rei Herbariae (the Principles of Botany) which was the first book to give a clear classification of the genus and species of plants. Its publication in 1700 constitutes therefore a terminus post quem for the date of execution of this watercolour. Further evidence for the date is provided by the early eighteenth-century watermark which appears on the sheet.
Two earlier depictions by Nicolas Robert of the same species seen here, the Monstre Jaune and Monstre Rouge, are in the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle 2.
We are grateful to Madame Pascale Heurtel, Curator of Manuscripts at the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, in Paris, for her help and advice in the preparation of this entry.
Cremona 1671-1749 Bologna
Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white on brown prepared paper. Laid down.
840 x 565 mm. (33 1/16 x 22 1/4 in.)
The present drawing is connected with the large painting executed by Francesco Monti, Nunzio Ferraiuoli, and Il Mirandolese, which is recorded in the Accorsi Collection, Turin, in 1947 1. The painting was part of a vast project devised by the Irish impresario Owen McSwiny between 1723 and 1730, and commissioned by Lord March, 2nd Duke of Richmond (1701-1750). A series of 24 canvases of allegorical memorials were to be executed by a number of mainly Bolognese and Venetian artists, including Creti, Monti, Canaletto, Pittoni, Ricci and others. Two or three artists worked in concert on each of the canvases, contributing their respective expertise in landscape, architecture, or figure painting. 20 of these pictures are known to have been painted, and are now in The British Embassy, Rome, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C., the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and elsewhere2. The Duke of Richmond’s appreciation of the paintings led him to commission a number of chiaroscuro replicas. These were to be executed by the very same artists and their workshops just before the originals were shipped from Bologna to England. Subsequently, McSwiny arranged for a volume of engravings entitled Tombeaux des Princes, des grands capitaines et autres hommes illustres qui ont fleuri dans la Grande Bretagne vers la fin du XVII et le commencement du XVIII siècles, to be produced in Paris, and Domenico Maria Fratta’s drawings were to serve as the models for the engravers. At least ten such drawings were made by the Bolognese artist, of which two, including the preparatory drawing for the Allegorical Tomb of The Duke of Marlborough, are in The National Gallery, Washington D.C3. However, the project was never completed, and only nine of the canvases were engraved between 1736 and 1741.
1. Aegidius Sadeler after Roeland Savery, engraving. |
The allegorical tombs were extremely popular with eighteenth-century collectors, and numerous replicas and copies were made to satisfy the demand of the contemporary art market. The present sheet, along with another after the Allegorical Tomb of The Duke of Marlborough (see no. 23), probably belonged with one of these series. Interestingly, these two drawings are drawn in chiaroscuro and their size is almost identical to that of the grisaille replicas. This suggests that the latter served as models for these drawings, rather than the large canvases. Furthermore, both the grisailles and the preparatory drawings for the engravings, show the same differences in composition, such as the addition of figures, with the large canvases. This would seem to indicate that the grisaille replicas were used as models for the drawings and the engravings too.
The fact that both sheets reproduce works which were executed by several different artists makes the attribution difficult to establish. Nevertheless, their style and quality suggest that they were executed by an artist working in the immediate circle of Donato Creti. Julien Stock has proposed an attribution to Giuseppe Marchesi (1699 - 1771), whose style is close to that of both Creti and Monti, and whose works, judging from the many which have been discovered in English country-house collections, must have had a particular appeal with English patrons.
Cremona 1671-1749 Bologna
Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white on brown prepared paper. Laid down.
840 x 565 mm. (33 1/16 x 22 1/4 in.)
The present drawing is connected with the large painting executed by Donato Creti and Carlo Besoli in 1727, and now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna1. The painting was part of a vast project devised by the Irish impresario Owen McSwiny between 1723 and 1730, and commissioned by Lord March, 2nd Duke of Richmond (1701-1750). Aseries of 24 canvases of allegorical memorials were to be executed by a number of mainly Bolognese and Venetian artists, including Creti, Monti, Canaletto, Pittoni, Ricci and others. Two or three artists worked in concert on each of the canvases, contributing their respective expertise in landscape, architecture, or figure painting. 20 of these pictures are known to have been painted, and are now in The British Embassy, Rome, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and elsewhere2. The Duke of Richmond’s appreciation of the paintings led him to commission a number of chiaroscuro replicas. These were to be executed by the very same artists and their workshops just before the originals were shipped from Bologna to England. Subsequently, McSwiny arranged for a volume of engravings entitled Tombeaux des Princes, des grands capitaines et autres hommes illustres qui ont fleuri dans la Grande Bretagne vers la fin du XVII et le commencement du XVIII siècles, to be produced in Paris, and Domenico Maria Fratta’s drawings were to serve as models for the engravers. At least ten such drawings were made by the Bolognese artist, of which two, including the preparatory drawing for the Allegorical Tomb of The Duke of Marlborough, are in The National Gallery, Washington D.C3. However, the project was never completed, and only nine of the canvases were engraved between 1736 and 1741.
actual size detail. |
The allegorical tombs were extremely popular with eighteenthcentury collectors, and numerous replicas and copies were made to satisfy the demand of the contemporary art market. The present sheet, along with another after the Allegorical Tomb of William Cadogan, 1st Earl Cadogan (1675-1726) (see no. 22) painted by Francesco Monti, Nunzio Ferraiuoli, and Il Mirandolese, probably belonged with one of these series. Interestingly, these two drawings are drawn in chiaroscuro and their size is almost identical to that of the grisaille replicas. This suggests that the latter served as models for these drawings, rather than the large canvases. Furthermore, both the grisailles and the preparatory drawings for the engravings, show the same differences in composition, such as the addition of figures, with the large canvases. This would seem to indicate that the grisaille replicas were used as models for the drawings and the engravings too.
The fact that both sheets reproduce works which were executed by different artists makes the attribution difficult to establish. Nevertheless, their style and quality suggest that they were executed by an artist working in the immediate circle of Donato Creti. Julien Stock has proposed an attribution to Giuseppe Marchesi (1699-1771), whose style is close to that of both Creti and Monti, and whose works, judging from the many which have been discovered in English country-house collections, must have had a particular appeal with English patrons.
Isle-sur-le-Doubs 1712 -1756 Besançon
Oil on canvas. Signed at lower right of feigned print: G. Gresly. Dated at centre of almanac: M. DCCXLVI.
870 x 680 mm. (34 1/4 x 263/4 in.)
During the Eighteenth Century in France, there was a revival of interest among artists in the work of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painters, like Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-78), Cornelis Brize (1621/22-65/70), Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts (active 1657-1675), Wallerant Vaillant (1623 -1677) and Edward Collier (1640-after 1706), who had evolved a distinctive manner of trompe-l’oeil still-life in which a series of seemingly unrelated objects, or quodlibet [pocket-emptyings], are displayed against a feigned wooden panel.1 The obvious delight that these virtuoso performances occasioned in spectators was often expressed in terms of the tried and true confusion between Art and Nature, which goes back to the Ancients. When, for example, Ferdinand III was given a trompe-l’oeil painting of a print attached to a board by the Strasbourg artist Sébastien Stoskopff (1597-1657), the Emperor tried to remove the print and then laughed at the deception.2 The celebrated Président de Brosse had a similar reaction in 1737 before the elaborate cut-out trompe-l’oeil by Antonio Forbera, which was housed in the Chartreuse at Villeneuve until the French Revolution.3
Most of the practitioners of this form of still-life in eighteenth-century France were provincials, although artists of the calibre of Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-89) and Louis- Léopold Boilly (1761-1845) did not hesitate to use it from time to time. The most talented and individual of these painters was Gabriel Gresly who was born near Besançon in the Franche-Compté to a family of glass-makers.4 He probably studied with P.-A. Fraichot (1690-c,1763), a local painter, whose daughter he married. Gresly met with discreet success among middle class and aristocratic patrons, most notably the comte de Caylus; he never, however, lived for any length of time in Paris. He also painted more conventional still-lifes with vases of flowers and bowls of fruit,5 as well as genre scenes.
This witty Trompe-l’OEil Still-Life is a perfect example of Gresly’s work in the genre. Displayed against the artist’s characteristic feigned pine panel, we find an array of those objects – a torn, creased print by Callot fixed at the corners by nails and fragments of playing cards, a pin-cushion and piece of braid attached to a hook, and an almanac, pencil, open envelope and quill held in place by a ribbon – , or others like them, that form his standard repertory.6 As one would expect, the composition, given its date, is less crowded and more rationally arranged than the artist’s seventeenth-century models, while the light, pastel-like palette is quintessentially eighteenth-century French.
Paris 1703 -1770 Paris
Black, white and blue chalk on light brown paper. Inscribed ‘f. Boucher’ in black chalk at lower left. 211 x 151 mm (8 3/8 x 5 15/16 in.)
François Boucher began his career in the studio of Francois Lemoyne. He was, however, more influenced by the delicacy and frivolity of his contemporary, Antoine Watteau. In 1723, Boucher won the Prix de Rome. He became a Faculty member of the Royal Academy in 1734 and, in 1765, he was made first painter to the king, and Director of the Royal Academy. His unparalleled success was encouraged by his patron, the Marquise de Pompadour, mistress to King Louis XV.
An exceptionally talented draughtsman, Boucher was as prolific as he was gifted, and claimed to have produced ten thousand drawings over a career of some fifty years. As well as copious preparatory studies, Boucher also executed many finished drawings as independent works, often adapting and elaborating a head or figure from one of his paintings. From the early 1740s he began to exhibit drawings as well as paintings at the Salons; these were intended both for sale to collectors and for reproduction by engravers such as Gilles Demarteau, Gabriel Huquier or Louis-Marin Bonnet. Indeed, Boucher’s popularity as a draughtsman owes much to the fact that many of his drawings were reproduced and widely distributed as engravings.
1. François Boucher, The Fortune Teller, Versailles. |
A work of the artist’s maturity, the present sheet is a preparatory study for the head of the young fortune teller in Boucher’s painted tapestry design La diseuse de bonne aventure (fig.1), executed in 1767, and now at Versailles1. A chalk study for the head of the child in the same painting was in the Michel-Levy Collection2. In his later life, Boucher preferred to work with black, red and brown chalk often on coloured paper. Here, the addition of blue chalk against the bold, heavy black chalk contours serves to accentuate the subtle contrasts of reflected light. This, together with the white chalk lines set against the pale brown coloured paper, adds depth and three dimensionality to the composition. The graceful pose of the young girl, with her head tilted to the left, and the fleshy tones of her face are modelled with the fullness and delicacy which recall Rubens, an artist whom Boucher greatly admired. Her features are dainty, her headdress has a playful, diaphanous quality and, with her melancholic expression, she typifies the sensuous frivolity and exaggerated refinement of Boucher’s portrait studies.
Nîmes 1700 -1777 Castel Gandolfo
Oil on unprepared copper. Signed and dated on rock at right of centre: NA.re / 1760. A label on the verso bears the following inscription: Natoire . 1700-1777 / ‘L’amour répand des fruits et des fleurs sur la terre ’. 280 x 355 mm. (11 x 14 in.)
PROVENANCE: private collection, France.
An exact contemporary of François Boucher (1703-1770), Natoire learnt the rudiments of his art with his sculptor father in Nîmes before coming to Paris to study with Louis Galloche (1670-1761), a man of many talents whose interest in landscape awakened a similar taste in the young man. However, it was François Lemoyne (1688-1737) – the most sought-after painter in Paris at the time - who was to exert a decisive influence on Natoire’s future style and subject-matter. In 1721, he won the prix de Rome, and left Paris for the Académie de France in 1723, remaining in the Eternal City for seven years. While in Rome, Natoire painted an ambitious canvas of Christ driving the Money-changers from the Temple for the French ambassador Cardinal Melchior de Polignac and now in the church of Saint-Médard, Paris. Natoire was only fully agréé to the Académie Royale in 1734, three years after his return to Paris, because he was too busy supplying royal and aristocratic patrons with decorative cycles for palaces and châteaux in the light, fashionable manner of the moment to finish his morceau de réception. In fact, between 1731 and 1740, he executed what was perhaps his most important commission: the series of large mythological and historical canvases for the country residence at La Chapelle- Godefroy of Philibert Orry, of the comte de Vignory, one of the most influential men in France until his disgrace in 17451. In 1735, Germain Boffrand began the restoration of the hôtel de Soubise for the prince de Rohan; the celebrated architect chose Natoire to paint the canvases with the Story of Psyche in the spandrels between the blind arches for mirrored decoration in the oval salon de la princesse, the finest of the new rooms2. Natoire was again associated with Boffand between 1746 and 1750. Together, they executed the paintings in the chapel of the destroyed Foundling Hospital, where the highly elaborate trompe l’oeil effects, unusual in France, were painted by the celebrated Italian decorators Gaetano and Paolo Antonio Brunetti3. He also executed religious paintings for churches and cabinet pictures for connoisseurs, as well as providing cartoons for tapestries4.
In 1751, Natoire was appointed director of the Académie in Rome, remaining in Italy for the rest of his life. He was asked to decorate the ceiling of the French national church – S. Luigi dei Francesi – with the Apotheosis of St. Louis in 17545. Acompetent work in the style of the late Roman Baroque, it was the painter’s last important, official commission, and met with criticism from Winckelmann and Mengs. Natoire had made no attempt to modify his style at a time when Neoclassicism was making its appearance in Rome. After the rejection of his tapestry series of Anthony and Cleopatra by the new Directeur des Bâtiments du Roi, the marquis de Marigny, he began to paint less and devote more time to drawing with his pupils in Rome and the surrounding countryside. His plein-air classes were to influence the development of two of his most talented students, Hubert Robert (1733-1808) and Fragonard. (1732-1806). Natoire was removed from office in 1775 when he retired to Castel Gandolfo.
This small painting on copper is an enchanting example of those compositions of putti with a light-hearted allegorical significance that enjoyed great popularity during the Rococo period in France and the rest of Europe. Although delightful Cupids and putti feature in abundance within his mythological canvases, Natoire’s most sustained effort in the genre was the series of the Four Seasons of about 1735 for La Chapelle-Godefroy. The paintings were destroyed in 1814, but are known through engravings by Natoire himself and B. Audran the Younger6. The putti in the present copper are related by type and dimpled modelling to those in the Four Seasons series and other of Natoires’s works, such as the Triumph of Bacchus of 1747 in The Louvre and the Bacchanal of 1749 in The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston7. A like setting of water and bull rushes with a putto and female figures is seen in a signed and dated (1756) chalk drawing that was on the London Art Market in 1988,8 while many similar elements of the composition are repeated in the Vendanges de Cythère, a watercolour signed and dated 1774, and now in the Musée Atger, Montpellier9.
The use of copper is extremely rare for Natoire: the only other known painting by him on the same support is the large Expulsion from Paradise of 1740, now in The Metropolitan Museum, New York. The copper of the unprepared panel adds flashes of tawny colour to the Rococo palette.
During the late 1750s and throughout the 1760s, Natoire noted in his letters to Marigny and his friend Duchesne that he was working on small pictures of amusing mythological scenes, whose protagonists were at times suggested to him by people he saw in the Roman streets10. L’amour répand des fleurs sur la terre was obviously intended for a private patron, and may, in fact, be one of these ‘petits morceaux’ which Natoire enjoyed painting at this time.
A large oval canvas (95 x 80 cm) of the same subject is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Troyes11.
Geneva 1702 -1789 Geneva
Black and red chalk. Drawn on half a sheet which has been folded and the verso selectively silhouetted with red, black and orange chalk1. Bears faint inscription in red chalk on the verso: Bennel Pasteur/J.E.Liotard 246 x 195 mm. (9 7/8 x 11 11/16 in.)
PROVENANCE: Christoph Bernoulli, Basel; purchased from him on 22 May 1944 by Dr. Tobias Christ, Basel; by inheritance to the previous owners.
LITERATURE: Anne de Herdt, Dessins de Liotard, exhibition catalogue, Geneva, Musée d’art et d’histoire and Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1992, p.192, under no.105, illustrated.
Jean-Etienne Liotard began his career apprenticed to a miniaturist in Geneva. He rose to prominence as a portrait painter and travelled widely; in 1743 he worked in Vienna where he met instant success at court and painted the celebrated Belle Chocolatière, now in Dresden2. He moved on to Venice, Lyon, and Amsterdam, returning to Geneva in 1757. Although he continued to execute miniatures and experiment with enamel throughout his career, it is in his remarkable pastels that his pre-eminence is most evident. The technique of pastel was not new; it had been employed as a medium for use in preliminary drawings for many years but it was not until the late 17th century that the medium gained popularity for finished drawings. The primary reason for this perhaps being that it was not until this time that a method for fixing the highly friable powdered pigment to the surface was discovered. The 1720s thus saw an explosion of painting in pastel amongst French and Venetian artists, the most famous of these being Rosalba Carriera who interestingly, had reached the height of her fame in Paris just at the time that Liotard arrived in the city, in 1723.
1. Jean-Etienne Liotard ?, Portrait of Charles Bonnet, Bibliothèque Universitaire, Geneva. |
In her catalogue of Liotard’s drawings, Anne de Herdt points out that, when first published in 1946, the present sheet was mistakenly recorded as showing a portrait of the pastor Jacob Benelle (1725 -1794), due to the old inscription on the verso. On the basis of a comparison with a portrait now in the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire (fig.1), in Geneva, Anne de Herdt has identified the sitter as Charles Bonnet (1720 -1798)3. The portrait in Geneva is executed in black and red chalk and graphite, but appears sketchier than the present sheet, and of such inferior quality, that it’s authorship has been doubted by Schazmann, who attributed it to Liotard’s twin brother, Jean Marie4. According to Anne de Herdt, however, Bonnet’s fragile health did not enable him to sit for long periods of time, which forced Liotard to hurriedly draw the Geneva sketch, and subsequently execute the present finished drawing in the absence of the sitter. Anne de Herdt dates both sheets to around 1758 -1762.
However, Novella Baroni’s recent discovery of a monogram and date J. E. L. 1785, inscribed in red chalk on the recto, at mid right, is perplexing. On the one hand, there seems to be no reason to doubt neither Anne de Herdt’s identification of the sitter, nor the authenticity of the signature, which is applied in red chalk on a red chalk background, making it barely visible. On the other hand, the portrait, as noted by Anne de Herdt, is stylistically similar to the artist’s drawings of the 1760s rather than to those of the 1780s. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that the date of execution for this drawing is 1785, when the sitter was sixty-five. As things stand, there seem to be no definitive answer to this puzzling dilemma, unless, for example, the artist executed the drawing in the 1760s, and signed it much later in 1785.
Tournus 1725 -1805 Paris
Brush with brown and grey ink over graphite on white paper. 352 x 273 mm. (13 7/8 x 10 3/4 in.)
Jean-Baptiste Greuze began his career apprenticed to a Lyonnese portrait painter named Grandon. In 1750, he moved to Paris, and entered the studio of Charles-Joseph Natoire. He was admitted into the Académie Royale as an associate member in 1755, in the category of peintre de genre particulier, but did not gain full membership as an Academician until 1769. His paintings of moralizing genre subjects, exhibited at the annual Salons, earned him the praise of the influential critic Denis Diderot. He was also a superb portraitist, exhibiting a number of portraits at the Salon throughout the 1760’s to considerable acclaim. Whilst Greuze enjoyed the patronage of such prominent collectors as Jean de Jullienne, Lalive de Jully, the Duc de Choiseul and the Empress Catherine II of Russia, his antagonistic temperament often alienated other clients, as well as other artists. Even the artist’s great champion Diderot, writing to the sculptor Falconet in 1767, described Greuze as ‘an excellent artist, but a totally impossible person. One should collect his drawings and pictures, and leave the man alone’. In 1769, angered by the rejection of his reception piece, a history painting ‘Sévère et Caracalla’, by the Académie, who instead admitted him only in the lower category of genre, Greuze, humiliated, refrained from exhibiting at the Salon until 1800. His reputation suffered after the Revolution, and he died in relative poverty and obscurity.
A gifted and prolific draughtsman, Greuze was praised by Diderot, who noted that the artist ‘draws like an angel…he makes studies endlessly; he spares neither effort nor expense in order to have models which suit him.’
The theme of the present sheet is difficult to determine, and no painted composition has been identified for which the drawing could have served as a preparatory study. Nonetheless, it is a superb example of Greuze’s moralising domestic scenes. Ayoung girl sits with head bowed, holding her father’s hand, perhaps in an act of forgiveness, whilst her mother stands watching in the background. In stylistic treatment, this drawing can be compared to two preparatory studies for the painting of La Malédiction Paternelle, (The Father’s Curse,), datable to 1777-78; The Ungrateful Son, and its’ pendant, The Punished Son, both in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille1. In these drawings, Greuze shows the same verve and freedom characteristic of his later wash drawings; the composition is executed with quick, bold pen strokes that are then heightened with a fluid wash, and the contrast between light and shade are suggestive of the influence Dutch art had on the artist, particularly that of Rembrandt.
Paris 1733 -1808 Paris
Oil on the original, unlined oval canvas. 527 x 638 mm. (20 3/4 x 25 1/8 in.)
PROVENANCE: collection of a Spanish noblewoman.
Following his release from prison in August 1794 on the fall of Robespierre, Hubert Robert, like many other Frenchmen after the violent upheavals of the Revolution, gradually resumed his former life. Old and new clients, including the Tsar of Russia, soon began to commission paintings for large-scale decorations, and he again exhibited at the Salon from 1795 to 1798. More importantly, he was appointed in 1795 to the Conservatoire du Muséum national - the new governing body of The Louvre – whose task it was to put order into the chaotic state of the collections. He, meanwhile, resumed his brilliant social life, and, although he preferred his old friends from the ancien régime who gradually returned to France from exile, became something of an ornament in the amusing salons of young people, which had blossomed in the propitious climate of the Directoire and the Consulat. Visiting Paris during the winter of 1802-03, J.-F. Reichardt noted that the ‘real jewel’ of Robert’s studio was Madame Recamier (1777-1849) in person, who, draped in a fur-trimmed Egyptian shawl with her pretty curls pushed back from her forehead, was busy colouring a landscape in the corner of the room she had made her own. The same visitor was equally struck by the seventy-year old artist’s skills as a dancer, which he exhibited in an extraordinary series of leaps and lifts at Madame Vigée- Le Brun’s. In the end, the hectic life of Society proved too much for Hubert Robert: he died unexpectedly as he was dressing to go out to dinner with his wife1.
This unusual masterpiece from Robert’s later years represents an unrecorded example of the artist’s life-long fascination with Egypt and the pyramids. During his first months in prison at Sainte-Pélagie when he could not paint, Robert whiled away the time by rereading Claude- Etienne Savary’s Lettres sur l’Egypte (1788-89), celebrated at the time for its picturesque descriptions and brilliant style. He wrote a charming letter to the daughter of a fellow captive - the minor poet Jean-Antoine Roucher (1745-1794) – who had sent him the book, expressing his pleasure at being able to ‘visit’ again that land where the ancient monuments had defied the ravages of time and nature. He concluded by saying that, when he had finished ‘his race round the pyramids’, he collapsed in her father’s cell where the talk turned to the loved ones beyond the prison walls2.
Artistic interest in ancient Egypt – a recurring phenomenon in Western Europe since the time of the Romans - had been stimulated during the first half of the eighteenth century by erudite accounts, as well as by the speculative reconstructions of its monuments, including the pyramids, by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (1656-1723). But, it was only with the advent of Neo-classicism and the work of more serious scholars, like Frederik Norden and Count Caylus (1692-1765), who emphasized the grandeur and primitiveness, the simplicity and massiveness of pharaonic art, that Egyptomania, or Egyptiennerie, in architecture and interior design, began in earnest.
Early in his career, Robert turned his back on a Rococo depiction of Egyptian motifs in Rome, like the Pyramid of Caio Cestio, for a more visionary approach to this subject-matter that has been said to anticipate Étienne-Louis Boulée’s3. This is best seen in the Egyptian Fantasy (signed and dated Rome, 1760) in a private collection, where the artist united Fischer von Erlach’s images of cloud-wreathed immensity with Piranesi’s bold fore-shortening to produce what is one of his most singular works4. However, not all of Robert’s depictions of pyramids, like, for example, that of 1779 at Arkhangelskoïe5, near Moscow, are of the same intensity
The present picture, however, may hide a more serious meaning under its seemingly lighthearted exterior, as can be seen by comparing it to a related drawing of about 1797 in a private Portuguese collection, where the scene of pillage is located in the Roman campagna6. More important than Robert’s changes to staffage and shape in the canvas are those to place and atmosphere. There are now two pyramids with the main one sited in the middle distance to increase its monumentality, the foreground being littered with Robert’s ‘débris imposants’ of broken obelisks and columns, while the leafly, bucolic setting has disappeared to be replaced by a vast, desert waste.
It is well known that Robert often responded to events after 1789 in an oblique fashion, coding his characteristic subject-matter with messages about his own plight and that of his friends. Emblematic of this is the pair of paintings with birds imprisoned and freed from their cages which he gave to Madame de Tourzel (1749-1832) who was gaoled several times for her loyalty to the family of Louis XVI7, narrowly escaping death on each occasion, or the picture commemorating the return to France of Madame de Genlis (1746-1830) in 18018.
What incident could have lead Robert to do something similar in the present Sack of an Ancient Pyramid? Napoleon invaded Egypt in July 1798, issuing a proclamation that he had come to restore liberty and uphold Islam. After an easy capture of Alexandria, the French advanced up the Nile, destroyed the Mameluke army at the Battle of the Pyramids on 21 July, and entered Cairo. Always ambivalent to the new order, which he judged to be as ignorant as it was opulent 9, and its considerable achievements, Robert was not above hunting with hounds and running with the hares. A large canvas (signed and dated 1798) with a diminishing vista of pyramids and obelisks, surrounded by dancing and singing figures, in The Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, may represent his ‘official’ view of the Egyptian campaign, while the present canvas may be a more private meditation on the pernicious effects of marauding armies – expressed anachronistically by the Roman sarcophagus cascading from the hands of graverobbers – on those ‘ossuaries of Antiquity ’ that he loved so much.
The group of figures with a man trying to restrain a rearing horse in the middle foreground was inspired by Guillaume Coustou’s monumental group of 1739-45, which was originally executed for Marly, but moved, together with its pair, in 1794 to the Place de la Concorde in Paris. A version of the present picture without the female staffage in the middle distance was on the Parisian art market in the mid-1950s10.
Cabella Ligure 1749-1790 Genoa
Brush and grey ink, with grey wash, heightened with white, red and yellow gouache, over an underdrawing in black chalk. The composition set within a fictive mount, drawn with a black wash border and black framing lines. 240 x 198 mm. (9 7/16 x 7 13/16 in.)
LITERATURE: Probably Federico Alizeri, Notizie dei professori del disegno in Liguria, Genoa, 1864, I, p.369, ‘Di quest’ultimo tema [Medea and Aeson] ho veduti bei quadri da gabinetto; e d’un bel disegno m’è stato cortese il prof. Isola, poco dissimile dalla vivacità d’un dipinto’; Mary Newcome Schleier, ‘ New Paintings and Drawings by Giovanni David’, in Arte Documento, 22, Edizioni della Laguna, 2006, pp.226-29.
Giovanni David, a Genoese artist succinctly described by the biographer Federico Alizeri as ‘with few known works, a bizarre style, and an obscure, almost mysterious, life’1, studied with Domenico Corvi in Rome in the early 1770s, winning a first prize at the Accademia di San Luca in 1775. Upon his return to Genoa at the end of the 1770s, he entered the service Count Giacomo Durazzo, a diplomat and collector who had earlier sponsored David’s artistic training in Rome and who was to be his protector and chief patron throughout his career. He executed a number of paintings for Genoese churches, including Santa Maria del Carmine, the convent of Santa Maria del Rifugio and Santa Maria delle Vigne.
During his Venetian sojourn between 1775 and 1776, David also produced a large number of prints of allegorical, literary and genre subjects, as well as reproductive etchings after the work of earlier artists. Many of these prints seem to have been commissioned by Giacomo Durazzo, or were dedicated to him. It was also during his brief stay in Venice that David worked as a scene painter at La Fenice, probably through Count Durazzo’s influence. Upon his return to Genoa, he received one of his most important public commissions, two lunettes in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio of the Palazzo Ducale, which were completed in 1780. One of David’s final projects was the design of a catafalque for Charles III of Spain’s exequies, erected in the church of San Lorenzo in 1789, the year before the artist’s death at the young age of forty-one.
Relatively few drawings by David are known. A large number , however, once belonged to Count Durazzo, as is demonstrated by the fact that some 156 drawings and watercolours and, possibly, prints by the artist were included in the sale of Durazzo’s collection in Stuttgart in November 18722.
1. Giovanni David, Medea Rejuvenating Aeson, Private Collection, Turin. |
A painting of the same subject as the present drawing, but considerably different in composition (fig.1), is in a private collection, Turin3. Taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, both depict Medea, a sorceress and the wife of Jason, restoring youth and vitality to her husband’s aged father Aeson by draining his blood and replacing it with a herbal potion of her own. The subject may have had particular appeal for David since he was often beset by illness. As Mary Newcome Schleier has recently noted of the present sheet and the painting in Turin: ‘It has been suggested that the subject of the painting, that of exercising powers to restore life, could have been done for one of his doctors who was treating David for a variety of health problems: arthritis, fever and dropsy ... Both drawing and painting certainly can be interpreted as alluding to the fragile state of the artist’s mental and physical health, but missing in the painting is the emotive strength and exuberance seen in the drawing.’4
Both the present drawing and the painting are likely to be those seen by Alizeri in 1846. The gouache was shown to him by Professor Isola, and he was so impressed by the quality and intensity of the colours that he judged it to be almost as lively as a painting5.
Madrid 1746 -1799 Madrid
Oil on copper. Oval. Signed J. Paret P in white paint along the edge, at the lower left. 156 x 122 mm. (6 1/8 x 4 13/16 in.)
Luis Paret y Alcázar received his training in Madrid, where he studied for four years at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. In 1763, with the patronage of the Infante Luis Antonio Bourbon, brother of King Charles III, he went to Rome to complete his apprenticeship. Upon his return to Madrid in 1766, Paret was awarded prizes from the Real Academia and, from around 1770, he worked as court painter, producing such paintings as Charles III Lunching before his Court and the Royal Couples, both in the Prado, Madrid. In 1775, he became embroiled in a scandal that led to the disgrace of the Infante Don Luis. As a result, Paret was exiled to Puerto Rico, where he established a painting academy. The artist returned to Spain in 1779, settling in Bilbao, as he was still forbidden to reside in Madrid. There he married, and undertook private commissions, producing some of his most remarkable portraits, such as that of Maria de Las Nieves Micaela Fourdinier, The Artist’s Wife, in the Prado, Madrid. He also executed large canvases and frescoes of religious subjects, as well as the famous series illustrating the Cantabrian ports, for Charles III. These paintings were so well received that in 1785, Paret obtained the King’s pardon, and in 1787, he returned to Madrid. There, the artist became Vice- Secretary of the Real Academia, and continued to execute pictures of fashionable contemporary life, such as the 1791 Ferdinand VII Taking the Oath as a Prince of Asturias in the Prado, Madrid. Paret was also a talented architect, and from 1792, he was actively involved in the Comisión de Arquitectura de la Real Academia. Paret is considered one of the most interesting artists of his time. He died in Madrid in 1799, the year Goya was appointed court painter.
This small copper of the Virgin and Child is a typical example of the artist’s work. The enamelled quality of the paint, the exquisite draughtsmanship and the meticulous attention to detail, are characteristic of the Spanish Master. The use of a copper support, - particularly suitable to the artist refined technique - recurs in several other works by Paret, such as the portrait of Maria de Las Nieves Micaela Fourdinier, The Artist’s Wife, in the Prado, in Madrid1, the Sleeping Woman in a private collection2, and the Saying of the Rosary in the Palacio Real in Madrid3. Equally, the style, technique and lustrous palette of the present picture are close to those found in other religious paintings by Paret, such as the Martyrdom of St. Lucy in the church of Santa Maria de Larrabuezúa, in Bizkaia4, the Virgin and Child with St. James the Great in the Museo de Bellas Artes, in Bilbao5, and the Virgin Mary Visiting St. Isabel in the church of Santa Maria de la Asunción, in Viana6. These altarpieces all date from the 1780’s, and a similar dating would seem appropriate for this Virgin and Child.
Florence 1676 -1741 or 1746 Mondovi
Pen and black ink and grey wash over black chalk, with traces of white heightening. 273 x 357 mm. (10 3/4 x 13 7/8 in.)
One of the foremost artists working in fresco in Northern Italy in the early eighteenth century, Galeotti trained in Florence under Alessandro Gherardini and in Bologna under Gian Gioseffo dal Sole. His early work in Florence clearly shows the influence of Cortona and Luca Giordano. Rapid success caused him to travel all over the Northern region, painting frescoes in Pisa, Parma, Rivoli, Vicenza and finally in Genoa, where he was based for ten years from 1729, and where the influence of Gregorio de’ Ferrari prevailed. Civil commissions followed, for the Palazzo dell’Università and for palaces in and around the city as well as in Savona and Pontremoli. After 1738 Galeotti, began to move further across the north of Italy again, going to Pinerolo, Cremona, Lodi and finally Mondovi where he died at the commencement of a commission to decorate the sanctuary.
This drawing is identical in style and technique to a study in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini (inv.31413), which was attributed to Galeotti by Ugo Ruggeri and then connected with the figure of a disciple on the left side of the Supper at Emmaus, Galeotti’s fresco of 1729 in the church of S. Maria Maddalena, in Genoa1. Perhaps due to the fact that all the most successful Genoese artists were occupied at the time, Galeotti was summoned to decorate the church of Santa Maria Maddalena thanks to the intercession of one G.B. Spinola. Galeotti found himself facing the largest and most complex project in a sacred building of his career so far and, as Rita Dugoni suggests2, he may have found the religious subject matter a challenge. In fact, work in the church was interrupted in 1730 and Galeotti occupied himself with other, secular projects in the city, before continuing his attempts to complete the decoration of the cupola and the vault of Santa Maria Maddalena in 1733-34.
The turbaned figure in the present drawing is very similar, though reversed and placed on the other side of the sheet, to that of the Cini Foundation drawing. Furthermore, the figures in both drawings are bound by the edge of an oval, indicating the margin of a frame. This suggests that the present drawing may be a discarded study for the same project. In discussing the Cini drawing, A. Czere3 had linked it with two other studies by Galeotti of single Biblical figures connected to this scheme; the Abraham in the Martin von Wagner Museum, in Wurzburg and the young prophet Daniel, wearing a turban similar to that seen on the present figure, in the Suida-Manning collection, New York4. In her essay on Galeotti’s drawings, Dugoni notes that this group of three studies, to which the present sheet is to be added, constitute a turning point in the artist’s approach to the figure; in comparison with the fluidity and lightness of touch seen in the studies dating from the years 1714-25, in these later drawings a more vigorous modelling of the figure is expressed through surfaces which give an impression of marmoreal hardness broken up by areas of deep shadow5. Dugoni describes this development in Galeotti’s work as the result of a leaning towards the style of Bolognese masters such as Franceschini and the second generation Genoese pupils who studied in Rome under Maratta; it was perhaps an artistic language which Galeotti felt to be more in keeping with the solemnity and grandeur of the ecclesiastical subject matter he was working with at the time.
Venice 1712 -1793 Venice
Pen and brown ink and wash over black chalk. 226 x 314 mm. (9 x 12 1/4 in)
WATERMARK: Three crescents, proprietary: Mezana.
PROVENANCE: Collection of M. Adrien Fauchier-Magnan, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris; possibly his sale, London, Sotheby’s, 4 December 1935, lot 28, bought by Colnaghi.
LITERATURE: Antonio Morassi, Guardi, Tutti I Disegni di Antonio, Francesco e Giacomo Guardi, Venice 1975, cat. 629, fig. 605.
An excellent example of the fine connoisseurship which informed the collection of eighteenth century art belonging to M. Fauchier-Magnan1, this airy and luminous drawing epitomises the style of Francesco Guardi’s late, imaginative landscapes. Here fine waves and scratches of pen outline the buildings, the boats, the figures and the contours of the land; passages of pale brown wash give depth to the water and bring shadow to the lagoon banks and with the point of a brush and a richer, more golden tone of wash the artist picks out the fishermen and animates the passages of deepest shade. Frills of delicate black chalk suggest clouds and act as another, background, layer bringing further movement and light to the main features; the effect created is of a scene shimmering with light, the mist-like insubstantial atmosphere in the distance contrasting with the still, reflective surface of the foreground water.
Antonio Morassi described this drawing as being a beautiful invention, perfectly composed, constituting, with the painting to which it corresponds, one of the most felicitous examples of Francesco’s maturity (fig.1) 2. When the painting was first published by Morassi in 1973, the entry noted new motifs used in the composition as evidence of a further level of achievement in Guardi’s imaginative work of this period3. There are only a few differences between the drawing and the painting; small alterations in the staffage, an additional dog, a few lines of rope and, remarkably, between this delicately drawn and subtle work on paper and the grand-scale oil painting almost two metres wide, the atmosphere of light and air is extraordinarily the same.
1. Francesco Guardi, Lagoon Capriccio with a Ruined Tower, Whereabouts unknown. |
James Byam Shaw dates Guardi’s capricci to after 1780 and suggests that they were all drawn in his studio, the latest ones becoming increasingly free and impressionistic, the pen ‘seeming to flutter over the paper like a winged insect hardly confined to earth’4. In discussing the evolution of the capriccio in Venetian landscape art, from Zuccarelli and Zais to Marco Ricci and Canaletto, he points out that though such influences may be seen in Guardi’s work, in general his method of composing these ‘Romantic’ views is ‘entirely individual and their manner of draughtsmanship most personal and subjective’. Byam Shaw expressed his great understanding and appreciation of Guardi’s late drawings most eloquently: It is only in the cases of the many Capricci that one feels he was drawing for the sake of drawing – inventing, imagining, composing, above all enjoying himself... They dangle before our eyes the key to the painter’s heart and offer us a glimpse of his own private world .... a world, one might say, of two elements only, of air and water ...5
Venice 1727 -1804 Venice
Pen and brown ink and wash over black chalk, with one study in black chalk. 253 x 387 mm. (9 7/8 x 15 1/4 in)
WATERMARK: Fleur de Lys.
PROVENANCE: sale, London, Christie’s, 14 April 1992, lot 141, as Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo1.
LITERATURE: Bernard Aikema, Some Early Drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo, Master Drawings, 2004, no.42, vol.4, fig.8.
Giandomenico’s career was inextricably linked with his father’s until the latter’s death, in 1770. Acting as Giambattista’s amanuensis, Giandomenico worked in Venice, in the family villa at Valmarana, and on the grand commisions in Würzburg and Madrid. After 1770, however, and for the following fifteen or so years, he enjoyed his own, similarly high reputation, particularly as a history painter in the grand manner. In the last decade of his working life his output as a painter dwindled, the series of exquisite Puncinellos being his final painted offerings. As a draughtsman, however, Giandomenico worked continuously throughout his long life, producing a vast number of drawings which, collectively, may well be regarded as his most lasting legacy. Executed in pen and wash, the drawings were produced, for the most part, in large series as independent works in their own right. They include a group of over two hundred religious drawings, known as the Large Biblical Series, the Scenes from Contemporary Life, numbering about one hundred sheets, and the celebrated series of 104 sheets entitled Divertimenti per li Ragazzi. These were drawn towards the end of Giandomenico’s life, and illustrate scenes from the life of Punchinello, the famous and popular character from the Commedia dell’Arte.
This drawing shows a delicacy of line and skill in the application of wash which is extremely close to Giambattista’s own work; indeed it was published as such in 2004 and constitutes, therefore, a perfect example of the fascinating overlap in style, technique and quality between father and son2. The exact purpose of the drawing is not known, but similar elaborate vases appear throughout the painted oeuvre of both Giambattista and Giandomenico. Comparable sheets with studies after numerous models, whether heads, helmets or decorative details are also found in both their work, such as, for example, the studies of exotic heads by Giambattista from the Somaschi Library group3. The mise en page of the vases on this sheet meanwhile compares well with the compositions seen in Giandomenico’s rare etchings of trophies and fanciful heads, arms and Roman insignia4, which were taken from his own and his father’s inventions.
In discussing Giambattista’s vase studies, the majority of which he dates to the 1730s and 1740s, Bernard Aikema5 suggests that such drawings were inspired by the prints of ornamental vases executed by or after sixteenth century artists, such as Enea Vico and Polidoro da Caravaggio. For the present drawing, an appropriate comparison might also be made with the more archeologically precise and nearly contemporaneous studies of antique vases by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, engravings after which were published by his son Francesco in 17786. Indeed, this impressively large drawing has a grandeur and elegance of composition and tone somewhat akin to the atmosphere found in much of Piranesi’s work. More precisely drawn, particularly in the outlines, than the numerous vase drawings by Giambattista in the Museo Civico, Trieste7, the effect produced in this comparatively orderly procession of vessels, is a form of gentle classicism containing the more exuberant and characteristics details of light playing on animated form.
Venice 1727 -1804 Venice
Oil on canvas, a pair. The stretcher of the St. Dominic canvas bears a typewritten label with the following inscription: 77./Dominicus Tiepolo, Venedig./Der heilige Dominicus./L.,G.R., h.43,b.33. The stretcher of the St. Rose of Lima canvas bears the same typewritten label with the following inscription: Dominicus Tiepolo, Venedig. / Die Heilige Theresie./ L., G - R, h.43,b.33. Each 440 x 340 mm (17 5/16 x 13 3/8 in.)
PROVENANCE: Johann Dominik Bossi (1767-1853); thence by descent to his daughter, Maria Theresa Caroline (1825-1881) who married Carl Christian Friedrich Beyerlen (1826-1881) in 1853; the Bossi- Beyerlen Collection, Stuttgart, with its pair of St. Rose of Lima; Sale ‘ Gemälde-Sammlung Domenico Bossi (1767-1853) Italienische Meister des 16.-18. Jahrhunderts’(Lugt 77119), Helbing, Munich, 29 September 1917, Lot 48 and 49, the pair being separated at this time, as Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo; Leo Spik, Berlin, the 1950’s; the Heinrich Vetter Collection, Mannheim (St. Dominic).
LITERATURE: E. Sack, Giambattista und Domenico Tiepolo/Ihr Leben und Ihre Werke, Hamburg, 1910, p. 195, no. 360-1. figs. 191-2, as Giambattista Tiepolo; P. Molmenti, Tiepolo/La vie et l’oeuvre du peintre, Paris, 1911, p. 209, as attributed to Giambattista Tiepolo with incorrect dimensions; A. Morassi, A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings of G.B. Tiepolo, London, 1962, p. 50, as by Giandomenico Tiepolo and formerly in the Beyerlen di Bossi Collection; G. Knox, ‘Giambattista-Domenico Tiepolo: The Supplementary Drawings of the Quaderno Gatteri’, in Bollettino dei musei civici veneziani, 1966, no. 3, p. 10, no. 45, p. 23 & fig. 45; G. Knox & C. Thiem, Drawings by Giambattista, Domenico and Lorenzo Tiepolo from the Graphische Sammlung Staatsgalerie Stuttgart ... , exhibition catalogue circulated by the International Exhibitions Foundation, 1971, p. 121-2, no. 114 & 132; A. Mariuz, Giandomenico Tiepolo, Venice, 1971, p. 136, as formerly in the Beyerlen Di Bossi Collection; G. Knox, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo. A Study and Catalogue Raisonné of the Chalk Drawings, Oxford, 1980, I, p. 135, D.44, p. 260-1, M.387 & M. 405, & p. 317, P.249-50, as formerly in the Bossi-Beyerlen Collection, Stuttgart.
Until their recent reappearance, these poetic, silvery images of St. Dominic and St. Rose of Lima were only known through rather poor photographs reproduced in the 1910 study of the Tiepolo family by Eduard Sack, who attributed both canvases to Giambattista1. Pompeo Molmenti (1911) examined both paintings while they were still in the Bossi-Beyerlen Collection, judging them to be beautifully drawn but pale in colour and probably from the hand of the elder Tiepolo2. Following the author of the 1917 Munich sale catalogue of the Bossi-Beyerlen collection of Old Master paintings, Antonio Morassi (1962) identified Giandomenico Tiepolo as the author of the two small canvases3.
1. Giandomenico Tiepolo, St. Dominic, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. |
He was followed by Adriano Mariuz (1971), who dated them to the 1760’s and noted that they may have formed part of a series with the St. Vincent Ferrer of similar size (46 x 35.5 cm) and style in the Museo Civico, Udine4. George Knox (1980) included the former Bossi- Beyerlen pair in his ‘Check-list of Paintings by Domenico Tiepolo’5.
The compositions of the present St. Dominic and St. Rose of Lima are related to two small oval drawings (figs. 1 and 2) of the same subjects6. These drawings belong to a group of thirty-five studies of Christ, the Virgin, saints and sacred emblems by Giandomenico Tiepolo, which were formerly in the Bossi-Beyerlen Collection and are now in the Graphische Sammlung Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart7. The series is generally dated to 1750-53 when Giandomenico was in Würzburg to help his father with the celebrated fresco decoration to adorn the Palace of the Prince Bishop, Karl Phillip von Greiffenklau. James Byam-Shaw has suggested that these drawings may have been intended for engraving8.
2. Giandomenico Tiepolo, St. Rose of Lima, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. |
Although a number of the characters from this series reappear in a slightly altered or reversed form in other devotional paintings by Giandomenico9, only this St. Dominic and its companion of St. Rose of Lima adhere quite so faithfully to the drawings10. Aside from the difference in shape – the drawings are oval whilst the finished works are rectangular – there are further minor compositional differences. St. Dominic is missing the star above his forehead and the Christ Child extends his arm to caress St. Rose of Lima.
George Knox has pointed out that a drawing (red and white chalk study of size 80 x 142 mm) of a clenched right hand by Giandomenico in the Museo Correr, Venice, is, in fact, preparatory for St. Dominic’s right hand in the present picture11. It is one of two hundred and twenty-five sheets which make-up the so-called Supplementary Drawings of the Quaderno Gatteri, and is part of a group that are related to works executed by Giandomenico during his Würzburg period12.
The fact that not only the related figure study, but also, and more importantly, the preparatory drawing for the hand, would seem to date from Giandomenico’s Würzburg years challenges Mariuz’s view that this pair was painted during the 1760s. Given this evidence, it could be argued that they were executed in the early to mid 1750s when Giandomenico emerged as an independent artistic personality with a style and sphere of interest distinct from that of his famous father13. Stylistically, this is certainly true. The flickering brushwork and nervous highlights, the technique of heavy impasto in the rendering of the face and the luminous, three-dimensional drapery, all point towards this theory. Similar details can be found, for example, in the 1751 Alexander the Great and the Family of Darius in The Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit14, Christ Healing the Blind Man (signed and dated 1751) in The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford15, and The Minuet of 1754 in The Louvre16. Furthermore, St. Dominic shares an almost identical delicate, adolescent face – the artist may even have used the same model - with the Udine St. Vincent Ferrer, which Aldo Rizzi dated to the 1750s17. The Detroit Alexander the Great also shows a similar youthful cast of features, but without the wispy beard and moustache.
Anative of Spain, St. Dominic (1170 -1221) founded the Order of Preachers, also called Dominican, or Black, Friars, which, together with the Franciscans, revolutionised the concept of theology and revitalised religious and cultural life in the Thirteenth Century. He is depicted with his usual emblems of the lily for chastity and the book of the Gospels.
Patroness of the Americas, St. Rose of Lima was born in Lima, Peru, on 20th April 1586. At her confirmation she adopted the name of Rose, because, when an infant, her face had been seen transformed by a mystical rose. In her twentieth year she donned the habit of St. Dominic. Thereafter, she willingly endured a variety of severe penances, including the constant wearing of a metal spiked crown concealed by roses, and of a heavy iron chain around her waist. St. Rose died in Lima on 30th August 1617. She was beatified by Pope Clement IX in 1667, and canonized in 1671 by Clement X, becoming the first South American to be so honoured.
It would seem appropriate in closing to say a brief word about these pictures distinguished early provenance. No one seems to know how Johann Dominik Bossi (1767-1853), a fine miniaturist from Trieste who had worked in northern Germany, Sweden, St. Petersburg and Vienna before settling in Munich at the end of his life, came to possess such an important collection of works, especially drawings, by various members of the Tiepolo family18. The collection was inherited by Bossi’s daughter Maria Theresa Caroline (1825-1881) who had married Carl Christian Friedrich Beyerlen (1826-1881) in Stuttgart in1853. Their heirs sold the drawings at auction in Stuttgart in 1882, the largest single buyer being the local museum. The paintings, including the present St. Dominic and St. Rose of Lima, were dispersed in the 1917 sale of the ‘Gemälde-Sammlung Domenico Bossi (1767-1855) Italienische Meister des 16.-18. Jahrhunderts’ at Helbing’s in Munich19.
Venice 1727-1804 Venice
Pen and dark brown ink. Signed: Dom Tiepolo 230 by 330 mm. (9 x 13 in.)
PROVENANCE: Kate Ganz Ltd, London, Summer 1984, exhibition catalogue no. 32, where an earlier provenance is given of Antonio Morassi (L.143a), though no mark is visible on the sheet.
This lively study may be compared with a depiction of sheep and goats in a landscape from the Robert Lehman collection which, underneath the brush and wash, shows precisely the same quick penmanship of rapid outlines and scribbled, calligraphic areas of shading1. The latter drawing, when exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was tentatively dated to the years Domenico spent in Spain and considered to have been studied from life. The present drawing, with its vivid and accurate notations of goats with their kids and bears, prowling, eating and sulking, could plausibly have been made whilst watching animals in captivity. Indeed the studies do not appear to be based on any of the exotic animal prints of Stefano della Bella or Ridinger which are often described as sources for the artist. As Byam Shaw has however demonstrated, other seemingly spontaneous animal drawings by Domenico can be deconstructed and revealed to be ‘conglomerations of motives borrowed from other masters’, see for example the Monkeys in a Rocky Landscape, formerly with Hans Calmann and the Bears and a Monkey from the collection of E. Schaeffer, New York.2 It is suggested that even early on in his career, whilst travelling with his father in Germany and in Spain, Giandomenico began to collect animal studies from various sources to be re-animated for use in compositions. Giandomenico’s more finished animal drawings are usually connected to the over-door frescoes in the Tiepolo villa at Zianigo, near Padua. Those with the addition of wash and landscape backgrounds, of which there are numerous examples in public and private collections, often have a ledge at their base, suggesting a dado running around a room. A precise dating of these drawings is difficult, though they are believed to belong to the later years of his career when Domenico was spending much of his time at the family villa, having inherited it upon his father’s death in 1770.3 Certain creatures repeated from the drawings appear more than once amongst the frescoes there as well as in many of the drawings belonging to the Large Biblical Series, which are also late works. In an article describing what remains of Domenico’s decorations in the villa, James Byam Shaw takes the reader upstairs to a long room on the first floor with five doors over which are sopraporte of animal subjects frescoed in tones of green, ochre and white. The two best preserved depict a herd of deer and a pride of lions but that over the west door, sadly cracked and rubbed, shows bears and wolves and over the entrance are the remnants of a landscape with sheep, cows, goats and rams4.
Pitigliano 1702 -1788 Florence
Pen and brown ink and brown wash, watercolour and gouache, heightened with white, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Signed with monogram FZ in brown ink at the lower left. Laid down on a Barnard mount, with the collector’s initials J:B in brown ink at the lower right corner. Inscribed by Barnard, ‘J:B No: 795. / 16 3.4 by 11. / I purchased this Pair of Colored Drawings Numbered 795. / of Mr: Zuccharelli at Richmond Ano: 1767. J:B.’ in brown ink on the bach of the old mat (fig.1). 270 x 421 mm. (10 5/8 x 16 9/16 in.)
PROVENANCE: Acquired from the artist in 1767 by John Barnard, London (Lugt 1419); probably his sale, London, Greenwood’s, 16-24 February 1787; Ernest Brown & Phillips Ltd. (The Leicester Galleries), London; Sir Robert L. Mond, London; by descent to D. E. Brackley; His sale, London, Sotheby’s, 26 November 1970, lot 56, bt. Robinson for £1,000.
LITERATURE: T. Borenius and R. Wittkower, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings by the Old Masters formed by Sir Robert Mond, LL.D, F.R.S.E., F.S.A., London, n.d. (1937), p.68, no.274..
Born in Tuscany, Francesco Zuccarelli worked as a reproductive engraver in Florence before settling in Venice around 1730, where he entered the studio of Sebastiano Ricci. He spent most of his career in Venice and later in England, where his landscapes found many admirers. In Venice, he obtained the patronage of the future British consul, Joseph Smith, and it was with Smith’s encouragement that Zuccarelli first travelled to England in 1752. He remained in London for ten years, enjoying a great deal of success and influencing artists, such as Richard Wilson, before returning to Venice, where in 1763 he was elected to the Accademia. He was once again in England between 1765 and 1771, and was a founder member of the Royal Academy in 1768. In 1773, after a brief period as president of the Accademia in Venice, Zuccarelli retired to his native Florence.
Most of Zuccarelli’s drawings are pastoral landscapes, and were only rarely intended as studies for paintings. These highly finished landscape drawings, such as the present impressive sheet, were intended as works of art in their own right, and were avidly collected by connoisseurs. Typical of these was Count Tassi in Bergamo, for whom Zuccarelli worked between 1747 and 1752, and who praised the artist’s ‘ ... landscapes with delightful figures, showing that in this genre he has surpassed not only the modern artists, but also
1. John Barnard’s inscription on the verso of the sheet.
competes with the most famous artists of the past, his beauty and sweet harmony of landscape uniting with gracefully posed figures and coloured with great naturalness never having been excelled’. The painterly quality of Zuccarelli’s drawings is a particular characteristic of his work, whether in finished studies as the present example or in sketches in pen and ink or red chalk.
The present sheet was at one time part of the large collection of drawings and prints assembled by John Barnard (d.1784) over a period of more than fifty years. Numbering around 1,100 pieces, Barnard’s collection was one of the finest in England at the time. As the preface to the catalogue of the sale of the collection in 1787 stated: “It is presumed, that a more capital collection was never offered to the Public or more worthy the Attention of the learned Connoisseurs”1. Barnard generally signed the drawings he owned with his initials and often added further notes, such as the dimensions of the sheet and brief biographical details about the artist. In the case of this sheet, he noted that he acquired it directly from the artist in 1767, as one of a pair of finished drawings. (The pendant of identical dimensions and also numbered 795 by Barnard, was formerly in the de Boer collection in Amsterdam and appeared at auction in London in 19952.) Another drawing by Zuccarelli acquired by Barnard at the same time appeared at auction twice in the 1980s3. Other drawings were purchased by the same collector two years later, at an auction of Zuccarelli’s drawings held in London in 17694, while at least one of his drawing seems to have come into Barnard’s possession as a present from the artist5.
The present drawing later entered the collection of the industrialist Sir Robert Ludwig Mond (1867-1938).
Palmanova 1762-1844 Milan
Oil on panel. 210 x 170 mm. (8 1/4 x 6 11/16 in.)
One of the last and most gifted exponents of the 18th century vedute tradition, Giuseppe Bernardino Bison received his artistic training in the studio of Anton Maria Zanetti in Venice. The early part of his career was spent working as a decorative fresco painter at villas and palaces around the Veneto, including the Palazzo Manzoni in Padua, the Villa Tironi at Lancenigo, the Villa Spineda at Breda di Piave and the Casino Soderini in Treviso. Around 1800 he settled in Trieste, where among his more important works were the decoration of the Palazzo Carciotti, painted around 1805, and the Palazzo della Vecchia Borsa, completed three years later. During this period, he also started working for the theatre, producing countless stage designs in tempera on paper and numerous oil sketches. In 1831 Bison moved to Milan, where he remained for the rest of his life, and continued his activity as a scenographer, producing stage designs for the Teatro alla Scala and other theatres.
Bison was as prolific and talented a draughstman as he was a painter, working with all mediums, and whose oeuvre encompasses a wide range of subjects, from religious representations to genre scenes, landscapes, capricci, stage designs, and even portraits. His talent, however, does not so much lie with what he painted, but, rather, on how he painted: regardless of the subject, paint is applied with brio, almost playfully, his brush strokes are light and spirited, and his colours are dazzling. In fact, the artist’s technical virtuosity is the most important characteristic of his style; it is also what distinguishes him from his contemporaries, and, ultimately, makes him a protagonist of his time.
The popularity of Bison’s works amongst collectors and his natural talent enabled the artist to work intensely and swiftly; so swiftly, in fact, as to paint a small picture commissioned by a Paduan patron to decorate his Café in just one day!1 However, the artist’s frantic activity and relatively unchanging style have made the dating of his works rather hypothetical. Nevertheless, the theatrical composition and use of rich colour to enhance the sense of drama and luminous quality of the panel, as well as the general handling of the present Capriccio, all recur in other small paintings such as, for example, the View of Campo San Bosco e Piazza San Marco in the Rouvière collection, Paris2, the Interior of an Inn in a private collection, Trieste 3, or the Figures under a Portico in a Sotheby’s sale in 19824. All these pictures belong to the artist’s Triestine period between 1800 and 1831, and a similar dating for the present oil would therefore seem likely.
Florence 1772 -1850 Milan
Pen and brown and black ink on paper, laid down on a mat. Signed Sabatelli dis. in brown ink in the margin at the lower right margin of the mat. Further inscribed ‘E quattro gran bestie salivano fuor del mare, differenti l’una dall’altra. La prima era simile ad un leone ed avea dell’ale d’aquila; io stava / riguardando, finchè le furono divolte l’ale, e fu fatta levar da terra, e che si rizzò in piè, a guisa d’uomo. - Poi, ecco, un altra seconda bestia, simigliante ad un orso, la / quale si levò da un lato, ed avea trè costole in bocca, fra i suoi denti. E le fu detto così: Levati, mangia molta carne. - Poi, io riguardava, ed eccone un altra, simigliante / ad un pardo, la quale aveva quattro ale d’uccello in sul dosso; e quella bestia avea quattro teste e le fu data la signoria. Appresso, io riguardava nelle visioni di notte, ed ecco / una quarta bestia, spaventevole, terribil, e molto forte, la quale avea di gran denti di ferro; ella mangiava, e tritava, e calpestava il rimanente coi piedi; ed era differente / da tutte le bestie, ch’erano state davati a lei ed avea dieci corni. Io poneva mente a questa corna, ed ecco un altro corno piccolo saliva tra quelle, e trè della prime corna / furono divelte d’innanzi a quello; ed ecco, quel corno avea degli occhi simiglianti agli occhi di un uomo, e una bocca che proferiva grandi cose... Daniele, Cap.VII, v. 2-8.’ in brown ink in the lower margin of the mat1. 409 x 632 mm (16 1/8 x 24 7/8 in.) [image] 573 x 816 mm (22 9/16 x 32 1/8 in.) [sheet]
From the outset of his career, Luigi Sabatelli benefited from the patronage and support of a number of important figures. The first of these was the Marchese Pier Roberto Capponi, whose assistance enabled the young artist to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and to continue his training in Venice and Rome. Another was Tommaso Puccini, an intellectual and connoisseur who later became Director of the Gallerie Fiorentine. Puccini commissioned a series of highly finished drawings from Sabatelli, for which he also provided the subjects. In the early 1790s Sabatelli was a frequent participant in the informal drawing study sessions hosted by Felice Giani at his studio in Rome, known as the Accademia dei Pensieri. Here he met and exchanged ideas with several of the Italian and foreign artists working in the city, most notably Vincenzo
1. Luigi Sabatelli, Daniel’s Vision, etching, Uffizi, Florence.
Camuccini, Giuseppe Bossi and François-Xavier Fabre. After his return to Florence in 1795, Sabatelli began to incorporate into his paintings the powerful brushstrokes and conflicting light and dark tones seen in the work of Antoine-Jean Gros. Under his influence, Sabatelli admired the dramatic and overtly emotional style of the Flemish Baroque painter, Peter Paul Rubens. He also discovered contemporary English painting and the representation of the Sublime, absorbing the imaginative and subjective approach, the emotional intensity and the terrible poses exemplified in the works of Benjamin West, Alexander Runciman and John Flaxman. In 1808 Sabatelli was appointed Professor of painting at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, where he lived for the remainder of his long career. Although he executed many decorative projects in Milan and throughout Lombardy, he continued to work occasionally in his native Florence, notably between 1820 and 1825, when he executed the cycle of frescoes for the Sala dell’Iliade in the Palazzo Pitti. These show the influence of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who was in Florence at around this time and whom Sabatelli befriended. The influence of Ingres is also evident in Sabatelli’s pen portrait drawings of this period. In 1830, Sabatelli undertook a commission for the church of San Filippo Neri and, in 1841, he completed a project for the decoration of the Tribuna di Galileo in the Palazzo della Specola.
Luigi Sabatelli’s pen drawings, and the engravings derived from them, were greatly admired by his contemporaries. His bold, inventive draughtsmanship owed something to the example of Michelangelo, as well as to the Swiss artist Johann Heinrich Fuseli, whose work he would have seen in Rome during his stay there. He produced a number of independent, highly finished drawings for sale to collectors, including scenes from Homer, Dante, classical history and the Old Testament. He also illustrated a History of Florence, written by Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, published in 1833. As well as being a talented printmaker in his own right, Sabatelli provided drawings for other engravers. Among his etched illustrations are a series entitled Pensieri diversi, published in Rome in 1795, and The Plague of Florence, inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron and published in 1801.
A superb example of Sabatelli’s vigorous pen draughtsmanship, the artist’s favourite medium, the present sheet is related to an etching of the same subject (fig.1), signed and dated 18092. One of only fifteen etchings executed by the artist, its’ superior quality was already recognized by Antony de Witt, the first scholar to write about Sabatelli’s etchings: ‘…The representation is to be praised for its effective chiaroscuro and its romantic, evocative impetuosity; the great acumen and vigour displayed in the etching of the theme are characteristic of the artist’s most inspired moment…’3. A preparatory compositional sketch for the present sheet is found in a large, double-sided drawing in a private collection4.
The most striking quality of this highly finished drawing is the phenomenally original interpretation of the subject matter. Daniel stands to the left, shielding himself from the wrath of the ten-horned beast about to devour the earth. Other mythological creatures snarl and thrash in the water, writhing with fury. The action is so violent and the composition so dynamic, the effect is of chaos engulfing the lone figure of Daniel. The intensity of movement and turmoil are achieved by Sabatelli’s masterly use of pen; the circular pen strokes defining Daniel’s cloak are repeated in the cross-hatching of the water, the clouds and in the rendering of the mystical fiends. The strong contrasts of light and shade surrounding the central composition, the heavy etching of the figure of Daniel and the stark chiaroscuro of the menacing beasts not only adds to the three-dimensionality of the composition but leads the viewer’s eye to the centre of the tumult. The descending clouds and stormy sea create a vortex of energy within the composition.
This inventiveness and imagination is typical of Sabatelli’s work. An interesting stylistic and thematic comparison may be with a drawing of a fantastical sphinx-like creature with the torso of a woman and the tail and body of a dragon, holding two snarling dogs, which was reproduced as an etching by Damiano Pernati in the Pensieri diversi of 17955. Also comparable in spirit is an etching by Sabatelli of The Whore of Babylon seated on a three-headed beast6, part of a series of six etchings of scenes from the Apocalypse of Saint John, published in Milan between 1809 and 1810.
Belluno 1809 -1866 Battle of Lissa
Oil on paper, laid down on thin board. 87 x 133 mm. (3 7/16 x 5 1/4 in.)
PROVENANCE: Private collection, London.
Ippolito Caffi initially trained in his native city, then in Padua with his cousin Pietro Paoletti (1801-1847). In 1827, aged eighteen, he moved to Venice, where he entered the Accademia di Belle Arti. Under his professors, the young artist learnt the rules of perspective, which in Venice were still based on Canaletto, a master who was to be a source of inspiration for the young Caffi. In 1832, the sale of fourteen small canvases of the Stations of the Via Crucis to the church of Caerano di San Marco, near Montebelluna, gave him the means to travel to Rome. There, he acquired immediate fame as a vedutista, and in 1834, he published a textbook on perspective, which required the publication of three editions to satisfy the large demand. While in Rome, the artist admired the works of Valenciennes (1750-1819) and Corot (1796-1875), whose last trip to Rome dates from 1843, and modernized the veduta vocabulary inherited from Canaletto. Caffi also showed an interest in nocturnal scenes with fireworks and other nighttime illumination. His most famous composition, The 1837 Festival of Candles in Rome, in the Ca’ Pesaro, in Venice, exists in forty-two replicas, a practice the artist adopted for other popular subjects. His quest for visual experience and adventurous nature led him as far afield as Egypt and the Near East, which he visited in 1843-44. In 1847, he went up in a balloon, painting Rome and its countryside from a height of three thousand metres. An ardent patriot, Caffi depicted important moments of the Risorgimento, and took an active part in the Venetian revolt against Austria in 1848-9. In 1855, the Exposition Universelle was inaugurated in Paris by Napoleon III. As the artist’s great grandchild recalls, Caffi participated with paintings: a View of the Roman Forum, a Carnival in Rome, and a View of Venice1. The comments of the French writer Téophile Gautier about the latter picture well illustrate the critical acclaim received by the artist’s innovative work: AVenetian who, after Canaletto, after Bonington, after Joyant, after Wyld, has found a means to paint a new aspect of Venice. His view of the Gran Canal and of Santa Maria della Salute, its cupolas and palaces covered with a sheet of snow, is an authentic novelty 2. The artist embarked on an Italian warship in May 1866 during the war of Independence against Austria, when the nation suffered heavy defeats on land and sea. Caffi died when his ship sank during the Battle of Lissa in the upper Adriatic.
In this particularly fine sketch of St. Peter’s Square, Caffi shows the crowds beginning to gather before the actual blessing. It was a scene that the artist painted often, and fine examples, with more people in the foreground, and sometimes with a tiny figure of the pope under the awning, are known in private collections3 and in the Museo di Roma4.
Montauban 1780 -1867 Paris
Graphite pencil. Signed Ing at the lower left. A study of Napoleon’s right arm is glued to the upper right corner of the sheet. Another strip of paper has been added to the right edge of the sheet. 393 x 253 mm. (15 3/4 x 9 7/8 in.)
PROVENANCE: Bears the mark of the Haro Collection, stamped in red ink at the lower right (L.1241); His Sale, Paris, 2-3 April 1897, possibly no.46 (as Man with his Arm Raised)
This impressive sheet is a preparatory study for the figure of Napoleon in the monumental painting of the Apotheosis of Napoleon, commissioned by Prince Jérôme Napoleon in 1853 to adorn the ceiling of the Salon de l’Empereur in the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. Sadly, the painting was destroyed by fire in the Commune of 1871, but its composition survives in three existing sheets: a watercolour dated 1853 in the Musée Bonnat, in Bayonne1; another in the Cabinet des Dessins, in the Louvre2, and a drawing in wash, in the British Museum, in London (fig.1)3. The central tondo depicted Napoleon being taken in a chariot to the temple of Glory and Immortality, surrounded by allegories of the eight cities conquered by his armies. Ingres’ belief in the greatness of the Imperial family was further reiterated in the inscription carved into the steps of the empty throne: ‘In nepote redivivus’ (He Lives again in his Nephew), a clear reference to the inauguration of Napoleon III. The colossal oil on canvas epitomized, in both subject and in scale, the high ideals of history painting in the Grand Manner. It was painted as a pendant to the work of Ingres’ nemesis, Delacroix; the latter executed a similarly majestic work for an adjoining room in the Hôtel de Ville, the Salon de la Paix, completed in 1854, and also destroyed by fire in 1871. The purpose of the imperial commission for the two chefs d’école of contemporary French painting was political propaganda. Their art was to symbolize French superiority over all other nations. Whilst Delacroix chose the overtly romantic theme of Peace appearing to console men and restore abundance, Ingres chose to recall the heroic military conquests of the great General and to celebrate the power of the Second Empire in a typically pro-Classical manner.
1. John Barnard’s inscription on the verso of the sheet. |
Ingres made numerous compositional and figure studies in preparation for the finished tondo, many of which are housed in the Musée Ingres at Montauban4. In fact, there are eighty-five extant drawings, including the present sheet. In this drawing, Napoleon is depicted in heroic splendour, standing with a sceptre in his right hand and a sphere in his left. The restrained pose derives from the antique: it is a composite memory of Praxitelean originals of the 4th century BC. In the rendering of the figure, there is a suavity and clarity of outline characteristic of his drawing style. The powerful, muscular torso is defined by minutely controlled parallel hatchings to create a careful gradation of light and shade. The image is one of classical restraint and proportionate harmony. Two earlier studies for Napoleon are known in the Musée at Montauban: a full length, albeit sketchier, drawing of the figure in graphite pencil, showing the Emperor in a similar pose5; and a copy after a bronze statue6.
Senlis 1815 -1879 Villiers-le-Bel
Black chalk, heightened with touches of white chalk, on light blue paper faded to brown. The verso in black chalk. Numbered 8 in pencil at the lower right. Further numbered 8 and 8 dos (?) in pencil on the verso. 311 x 270 mm. (121/4x 105/8in.)
PROVENANCE: Thomas Le Claire, Hamburg, in 1989.
LITERATURE: Louise d’Argencourt and Roger Diederen, The Cleveland Museum of Art. Catalogue of Paintings, Part Four: European Paintings of the 19th Century, Cleveland, 1999, I, p.176, under no.65 (Related Works).
EXHIBITED: Hamburg, Thomas Le Claire Kunsthandel, Ansichten menschlicher Köpfe, 1989, no.17.
Thomas Couture was a student of Baron Gros from 1830 to 1835, entering the École des Beaux- Arts in 1831. After a further period of study with Paul Delaroche, he became an independent artist. Couture achieved his first great public success at the Salon of 1847, where his grandiose painting of The Romans of the Decadence won first prize and was purchased by the State; it is now in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Soon afterwards he began work on a second monumental canvas, entitled The Enrolment of the Volunteers of 1792. Intended for the Assemblée Nationale but never completed, the painting survives today in its unfinished state. Among his other important public commissions was the decoration of the chapel of the Virgin in the church of Saint Eustache, Paris, executed between 1851 and 1856. In 1847 he established his own private art school in Paris, where he rejected the staid principles of the academic system in favour of an emphasis on freedom of brushwork, the use of pure colour and the importance of the preliminary oil sketch, or ébauche. He also published a book outlining his ideas, the Méthode et entretiens d’atelier, in 1867. Highly successful as a teacher, he counted among his pupils Puvis de Chavannes and Edouard Manet. The largest surviving groups of Couture’s paintings and oil sketches are today in the Musée Nationale du Château, Compiègne and the Musée d’Art et Archéologie, Senlis.
Beginning in 1857, Couture treated the theme of the adventures of the French commedia dell’arte stage characters Pierrot and Harlequin in seven paintings. Both sides of this drawing are preparatory studies for the head of the masked figure of Harlequin in one of these paintings: Pierrot à la correctionnelle, painted in 1863 and now lost. The composition of the picture is known, however, from a number of finished drawings, as well as a smaller replica in oil (fig.1), executed between 1864 and 1870 and now in the Cleveland Museum of Art1.
1. Thomas Couture, Pierrot à la correctionnelle, the Cleveland Museum of Art. |
The scene is set in a courtroom, with Pierrot seated at the centre of the composition. He is accused of stealing food and wine from an innkeeper and his cook, who are placed on the left, with the stolen goods on the floor between them and the accused. Pierrot is defended by his master, the masked Harlequin, who gestures at the pair of dozing magistrates. A large number of preparatory studies for the painting are known, including drawings for each of the figures, as well as the room and its furnishings2. Another chalk study for the head of the masked Harlequin is in the collection of the Musée Nationale du Château, Compiègne3. A finished compositional study for, or ricordo, of the painting was on the New York art market in 19964, while another is in the Brandegee Charitable Foundation, Boston5.
Valenciennes 1819-1916 Saint-Privé
Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil. Signed hy harpignies in brown ink at the lower left. 236 x 323 mm. (9 1/4 x 12 3/4 in.)
Henri-Joseph Harpignies was born in Valenciennes where his family owned a sugar-beet factory. It was not until he was in his late twenties that he decided to abandon his career in commerce and begin training as an artist in the studio of the landscape painter Jean- Alexis Achard. On Achard’s advice, Harpignies travelled to Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, returning to France in 1852. He made his Salon debut the following year, exhibiting views of Capri and Valenciennes, and he continued to show regularly at the Salons throughout his very long and productive career, receiving his first gold medal in 1866, and the grand prix at the Exposition Universelle in 1900. Harpignies continued to exhibit until 1912. He studied the work of the major Barbizon masters; he first met Camille Corot in the early 1850s and Harpignies’ landscape paintings, with their luminous, silvery palette and breadth of treatment, were inspired by him1. In 1863 three of his four entries to the Salon were rejected, and were instead shown at the Salon des Refusés. The same year he made his second visit to Italy, remaining there until 1865, and this sojourn was also to have a significant effect on his later work.
Although best known within France for his paintings in oil, Harpignies was also a talented aquarellist, and it is his watercolour drawings which formed the basis of his reputation outside his homeland. As a contemporary English critic, writing in 1905, noted, ‘one ventures to prophesy that the day will come, if it has not already arrived, when the water-colours of M. Harpignies will be prized even more dearly than his paintings in oils. As an aquarellist M. Harpignies is practically without a living rival in his own country...’2. His first watercolour landscapes were exhibited at the Salon of 1864, where they received high praise from the critic Théophile Thoré. The freshness and radiance of these works gained him a wide audience, and led to his taking on a number of private pupils. Indeed, Harpignies’ reputation as a watercolourist spread to England, and he was invited by Whistler to exhibit at the Royal Institute in London, and also exhibited at the New Watercolour Society. In 1881 he was elected a member of the Société des Aquarellistes Français, and from 1883 onwards began to sell his work through the art dealers Arnold & Tripp, from whom he also received commissions. These afforded Harpignies with an average annual income of 70,000 francs and it was this newfound financial security which enabled the artist to concentrate fully on his work, leading to an increase in his output. In the paintings and watercolours produced well into the early years of the 20th century, Harpignies continued to maintain an emphasis on a distinctive manner of tonal landscape, inspired by Corot but, in his bold palette and free brushwork, he is perhaps a precursor of modernism. Harpignies died at the age of ninety-seven at La Trémellerie, his home at Saint-Privé, near Bléneau on the river Yonne.
Harpignies first visited the island of Capri in the summer of 1851. After some time in Rome, the artist settled for six months in Naples, spending the summer sketching in and around the city, as well as in Sorrento, Ischia and Capri. Returning to Rome in the winter of 1851, he was back in France by the spring of 1852, although, as he noted in later years, he would probably never have left Italy had his father not insisted on his return. The style of this View of the Amalfi Coast by Harpignies suggests, however, that it was perhaps executed during his second visit to Italy, between 1863 and 1865. In this charming watercolour, the grayish-green palette, overlapped with bright blue, masterly reflects the crisp, luminous light of southern Italy.
Paris 1834 -1917 Paris
Charcoal and pastel: Bears the Degas vente mark, stamped in red ink at lower left. 700 x 545 mm. (27 9/16 x 21 7/16 in.)
PROVENANCE: Atelier Degas, the second vente, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 11-13 December 1918, no. 109, illustrated; Collection René de Gas; Sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 10 November 1927, no. 43, illustrated; Collection Morhange.
LITERATURE: P.A. Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre, Paris, 1947, III, p. 574, no. 988, illustrated on p. 575.
Ballet subjects make up about half of Degas’s total oeuvre; he began depicting them regularly in the early 1870s, and continued to treat them in paintings, drawings, pastels, sculptures, prints and even photographs until the end of his very long career. In his drawings of dancers, Degas was to develop a huge repertoire of poses, which he used and reused in his paintings and sculptures. These drawings were made both behind the wings at the Opéra itself and, more frequently, from the model posed in his studio. He appears to have been much less interested in the actual performances than in the dancers themselves, who are often portrayed at rest or exercising behind the scenes. Degas seems to have had a natural affection for these little dancers, known as the ballet ‘ rats ’; girls from poor families who entered the Opéra at the ages of seven or eight and spent ten or more years in classes, training for the corps de ballet. He studied and drew their long and arduous hours of practice, and seems to have sympathized with them and admired their dedication.
This impressively large pastel is a nearly full-scale study for the Dancers on the Stage (76 x 81 cm) of c. 1889 -94, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon1; its shows the three dancers resting or seated on a stool in the right-hand section of the composition. As Jill De Vonyar and Richard Kendall note in the context of Degas’s late ballet subjects, the painting in Lyon ‘... belongs to one of an extraordinary group of revisitations of such pioneering subjects [i.e., rehearsals on stage when a degree of informality was still permitted] from his later years, featuring a dark, blurred figure at left who is arguably the last dancing master in Degas’ oeuvre. The handling of this picture – a transitional statement in many ways – is broad and tactile, yet its spaces echo the airy classrooms and friezes of a previous era, and the sense of everyday Opéra activities is knowingly observed ’ 2.
A pastel study (620 x 480 mm) of the two dancers on the left of the painting, who come forward with their hands joined, also featured in the second Degas vente 3, while a slightly larger counterproof (740 x 580 mm) of the present pastel was formerly in the Le Peique Collection, Paris 4.
Ferrara 1842 -1931 Paris
Oil on panel. The verso partially couched with oil and inscribed Boldini G. in pen and ink. Numbered 12 in blue chalk and bis in pen and ink. Stamped with a French customs seal: Douane Exportatrice Paris Centrale. 411 x 267 mm. (16 3/16 x 10 1/2 in.)
PROVENANCE: Jean-Gabriel Domergue (1889-1962); by descent in the family.
Born in Ferrara, Giovanni Boldini received his training from his father Antonio. His talent was soon recognized and, at the age of eighteen, he was already known in his native town as an accomplished portrait painter. Boldini travelled to Florence in 1862, where he formed close friendships with artists of the revolutionary movement of the Macchiaioli, such as Giovanni Fattori, Telemaco Signorini and Silvestro Lega. In 1871, following a trip to London, where the portraits of Gainsborough and Reynolds left an indelible mark on the artist, Boldini settled in Paris. In 1874 he exhibited for the first time at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars, winning public acclaim. In 1876, he travelled to Germany, where he met Adolf von Menzel, and to Holland, where he admired the portraiture of Frans Hals. Around that time, Boldini started to paint portraits of beautiful society women. In fact, his bold painterly technique and flamboyant style proved so popular with the increasingly fashionconscious society, that, by the turn of the century, Boldini had achieved a success in Paris equal to that of his friend John Singer Sargent in London. Among his numerous portraits, those of Giuseppe Verdi, Whistler, Consuelo Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough, Count Robert de Montesquiou, Princess Bibesco and the Marchesa Casati, are but a few of the artist’s most famous sitters. Boldini befriended other society portrait painters such as Paul-César Helleu, James A. McNeill Whistler, and in particular Degas, who truly admired his work and once said of his friend: ‘Ce diable d’italien est un monstre de talent’. Atireless and extremely prolific painter and draughtsman, Boldini remained active to the very end of his life.
Boldini’s portraits are not simply realistic and elegant depictions of the sitters. With his nervous, rapid and fluid brushstrokes, the artist also reveals the artificial and ephemeral splendour of the Belle Epoque. The sitters would arrive at Boldini’s studio with haute couture dresses. With their extravagant and intricate detail, these dresses were often designed for the specific purpose of intriguing and inspiring the artist to create the dazzling and sensuous portraits for which he was famed. In the confident, sophisticated pose and elaborate costume of each sitter and in the exaggerated movement of the artist’s brushstrokes, Boldini captures the evanescent magnificence of the era.
This lively portrait shows a smiling and rather amused young lady. She is depicted standing, wearing an elegant pink and white striped dress. Her coiffure is elaborate and her hat feathered. Her gloved hands are holding a parasol. Here too, the paint is applied in rapid and lively brushstrokes, with the background summarily painted, and the bare wood showing in many places. This small panel, like many others by Boldini, was intended as a sketch and probably made in preparation of a full-size portrait. It is comparable in style to the 1890 portrait of Sabine Carolus- Duran in Her Garden, in a private collection in Paris1. Also executed on panel, the sitter is wearing a similar striped dress, albeit with pink and black stripes, as that of the woman in the present picture.
Jean Gabriel Domergue (1889 -1962) was a painter, draughtsman and poster artist, as well as a friend of Boldini. It is said that he had assembled a worthy collection, among which were a number of drawings and paintings by the Italian Master. In 1955, he was made curator of the Musée Jacquemart-André. Until his death in 1962, he organised important exhibitions of works by Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Berthe Morisot and Goya. Domergue regarded himself as a pupil of Boldini, and such was his admiration of his teacher, that he had planned to hold an exhibition of the Italian artists’s work too. Unfortunately, his sudden death prevented the completion of this project. Nevertheless, an important retrospective of Boldini’s work was held in Domergue’s honour at the Musée Jacquemart-André in 1963, one year after his death.
Ferrara 1842 -1931 Paris
Pencil. Signed Boldini in black chalk, at lower centre. 362 x 267 mm. 1/4 x 101/2 in.)
PROVENANCE: Jean-Gabriel Domergue (1889-1962); by descent to the previous owner.
Born in Ferrara, Giovanni Boldini received his training from his father Antonio. His talent was soon recognized and, at the age of eighteen, he was already known in his native town as an accomplished portrait painter. Boldini travelled to Florence in 1862, where he formed close friendships with artists of the revolutionary movement of the Macchiaioli, such as Giovanni Fattori, Telemaco Signorini and Silvestro Lega. In 1871, following a trip to London, where the portraits of Gainsborough and Reynolds left an indelible mark on the artist, Boldini settled in Paris. In 1874 he exhibited for the first time at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars, winning public acclaim. In 1876, he travelled to Germany, where he met Adolf von Menzel, and to Holland, where he admired the portraiture of Frans Hals. Around that time, Boldini started to paint portraits of beautiful society women. In fact, his bold painterly technique and flamboyant style proved so popular with the increasingly fashion-conscious society, that, by the turn of the century, Boldini had become one of the leading portrait painters in Europe, achieving a success in Paris equal to that of his friend John Singer Sargent in London. Among his numerous portraits, those of Giuseppe Verdi, Whistler, Consuelo Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough, Count Robert de Montesquiou, Princess Bibesco and the Marchesa Casati, are but a few of the artist’s most famous sitters. Boldini befriended other society portrait painters such as Paul-César Helleu, James A. McNeill Whistler, and in particular Degas, who truly admired his work and once said of his friend: ‘Ce diable d’italien est un monstre de talent’. A tireless and extremely prolific painter and draughtsman, Boldini remained active to the very end of his life. In 1916, however, his eyesight began to deteriorate, and from 1927 he executed only charcoal drawings.
This beautiful drawing is a typical example of the artist’s refined draughstmanship. The pianist is portrayed in Boldini’s studio, seen in profile and playing the artist’s piano. The atmosphere is one of absorbed concentration; the tension of the pianist’s body as he leans towards the piano, as if straining to read the music, and the intensity of the figure’s gaze, are masterly rendered by an extremely precise and delicate use of the pencil.
1. Giovanni Boldini, The Pianist in the Studio, Private Collection. |
Although the identity of the sitter remains unknown, the same pianist recurs in a small oil sketch of The Pianist in the Studio (fig.1) in a private collection 1. Dated to around 1910, it depicts a corner of the artist’s studio, with the pianist seen from behind and also playing the artist’s piano.
Jean Gabriel Domergue (1889-1962) was a painter, draughtsman and poster artist, as well as a friend of Boldini. It is said that he had assembled a worthy collection, among which were a number of drawings and paintings by the Italian master. In 1955, he was made curator of the Musée Jacquemart-André. Until his death in 1962, he organised important exhibitions of works by Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Berthe Morisot and Goya. Domergue regarded himself as a pupil of Boldini, and such was his admiration of the master, that he had planned to hold an exhibition of the Italian master’s work too. Unfortunately, his sudden death prevented the completion of this project. Nevertheless, an important retrospective of Boldini’s work was held in Domergue’s honour at the Musée Jacquemart-André in 1963, one year after his death.
Paris 1854 -1941 Paris
Black chalk, pastel and pencil, with drawing pin marks at each corner and at the middle top edge: 240 x 450 mm (9 1/2 x 173/4 in.)
PROVENANCE: Bears the Luce signature stamp in black, the Luce Atelier stamp in red at the lower left and the Jean Bouin Luce collection mark at the lower right.
LITERATURE: Maximilien Luce, Catalogue de l’oeuvre peint, Edition JBL, Paris 1986, p.239, ill. no.954.
A printmaker, painter and anarchist, Maximilien Luce grew up in the working class environs of Montparnasse. Throughout his life he held a fascination for the depiction of the working people with whom he had spent his formative years. Trained initially as a wood-engraver, he took up landscape painting in the late 1870s. Early in his career, he befriended the contemporary painters Camille Pissarro and Louis Valtat and, along with Seurat and Signac, Luce sought to synthesize the colour experiments of the Impressionists with the new scientific studies of optical phenomena. Although best known for his work as a Neo-Impressionist painter, Luce often preferred urban scenes emphasizing the activities of people at work, to the landscape views of his contemporaries. Like Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross, Luce continued to work in a Neo- Impressionist, or pointillist, manner for many years after the death of the group’s mentor Georges Seurat, in 1891. He exhibited with the Neo-Impressionist artists at the Salon des Indépendants, and also took part in the exhibitions organized by Les XX in Brussels in 1889 and 1892. Together with Pissarro, Luce was a member of the French anarchist movement. He was briefly imprisoned as a political activist in 1894 and provided illustrations for several anarchist and subversive broadsheets, including Le Père Peinard, Le Chambard and Le Temps Nouveau. During the First World War, Luce executed war scenes, depicting soldiers struggling against the horrors of the Great War, rendered in a less formal and more emotive painting style than pointillism had previously allowed.
This exquisite drawing is a preparatory study for the painting Baigneuses à Saint-Tropez (fig.1), executed during Luce’s first visit to Saint-Tropez with Signac, in 1892, and now in a private collection1. Two further preliminary studies of other female nudes in the same painting are known2; less refined than the present sheet, each figure is drawn in crisp outline and squared for transfer, indicating that these two drawings were intended as cartoons for the finished work.
1. Maximilien Luce, Baigneuses à Saint-Tropez, Private Collection. |
Paris 1881-1953 Avignon
Oil on canvas.166 x 219 mm. (6 9/16 x 8 5/8 in.)
Born in Paris in 1881, Albert Léon Gleizes began his career working in is father’s fabric design factory, later claiming that the precision of design formed the basis of his artistic training. The process of design had enabled him to achieve his goal of ’a sublime precision’ and a capacity to individualize abstractions in order to create an autonomous structure. His days spent amongst the factory workers may also have contributed to his lifelong preoccupation with social themes and his ultimate political belief in the creation of a democratic socialism. He exhibited for the first time at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in 1902, and participated in the Salon d’Automne in 1903 and 1904. In colour and subject matter, these early works show the influence of the Impressionists and, in particular, the work of Pissarro.
By 1909, the radical paintings of Picasso and Braque were exhibited at the galleries of the dealers Kahnweiler and Wilhelm Uhde, and their development of multiple views and innovative abandonment of Renaissance perspective, had a profound effect on Gleizes. By 1910, a number of emergent Cubists had begun to formulate individual attitudes that were destined to enlarge the boundaries of the Cubist style. Gleizes, with his friend, Jean Metzinger, became the leading critics and expositors of the movement, so much so that their artistic contributions have often been overshadowed by the reputation of their theoretic writings, specifically the pioneer, On Cubism, published in 1912, in which much of the pictorial vocabulary of Cubism was first described. Gleizes, in particular, was instrumental in expanding the range of the new art, both in type of subject and of attitude toward subject as, very early in the history of Cubism, he became involved with expressive as well as plastic and formal elements. Gleizes met regularly with Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger and Henri Le Fauconnier at the home of the Socialist writer Alexandre Mercereau, at the Café Closerie des Lilas and at sessions organised by the journal Vers et Prose. During these meetings he exchanged ideas with critics such as Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon. In the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, the group arranged to have their works hung together, thus gleaning violent attacks from most critics. In the same year, Gleizes was joined by Archipenko, Roger de la Fresnaye, Francis Picabia, Frantisek Kupka and Juan Gris. The collaboration of these artists saw the original Cubist concepts pushed to new limits of complete abstraction, exemplified in the exhibits by Duchamp, Picabia and Kupka for the ironically titled ‘Section d’Or’ show at the Galerie La Boétie in October 1912. Gleizes’ monumental painting of the same year, Harvest Threshing represents the culmination of these ideals; it is a provocative opening up of the general hermetic world of Cubism, and in its suggestions of the dignity of labour it also has social implications.
The present canvas, also executed in 1912, represents many of the Cubist ideals of the period. Gleizes has reduced the landscape to a series of coloured geometric planes separated at intervals by black contours. The multifaceted structure and infinitely ambiguous use of space reflect the elements of Synthetic Cubism, whilst the use of black patches to replace light recalls the work of Braque. Although the palette remains within the subdued range of both Picasso and Braque, at the same time, grey and green are juxtaposed with flashes of white and red giving a richness of colour suggestive of the romantic overtones of Jules Breton or Jean-Francois Millet. In amongst the geometric shapes are freer and more cursive forms. Gleizes was to develop these curvilinear shapes to form a more lyrical abstraction in his later works.
The autenticity of this painting has been confirmed by Madame Varichon.
Antheit 1897 -1994 Veurne
Black ink. 170 x 121 mm. (6 11/16 x 4 3/4 in.) 170 x 121
PROVENANCE: Improvvisazione Prima, Galleria d’Arte, Rovereto, Italy, 1997; Private Collection, Paris
EXHIBITED: Improvvisazione Prima, Rovereto 1997, exhibition catalogue, p.51
LITERATURE: Fondation-Musée Paul Delvaux, Furnes, Belgium
The son of a lawyer, the young Delvaux studied Greek and Latin; he absorbed the fiction of Jules Verne and the poetry of Homer, and these readings were to influence his artistic output throughout his career, beginning with his earliest drawings depicting mythological scenes. After studying architecture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Delvaux pursued his passion to become a painter, and enrolled in classes taught by Constant Montald and Jean Deville. Actively encouraged by the artists Frans Courtens and Alfred Bastien, Delvaux became a prolific painter; he completed around 80 paintings between 1920 and 1925, also the year of his first solo exhibition. In these early works, he experimented with Impressionism creating colourful, naturalistic landscapes. It was not until the late 1920s and early 1930s that he began to execute the subjects for which he is best known; female nudes gesturing mysteriously, sometimes accompanied by skeletons, men in bowler hats or scientists, drawn directly from the stories of Jules Verne and each depicted in incongruous settings. These works, with their interruption of everyday scenes with inexplicable instances of the bizarre, reflect the influence both of the Flemish Expressionists, Costant Permeke and Gustave De Smet, and of the Belgian Surrealists. Delvaux, however, did not consider himself to be a Surrealist, ‘in the scholastic sense of the word’, as his works never incorporated the manifestly psychoanalytic references favoured by Dalì and Mirò, the protagonists of the Surrealist movement. The Metaphysical art of Giorgio de Chirico provided a stronger influence on the artist, as did the motifs of Magritte’s work, many of which Delvaux incorporated into his own paintings. Aside from the flattened style and distorted perspectives of the 1950s, Delvaux was to repeat variations on the theme of mystical women set in a dream-like world for much of his career. In 1965, he was named Director of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, and in 1982, the Paul Delvaux Museum opened in Saint-Idesbald.
1. Paul Delvaux, La Rose, Private Collection, Brussels. |
This exquisite drawing is a preparatory study for one of Delvaux’s most important paintings, La Rose (fig.1), executed around 1936 and now in a Private Collection in Brussels1. A comparison between the drawn sketch and the finished painting reveals how Delvaux rethought parts of the composition. In the present sheet, the standing female figure is placed in the centre of the composition; in the finished painting, the figure has been re-positioned to the left of the picture plane. The treatment of the window also differs; in the drawing, the window is depicted as an empty void, whilst in the painting, the space is filled with a view of the countryside, recalling Delvaux’s early landscapes. The window with velvet curtains derives from a spectacle Delvaux observed during a visit to the Spitzner Museum in the early 1930s. A museum of medical curiosities, it housed a booth in which skeletons and a mechanical Venus figure were displayed in a window with red velvet curtains. The artist was captivated by this image, and it is one that recurs in a number of his paintings. The realistic rendering of ordinary objects unexpectedly juxtaposed is a characteristic of Delvaux’s work. Here, the artist has placed a rose in the foreground of the sketch, seemingly sprouting from the wooden floor. It is indeed an inexplicable event and typical of the fantastic dissociation of the Magic Realists, to which Delvaux was associated, along with Pierre Roy. The precisely rendered, oddly lifeless and expressionless women and the rigidity of the classical architecture create a dream-like, timeless quality, whilst the dramatic shadowing of the figures recalls the work of De Chirico.
NOTES FOR THE CATALOGUE
No. 1
Francesco Mazzola, called Il Parmigianino
1. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Scuptors and Architects, Translated by Gaston du C. de Vere New York and Toronto, 1996, p.933
2. Giorgio Vasari, op cit., p.936
3. Carmen Bambach, Hugo Chapman et al, Correggio and Parmigianino, Master Draughtmen of the Renaissance, London 2000, cat.59. Michelangelo’s Pieta of 1498-9 was then installed in the Cappella della Vergine Maria della Febbre, a small space at the southeast corner of the old St Peter’s basilica.
4. See exhibition catalogue, op cit. 2005, p.198 and exhibition catalogue op. cit. 1995, cat.8. The painting is in a private collection in Parma.
5. Its location in the sixteenth century is unclear but the relief seems to have been known already in the 14th Century and was recorded in drawings by other 16th century artists including Giulio Romano. By the 17th century it had reached the Villa Giulia where it remained until its move to the Vatican in the mid-18th century. See Philyllis Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, London and New York 1986, p.176, cat.139.
6. David Ekserdjian, Parmigianino, New Haven and London, 2006, p.28.
7. Giorgio Vasari, op. cit., p.936
8. David Ekserdkian, ‘Parmigianino and Michelangelo’ in Reactions to the Master, ed. Francis Ames Lewis, Aldershot 2003, p.58 and note 36
9. See Sale, Philips, London, 15 December 1998, lot 125, as Circle of Astolfo Petrazzi. A note to Prof. Ekserdjian’s article of 2003 (see op. cit., under Literature), acknowledges the kindness of Dr Paul Joannides in pointing out the picture and its link to this drawing).
No. 2.
Jan De Beer
1. Adapted from D. Ewing, in The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, I, pp. 204-06. The so-called Pseudo- Bles takes his name from a panel with the Adoration of the Magi in Munich, which bore a false Herri met de Bles signature.
2. cf., D. Ewing, in The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996, III, pp. 492-93.
3.cf., Literature.
4. cf., Literature
5. L. Baldass, “Die niederländischen Maler des spätgotischen Stiles”, in Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, N.S. XI, 1937, p. 137; M.J. Friedländer, op. cit., p. 68, no. 16, as “ ... Scene from a Legend. [...] Possibly pieced out at the top and part of the series listed under No. 17.”, pl. 14, fig. 16. K. Demus et al (cf. Literature) note that after the additions and overpaint were removed the Harrach panel corresponded in size to the other paintings in the series. This indicated that it might belong with them, even though, in their opinion, it was stylistically different.
6. cf., Literature. Friedländer (cf., Literature) merely refers to the panels as “Four Scenes from Legends”.
7.Baldass, op. cit., p. 137.
8. A. Jameson, The History of Our Lord as Exemplified in Works of Art … , continued and completed by Lady Eastlake, London, 1890, II, pp. 385-91.
No. 3
Prospero Fontana
1. Vera Fortunati Pierantonio, Pittura bolognese del ‘500, Bologna, 1986, vol. I, illustrated p.382.
2. From the website www.salviani.it/vitelli which gives a detailed description of the history, design and decoration of the palazzo.
3. Sotheby’s, London, 22 April 1998, lot 42.
4. John Gere and Philip Pouncey, Artists Working in Rome c.1550-c.1640, London 1982, cat.103, also in pen and brown ink and wash, heightened with white, on blue paper.
5. Vera Fortunati Pierantonio, op.cit., illustrated p.369.
No. 4.
Jacopo Ligozzi
1. Bei Börner, Leipzig, am 9. Mai 1930 ersteigert. Katagog CLXIV / Nummer 222, abgebildet auf Tafel XXIV / Katalogbeschreibung: “Giacomo Ligozzi. Um 1547 Verona – 1626 Florenz. Allegorie der Gefrässig- / Keit. Rechts das Monogramm des Künstlers (J-L, durch einen Querstrich verbun / den, mit einem Kreuz darüber), darunter das Datum 1590”. / Sammlungen: von Schönberg – Rothschönberg und Hasse. / Gehört zu den bei Nagler. Monogr. III 1938 genannten Blättern mit allegorischen / Darstellungen der Todsünden, von der Voss (die Malerei der Spätrenaissance / in Rom und Florenz, II p. 422) ein weiteres Blatt in der Sammlung von / Kuffner in Wien nachweist (abgebildet bei Voss, a.a.O., p.423, Abb.165).” / Berlin, 12. Mai 1930 / Dr. Morat [?]’: Bought at Börner, Leipzig, 9 May 1930. Katalog CLXIV / Number 222, illustrated on plate XXIV / Catalogue description: / Giacomo Ligozzi. Around 1547 Verona – 1626 Florence. Allegory of Gluttony. / On the right the monogram of the artist (J-L, linked by a hyphen, / With a cross above), below the date 1590.”/ Collections: von Schönberg – Rothschönberg and Hasse. / Mentioned by Nagler, Monogr. III 1398 belongs to the sheets with allegorical representations / of the deadly sins, of which Voss (Late Renaissance Painting / in Rome and Florence, II p.422) identifies a further sheet in the collection of / Kuffner in Vienna (illustrated by Voss, a.a.O. p.423, Ill.165).” / Berlin, 12 May 1930 / Dr. Morat [?]’. The sheet is in fact the Allegory of Avarice, now in the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, which, interestingly, is also published as Rottenhammer by R.A. Peltzer in Hans Rottenhammer, in the Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, 1916, band XXXIII, heft.5, p.298, fig.1.
2. Lucilla Conigliello, Ligozzi, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2005, p.68, under no.6-7.
3. Ibid. p.7: ‘Clearly our artist is a man of the Late International Mannerism, in its most refined and controversial manifestations. He is also a devout and tormented supporter of the Counter-Reformation, obsessed with the notion of sin and the thought of death. In this sense, the series of the Seven Deadly Sins is emblematic. It oscillates between the simple pretext to represent scenes of marked eroticism and the most violent obsession with damnation.‘
4. Master Prints and Drawings, Artemis Fine Art, London, 1982, no.13
No. 5.
Hans Rottenhammer
1. C. Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’Arte ovvero le vite degli illustri pittori veneti e dello stato, Ed. By D. F. von Hadeln, Berlin, 1924, II, pp. 84-5. Rudolph’s painting shows the Feast of the Gods and is now in The Hermitage, in St. Petersburg.
2. C. van Mander, Dutch and Flemish Painters, translated by C. van de Wall; New York, 1936, p. 409.
3. A. Somol, Ermitage Impérial / Catalogue de la Galerie des Tableaux, St. Petersburg, 1901, II, p. 343, no. 509; illustrated in R. Peltzer, ‘Hans Rottenhammer’, in Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorisches Sammlungen der Allerhöhsten Kaiserhauses, Wien, 1916, Vol. 33, no. 5, p. 346, fig.33.
4. Illustrated in H. Wagner, ‘Zwei unbekannte Andachtsbilder von Johann Rottenhammer ’, in Pantheon, XXVIII, 1970, p. 519 20, fig. 7.
5. Ibid., fig. 4, illustrated in colour..
6. A. Somol, op, cit., under no. 509.
No. 6
Hans Rottenhammer
1. Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorisches Sammlungen der Allerhöhsten Kaiserhauses, Wien, 1916, Vol. 33, no. 5, p. 349, no. 78, pl. XXXIV; Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, Photo no. 427590.
2. Oil on oval copper. (328 x 394 cm). Signed and dated Hr 1606
3. His sale, Amsterdam, Sotheby Mak van Waay, 18th April 1977, lot 28, where dated to 1597.
4. Jahrbuch…, op, cit., p. 358, no. 20, fig. 23.
5. Keith Andrews, Disegni tedeschi da Schongauer a Liebermann, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1988, no. 53, fig. 53.
No. 7.
Alessandro Allori, called Il Bronzino
1. Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Guardaroba Medicea 249, C.19.
2. Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Guardaroba Medicea 479, C.11 s: ‘Two small oval lapis-lazuli paintings, one depicting Christ in the Garden of Olives, and the other illustrating Christ on the cross with Mary Magdalen at his feet, with the figure of death and other small figures, in the hand of Alessandro Allori, called Bronzino, framed in ebony inset with ivory, no. 2 ’.
3. Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Guardaroba Medicea 657, C.14. The Crucifixion is ascribed to Agnolo Bronzino in the inventory. However, this is almost certainly a mistake, since the description of shape, subject, and support correspond to that of the present painting, and the size recorded in the inventory is very similar (a Florentine braccio is 58,8 cm, making the dimensions of the oval recorded in the inventory 19,6 cm by 14,7 cm, compared with 17,1 by 13,5 cm of the present picture).
4. Simona Lecchini Giovannoni, Alessandro Allori, Umberto Allemandi & C., Turin 1991, p. 296, no.166, fig. 391.
5. Ibid., p. 296, no. 168, fig. 393.
6. Ibid., p. 247, no. 69, fig. 140.
7. Ibid., p. 247, under no. 69, fig. 143.
8. Ibid., p. 247, under no. 69.
9. Ibid., p. 310-11, fig. 437.
10. Françoise Viate, Dessins Italiens du Musée du Louvre, Dessins Toscans XVIe-XVIIIe siècles,I, Paris, 1988, p. 28, no.14.
11. Op.cit., p.310-311.
No. 8
Giuseppe Cesari, called Il Cavalier d’Arpino
1. H. Röttgen, Il Cavalier Giuseppe Cesari d’Arpino, Rome, 2002, p. 376, no. 131.
2. Ibid., pp. 351-52, fig. 114.2.
No. 9.
Gillis Coignet
1. Giovanna Sapori, ‘Van Mander e compagni in Umbria,’ Paragone, vol. 91, 1990, pp. 11-48; see further eadem, Fiamminghi nel cantiere Italia 1560-1600, Milan, 2007, pp. 82-87..
2. Illustrated in Ad Meeskens, Familia Universalis: Coignet. Een familie tussen wetenschap en kunst, Antwerp, 1998, p. 50.
3. Sapori, Fiamminghi, p. 86, illustrated in colour p. 160.
4. An illustration of this work in colour may be found ibid. p. 165.
5. See Meeskens, op. cit., p. 33, fig. 15.
6. For these paintings, and further literature on them, and for Van Mander’s commentary see Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, ed. Hessel Miedema, vol. 5, Commentary on Lives, Dorrnspijk, 1998, pp. 1-9, figs. 4 and 5.
No. 10.
Roeland Savery
1. J. Spicaer ‘The naer het leven Peasant Studies, by Pieter Bruegel or Roelandt Savery?’, Master Drawings, 1970, Vol. I, pp.3-30.
2.Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish etchings, engravings and woodcuts ca. 1450-1700, vol. XXIII, p.222, no.3.
3. Photo Witt Library
No. 11.
Hendrick Avercamp
1. Kolf is a sport in which the ball is struck with a kolf stick (a cross between a golf club and a hockey stick). The object is to hit the poles on the kolf pitch. Kolf was played both on land and on ice. For centuries, it was as popular in the Low Countries as football is today.
2. Albert Blankert, Doortje Hensbroek-van der Poel, Georges Keyes, Rudolph Krudop and Willem van de Watering, Heindrick Avercamp, Barent Avercamp, Frozen Silence, Paintings from Museums and Private Collections, K & V Waterman B.V., Rokin 116, Amsterdam 1982. Nos. 10 and 12.
No. 12.
Carlo Dolci
1. F. Baldinucci, Notizie dei professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, Florence, 1847, IV, p. 336.
2. F. Baldinucci (pp. 346-347) praised Dolci’s coppers with small figures for ‘ ... la gran diligenza, la franchezza e vaghezza del colorito, e ‘l finire maraviglioso ... ‘, adding that ‘ ... risplende in esse tanto più, quanto che la picciolezza loro obbligò la mano a più esatta osservazione e a tocco più minuto ’.
3. F. Baldassari, Carlo Dolci, Turin, 1995, pp. 37, no. 5, illustrated in colour as pl. IV.
4. F. Baldinucci, op. cit., pp. 340-341.
5. F. Baldassari, op. cit., p. 33, no. 1, illustrated in colour as pl. I. The copper measures 27 x 18.8 cm
6. Ibid., pp. 33-34, no. 2, illustrated in colour as pl. II. The panel measures 17.2 x 11.4 cm.
7. Ibid., p. 34, no. 3, illustrated in black and white on p. 35. Larger than other early works with similar subject-matter, the Cleveland canvas measures 88.6 x 70.5 cm.
8. Ibid., p. 38, no. 8, illustrated in black and white on p. 40. The canvas measures 118 x 96 cm.
9. Ibid., p. 40, no. 9, illustrated in black and white on p. 40.
10. Ibid., pp. 42-44, no. 12, illustrated in black and white on p.43. The canvas measures 34.5 x 47 cm. A preparatory drawing for the angel is in the Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, Rome.
11. The prototype for the St. Joseph in the London Adoration of the Shepherds is, for example, the Christ in Jacopo Vignali’s Agony in the Garden of 1626 in the church of Sta. Lucia, Castellina (Florence) (ibid., pp. 18-19, fig. 4s).
12. Sotheby’s, New York, 27 January 2005, Important Old Master Paintings, Lot 153, p. 102.
13. J.B. Knipping, Iconography of the Counter Reformation in the Netherlands, Nieuwkoop/Leiden, 1974, I, pp. 114-5.
14. C. Baker and T. Henry, The National Gallery/Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London, 1995, p. 484.
15. C. R. Puglisi, Francesco Albani, New Haven and London, 1999, nos. 67-8, pp. 152-3, colour pl. XII (altarpiece in Sta. Maria della Galliera).
16. The painting was with Ezio and Mario Benappi, Turin.
No. 13
Guido Reni
1. Information given in a letter written by Catherine Johnston dated 5 March 2007; the author having
seen the drawing in a private German collection and studied photographs thereafter.
2. Stephen Pepper, Guido Reni, Oxford 1984, p.266, cat.135.
Reni's head study for St. Proculus, see James Byam Shaw, Drawings by Old Masters at Christ Church,
3. Oxford, Oxford 1976, cat.966.
4. See Veronika Birke, Guido Reni, Zeichnungen, exhib. cat., Vienna, Albertina, 1981, cat. 120, (in other
citations the drawing is mistakenly said to be in the Real Academia di San Fernando), the St. Proculus
head is also illustrated here as fig.58.
5. In the letter dated 5 March 2007 (see note 1). For an illustration of the Sant' Andrea Corsini see
Catherine Johnston, The Drawings of Guido Reni, PHD dissertation, 1974, p.191, cat.164.
6. See Otto Kurz, Bolognese Drawings of the XVII and XVIII Century in the Collection of Her Majesty the
Queen, Bologna 1955, cat.351.
7. For the information on Reni's commission and background history see Catherine R. Puglisi, 'Guido
Reni's Pallione del Voto and the Plague of 1630', Art Bulletin, vol.77, no.3, pp.402-12.
No. 14
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino
1. Barbara Ghelfi, Il libro dei conti del Guercino, Bologna, 1997, p.83, no.134.
2. Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen
at Windsor Castle, Cambridge, 1989, p.49, no.84, pl.88; Nicholas Turner and Carol Plazzotta, Drawings
by Guercino from British Collections, London, 1991, p.135, no.108, illustrated in colour pl.16.
3. Turner and Plazzotta, ibid., pp.134-5, no.107.
4. Mahon and Turner, op.cit., p.50, under no.84, fig.17; David M. Stone, Guercino: Master Draftsman.
Works from North American Collections, exhibition catalogue, Cambridge, MA and elsewhere, 1991,
pp.92-3, no.38.
5. Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken, Guercino (1591-1666): Drawings from Dutch Collections, exhibition
catalogue, Haarlem, Teyler Museum, 1991, pp.102-103, no.37; Sir Denis Mahon, Giovanni Francesco
Barbieri, Il Guercino: Disegni, exhibition catalogue, Bologna, 1991, pp.142-4, no.88.
6. London, P. & D. Colnaghi, Exhibition of Old Master and English Drawings, 1970, no.22. The drawing,
formerly in the collections of Robert Laurent of Indiana and Mr. and Mrs. Lester Avnet of New York,
reappeared on the art market in 2001 (Munich and London, Katrin Bellinger Kunsthandel, Master
Drawings, 2001, no.10.)
7. Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 23 November 1971, lot 72 (bt. Rogers for 620 gns.); Illustrated
in Stone, op.cit., p.92, under no.38, fig.38a.
8. Sir Denis Mahon, Guercino: Master Painter of the Baroque, exhibition catalogue, Washington, National
Gallery of Art, 1992, pp.268-70, no.41.
No. 15
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino
1. Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen
at Windsor Castle, Cambridge 1989, cats.326 and 337.
2. Nicholas Turner and Carol Plazzotta, Drawings by Guercino from British Collections, exhibition
catalogue, British Museum, London, 1991, cats.103 and 104.
No. 16
Alessandro Turchi, called L'Orbetto
1. D. Kelescian Scaglietti, in Cinquant'anni di pittura veronese 1580-1630, exhibition catalogue Verona,
1974, pp. 118-9, nos. 92-3, figs. 111 & 114.
2. B. Dal Pozzo, Le vite de'pittori, degli scultori et architetti veronesi, Verona, 1718, p. 165.
3. Kelescian Scaglietti, op. cit., pp. 125-6, nos. 103-5, figs. 124, 126 & 128.
4. F. Haskell, Patrons and Painters/Art and Society in Baroque Italy, New Haven/London, 1980 [revised
and enlarged edition], pp. 184-5.
5. Kelescian Scaglietti, op. cit., p. 123, under no. 99.
6. Ibid., pp. 124-5, no. 101, fig. 125.
No. 17
Aniello Falcone
1. F.Saxl, 'The Battle Scene without a Hero. Aniello Falcone and his Patrons', Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, vol.3, 1939-1940, pp.70-87.
2. See Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa, his Life and Times, New Haven and London, 1995, p.5.
3. Anthony Blunt, 'A Frescoed Ceiling by Aniello Falcone', The Burlington Magazine, April 1969, no.793,
pp.214-5.
4. Annachiara Alabiso 'Aniello Falcone's Frescoes in the Villa of Gaspar Roomer at Barra´, The Burlington
Magazine, January 1989, no.1030, pp.30-6.
5. Magda Novella Radicea, 'Contribuiti alla conoscenza di Andrea e Onofrio de Lione´, Napoli Nobilissima,
XV [1976], pp.162-9.
6. Alabiso, op.cit., p.34, fig.48. See sale, London, Christie's, 4 July 1984, lot 46.
7. Alabiso, op.cit., p.35, fig.49. See sale, London, Christie's 20 March 1973, lot 36.
8. Chris Frischer and Joachim Meyer, Neapolitan Drawings, see Chris Fischer and Joachim Meyer,
Neapolitan Drawings, Copenhagen, 2006, no.18
9. Civilita del Seicento a Napoli, Capodimonte, Naples, 1984, exhibition catalogue, pp.84-8.
10. Falcone painted another version (now in the Capodimonte Museum, Naples) of the Battle between the
Israelites and the Amalekites, in which the figure of Moses can be seen in the distance and with his arms
held aloft by Aaron and Hur; the battle could only be won if Moses kept his arms raised all day until
the setting of the sun, see exhibition catalogue, Painting in Naples 1606-1705, London, The Royal
Academy, 1982, cat.42.
No. 18
Salvator Rosa
1. Michael Mahoney, The Drawings of Salvator Rosa, New York and London, 1977, vol.I, pp.357-65, Group
31, vol.II, figs.31.1- 31.12.
2. See Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, New York and London, 2005, cat.14
3. See F. Baldinucci, Notizie de'Professori del Disegno ..., Florence, 1681-1728, vol.VI, p.564 (quoted by
Mahoney, op. cit., 1977, p.358).
4. Mahoney, op. cit., p.357.
5. Luigi Salerno, L'Opera Completa di Salvator Rosa, Milan, 1975, cat.102 and 103.
6. Ibid., cat. 123 (St Philip Baptising the Eunuch in the Walter Chrysler Jnr. Collection, New York) and
cat.155 (Jonah Preaching in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) and Exhibition catalogue,
Salvator Rosa, Michael Kitson et al., Hayward Gallery, London 1973, plate 37 (Pythagoras emerging from
the Underworld, in the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth).
7. Michael Kitson et al., op. cit., p.44, under cat.63.
No. 19
Jacques Stella
1. See: Literature.
2. Chomer and Laveissière, op. cit., no. 145, p. 222, illustrated on p. 223.
No. 20
Carlo Donelli, called Il Vimercati
1. Interestingly, following his election to the post of sindaco of the newly founded institution,
Vimercati tried repeatedly, between 1695 and 1715, to be elected to a more prestigious position within
the Accademia. He consistently failed, finally losing the contest for the election of the Vice principe to
Ferdinando Galli Bibbiena. See Poggi, op.cit., p.172-3.
2. Ibid., p.177-84.
3. The drawings are all visible on the Internet. Search under Donelli at
http://www.italnet.nd.edu/ambrosiana/eng/index.html.
4. Poggi, op.cit., p.183, no.83.
5. Ibid., p.174.
No. 21
French School early 18th century
1. Mike Dash, Tulipomania: The story of the world's most coveted flower and the extraordinary passions it
aroused, Crown Publishers, 2000, p.
2. Aline Raynal-Roques and Jean Claude Jolinon, Les Peintres de Fleurs, Les Velins du Museum, Paris 1998,
pp.72 and 74.
No. 22
Donato Creti, circle of
1. George Knox, "The Tombs of Famous Englishmen" as described in the letters of Owen McSwiny to The Duke
of Richmond, in Arte Veneta, Vol.XXXVII, 1983, p.233. There are no existing images of the painting of
the Allegorical Tomb of William Cadogan, 1st Earl Cadogan, and the identification of the subject of the
present drawing is therefore based on the description of the painting while hanging in the Duke of
Richmond's dining room at Goodwood in 1747: to the Earl of Cadogan. Crest boars head on a ducal
coronet on high is fame flying with a garland trophies and standards of arms on a pedestal. Slaves in Fetters.
Military men horses Trajans collumn painted by Fr. Monti not printed.
2. Ibid., p.231-4.
3. Inv. Nos.1996.128.17 and 1996.128.16, Pen and brown ink on paper, laid down. Both signed and
dated 1732.
No. 23
Donato Creti, circle of
1. A. Emiliani, 'La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna', Bologna, 1967, p.389, no. 309, illustrated p.388.
2. George Knox, 'The Tombs of Famous Englishmen' as described in the letters of Owen McSwiny to The Duke
of Richmond, in Arte Veneta, Vol. XXXVII, 1983, p. 231-4.
3. Inv. Nos.1996.128.17 and 1996.128.16, Pen and brown ink on paper, laid down. Both signed and
dated 1732.
No. 24
Gabriel Gresly
1. For trompe-l'oeil still-life see: M. Milman, Trompe-l'OEil Painting, 1983, London & C. Brusati,
'Capitalizing on the Counterfeit: Trompe-l'OEil Negotiations' in Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands
1550-1720, exhibition catalogue [Amsterdam – Cleveland], edited by A. Chong and W. Kloek, 1999,
pp. 59-72 and 221-33, cat. nos. 52-6.
2. Ibid., p. 64 and fig. 8.
3. M. & F. Faré, La vie silencieuse en France.La nature morte au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1976, p. 406 & Milman,
op. cit., p. 92, illustrated on p. 93.
4. Faré, op. cit., pp. 344-9, figs. 571-80.
5. Ibid., p. 349, figs. 571 and 579
6. A Trompe-l'OEil Still-Life (ibid., fig. 576) in a private collection shows a feigned landscape print by
Perelle, another of Gresly's favourites, fixed at the corners by nails and bits of playing cards.
No. 25
François Boucher
1. A. Ananoff and D. Wildenstein, 'Francois Boucher', Lausanne and Paris, 1976, Vol II, no. 640;
illustrated as no. 1681, pages 270-1. 'The Fortune Teller' 230 x 171 cm. Made in 1767, the tapestry was
also woven in the Gobelins in the same year.
2. Ibid., p. 271, no. 640-5, fig. 1684.
No. 26
Charles-Joseph Natoire
1. J.-P. Sainte-Marie and J. Vilain, in Charles-Joseph Natoire, exhibition catalogue [Troyes, Nîmes, and
Rome], Nantes, 1977, pp. 54-60, nos. 7-14.
2. L. Duclaux, in op. cit., pp. 61-4, nos. 18-9.
3. L. Duclaux, in op. cit., pp. 82-7, nos. 45-53.
4. I. Julia, in op. cit., pp. 66-73, nos. 23-8.
5. G. Brunel, in op. cit., pp. 97-101, nos. 68-70. The actual ceiling was executed by Antonio Bicchierari,
a professional painter of frescoes.
6. J. Vilain, in op. cit., p. 55, no. 7.
7. C.B. Bailey, The Loves of the Gods/Mythological Painting from Watteau to David, exhibition catalogue [Fort
Worth and Paris], New York, 1992, pp. 356-63, no. 40 [Triumph of Bacchus, Louvre] and pp. 364-9, no.
41 [Bacchanal, Minneapolis].
8. Christie's, London, 6 December 1988, Lot 138, 'Two Girls and a Child with a Swan', black and white
chalk on grey-blue paper, 321 x 452 mm.
9. L. Duclaux, in Charles-Joseph Natoire, p. 110, no. 81.
10. P. Voilette, in op. cit., pp. 44-6.
11. F. Boyer, 'Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre de Charles Natoire, peintre du roi (1700-1777)', in Archives
de l'Art Français, 1949, p. 38, no. 37.
No. 27
Jean-Etienne Liotard
1. A number of drawings by Liotard are similarly drawn on both sides of the paper. In the present sheet, the artist has delicately applied red, orange and black chalk in order to achieve richer and subtler degrees of tone and relief on the recto. This technique derives from the tradition of toning miniatures on ivory on the verso.
2. 'L'Opera completa di Jean-Etienne Liotard', Classici dell'Arte Rizzoli, 1978: Plate X
3. Anne de Herdt, Dessins de Liotard, exhibition catalogue, Geneva, Musée d'art et d'histoire and Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1992, p.192, no.105. Alawyer by profession, Bonnet's true interest lay in the study of the natural sciences; he wrote copious treatises on philosophy, metaphysics and on the theory of evolution. In 1740, Bonnet submitted a paper to the Academy of Sciences in which he identified parthenogenesis in aphides (tree lice). His published works include Meditations sur l'origine des sensations (1754), a precursor of Darwinian theory in which he suggested that plants were endowed with the powers of sensation and discernment, and the 'Essai analytique sur les facultés de l'ame' (1780), a discussion of the physiological conditions of mental activity, in which he described a condition now known as 'Charles Bonnet Syndrome'.
4. P. E. Schazmann, Un dessin inédit de J. E. Liotard, le portrait du Pasteur Jacob Benelle, in Pro Arte. Revue internationale d'art ancien et contemporain, no.45, January 1946, pp.17-9, illustrated.
No. 28
Jean.Bapriste Greuze
1. Edgar Munhall, Jean-Baptiste Greuze 1725-1805, exhibition catalogue, Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum, 1976, p.148, no.48, p.151, no.49.
No.29
Hubert Robert
1. For Robert's life after his release from Saint-Lazare cf., P. de Nolhac, Hubert Robert, Paris, 1910, pp. 78-89 & J. de Cayeux, Hubert Robert, Paris, 1989, pp. 295-316.
2. P. de Nolhac, op. cit., pp. 80-2.
3. Robert's transformation of this motif is discussed by C. Boulot & J.-P. Cuzin, in J.H. Fragonard e H. Robert a Roma, exhibition catalogue, Rome (Villa Medici), 1990, p. 101.
4. Ibid., no. 49, p. 100, colour pl. XII on p. 124. For Fischer von Erlach's reconstruction of the pyramids which were also to influence Étienne-Louis Boulée cf., R. Middleton & D. Watkin, Neoclassical and 19th Century Architecture, Milan, 1980, I, p. 66, fig. 74.
5. Illustrated in Hubert Robert et Saint-Pétersbourg, exhibition catalogue, Valence, 1999, no. 31, p.154.
6. N. Turner, European Master Drawings from Portuguese Collections, exhibition catalogue, Lisbon, 2000, no. 99, pp. 220-1.
7. P. de Nolhac, op. cit., p. 82. The first of the paintings, Captivitas, captivitatis et omnia captivitas, is illustrated between pp. 80 & 81, while the second, Carcere tandem aperto, is found between pp. 82 & 83.
8. Ibid., p. 87.
9. From a letter of 11 March 1806, quoted by J. de Cayeux (op. cit., p. 303), to Pierre-Adrien Pâris who had been Louis XVI's architect.
10. Sale, Paris, Charpentier, 5 December 1955, Lot 46, 53 x 64 cm.
No. 30
Giovanni David
1. ' … raro alle opere, bizzarro allo stile, oscuro alla vita e pressochè misterioso', in Alizeri, op.cit., I, p.371.
2. Stuttgart, H. G. Gutekunst, Durazzo Sale, 19 November 1872, lot 4195.
3. M. Newcome Schleier and G. Grasso, Giovanni David: Pittore e incisore della famiglia Durazzo, Turin, 2003, pp.46-7, no.D17.
4. Newcome Schleier, 'New Paintings and Drawings by Giovanni David', op.cit., p.229.
'Medea, che apparisce ne' suoi zibaldoni ora con Giasone a combattere il mostro, ora intenta alle arti magiche, ora nel maleficio di Esone: e sempre composta in tali scene, che i giochi dell'ombra, o il lume notturno, o qualsiasi stravaganza negli accessori le accrescano curiosità. Di quest'ultimo tema ho veduti bei quadri da gabinetto; e d'un bel disegno m'è stato cortese il prof. Isola, poco dissimile dalla vivacità d'un dipinto.', Alizeri, op.cit., pp.368-9.
No. 31
Luis Paret y Alcazar
1. Luis Paret y Alcázar 1746-1799, exhibition catalogue, Bilbao. 1991, no.10.
2. Ibid., no.29.
3. Ibid., no.28.
4. Ibid., no.14.
5. Ibid., no.13.
6. Ibid.,no.16.
No. 32
Sebastiano Galeotti
1. Rita Dugoni, 'il Cantiere di Sebastiano Galeotti. I cicli ad affresco in Liguria e i disegni di progetto', Arte Documento, Venice 1994, vol.8, p.250, fig.3 and Rita Dugoni, Sebastiano Galeotti, Milan 2002, D78.
2. Rita Dugoni, op. cit., 1994, p.249.
3. A. Czere, 'Dessins de Sebastiano Galeotti à Chicago et à Budapest', Bulletin du Musee Hongrois des Beaux Arts, 70-1, 1989, pp.104, note 11, and 108, fig.88.
4. See Rita Dugoni, op.cit. 1994, figs.14 and 16.
5. Rita Dugoni, op. cit., 2002, p.75. 'sono testmonianza della svolta in senso di esasperato plasticismo e monumentalita che caratterizza gli affreschi realizzati a Genova ... questo cambiamento, sopratutto se confrontato con la fluidità e la leggerezza di segno di alcuni schizzi degli anni 1714-1725 ... la plastica vigorosa delle figure ... sono gia insiti nelle superfici dure, quasi marmoree, scheggiate dalle ombre profonde'.
No. 33
Francesco Guardi
1. Lot 28 in the Fauchier-Magnan sale matches this drawing in the description: 'A Landscape Capriccio
with ruins in the middle distance' although the horizontal measurement is too small. The catalogue of the collection lists excellent works by Canaletto, Watteau and both Tiepolos, a dozen drawings by Francesco and Giacomo Guardi and eight paintings by Francesco.
2. Antonio Morassi, op. cit., 1975, cat 629: 'Bella invenzione, ricca di spunti e bene orchestrate nella composizione, che costituisce con il dipinto corrispondente uno degli esempi piu felice della maturita'.
3. Antonio Morassi, op. cit., 1984, reprint of 1975, cat. 922, 'Opera bellissima ... La riccamente congegnata composizione, con nuovi motive d'invenzione pittorica, costituisce un altro traguardo della fantasia di Francesco. The painting had been in a collection in St Petersburg, Russia, before appearing on the Paris and London art market.
4. James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Francesco Guardi, London 1951, pp.31, 36 and 55.
5. James Byam Shaw, op. cit., 1951, p.55.
No. 34
Giandomenico Tiepolo
1. The Christie's catalogue notes that Professor George Knox had endorsed the attribution to Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo.
2. See Bernard Aikema, 'Some Early Drawings by Giambattista Tiepolo', Master Drawings, 2004, vol.42, no.4, fig.8, where the drawing is published as Giambattista Tiepolo. Professor Aikema, who only knew the drawing from photographs, has since concluded that it is by Giandomenico (November 2007, email correspondence).
3. See Sale, London, Sotheby's, 30 June 1986, lot 73.
4. Aldo Rizzi, The etchings of the Tiepolos, Venice and London 1971, cats.153-5.
5. Bernard Aikema, op.cit., pp.365-7.
6. See Luigi Fiacci, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Complete Etchings, Cologne 2000, pp. 582 and following pages.
7. Giorgio Vigni, Disegni del Tiepolo, Padua 1942, nos. 37-53.
No. 35
Giandomenico Tiepolo
1. E. Sack, Giambattista und Domenico Tiepolo/Ihr Leben und Ihre Werke, Hamburg, 1910, p. 195, nos. 360-1. figs. 191-2.
2. P. Molmenti, Tiepolo/La vie et l'oeuvre du peintre, Paris, 1911, p. 209, as attributed to Giambattista Tiepolo with incorrect dimensions. Curiously, Molmenti identified the St. Rose of Lima as a 'St. Theresa of Avila', noting as well that Herr Beyerlen possessed three ceiling sketches by Giambattista Tiepolo in bad condition. These may be identified with no. 47, as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and nos. 50 & 51 in the 1917 Munich catalogue (See Provenance).
3. A. Morassi, A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings of G.B. Tiepolo, London, 1962, p. 50.
4. A. Mariuz, Giandomenico Tiepolo, Venice, 1971, p. 136. For the Udine St. Vincent Ferrer which derives from a 1730-35 painting (34 x 26 cm.) of the same saint by Giambattista Tiepolo in the Venier
Collection, Milan, see, A. Rizzi, La Galleria d'arte antica dei Musei civici di Udine, Udine, 1969, no. 38, illustrated in colour & Mariuz, op. cit., p. 138, pl. 298.
5. G. Knox, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo. A Study and Catalogue Raisonné of the Chalk Drawings, Oxford, 1980, I, p. 135, D.44, pp. 260-1, M.387 & M. 405, & p. 317, P.249-50.
6. Red chalk on white paper, 100 x 80 mm and 100 x 77 mm, respectively.
7. The entire series, which Sack (op. cit., p. 241) attributed to Giambattista, is illustrated and discussed in G. Knox & C. Thiem, Drawings by Giambattista, Domenico and Lorenzo Tiepolo from the Graphische Sammlung Staatsgalerie Stuttgart ... , exhibition catalogue circulated by the International Exhibitions Foundation, 1971, pp. 120-5, nos. 110-44.
8. J. Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, Boston, 1962, p. 26, note 2.
9. Although reversed, the drawing of St. Joseph and the Christ Child (Knox & Thiem, no. 123) may have served as inspiration for a small painting (39.5 x 30 cm) of the same subject, formerly in the Dal Zotto Collection, Venice (Mariuz, p. 146, pl. 285), while its pair of the Virgin with her hands joined in prayer, although again reversed, is obviously related to a study of the Immaculate Conception in the series (Knox & Thiem, no. 130). Giandomenico most likely turned to the Stuttgart Ecce Homo (Knox & Thiem, no. 111) for the figure of Christ in the small Mocking of Christ (44 x 34 cm.) in the San Diego Museum of Art (Mariuz, op. cit., p. 136, pl. 297). It is interesting to note that all these pictures, although upright in shape, retain the bust-like format of the oval drawings.
10. Although Sack (op. cit., p. 195) noted the relation of the small red chalk oval of St. Rose of Lima in the Stuttgart gallery to the Bossi-Beyerlen canvas of the same subject, he did not do the same for the St. Dominic. Knox & Thiem (op. cit., p. 121, no. 114) were the first to notice the connection between the two.
11. G. Knox, "Giambattista-Domenico Tiepolo: The Supplementary Drawings of the Quaderno Gatteri" in Bollettino dei musei civici veneziani, 1966, no. 3, p. 10, no. 45, p. 23 & fig. 45.
12. G. Knox, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo.A Study and Catalogue Raisonné of the Chalk Drawings, Oxford, 1980, I, p. 129. The drawing is listed as no. D44 in the group numbered D23 to D45.
13. Ibid., p. 52.
14. Mariuz, op. cit., p. 118, pl. 118.
15. Ibid., p. 120, pls. 51-2.
16. Ibid., pp. 131-2, pls. 83-4.
17. See, note 4. Mariuz (op. cit., p. 138), however, dates it to about 1770.
18. For the various theories about whom Johann Dominik Bossi was – Molmenti (op. cit., pp. 172-73)), for example, called him "un certain de Rossi" - and how he came to amass his collection cf., Byam Shaw op. cit., pp. 19-20, note 19 & Knox, op. cit., pp. 200-1.
19. See Provenance. The sale consisted of 71 painting and an ivory crucifix.
No. 36
Giandomenico Tiepolo
1. George Szabo, Eighteenth Century Italian Drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1981, cat.118.
2. J. Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, London 1962, p.43
3. Ibid., nos. 48-9, figs. 48-9.
4. J. Byam Shaw, 'The Remaining Frescoes in the Villa Tiepolo at Zianigo', The Burlington Magazine, November 1959, pp.391-395.
No. 37
Francesco Zuccarelli
1. Quoted in A Catalogue of that superb and well known Cabinet of Drawings of John Barnard, Esq. Late of Berkley-Square, Deceased, London, Mr. Greenwood, 16 February 1787 onwards.
2. London, Christie's, Stichting Collectie P. en N. de Boer sale, 4 July 1995, lot 75. The drawing measures 273 x 424 mm.
3. Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 12 April 1983, lot 24 and Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 6 July 1987, lot 68. The drawing, which measures 345 x 511 mm., is on a mount inscribed by Barnard 'J:B. No.399 / 20 1/4 x 13 3/4 / I Purchased this Drawing of Franco: Zuccarelli / Himself at his Lodgings at Richmond for / Five Guineas, the 8th of Augst: 1767. J:B.'.
4. One such example, inscribed by Barnard 'Bought at the sale of Mr. Zuccarelli's drawings at Langford's, the 3rd April, 1769. J.B.', later entered the collections of J. P. Heseltine and Henry Oppenheimer (J. P. Heseltine, Original Drawings by Old Masters of the Schools of North Italy, In the Collection of J. P. H. London (privately printed), 1906, unpaginated, no.33). Another drawing bought by Barnard at Langford's in 1769 appeared on the art market in London in 1928 (Thionville sale, London, Sotheby's, 2-3 May 1928, lot 18) and is now in the Witt Collection of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
5. In the catalogue of the posthumous sale of the collection of William Esdaile, held in 1840, a chalk drawing of a Holy Family by Zuccarelli is listed as having been 'presented by Zuccarelli to Mr. Barnard' (Esdaile sale, London, Christie's, 19 June 1840, lot 400).
No. 38
Giuseppe Bernardino Bison
1. 'Nuovi paesaggi e pitture del Bison' Franca Zava Boccazzi, in Arte Veneta, XXV, 1971, p. 234, and note 17.
2. Piero Damiani, Giuseppe Bernardino Bison, Udine, 1962, p. 34-5, pl. 35.
3. Zava Boccazzi, op.cit., p.235-6, fig. 321.
4. Sale Sotheby's London, 21st April 1982, lot 103 (photo Witt Library).
No. 39
Luigi Sabatelli
1. 'And four great animals came up from the sea, diverse one from another. The first was like a lion, and had eagle's wings: I saw until its wings were plucked, and it was made to stand on two feet as a man. Behold, a second animal, like a bear; and it was raised up on one side, and three ribs were in its mouth between its teeth. and they said thus to it, Arise, devour much flesh. After this I saw, and behold, another, like a leopard, which had on its back four wings of a bird; the animal had also four heads; and dominion was given to it. After this I saw in the night visions, and, behold, a fourth animal, awesome, terrifying, exceedingly and strong; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and grinded, and stamped the residue with its feet: and it was diverse from all the animals that were before it; and it had ten horns.I considered the horns, and behold, there came up among them another horn, a little one, before which three of the first horns were plucked up by the roots: and behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things… Daniel. Chapter VII, v.2-8'.
2. Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, Luigi Sabatelli: Disegni e incisioni, exhibition catalogue, Florence, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, 1978, p.62, no.61, fig.64.
3. Antony de Witt, Luigi Sabatelli incisore, in "Emporium, January 1937,Vol. LXXXV, no.505, p.32.
4. Adriano Cera, Disegni, acquarelli, tempere di artisti italiani dal 1770 ca. al 1830 ca., Bologna, 2002, Vol.II,
Sabatelli no.22.
5. Luigi Sabatelli, Pensieri diversi, Rome, 1795, unnumbered, pl.3. The print is signed 'Alo. Sabatelli inv.' and 'Dam. Pernati inc. 1794', and captioned 'Homines ratione destituti in pecudum degenerant naturam
libidine'.
6. Strozzi, op.cit., p.65, no.66, fig.65; Franco Cajani and Sergio Gatti, Contributi per lo studio della Bottega dei Sabatelli (1772-1899), Seregno, 1997, p.63, fig.8. The print is captioned 'Et vidi mulierem sedentem super bestiam coccineam...' from Revelation 17:3: '...and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full
7. of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.'
No. 40
Ippolito Caffi
1. G. Avon Caffi, Ippolito Caffi, Padova, 1967.
2. G. Perocco, Ippolito Caffi (1809-1866), Venice, 1979, p.19.
3. Annalisa Scarpa-Sonino, Ippolito Caffi, Belluno, 2006, exhibition catalogue, p.272, no.49, illustrated p.148, and p.273, no.55, illustrated p.153.
4. Ibid., p.271, no.48, mistakenly illustrated p.146, instead of p.147. Signed and dated 26 marzo 1843.
No. 41
Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres
1. Georges Vigne, Dessins d'Ingres. Catalogue raisonné des dessins du Musée de Montauban, Paris, 1995, p.397.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., nos. 2165-2245, all illustrated.
5. Ibid., pp.386-7 no.2186.
6. Ibid., no.2187.
No. 42
Thomas Couture
1. G. Bertauts-Couture, Thomas Couture (1815-1879): Sa vie, son oeuvre, son caractère, ses idées, sa méthode, par lui-même et par son petit-fils, Paris, 1932, illustrated facing p.88; Senlis, Musée de L'Hôtel de Vermandois, Thomas Couture: Dessins (1859-1869), exhibition catalogue, 1993-4, illustrated on p.11; d'Argencourt and Diederen, op.cit., pp.173-7, no.65.
2. Several preparatory drawings for the painting are illustrated in Senlis, op. cit., pp.10-4, nos.5-16. Alist of the known preparatory drawings for the painting is given in d'Argencourt and Diederen, op.cit.,
p.176.
3. Senlis, op.cit., p.12, no.9.
4. M. Klobe, the Chamberlin Gallery, Inc., Nineteenth Century French Drawings, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1996, no.7.
5. D'Argencourt and Diederen, op.cit., p.174, fig.65a.
No. 43
Henri-Joseph Harpignies
1. Corot purchased two of the young artist's watercolours in an attempt to encourage him in his work.
No. 44
Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas
1. P.A. Lemoisne, op. cit., p. 574, no. 987, as with Reid and Lefevre, London, illustrated on p,. 575; Jill De Vonyar and Richard Kendall, in Degas and the Dance, exhibition catalogue [Detroit et al], New York, 2002, pp. 268-69, fig. 309.
2. Idem.
3. P.A. Lemoisne, op. cit., p. 574, no. 989, as with Gallery Durand-Ruel, Paris, illustrated on p. 575.
4. Ibid., p. 574, no. 988 bis, illustrated on p. 575.
No. 45
Giovanni Boldini
1. Piero Dini – Francesca Dini, Boldini, Catalogo ragionato, Allemandi ed., Turin, 2002, Vol.III, Tome I, p.327, no. 602 (oil on panel, 49 x 26,5 cm).
No. 46
Giovanni Boldini
1. Brera mai vista, 'Giovanni Boldini maestro Della Belle Époque': Il Ritratto di Emiliana Concha de Ossa detto Il Pastello Bianco, Exhibition Catalogue, Electra, 2006, p.34, fig.22.
No. 47
Maximilien Luce
1. Maximilien Luce, Catalogue de l'oeuvre peint, Edition JBL, Paris 1986, p.240, ill. no.958.
2. Ibid., p.239, ill. nos.956-7.
No. 49
Paul Delvaux
1. Photo Witt Library.
| ALLORI, Alessandro, il Bronzino: no. 23. |
| AVERCAMP, Hendrick: no.33. |
| BEER, Jan de: no. 9. |
| BISON, Giuseppe Bernardino: no. 99. |
| BOLDINI, Giovanni: nos. 115-117. |
| BOUCHER, François: no. 67. |
| CAFFI, Ippolito: no. 105. |
| CALDER, Alexander: no. 93. |
| CESARI, Giuseppe, il Cavalier d': no. 27. |
| COIGNET, Gillis: no. 29. |
| COUTURE, Thomas: no. 109. |
| CRETI, Donato, circle of: nos. 61-63. |
| DAVID, Giovanni: no. 81. |
| DEGAS, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar: no. 113. |
| DELVAUX, Paul: no. 123. |
| DOLCI, Carlo: no. 35. |
| DONELLI, Carlo, il Vimercati: no.55. |
| FALCONE, Aniello: no. 47. |
| FONTANA, Prospero: no. 13. |
| FRENCH SCHOOL, early 18th cent.: no. 57. |
| GALEOTTI, Sebastiano: no. 85. |
| GRESLY, Gabriel: no. 65. |
| GREUZE, Jean-Baptiste: no. 75. |
| GUARDI, Francesco: no. 87. |
| GUERCINO, G. F. Barbieri, il: nos. 41-43. |
| HARPIGNIES, Henri-Joseph: no. 111. |
| INGRES, Jean-Auguste-Dominique: no. 107. |
| LIGOZZI, Jacopo: no. 15. |
| LIOTARD, Jean-Etienne: no. 73. |
| LUCE, Maximilien: no. 119. |
| NATOIRE, Charles-Joseph: no. 69. |
| PARET Y ALCAZAR, Luis: no. 83. |
| PARMIGIANINO, Francesco Mazzola, il: no. 5. |
| RENI, Guido: no. 37. |
| ROBERT, Hubert: no. 77. |
| ROSA, Salvator: no. 51. |
| ROTTENHAMMER, Hans: nos. 19-21. |
| SABATELLI, Luigi: no. 101. |
| SAVERY, Roeland: no. 31. |
| STELLA, Jacques: no. 53. |
| TIEPOLO, Giandomenico: nos. 89-93. |
| TURCHI, Alessandro, l'Orbetto: no. 45. |
| ZUCCARELLI, Francesco: no.97. |
Alessandro Turchi, Called L'Orbetto
1578 -1649
Adam and Eve
Oil on copper
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