Presented here is a selection of 19th century drawings and oil sketches in stock.  Please click on a thumbnail to view further information on the work, as well as an enlarged image of the entire drawing. Six thumbnail images are shown per page; click on the red page number at the lower right to view another page.

GUSTAV BAUERNFEIND

Sulz am Neckar 1848-1904 Jerusalem

A Well in Jaffa

Watercolour.

Signed and inscribed G. Bauernfeind / Jaffa at the lower right.

Faintly inscribed and dated Brunnen in Jaffa Juni 18(8?)0 at the lower right.

Further inscribed Brunnen in Jaffa in pencil on the verso.

357 x 480 mm. (14 x 18 7/8 in.)

Although Bauernfeind is today regarded as undoubtedly one of the most significant and gifted Orientalist artists, he was singularly inept at self-promotion and struggled to make a living for much of his career. He made three trips to the Near East between 1880 and 1889 before leaving Germany for good in 1896 to settle in Palestine, where he lived for the eight years until his death. Perhaps as a result of his training as an architect, Bauernfeind was particularly interested in the streets, buildings, temples, and other urban architecture of the sites he visited in Cairo, Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Damascus, and would often travel with a camera. Yet, as one modern scholar has noted, ‘Bauernfeind had no intention of glamorizing reality, nor did he seek only elaborate or monumental structures. He concentrated on genuine paintings of every-day life, on forgotten and little-known corners, markets and narrow lanes—in other words, the scene as he witnessed it.’ The artist would faithfully reproduce these views in watercolour before enlarging them in paintings peopled with exotic figures of Arabs, Jews and others.

Bauernfeind visited the coastal town of Jaffa in 1880, during his first trip to Palestine. He produced a number of watercolour drawings of specific sites in Jaffa and Damascus; places where only a handful of Orientalist painters had worked. As one recent scholar has noted, ‘These studies represent architectural documentation that was drawn up at the exact location of the subject and thus are highly interesting from the point of view of architectural history…Bauernfeind’s chief concern all his life in his work was to produce topographically exact representations; he was not interested in merely producing a likeness of the view but rather worked with photographic precision.’ While Bauernfeind produced a number of paintings of scenes in Jaffa, the present sheet appears to be unrelated to any surviving painting by the artist.

EDMUND BERNINGER

Arnstadt 1843-c.1910 Munich(?)

Landscape in Capri

Oil on paper, laid down on panel.

Signed E. Berninger at the lower right.

170 x 251 mm. (6 3/4 x 9 7/8 in.)

A landscape painter and watercolourist, Edmund Berninger trained in Weimar before settling in Munich in 1874. He was a well-travelled artist, producing paintings, oil sketches and watercolours of sites in England, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, Constantinople, Egypt, Palestine, Algeria and Tunisia. He painted views of Jerusalem and Cairo, as well as richly coloured landscapes and scenes of Oriental markets and caravans. In Italy, Berninger was particularly drawn to the area around the bay of Naples, Sorrento and the Amalfi coast, producing a number of landscape paintings of coastal views; one such example is a large View of Capri in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

FRANÇOIS ÉDOUARD BERTIN

PANCRACE BESSA

Paris 1772-1846 Ecouen

Study of a Thistle

Oil and gouache on two joined sheets of paper. Made up areas along the bottom edge.

587 x 444 mm. (23 1/8 x 17 1/2 in.)

This very large and impressive sheet is among a group of drawings and oil sketches by Pancrace Bessa only recently rediscovered in the possession of the artist’s heirs.

Ferrara 1842-1931 Paris

A Parisian Antique Shop

Pencil. Signed Boldini in pencil at the lower right.

101 x 133 mm. (4 x 5 1/4 in.)

Ferrara 1842-1931 Paris

Landscape with Trees

Watercolour, with some traces of an underdrawing in pencil.

Signed Boldini in brown ink at the lower right.

535 x 367 mm. (21 x 14 1/2 in.)

Large-scale landscape watercolours by Boldini are a very small but choice feature of his extensive oeuvre as a draughtsman. The present sheet may depict trees in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, which the artist used as the setting for one of his finest paintings, a full-length double portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Lyding Walking in the Bois de Boulogne, today in the Museo Boldini in Ferrara.

The Porte Saint-Denis, Paris

Pencil on ruled paper; a page from a notebook.

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

FRANÇOIS-AUGUSTE BONHEUR

ROSA BONHEUR

Bordeaux 1822-1899 Thomery

A Grove of Trees

Watercolour, heightened with gum arabic.

Inscribed hauteur / Pion in pencil at the lower left.

Stamped with the Rosa Bonheur vente stamp (Lugt 274) in black at the lower right.

227 x 291 mm. (9 x 11 1/2 in.)

This delightful and vibrant watercolour landscape was included in the four-day auction of the contents of Rosa Bonheur’s studio held in Paris in June 1900. The sale included a total of 1,835 works by Bonheur, including two hundred watercolours, almost 750 drawings and pastels, and sixteen sketchbooks. Four similar landscape watercolours by the artist, each with the same provenance from the 1900 studio sale as the present sheet, are today in the collection of the Musée National du Château de Fontainebleau.

Honfleur 1824-1898 Deauville

A Study of Sea and Sky

Pastel on blue paper, laid down.

Stamped with the atelier stamp E.B. (Lugt 828) at the lower right.

149 x 220 mm. (5 7/8 x 8 5/8 in.)

An unassuming man, Eugène Boudin was never particularly concerned with his public stature or reputation, content with his modest successes as a petit maître. As he once described himself to a critic, ‘I am a loner, a daydreamer who has been content to remain in his part of the world and look at the sky.’ Indeed, the artist was particularly drawn to the sky, and he produced numerous pastel studies of clouds and skies. As he wrote in one of his notebooks, ‘To swim in the open sky. To achieve a cloud’s tenderness. To suspend those background masses, far off in the grey mist, and break up the azure…What delight and what torment!...Did they do better in the past? Did the Dutchmen achieve that poetry of clouds I seek? That tenderness of the sky which even extends to admiration, to worship: it’s no exaggeration.’

Writing in 1859, Charles Baudelaire noted of that he had recently seen a large number of Boudin’s pastel studies, ‘improvised facing sea and sky’, in the artist’s studio. He noted that ‘These studies, so swiftly and accurately sketched, after what, in terms of force and colour, are the most inconstant, the most fleeting of things, after waves and clouds…all these clouds with their fantastic, luminous shapes…’ This fine sheet may be dated to the first half of the 1860s. A group of comparable sky and cloud studies in pastel are in the collection of the Musée Eugène Boudin in Honfleur and the Louvre.

ALEXANDRE CALAME

Vevey 1810-1864 Menton

View of Bordighera

Black chalk, brush and gray wash, heightened with white gouache, on dark blue paper.

Inscribed and dated Bordighera 27.7.58 in pencil and numbered 26 in black ink at the lower right.

149 x 215 mm. (5 7/8 x 8 1/2 in.)

This drawing is part of a now-dismembered sketchbook used by Alexandre Calame in July and August of 1858. The drawings from this sketchbook, all on sheets of blue paper, are devoted to views and sites along the Italian and French Riviera, from Bordighera on the northwest coast of Italy westwards along the corniche to Menton, Villefranche, and the island of Saint-Honorat, near Cannes. Unique among Calame’s sketchbooks in being devoted solely to coastal views, with the vibrant blue of the paper used to depict sea and sky, the drawings bear numbers up to 35, although only nineteen sheets are known today. Twelve of the drawings depict views in or near the Italian coastal town of Bordighera, a resort popular with English visitors and famous for its many palm trees. To judge from the dates inscribed on these drawings, Calame seems to have spent most of the month of July 1858 in the town. The present sheet is a particularly fine example of Calame’s draughtsmanship, and was one of four drawings from the sketchbook drawn on the same day, the 27th of July, 1858.

JEAN-BAPTISTE-CAMILLE COROT

Paris 1796-1875 Ville d’Avray

The Forum with the Temple of Venus and Roma

Pencil.

Inscribed temple de Venus & de Rome and Rome – X^bre 1825 in pencil at the lower right centre.

Stamped with the vente stamp (Lugt 460a) in red ink at the lower right.

171 x 348 mm. (6 3/4 x 13 5/8 in.)

Towards the end of 1825, at the age of twenty-nine, Camille Corot left Paris for Italy, intent on completing his artistic education. He arrived in Rome in November or at the very beginning of December, and soon began producing drawings and oil sketches of views in the city and the surrounding countryside. He remained in Italy for three years, producing around 220 drawings and 150 landscape paintings and oil sketches. Many of the drawings are precisely dated and with the views identified, and from these it is possible to gain a clear idea of his travels in Italy. This fine pencil study, dated December 1825, is one of the earliest of Corot’s Roman drawings. The drawing depicts a view of the Forum with the apse of the Temple of Venus and Roma at the left, the church of San Francesco Romana and its bell tower to the left of centre, the tower of the Palazzo Senatorio in the distance and part of the Basilica of Constantine at the right. Undoubtedly one of the first drawings produced by Corot in Italy, the present sheet is in fact one of only two drawings of Roman views dated 1825. Corot’s use of a sharp lead pencil for this drawing is typical of his Italian drawings. (As the artist later recalled, ‘In those days I had wonderful pencils! They never broke; they were more likely to tear the paper.’)

Of the Italian drawings by Corot which are not today in the Louvre, several were reproduced in facsimile in a large volume compiled by the artist’s close friend and collaborator, the painter and lithographer Charles Desavary, and published in 1873, shortly before the master’s death. The present sheet was chosen as one of the small but choice group of around sixty drawings, dating from all periods of Corot’s career, reproduced in facsimile in Desavary’s Album.

Paris 1834-1917 Paris        

Coastal Landscape at Sunset

Pastel on light brown paper, mounted on board.

Stamped with the Degas vente stamp (Lugt 658) in red ink at the lower left.

232 x 316 mm. (9 1/8 x 12 1/2 in.)

The present sheet may be grouped with a series of more than forty pastel studies of landscapes and seascapes, probably done en plein air, drawn by Degas on the Channel coast in the summer and autumn of 1869. Degas spent much of the summer of 1869 at the village of Beuzeval, near Houlgate and Villers sur Mer on the Normandy coast. He spent his time making pastel drawings along the small stretch of coastline between Villers, Houlgate and Dives-sur-Mer to the southwest. P.-A. Lemoisne, the author of the seminal catalogue raisonné of the artist’s works, noted of these Normandy scenes that ‘As he looks at them, Degas’s keen eye also registers the appearance of the countryside, the pale sea-green shore fringed with foam, the curve of a bank of golden sand, the outline of hills, a velvety meadow, the color of the sky. Later, back in the studio, the artist delights in recreating some of these places from memory, attempting to reproduce the colors and outlines with his sticks of pastel.’ Although until recently regarded by scholars as having been done in Degas’s Paris studio, Richard Kendall has convincingly argued that a number of these 1869 pastels are topographically accurate and depict actual sites on the Normandy coast, and that most—if not all—of these works must have been done on the spot. Kendall has further suggested that the present sheet is a view taken from just southwest of Houlgate, looking towards the resort town of Cabourg in the distance.

This group of small pastels, characterized by a sense of emptiness and an absence of human figures, was never exhibited in Degas’s lifetime and remained in his studio until his death. The fact that several of these pastel landscapes are both signed and dated 1869 would suggest that the artist may well have regarded them—despite their relatively small proportions and austere compositions—as finished, independent works. As Kendall has noted of these works, ‘Never exhibited as a group and still generally unknown, these pastels can be counted among the seminal achievements of [Degas’] pre-Impressionist years.’

Charenton-Saint-Maurice 1798-1863 Paris

A Bugler on Horseback, Accompanied by a Hound

Pencil, grey and brown wash, with watercolour and gouache.

208 x 255 mm. (8 1/8 x 10 in.)

Although this fine drawing by Delacroix does not relate to any surviving painting, it is a splendid example of the artist’s spirited draughtsmanship. Unlike scenes of Oriental or medieval horsemen, contemporary military subjects are rare in Delacroix’s oeuvre. The artist's interest in equine subjects dates from the beginning of the 1820s, when he made numerous studies of horses; as the artist noted in his journal on the 15th of April 1823, ‘Il faut absolument se mettre à faire des chevaux, aller dans une écurie tous les matins.’ The present sheet was once part of the extensive collection of drawings by Delacroix assembled by the French geologist Louis de Launay (1860-1938).

Charenton-Saint-Maurice 1798-1863 Paris

A View of a Riverbank
Watercolour over an underdrawing in pencil.

Inscribed champrosay in pencil on the verso.

213 x 329 mm. (8 3/8 x 13 in.)

The artist’s inscription ‘champrosay’ on the verso of the sheet identifies this watercolour as a view near Delacroix’s country home at Champrosay, to the south of Paris, near Fontainebleau. Delacroix began renting the house in 1844, spending more and more time there and eventually purchasing the property in 1858, explaining his decision in a letter to his cousin; ‘But this is home: for fifteen years I’ve been coming to this region, seeing the same people, the same woods, the same hills…In other words, I bought the house…it will provide me with a small refuge in keeping with my humble fortune.' At Champrosay, Delacroix spent much of his time sketching and drawing from nature, particularly on his daily walks in the nearby forest of Sénart and along the river Seine, just to the west of the town.

This remarkably free and fresh study may be compared to a handful of other, equally atmospheric watercolours by Delacroix in the Louvre. Delacroix’s watercolours, with their fluidity of wash and delicacy of touch, show that the artist, while not a specialist, could more than hold his own in this challenging medium. Such works as the present sheet are, in the words of one scholar, ‘a painter’s sketches, free from the manual and intellectual habits of the watercolor specialist and the illustrator.’

CHARLES FILIGER

Thann 1863-1928 Brest

Still Life with a Pot and Pumpkin

Watercolour and gouache on a thin card.

Signed Ch. Filliger at the lower left.

Inscribed offert / a Léon par sa mere / Melina Rodde / 20 Fevrier 1929 in brown ink on the verso.

160 x 225 mm. (6 1/4 x 8 7/8 in.)

Born in Alsace, Charles Filiger studied at the Atelier Colarossi in Paris before settling in 1890 in the Breton village of Le Pouldu, where he befriended several of the artists working there, including Paul Gauguin, Paul Serusier, Emile Bernard, Claude-Émile Shuffenecker and the artists of the Nabis group. Filiger was a deeply religious man, and his work is often of a religious or mystical nature. He had a particular admiration for Byzantine art and the work of the Italian primitives, and his interest in such earlier art, and in the simplification of form and colour in his own work, led eventually to the geometrical and abstract nature of a series of watercolours which he described as ‘notations chromatiques’. Filiger exhibited only infrequently in Paris throughout his relatively brief career, and an exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1899 was to be his last, as after this he seems to have abandoned Paris, living a reclusive life in Brittany until his death by suicide in 1928.

Included in several recent exhibitions, this is an early work by the artist, who signed his name with two L’s—the correct spelling of his family surname—only at the beginning of his independent career. Like many of his contemporaries, Filiger briefly experimented with the pointilliste technique in the late 1880s, and he exhibited two small pointillist watercolours at the fifth Salon des Indépendants in 1889. Still life subjects are, however, very rare in Filiger’s oeuvre.

Lyon 1811-1902 Paris

A Seated Woman with a Book

Pencil on off-white paper, backed.

Signed and dated Paul Flandrin 1862 at the right centre.

348 x 268 mm. (13 5/8 x 10 1/2 in.)

Like his better-known elder brother Hippolyte, Paul Flandrin studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon before entering the studio of Ingres in Paris in 1829. The brothers were among the first pupils taken on by Ingres, and grew to be the master’s favourite students. Somewhat more shy and reserved than his brother, Paul Flandrin maintained a lifelong interest in landscape painting. He travelled widely throughout France, and landscapes of views in Provence, the Languedoc and Normandy were to make up the bulk of his Salon entries throughout his career. Although best known today for his landscapes, Paul Flandrin was also greatly admired in his day as a portrait painter, and many of his commissioned portrait paintings were exhibited at the annual Salons. He also produced a great number of portrait drawings in lead pencil, in which the inspiration of his master Ingres is particularly evident. Flandrin’s pencil portraits, greatly admired by his contemporaries, provide a fascinating glimpse of the society of the Second Empire and the Third Republic. His subjects included eminent figures, aristocrats, statesmen and members of elegant Parisian society, as well as members of his family and fellow artists.

Drawn in 1862, the present sheet, a portrait of an unknown woman seemingly distracted from her reading, is typical of Flandrin’s delicately executed drawings, which reflect the inspiration of Ingres’ own drawn portraits. As in all of the artist’s drawings, a particular emphasis is placed on the sitter’s pose and on the precise rendering of her costume and coiffure. Also in keeping with a number of other portrait drawings by the artist, Flandrin has here chosen to depict his subject in strict profile, seated in a chair; a pose which imparts a certain familiarity between the artist and the sitter.

ALEXANDRE THOMAS FRANCIA

Calais 1815-1884 Brussels

A Still Life of Letters, Cards, an Envelope, a Pencil, a Match and a Cigar Stub

Watercolour.

Signed with a depiction of the artist’s visiting card, inscribed M^r A. FRANCIA. / 6 rue de Berceau and P.P.C. in black ink.

Dated 1880 twice, on a letter and a banknote.

171 x 214 mm (6 3/4 x 8 3/8 in.)

The son and pupil of the emigré French watercolourist François Louis Francia, who worked for some twenty-five years in England, Alexandre Francia was raised in his father’s native city of Calais. Unlike his father, who after returning from London in 1817 worked in relative obscurity in Calais until his death in 1839, Alexandre travelled extensively throughout Europe, particularly in Scotland and the Low Countries, and eventually settled in Brussels. He specialized in marine subjects, notably views of ports, fishing scenes and storms. He made his Salon debut in Paris in 1835, and was to exhibit in Paris, London, Antwerp and Brussels throughout his career, receiving numerous honours and prizes.

FRANÇOIS-PASCAL-SIMON, BARON GÉRARD

Rome 1770-1837 Paris

The Head of Venus

Black chalk, with stumping and touches of white chalk, on pale grey paper.

215 x 170 mm. (8 1/2 x 6 3/4 in.)

François Gérard established a reputation as a painter of mythological and historical subjects, and also gained a considerable reputation as a portraitist. Indeed, by the beginning of the 19th century Gérard had became the most fashionable portrait painter in France, rivalling his master David. He received numerous commissions from Napoleon, his family and members of the Imperial court, as well as from significant figures throughout Europe. He also continued to paint large-scale history subjects, and was the recipient of numerous honours throughout his career, culminating in his ennoblement as a Baron in 1819. Drawings by Baron Gérard include portraits, compositional and figure studies for religious and history subjects, and several landscapes, as well as designs for book illustrations. While his drawings, and in particular the studies for history paintings and the illustrations from Virgil and Racine for Didot, reveal the particular Neoclassical influence of David’s draughtsmanship, Gérard’s portrait drawings often display a more languid sensuality that anticipates the Romanticism of the succeeding generation of artists.

THÉODORE GÉRICAULT

Rouen 1791-1824 Paris

A Sleeping Dog

Pen and grey ink, grey and yellow wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk.

101 x 160 mm. (4 x 6 1/4 in.)

Géricault produced numerous studies of dogs, both in his sketchbooks and as individual drawings, and the dog in this drawing may well have belonged to the artist; a study of the same dog is also found on a sheet of studies by Géricault formerly in the collection of Maurice Gobin in Paris. The attribution of the present sheet has been confirmed by Lorenz Eitner, who has further described the drawing as ‘a fairly characteristic example of Gericault’s casual sketches of dogs taken from life’ and dates the drawing to around 1820.

THÉODORE GÉRICAULT

Rouen 1791-1824 Paris

Scene from the Race of the Barberi Horses

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an extensive underdrawing in black chalk.

353 x 484 mm. (13 7/8 x 19 in.)

In 1816, at the age of twenty-five and having failed in his attempt to win the Prix de Rome earlier in the year, Théodore Géricault decided to travel to Italy at his own expense. He arrived in Italy in October 1816 and settled in Rome the following month. Although he had intended to stay for two years, he remained in Italy for only about a year before returning to Paris in the autumn of 1817. This large and impressive drawing may be included among a group of drawings and oil sketches by Géricault relating to the most important project of his Roman years: a monumental painting depicting the Race of the Barberi Horses. It was in February 1817 that Géricault would have witnessed this annual event—a race of wild, riderless horses along the Via del Corso, from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza Venezia—that was the highlight of the Roman Carnival. As Lorenz Eitner has noted of the race, ‘The gaudy vigour of the show, spiced with danger and cruelty, could not fail to fascinate the ardent sportsman in Géricault, and the artist for whom the horse had always embodied nature’s energy and passion.’ Géricault’s huge painting of the subject, measuring some thirty feet in length, was abandoned unfinished in his Roman studio on his sudden return to France in September 1817, and no longer survives.

The artist brought back around twenty oil sketches and numerous drawings related to the Barberi project when he returned to Paris in 1817. As Charles Clément, Géricault’s early biographer and author of the first catalogue raisonné of his work, has noted, ‘The admirable drawings of the Race of the Riderless Horses which have survived are executed, in pen and ink for the most part, with details indicated very lightly with a few hatchings. One would be very wrong to regard these as improvisations, or mere sketches.’ That the present sheet is indeed related to the theme of the corso de’ Barberi is seen in the plume of feathers on the bridle of the nearest horse, which was worn by all of the horses in the race. As Bruno Chenique has pointed out, however, the same horse is also draped with a richly embroidered blanket, tied with a belt; this is the attribute of the winning horse.

The present sheet is exceptional among Géricault’s drawings for its size and scale. The attribution of this drawing has been confirmed by both the late Lorenz Eitner and Bruno Chenique. The latter, who describes the work as ‘ce magnifique et important dessin’ and further notes the ‘exceptionnel qualité graphique’ of the sheet, will include the drawing in his forthcoming Catalogue raisonné des dessins inédits de Théodore Géricault.

GASPARD GOBAUT

Paris 1814-1882 Paris

Landscape with a Mill

Watercolour, with touches of gouache.

Signed, dated and dedicated à mon bon ami Sabourin - Gobaut 1870 at the lower right.

270 x 371 mm. (10 5/8 x 14 5/8 in.)

Best known for his watercolours of landscapes, military subjects and battle scenes, Gaspard Gobaut began his career in 1836 as a military draughtsman, attached to the Ministry of Defence, and worked in this capacity throughout most of his career. Gobaut exhibited at the annual Salons between 1840 and 1878, showing almost exclusively watercolour landscapes, and won a bronze medal at the Salon of 1847. Among the subjects of his watercolours were scenes from the North African campaigns of the French army, views of Paris, Swiss mountain views and landscapes in Algeria and Morocco. Works by Gobaut are today in the collection of the Duc d’Aumale at Chantilly, at Versailles and in the museums of Pontoise and Honfleur.

FRANÇOIS-MARIUS GRANET

Aix-en-Provence 1775-1849 Malvallat

Monks on the Staircase of the Villa of Maecenas at Tivoli

Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with touches of watercolour.

Signed Granet. and inscribed villa mécène / 15=2/40. in the lower margin.

193 x 157 mm. (7 5/8 x 6 1/4 in.)

In 1802 Granet trav­eled to Rome, remaining there for most of the next twenty-two years. He set up his studio in an abandoned monastery and worked extensively in the city and the surrounding Campagna. Although never a pensionnaire at the Académie de France, he was able to make a reasonable living selling views of Rome to the many French tourists who visited the city during the Napoleonic occupation. Granet made his first visit to Tivoli in 1804, and returned there often during his stay in Italy. Here he depicts the staircase at the entrance to the Villa of Maecenas, with the darkness of the foreground contrasted with the bright sunlight at the top of the stairs. An oil sketch of an almost identical view of the staircase of the Villa of Maecenas, generally attributed to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot but more recently given, albeit tentatively, to Granet, is in the Gere collection at the National Gallery in London.

HENRI-JOSEPH HARPIGNIES

PAUL-CÉSAR HELLEU

Vannes 1859-1927 Paris

Pastel on blue-grey paper. A partial study of a standing male nude in black chalk on the verso.

Signed and dated P. Helleu 80 in black chalk at the upper left.

405 x 327 mm. (15 7/8 x 12 7/8 in.)

Signed and dated 1880, this pastel is an early work by Helleu, and demonstrates that his skill as a pastellist was already evident at the very beginning of his career. The signature is that used by the artist in the early 1880s, while the style of the pastel is similar to that of a painting of the same year donated to Musée La Cohue in Vannes by the artist’s daughter in 1996. Helleu’s reputation was, to a large extent, established by his pastel portraits. He exhibited a number of large pastel portraits at the Salons of 1885 and 1886, where they were greatly admired, and his career was launched with a large exhibition of pastels at the Galerie Petit in 1888. Helleu continued to work in pastel throughout his career, mainly for portraits but also for floral subjects, and exhibited these works frequently at the Société des Pastellistes.

ALEXANDRE HESSE

Paris 1806-1879 Paris

Studies of a Right Arm and Left Hand

Black, red and white chalk on blue paper, irregularly trimmed.

312 x 276 mm. (12 1/4 x 10 7/8 in.) at greatest dimensions.

The son and nephew of artists, Alexandre Hesse entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1821. In 1830 he made his first visit to Italy, and his experiences in Venice inspired his painting of The Funeral of Titian, exhibited at his Salon debut in 1833, where it won a first-class medal. He returned to Italy in the same year, again visiting Venice, where he made several copies after the work of Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese; artists who were to be a particular influence on his own work. Hesse lived and worked in Rome between 1842 and 1847, and on his return devoted much of his later career to providing paintings for chapels in Parisian churches, including Saint-Séverin, Saint-Sulpice and Saint-Gervais. Hesse continued to exhibit at the Salons until 1861, and in 1867 was nominated to succeed Ingres at to the Institut de France. His last significant commission, for the decoration of a chapel in the Parisian church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, was left unfinished at his death.

ADOLF HIRÉMY-HIRSCHL

JOHAN BARTHOLD JONGKIND

ADOLPH VON MENZEL

Breslau 1815-1905 Berlin

Graphite (carpenter’s pencil), with stumping.

Signed with initials and dated A.M. / Oct. 84 at the lower right.

226 x 185 mm. (8 7/8 x 5 7/8 in.)

Together with his widowed sister and her family, Adolph Menzel made annual summer visits to the spa town of Bad Kissingen, near Würzburg in Franconia, in the 1880s and 1890s. While he rarely took the baths or waters himself, he found in Kissingen numerous subjects that captured his attention, and these resulted in a series of small gouache paintings of genre scenes dating from between 1884 and 1893. This drawing is a study for one of the earliest of these small gouaches, Kurgäste am Wärmekessel in Kissingen (Spa Guests at the Warm Kettle in Kissingen), depicting people drinking warm mineral water served by a vendor. Painted in 1884, the small gouache was last recorded in a private collection in Berlin in 1905 and is now lost.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET

Gruchy 1814-1875 Barbizon

Landscape with a Farmhouse

Watercolour, pen and grey ink.

Inscribed Vichy in grey ink near the lower left.

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

The present sheet may be related to a group of landscape drawings made in Vichy in the summers of 1866 and 1867. Millet made his first visit to Vichy in June 1866, when he accompanied his family to the spas of the resort town, and he returned there again in 1867 and 1868. He made dozens of landscape drawings of the hills and farmland around Vichy—to be worked up into finished watercolours, paintings and pastels upon his return to Barbizon—and this period was in fact to be his most productive as a landscape draughtsman since the 1850s. The artist seems to have been attracted to the scenery around Vichy as it reminded him of the landscapes of his childhood in Normandy, and in particular the way in which the undulating features of the landscape would partially hide the farms and buildings beyond them. The present sheet may, however, have been drawn in Normandy a few years after Millet's last stay in Vichy.

The attribution of this drawing has kindly been confirmed by Alexandra Murphy.

CLAUDE MONET

Paris 1840-1926 Giverny

Waterloo Bridge, London

Pastel.

Signed Claude Monet in pencil at the lower right.

294 x 463 mm. (11 1/2 x 18 1/4 in.)

Around 110 pastel drawings by Claude Monet are known today, almost all of which are signed, fully developed compositions, rather than quick sketches. That the artist considered his pastel landscapes as significant works in their own right is evident as early as the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, when he chose to exhibit seven of his pastels alongside five paintings. Nevertheless, Monet’s pastels are today far less well known, and have been much less studied, than his paintings. The vast majority of these vibrant works on paper remain in private hands today, and only a few are in museum collections. This large pastel of Waterloo Bridge, never previously exhibited or published, is a new and superb addition to this choice group of drawings by the artist.

In 1899 Monet spent some six weeks in September and October in London. He took a suite of rooms at the Savoy Hotel, on the Victoria Embankment overlooking the Thames. From his hotel window, he painted views of Charing Cross railway bridge looking upstream to the right and Waterloo Bridge to the left. The views of Waterloo Bridge, looking downstream along the Thames, show factory chimneys and the prominent tower of a lead foundry on the far bank of the river. In 1900 and 1901 Monet returned to London in winter to continue this series of paintings; on each trip he would embark on new works as well as returning to the canvases he had begun earlier. Monet’s London paintings are characterized by a desire to record the atmospheric light effects of sunshine diffused by the combination of fog, mist and coal smoke prevalent in the city during the winter months.

This previously unknown study of Waterloo Bridge is a significant addition to the small corpus of pastels produced by Monet during his third and final stay in London in 1901. Having arrived at the end of January to find that his painting materials had been held up at customs and had not yet reached him at the Savoy, Monet immediately produced ‘a few pastel sketches,’ as he wrote in a letter to his wife Alice. The following day he wrote again to Alice: ‘[I] continue to experiment with pastel. I enjoy it very much even though I’m not accustomed to using it; it keeps me busy and may even help me.’ The next day he wrote of his pastels, ‘It is true that I am not wasting my time on this: I am looking a great deal and observing what I will be working on; I am making many pastel studies which function as exercises, however, I would prefer to be more gainfully employed.’ By the 1st of February he was back at work on his paintings, but still wrote to Alice that ‘It is thanks to my pastels, made swiftly, that I realized how to proceed.’ This group of pastels may, therefore, be precisely dated to the end of January and the first few days of February 1901. In all, twenty-six pastels from Monet’s third visit to London in 1901 are known, including sixteen views of Waterloo Bridge. Like many of the London pastels, the artist has here used a pale oatmeal paper, which sets off the cool blues of the pastel, though other examples are on grey or bluish paper. Describing a very similar pastel of the same view, Richard Kendall has noted that ‘Monet appears to have begun a number of his London sheets, perhaps all of them…[by] first drafting the major forms with relatively crisp lines, then spreading successive strokes of colored pastel as he developed his “effect”. In most examples, the subsequent accumulation of powdery hues would be softened with his finger or with a stump…emphatic strokes—some of them colored—have marked out the contours of bridge, boats, and distant chimneys. Over and around them, Monet has spread a thin veil of paler pastel, evoking the insubstantial effects of smoke or mist through his gentle manipulations.’

This pastel, signed in full by the artist, was almost certainly regarded by Monet as a finished work of art, to be sold to a collector or given as a gift to a friend. This is true of almost all of the London pastels, and it is interesting to note that, despite having been produced simply to occupy his time while waiting for his painting materials to arrive, these works on paper appear to have been held in high regard by the artist. Monet’s London pastels of 1901 were his last works in the medium, which he does not seem to have taken up again after his return to France. Indeed, Daniel Wildenstein describes them as ‘a veritable swansong in the field of pastel that had been abandoned for several years…[and] the most important series’ of pastels by the artist. This splendid pastel of Waterloo Bridge, previously unpublished, is a magnificent addition to this small but significant facet of Monet’s late draughtsmanship.

DOMENICO MORELLI

Naples 1823-1901 Naples

A Seated Arab Man

Pen and brown ink, with touches of brown wash.

Signed and dated Morelli 1883 at the lower right, and illegibly inscribed (in mock Arabic?) in brown ink at the bottom.

445 x 323 mm. (17 1/2 x 12 3/4 in.)

Domenico Morelli’s draughtsmanship is characterized by rapid, short pen strokes with a minimum of shading. His pen style as a draughtsman was largely developed by around 1865 and remained relatively constant for the rest of his career. A significant group of drawings by Morelli is in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, while another important group was presented by a descendant of the artist to the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin in 1998. Orientalist or Islamic subjects account for a small but distinctive part of Morelli’s painted oeuvre. He never seems to have visited the Near East, although he owned a large collection of photographs of sites in the Holy Land and elsewhere. The model depicted by Morelli in the present sheet also appears in a painting of an Arab musician playing a musical instrument on his lap, datable to the mid-1870s. Formerly in the Stevens-Ricciardi collection in Naples, the painting is today in a private collection.

PIERRE PRINS

Paris 1838-1913 Paris

Sunset over the Sea at Puys

Pastel on paper, laid down on board.

Signed Pierre Prins in black chalk at the lower left.

190 x 277 mm. (7 1/2 x 10 7/8 in.)

Shy and unassuming by nature, Pierre Prins worked in relative solitude for most of his career. Although he was close friends with several of the Impressionists, notably Edouard Manet, Alfred Sisley and Frederic Bazille, he preferred not to take part in the artistic debates and controversies of the period. His style, while at times close to that of the Impressionist painters, remained distinctively his own. In 1878, inspired by Manet’s pastels, he began to work in the medium, becoming highly proficient and eventually working almost exclusively in pastel. In 1890, at the age of fifty, he had his first one-man exhibition, showing some forty landscapes—almost all executed in pastel—at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. He also exhibited regularly at the Salons. However, on his deathbed, Prins asked his heirs not to exhibit his work, nor to release any work from his studio, for a period of thirty years after his death. As a result, his work remained almost completely unknown for much of the period when that of his friends and contemporaries among the Impressionists rose to new heights. It was not until a retrospective exhibition in Paris in 1963 that his work came to be better known and appreciated.

Prins produced a large number of pastel studies of the sea and sky. In the 1880s and 1890s he spent much time on the coast of Normandy and Brittany. While some of Prins’s pastel landscapes are very large, most are smaller in scale and more intimate. He often used a coarse-grained coloured paper, and almost never used any fixative, so as to keep his pastels as bright and fresh as possible. An interest in atmospheric effects is evident in much of his work, with a particular interest in the sky at sunrise, in full sunlight, at twilight and at sunset. As Daniel Wildenstein has noted, ‘Prins was above all a painter of the sky and of light in their most subtle expressions. With the art of a visionary, and yet without any of the fairy-tale romance of Turner and Bonington, he was capable of catching their most fleeting effects. In this he was particularly successful with pastel, which he used with great mastery and which, in his hand, turns into a luminous haze in boundless space, resting on a very low, very distant horizon only slightly more substantial than the clouds. He makes the slightness of pastel serve the insubstantiality of the sky, thus bringing the means and the end into harmony.’

JOHN RUSKIN

London 1819-1900 Brantwood

The Chateau des Rubins at Sallanches, with the Aiguille des Varens Beyond

Watercolour and gouache, over an underdrawing in pencil, on faded blue paper.

215 x 193 mm. (8 1/2 x 7 5/8 in.) [sheet]

This splendid watercolour is a view of the Chateau des Rubins in the town of Sallanches in the French Alps, looking towards the mountain peak known as the Aiguille de Varens. Ruskin seems to have taken his view from the gorge of Levaux at Sallanches, which is in the French departement of Haute-Savoie. The 14th century Chateau des Rubins depicted in the foreground still stands; one of the few surviving buildings from a fire that destroyed much of Sallanches in the 1840s. (The chateau today houses a local museum, the Centre de la Nature Montagnard.)

Ruskin’s first visit to the area around Sallanches took place during his inaugural trip to France, Switzerland and Italy with his parents in 1833, and he returned there often throughout his life, up to his final tour in 1888. In his diaries and letters he recorded his delight in the views of the mountains from the town and the surrounding countryside. In 1854 he wrote, ‘Sallenches. How little I thought God would bring me here again just now - and I am here, stronger in health, higher in hope, deeper in peace, than I have been for years. The green pastures and pine forests of the Varens softly seen through the light of my window. I cannot be thankful enough, nor happy enough.’

RADEN SARIEF BUSTAMAN SALEH

Semarang 1811-1880 Bogor

A Tiger Attacking a Sika Deer

Pencil, heightened with white and gum arabic.

Dated VI.I.78 at the lower left and signed(?) R. Saleh on the verso.

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

Born into a noble family on the island of Java, Raden Saleh is regarded as a pioneer of modern Indonesian painting. After winning a scholarship from the Dutch government in 1829, the young artist settled in The Hague, where he completed his studies and lived until 1839, receiving private commissions for portraits, seascapes and animal drawings. Raden Saleh was to live and work in Europe for nearly twenty years, establishing a reputation as a portrait and animal painter and receiving commissions from patrons in Holland, Germany and France. In 1839 he was sent by the Dutch government on a six-month study trip throughout Europe, and eventually settled in Dresden. The four years he spent in Dresden he later recalled as the happiest of his life. Unlike his experiences in conservative Holland, where he was seen as a talented product of the Dutch colonial heritage, in Germany Raden Saleh was regarded as a particularly fascinating, cultured and exotic figure. Moving in refined artistic and social circles, he dressed in Javanese costume and came to enjoy his stature as a sort of Oriental ‘painter-prince’. He also spent a considerable amount of time in Paris, where he met and was influenced by Horace Vernet and exhibited at the Salon.

Catering to the European taste for Romantic subjects, Raden Saleh developed a particular reputation for paintings of such exotic Oriental subjects as animal hunts. Indeed, he was especially renowned for his depictions of the combat between animals, and between humans and animals, and his paintings of such subjects were highly sought after by collectors. In 1851, after more than twenty years in Europe and at the suggestion of his friend Vernet, Raden Saleh returned to Indonesia, where as the first European trained artist in the country he was soon in demand as a society portrait painter. He received numerous commissions from the Javanese aristocracy and enjoyed a successful and lucrative career as a portrait and landscape painter. Despite his local success, however, Raden Saleh seems to have missed the heady cultural milieu of Europe. He returned briefly to Germany between 1876 and 1878, but found that tastes had changed, and his work was less fashionable than it had been a quarter of a century earlier. He returned to Indonesia, where he died in 1880.

The present sheet was drawn in 1878, during the artist’s second and final visit to Europe. Raden Saleh had begun depicting lions and tigers as early as 1836 in The Hague, where he met a famous wild animal tamer named Henri Martin, who allowed the young artist to make extensive studies of the lions and tigers in his menagerie. The subject of animals attacking their prey remained a popular theme in the artist’s oeuvre.

GEORGE PIETER WESTENBERG

Nijmegen 1791-1873 Brummen

Landscape with a Path

Pen and grey ink and grey wash, with framing lines in grey ink.

A study of a fallen tree trunk in pen and grey ink and grey wash on the verso.

Signed with initials P.G.W. in grey ink at the lower right.

Inscribed (signed?) P. G. Westenberg / am [Bentheim](?) in pencil on the verso.

259 x 199 mm. (10 1/4 x 7 7/8 in.)

A landscape and animal painter, Pieter Westenberg was a pupil of Jan Hulswit in Amsterdam from 1808 to 1813, and also attended the drawing academy in Amsterdam. Inspired by the Dutch landscape painters of the 17th century, Westenberg exhibited landscapes and urban views regularly from 1814 onwards. He undertook two study trips; in 1816 to Gelderland and to Bentheim in Germany and the following year to the region of the Ruhr and along the Rhine; the studies and sketches he made on both trips were to have a profound effect on his later paintings and drawings. He also worked as a drawing master to several wealthy families, but in 1836 moved to Haarlem, where two years later he was appointed director of the Collection of Paintings by Living Masters in the Paviljoen Welgelegen. In 1857 he travelled with his family to Batavia to take up a post with the colonial administration in Java.

Text and images copyright © 2007-2010 by Stephen Ongpin Fine Art. No portion of this website may be transferred, copied, or reproduced in whole or in part in any manner or in any media without the prior written consent of Stephen Ongpin Fine Art.