Presented here is a selection of 20th century drawings 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.

MAXWELL ARMFIELD

Ringwood 1881-1972 Dorset

Three Feathers

Tempera on board.

Signed with the artist’s monogram and numbered OP / 253 in white gouache at the upper right.

253 x 305 mm. (10 x 12 in.)

Maxwell Armfield was largely self-taught as an artist. Under the influence of Joseph Southall, he began experimenting with painting in tempera, although he only began taking up the medium with more seriousness around 1910. His first significant one-man exhibition was held at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1908, and a review in The Times noted the artist as ‘a man of originality and promise…[he] is said to be very young: but he is also very versatile…his gifts are undoubted.’ Armfield was a prolific and accomplished illustrator and decorative artist, and also found the time to publish a number of books of poetry, travel accounts and technical guides such as the Manual of Tempera Painting, published in 1930. Although his work was largely forgotten after the Second World War, Armfield lived to see a reassessment of his oeuvre take place in the 1970s. Paintings by the artist are in the collections of the Tate, the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, the Southampton City Art Gallery, and elsewhere.

The present work is numbered by the artist as Opus 253, which would suggest an approximate date of 1948; it was first exhibited the following year. Writing a few years later, Armfield described the particular appeal of tempera, noting that ‘only in this apparently most material and restricted medium could I learn to express in this age, those fundamental things which could not at the present time find acceptance in a direct or ostensible way.’ In another publication, Armfield wrote, ‘Tempera because of the exigencies of material is specially suitable for smallish pictures, gay and rich in colour…the peculiarities of the medium itself render it most suitable for the presentation of flowers, fruit, and the small beasts naturally associated with them: for sky, pebbles, and generally, the smaller details of nature...’

JENNIFER BARTLETT

Born 1941

In the Garden, No.12

Conte crayon on paper.

495 x 660 mm. (19 1/2 x 26 in.)

Born in Long Beach, California, Jennifer Bartlett studied at Mills College and at the Yale School of Architecture. She has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Documenta in Kassel and at the Whitney Biennial in New York. The series known collectively as In the Garden was begun as a group of drawings made in 1979 and 1980 in the garden of a villa in the south of France. Yet, as one recent scholar has noted, ‘You expect an idyllic hortus conclusus. The garden itself was indeed shut in from the glamorous world around it in the old town of Nice; it was ordinary, dull and certainly not picturesque. The reference, then, is ironic, it asks us to laugh as much at Bartlett’s predicament (self-imposed) as at the apparent grandeur of the garden theme in Western Art rediscovered by the American traveler in Europe.’ It was at this period that, by necessity, Bartlett began to work on a small scale, and in particular to begin to develop her skills as a draughtsman. She imposed a rule of a uniform size of paper for all the drawings and, having run out of time to complete the project in France, took photographs of the pool and the garden which served as the basis for the later works in the series. The 197 drawings that make up the complete In the Garden series—drawn variously in pencil, coloured pencil, charcoal, crayon, pen and ink, brush and ink, watercolour, pastel and gouache—were exhibited together at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York in 1981, to considerable critical acclaim. The series was also reproduced in its entirety in the first monograph solely on Bartlett’s work, published the following year.

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

Brooklyn 1960-1988 New York

Untitled

Wax crayon on paper.

317 x 444 mm. (12 1/2 x 17 1/2 in.)

Datable to 1981, the present sheet is an impressive and vibrant example of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s draughtsmanship at the onset of his rise to fame. Basquiat was a compulsive draughtsman, and produced many hundreds of drawings over the course of his brief career. Indeed, the artist may be said to have been at heart a draughtsman, and his paintings, while resonant with vibrant colour, find their embodiment in line. As one scholar has noted, ‘Basquiat understood color like few others and used it with unbridled temerity, but he was essentially a draftsman…In fact, his paintings are drawn as much as painted. Areas of color are scribbled in impatiently, while most everything else in described with quick, confident, linear strokes…If Basquiat had the facility to deploy the power of color, that did not mean that he also needed to spend a lot of time getting it on canvas; he wanted to be drawing.’ Replete with signs, symbols, words, numbers and codes, Basquiat’s drawings were a fundamental part of his artistic process, and it is arguably in his drawings that the creative intensity of Basquiat’s artistic temperament can best be seen.

The curator and critic Robert Storr has written of Basquiat’s drawings that, ‘Scarred, torn and trampled, much of his work on paper bears the direct imprint of his urgency. Drawing, for him, was something you did rather than something done, an activity rather than a medium. The seemingly throw-away sheets that carpeted his studio might appear little more than warm-ups for painting, except that the artist, a shrewd connoisseur of his own off-hand and under foot inventions did not in fact throw them away, but instead kept the best for constant reference and re-use. Or, kept them because they were, quite simply, indestructibly vivid.’

EDMUND BLAMPIED

St. Martin, Jersey 1886-1966 St. Aubin, Jersey

The Dunes at Wimereux, Normandy

Oil on board.

Signed and dated Blampied 1934. and inscribed Wimereux. in pencil at the lower centre.

204 x 291 mm. (8 x 11 1/2 in.)

Edmund Blampied began his formal artistic training in 1903, when he was admitted as a student at the Lambeth School of Art in London. He eventually obtained a scholarship to continue his studies, while at the same time working for a number of London newspapers as an illustrator, and by 1911 had begun working independently as an illustrator for magazines and books. He also took up the art of etching, and soon became proficient—and, indeed, quite prolific—as a printmaker. In 1920 Blampied was elected to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers. Yet while his etchings, drypoints and lithographs earned him a substantial reputation, he continued to supplement his income with commissions for magazine and book illustrations. In the late 1920s Blampied began to paint in oils and watercolours, producing works that attracted the interest of a new group of collectors, many from America. With the decline in the etching market in the 1930s, Blampied began to concentrate more on paintings, drawings and watercolours. In 1941 a large and comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work as printmaker, painter and draughtsman was presented at the Print Club of Cleveland, Ohio. Works by Blampied are today in the collections of the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and elsewhere.

This appealing picture may be included among a series of a landscapes painted on small wooden panels by Blampied, several of which—including views of Wimereux, Knokke in Belgium, Zefeld in Austria, St. Brelade in Jersey, and elsewhere—were included in the Cleveland exhibition in 1941. Blampied visited Wimereux, near Boulogne in the Pas-de-Calais, several times in the 1930s, often staying with his friend, the writer and journalist Cecil Hunt.

CHRISTOPHER BRAMHAM

Born 1952

The Ducks III, Richmond

Watercolour, gouache and pastel on paper.

Signed, titled and dated Ducks 3 / Spring 1996 / C. Bramham on the backing board.

1613 x 750 mm. (63 1/2 x 29 1/2 in.)

Born in Yorkshire in 1952, Christopher Bramham studied at the Bradford College of Art and the Kingston-upon-Thames Art School. A friend of Lucien Freud, whom he met in 1982 and who was instrumental in bringing his work to greater public attention, Bramham has devoted his mature career to landscape painting. He had his first one-man exhibition in 1988, and over the next several years exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in London. Throughout the 1990s, his preferred subject matter was suburban London landscapes, and in particular views from the window of his home in Richmond in Surrey. Studied at different times of the day and in various seasons, the streets and scenery of suburban Richmond are depicted in Bramham’s paintings with a devotion that belies the apparent mundanity of the subject. In 1999 the artist left London to settle in Cornwall, and his landscapes took on a new dimension, with depictions of farmhouses and rural views.

This monumental and impressive sheet, drawn in the spring of 1996, is a remarkable tour de force of pastel and watercolour, and depicts the view from the artist’s studio in Richmond. This drawing belongs with a large group of paintings and pastels, executed in the second half of the 1990’s, focusing on the angled view from the artist’s studio window down into his garden, with its ducks and greenhouse. When the present work was exhibited at the Yale Center for British Art in 2000, it was noted that, ‘though executed in gouache and pastel, mediums that invite spontaneity and loose strokes, Bramham has not deviated from his usual, laborious style. The odd aerial perspective is testimony to the artist’s practice of painting or drawing what he sees from his upper-story window in Richmond—the ducks, in fact, are family pets…Devotion to and love of the subject matter is what keeps Bramham so intently focused. In painting the world literally at his doorstep, with care and consideration, he discovers the strange beauty of nondescript streets, rows of garages, and railway embankments. It is this ability to render the familiar fresh and new that gives Bramham’s work its power.’

PATRICK CAULFIELD

London 1936-2005 London

A Jug

Pencil.

Signed with initials PC at the lower right.

297 x 209 mm. (11 5/8 x 8 1/4 in.)

In 1960 Patrick Caulfield was admitted to the Royal College of Art, where his fellow pupils included R. B. Kitaj, David Hockney and Allen Jones. While still at the Royal College of Art, Caulfield’s work was exhibited at the Young Contemporaries exhibitions in London in 1961, 1962 and 1963. At this time Caulfield began to produce the first of many screenprints, and printmaking was to become an important aspect of his artistic production. Apart from paintings and prints, Caulfield also produced designs for posters, wall hangings, book covers, tapestries, ceramics and murals, as well as sets and costumes for stage productions at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. A reserved and introspective man, Caulfield worked very slowly, and throughout the last thirty years of his career only rarely produced more than two or three paintings and a few prints each year. At the end of 2002 Caulfield was found to be suffering from cancer of the mouth and throat, and two operations left him unable to speak. Despite his frail state, he was able to complete one large major painting in 2004 before his death the following year.

This fine sheet, drawn in 2003, shows that the artist’s skills as a draughtsman remained formidable even during his illness. As his friend the art historian Marco Livingstone recalled, after Caulfield underwent a major operation for the cancer diagnosed in November 2002, ‘more than a year passed before he again felt strong enough and sufficiently motivated to return to painting, having made only a few small but typically beautiful pencil drawings in the meantime.’ The motif of a jug or pitcher had appeared—either individually or as elements in a larger still life—in Caulfield’s work throughout his career.

HENRI DELUERMOZ

Paris 1876-1943 Paris

Studies of an Eagle

Brush and black ink and brown wash, with touches of white heightening, on reddish-brown prepared paper.

Signed with a monogram and dated .hD.1906 in black ink at the lower right.

Inscribed with colour notes brun rougeâtre, autour du bec et / des yeux (jaune), and duveter soigneussement la tête / trop mou.

273 x 398 mm. (10 3/4 x 15 5/8 in.)

A painter, illustrator and engraver, Henri Deluermoz was a pupil of Alfred Roll and Gustave Moreau. He became one of the finest animal painters of his day, with a particular penchant for depictions of wild animals. He also painted Provençal landscapes, equestrian and bullfight scenes, and produced designs for tapestries, mural decorations, and book illustrations. (Among the books he illustrated were editions of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book and Henri de Montherlant’s Les Bestiaires.) Deluermoz did not send any paintings to the Salon until 1909, when he was already in his thirties, although thereafter he exhibited there regularly, and also showed at commercial galleries in Paris between 1913 and 1919.

This drawing is a relatively early work by the artist. Deluermoz had spent the early years of his career sketching in the Jardin des Plantes and the Jardin d’Acclimation in Paris. In 1905 he settled in Orange in Provence, where he was engaged on a large-scale decorative mural project, and began a series of travels around the Midi. This drawing, dated 1906, was probably drawn at the Jardin Zoologique in the gardens of the Palais Longchamp in Marseilles. Another drawing of the same period—a study of the wings of an eagle—is also in stock.

MAURICE DENIS

ANDRÉ DERAIN

Chatou 1880-1954 Garches

Recto: Costume Designs for a Musketeer and a Woman

Verso: Still Life With a Plate of Fish on a Table

Pen and brown ink and brown wash on light brown paper. The verso in pencil.

270 x 417 mm. (10 5/8 x 16 3/8 in.)

This drawing may be dated to the late 1940s, and is probably related to a stage design. Derain had begun to design for the theatre in 1919, when he was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev to design the costumes, sets and stage curtains for the ballet La Boutique Fantastique. In the last decade of his career Derain designed sets for several opera and ballet productions; in all, Derain created costumes and sets for thirteen ballets, two stage plays and two operas, while also providing designs for a number of unrealized projects. As one modern scholar has written of Derain, 'He was a born man of the theatre, gifted with an ability of rendering his designs lyrical and comprehensible...Such works...contain no trace of the heaviness and seriousness sometimes found in many of his paintings. It is as if his need to transpose his sentiments into another medium acted as a liberating force, and his designs...spirited, witty, modern and utterly charming, accorded perfectly with the mood of the moment.'

EDMUND DULAC

Toulouse 1882-1953 London  

Venise  

Watercolour.

Signed Edmund / Dulac in watercolour at the lower left.

354 x 272 mm. (13 7/8 x 10 3/4 in.) [sheet]

Naples 1852-1929 Naples

A Child on a Rocking Chair

Pencil and watercolour, heightened with white gouache, on buff paper.

Signed and dated V. GEMITO / 1910 at the lower left.

204 x 270 mm. (8 x 10 5/8 in.)

After Antonio Canova, Vincenzo Gemito was perhaps the foremost Italian sculptor of the 19th century. He was also an immensely gifted draughtsman, and produced a large number of figure and portrait studies in pen, chalk, pastel and watercolour. Around 1887, after he began to experience bouts of mental illness, Gemito gave up sculpture almost entirely. He nevertheless continued to produce a large number of drawings, mostly portraits of friends and colleagues, as well as studies of street urchins, Neapolitan girls and other city folk. It was not until around 1909 that Gemito again took up sculpture full time, and it was in this later period of his career that he produced some of his finest work in bronze, executed with a delicacy and fineness of detail ultimately derived from his drawings. Gemito’s drawings were greatly admired throughout his career, and were avidly collected by his contemporaries. Yet until relatively recently Gemito’s drawings have remained little known outside Italy, and it may be argued that he deserves to be recognized as not only one of the most significant sculptors of the period, but also one of its most gifted and distinctive draughtsmen.

Young children appear in a significant number of Gemito’s drawings and sketches.The subject of the present sheet, dated 1910 and drawn in a striking combination of watercolour and white gouache, may have been a family member, perhaps one of the four children of Gemito’s daughter Giuseppina.

Alençon 1878-1954 Versailles

Still Life with Apples

Charcoal and stumped black chalk, the paper slightly abraded and scored by the artist to create highlights.

Signed L. Hervieu in charcoal at the lower right.

Inscribed by the artist ce dessin ne doit être / collé que d'un seul coté / priere laisser autour une / marge blanche / L. Hervieu in black chalk on the verso.

203 x 273 mm. (8 x 10 3/4 in.)

An extraordinary figure in the artistic and literary circles of Paris in the first half of this century, Louise-Jeanne-Aimée Hervieu took up painting around 1905. She participated in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, and in 1910 had a one-woman exhibition at the Galerie Eugène Blot in Paris. After this, however, she abandoned painting at the insistence of her parents, although she continued to make charcoal drawings and pastels, often of still lives and interior scenes.

She soon came to the attention of the critic Félix Fénéon, who in 1917 organized the first of several exhibitions of her drawings at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. Fond of intense chiaroscuro techniques, Hervieu achieved remarkable effects of mood and mystery in her drawings. Hervieu’s eyesight gradually deteriorated, the result of a case of inherited chronic meningitis, and by the early 1920s she had abandoned working in colour. By 1927 she had grown almost completely blind and had stopped drawing altogether. She had by then turned to writing, and in 1925 her book L'âme du cirque was published, accompanied by illustrations by Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Picasso, Georges Rouault and André Lhote. In 1936 her novel Sangs won the Prix Fémina; this was followed by Le crime, published in 1937, Le malade vous parle in 1943 and La rose de sang in 1953.

DAVID HOCKNEY, R.A.

Born 1937

Portrait of Michael Horovitz

Red and blue-green ink.

Inscribed by the artist, signed and dated Micheal [sic] Horovitz / Drawn by David Hockney / on June 22^nd 1978. in red ink, and in 17 Powis Terrace, / W.11. in blue-green ink at the lower left.

355 x 433 mm. (14 x 17 in.)

Two years older than his friend Hockney, Michael Horovitz (b.1935) is a jazz poet, literary editor and artist who is best known as the founder of the poetry magazine New Departures in 1959. Hockney contributed illustrations to several issues of New Departures, as did such contemporaries as Peter Blake and R. B. Kitaj. In 1969 Horovitz appeared at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in London, alongside Allen Ginsberg, and launched the Poetry Olympics in 1980.

The present portrait was drawn, as Hockney notes on the sheet, in June 1978 in the artist’s studio at 17 Powis Terrace in Notting Hill, West London. Hockney moved into a first-floor flat there in 1962, and was to live there for almost twenty years, eventually coming to own the whole house. The medium of coloured ink was one that Hockney seems only occasionally to have used for drawings in this period of his career, though he was to return to the technique in a series of portrait drawings made in 2002, using red and black ink applied with extensive shading and crosshatching.

ELIOT HODGKIN

London 1905-1987 London

Five Oyster Shells

Tempera on board.

Signed and dated Eliot Hodgkin 12.i.61 in pencil at the lower left.

248 x 382 mm. (9 3/4 x 15 in.)

Eliot Hodgkin studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and had, by the middle of the 1930s, established as a painter of still lives and landscapes, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy. Within a year or two of his first one-man exhibition, held in a London gallery in 1936, Hodgkin had begun working in egg tempera, and many of his finest works were painted in this demanding medium. As he wrote in 1967, ‘Tempera has no attraction for me simply because it was used by the Italian primitives, most of whose work does not greatly appeal to me. I use it because it is the only way in which I can express the character of the objects that fascinate me. With oil paint I could not get the detail without getting also a disagreeable surface: moreover I should have to wait while the paint dried before continuing.’ Although he turned down the opportunity of becoming an Academician in 1959, he continued to show at the Royal Academy throughout his career, exhibiting a total of 113 paintings at the Summer exhibitions between 1934 and 1981. Owing to worsening eyesight, Hodgkin gave up painting in 1979.

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

ALBERT HUYOT

Paris 1872-1968 Paris

Collage on the Theme of the First World War

Black chalk, pencil, oil and mixed media collage on grey paper from a large sketchbook.

Signed, dated and inscribed A. Huyot 1917 / Souvenir de Poperinghe at the lower centre.

340 x 488 mm. (13 3/8 x 19 1/4 in.)

A pupil of Diogène Maillart and Gustave Moreau, Albert Huyot’s first paintings were done in a generic Post-Impressionist manner indebted to the example of the Nabis, but he soon became influenced by Cubism. He exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Tuileries, and also participated in the Grande Exposition in Brussels in 1910; in the same year he also spent some time in Russia. Huyot was a friend of Henri Matisse, and around 1912 his work reveals the influence of Fauvism; André Derain was another particular influence. After 1920, however, Huyot seems to have abandoned the rigour of his earlier work in favour of landscape painting. An exhibition of his work was held at the Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris in 1926.

The Belgian town of Poperinghe was the main military centre for Allied forces in Flanders during the First World War, and was surrounded by camps, headquarters, hospitals and supply depots. A few kilometers west of Ypres, the town was frequently the recipient of heavy German artillery bombardment but remained in Allied hands for most of the war. A military cemetery remains in the town today.

HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Walberswick 1907-1950 Poros

The Purple Yacht

Pencil, black chalk and watercolour on oatmeal paper.

Stamped with the Jennings studio stamp, not in Lugt, on the verso.

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

One of the leading documentary filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s, Humphrey Jennings was also active as a painter, draughtsman, photographer and poet. As an old friend, writing shortly after Jennings’s untimely death, noted of him, ‘He always regarded himself as, before everything, a painter; film-making was of secondary importance and the writing of poems an occasional mode of expression; and it is significant that Humphrey himself said, early last year, that he had just begun to be sufficiently satisfied with his work to feel that the time had come for an exhibition. He had mastered his style.' As early as 1929, before he had started working at the GPO Film Unit, Jennings had written in a letter to his wife, ‘I should hate doing films really…simply I want to draw’, and in 1937 a one-man exhibition of his paintings was held at the London Gallery.

Relatively few paintings and drawings by Humphrey Jennings are signed, dated or titled by the artist, and only a handful of his works are today in public collections. Like his paintings, Jennings’s drawings are characterized by a spare, almost Oriental, use of line. As Kathleen Raine recalled, ‘Sometimes he would paint some apparently naively simple, realistic object—like a matchbox; or, approaching the problem from another point of view, only a few brushmarks, of infinite delicacy of touch and subtlety of colour, on canvases largely left bare—so left because every brushmark must be made with meaning, deliberately placed according to a complex imaginative operation, involving both conscious thought and instinctive sensibility…French in visual perception, English in his sense of the poetic image, Chinese in his philosophy of how an action (painting in particular) should be performed, he sought simultaneously for three kinds of truth; in his mature work, so it seems to me, all these are achieved.’ This watercolour may be dated to around 1949, and would appear to be a study for a small oil painting on canvas by Jennings, of identical dimensions and dated 1949-50.

R. B. KITAJ

Cleveland (OH) 1932-2007 Los Angeles

Portrait of Philip Roth

Charcoal on handmade paper.

775 x 570 mm. (30 1/2 x 22 1/2 in.)

Throughout his career, R. B. Kitaj was always particularly highly regarded as a draughtsman. In 1981, the art critic Robert Hughes, writing of a retrospective of Kitaj’s work at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, noted of the artist that ‘Of late, he has also emerged (alongside David Hockney and Avigdor Arikha) as one of the few real masters of the art of straight figure drawing in Europe or, for that matter, in the world…Kitaj draws better than almost anyone else alive, taking on all the expressive and factual responsibilities of depiction and carrying most of them through.’  Hockney himself recalled of Kitaj, shortly after his death, that ‘He was a great draughtsman. (The best Jewish draughtsman of all, he told me.)’  Kitaj met Philip Roth in 1985, when the writer and his wife Claire Bloom were neighbours of the artist in Chelsea, London. Roth became a good friend, and his writings influenced and inspired much of Kitaj’s thinking, particularly on the question of Jewish identity. Drawn in London in 1985, soon after Roth and Kitaj first met, the present sheet was, according to Kitaj, done in ‘about six sessions.’ The drawing remained in the artist's own collection until his death in 2007.

HENRI LEBASQUE

Champigné 1865-1937 Le Cannet

A Woman Seated at a Table

Watercolour and black chalk.

Signed Lebasque in pencil at the lower right.

271 x 200 mm. (10 5/8 x 7 7/8 in.)

Henri Lebasque was an accomplished watercolourist, and worked frequently in the medium. As a recent scholar has noted, ‘Henri Lebasque’s watercolors have a purity of color and line, and yet a lyrical feeling to them as well...many derive their charm from their elusive, unfinished nature, with figures melting or floating under the Riviera sun.’ A watercolour variant of this composition, of slightly larger dimensions, appeared at auction in Monte Carlo in 1988. Both drawings are in turn related to a painting of 1923, in a private collection.

L. S. LOWRY

Manchester 1887-1976 Glossop

A Group of Five Figures

Watercolour on buff paper.

Signed and dated L. S Lowry 1952. at the lower right.

127 x 177 mm. (5 x 7 in.)

Watercolours such as the present sheet are very rare in L. S. Lowry’s oeuvre—the artist himself recalls producing ‘no more than a dozen’—and all date from the 1950s. As Lowry noted, near the end of his long career, ‘Water-colours I’ve used only occasionally. They don’t really suit me; dry too quickly. They’re not flexible enough. I like a medium you can work into, over a period of time.’ Mervyn Levy has, however, noted of Lowry’s few works in watercolour that, although the artist ‘has no great relish for the medium…he can extract from its fleeting potential a deftness of touch and a shimmering translucency of colour…’

Lowry’s interest in the medium of watercolour may in fact have been inspired by the first owner of the present sheet: Ethelwyn Warburton, who was the daughter of Percy Warburton, one of his teachers at the Salford School of Art. Lowry remained close to his former teacher in later years, and would occasionally stay with the Warburton family in Bolton. According to Lowry’s biographer Shelley Rohde, during one of these visits the young Ethelwyn Warburton told the artist: “You can’t be very famous; no one at school has ever heard of you.’ He borrowed her little box of watercolours ‘to try them out’ and gave her the result, travelling years later to visit her in college in Yorkshire and to take her to the cinema.’ This small, charming study of figures may therefore be regarded as among Lowry’s very first attempts at working in watercolour.

Paris 1858-1941 Paris

Oil on stamped Arches paper, laid down on canvas.

Signed Luce in pencil at the lower left.

273 x 370 mm. (10 3/4 x 14 5/8 in.)

Although best known for his work as a Neo-Impressionist painter, Maximilien Luce often preferred urban subjects to the landscape views produced by colleagues such as Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac. 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 leader Georges Seurat, in 1891.

This vibrant oil sketch may depict a view near the town of Méréville, about fifty kilometres south of Paris, where Luce spent several summers in the first few years of the 20th century. Located in the valley of the river Juine, the town is best known for the Chateau de Méréville, with its Romantic park and gardens constructed in the late 18th century. Denise Bazetoux has confirmed the attribution of the present sheet. She has succinctly described Luce’s landscape paintings of the first decade of the new century as ‘free of the theoretical rigidity of neo-impressionism, but still imbued with the desire to construct the subject carefully, and capture the light.’

BEN NICHOLSON

Denham 1894-1982 London

March 1959 (white form)

Gouache, watercolour, pencil, and pen and ink on card, mounted on the artist’s prepared etched grey board.

Signed and dated NICHOLSON / March 59 and inscribed (white form) on the reverse of the prepared board.

277 x 272 mm. (10 7/8 x 10 3/4 in.) at greatest dimensions [sheet]

Ben Nicholson’s lifelong interest in still life can be traced to his youth. As he recalled of his father, the painter William Nicholson; ‘But of course I owe a lot to my father—especially to his poetic idea and to his still-life theme. That didn’t come from Cubism, as some people think, but from my father—not only from what he did as a painter but from the very beautiful striped and spotted jugs and mugs and goblets, and octagonal and hexagonal glass objects which he collected. Having those things throughout the house was an unforgettable early experience for me.’ Many of the same elements—jugs, goblets, carafes, and so forth—appear in Nicholson’s still life compositions throughout his career. These objects, drawn in outline and depicted without volume as a series of overlapping lines, were intended to introduce a sense of rhythm and movement across the painted or drawn surface. They were, to some extent, the visual equivalent of the spatial relationships explored in the carved and painted reliefs, and were an extension of the artist’s interest in abstraction.

The present sheet, dated March 1959, was completed the year after Nicholson had settled in the canton of Ticino in southern Switzerland, where for the first months of his stay, he lived and worked in a small, two-room house. As one scholar has noted, ‘With a real sense of starting afresh, he adapted to the lack of space and set about making the first of a spate of drawings—some two hundred over the next two years—all of them variations on familiar still-life objects… Throughout the 1940s and 1950s still life was a major theme in his paintings. Now he would explore its latent possibilities purely in terms of line… The line of a cup or a beaker extends in an abstract rhythm and plays against the free-flowing lines of a jug or goblet in one, seemingly continuous, movement… The shape of the spaces between objects is as important as the shape of the objects themselves, so that there is a teasing interchange between the two. Always Nicholson’s drawings bear the marks of their physical making, nothing is fudged or concealed, each line is to be appreciated for its qualities as a line as well as for its function of delineating.’

EGON SCHIELE

Tulln 1890-1918 Vienna

Portrait of a Child (Anton Peschka, Jr.)

Black crayon. The upper left corner of the sheet previously torn and reattached.

Signed and dated EGON / SCHIELE / 1918 in pencil at the lower right.

381 x 283 mm. (15 x 11 1/8 in.)

Drawn in the last months of Schiele’s brief career, the present sheet is a portrait of the artist’s young nephew, Anton Peschka, Jr. The son of his younger sister Gertrude (Gerti) Schiele and Anton Peschka, a painter and close friend of the artist, the young Anton, known as ‘Toni’, was born on December 27th, 1914. Within a few months Schiele had begun to make drawings of the baby. Schiele continued to make drawings of his nephew and, as the boy grew older, Schiele began to develop ideas for a painted portrait of him, and to this end produced several charming drawings of the child in 1917. The present sheet is one of only three known portrait drawings of Schiele’s young nephew to date from 1918. Of the other two drawings, likewise drawn in black crayon alone, one shows him seated on his mother’s lap, while in the other he is shown in much the same way as in this drawing, seated and facing forward. This is indeed how he appears in Schiele’s painting of 1918, which was left unfinished at the artist’s death in October of that year. In the painting, as in the present sheet and other drawings of the young Toni Peschka at the age of two or three, the child is depicted wearing a dress, which was not uncommon for small boys at that time.

In this intimate portrayal of his young nephew (who, like his father and uncle, was to become a painter and a student at the Akademie in Vienna), Schiele was able to capture something of the essence of childhood. It has been noted that, ‘If Schiele felt most at ease with himself as a model, he gradually discovered that children could be nearly as congenial. Since he was (in his own words) an ‘eternal child’…it is understandable that he would relate more readily to children than to adults... Schiele’s skill in working with young models derived from his ability to put them totally at ease, to allow them simply to be who they were.’ Of the drawings produced in the last year of the artist’s life, Jane Kallir has written; ‘Always the speedy worker, Schiele had finally found the perfect line. In 1917 and 1918 he was usually able to capture his subjects with a single, virtually unbroken sweep of his crayon. In his works on paper, he became more and more focused on the qualities of drawing as such, and therefore relatively few of his 1918 studies are colored. Instead he was increasingly interested in sculpting volume… Schiele had no need, as formerly, to redraw or embellish faulty contours…he was in complete control, and in these drawings Schiele achieved an unprecedented degree of accuracy.’

SEAN SCULLY

Born 1945

Untitled (11.17.90)

Watercolour on paper (a page from a large sketchbook).

Signed and dated Sean Scully 11.17.90 at the lower right.

306 x 403 mm. (12 x 15 7/8 in.) [sheet]

Over the course of his career, Sean Scully has created a significant body of works on paper—watercolours, pastels and prints—alongside his paintings on canvas. He has referred to his works on paper as ‘complements and antidotes’ to the paintings, and has further noted that ‘the watercolors are very, very personal to me.’ In a 1995 interview, the artist stated that ‘the watercolors are about the extreme absence of physicality. They are really as close as a painter can get to pure light, an effortless, physically effortless vision. And that’s what’s really interesting about them to me...I think the idea of the lack of physicality in the watercolors is crucial to their nature, that the white paper is shining through the watercolor the whole time. And it’s pure pigment, it’s pure pigment suspended in a small amount of gum Arabic and it’s floated onto the paper.’ Of the Wall of Light watercolours, of which this is a particularly fine and fresh example, one scholar has noted that ‘Graceful and seemingly effortless, these are works Scully says he pursues chiefly for himself as “private” entities. He makes them in a relaxed state of mind, focusing chiefly on the quality of light, and he renders them without vigorous physical action…His Wall of Light watercolors are poetic studies of light, with a quiet undertone and a subtle, rhythmic quality alive with luminosity.’

This watercolour was executed in 1990, and is part of a group of paintings, watercolours, pastels and prints known collectively as the Wall of Light series. These works evolved following a trip Scully took to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico in 1983, where he was captivated by the appearance of the stacked stone walls of Mayan ruins. He produced a number of watercolours during this trip that were his first attempts in the medium, and these served, several years later, as the basis for the Wall of Light series. Indeed, the artist refers to these irregular rectangles of colour in these works as ‘bricks’; a conscious move away from the broad bands and stripes of colour of his earlier paintings.

GEORGES VALMIER

Angoulême 1885-1937 Paris

Portrait of Major Lambert

Watercolour and gouache, over an underdrawing in pencil.

Signed and dedicated à Monsieur le Major Lambert / Souvenir de la campagne / 1914-1915 / G. Valmier at the lower left.

630 x 506 mm. (24 3/4 x 19 7/8 in.)

Drawn between 1914 and 1915, the present sheet is a relatively early work by Georges Valmier, and one of the very few surviving works from the period of the First World War. Valmier was associated with several Cubist artists in Paris in the years leading up to the war, and was particularly influenced by the work of Albert Gleizes. Valmier met Gleizes when both artists were conscripted to serve with an infantry regiment at Toul in Lorraine in 1914. There they met Major Lambert, a military doctor in the same regiment, who allowed both artists the freedom to continue working while serving in the army. Both Valmier and Gleizes used Dr. Lambert as a model for several paintings and drawings during the war years, most notably in Gleizes’ only major canvas of this period, the Portrait of an Army Doctor of 1914, now in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Lambert seems to have much preferred Valmier’s portrait of him to that of Gleizes, as the latter later noted in his unpublished Souvenirs, ‘The portrait that he [Valmier] made of the Doctor was excellent, a very good likeness that remained in the classical idiom. But for myself, I wanted to remain faithful to Cubism and not to play games with my own convictions. So the portrait I envisaged was a little surprising for the good doctor’s habits of mind. He did not conceal his way of thinking, but let me do what I wanted. I made of him, from memory, a large number of drawings…when he saw them, the model was pretty shaken…When [the painting] was finished…he refused, definitely but amicably, to take possession of it.’

ERICH WOLFSFELD

JOHN WONNACOTT

Born 1940

Estuary Window

Pencil on cream paper, with framing lines in pencil.

Inscribed with colour notes darker(?), pink sky(?), very bright, slightly paler than sky, blue purple grey and pale orange in pencil.

461 x 657 mm. (18 1/8 x 25 7/8 in.) [sheet]

Born in London in 1940, John Wonnacott studied at the Slade School of Art between 1958 and 1963, and held his first one-man show in 1977. A painter of portraits, landscapes and self-portraits, Wonnacott lives and works in a house overlooking the Thames estuary at Leigh-on-Sea, near Southend on the South Essex coast. Paintings by Wonnacott are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain and the Imperial War Museum in London, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, and elsewhere.

This large drawing may be related to a series of paintings produced by Wonnacott in the late 1970s and 1980s. ‘In all my recent work…the frame of my studio bay window, or some section of it, has been allowed to dominate the picture surface with its own geometry. The main series of window paintings begin a study through tone of the changing atmospheric light that unifies the busy space outside my window – the road, trees, railway, mudflats and sea that stretch across the estuary from Essex to Kent. Each painting records a particular time of day and season (under specific conditions of weather), and is made from direct observation, though with an extensive photographic backup. The camera is used both to freeze the rapidly changing sky and its immediate effect on the estuary, and to track the people who regularly pass beneath my window. Each figure – bait digger, commuter, neighbour etc., is an individual portrait of someone with whose routine and appearance I have become familiar during the course of the painting.’ (John Wonnacott, November 1980, in London, Marlborough Fine Art, John Wonnacott: First London Exhibition, 1980-1981, p.3).

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