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

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 or inscribed 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.

FRANÇOIS-AUGUSTE BONHEUR

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.’

EDGAR DEGAS

Paris 1834-1917 Paris        

Pencil on coarse, flocked pale grey paper.

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

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

‘One of the most passionate and convinced copyists of his time’, as one scholar has written, Edgar Degas spent much of the early years of his career engaged in a serious study of Renaissance art, resulting in a significant number of drawn and painted copies by the artist. He first registered as a copyist at the Louvre in April 1853, and soon began making drawings after Old Master paintings in the museum’s collection, with a particular emphasis on Italian art of the 15th and early 16th centuries. Degas continued to register as a copyist in the museum until 1862, and among the Quattrocento and Cinquecento paintings he copied were works by Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Filippino Lippi, Mantegna, Lorenzo di Credi, Vittore Carpaccio, Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian and many others. As the artist himself said, ‘One must copy and recopy the masters, and only after having given every proof of being a good copyist can one reasonably be expected to paint a radish from nature.’

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

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.

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.

WILLIAM FRASER GARDEN

Gillingham 1856-1921 Huntingdon

The Bridge at St. Ives, Huntingdonshire

Watercolour.

Signed with initials and dated W. F. G. ’99. at the lower right.

120 x 155 mm. (4 3/4 x 6 1/8 in.)

Born into a family of artists, Garden William Fraser changed his name to William Fraser Garden so as to distinguish himself from his six brothers, all but one of whom were also active as landscape artists. Arguably the best of the so-called ‘Fraser Brotherhood’, Fraser Garden exhibited his watercolours at the Royal Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours. The subjects of his watercolours were by and large views of the fen villages along the river Ouse, such as Holywell, Hemingford Grey and St. Ives, characterized by a remarkable attention to detail and crisp, cool lighting. He was never, however, a very prolific artist. Although he was the most successful of the Fraser brothers, Garden was very poor for most of his life, and was declared bankrupt in 1899. Long unknown to scholars and collectors, Garden’s body of work has only fairly recently been rediscovered, and his reputation as among the finest Victorian landscape watercolourists firmly established.

Fraser Garden painted several views of town and bridge of St. Ives. The narrow stone bridge at St. Ives, on the left bank of the river Ouse in Huntingdonshire, was built around 1415. The chapel dedicated to St. Leger, constructed on the eastern, downstream side of the bridge with an altar consecrated in 1426, is one of only three surviving examples of bridge chapels in England. The present sheet depicts the upper two-story extension to the chapel which was added in 1736, when the structure was converted to a house. The bridge chapel was returned to its original appearance in 1930.

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.

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.

London 1803-1873 London

An Ecorché Study of the Head of a Horse

Black, red and white chalk on blue-grey paper.

500 x 310 mm. (19 3/8 x 12 1/4 in.)

Throughout his life, Edwin Landseer made countless studies and sketches of animals, in oil, watercolour, chalk and pencil. Most of these are unrelated to his larger finished paintings, and seem to have been done as exercises or to capture the appearance of an unusual animal or breed. This magnificent ecorché study of the head of a horse is among the finest of a small but significant group of anatomical studies of animals dating from the early years of Landseer’s independent career, which the artist kept among the contents of his studio until his death.

The present sheet is part of a group of youthful drawings by Landseer - including several large ecorché studies of horses, dogs and cats drawn in black and red chalk – acquired at the artist’s estate sale in 1874 by the Welsh landowner Charles William Mansel Lewis. As Richard Ormond has noted, ‘Only a collector of a special kind would appreciate the artistry and scientific know-how that had gone into the production of these painfully precise studies of flayed horses, cats and dogs. They are not for the squeamish and it would require an artist’s eye to appreciate their significance in the training of England’s most brilliant animal painter of the nineteenth century. In these records of dissected animals Landseer built up a profound knowledge of anatomy, which was the bedrock on which his art was built…They are both accurate representations of skinned animals and examples of virtuoso draughtsmanship.'

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.

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.’

This oil sketch is a study for the prominent figure in the foreground of Week’s large canvas Powder Play: City of Morocco, Outside the Walls, painted in Paris around 1880-1882. The painting depicts a scene outside the walls of a Moroccan city, possibly the ancient capital of Marrakech, with the snow-capped Atlas mountains in the distance. A contingent of mounted troops parades before the Bashaw, or Sultan, sitting on horseback under a red canopy, while in the foreground a smaller group of mounted warriors show off their marksmanship. As Ellen Morris notes of the painting, ‘[The] generally subdued palette of the work is offset by the finely-drafted and brightly-colored foreground figures, and some judiciously-placed color accents in the spectators and the line of mounted troops. The painting exhibits a strong sense of naturalism in both its composition and the superb modelling of the figures.’

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