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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.
| |  Click to enlarge | | JEAN-ACHILLE BENOUVILLE Paris 1815-1891 Paris Sunset Seen from a Rocky Coastline Watercolour, with pen and brown ink and touches of white gouache, on blue-grey paper. Faintly dated 1842 in pencil at the lower right. Stamped with both versions of the Bénouville atelier stamp. 201 x 289 mm. (7 7/8 x 11 3/8 in.)
Achille Bénouville made his debut at the Salon of 1834. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1837, and the following year made his first trip to Italy, returning there again in 1840 and 1843, the last time in the company of Corot. In 1845 he won the Prix de Rome in the category of historical landscape painting and, accompanied by his younger brother Léon Bénouville (winner of the Prix de Rome for history painting that year) left for Rome to take up a place as a pensionnaire at the Académie de France. Bénouville was to live in Rome for the next twenty-five years, only returning to France in 1871. Throughout his career, he continued to specialize in the genre of historical landscape painting, often basing his compositions on drawings and sketches made directly from nature. He eventually moved away from the paysage historique in favour of pure topographical landscapes. He continued to show Italian landscapes regularly at the Salons, although in his later years he turned from painting large-scale pictures to smaller, more intimate views.
| |  Click to enlarge | | Attributed to ANTOINE BERJON
Lyon 1754-1843 Lyon Six Studies of Roses Pencil, with gray and pale green washes, on light brown paper. 370 x 282 mm. (14 1/2 x 11 1/8 in.) Arguably the most important flower painter in France in the first half of the 19th century, Antoine Berjon worked mainly in his native Lyon. He is regarded as the founder and leading exponent of the Lyon school of flower painters; a particular speciality that traced its origins to the 18th century silk manufacturers in the city. By 1791 he had made his debut at the Paris Salon, exhibiting three floral still lives and a pastel drawing of fruit and flowers. Although best known as a flower painter, he painted portraits in oil and pastel and also worked as a miniaturist and printmaker. He spent the last two decades of his life as something of a recluse, producing a large number of drawings of which only a few were sold. Berjon’s paintings and drawings are characterized by a meticulous technique and an attention to detail. Flowers and fruit are depicted with a great deal of scientific accuracy, the result of the artist’s studies in the botanical gardens in Lyon. Also typical of his work are restrained, uncluttered compositions and a particular delicacy of touch.
| |  Click to enlarge | | FRANÇOIS ÉDOUARD BERTIN Paris 1797-1871 Paris An Italian Hillside Town with Figures on a Path in the Foreground Pen and black ink, pencil and white chalk on brown paper, with an arched top. Framing lines in pencil. Stamped with the atelier stamp EDOUARD BERTIN (Lugt 238a) at the lower left. 305 x 410 mm. (12 x 16 1/8 in.) [sheet]
Edouard Bertin competed unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome in 1821, in the category of the paysage historique, and later that year made his first visit to Italy. Bertin made eleven separate visits to Italy, spending a total of some eighteen years in the country, whose landscapes were to be a source of inspiration throughout his career. He made numerous sketching and painting excursions into the Roman countryside in the company of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny and also ventured south to Ischia, Capri and Sorrento. Significant groups of drawings by Bertin are in the collections of the Louvre and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans, the Musée Départemental de l’Oise in Beauvais, the Musée de Picardie in Amiens and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chartres. The strong contours of the trees and rocks in this drawing are characteristic features of Bertin’s draughtsmanship, and are a legacy of his time in the studio of Ingres. Most of Bertin’s finished landscape drawings are distinguished by an arched top, while the use of coloured paper is also typical. The present sheet further incorporates a compositional motif particularly characteristic of the artist; a road or pathway in the centre foreground of the composition, leading into the distance.
| |  Click to enlarge | | FRANÇOIS-AUGUSTE BONHEUR Bordeaux 1824-1884 Bellevue-Meudon
Mountain Landscape in the Auvergne
Oil on canvas. Signed A Bonheur at the lower left. Inscribed Auvergne on a small label pasted at the lower right. 139 x 308 mm. (5 1/2 x 12 1/8 in.)
The younger brother of Rosa Bonheur, Auguste Bonheur was, in his day, as celebrated a painter of landscapes and animalier subjects as his sister. The present sheet is one of a group of fresh and spirited landscape oil sketches by Bonheur that have only come to light in recent years, having been found in his studio after his death and retained by his descendants. Produced during the artist’s extensive travels throughout France, notably in Brittany, the Auvergne and the Pyrénées, these works can be seen as Bonheur’s particular contribution to the 19th century French tradition of plein-air painting. The artist was particularly fond of the rugged, mountainous landscapes of the Cantal in the Auvergne, to which he returned repeatedly throughout his career, and which provided the setting for many of his oil sketches and finished paintings. The small label inscribed with the location depicted and attached to the corner of the oil sketch is typical of the Bonheur's working practice.
| |  Click to enlarge | | EUGÈNE BOUDIN 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.
| |  Click to enlarge | | GIUSEPPE CASCIARO Ortelle 1863-1941 Naples Coastal Landscape Pastel on pale grey paper. Signed G Casciaro in pencil at the lower right. 270 x 408 mm. (10 5/8 x 16 1/8 in.)
Born in the province of Lecce, Giuseppe Casciaro enjoyed a long career of some sixty years. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples, where he won numerous prizes. Casciaro made a particular speciality of landscape drawings in pastel. He may have first been inspired to take up the medium in 1885, when a series of pastel drawings by the artist Francesco Paolo Michetti was shown in Naples. Two years later, in 1887, Casciaro exhibited a series of eleven pastel landscapes of his own. He settled on the hillside quarter of Naples known as the Vomero, sharing a studio with the painter Attilio Pratella, and for much of his life his preferred subject matter were views in and around Naples and the islands of Capri and Ischia. Between 1892 and 1896 he travelled regularly to Paris, where he had a one-man exhibition and received commissions from the dealer Adolphe Goupil, and met the painter Giuseppe de Nittis. Appointed a professor at the Accademia in Naples in 1902, by 1906 he was engaged as a tutor in pastel drawing to the Queen of Italy, Elena di Savoia.
| |  Click to enlarge | | SIR GEORGE CLAUSEN, R.A., R.W.S. London 1852-1944 Newbury
Study of Sky and Clouds
Pastel on brown paper.
Signed with initials GC. in black chalk at the lower right.
285 x 366 mm. (11 1/4 x 14 3/8 in.)
As a draughtsman, George Clausen was a gifted and prolific master of different media, and some forty sketchbooks from throughout his long career survive. His drawings were often preparatory studies for his pictures, although their significance as works of art in their own right can be seen in the fact that, at his first one-man exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in London in 1902, he actually exhibited more drawings and pastels than oil paintings. The 1880’s and early 1890’s found Clausen working regularly in pastel. Of his pastel drawings, influenced by those of Degas, one reviewer of the 1902 exhibition noted in particular that ‘the stroke of the pastel chalk seems to be the most direct and satisfactory means of expression for Mr. Clausen. In his oil paintings he often appears to hanker after it, hatching his paint without the same result in freshness…Here the notes are clear struck and decisive. He renders more than once a beautiful effect that is almost his own property.’
| |  Click to enlarge | | HENRI EDMOND CROSS Douai 1856-1910 Saint-Clair A Design for a Dish Brush and blue-grey wash, over an underdrawing in pencil. Stamped with the atelier stamp H.E.C. (Lugt 1305a) in red ink at the lower right. Inscribed Ancienne collection Félix Fénéon in pencil at the lower left and projet de plat / Henri Edmond Cross. at the lower right. 249 x 325 mm. (9 3/4 x 12 3/4 in.) Early in his career, Henri Edmond Delacroix changed his surname to Cross, an Anglicized version of croix, to avoid comparisons with the famous Romantic painter and confusion with a contemporary artist named Henri Eugène Delacroix. Little is known of Cross’s work before 1884, when he first exhibited with the Société des Artistes Indépendants. He did not, however, adopt the Neo-Impressionist technique of his colleagues Georges Seurat and Paul Signac until the early 1890’s, after Seurat’s death. At around the same time he left Paris for the south of France, and the Mediterranean landscape of the Côte d’Azur was to become his preferred subject matter for the remainder of his career. The scholar and critic Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), a champion of the Neo-Impressionists, owned a large number of paintings and watercolours by Cross. In 1907 he organized a one-man exhibition of Cross’s work at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, and after the artist’s death three years later assisted Cross’s widow and Signac with making a proper inventory of the artist’s studio.
| |  Click to enlarge | | EDGAR DEGAS Paris 1834-1917 Paris A Standing Dancer, Her Hands Behind her Back Pastel and charcoal on faded blue paper. Stamped with the Degas vente stamp (Lugt 658) in red at the lower right. 476 x 395 mm. (18 3/4 x 15 1/2 in.)
This splendid drawing of a young dancer is related to three small, horizontal paintings by Degas, each depicting dancers in a rehearsal room, in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. All three paintings—in Washington, New York, and Detroit—are part of a distinctive group of around twenty rehearsal room scenes with prominently horizontal, frieze-like compositions that were begun in the late 1870s and continued into the early years of the new century. Degas worked on this series of paintings for more than two decades, and over this period seems to have made a number of drawings of individual dancers, which were used for different variants of the painted compositions. The present sheet, which may be dated to the early 1880s, is typical of Degas’ drawings of this period. The young dancer is here depicted tying the ribbon of her tutu behind her back, standing with her legs turned out and gazing abstractedly downward as she prepares for her class. Degas often chose to depict dancers in such quiet moments of relaxation or private preparation, and this is especially true of the frieze paintings of the 1880s. The model for this drawing, as well as for several other figures in the same composition, has been tentatively identified as an English dancer named Nelly Franklin, whose name appears on one of Degas’ preparatory studies for the Washington painting of 1879.
| |  Click to enlarge | | EUGÈNE DELACROIX 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.)
Delacroix produced relatively few landscape drawings. This watercolour is one of a number of drawings made in the forest of Sénart near his country home in Champrosay, south of Paris.
| |  Click to enlarge | | ALEXANDRE DESGOFFE Paris 1805-1882 Paris Coastal Landscape at Marseilles Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil. The Desgoffe atelier stamp stamped at the lower right. Inscribed and dated M. le 26. 7 bre 1838 at the lower right. 155 x 235 mm. (6 1/8 x 9 1/4 in.)
Alexandre Desgoffe was already a talented amateur landscape draughtsman when in 1827 he entered the studio of Ingres as one of the master's first pupils. Nicknamed 'Le Père la Nature' by the artist Jules Laurens, in view of the fact that he painted numerous plein-air studies from nature, Desgoffe exhibited his work at the Salons between 1834 and 1868. He was best known, however, as a painter of historical landscapes, and together with Paul Flandrin may be regarded as a master of the paysage ingresque. An inveterate traveller, Desgoffe was particularly fond of the landscapes of the Auvergne, and also worked at Barbizon (one of the first artists to do so) and Fontainebleau, the Midi and, in the final years of his career, at Pornic on the Atlantic coast.
This charming watercolour was, as the artist's inscription notes, drawn on a visit to the coast near Marseilles in September 1838. Desgoffe was in Marseilles between the 22nd and the 29th of September 1838, on a trip to the Midi that also included visits to Avignon, Nîmes, Arles, Toulon, Hyères, Sainte-Baume and elsewhere.
| |  Click to enlarge | | EUGÈNE DEVÉRIA Paris 1805-1865 Pau The Head of a Bearded Man Pencil and stumped black chalk, with touches of red chalk, on buff paper. Signed E Deveria in pencil at the lower left. 405 x 302 mm. (15 7/8 x 11 7/8 in.)
| |  Click to enlarge | | TRISTRAM JAMES ELLIS Great Malvern 1844-1922 Barnes (London) Epping Forest Pencil and watercolour, with touches of bodycolour, heightened with gum arabic, laid down on a thin board. Signed with the artist’s monogram TJE in white bodycolour at the lower left. 339 x 482 mm. (13 3/8 x 19 in.) A pupil of Leon Bonnat in Paris, Tristram Ellis had begun his career as an engineer on the District and Metropolitan Railway in London. He travelled extensively in Europe, Asia Minor and the Middle East, producing a large number of landscape views in oil and watercolour. In 1883 Ellis published Sketching from Nature: A Handbook for Students and Amateurs; a technical manual which set out many of his precepts of successful landscape draughtsmanship.
| |  Click to enlarge | | 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 Mr 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.
| |  Click to enlarge | | FRANÇOIS-MARIUS GRANET Aix-en-Provence 1775-1849 Malvallat A Monk in His Cell Pen and brown ink and brown wash, with red and blue watercolour, over a underdrawing in black chalk. Signed Granet in brown ink at the lower left. 350 x 274 mm. (13 3/4 x 10 3/4 in.)
HENRI-JOSEPH HARPIGNIES Valenciennes 1819-1916 Saint-Privé A Circular Landscape, Surrounded by Oriental Lanterns and Motifs Watercolour, pen and grey ink and grey wash. Signed and dated h. harpignies 8[4?] in grey ink at the lower right of the landscape. 194 x 116 mm. (7 5/8 x 4 5/8 in.) This charming drawing by Harpignies is unusual among his drawings in its use of Oriental motifs. A related drawing by the artist, of similar dimensions and dated 1894, was on the art market in Paris in 1995; it depicted two separate vignettes of a coastal landscape and boats at sea, placed on the page and bordered by flowers and oriental lanterns. Such drawings reflect the fashion for Japonisme, which first emerged in France in the early 1860s and continued throughout the late 19th century. | |  Click to enlarge | | HENRI-JOSEPH HARPIGNIES Valenciennes 1819-1916 Saint-Privé Landscape with Trees Watercolour. Signed and dated h harpignies 89 at the lower left. 135 x 214 mm. (5 1/4 x 8 3/8 in.)
| |  Click to enlarge | | LOUIS WELDEN HAWKINS Esslingen 1849-1910 Paris Masque Black chalk and pencil on light brown paper, laid down. Signed with a monogram LWH in a circle and L.W. HAWKINS at the bottom. 432 x 239 mm. (17 x 9 3/8 in.)
From about 1900 onwards Louis Welden Hawkins began producing a series of portrait masks, intended as advertising images or magazine illustrations, as designs for fans and mirrors and, occasionally, as illustrations for menus, theatre and concert programmes. Perhaps the best known of Hawkins’ mask designs was one created for the goldsmiths Christofle et Cie. and used as an advertisement during the Exposition Universelle of 1900. This drawing, with its precise and confident handling of pencil and black chalk, is a superb example of Hawkins’ refined draughtsmanship. The particularly Symbolist fascination with the mask as an artistic device (as seen, for example, in the work of Fernand Khnopff) is here balanced by elements and motifs - stylized vegetation and curved lines – derived from the vocabulary of Art Nouveau.
| |  Click to enlarge | | 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 |
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