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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.
| |  Click to enlarge | | STANLEY ROY BADMIN, R.W.S. Sydenham, London 1906-1989 Bignor, West Sussex St. Ives, Cornwall Watercolour over pen and black ink, heightened with touches of gouache. Signed and inscribed St. Ives. / S.R. Badmin at the lower right. 287 x 386 mm. (11 3/8 x 15 1/4 in.) [sheet]
A prolific landscape watercolourist, etcher and lithographer, S. R. Badmin studied at the Camberwell School of Art and the Royal College of Art. After graduating in 1928, he began to establish a reputation for his landscape watercolours and etchings, and in 1931 he was elected to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, and the following year, at the age of twenty-six, became one of the youngest Associate members of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours. Badmin is best known for his watercolour landscapes; charming and affectionate depictions of the English countryside. As one recent author has noted of Badmin, ‘his craft has been based on hard work and experience, and his talent on a love for and deep knowledge of the British countryside.’ In the 1940s and 1950s he illustrated a number of books on pastoral or topographical themes, notably Village and Town and Trees in Britain, published in 1939 and 1942 respectively, and The British Countryside in Colour, which appeared in 1951. Among his other commercial projects were designs for Shell posters depicting the various counties of England.
| |  Click to enlarge | | MAURICE DENIS Granville 1870-1943 Paris Les Mois de Marie Oil on cardboard. Signed with a monogram MAVD in pencil at the lower right. 264 x 335 mm. (10 3/8 x 13 1/4 in.)
This oil sketch is closely related to, and may be a preparatory study for, a large painting of The Virgin and Child in a Spring Landscape, signed and dated 1907, formerly in the Henri Aubry collection in Paris. The main difference is that in the present work the figures surround a statue of the Virgin, while in the painting the statue is replaced by the seated Virgin and Child. The landscape depicted in both painting and sketch is the hillside of Mareil, near Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The composition of this oil sketch is also related to The Madonna, one of four panels of the decorative scheme entitled Eternal Spring, painted in 1908 for the dining room of the villa of Denis’ patron Gabriel Thomas at Meudon and today in the Musée Départemental Maurice Denis in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The painted panel, like the present sketch, depicts nuns and young communicants gathered around the Virgin and Child in a landscape, although unlike the oil sketch it is vertical in format.
| |  Click to enlarge | | 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.'
| |  Click to enlarge | | RAOUL DUFY Le Havre 1877-1953 Forcalquier The Bay of Sainte-Adresse Pencil on white paper. Extensively inscribed by the artist lumieres à gauche, contre jour ou ombre, lumières a droite, bleu, vert dégradé, carul(?), ocre rouge [?] blanc, orient et persian(?) blanc et noir in pencil in the margins of the sheet. 500 x 654 mm. (9 5/8 x 25 3/4 in.) [sheet]
Dufy painted his native town of Le Havre and the bay of Sainte-Adresse throughout his career. In its rectangular, panoramic format, the present sheet would appear to be a preparatory study for a large, signed gouache by Dufy, of similar composition and identical dimensions. A slightly smaller variant of the same composition, also drawn in gouache, was in a private Japanese collection in 1983. Both gouaches are in turn related to one of the best-known works of Dufy’s career; the very large painting on cotton of La Baie de Sainte-Adresse, one of a series of fourteen ‘tentures’ commissioned by Paul Poiret for the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925. These tentures were large wall hangings, painted in mordant colours on dyed cotton and measuring almost three metres high and four metres in length. They were intended to hang as decoration on a barge on the Seine, where Poiret had chosen to display his work during the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs. As one scholar has noted of this particular composition, ‘A frequent event in Le Havre, the regatta played an important part in the life of the people of the city. The sailboat race shown in the hanging is based on the one organized for the visit of the English flotilla. It provides Dufy with an excuse to portray the Seine estuary and the Bay of Sainte-Adresse with its cliffs stretching off to the north, encouraging daydreams and escapism.’ Extensively annotated by the artist with colour notes, this large sheet—despite the apparent spontaneity of the draughtsmanship—underlines the care with which Dufy developed his painted compositions. As Dufy himself wrote, ‘My drawings are indeed drawings in themselves, but not one of them exists for itself. They are always designs for paintings...My drawings are always done from nature and they express above all the density of forms and their position in light and space. They are always created to capture the effect of light. That is why they help me paint.’
| |  Click to enlarge | | 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]
This watercolour is the first of a series of four drawings used to illustrate the poem Venise by Alfred de Musset (1810-1857), published in the special Christmas issue of the magazine L'Illustration in December 1912. The model for the woman in this drawing is the artist's wife Elsa Bignardi. Dulac's illustration was captioned by one stanza of de Musset's poem:
- Ah! maintenant plus d'une
Attend, au clair de lune,
Quelque jeune muguet,
L'oreille au guet.
| |  Click to enlarge | | SIR JACOB EPSTEIN New York 1880-1959 A Reclining Female Nude Watercolour over an underdrawing in pencil. Signed Epstein in pencil at the lower right. 583 x 448 mm. (23 x 17 5/8 in.)
The subject of this drawing is an Indian woman named Sunita, who posed for both Epstein and Matthew Smith. As Epstein’s wife Kathleen later recalled, ‘Epstein was always interested in exhibitions where colourful people from other countries displayed themselves and their wares…he visited the Wembley World Fair and found there the beautiful Indian Sunita in charge of a stall with her younger sister and small son. These three posed for the sculptor over a period of years. Sunita could be equally a Madonna (she and her son posed for the Madonna and Child, 1926, now in a New York church) or the odalisque of many drawings—alone, with her sister, or with her boy…She returned to India and died suddenly.’ (Lady Epstein and Richard Buckle, Epstein Drawings, London, 1962, p.21, under no.57).
| |  Click to enlarge | | INGRID GERHARDT Düsseldorf(?) 1925-2002 A Large Manor House Watercolour and gouache, with pen and brown ink and brown wash. Signed and dated Gerhardt 50 in pencil at the lower right. 312 x 482 mm. (12 1/4 x 19 in.)
Almost nothing is known of the German artist Ingrid Gerhardt, who does not seem to appear in any biographical dictionaries of 20th century artists. She studied at the free art school established by the painter Jo Strahn in Düsseldorf in the 1940s. Gerhardt lived and worked for much of her later life in France, in the département of Ille-et-Vilaine in Brittany. This splendid, large sheet is one of seven drawings by the artist in stock.
| |  Click to enlarge | | 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 22nd 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.
| |  Click to enlarge | | DAVID HOCKNEY, R.A. Born 1937 Portrait of Shinro Ohtake Pencil and coloured chalks on white paper. Signed with initials and inscribed Shinro DH in pencil at the lower right. 235 x 265 mm. (9 1/4 x 10 3/8 in.)
Born in Tokyo in 1955, Shinro Ohtake completed his artistic studies at the private Musashino Art University in Tokyo. Soon after his graduation in 1980 he travelled to the north of England to try and meet Hockney, his idol, and his early work shows the influence of English Pop Art. As Hockney wrote in an introduction to the catalogue of Shinro Ohtake’s first one-man exhibition, held in Tokyo in 1982, ‘I met Shinro through my mother who lives in Bradford, England, about 200 miles north of London. Shinro had noticed an address in a section of my book on my own work, in a letter dated 1952. He had taken the train from London, found the house, and knocked on the door. My mother explained I hadn’t lived there for many years and, inviting him into the house, enquired where he was from. Shinro, in his halting English, had said Tokyo, and my mother thought he said “York”, about 35 miles from Bradford. As the truth came out and Shinro explained, he had come up from London. My parents invited him to stay the night as the last train back to London had left. My parents were charmed by Shinro (and he by them) and I eventually heard of his adventures from my mother who told me I should meet him. A few months later we met in London (I had been in the USA at the time of Shinro’s trip to Bradford) and I too was charmed by him. Conversation at first was difficult, but over the years Shinro’s English improved...and we have had interesting conversations. His work has a liveliness and curiosity about European Art that is refreshing but I explained to him how European art had been influenced by the Japanese woodcut, so his curiosity and influence has a respectable history. I told Shinro of my own admiration for the contemporary artists of Japan who work in the traditional style. Unknown in Europe I had only seen their work on my visit to Japan in 1971. Shinro very kindly sends me books about their work, so an East West dialogue goes on. That a Japanese artist should travel to Europe and be influenced by it in a lively way is a repeat of the nineteenth century European’s travels to Japan (ie. by seeing the art) and being absorbed by it, so Shinro’s art is both untraditional in a Japanese sense, and yet in a wider sense of art’s universal language.’
| |  Click to enlarge | | DAVID HOCKNEY, R.A. Born 1937 Portrait of Wayne Sleep Black ink. Inscribed, signed with initials and dated Wayne Sleep DH. 1969 at the lower right. 430 x 354 mm. (6 7/8 x 13 7/8 in.)
A splendid example of what are among Hockney’s most celebrated works, his pen and ink line portrait drawings—‘some of the most beautiful, elegant and radically economical life studies of the twentieth century’, in the words of one recent scholar—the present sheet is a portrait of the dancer Wayne Sleep, who has modelled for the artist on several occasions. A principal dancer at the Royal Ballet, Sleep first met Hockney in 1967, and the two became good friends. Hockney introduced Sleep to George Lawson, with whom he was to have a long relationship. Between 1972 and 1975 Hockney worked on a large painting of Lawson and Sleep, which he eventually abandoned. The present sheet, though drawn a few years earlier in 1969, is related to this unfinished painting in the pose of Sleep, standing in a doorway, with his legs crossed in the same way as in the drawing.
| |  Click to enlarge | | 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.
| |  Click to enlarge | | FRANTIŠEK KUPKA Opočno 1871-1957 Puteaux Composition Watercolour, pencil and gouache on paper. Signed Kupka in pencil in the lower right margin. 277 x 251 mm. (10 7/8 x 9 7/8 in.) [sheet] Drawn c.1925.
| |  Click to enlarge | | ANDRÉE LAVIEILLE
Paris 1887-1960 Paris Rocky Coastline, Brittany Watercolour, with touches of white gouache, over an underdrawing in black chalk, on buff paper. 374 x 262 mm. (14 3/4 x 10 3/8 in.) [sheet]
The granddaughter and daughter, respectively, of the landscape painters Eugène Lavieille and Adrien Lavieille, Andrée Lavieille also counted printmakers, painters and sculptors among her extended family. In 1908 she entered at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, training in the studio of Ferdinand Humbert. In 1911 Lavieille exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français for the first time, showing a still life of apples, and she continued sending works to the annual Salons until 1939. The subject matter of her exhibited paintings and watercolours were mainly still lives, church interiors and Breton landscapes. As the years progressed, she began to concentrate on working in watercolours, which allowed her the greatest amount of spontaneity and freedom. Following the Second World War, however, Lavieille began to develop Parkinson's disease, affecting the use of her right hand and reducing her output considerably, and she appears to have produced almost nothing in the last decade of her life. Although she had exhibited regularly at the Salons, Lavieille does not seem to have had any gallery exhibitions in her lifetime, and as such her work remains little known today.
In her lifetime, Andrée Lavieille travelled extensively around France, producing landscape views and watercolours at Fontainebleau, the Vendôme, the Pyrenées, the Alps, Normandy and the Pas-de-Calais. It was the landscapes of Brittany, however, that were to be closest to her heart, and to which she would return most often. She worked mainly in and around Le Pouldu, south of Quimperlé; at Kerzellec, Carnac, Moëlan, Erquy and elsewhere, as well as at Saint-Guénolé and around the bay of Trépassés; at Kerherneau, Castelmeur, Keriolet and Brézellec.
| |  Click to enlarge | | HENRI LEBASQUE Champigné 1865-1937 Le Cannet A Family at the Seaside Watercolour and black chalk. Signed Lebasque in pencil at the lower right. 263 x 370 mm. (10 3/8 x 14 5/8 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...while many derive their charm from their elusive, unfinished nature, with figures melting or floating under the Riviera sun, the majority of Lebasque’s watercolors are polished examples of his mastery of the medium...Lebasque’s exceptional draughtsmanship enhances the simplicity of [his] compositions, which are clean-lined, with few colors and mesmerizing intense hues...[He] captures the intensity of colors as he saw them; the seeping purples of afternoon skies, and the radiant azure of midday oceans filling these watercolor paintings with color that remains strong.’ A fine example of Lebasque’s watercolour technique, this drawing almost certainly depicts members of the artist’s family. His wife Ella and three children—two daughters named Marthe and Nono and a son Pierre—appear in many of his works.
| |  Click to enlarge | | LUCIEN LÉVY-DHURMER Algiers 1865-1953 Le Vésinet The Dent du Chat, Savoie Pastel. Signed L. Lévy Dhurmer in blue pastel at the lower right. Inscribed L. Lévy Dhurme[r] and Dent du Chat in black chalk on backing board. 720 x 474 mm. (28 3/8 x 18 5/8 in.)
Lévy-Dhurmer had a particular penchant for the medium of pastel, with which he was able to achieve striking chromatic effects. Indeed, he had a distinct preference for the medium, using it for portraits, allegorical scenes and landscapes, all of which he exhibited regularly at the Salon des Pastellistes Français between 1897 and 1913. Among Lévy-Dhurmer’s landscape paintings and pastels, studies of mountains are particularly prominent. This very large and impressive pastel is a view of the Dent du Chat, a mountain peak—rising to nearly 1,400 metres—above Aix-les-Bains on the western edge of the Lac de Bourget, in the département of Savoie in France. Lévy-Dhurmer visited the region in 1924 and 1935, and the present work is likely to date from the second of these trips.
| |  Click to enlarge | | WYNDHAM LEWIS Amherst, Nova Scotia 1882-1957 London Study of a Rolling Dog (Tut) Pencil with brown and pale yellow wash, on a page from a sketchbook. Signed with initials and dated W.L.1933. in pencil at the lower left. 347 x 217 mm. (13 5/8 x 8 1/2 in.) [sheet]
This drawing is a study of Lewis’s black and white Sealyham terrier Mr. Tut, who appears—often depicted rolling around on the floor—in a handful of charming drawings of the early 1930s. With the onset of the Second World War, Lewis and his wife Froanna took Tut with them to America and Canada, where the dog died of a tumour in 1944. The Lewises were left devastated by his death, with the artist writing of Tut to a friend, ‘Like the spirit of a simpler and saner time, this fragment of primitive life confided his destiny to her [Froanna Lewis], and went through all the black days beside us.’ | |  Click to enlarge | | GUSTAVE LOISEAU Paris 1865-1935 Paris Still Life with Fried Eggs Oil on board. Signed G. Loiseau in blue oil paint at the lower right. 440 x 554 mm. (17 1/4 x 21 3/4 in.)
Gustave Loiseau produced several paintings of still-life compositions, particularly in the 1920s and onwards. Often painted on board, many of these works were done at Pont-Aven between 1922 and 1928. As Didier Imbert has noted of the painter’s method and technique, ‘essentially impressionist in his depiction of landscapes or street scenes, it acquires for the still-lifes a certain classical resonance, a staid geometric composition, almost synthetic, in which one perceives his preoccupation with immobility, lack of movement, the static quality of the object represented.’ The present work may be dated to around 1923. The ceramic plate or pan in which the eggs are placed reappears in a number of paintings by Loiseau of the early 1920s.
| |  Click to enlarge | | MAXIME MAUFRA Nantes 1861-1918 Poncé-sur-Loire Breton Landscape with a Farmhouse Watercolour and pencil. 117 x 161 mm. (4 5/8 x 6 3/8 in.)
A native of Brittany, Maxime Maufra was not formally trained as an artist and at first worked in commerce, painting in his spare time. Although he submitted two paintings to the Salon of 1886, he did not take up painting as full-time profession until 1890. In that year he made hi |
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