 | | |  | 
Presented here is a selection of 18th 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 | | ANTOINE COYPEL Paris 1661-1722 Paris Recto: A Seated Male Nude, Seen from Behind, Reaching Up with His Left Arm Verso: Study of a Veiled Figure Black, red and white chalk on blue paper. 323 x 475 mm. (12 3/4 x 18 3/4 in.)
The recto of this sheet is a preparatory study for Coypel’s large painting of Bellerophon, Mounted on Pegasus, Battling the Chimera, one of the artist’s last works and now lost. The painting is listed among Coypel’s unfinished works (‘tableaux en désordre’) in the catalogue of the posthumous sale of the contents of the studio of his son Charles-Antoine Coypel in 1753. The composition, known from a preparatory study in black and red chalk in the Louvre, depicted the hero Bellerophon, mounted on the winged horse Pegasus, thrusting a spear into the mouth of the Chimera below him, with Minerva seated in clouds at the left and Neptune with his trident standing on a shell chariot at the right. The figure in the present sheet is seen at the lower right of the compositional study in the Louvre, which also houses another study for the same figure, drawn in black chalk alone and squared for transfer. The veiled, draped figure sketched on the verso of the present sheet may be tentatively related to the allegorical figure of Religion in an engraving of Louis XIV with Religion, Guile and Strength, designed by Coypel and engraved by Bernard Picart in 1709.
| |  Click to enlarge | | ANTOINE-JEAN DUCLOS Paris 1742-1795 Paris Figures Seated at a Table in an Interior Pen and black ink and grey wash, with framing lines in black ink. Signed and dated A.J. Duclos inv. et del. 1770 in the lower left margin. 175 x 101 mm. (6 7/8 x 4 in.) Antoine-Jean Duclos was a pupil of the draughtsman and engraver Augustin de Saint-Aubin, whose designs he often reproduced as prints. Adept at the art of engraving and etching on a small scale, Duclos is perhaps best known as a book illustrator, his first efforts in this field coming around 1765. Much of his work was in the form of engravings after drawings by other artists, notably Cochin, Gravelot, Eisen, Marillier and Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard. Duclos is recorded as exhibiting at the Salon just once, in 1795. Drawings by Duclos - ‘quelques dessins à la facture petite et gentillette’, in the words of the Goncourts – are rare.
| |  Click to enlarge | | GAETANO GANDOLFI
San Matteo della Decima 1734-1802 Bologna
A Seated Male Nude
Black and red chalk, with touches of white chalk, on light brown paper.
414 x 287 mm. (16 1/4 x 11 1/4 in.)
A very similar drawing of a male nude in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, of comparable medium, handling and dimensions, was previously attributed to Ubaldo Gandolfi but is now given to his brother Gaetano, who more often used a combination of red and black chalk in his drawings. As Mimi Cazort and Catherine Johnston have noted, ‘Gaetano’s amazing prowess in this most Bolognese area, draughtsmanship of the human figure, is attested to quite early on in his career by the fact that while attending the Accademia between 1752 and 1756 he received the Fiori prize for drawing four times. We also know that he continued to draw from the model at the Accademia...throughout his career.’
| |  Click to enlarge | | GAETANO GANDOLFI San Matteo della Decima 1734-1802 Bologna Saint Margaret of Cortona in a Landscape, Kneeling in Prayer Before a Crucifix Black chalk, with stumping, heightened with touches of white chalk, on light brown paper.
Signed and dated G. G.fi f 1800. on the verso.
438 x 319 mm. (17 1/4 x 12 1/2 in.)
In the last few years of his career, Gaetano Gandolfi produced a number of large, highly finished black chalk drawings of religious, classical and mythological subjects. These are all of approximately the same size, and are dated on the verso from the late 1790’s to 1802, the year of his death. This drawing, signed with the artist’s initials and dated 1800 on the verso, is a fine and characteristic example of this group of late drawings which, although occasionally related to small easel pictures, seem to have also been produced as autonomous works of art, intended for sale to collectors. While no painting related to this drawing is known, a similar figure of a kneeling Saint Margaret of Cortona, holding a skull and accompanied by a dog, appears in Gandolfi’s altarpiece of Saints Margaret of Cortona, James of the March and Didacus, painted in 1775 for the church of San Giorgio in the Marchigian coastal town of Porto San Giorgio, near Fermo on the Adriatic.
| |  Click to enlarge | | UBALDO GANDOLFI San Matteo della Decima 1728-1781 Ravenna Design for a Monument or Frontispiece, With a Male and Female Figure Flanking a Cartouche, Three Putti Holding a Garland Above Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an extensive underdrawing in red chalk. Laid down on an 18th century Italian mount. 300 x 210 mm. (11 3/4 x 8 1/4 in.)
| |  Click to enlarge | | ANTOINE-PIERRE MONGIN Paris 1761-1827 Versailles Landscape with Classical Buildings and Women Bathing by a Lake Gouache. Signed and dated Mongin / 1795 at the lower left. 293 x 387 mm. (11 1/2 x 15 1/4 in.)
Although very well known in his lifetime, Antoine-Pierre Mongin survives today as, at best, a footnote in any account of late 18th and early 19th century painting in France. This is perhaps due to the fact that relatively few works by this petit-maître have survived, despite his long and busy career. Mongin contributed gouache landscapes as well as genre scenes, military subjects, animal scenes and history paintings to the annual Salons between 1791 and 1824, with a particular emphasis on the depiction of the world of high society in Paris during the periods of the Directoire, Consulat and Empire. The artist is best known for his gouache landscape drawings, of which the present sheet, signed and dated 1795, is a particularly fine and fresh example. Produced and sold as independent works of art, these gouaches were often exhibited at the Salons. Mongin made several gouache views of the parks and public gardens of Paris, many of which were engraved by Louis-Jean Allais; such works evoke the landscapes of Mongin’s teacher, Louis Gabriel Moreau the Elder. A common theme in many of the artist’s gouaches is a kind of mild voyeurism, with people spying on bathers.
| |  Click to enlarge | | JEAN-BAPTISTE PILLEMENT Lyon 1728-1808 Lyon Chinoiserie Design, with Two Seated Figures Black chalk, with touches of red chalk, and blue and red watercolour. 376 x 308 mm. (14 3/4 x 12 1/8 in.) This highly finished sheet, drawn in red and black chalk and touches of watercolour, is likely to have been produced as a collector’s drawing in its own right, and may be dated to the 1760s. Such charming and original compositions as this, with their immense visual appeal, were the source of much of the artist’s contemporary fame. As one author has noted, ‘ [Pillement’s] chinoiseries exaggerate wispy, fragile qualities of the style. It is as though the world is a fairyland conjured out of gossamer and stalks of grass, and the humans inhabiting it, fanciful little creatures who dance and tumble around so effervescent and lively they seem more creatures of the air than earth.'
| |  Click to enlarge | | JEAN-BAPTISTE PILLEMENT Lyon 1728-1808 Lyon Ornamental Design: Flowers and Ribbons Black chalk, with stumping. Signed j. Pillement at the lower left. 173 x 277 mm. (6 3/4 x 10 7/8 in.) This charming, whimsical drawing of stylized flowers is a study for one of eight etchings published in London in 1760 as Recueil de differentes Fleurs de Fantasie dans le goût chinois, Propres aux Manufactures d’etoffes de Soie et d’Indienne, inventées et dessinées par Jean Pillement et gravé par P.C. Canot. Pillement created numerous such designs of fleurs de fantasie throughout his career, many of which were reproduced as series of prints.
| |  Click to enlarge | | GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO Venice 1727-1804 Venice God the Father in Glory Pen and brown ink and brown wash, backed. Signed Domo. Tiepolo in brown ink at the lower right. 287 x 200 mm. (11 3/8 x 7 7/8 in.) The present sheet may be included among a large series of drawings by Domenico Tiepolo on the theme of God the Father in clouds, supported by angels and cherubs. The artist drew several such series of drawings—depicting both religious and secular subjects—characterized by variations on a single theme. As James Byam Shaw has noted of such drawings, ‘Sometimes the theme itself derives from some great work of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, sometimes it is apparently Domenico’s own. In either case, he takes an evident pride and pleasure in ringing the changes, devising new pictorial patterns, new relationships of figure to figure, while the essential material remains the same: and all within a limited scope—for, as always in Domenico’s work, whether painting or drawing, there is little attempt at composition in depth; it is on one plane, in two dimensions, whether the scene is on terra ferma or in the clouds.’ Writing in 1961, Byam Shaw noted that he knew more than sixty drawings by Domenico Tiepolo on the theme of God the Father, but that there must have been many more. Many of the drawings are numbered—the highest known number being 140—and they exist in both vertical and horizontal formats. The largest extant group of these drawings of God the Father, numbering fourteen, is today in the collection of the Museo Correr in Venice, while others are in museum and private collections in Europe and America. It has also been noted that Domenico seems to have drawn inspiration for these drawings from the figure of the Almighty in the upper part of Giambattista Tiepolo’s large altarpiece of Saint Thecla Freeing Este from the Plague, painted for the Duomo in Este and installed in the church in December 1759.
| |  Click to enlarge | | GIOVANNI DOMENICO TIEPOLO Venice 1727-1804 Venice Hercules and Antaeus Pen and brown ink and brown and grey wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk. Signed Dom. Tiepolo f at the lower right and numbered 77 at the upper left. 203 x 162 mm. (8 x 6 3/8 in.)
This drawing may be added to a series of drawings of Hercules and Antaeus by Domenico Tiepolo that have been dated to the latter part of the artist’s career. The largest single group of drawings of this subject, numbering thirty-eight sheets, were once in a small album formerly in the Henri Bordes collection and purchased by Colnaghi’s from Paul Prouté in 1936. The album was broken up and the drawings dispersed among public and private collections between 1936 and 1941, and examples are today in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, MA. (According to James Byam Shaw, however, none of the Bordes drawings were numbered, and as such the present sheet is unlikely to have been part of the album.) Byam Shaw has suggested that these Hercules and Antaeus drawings may have been related to the decoration of the Tiepolo villa at Zianigo, since many of the drawings depict the figures of Hercules and Antaeus on the same sort of ledge that appears in other drawings by Domenico—mostly of animals— that are thought to have been intended for the Zianigo villa. As he notes, ‘It seems possible, therefore, that the subject was at least conceived as a suitable one for the decoration of that villa, and that the series was drawn at a relatively late date in Domenico’s career.’
Text and images copyright © 2007-2008 by Stephen Ongpin Fine Art. No portion of this website may be transferred, copied, or reproduced in whole or in part in any manner or in any media without the prior written consent of Stephen Ongpin Fine Art.
|
| | | |
| |
| | | | | | | | |  |
