Collectors’ Focus
It’s a comparatively recent idea that Spanish drawings – once neglected by artists and collectors alike – should be highly prized; but in the last decade scholarship has made great strides, and the market is gathering momentum
Emma Crichton-Miller on Spanish drawings
The story used to be, the Spanish did not draw. With a handful of attributed drawings by Velázquez, no signed sheets by Francisco de Zurbarán (only some hesitantly attributed sketches and one or two outstanding finished drawings), set against a general dearth, the view was that, until Goya, drawing as an art form had been poorly valued, by both artists and collectors. Used as tools in the studio, drawings were, as the scholar and collector Sir William StirlingMaxwell put it in his Annals of the Artists of Spain ( ), ‘passed from hand to hand in the schools until they fell into rags’.
Over the last years, however, research has modified the picture, rescuing Spanish drawings from wrongful attribution and refining the history. For instance, although the Real Academia de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain’s first formal art academy, was founded as late as , Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Francisco Herrera the Younger had established a school of fine art in Seville almost a century earlier, in , that reinforced drawing as the basis of artistic practice. Francisco Pacheco – father-in-law of Velázquez and teacher of Alonso Cano – insisted on the importance of drawing in his treatise the Arte de la pintura, published posthumously in . He made preparatory drawings for his own painted compositions, created others as models for students, and produced some as independent sheets. Drawings by Pacheco, Cano and Murillo appear, among many others, in the Alcubierre album of drawings, assembled by Don Miguel de Espinosa Maldonado Saavedra Tello de Guzmán, second Count of Aguila, between and : evidently, they had been valued enough to survive a century or so. Last sold by Caylus Gallery in Madrid, in
, the album is today owned by the billionaire art collector Juan Abelló.
Besides Spanish collectors, in the early th century, after the Napoleonic Wars, British and French connoisseurs began avidly acquiring works by Golden Age artists, depriving Spain,
some Spanish commentators have said, of its patrimony. Much more recently, a series of exhibitions has contributed to a new picture: ‘The Spanish Manner: Drawings from Ribera to Goya’ at the Frick in New York ( – ), ‘The Spanish Line: Drawings from Ribera to Picasso’ at the Courtauld in London ( – ), the British Museum’s ‘Renaissance to Goya: Prints and Drawings from Spain’ ( – ), and ‘Ribera: Master of Drawing’ ( – ), the Prado’s collaboration with the Meadows Museum in Dallas. Scholarship has identified groups of draughtsmen in Castile, Madrid (Vicente Carducho, Alonso Cano and Francisco Rizi), Andalucia (Pacheco, Murillo, Antonio del Castillo y Saavedra, Juan de Valdés Leal and Zurbarán) and Valencia (Juan de Juanes, Francisco Ribalta, his son Juan Ribalta and Pedro de Orrente), with Valencia-born Jusepe de Ribera, based in Spanish-owned Naples, an outlier. Interest has grown among institutions and private collectors alike.
Cristiana Romalli, senior specialist in Old Master drawings at Sotheby’s London, says, ‘There is not a Spanish school until the
th century.’ The earliest drawings made in Spain found at auction are by artists hired by Philip II to adorn El Escorial, his monasterypalace outside Madrid, built between – . Most were by Italians, such as Francesco da Urbino, Federico Zuccari and the Genoese Fabrizio Castello. Alongside Italian-trained Spanish masters like Alonso Berruguete (c.
– ), their influence on Spanish painters was enormous. A preparatory drawing (c.
) by Castello for frescoes in the Monastery of San Lorenzo is up for sale on July at Sotheby’s London in ‘A Fine Line: Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries’ (estimate , – , ). In the same sale, a drawing of The Assumption of the Virgin by Francisco Rizi (Madrid, – ) – sold in as German School, c. , at Christie’s South Kensington – is also offered with an estimate of , – , (Fig. ). In an exuberant drawing in pen and brown ink with red wash of The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew by Rizi sold for , , to a Spanish private collector, on an , – , estimate at Sotheby’s London. ‘When Spanish drawings are good,’ Romalli says, ‘there are bidders.’
A bold, intriguing red chalk drawing by Jusepe de Ribera titled Head of a Woman Wearing a Veil with Two Small Naked Figures on It sold at Sotheby’s Paris in March
for , , on a , – , estimate, while in London a beautiful, intimate Madonna and Child (c. – ) by Murillo sold in for , , more than three times the top estimate of , . Stijn Alsteens, Christie’s international head of Old Master drawings, confirms that over the last decade collectors have become highly informed, ‘very dedicated and very scholarly’. He suggests the interest of most collectors is academic – seeking to bring artists to the light, and document their practice as much pursuing aesthetic pleasure. He notes that ‘the culture of creating drawings, admiring drawings and collecting drawings’ had not developed in th-century Spain, ‘so the majority of drawings are functional’. In July, however, Christie’s London is offering a highly finished drawing by Murillo which Alsteens admits contradicts this generalisation. The sugar-sweet Good Shepherd is expected to fetch , – , . A drawing of the Holy Family by Murillo sold for , at Christie’s New York in (estimate , – , ), while in a Madonna and Child sold for , (est.
, – , ), confirming an appetite for drawings by the artist. But even a modest drawing by an unknown artist such as Jerónimo de Bobadilla (Seville, born after
– ) can surprise. His Saint Joseph with
the Christ Child achieved , on an estimate of , – , , in London in .
The Barcelona dealer Artur Ramon sees his task partly as drawing the world’s attention to Spanish art. ‘For us the challenge is to explain to the international audience that Spanish drawings existed before Goya.’ One frustration is that whenever a truly great drawing turns up in Spain, tough restrictions on the export of Spanish heritage can narrow his market to a handful of committed Spanish collectors or the Prado. He notes that where he can sell abroad, to American institutions and a few private collectors, prices have risen fast in the last few years, ‘but are still well behind Poussin, or an Italian master’. Next month he will take to Salon du Dessin an academic drawing by Juan Conchillos y Falcó (Valencia, – ). The Madrid-based scholar and dealer José de la Mano comments that though he has been dealing for years, ‘things have changed completely in the last seven’. Where once Spanish drawings were despised, now the oeuvre is better understood, attributions are trusted; he has sold to the British Museum, the Ashmolean, the Getty, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Morgan Library and the Louvre. Recently he sold a drawing by Juan de Valdés Leal (Seville, – ), The Apparition of Christ to Saint Ignatius on the Road to Rome (c. ), to the Meadows Museum (Fig. ). This work reveals, he says, the strength of Spanish drawing, a combination of religious strictness and heightened drama, the red and black chalk intensifying the impact of the blood dripping from Christ’s forehead. He will also show at Salon du Dessin a double sheet by Claudio Coello (Madrid, – ),
The Bust of a Child and the Head of an Angel recto and The Vision of Saint Anthony verso, price , .