Art market
Sketches and studies from famous faces abound in two major European fairs
On ‘writer’s today’ I’m preparing to go to Maastricht and hoping that all snow will have disappeared by the time I get there; ‘reader’s today’ will find me at the opening of this year’s Salon du Dessin at the Palais Brongniart in Paris. Lead-in times can be very confusing in journalism, but at least in a weekly publication I do not have the greater challenge of writing in early March for May’s edition, which will actually be published in April. There is, no doubt, some production reason for that practice, but I have no idea what it might be.
Some art and antique dealers must display similar mental agility when exhibiting at several fairs in rapid succession. Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker (as Lowell Libson of Clifford Street, W1, has recently become) has had to decide how to divide its best offerings between Maastricht and Paris. These events are so close together that any announcements or advertising would have to be done at the same time, so might visitors to TEFAF be irritated at being unable to see items reserved for the Salon and Parisian clients feel short-changed if what they would have liked to consider has already been sold at Maastricht?
In fact, Libson & Yarker had one fairly easy decision to make: that a group of 10 Constable drawings should form the core at the Salon, even if previously sold. As the gallery says, ‘Constable received considerable critical success in Paris during his lifetime and had a tremendous impact upon French painters, Eugène Delacroix considered that he was: “the father of our own landscape school”.’ This group of landscapes and Academic nude studies spans his whole working life, from four sheets of life studies drawn in 1808 at the Royal Academy to a sketchbook page made in 1832 on the River Stour. Most are in pencil and all are small, but, as ever with Constable, small is powerful. Prices range from €23,000 to €105,000, with this 47⁄8in by 3in East Bergholt Church Porch at €78,000 (Fig 1).
This year, there are 39 exhibiting galleries at the Salon, slightly
more than half from overseas, and there is a loan exhibition of 18thcentury drawings from the Musée d’arts de Nantes. I congratulate the organisers on appearing to have had the English version of the catalogue proofed by a native English speaker. So many fairs let themselves down badly in this.
One of the most distinguished Parisian galleries for Old Master drawings is de Bayser, a family business since the 1930s, and the highlight of its stand is a great rarity: a red chalk drawing by the Leonardo follower Cesare da Sesto (1477–1523). One of his best-known paintings is the
Salome of about 1520, now in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, but only three preparatory drawings for it are known. This recently discovered 101⁄4in by 75⁄8in
study of The Head of St John the
Baptist (Fig 2) joins studies of a hand holding his hair (in the Royal Collection) and of a foot (in Berlin).
Probably the youngest gallery is Omer Tiroche, launched in Mayfair in 2015 to deal in modern and contemporary works. It took a moment to realise what its 195⁄8in by 365⁄8in double-sided sheet of brown and black chalk drawings of fishing from boats by Picasso reminded me of (Fig 3). It seems unlikely, but it would be pleasing to think that, at some point during his convoluted domestic life, the artist read the Just So Stories to his children. These 1957 drawings could happily accompany Kipling’s own illustrations for How The First Letter Was Written and How the Alphabet was Made.
The Paris-based Old Master dealership Marty de Cambiaire is a little older, having been set up in 2010. With it is a 162⁄3in by 10in black chalk, brown ink and grey-wash drawing it calls Design
for a thesis (Fig 4). It’s by Grégoire Huret (1606–70), Draughtsman and Engraver in Ordinary to the King, and I would guess that it is connected to his Optique de
portraiture et peinture, published in the year of his death.
From New York, W. M. Brady has brought a handsome 93⁄4in by 81⁄3in sanguine drawing of a half-length female nude reclining against a cushion by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, il Guercino (1591–1666), traditionally a great favourite with British collectors. The pose is quite close to that used by him for The Death of
Cleopatra, but could have been applied to a number of subjects.
I have been intrigued to learn that only one pen and ink drawing by Claude Monet is known, and here it is with the Helene Bailly Gallery of Paris (Fig 5).
It’s a 67⁄8in by 111⁄4in version of his 1865 painting Mouth of the
Seine at Honfleur, which is now in the Norton Simon, California. Apparently, Monet, then at the beginning of his career and comparatively impoverished, was persuaded of the merits of publicity to boost the chances of the painting, which had been accepted for exhibition. This drawing would have been perfect for engraving in a magazine. It shows fishing boats off the port and Hospice Lighthouse—beside which I was buying oysters in a rainstorm just before Christmas. Next week TEFAF shopping bag
‘This year there are 39 exhibiting galleries at the Salon’