July 2024

Monday, July 1

 
 

Trois Crayons (French, "three crayons") The technique of drawing with black, white and red chalks (à trois crayons) on a paper of middle tone, for example mid-blue or buff. It was particularly popular in early and mid-18th century France with artists such as Antoine Watteau and François Boucher. (Clarke, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms)

 

Coming Up

Dear all,

Greetings from Trois Crayons HQ, where our exhibition, ‘500 Years of Drawing’, is in full swing at No.9 Cork Street and continues until Friday (10am - 6pm).

Our event programme begins today and remains open for registration with a handful of places still available for the following events:

Michelangelo’s Last Drawings with Grant Lewis (British Museum)

Monday, 1st July, 16:00

ArtTactic, Market Transitions: with Alexander Faber (Sotheby’s), Stephen Ongpin (Stephen Ongpin Fine Art) and Kate de Rothschild

Tuesday, 2nd July, 16:00

Towards a new catalogue of Raphael’s drawings at the Ashmolean Museum: challenges and discoveries: with Angelamaria Aceto (Ashmolean Museum)

Wednesday 3rd July, 16:00

For this month’s edition of the newsletter, we have picked out 10 current events from across the UK and around the world, spoken with Sarah Mallory of the Morgan Library & Museum about a favourite drawing in the newly-opened exhibition, ‘Far and Away: Drawings from the Clement C. Moore Collection’, discussed the phenomenon that is blue paper in the first of a two-part interview with Dr Alexa McCarthy, and recommended our customary selection of literary and audio highlights. As ever, you can test your inner connoisseur with the real or fake section.

For next month’s edition, please direct any recommendations, news stories, feedback or event listings to tom@troiscrayons.art.

 

NEWS

 

In the London art world, ‘London Art Week’, ‘Classic Week’ at Christie’s, and ‘The Summer Season’ at Sotheby’s continue this week with the principal drawings sale at Sotheby’s, Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries, kicking off at 10am on Wednesday morning and the Christie’s mixed Old Masters sale, Old Masters Part II: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings and Watercolours, following suit at 10.30am.

In Germany, the Lippische Landesbibliothek has released information on a research project into 28 drawings of “dubious” origin in their collection which were likely stolen from French or Dutch collections during the Second World War. The project aims to retrace the drawings’ provenance and reunite them with their rightful owners. A full list of the drawings can be found at the bottom of this page. In similarly themed news, an oil sketch by Peter Paul Rubens which was illegally sold in the aftermath of the Second World War has now been returned to the Friedenstein Foundation in Gotha, Germany.

In Paris, a previously unknown drawing by Hans Schäufelein has been discovered in the pages of a Biblia Pauperum and presented at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art. In Orléans, to accompany the recently opened exhibition, Etoiles du Nord, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, the museum has published a catalogue of their holdings of drawings by Northern European artists, written by David Mandrella. Another catalogue of note, recently presented at the Palazzo Barberini and compiled by Francesco Baldassari, on the Italian painter, Cecco Bravo - or ‘Cecco Well done’ as English Google Translate will insist – has also just been published, gathering almost four hundred drawings for the two-volume work. In Venice, following an investigation into a drawing attributed to the Italian modernist Amedeo Modigliani which was due to be sold with a price tag of €300,000 ($320,000) at auction in 2022, the drawing has been confiscated and confirmed as a fake. On the opposite end of the spectrum, artnet news has also reported on a pastel, which was acquired as a “fake” Degas in 2021 for €926 and has now been identified as a Long-Lost Degas, estimated at around €7-12 million.

In acquisition news, curators at the Art Institute of Chicago have announced the arrival of three works on paper, one by Hans Jakob Oeri, another by Albert Bartholomé and a third by George Romney. In Antwerp, Galerie Lowet de Wotrenge has announced the sale of a bozzetto by Cornelis Schut to the Snijders&Rockoxhuis, and a rare design for a stained-glass window by Theodoor van Thulden to the Museum Plantin-Moretus. In Paris, at the auctioneers Rémy Le Fur, several unpublished drawings by Anne-Louis Girodet have been pre-empted by a number of institutions, including the Musée du Louvre and the Musée national des châteaux de Malmaison et de Bois. The Chateau de Versailles has also pre-empted a collection of head studies by Horace Vernet originating from the Delaroche-Vernet family collection, and the Musée Ingres Bourdelle has pre-empted a study by Ingres which was offered at Christie’s, Paris.

In conference news, a save the date has been issued for September 5-6, 2024, for a conference entitled ‘Creativity and Invention in Antiquarian Drawings (1400-1600)’ at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Further details to follow in due course. And finally, the Summer 2024 issue of Master Drawings was published at the start of this month.

 

EVENTS

 

This month we have picked out a selection of new and previously unhighlighted events from the UK and from further afield. For a more complete overview of ongoing exhibitions and talks, please visit our Events page.

UK

Wordlwide

 

DRAWING OF THE MONTH

 

Johanna Helena Herolt (Frankfurt am Main 1668 – ca. 1723/43 Suriname)

Yellow and Purple Verbascum, with the Life Cycle of a Moth, ca. 1691 – 1711

Watercolor, over black chalk, on parchment, 380 x 300 mm. The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, Promised gift of Clement C. and Elizabeth Y. Moore.

Sarah Mallory, Annette and Oscar de la Renta Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & museum, New York, has kindly chosen our tenth drawing of the month.

Now on display at The Morgan Library & Museum, in the exhibition ‘Far and Away: Drawings from the Collection of Clement C. Moore,’ is an ethereal watercolor drawing, done by Johanna Helena Herolt (née Graff ), depicting three stems of verbascum (perhaps moth mullein, or Verbascum blattaria) and the lifecycle of a moth. Though the flowers appear to be quite delicate, as if their petals might drift away on a breeze alongside the moth, Herholt’s work in fact reveals the enduring power of drawings to connect people and places near, far, and away.

Herolt, alongside her sister Dorothea Maria Graff, trained at the knee of her parents, Maria Sybilla Merian and Johann Andreas Graff, who were themselves apprenticed to Merian’s stepfather, the eminent flower painter Jacob Marrel. In this finely executed work, we see Herolt continue the natural history drawing tradition begun by the Merian lineage. Three gracefully curving stems fill the page, guiding the eye up the cache of tiny blossoms amid which we see the life cycle of an owlet moth. Herolt likely drew the picture using preserved specimens and her apt imagination. Indeed, the harmonious placement of moth and plant is an idealized vignette intended to show the subjects’ various developmental stages, a feat of synchronicity that would never transpire in nature.

Herolt likely produced this drawing while living in Amsterdam, from 1691 to 1711. During this period, she made flower books and also drawings for Agnes Block and the Hortus Botanicus of Amsterdam. The express purpose of this sheet is yet unknown, but it might well have once been part of a flower book or album. In the “Bloem Boek,” an album of forty-nine Herolt watercolor drawings of flowers dated to ca. 1698, the artist included a drawing of a stem of verbascum alongside two stems of Jacob’s ladder.

Verbascum, thought of as a flowering weed, was not a common subject in florilegia, which more often featured ornamental blossoms (irises and peonies, for example). The plant was, however, a mainstay of herbals, including De materia medica, which was written in 50–70 CE by Greek physician Dioscorides, subsequently copied for millennia, and remained highly influential in early modern Europe. Many of the earliest surviving copies of De medica are on parchment and depict verbascum; Herolt’s drawing, also on parchment, is thus a profound link in the long chain of artistic tradition wrought from the study of nature.

So important was the verbascum as a treatment for an array of ailments—ulcers, dysentery, barren wombs, pleurisy—European colonizers cultivated the plant in the Americas, where it still grows. Herolt would have encountered mullein in her daily life; she was also likely familiar with herbals, such as John Gerard’s The Herball; or, Generall Historie of Plantes (1597), which notes that moth mullein had no obvious use except to attract bugs. Herolt’s drawing can but confirm and refute his assertion, for in her remarkable drawing of this workaday weed we experience the allure of reciprocity between insect, plant, and artist.

Far and Away: Drawings from the Clement C. Moore Collection’ at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, continues until 22 September.

 

DEMYSTIFYING DRAWINGS

 

What’s the big deal with blue paper?

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, A Flying Angel (recto); Studies of Hands Playing Instruments (verso), The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, A Young Woman Buying a Pink from a Young Man, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland

To the lover of drawings, the term ‘blue paper’ might evoke an array of images. To the Italianist, perhaps the drawings of Tintoretto and Veronese; to the ‘dix-huitièmiste’, the Fables of Oudry; to the devotees of Dutch drawing, the figure studies of Govert Flinck and Jacob Adriaensz Backer; and to the Anglophile, the self-portraits of Jonathan Richardson the Elder.

The past few years have seen a revived interest in the appreciation and understanding of blue paper in all its forms. In 2024 alone, readers of this newsletter will have observed last month’s call for papers for a conference, Drawn to Blue, co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the University of Amsterdam, and prior to that, the opening of an exhibition, Drawing on Blue, at the Getty Center in January. January also saw the publication of Venetian Disegno: New Frontiers, the product of a conference held in May of 2021, which, amongst other topics, addressed blue paper in its Venetian context. In September of 2021, the first conference dedicated to the use of blue paper, “Venice in Blue The Use of carta azzurra in the Artist’s Studio and in the Printer’s Workshop, ca. 1500–50,” was held and will result in a forthcoming edited volume. This coming autumn, the Courtauld Gallery will host their own exhibition on the topic, Drawn to Blue: Artists’ use of blue paper.

Dr Alexa McCarthy, one of the contributors to Venetian Disegno: New Frontiers and co-editor of Venice in Blue The Use of carta azzurra in the Artist’s Studio and in the Printer’s Workshop, ca. 1500–50, joins our editor to unpick this phenomenon in a two-part feature.

Why do you think have we seen such an interest in blue paper in recent years?

 Blue paper is certainly experiencing a moment in the sun- or spotlight! I believe that an increased focus on materiality and the process of making has prompted art historians, conservators, collectors, and curators to look anew at works on paper. Collaboration with conservators also opens new possibilities for understanding drawing materials, of what they are comprised, and their individual histories. You may pull at one small strand, and a wealth of knowledge begins to unravel. There is simply something about the celestial colour that draws the viewer in immediately.

In the early 2010s, I was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as Collections Management Assistant in the Department of Drawings & Prints and there was a Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery rotation that featured drawings on blue paper. This installation prompted me to consider how blue paper figures prominently in works on paper collections around the world, but aside from a passing reference, the material itself had been little explored. My interest in blue paper planted the seed for my doctoral dissertation, ‘Carta azzurra / blauw papier : drawing on blue paper in Italy and the Netherlands, ca. 1450–ca. 1660’ (2022). Iris Brahms’ seminal 2015 article ‘Schnelligkeit als visuelle und taktile Erfahrung: Zum chiaroscuro in der venezianischen Zeichenpraxis,’ was a critical step in considering the efficacy and efficiency of the use of blue paper in Venetian artistic practice. Additional publications by Brahms, as well as those by conservators Thea Burns and Leila Sauvage, as well as projects like the Getty’s exhibition have demonstrated the wealth of discoveries made possible by a close examination of blue paper.   

How is blue paper made, what are its origins, and when and where was it most frequently used?

Blue, and more broadly, coloured papers can be created through a variety of means, each producing a different result. These types of fabricated coloured paper include: self-coloured paper, in which raw materials such as blue rags produce the colour in the sheet, coloured by inclusion, or the addition of coloured fibres into the pulp base, paper that has been dyed in the beater as the pulp is being beaten, and paper that has been dyed in the vat. Thea Burns and Leila Sauvage have categorised blue paper as follows: variegated (papier chiné), variegated and dyed, or dyed. Variegated blue paper is made with natural-coloured rags with some whiteness, to which the papermaker adds a proportion of blue rags and pulps. To this variegated blue paper, the papermaker could add dye to the pulp to enhance or homogenise the colour, hence variegated and dyed. Dyed blue paper is that which is produced from neutral and white rags that are dyed blue during the papermaking process. The difference between these types of blue paper can be difficult to discern with the naked eye, but often individual fibres visible in the sheet can aid the viewer. My research focuses on paper that was made blue during the papermaking process, rather than that which was prepared later by colourmen or artists.

Handmade blue paper is particularly interesting in that it was produced throughout Europe for the utilitarian purpose of wrapping goods and was widely adopted for artistic purposes. Though artists’ use of handmade blue paper most likely originated in Italy, its association with Veneto is due to the proliferation of its use there by artists and printers during the first half of the sixteenth century. The earliest extant drawing on blue paper is attributed to Emilian artist Giovanni da Modena (ca. 1379-1454/55) in the Kupferstich-Kabinet Dresden, depicting a procession, dating from ca. 1410-1420. The earliest extant mention of blue paper dates to a Bolognese statute of 1389, which serves to codify standards for price, quality, size, and weight, and reveals that blue paper was less expensive to produce and procure. To create the finest white paper, rags needed to be unused and spotless, and these rags were the most expensive to purchase.

The colour of blue paper sheets could be homogenised by the addition of indigo and woad, both of which were strong enough to withstand the papermaking process. Indeed, a Late Babylonian clay cuneiform tablet (600-500 BCE) in the collection of the British Museum bears instructions for dying wool blue and purple (inv. no. 62788), most likely through the use of indigo. Though the plant originates in Asia, it was already imported to Europe during the twelfth century, where Venetians were purportedly the first Europeans to employ indigo as a dye. Indigo and woad were both readily available during the early modern period, with woad being cultivated throughout western Europe. Neither colourant requires a mordant, or substance to fix the dye. Blue was one of the darkest colours available to cover stains so that clothing, which was expensive, could continue to be worn. Black fabric required a succession of dye baths to achieve, making it more costly to produce, especially until the mid-sixteenth century. These are all contributing factors to the prevalence of blue paper.  

What are blue paper’s distinguishing qualities and their associated advantages?

Requiring no preparation on the part of the artist, blue paper proved a quick and efficient means through which to render forms in space, capitalizing on the inherent mid-tone of the support. To the sheet’s mid-tone, a sense of three-dimensionality can be achieved through the addition of light and dark drawing materials. The variegated texture of a sheet of handmade blue paper, often with lentils, or clumps of unprocessed fibres, is a welcome surface for friable materials like chalk and charcoal to be subtly blended and applied with varying degrees of pressure to model figures and create atmospheric effects. Ink and wash can be employed to produce results that reflect those of chiaroscuro woodcuts. If we consider some of the artistic innovations associated with blue paper in the Veneto alone, such as those achieved through explorations aux trois crayons in the Bassano and Caliari family workshops, the chiaroscuro drawings by Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) and Paolo Farinati (1524–1606), or the patterns established in Jacopo Tintoretto’s (1518/19–1594) workshop through copying drawings of sculpture and sculptural casts on blue paper, the employment of the material demonstrates how disegno informed Venetian colorito. This is a topic I look forward to discussing with you in next month’s issue.

What artistic innovations are associated with the use of blue paper?

n addition to the innovations I refer to above, our forthcoming edited volume considers the questions surrounding the early uses of blue paper for printing in the Veneto. Further, I recommend the scholarship of Thea Burns, Leila Sauvage, and Iris Brahms on the relationship between pastels and blue paper in the eighteenth century. I am particularly fascinated by the role of blue paper in contributing to the establishment of stylistic identity or its role in stylistic shifts.

Govert Flinck (1615–1660), a former pupil of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), who was known for his ability to faithfully convey his master’s style in his own drawings, began to employ blue paper as his style changed from Rembrandt’s to that of what artist biographer Arnold Houbraken (1660–1719) referred to in part two of his Groote schouburgh (1718–1721), as a ‘clear’ manner of execution, characterized by the conventional ideals of form and symmetry (helder schilderen). Houbraken referred to this style as ‘Italiaansche penceelkonst’ (Italian brushwork).

Govert Flinck’s extant drawings indicate that he began using blue paper only after he was no longer under Rembrandt’s tutelage, as he transitioned towards this ‘clear’ style. A 2016 exhibition at the Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam, curated by Judith Noorman and David de Witt, was the first to centre upon the corpus of figure studies on blue paper produced by Flinck and his Amsterdam colleagues, Jacob Backer (1609–1651), Jacob Van Loo (1614–1670), and Ferdinand Bol (1616–1680) in the mid-1640s and 1650s. This exhibition provided insight into the illegal practice of drawing nude female models from life in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century. Drawing on blue paper was a fundamental part of artistic training and practice in order to eloquently depict bodies in space, whether drawn from life (dal vivo; naer het leven), the imagination or mind, quite possibly derived from an artist’s innate talent or ingegno (immaginazione; uyt den gheest), or from memory (memoria; van onthout). I argue that Flinck’s stylistic transition can be traced to these group drawing sessions exploring the nude female body on blue paper.

Discolouration is a common concern with old master drawings on blue paper. Paper that reads to the naked eye as brown may once have been blue – eg Piazzetta. What is the cause of this, and how might one discover a discoloured sheet’s original colour?

Discolouration is typically caused by exposure to light or liquid. Drawings that have been stored in portfolios and, later, solander boxes are often less discoloured than those that were displayed on walls and regularly exposed to light. For example, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682–1754) utilised the inherent mid-tone of blue paper to create highly refined, large-scale head studies that were intended to be displayed like paintings. Having been hung on walls, Piazzetta’s finished blue paper drawings now often look buff or greyish-green due to light exposure. Two sheets by Piazzetta in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art demonstrate this difference. A blue sheet of preparatory studies with a flying angel and hands playing instruments (inv. 1938.388) was likely stored in a portfolio, an intermediary step in the artist’s process, whereas his drawing of a young woman buying a pink (inv. 1938.387), an independent artwork hung on a wall, now looks buff-grey.

Sometimes, looking at the verso of a work on paper or a border that has been protected by a matboard allows you to begin to ascertain how the sheet would have looked prior to discolouration. Certain colourants age better than others and some are more lightfast than others, so this can begin to give a clue as to the colourant(s) present. Knowledge of how the colourant typically manifests can aid in determining the sheet’s original colour. Woad, for example, typically results in fibres that are less vivid and can be slightly greenish. In addition to the colourants of indigo and woad, logwood began to be employed more often in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century. Indeed, Dutch papermakers eventually maintained their own mills for processing logwood. Logwood does require a mordant and was typically added to the pulp while in the vat. Litmus, derived from European lichens such as Lacca coerulea and rocella and juices obtained from blueberry, violet, safflower, or cornflower also yielded blue dye. The Blue Paper Research Consortium has created a blue paper sampler (website: www.bluepaperresearch.org), comprised of sheets that have been produced and coloured using preindustrial methods and materials described above and can be used for visual comparison. Using noninvasive methods like spectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence, described by conservator Michelle Sullivan in the Getty’s publication, are also critical methods of study in determining the materials present and to ascertain how the sheet may have originally looked.

 

Real or Fake

 

Can we fool you? The term “fake” may be slightly sensationalist when it comes to old drawings. Copying originals and prints has long formed a key part of an artist’s education and with the passing of time the distinction between the two can be innocently mistaken.

PHILIPS WOUWERMAN (copy after?)

Man on Horseback, Chantilly, Musée, Condé

PHILIPS WOUWERMAN (copy after?)

Group of men with two horses and dogs, British Museum, London

This month’s ‘real or fake’ section does not offer the usual choice of right or wrong, but instead highlights a group of problematic drawings linked to the Dutch artist Philips Wouwerman. Evidently drawn with skill, this group of red chalk figurative studies, many of which are monogrammed, were exhibited as autograph works by the artist in a monographic exhibition of 2009-10. Many of these figures can also be directly connected to those in autograph paintings. But did Wouwerman really draw with red chalk?

Scroll to the end of the newsletter for more information.

 

Resources and Recommendations

 

to listen

British Art Matters podcast: Tim Clayton, 2023 Berger Prize winner

Dr Adam Rutherford, the approachable face of British science, provides a scientist’s analysis of Rembrandt’s iconic 1632 oil painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. On the topic of draughtsmanship, Rutherford stops by Galen, and the birth of anatomical drawings in the Renaissance with Leonardo and Vesalius.

to watch

Rome According to Maarten van Heemskerck | ARTE.tv Culture

Five centuries after Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck first passionately drew the city of Rome, urban sketchers are revisiting his legacy. Following in his footsteps, this documentary combines the pleasures of art history and drawing in the open air.

to read

The Pisa sinopites. what they are, what they were used for, how they were discovered

A journalist’s exploration of the Pisa sinopites, preparatory drawings for frescoes preserved at the Museo delle Sinopie in Pisa. Originating from Sinope's red-brown pigment, these sketches were crucial in planning fresco compositions. Discovered during WWII after a bombing damaged Pisa's Camposanto Monumentale, the sinopites offer insight into medieval and Renaissance artistic processes. Their preservation involved detaching frescoes to reveal the underlying sinopites, which were then showcased in the museum. This discovery has provided valuable information on the techniques and methodologies of historical artists.

 

answer

 

PHILIPS WOUWERMAN

Travelers in a Landscape with a Urinating Horse, c. 1655, Location Unknown

PHILIPS WOUWERMAN

Hunter Talking to a Gypsy Family Pommersfelden, Schloss Weissenstein, Collection of the Count of Schönborn

Annemarie Stefes ‘Did Philips Wouwerman Draw with Red Chalk?’, Master Drawings , Winter 2019, Vol. 57, No. 4, pp. 453-472

Dr Annemarie Stefes provides the most comprehensive overview of this curious group of drawings in an article in Master Drawings, published in 2019.

“What was considered in 2009–10 to be a coherent group of red chalk studies by Wouwerman is not so coherent after all, with several different hands involved.”

“In my opinion, these red chalk “studies” are drawn in a manner that sets alarm bells ringing. There is nothing sketchy about them, no sense of a searching line. Although left partially unfinished, the motifs—often floating in empty space—are represented as finished details in nucleo, the figures fully modeled, with light and shade consistently applied. Lacking spontaneity and devoid of pentimenti whatsoever, their rendering betrays all the hallmarks of a copyist working from painted or printed prototypes. Indeed, Hind had already expressed reservations in attributing the British Museum sheets to Wouwerman, describing them as drawn “with no freedom of style,” either being early works or copies of independent drawings by another hand. In 2001–2, David Mandrella labeled the two drawings in Chantilly as copies; the drawing in Cambridge is catalogued on the Fitzwilliam website as a copy after a painting; and, most recently, the traditional attribution of the entire group to Wouwerman was also questioned by Plomp and Schumacher. Adding to suspicions are the monograms themselves. Inscribed in brown ink, they were apparently added after the red chalk drawings were completed. These monograms, written in the form that was used by Wouwerman only after 1646 (even though some of the related paintings are of earlier date), could have been copied from any drawn or painted model of that later period. Above all, the mise-en-page of the motifs on the red chalk drawings implies that they are details extracted from larger narrative scenes. Indeed, it is possible to support this idea with “hard” evidence in many, if not most cases, namely by matching the motifs to details in specific paintings by Wouwerman.”

 
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Demystifying Drawings #10