September 2024
Sunday, September 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 we are celebrating our first anniversary this month, and the 12th edition of this newsletter.
For this issue, our editor reflects on the year past and also looks forward to the year ahead. Read on for the usual summary of upcoming and ongoing events, news, literary, visual and audio highlights, and 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 UK, the Courtauld Gallery has reopened following a fire that broke out on the roof of Somerset House on Saturday August 17. No one was injured in the blaze, and the gallery has since confirmed that neither the building nor its collection was affected. In more positive news from Somerset House, the Witt Library’s digitisation project of 2.2 million images is moving into its final phases. The first batch of images from the British School is now available to view, with the French School images due to be online this coming week, the Netherlandish School in November, the Italian School in February, the German and American Schools in March, and the Remaining Schools in April. At the King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, the outline of the upcoming exhibition ‘Drawing the Italian Renaissance’ has been revealed. The exhibition opens on November 1 and will feature around 160 works by over 80 artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian. Over 30 works will be on display for the first time, and a further 12 have never been shown in the UK. From 16-22 September, the Association for Art History’s ‘Art History Festival’ will take place across the country and online with free talks and events now available for registration.
Raphael (1483–1520), The Three Graces, © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust
In the US, at Freeman’s | Hindman, Philadelphia, a drawing of the destruction of the Bastille, gifted by the Marquis de Lafayette to George Washington in 1789, heads to the auction block on September 10. In San Francisco, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco has publicised a career opportunity. The museum is seeking a Curator, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts. Hurry, applications close at 5pm, September 3. In France, the actor and esteemed collector of Old Master drawings Alain Delon passed away on August 18. Tributes to the actor as collector can be read here. For CODARTfeatures, Ilona van Tuinen has interviewed the newly appointed Director of the Fondation Custodia, Stijn Alsteens, sharing insights into his vision for the future of the institution. In Italy, the celebration of the 450th anniversary of Giorgio Vasari’s death, ‘Arezzo. The City of Vasari’, continues in the artist-historian’s hometown, as the Museo di Casa Vasari opens an exhibition entitled, ‘Il disegno fu lo imitare il più bello della natura: The House, the Drawings, the Ideas: Giorgio Vasari and the Image of the Intellectual Architect’. The programme runs until February 2, 2025, and further details are available here. In the Netherlands, Heemskerck-mania shifts from Berlin to the artist’s homeland as celebrations of the 450th anniversary of the artist’s death continue. An exhibition in three museums - Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, and Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar, Alkmaar - opens this month on September 28, with each museum exploring a different chapter from Heemskerck’s fascinating life.
In conference and lecture news, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, hosts a workshop from September 5-6, entitled ‘Creativity and Invention in Antiquarian Drawings (1400–1600)’. Attendance is free, but advance registration is required. In Munich, calls for papers have been issued for a colloquium entitled ‘Fake News? – Fantasy Antiquities. Visualizing Antiquity. On the Episteme of Early Modern Drawings and Prints IV’. Submissions are due September 15, and the event will take place on February 14, 2025. At the Bard Graduate Center, New York, Mia Jackson (Waddesdon Manor) will give a lecture on the life and work of the recently rediscovered Sèvres painter Louis-Denis Armand (1723–1796), now celebrated as one of the foremost painters of birds. Registration is now open for the lecture on December 11.
In acquisition news, the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, has announced the arrival of works by Jean Dupas, in anticipation of a retrospective planned for 2026, as reported in La Tribune de l’Art. In London, Colnaghi Elliott Master Drawings has also announced the acquisition of various works from the gallery by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
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
reviews
Editor’s Letter: A Year of Trois Crayons
Tom Nevile
As the post-summer exhibition programme begins across the globe and the commercial art world kicks back into gear following its summer slumber, Trois Crayons is celebrating its first birthday. I won’t attempt anything as grandiose as a state of the nation address in this letter, but I will take this opportunity to reflect, look forward, and thank our readers, contributors, and team, for their engagement, encouragement and support for all our activities this past year.
Officially launched in September 2023, the past 12 months have seen change and growth at Trois Crayons, as we have ventured from the virtual realm into the physical one. In addition to these monthly newsletters, which have grown in scope (and length – my apologies), we have brought a board game into the world, Attribution!, launched in Paris at Nicolas Schwed’s gallery, organised an exhibition, ‘500 Years of Drawing’, held at Frieze’s permanent exhibition space in London, and arranged a number of talks, to accompany with the exhibition. Sebastien, Alesa and I were joined in January by Tom Mendel who was invaluable in helping us through the busy period. As planned, he now returns to the Nonesuch Gallery and Maggie Williams, formerly of Alon Zakaim Fine Art, joins the team as Managing Director, and will be taking the lead in planning our next events.
The past 12 months have reinforced my conviction that there is a healthy appetite for premodern drawings. The responses to this newsletter and our social media activity reveal as much. The attendance of over 2,000 people at our inaugural exhibition and the queue round the block on the opening night showed that the audience is not just a digital one. The exhibition highlighted the power of collaboration, timing and placement, for reaching new audiences. Popular monographic exhibitions devoted to the drawings of Botticelli, Michelangelo, Heemskerck and Claude, as well as thematic ones like ‘Bruegel to Rubens’, and ‘Drawing on Blue’ provide further evidence of the interest, and upcoming shows at the Fondation Custodia, the National Galleries of Scotland, The King’s Gallery, the Courtauld Gallery, the Albertina, and the Städel, to name but a few, devoted to Old Master drawings, speak to the institutional and curatorial commitment in the field. Specialist events like Master Drawings New York and the Salon du Dessin are important components in these local and global ecosystems, facilitating collaboration between museums, academics, journals, dealers, galleries and auction houses. Dedicated organisations like the Tavolozza Foundation, Bella Maniera and The Drawing Foundation all play their role in the promotion, support and organisation of these events and others of the kind, creating a rich and varied landscape and a multitude of ways in which to engage with drawings. Long may these collaborations and partnerships grow, innovate, and break down barriers to entry. This optimism must be tempered by the challenges faced by the field, with evolving tastes, application rates for art history degrees falling, minimal opportunities within the state sector, uncertainty at the major auction houses and a changing digital landscape, all of which serves to highlight the importance of the above, and strengthens my belief that this appetite for drawings must be nurtured from the ground up and given the oxygen to thrive.
But whither Trois Crayons in all this? As we move forward, we will continue to provide a digital home for drawing-related features, news and events through this monthly newsletter, website and social media channels and redouble our efforts to make drawings and their history as welcoming and accessible to new audiences as possible. Designs are also underway for the ‘Trois Crayons Museum Forum’, a new platform which will allow institutions to promote and crowd source information for less-studied drawings within their collections. The platform will provide a space for ‘problem’ drawings, where the artists, sitters or motifs have proved difficult to securely identify, and it will host moderated discussions where viewers can posit their ideas and suggestions. Whilst some drawings may always remain a mystery, others simply need to be seen by the right pair of eyes. The forum is designed, therefore, to bring these lesser-known but no less interesting drawings to as many engaged viewers as possible. Beyond the forum, we are also taking on visitor and participant feedback from this summer’s exhibition. The response was heartening and the enthusiasm for a centralised space for drawings in London in early July was made clear. More on these plans will be released in the coming months.
Collating these newsletters has been highly rewarding, and each issue has been enriched by the generous contributions of the curators, reviewers, interviewees and readers who have bought into the concept. My inbox is always open for suggestions and feedback. There is much to look forward to in the drawings world these coming months, and there are many projects afoot here at Trois Crayons. I look forward to it all.
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.
© The Trustees of the British Museum
© The Trustees of the British Museum
As noted in the opening remarks to this section, copying drawings has long formed part of an artist’s education. Whilst a ‘forgery’ is created with the intent to deceive, a copy is often created with innocent, perhaps educational, intent. Over the course of an Old Master copy’s life however, the intent of the drawing is susceptible to reinterpretation, innocent or otherwise. Collectors as early as Giorgio Vasari have mistaken good quality copies for autograph drawings, and the practice of making autograph replicas has added further confusion to the mix. Similarly complex is the practice of later artists retouching and reworking earlier drawings, querying notions of fakery and originality.
This month we have two drawings from the British Museum, London, where not all is as it might seem. But which example is autograph, and which is the copy? Or is the story more complex than that?
Scroll to the end to reveal the answer.
Resources and Recommendations
to listen
Fairy Tales and Forests: The Grimms and Caspar David Friedrich
With Friedrich’s anniversary celebrations in full flow, it feels an appropriate time to look back on an episode of Neil MacGregor’s BBC Radio 4 series ‘Germany: Memories of a Nation’, highlighting why the artist holds such a cherished place in the German imagination. In this episode, MacGregor reveals how the fairy tales collected by the Grimms and the landscape art of Caspar David Friedrich played a vital role in re-establishing an identity for German-speaking people who had been defeated by Napoleon.
to watch
The Spinario by Jan Gossart (CODART Canon)
In recent weeks CODART launched a Youtube channel with recordings from annual congresses, curator interviews and the Canon video series. In this video, Jef Schaeps, Curator of Prints and Drawings, Print Room of University Leiden, Netherlands, discusses Jan Gossart’s drawing of the Spinario, one of 100 Masterpieces of Dutch and Flemish art (1350–1750) selected for the CODART Canon.
to read
Making faces: the science of expressions in Georgian drawings, Kirsten Tambling
This illuminating article explores how Georgian artists studied and depicted human emotions through facial expressions, drawing on the translated lectures of the French painter and theorist, Charles Le Brun, and contemporary studies in physiognomy and anatomy. It delves into the intersection of art and science during the 18th century using examples from William Hogarth and William Blake. These drawings and the efforts of contemporary writers highlight the reality that expressive potential of the human face is not so easy to systematise.
answer
The original, of course, is the upper image. The drawing is by Giulio Romano (c. 1499–1546). The lower image is a copy by an anonymous artist, reworked in the 17th century by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) or Erasmus Quellinus II (1607–1678).
Upper image: Giulio Romano, Perseus disarming and the origin of coral, London, British Museum
Lower image: Peter Paul Rubens or Erasmus Quellinus II, Perseus disarming and the origin of coral, London, British Museum
Although the lower image might appear more highly finished at first glance, on closer inspection the figurative outlines in pen and ink are rather pedestrian. The drawing is an early copy of Giulio Romano’s original, but it has been transformed in appearance by the vigorous and extensive additions made with the brush, which have been attributed to Rubens on stylistic and contextual grounds. Rubens was a dealer, diplomat and collector, who owned a large number of Italian drawings by the artists he admired, many of which he reworked in this manner. Clearly, the authorship of such a drawing can cause confusion; when it entered the British Museum in 1851, it was thought to be by Giulio Romano. The arrival of the Giulio Romano’s original drawing in 1895 revealed it to be a reworked copy.
More recently, Jeremy Wood has argued that the brushwork does not have the liveliness of Rubens and instead attributes it to Erasmus Quellinus II.
See, M. Jones, Fake? The Art of Deception, 1990, London, pp. 42-43.
