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Studying on paper
Fig.1
Hôtel Turgot seen from the garden,
20 December 2011
Fig. 2
Frits Lugt among his albums with drawings,
circa 1967
Master drawings from the
Fondation Custodia in Paris
by Ger Luijten, director Fondation Custodia
A
stone’s throw from the Assemblée Nationale in Paris, between the high
numbers of rue de Lille and the small square where rue de l’Université
briefly becomes place Bourbon (before reclaiming its name and barrelling
on as straight as a die), there is an 18th-century hôtel particulier. A low
building forming an enclave among tall though not unpleasant apartment
blocks built to the principles espoused by the urban renewer GeorgesEugène Hausmann (1809-91). All at least six storeys high, and on top, under the roof,
storage space and the chambres de bonnes. But not so Hôtel Turgot, which is named
after Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727-81), Controller-General of the Finances
under Louis XVI and a contributor to Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, who lived
in it for a while and died there. Hôtel Turgot has only two storeys, and is still suffused
with the atmosphere of the age when it was built (fig. 1). Today it is the home of the
Fondation Custodia, which was founded by the collector Frits Lugt (1884-1970) and
his wife To Lugt-Klever (1888-1969). They moved their collection there and regarded
it as the ideal location for the activities of their foundation, which administers, studies,
exhibits, publishes and enriches the collection and, more generally, serves art history.
The collection consists of drawings, paintings, portrait miniatures. prints, artists’
letters, rare old books, stained-glass panels, sculpture, furniture, classical antiquities
and Chinese porcelain. The most important section, that of Old Master drawings, most
of which are preserved authentically in original ‘art books’ - bound albums with empty
pages between which the drawings lie (fig. 2) - has been combed for a selection to be
exhibited at the 25th edition of TEFAF in The director’s choice, as part of the section
‘Works on paper’. The presentation is intended as homage to Frits Lugt, one of the most
important figures in the history of Dutch collecting, and as a delight for the eyes of the
TEFAF visitors.
The underlying principle has been to present the drawings in a form different
from the one in which they are preserved in the collection: classified by country or
city of origin. The exhibition is concentrated around ten different types of drawing:
draperies, nudes, figure studies, sketches with variations of the same subject, faces,
animals, landscapes, trees, architecture, studies of light and shade, and drawings that
tell stories. Four splendid examples have been chosen in each category to create a
powerful visual rhyme. At the entrance four drawings will be highlighted showing
draughtsmen at work. The idea is to stress that various artists have been preoccupied
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with very similar problems for which they found original
solutions.
The Frits Lugt collection is strong in drawings preparatory
for a painting or done by the artist to practice. In fact Lugt
wanted very much to understand the artistic process and reveal
it within his collection. In order to enhance that he also started
a collection of artist’s autographs, ideally letters that illuminate
the genesis of a work of art or an artistic career. Lugt was
particularly interested in sketchbooks and illustrated printed
manuals for artists. Rare examples of these will also be included
in the exhibition.
The tension will lie in the confrontation between the
sheets. One drawing that fires the imagination is a drapery study
on linen by Leonardo da Vinci (fig. 3) that perfectly illustrates the
master’s technique as described by Giorgio Vasari in 1550. He
is said to have drenched strips of canvas in sugared water and
then draped them around a mannikin in order to draw the folds. It
seems that Andrea Verrocchio, Leonardo’s teacher, did the same,
and that method must have been imitated in Florence, as can be
seen from a closely related study by Lorenzo di Credi, who is also
known to have spent some time in Verrocchio’s studio (fig. 4).
Lugt bought the latter drawing for a sizable sum in 1926, but
received the Leonardo as a gift in 1954 from Marquis Hubert de
Ganay in memory of his aunt, Comtesse Marie-Pol de Béhague.
It is incredible that the two sheets can be shown side by side in
the Fondation Custodia, and that treat is now being granted just
once to TEFAF visitors as well.
The purpose of drapery studies is to use them in a painting
for a clothed figure. The number of nude studies made in the
studio is countless, and Italian and Dutch samples will be on
view in the exhibition. The models were often asked to take up a
pose that was required in a painting. That is what the Bolognese
master Guercino must have done with an obedient little boy
just out of babyhood whom he wanted to draw with an eye to
an altarpiece with a Madonna and Child in which the infant Jesus
seated on his mother’s knee makes a gesture of blessing with his
Fig. 5
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri called Guercino (1591-1666)
Study of a nude child for the infant Christ, seated on the Virgin’s knee
Red chalk, washed over, heightened with white on buff paper, 254 x 197 mm
inv. no. 6170
Fig. 3
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Drapery study
Brush and grey-brown wash, heightened with white body-colour,
on linen coloured grey, laid down on paper, 240 x 193 mm
inv. no. 6632
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Fig. 4
Lorenzo di Credi (circa 1458-1537)
Drapery study
Silverpoint on pale pinkish ground, pale grey-brown wash,
heightened with white body-colour, 219 x 176 mm
inv. no. 2491
right hand (fig. 5). Until 1949 the drawing was part of an album
of drawings by Guercino. Lugt bought the sheet in London from
a dealer who had obtained the album at an auction and sold off
the studies individually.
The category of clothed figure studies contains works in
oil on paper by Jacob Jordaens and Dirck Hals, as well as two
sheets en trois crayons by Rubens (fig. 6) and Antoine Watteau.
Rubens used his masterly sheet in three different paintings, each
time for a maidservant in a kitchen scene. Lugt succeeded in
acquiring the large sheet in 1919 at the auction of the collection
of Pieter Langerhuizen (1839-1918), where he was a major
buyer, along with the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam. The
auction house had not recognised the maker of the drawing and
had placed it in a large miscellaneous lot. ‘I made the purchase in
question in an emptying room for a very reasonable sum,’ Lugt
later recalled.
Fig. 6
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)
Standing woman with a dish
Black and red chalk, corrected with white chalk, 472 x 301 mm
inv. no. 257
Many drawings demonstrate their maker’s studious
approach, with repetitions of the same subject, sometimes seen
from different angles or as variations on a theme. The exhibition
contains examples of this by Fra Bartolommeo, Jacques de
Gheyn and Guercino, and also by Alvise Vivarini, a 15th-century
Venetian artist whose work betrays the influence of Antonello
da Messina and Giovanni Bellini (fig. 7). The sheet consists of six
studies of hands, and it proved possible to identify all of them
in paintings by Vivarini. It is one of his few drawings, and the
most beautiful one. Lugt acquired it in Berlin in 1925 when the
attribution had already been made. Prior to that it had mistakenly
borne the names of Buffalmacco and Bellini.
In addition to hands and feet, a body, a pose and clothing,
figures in paintings also have faces, physiognomies, expressions.
They are not only studied by the artist looking in a mirror and
reproducing his own features but also by capturing those of the
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Fig. 10
Hubert Robert (1733-1808)
Grove in an Italian park
Red chalk, 396 x 492 mm
inv. no. 8915
Fig. 7
Alvise Vivarini (1445/46-1503/05)
Six studies of hands, two right, three left
Metalpoint, point of the brush and grey-brown colour, on
salmon-pink ground, heightened with white body-colour,
279 x 194 mm
inv. no. 2226
Fig. 8
Carlo Dolci (1616-86)
Portrait of the artist’s wife Teresa Bucharelli
Red and black chalk, slightly washed over in parts, 182 x
137 mm
inv. no. 7880
people around him, whether or not he actually intends to draw
someone’s portrait. There are drawn studies of heads - old and
young, attractive and revolting, learned and naive - and drawings
of the head of a son or daughter, father or mother, wife often
have a studious intent quite separate from the likeness. Andrea
del Sarto drew someone in his circle with long hair hanging loose
and used that study in a painting, while other artists asked a son
(Jan Cossiers) or a member of their family or household (Ottavio
Leoni) to pose and made a portrait or head that could serve for
the chaste Susanna or as the personification of beauty itself. Carlo
Dolci drew the portraits of his wife Teresa Bucharelli and their
children in a sketchbook (fig. 8), which he may have then given to
their daughter Agnese. By one route or another, including the great
collector of drawings Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri and many
others after him, the drawing of his wife with a red ribbon in her
hair ended up under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London in 1963,
where it was bought by Lugt.
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The Fondation Custodia’s collection contains several
albums of ‘portraits’ or more general depictions of animals
which artists often made in preparation for the staffage in
their paintings, but also out of an interest in nature. Here we
present a selection from the sheets by Jacques de Gheyn
(studies of a delightful donkey), Giandomenico Tiepolo,
who made a study of a flock of quail, Aert Schouman with
a watercolour of a bird of paradise, and Gerbrand van den
Eeckhout’s Studies of a dog lying down (fig. 9). This pupil, and
according to Arnold Houbraken later friend, of Rembrandt had
a superb mastery of the technique of making drawings from
life with brush and ink. Most of them are figure studies, and
this is the only known one of an animal. It is the German boar
dog type, an ancestor of the Great Dane, which was trained
to hunt wild boar. Lugt found the sheet in London in 1946,
and because of its quality and rarity was prepared to pay the
hefty sum of 825 guilders for it.
Fig. 9
Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621-74)
Studies of a dog lying down
Point of the brush in brown ink, brown wash,
294 x 199 mm
inv. no. 5822
Landscapes were Lugt’s great love, and the overviews that
he put together of Dutch, Flemish, Italian and French drawings in
this genre are unparalleled. On view at TEFAF are A wooded hill
in the neighbourhood of a city (c. 1508) by the Florentine artist
Fra Bartolommeo, the incredibly controlled Ruins of the Castle
of Spangen by Willem Buytewech from a century later, a Grove
in an Italian park by Hubert Robert (fig. 10), which displays a
superior use of red chalk and was only bought by Lugt in 1967
when it was auctioned as a Fragonard, and an even more recent
acquisition - the astonishing View of the plain near Vaugirard of
1856 by Léon Bonvin in deep black chalk that anticipates similar
drawings by Georges Seurat.
Landscape means trees, and there are drawn studies of
them in abundance, undoubtedly because their vigorous growth
and beauty constantly make fresh appeals to the creativity of
artists. The choice for the exhibition fell on two close-ups by
Federico Barocci (fig. 11) and the Fleming Jan Siberechts (fig.
12) respectively in order to highlight the universality of the
motif. Both artists used a little colour in their drawings, which
only enhances their attractiveness. Lugt bought them in 1957
and 1930. There is also a dense clump of trees in an oil sketch
on paper made in Rome in 1834 by Paul Flandrin, and a group
of scattered oaks on the royal route near Gentofte outside
Copenhagen by Vilhelm Hammershoi (1892), whose star has
now risen to great heights, which was acquired in 1990.
Studies of architecture, both exteriors and interiors, are an
important genre in drawing. In addition to identifiable architecture,
or topography, there are buildings, or rather built locations, as a
category of their own. Despite its picturesqueness, Anthonie van
Waterloo’s View of the Binnen-Amstel is pure description, and the
same is true of Pieter Jansz Saenredam’s Interior of St Cunera’s church
at Rhenen (fig. 13), which Lugt acquired from the Six Collection in
1928. Two other works in the group on display are also of built
architectural structures: Willem Schellink’s Chapel at the Valkhof at
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Fig. 11
Federico Barocci
(circa 1535-1612)
Studies of trees
Black chalk, point of the brush and
brown ink, brown wash, some white
and grey body-colour on buffcoloured paper, 405 x 268 mm
inv. no. 7216
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Fig. 12
Jan Siberechts
(1627-circa 1703)
Study of an old
gnarled tree
Watercolour over
black chalk, 444 x
311 mm
inv. no. 4542
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Fig. 16
Attributed to Giovanni Mauro della Rovere
(circa 1575-1640)
The drawing school, pen and brown ink
Brown wash over red chalk, heightened with pink and white
body-colour on greenish-grey paper, 222 x 309 mm
inv. no. 3779
Fig. 13
Pieter Jansz Saenredam (1597-1665)
The interior of St Cunera’s Church at Rhenen
1644, pen and brown ink, watercolour, 403 x 545 mm
inv. no. 3599
Fig. 15
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69)
The healing of the mother-in-law of St Peter
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, in some places rubbed
with a finger, heightened with white, 171 x 189 mm
inv. no. 5794
Nijmegen (1660) and the entrance to an unidentified French church
by Auguste-Xavier Leprince, but they are far less about architecture
as such and more about what can be seen at the location in the way
of tone and colour and the traces of man’s presence.
Artists have always been fascinated by rhythm, form,
colour, darkness and light. How does a man look when he is
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Fig. 14
Bartholomeus Breenbergh (1599/1600-57)
In the park of Castello Bomarzo
1625, pen and brown ink, brown and grey wash, 407 x 280 mm
inv. no. 4478
sitting smoking a pipe by candlelight? And what, precisely, do
you see looming out of the darkness of the catacombs of the
Capuchin friary in Palermo? Frans van Mieris made a drawing of
the first subject and the 19th-century Danish artist Martinus
Rørbye came back from Sicily with an oil sketch in which he
examined the latter. The exhibition also deals with the light of
a sun-drenched landscape. Many artists from northern Europe
went to Italy to record the light of the south in drawings and
paintings. Bartholomeus Breenbergh was one of them, and the
drawings that he made in the park in Bomarzo, one of which
Lugt bought in 1930, are still striking as the ultimate rendering
of sunlight (fig. 14). Christen Købke did the same on his visit to
Italy two centuries later, but he also succeeded in capturing the
meadows outside Copenhagen brilliantly as they lay in the full
light of the summer sun.
Ultimately, many artists wanted to use their studies to tell
a story taken from the Bible or mythology. Those drawings are in
the minority in the Lugt Collection, but there are a few. One, by
Paolo Farinati, is on blue paper and shows the figure of Daphne
in a niche in superb chiaroscuro with leaves sprouting from her
fingertips. Two figures telling a story can be seen in Rembrandt’s
Healing of the mother-in-law of St Peter (fig. 15), which once
belonged to the artist Max Liebermann and was bought by Lugt
in New York in 1942. Christ, who cured her ‘who lay sick of
fever’, is raising her up in such a way that he bears all her weight.
Rembrandt omitted all unnecessary details in order to focus
attention on the miraculous event. A story with three actors is
depicted in Giambattista Tiepolo’s Holy Family, in which Joseph
and Mary are so besotted with the love of their newborn that
they look as if they are eating him up. Federico
Zuccaro is represented with a pen study of a
group of excited bystanders witnessing a
scene of Christ raising the son of the widow of
Nain. The entire figure group, which is a design
for an altarpiece with Christ as the protagonist
that was commissioned for Orvieto Cathedral
in 1568, is on the other side of the sheet.
The presentation closes with four
drawings of artists at work. One is a landscape
attributed to Paulus van Vianen in which an
artist wearing a large hat is drawing trees
in the open air, and there are two sheets of
drawing lessons, one by Giovanni Mauro
della Rovere in which four young men are
drawing by lamplight (fig. 16). The other is
by an anonymous Dutch or English artist and
shows draughtsmen around a nude with their
eyes fastened on their model. And then there
is a sheet from Chardin’s circle illustrating a
practice not discussed so far but which must
have been a common sight: a young artist
wearing a cocked hat sitting on the ground
and carefully copying the painting standing
before him (fig. 17). Working from life was
one thing, but looking at art and imitating it
was always part of an apprentice’s training,
and was an important route to becoming an
artist oneself.
Fig. 17
Anonymous 18th-century French artist
Young artist copying a painting
Black chalk, 277 x 302 mm
inv. no. 3017
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