Sotheby's to sell works from the Private Collection of legendary art dealer Jan Krugier

Alberto Giacometti, Homme traversant une place par un matin de soleil, conceived in 1950. Est. £3-5 million/$5-8 million. Photo: Sotheby's

LONDON.- On 5 and 6 February 2014, Sotheby’s London will present over 100 masterworks from a collection that has captivated the imagination of world connoisseurs since it was first unveiled 14 years ago: The Private Collection of Jan Krugier. A survivor of the Holocaust, the legendary art dealer – perhaps best known for his involvement with the work of Picasso – walked through life believing in the redemptive potential of art. Together with his wife, Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, he amassed one of the world's most spectacular collections of works on paper through which he was able to connect particularly closely with the artists he admired the most. 

As he described it: “Marie-Anne and I began gathering works on paper by artists of all periods, their common denominator being an intrinsic timeless quality, a same universal, unique approach to the world and to things. It is also, somehow, an inner voyage, an ardent quest and a summing up of our tastes and our artistic aspirations.” 

These were the works that they chose to hang in their private home. 

Spanning the history of art from the late 18th to the mid-20th century, the group to be offered incorporates powerful works by the greatest names of their time: Goya, Delacroix, Géricault, Corot, Turner, Degas, Manet, Bonnard, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Matisse, Klee, Picasso and Giacometti. 

Many of the works were included in a series of celebrated exhibitions of the Krugier’s private collection, which were shown at museums in Berlin, Venice, Madrid, Paris, Vienna and Munich. 

Commenting on the forthcoming sale of the collection, Helena Newman, Chairman of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department, Europe, said: “Jan Krugier’s private collection is testament to a definitive journey in the history of the 20th century. Through it we come close to the mind and soul of this extraordinary man. Each work reflects his erudition, his devotion to art, boundless curiosity and inherent independence from convention. Regardless of their period of creation, these works of artistic genius describe a timeless vision of humanity, with unequaled power of expression. It is extremely rare for a private collection to boast such quality and variety and its appearance on the market will constitute a landmark event in 2014”. 

Together estimated to realise in excess of £24 million (US$39 million), all 119 lots capture what Krugier looked for in art: “a deep spirit, something sacred and deeply experienced”. 

THE ARTWORKS

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Alberto Giacometti played a major role in Jan Krugier’s personal life and career. Krugier met the Swiss artist during a summer in the Alps in 1947 when he was himself a young artist. He became a valued confidant and it was he who encouraged Krugier to become an art adviser and gallerist: “After all that you have been through, you do not need a monologue, but a dialogue… You understand artists better than anyone else.” As a collector, Krugier was looking for the “be or not be” in art, as reflected in a group of drawings and sculpture by Giacometti led by the iconic bronze sculpture. The February auctions feature Homme traversant une place par un matin de soleil, conceived in 1950 (est. £3-5 million/$5-8 million). While many have viewed Giacometti’s “walking man” as emblematic of the horrors of World War II, it is also a primary example of the visual depiction of Sartre’s existential man, moving through life, alone, yet free and responsible for his actions. 

The February auctions feature Homme traversant une place par un matin de soleil, conceived in 1950 (est. £3-5 million/$5-8 million). While many have viewed Giacometti’s “walking man” as emblematic of the horrors of World War II, it is also a primary example of the visual depiction of Sartre’s existential man, moving through life, alone, yet free and responsible for his actions. 

Alberto Giacometti, Homme traversant une place par un matin de soleil, conceived in 1950. Est. £3-5 million/$5-8 million. Photo: Sotheby's

signed A. Giacometti, numbered 6/6 and stamped with the foundry mark Alexis Rudier Fondeur, Paris; bronze; height: 47cm. 18 1/2 in. Executed in 1950 and cast in bronze in an edition of 6. The present bronze was cast in 1951. 

Provenance: Private Collection, Switzerland
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
J. David Settles, New York
Private Collection, Europe
Acquired from the above by the late owner in January 1989

Exhibited: New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Alberto Giacometti: Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings, 1985, no. 28, illustrated in the catalogue
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, 20th Century European Masters, 1985-86, no. 24
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Alberto Giacometti, dibujo-escultura-pintura, 1990-91, no. 243, illustrated in the catalogue (titled L'Homme qui marche III and as dating from 1960)
Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 185, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no. 217, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La Passion du Dessin. Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2002, no. 177, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Vienna, Albertina, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no. 165, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 218, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1962, illustration of another cast p. 244 (titled Homme qui marche III)

Note: Giacometti's remarkable Homme traversant une place par un matin de soleil is an instantly recognisable icon of Modern art. Captured in mid-stride, the figure’s weighted front foot is firmly rooted to the base while the other heel lifts off the ground, and the entire figure is defined by the diagonal line of the body as the man’s torso leans forward. Giacometti's creation of this sculpture at the end of the 1940s coincided with his production of other career-defining bronzes, all featuring his signature attenuated figures, either represented alone or in a group. In each case this image of psychological isolation represents Giacometti's most literal attempt to personify his own existential preoccupations in the years following the Second World War. And to the Existentialist philosophers themselves, this very image became the clear and undisputed signifier of the exasperating uncertainty that defined an entire generation.

In the late 1940s, Giacometti was fascinated by spatial relationships and the concept of movement within a single work. The present sculpture was undeniably conceived in an urban context, with the platform on which the figure is depicted derived from the notion of a city square. Referring to the new perception of people and the space surrounding them, Giacometti recounted that, upon leaving a cinema in 1945, he suddenly felt that ‘people seemed like a completely foreign species, mechanical... mindless machines, like men in the street who come and go... a bit like ants, each one going about his own business, alone ignored by the others. They crossed paths, passed by, without seeing each other, without looking... In the street people astound and interest me more than any sculpture or painting. Every second the people stream together and go apart, they approach each other to get closer to one another. They unceasingly form and reform living compositions in unbelievable complexity’ (A. Giacometti, quoted in Pierre Schneider, 'Ma longue marche par Alberto Giacometti', in L'Express, Paris, 8th June 1961, pp. 48-50).

Between 1947 and 1950 Giacometti made several sculptures centred on the figure of the walking man or a group of men set on a platform suggestive of a city square. Other sculptures from this period, now widely recognised as the pinnacle of his œuvre, include Homme qui marche sous la pluie (fig. 1), and La Place (fig. 3). In all of their various forms, Giacometti’s walking men were the embodiment of the isolation and anxiety symptomatic of post-war Europe. Frozen in time yet determined to move forward, alone yet unable to escape the urban throng, these solitary figures have come to symbolise the great existential dilemma of the twentieth century. 

Homme traversant une place par un matin de soleilepitomises Giacometti's mature style, developed during the years immediately following the Second World War and characterised by the tall, slender figures for which he is best known. No longer interested in recreating physical likenesses in his sculptures, the artist began working from memory, seeking to capture his figures beyond the physical reality of the human form. Giacometti elongated the vertical axis while reducing the thickness of his sculptures: the man in the present work is thus composed of thin lines, lending the composition a weightless, almost impalpable quality. The image of a man can be interpreted as a symbolic representation of the artist himself and, in a wider context of the post-war period, as a reflection of the lonely and vulnerable human condition. The man in this composition is rendered as a lean, wiry figure, a feature of Giacometti's work that reached its ultimate form in the life-sizedL’homme qui marche of 1960 (fig. 4).

Valerie J. Fletcher compared the present sculpture with the closely related Homme qui marche sous la pluie of 1948 (fig. 1): ‘Giacometti once spoke of Man Walking Quickly in the Rain, 1948 and Man Crossing a Square in the Sun [the present sculpture], 1949, as representing himself [...]. In Man Crossing a Square in the Sun, Giacometti made the pose more dynamic by tilting the torso further forward and lengthening the stride; this pose proved to be definitive, for it recurs in the monumental walking men of 1960’ (V. Fletcher,op. cit., pp. 135-136).

PABLO PICASSO

Picasso is certainly the artist most associated with Krugier’s career and his works occupy the core of his collection. Krugier met the Spanish master just once - in Paris in 1947 – but the effect was immediate and intense: Krugier was so deeply affected by Picasso, and in particular by the intensity of his eyes, that he was rendered speechless. Following Picasso’s death in 1973, Marie-Thérèse Walter, the artist’s long-time muse and lover entrusted him with her collection and in 1976, he became the sole agent for the collection of Picasso’s works inherited by the artist’s granddaughter, Marina.

The offering includes 18 works by Picasso, mainly works on paper, covering the key periods in the artist’s career, from 1902 to 1967. The Minotaur – a recurring figure in Picasso’s oeuvre dominates Composition au Minotaure, a gouache on paper executed in 1936 (est. £1.8-2.5 million/$3-4 million). Picasso’s use of the Minotaur as a symbol of the duality of violence and gentleness in all men profoundly echoes the experience of Jan Krugier who “discovered very young that there is a cohabitation of good and evil in human beings” and tried “to find something that sublimates this in the art” he surrounded himself with.

Pablo Picasso ( (1881 - 1973),  Composition (Composition au Minotaure). Est. £1.8-2.5 million/$3-4 million. Photo: Sotheby's

dated 9 Mai XXXVI (lower right); dated 9 Mai XXXVI on the reverse; gouache, pen and ink and pencil on paper; 50.2 by 65.2cm. 19 3/4 by 25 3/4 in. Executed on 9th May 1936.

Provenance: Estate of the artist (inv. 3871)
Marina Picasso (the artist's granddaughter; by descent from the above)
Acquired from the above by the late owner

Exhibited: New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Pablo Picasso. A Retrospective, 1980, illustrated in the catalogue
Venice, Centro di Cultura di Palazzo Grassi, Picasso, Opere dal 1895 al 1971 dalla Collezione Marina Picasso, 1981, no. 228, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Il Minotauro trafitto)
Munich, Haus der Kunst; Cologne, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle; Frankfurt, Städtische Galerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut & Zurich, Kunsthaus, Pablo Picasso, Sammlung Marina Picasso, 1981-82, no. 187, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Tokyo, The National Museum of Modern Art & Kyoto, Municipal Museum, Picasso, Masterpieces from Marina Picasso Collection and Museums in U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., 1983, no. 148, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Minotaur and Women)
Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria & Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Picasso, 1984, no. 113, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Tübingen, Kunsthalle & Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Picasso: Pastelle, Zeichnungen, Aquarelle, 1986, no. 162, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Tokyo, Seibu Art Forum & Ohtsu, Seibu Hall, Pablo Picasso: Collection Marina Picasso, 1990-91, no. 19, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Minotaur and Women)
New York, Jan Krugier Gallery, Tauromaquia, Works by Pablo Picasso, Photographs by L. Clergue, 1991
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Forma. El ideal clásico en el arte moderno, 2001-02, no. 62, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, La Révolution Surréaliste, 2002, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Vienna, Albertina, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no. 154, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 189, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Surrealism in Paris, 2011-12, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, œuvres de 1932 à 1937, Paris, 1957, vol. 8, no. 286, illustrated pl. 136
The Picasso Project (ed.), Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. Surrealism, 1930-1936, San Francisco, 1997, no. 36-060, illustrated p. 287
Brigitte Léal, Christine Piot & Maris-Laure Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, no. 745, illustrated in colour p. 303
Picasso and Greece (exhibition catalogue), Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Andros, 2004, illustrated p. 61 (titled Minotaur Pierced by a Sword)
Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso. From the Minotaure to Guernica (1927-1939), Barcelona, 2011, no. 800, illustrated in colour p. 252 (titled Dying Minotaur (Composition))

Note: Beautifully detailed and replete with allegorical and mythical imagery, the present work belongs to a series of Minotaur compositions that Picasso completed in May 1936 (figs. 1 & 2). The scene features a cast of characters who by this point were commonly represented in Picasso’s repertoire, but their significance here was much more heavily invested with biographical detail. These three pictures were considered by Picasso as amongst his most treasured works, and remained with him until his death, when the present work was inherited by his granddaughter Marina, and the other two formed part of the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. ‘If you marked on a map all the routes along which I passed and drew a line to join them together’, Picasso once remarked, ‘it would perhaps take the shape of a Minotaur’ (reprinted in Picasso and Greece (exhibtion catalogue), op. cit., back cover). The present work, executed with transparent washes of colour that enhance the element of fantasy, perfectly exemplifies this statement.

When he completed this picture in the late spring of 1936, Picasso was experiencing a drastic upheaval in his personal life. His marriage to Olga was in shambles, his mistress Marie-Thérèse had recently given birth to the couple’s daughter Maya, and his new love interest, Dora Maar, was now inserting herself within the drama of Picasso’s personal life. The scene depicted in the present work provides a dramatic narrative that can readily be applied to Picasso’s current state of affairs.  On the left appears the unmistakable image of Marie-Thérèse, shrouded by the sail, while the impaled Minotaur, understood to be the alter-ego of the artist who has fallen on his own sword, lies in agony at her feet. The bucking horse, which would appear a year later in Picasso’s harrowing Guernica, could be interpreted as a stand-in for Dora, while the black shadow over the dying beast is perhaps an allusion to the menace of Olga. Rich with interpretive possibility, this picture is one of the most visually engaging from Picasso’s fascinating series that spring.

The image of the Minotaur, a character of Cretan mythology born of the union between Pasiphaë and a bull, first appeared in Picasso's work in a collage of 1928, now at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. In 1933 Picasso executed another version of this subject for the cover for the first issue of Minotaure, a Surrealist periodical published by Albert Skira and Tériade in Paris. It was primarily the hybrid nature of the creature that appealed to Picasso and many Surrealist artists, who delighted in the union of opposing forces embodied in this figure. In a number of Picasso's works throughout the 1930s, including several preparatory sketches for Guernica, the Minotaur is depicted as a ferocious animal, often in scenes of rape and violence. In the present work, however, his fierce character appears at the mercy of the women surrounding him.

It appears that Picasso has conflated several stories of Greek mythology in this intricate composition. The raft on which the Minotaur lies dying alludes to the raft of Odysseus, while the laurel-crowned Marie-Thérèse could be a reference to the virtuous Calypso, the nymph-lover whom Odysseus abandoned in order to return to his wife. A female version of Theseus, who in Plutarch’s telling sails to Crete to slay the Minotaur, waves her lance astride a horse. In the essay ‘The Death of a Monster’, Niki Loizidi provides yet another possible narrative: ‘The presence of a spear leads us directly to the conclusion that the flower-wreathed woman is, as well as being a symbol of classical beauty, a female picador one of the protagonists of the Spanish corrida. In other words, the figure of the young girl combines the beauty of Aphrodite with the strength of an ancient Amazon and also the role in the Spanish bullfight of the picador, who aggressively torments the bull, ultimately delivering the coup de grâce’ (N. Loizidi, ‘The Death of a Monster, or Classicism as Modernism’s path to Self-Knowledge’, in Picasso and Greece (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 61).

Picasso’s power of expression is captured in La Femme qui pleure I, a portrait belonging to a series of weeping women that the artist created in 1937, following the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War (est. £1.2-1.8 million/$ 1.94-2.9 million).

Pablo Picasso ( (1881 - 1973), La Femme qui pleure I. Est. £1.2-1.8 million/$ 1.94-2.9 million. Photo: Sotheby's

signed Picasso (lower right) and numbered 8/15 (lower left); dry point, aquatint, etching and scraper on Montval laid paper; plate size: 69 by 49.5cm.; 27 1/8 by 19 1/2 in., sheet size: 78 by 57.5cm.; 30 3/4 by 22 5/8 in. Executed in 1937. A very fine impression of the seventh, final state.

Provenance: Estate of the artist (inv. 20393)
Marina Picasso (the artist's granddaughter; by descent from the above)
Acquired from the above by the late owner

Exhibited: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 139, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection,1999, no. 153, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Bern, Kunstmuseum, Picasso und die Schweiz, 2001-02, no. 121, illustrated in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 192, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: Georges Bloch, Pablo Picasso, catalogue de l'œuvre gravé et lithographié, 1904-1967, Bern, 1971, vol. I, no. 1333, another impression illustrated p. 1170
Felix A. Baumann, Pablo Picasso Leben und Werk, Stuttgart, 1976, no. 255, another example from the edition illustrated p. 138
Brigitte Baer & Bernhard Geiser, Picasso peintre-graveur, Bern, 1986, vol. III, no. 623.6, another example from the edition illustrated p. 123 (incorrectly catalogued as state VI)
Brigitte Baer, Picasso peintre-graveur, addendum au catalogue raisonné, Bern, 1996, no. 623, another example from the edition illustrated p. 561
Brigitte Léal, Christine Piot & Marie-Laure Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, no. 785, another example from the edition illustrated p. 322
Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso. Style and Meaning, 2002, no. 579, another example from the edition illustrated p. 599
Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso. From the Minotaure to Guernica (1927-1939), Barcelona, 2011, no. 1017, another example from the edition illustrated p. 332 (incorrectly catalogued as state VIb)

Note: La femme qui pleure I is arguably Picasso's most important print and without doubt one of the most significant prints of the 20th Century. The image is highly arresting, emanating a powerful presence both through the sheer physicality of the sitter and through the emotionally charged atmosphere of the work. In 1937 Picasso found himself in a maelstrom of personal and political anguish. It would lead him to create one of his greatest paintings, Guernica (fig. 2), and alongside it the important series of paintings, drawings and prints of the La femme qui pleure. The motif of the Weeping Woman first made an appearance in a drawing towards the end of May and in the coming months became a subject Picasso would return to repeatedly (figs. 3 & 4). Although the composition as it appears in the etching and in many of the paintings does not feature in the finished version of Guernica, it became the vehicle through which Picasso explored many of the themes central to the mural.

In January 1937 Picasso had started work on a pair of etchings in support of the Republican side in the Spanish civil war titled Sueño y mentira di Franco (Dreams and lies of Franco). In the same month he received an invitation to paint a large mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris that summer. He saw the opportunity to make a great political statement and experimented with various possible subjects to achieve this through the spring. On 26th April the German air force, at the request of Franco's forces, repeatedly bombed the Basque town of Guernica, all but levelling the town and killing many civilians. The event caused international outrage and was the catalyst to Picasso finding a subject through which he could channel his own abhorrence and anger at events unfolding in his native country. 

Motivated by a sense of moral outrage and determined to show his support for the Republican cause, Picasso turned to printmaking to more readily disseminate his visual protest. Idiomatically apt, the Weeping Woman spoke directly of the Spanish tragedy, her shattered features fulfilling the role of the modern Mater Dolorosa. On 1st July Picasso began the first state of La femme qui pleure I, outlining the figure with urgent economy. Gradually working on the plate over the course of two days, the image began to evolve. The tones of her face and hair were fleshed out with diverse hatching and aquatint washes until Picasso worked so extensively on the sixth state causing large areas to fall into tenebristic relief. The seventh state was the most accomplished work or the group, balanced between impressively achieved graphic effects and legibility. In total Picasso printed forty proofs, but only the 3rd (fig. 3) and 7th states were numbered and signed by the artist.

As ever in Picasso's art, events in his own life also impacted very significantly on the development of the image providing a creative energy which would work in tandem with his worldly concerns. The turmoil in Picasso's private life would have a vital bearing on the image. Certainly his personal life was more complex than at any time in preceding decades, fraught as it was with the emotionally complex, overlapping relationships with the three women who in one way or another shared his life at this time. The Weeping Woman is often described as a portrait of Dora Maar, his companion since the previous year of whom Picasso said 'For me Dora Maar is the weeping woman'. There are elements of Maar's physical appearance as Picasso depicted her in other portraits from this time evident in this composition. It has also been argued that characteristics belonging to Marie-Thérèse Walter, his mistress and mother to a child born to them in 1936, can also be identified, as well as those of Olga, his wife since 1918 with whom Picasso's relations were at an all-time low. One such example are the sitter's hands which are thought to depict those of both Maar and Walter. Maar, who kept her nails long, pointed and painted red, is represented by the talon-like left hand, whilst the other hand, with the nails bitten down is thought to be that of Marie-Thérèse.

Picasso created this masterpiece in the workshop of Roger Lacourière who enabled Picasso to realise fully the potential of the various processes of the intaglio medium. Beginning in July 1937 Picasso would work the subject through seven states using etching, aquatint and drypoint.

In harnessing elements from both his personal life and from the darkening political landscape of mid-1930s Europe, La femme qui pleure I is a work that expresses aspects of the human condition, reflecting themes that are at once personal and universal and which continue to resonate today.

Exceptional works from the artist’s classicist period are found in a portrait of a young boy, Tête de jeune homme, executed in 1923 (est. £1-1.5 million/$1.5-2 million) and a stunning portrait of Dora Maar, Dora Maar à la coiffe from 1936 (est. £350,000-450,000/$600,000-800,000). 

Pablo Picasso ( (1881 - 1973), Tête de jeune homme. Est. £1-1.5 million/$1.5-2 million. Photo: Sotheby's

signed Picasso (lower right); dated 11-12-2-23 on the reverse; Conté crayon on paper; 63.5 by 47.5cm., 25 by 18 3/4 in. Executed in Paris on 11th-12th February 1923.

Provenance: Estate of the artist (inv. 3289)
Marina Picasso (the artist's granddaughter; by descent from the above)
Acquired from the above by the late owner

Exhibited: Venice, Centro di Cultura di Palazzo Grassi, Picasso, Opere dal 1895 al 1971 dalla Collezione Marina Picasso, 1981, no. 150, illustrated in the catalogue
Munich, Haus der Kunst; Cologne, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle; Frankfurt, Städtische Galerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut & Zurich, Kunsthaus, Pablo Picasso, Sammlung Marina Picasso, 1981-82, no. 134, illustrated in the catalogue
Tokyo, The National Museum of Modern Art & Kyoto, Municipal Museum, Picasso, Masterpieces from Marina Picasso Collection and Museums in U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., 1983, no. 109, illustrated in the catalogue
Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria & Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Picasso, 1984, no. 83, illustrated in the catalogue
Madrid, Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza, Picasso 1923, Arlequin con espejo y La flauta de Pan, 1995-96, no. 6, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Visage de 3/4 gauche)
Humlebaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Picasso and the Mediterranean, 1996-97, no. 64, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Visage de 3/4 gauche)
Venice, Palazzo Grassi, Picasso: The Italian Journey 1917-1924, 1998, no. 174, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Visage de trois quart gauche)
Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 130, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection,1999, no. 145, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no. 178, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Bern, Kunstmuseum, Picasso und die Schweiz, 2001-02, no. 79, illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La Passion du Dessin. Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2002, no. 157, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Vienna, Albertina, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no. 143, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 179, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: Christian Zervos, Dessins de Pablo Picasso 1892-1948, Paris, 1949, no. 86, illustrated p. 59
Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, œuvres de 1923 à 1925, Paris, 1952, vol. 5, no. 13, illustrated pl. 7
The Picasso Project (ed.), Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. Neoclassicism II, 1922-1924, San Francisco, 1996, no. 23-029, illustrated p. 115
Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso. From the Ballets to Drama (1917-1926), Barcelona, 1999, no. 1318, illustrated in colour p. 361
John Richardson, A Life of Picasso. The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, New York, 2007, illustrated p. 223

Note: An intimate rendering of the face of a young man, Tête de jeune homme belongs to a group of drawings and paintings of a young male model, possibly a dancer, that Picasso executed at the end of 1922 and early 1923 (figs. 1 & 3). It is a remarkable example of the artist's creative versatility and exemplifies the Neo-Classical stylisation he favoured over Cubism in the 1920s. His emphasis during these years was on the strength of line and the monumentality of form, and his figures often resembled the classical sculpture that he encountered on trips to Italy and Fontainebleau during those years. When he applied this particular style to more intimate renderings, the results were often stunning. The subtle details of the young man's face are captured here with the most skillful and precise draughtsmanship, resulting in a work of art that is at once distinctly modern and eternally beautiful. As Picasso once said about his own work, 'To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was' (quoted in Picasso: The Classical Period (exhibition catalogue), C&M Arts, New York, 2003, p. 21). 

This beautiful drawing is distinctly a product of Picasso's Neo-Classical style that characterised his work in the years following the First World War. The term 'Neo-Classical' refers to the artist's conscious affiliation with the art of the Greek and Roman era and his attempt to incorporate a similar formal precision and clear draughtsmanship into his art. Picasso's focus on the Classical age was a product ofrapel à l'ordre, a movement that dominated avant-garde art in France during this time. Its overarching socio-political goal was to cast France as the centre of the new 'golden age' of civilisation. This post-war cultural preoccupation could not have come at a better time for Picasso, who had all but exhausted Cubism by this point and was looking for a new way to challenge himself. Together with Jean Cocteau, Picasso traveled to Italy in 1921 to study the Latinate origins of art in Naples and Pompeii. 

According to John Richardson, one of the objects that had the most profound effect on him was the head of the Antinous from the second century (fig. 2), whose features appear in several of his head studies from the early 1920s. Richardson explains: 'Picasso occasionally gives her idealized classical features a look of Olga, or his American friend Sara Murphy, or his former fiancée Irène Lagut, or conceivably, one of the nannies Olga hired and fired. The same with the men in Picasso's Classical work. Their features are mostly based on those of another of the Farnese marbles, the celebrated Antinous. Once again, Picasso uses this as a base to which he adds glimpses of real people: himself, Gerald Murphy and a professional model – possibly a Diaghilev dancer called Nicolas Zverev – who seems to have posed for the artist while recovering from an injury to his leg. A very fine example of this series is the drawing of a man's head [the present work]. References to the Farnese marbles would recur whenever Picasso's imagery took on a classical tinge' (J. Richardson, ibid., p. 13). 

Throughout his œuvre, Picasso's depictions of male figures are most often invested with autobiographical significance, as Richardson notes. For example, Pipes of Pan, also completed in 1923, is widely regarded as a depiction of the artist's alter-ego, and the present composition offers a similar interpretation. With both of these works and his Neo-Classical compositions in general, 'he established a synthesis between the ancient world and the modern world – a synthesis that celebrates the new Mediterraneanism which he and the Murphys claimed with some justice to have inaugurated' (ibid., p. 20).

EDGAR DEGAS

The collection is also distinguished by masterful Impressionist works, including a sublime pastel by Edgar Degas depicting a woman at her toilette – a theme central to the artist’s oeuvre which underlines his mastery of pastel. Dating from circa 1893, Femme s’essuyant les pieds is a work of genius in its subtlety of line and the boldness of its composition (est. £1-1.5 million/$1.5-2 million). 

Edgar Degas (1834 - 1917), Femme s’essuyant les pieds, circa 1893. Est. £1-1.5 million/$1.5-2 million. Photo: Sotheby's

stamped Degas (lower left), pastel on paper laid down on board, 45.7 by 58cm., 18 by 22 7/8 in. Executed circa 1893.

Provenance: Estate of the artist (sold: Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, Atelier Degas, 2ème Vente, 11th-13th December 1918, lot 63)
Charles Comiot, Paris (acquired by 1927)
Yolande Mazuc, Caracas
Wildenstein & Co., New York (acquired from the above in 1947)
Mr & Mrs Morris Sprayregen, Atlanta (acquired by 1956)
Jacqueline & Matt Friedlander, Moultrie, Georgia (acquired by 1978. Sold: Sotheby's, New York, 14th November 1984, lot 17)
Philip & Muriel Berman, Allentown, Pennsylvania (purchased at the above sale. Sold: Sotheby's, New York, 4th November 2004, lot 42)
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Exhibited: New York, Wildenstein & Co., Loan Exhibition of Degas, 1949, no. 82
Toledo, Ohio, Toledo Museum of Art, Degas, 1950
New York, Wildenstein & Co., The Nude in Paintings, 1956, no. 29
Atlanta, The High Museum of Art, Drawings from Georgia Collections, 19th & 20th Centuries, 1981, no. 17
Atlanta, The High Museum of Art (on extended loan, 1984)
Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Degas in Philadelphia Collections, 1985
Ottawa, Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada & New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Degas, 1988-89, no. 312, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (as dating from circa 1895)
Collegeville, Ursinus College, Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, A Passion for Art: Selections from the Berman Collection, 1989
Vienna, Albertina Museum, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no. 69, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 116, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud; Florence, Palazzo Strozzi & Vienna, Albertina Museum, Impressionismus - Wie das Licht auf die Leinwand kam, 2008-10, no. 274, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Edgar Degas, The Late Work, 2012-13, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: François Fosca, 'La Collection Comiot', in L'Amour de l'Art, Paris, April 1927, illustrated p. 111
Paul-André Lemoisne, Degas et son œuvre, Paris, 1946, vol. III, no. 1137, illustrated p. 659
Jean Crenelle, 'The Perfection of Degas', in Arts, New York, April 1960, illustrated p. 40
John Updike, Just Looking, New York, 1990, illustrated in colour p. 111

Note: Femme s’essuyant les pieds belongs to Degas’ remarkable series of pastels of female nudes after a bath. One of the artist’s most iconic subjects, the bather began to appear with increasing frequency in his work from the early 1880s. In his works on the subject of women at their toilette, the artist often depicted them in the process of washing or, as in the present pastel, drying various parts of their body, which allowed him to explore unusual contortions of the nude. The present work, executed around 1893, depicts a bather leaning against her tub and drying her feet. Degas executed several versions of the same pose, rendering the model from different vantage points in the room (figs. 1 & 2). Here the view appears to be from slightly above the figure, an angle that accentuates the broad expanse of her back. The practice of repeatedly painting and drawing a given subject allowed Degas to study the pose from different angles and to gain a better understanding of the beauty and complexity of human anatomy.

Unlike his pictures of the ballet and the racetrack, Degas’ bather scenes were usually staged in the artist’s studio. Nevertheless, this pastel effectively recreates the spontaneity of the act and the voyeuristic experience of watching a woman at her toilette. To create a sensation of warmth in the room after the bath, Degas uses rich pastels of reds and oranges. Leaning against the bath tub, the model is positioned on what appears to be a lush, oriental rug, executed in short brushstrokes of orange, blue and white tones. Her upper body is bent over as she reaches for her foot, and her face is hidden from the viewer. While in some similar compositions Degas rendered the bather in the presence of another female (fig. 3), in this work she is depicted alone and at close view, emphasising the intimacy of the image.

In painting the nudes and semi-nudes, whom Degas studied so assiduously, the artist was interested in exploring the female body, rather than in representing his sitters as individuals. He rarely personified them, and concentrated instead on depicting the human form in a variety of rituals and movements. Commenting on Degas’ fascination with the representation of the human body, his contemporary Georges Jeanniot noted: ‘Degas was very concerned with the accuracy of movements and postures. He studied them endlessly. I have seen him work with a model, trying to make her assume the gestures of a woman drying herself, tilted over the high back of a chair covered with a bath towel. This is a complicated movement. You see the two shoulderblades from behind; but the right shoulder, squeezed by the weight of the body, assumes an unexpected outline that suggests a kind of acrobatic gesture, a violent effort’ (G. Jeanniot, quoted in Robert Gordon & Andrew Forge, Degas, New York, 1988, p. 223).

This work is a wonderful example of Degas' mastery of pastel, the medium that would dominate his œuvre during the last decades of his life. By the time that he executedFemme s’essuyant les pieds, his approach to the subject of the bather had become bolder and more confident than that demonstrated in his compositions from the 1880s, and he employed the medium of pastel with a greater sense of spontaneity. Much like the crosshatching colour techniques of the old masters, Degas emphasised the interlacing and layering of colour, resulting in the zigzagged and striated appearance of the present work. The success of his late pastels of bathers and their importance in the artist’s œuvrewas acknowledged by John Rewald: ‘In his […] important pastels of dancers and nudes, he was gradually reducing the emphasis on line in order to seek the pictorial. Resorting to ever more vibrant colour effects, he found in his pastels a means to unite line and colour. While every pastel stroke became a colour accent, its function in the whole was often not different from that of the impressionist brush stroke. His pastels became multicoloured fireworks where all precision of form disappeared in favour of a texture that glittered with hatchings’ (J. Rewald, The History of Impressionism, New York, 1973, p. 566)

PAUL CÉZANNE

A group of post-impressionist works is spearheaded by three dazzling watercolours by Cézanne - a medium that the artist considered as a unique means of expression in its own right and which allowed him to combine drawing and painting. Executed in 1902-1904, Femme Assise (Madame Cézanne) is one of Cézanne’s late masterpieces in the medium. Its timeless beauty appealed to a series of prominent collectors before Jan Krugier, including Ambroise Vollard, Paul Rosenberg and Robert von Hirsch (est. £1-1.5 million/$1.5-2 million).

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Femme Assise (Madame Cézanne), 1902-1904. Est. £1-1.5 million/$1.5-2 million. Photo: Sotheby's

watercolour and pencil on paper, 49 by 37.2cm., 19 1/4 by 14 5/8 in. Executed in 1902-04.

Provenance: Ambroise Vollard, Paris
Adams Brothers, London (acquired from the above by 1946)
Private Collection, London
Paul Rosenberg, New York
Robert von Hirsch, Basel (acquired from the above in November 1951. Sold: Sotheby's, London, 27th June 1978, lot 838)
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Exhibited: London, Tate Gallery; Leicester, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery & Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, Paul Cézanne: An Exhibition of Watercolours, 1946, no. 25
Tübingen, Kunsthalle & Zurich, Kunsthaus, Paul Cézanne Aquarelle 1866 -1906, 1982, no. 101, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, L'Œuvre ultime de Cézanne à Dubuffet, 1989, no. 6, illustrated in the catalogue
Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand-Palais, Cézanne, 1995-96, no. 169, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (as dating from circa 1895)
Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 122, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Venice, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, 1999, no. 141, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no. 140, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La passion du dessin. Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2002, no. 124, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Vienna, Albertina Museum, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no. 95, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 125, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: Ambroise Vollard, Paul Cézanne, Paris, 1914, illustrated p. 125 (titled Etude pour un portrait de femme)
Lionello Venturi, Paul Cézanne Aquarelles, Oxford, 1934, illustrated pl. 14
Lionello Venturi, Cézanne, son art - son œuvre, Paris, 1936, vol. I, no. 1093, catalogued p. 276; vol. II, no. 1093, illustrated pl. 316 (titled Portrait de femme and as dating from 1895-1900)
Lionello Venturi, Paul Cézanne, Water Colours, London, 1943, illustrated pl. 14 (as dating from 1895-1900)
William Rubin (ed.), Cézanne: The Late Work, New York, 1977, pl. 21, illustrated p. 229
Galerie Jan Krugier (ed.), Dix ans d'activité, Geneva, 1983, no. 17
John Rewald, Paul Cézanne, The Watercolours. A Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1983, no. 543, illustrated
Cézanne: Finished - Unfinished (exhibition catalogue), Kunstforum, Vienna & Kunsthaus, Zurich, 2000, fig. 1, illustrated p. 192
Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors (exhibition catalogue), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2004, fig. 36, illustrated in colour p. 89
Susan Sidlauskas, Cézanne's Other. The Portraits of Hortense, Los Angeles & London, 2009, no. 59, illustrated in colour p. 202

Note: Executed in 1902-04, Femme assise is a remarkable example of Cézanne’s mature œuvre. It belongs to the climactic phase in Cézanne’s artistic production, during which he executed a number of his best works that were to have a pivotal influence on the development of twentieth century art. In this watercolour, depicting a woman in profile seated at a table, the artist reduced his palette to a combination of blue, green and orange tones; his broad brushstrokes are contained within the thin blue outlines, setting the woman, table and chair apart from the more loosely rendered background.

Femme assise was probably executed at Les Lauves, where Cézanne purchased a plot of land in 1901 and built a studio to which he moved in the autumn of the following year. John Rewald discussed the setting of the present work: ‘Vague indications in the background show that the woman seated at the same table was posed in the open, doubtless on the terrace in front of Cézanne’s Lauves studio […]. In the absence of guiding pencil lines, all outlines have been retraced with a blue brush. Occasionally, particularly in the lower sleeve, these brush lines are repeated numerous times, while in the back of the chair and in some other places they are applied in short, staccato strokes such as appear frequently in the artist’s watercolours of his last years [fig. 1]. But where the brush does not trace lines, it spreads washes in a superbly broad and sweeping fashion’ (J. Rewald, op. cit., p. 221).

John Rewald has commented that the identity of the sitter inFemme assise is unknown, and that the same model sat for Cézanne’s oil Portrait de femme of 1902-06 (Private Collection; formerly in the collection of the Norton Simon Foundation, Los Angeles). However, Carol Armstrong identified the sitter of the present composition as the artist’s wife, Madame Cézanne. Discussing this watercolour, she wrote: ‘In his portraiture and genre painting, Cézanne worked between watercolour and oil, but rarely did his watercolours serve as sketches towards his oils. One exception might be Seated Woman (Madame Cézanne) of around 1902-4 [the present work], which relates both to works like Young Italian Woman at a Table in the Getty Museum [fig. 2] and to many of Cézanne’s seated portraits of this period – all works that confirm his interest in the body that sits at and leans upon the still-life table’ (C. Armstrong in Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 90).

In her book Cézanne's Other: The Portraits of Hortense, the art historian Susan Sidlauskas argues that the subject of the present work may well be the artist's wife, Hortense Fiquet Cézanne. Sidlauskas links this watercolour to an earlier oil,Madame Cézanne au jardin of 1879-80 (fig. 3): 'Her oversize hands anticipate the proportions of Seated Woman [...]. Taches of green and blue radiate around this "figure at a table," surrounding her with an aureole of color, as if she is generating the color strokes herself' (S. Sidlauskas, op. cit., p. 205), a feature reminiscent of the semi-circular strokes of watercolour that form a halo around the upper body of the woman in the present work. Sidlauskas wrote of Hortense's recurring presence in Cézanne's art: 'She is […] indisputably, stubbornly, there, over and over - a constant figure who inspired an array of variations that present her as newly made every time. Cézanne kept coming back to her in his work. In Seated Woman, if I am right, he came back one last time. She sits at the table that provided the stage for so many of the artist's still-life arrangements and was at the center of his studio, at the center of his practice. By being there, Hortense Fiquet Cézanne sat with her husband, and became his art' (ibid., p. 211). 

Executed in patches of watercolour in contrasting hues,Femme assise is a testament to Cézanne’s virtuosity in this medium, as well as to his remarkably modern vision. By using the most minimal pictorial means, with patches of colour suggesting folds in the woman’s dress and the subtle effects of light and shadow caused by them, the artist is able to render the volume of the woman’s body and the elements that surround her, investing the areas of bare paper with an equal pictorial and compositional value as line and colour. In combining these positive and negative spaces and juxtaposing cool and warm tones, Cézanne achieved a sense of volume and space that makes his mature watercolours a unique achievement in modern art.

PAUL KLEE

Watercolour inspired some of Paul Klee’s most exquisite works, as seen in Mit dem Eingang, a magnificent example of his “magic square” paintings, realised in 1931 (est. £300,000-500,000/ $500,000-800,000) and Vollmond in Mauern from 1919 (est. £300,000-500,000/$500,000-800,000).

Paul Klee (1879 - 1940), Mit dem Eingang (With the Entrance), 1931. Est. £300,000-500,000/ $500,000-800,000. Photo: Sotheby's

signed Klee (upper right), titled, dated 1931 and numbered S. 5 on the artist's mount; watercolour on paper laid down on the artist's mount; image size: 45.5 by 35cm., 17 7/8 by 13 3/4 in., mount size: 59.5 by 42.6cm., 23 1/2 by 16 7/8 in. Executed in 1931.

Provenance: Hans & Erika Meyer-Benteli, Bern
Berggruen & Cie., Paris (acquired from the above in 1956)
Hendrickx Collection, Brussels (acquired from the above in 1957)
Hamilton Galleries, London
Galerie Beyeler, Basel (acquired in 1960)
Klaus Dohrn, Frankfurt (acquired from the above in 1965)
Sale: Galerie Wolfgang Ketterer, Munich, 23rd May 1977, lot 1048a
Fridart Foundation, Amsterdam (sold: Sotheby's, London, 29th June 1988, lot 359)
Yoyoi Gallery, Japan (purchased at the above sale)
Ogawa Museum of Art, Tokyo (acquired in 1991. Sold: Christie's, New York, 19th November 1998, lot 577)
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Exhibited: Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Klee, 1963, no. 41, illustrated in colour in the catalougue
Paris, Galerie Tarica, Paul Klee, 1963, illustrated in the catalogue
Southampton, Southampton City Art Gallery; Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery & Manchester, Manchester Art Gallery, Sounds of Colour, 1982-85, no. 18
Geneva, Galerie Jan Krugier, Ditesheim & Cie., Paul Klee. Traces de la mémoire, 1998-99, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 159, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection,1999, no. 168, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no. 168, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La Passion du Dessin. Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2002, no. 153, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 166, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature :The Artist's Handlist, 1931, no. 165 (S. 5)
The Artist's Handlist, 1932, no. 251 (W 11)
François Choay, 'Sur l'ambiguité fondamentale de la peinture contemporaine', in Cercle d'Art Contemporain, Zurich, 1960, illustrated p. 102
Paul Klee Foundation (ed.), Paul Klee, Catalogue raisonné, Bern, 2002, vol. 6, no. 5570, illustrated p. 119

Note: Mit dem Eingang, centred on a single rectangle of colour, and populated by dashes of bright colour overlaying a softly hued ground, possesses a lyrical quality unique to the works of Paul Klee. The artist’s experimental approach to painting sought to represent a synthesis of sound and colour - thereby becoming ‘polyphonic’. In works such as Mit dem Eingangand Polyphonie (fig. 1) Klee achieved this by reviving the Neo-Impressionist practise of pointillism. Discussing the emergence of the pointillist pictures in the early 1930s, Christine Hopfengart suggests: Their common feature is the screen-like application of coloured dots on the painted surface, similar in appearance to the divisionist works of late-Impressionist painters such as Georges Seurat or Paul Signac at the turn of the nineteenth century. […] Unlike Seurat, Klee’s concern with his pointillist experiments was not to reproduce the visible spectrum of colour in the manner of an ‘improved camera’, but to artistically exploit the investigations of simultaneous and complementary contrasts that he had intensively pursued in the context of his teaching at the Bauhaus’ (C. Hopfengart, Paul Klee. Life and Work, Bern, 2012, p. 236).

Paul Klee (1879 - 1940), Vollmond in Mauern (Full Moon within Walls), 1919 . Est. £300,000-500,000/ $500,000-800,000. Photo: Sotheby's

signed Klee, dated 1919 and numbered 210 (lower right); watercolour on chalk-grounded gauze laid down on card; image size: 25.5 by 21cm., 9 7/8 by 8 1/4 in. (oval). Executed in 1919

Provenance: Galerie Neue Kunst Hans Goltz, Munich (acquired in July 1920)
Kuno Sponholz, New York
Herwin & Hildegarde Schaefer, San Rafael (acquired in 1949. Sold: Christie's, New York, 29th November 1998, lot 746)
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Exhibited: Munich, Galerie Neue Kunst Hans Goltz, Paul Klee, 1920, no. 231
Geneva, Galerie Jan Krugier, Ditesheim & Cie, Paul Klee. Traces de la mémoire, 1998-99, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 153, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection,1999, no. 167, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no. 163, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La Passion du Dessin. Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2002, no. 150, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 160, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: Paul Klee Foundation (ed.), Paul Klee, Catalogue raisonné, Bern, 1999, vol. 3, no. 2274, illustrated p. 130

Note: Vollmond in Mauern is an exceptional example of Klee’s dramatic interpretation of architectural landscapes. Composed as an oval - the contrasting facets of colour representing the roofs and walls of a town - the present work epitomises the approach Klee’s art took after the First World War (fig. 1). The innovative use of plaster-covered gauze gives the work a wonderfully rich texture and vibrancy, and also echoes the architectural essence of the work. Discussing the pictures produced during this important period, Will Grohmann writes: 'Viewed superficially the pictures of 1919 are combinations of planes remotely reminiscent of analytical Cubism. Actually, however, they are based on a translucent network of straight lines which intersect at right or acute angles and produce a structure of planes. The 'story', if it exists at all, is worked in and expands the facts by including fate in the composition. Klee's attitude is existentialist in that he repeatedly faces the void, re-creates the universe, and accepts fate. All the paintings of 1919 are stigmatized by fate, represented by houses, windows, trees and stars, rarely by animals or human beings. The associative elements that usually determine the title are not the point of departure; nor are the forms, or at least only those that leave room for association. Klee's whole universe is indeed embraced by form, but it is a form filled by the universe, and from this balance springs the fullness and precision of his pictures' (W. Grohmann, Paul Klee, London, 1954, pp. 152 & 159).

Describing the present work Anita Beloubek-Hammer writes: ‘This oval structure of coloured shapes has a precious appearance, like a polished stone sparkling in the light, with the prismatic subdivision of its surface enclosing the yellow disc of the moon. Its sparkle radiates into its environs; in contrast, around the picture’s border, a night-time blue dominates. […] Angles, surfaces and colour contrasts produce a certain spatial effect, a complex, relief-like space of colour that is constructed without beginning and end, like the construction of the universe. The artist certainly had this metaphor in mind, for the years 1919-20 stand out in his œuvre as the period of "cosmic" pictures’ (A. Beloubek-Hammer, in The Timeless Eye – Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection(exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 344). 

FRANCISCO DE GOYA

Jan Krugier was both a connoisseur of art and humanity and his collection mirrors his lifelong quest for works that involve the viewer both visually and intellectually. Krugier once confessed that looking at drawings helped him overcome demons of the past and Francisco de Goya’s remarkable depiction of a man with a distressed expression entitled Loco (Madman) would probably have been be one of them (est. £700,000-900,000/$1.2-1.5 million). This prodigious drawing – one of four by Goya in the sale - is among the most powerful and extraordinary late works of the painter contained in the “Bordeaux albums”, an ensemble of works drawn during the artist’s exile in France, between 1824 and his death in 1828.

Francisco de Goya (1746 - 1828), Loco (Madman), Est. £700,000-900,000/$1.2-1.5 million. Photo: Sotheby's

inscribed Loco and Calabozo (lower centre) and numbered by the artist 17 (upper right); black chalk and lithographic crayon on paper; 19.1 by 14.6cm., 7 9/16 by 5 3/4in.

Provenance: Hyades Collection, Bordeaux
J. Boilly, Paris (sold: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 19th-20th March 1869, lot 48 (album de 20 dessins)
Leurceau Collection
Alfred Ströhlin, Lausanne
A.S. Drey (1939)
Zdenko Bruck, Buenos Aires
Private Collection
Sale: Kornfeld & Klipstein, Berne, 18th June 1980, lot 473
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Literature: August Mayer, 'Some Unknown Drawings by Francisco Goya', in Master Drawings, vol. IX, June 1934/March 1935, p. 20
Pierre Gassier & Juliet Wilson, Vie et Oeuvre de Francisco Goya, l'Oeuvre complet illustré, Fribourg, 1970 (English ed. 1971), no. 1725, illustrated
Pierre Gassier, Les Dessins de Goya, Les Albums, Fribourg, 1973, no.G17, illustrated
Galerie Jan Krugier, Dix Ans d'Activité, Genève, 1983, no.1
Françoise Garcia & Francis Ribemont, Goya Hommages. Les années bordelaises, 1824-1828, (exhibition catalogue), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, 1998, illustrated fig. 12

Note:
Goya: Drawings from the Private Albums
Goya is believed to have begun to compile the first of his Private Albums of drawings in 1796, when visiting the Duchess of Alba, and he continued this new and extraordinary artistic expression until his death in 1828. During these last thirty years of his life, he drew some 550 sheets, collected into eight albums, which in the most intimate way describe Goya’s vision of humanity, with freedom of imagination and unequalled power of expression. The album drawings, generally of a totally spontaneous nature, are therefore a form of ‘visual journal’, not intended to be seen by the general public, like the artist’s prints or paintings, but only to be shared with an intimate and private circle of friends. It is not known why, at the peak of his career as a painter, Goya turned to this new and totally personal form of expression, revealing a very private aspect of his mind, but one possible factor may have been that in 1793, following a near-fatal illness, he lost his hearing. But whatever the reasons, he embarked at this time on an entirely new way of communicating, through a rich variety of highly animated images, many shocking and brutal, depicted with Goya’s unique and acute observation of the world around him, often reflecting an intense sensibility to the political and moral issues of his time, and manifesting at every turn the painter’s astonishingly fertile imagination.

All four drawings by Goya in this sale of the Krugier-Poniatowski collection (the following three lots, and lot 113 in the sale on 6th February) were originally part of these celebrated Private Albums. 

In the unprecedented exhibition, Goya, drawings from his private albums, held at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 2001, Juliet Wilson-Bareau presented and examined the eight Private Albums in depth, and although she stressed in her introduction to the catalogue that we will never really know exactly how the albums were actually composed in Goya's own time, the exhibition revealed a great deal about their genesis, composition and subsequent fortunes after the artist's death.  The drawings do not all seem to have been contained in albums from the very beginning; some were apparently kept loose by the artist in folders, and were probably only bound together by him at a later stage.  All the pages of each album were, though, ultimately numbered by Goya himself, except those of the first, smaller notebook, the Sanlúcar album (A).  After Goya’s death, the eight albums that he left were divided up and remounted twice, and since the late 19th century their pages have become widely dispersed, in public and private collections throughout the world.  It appears that Goya's son, Javier, initially consolidated the eight original Private Albums into just three large volumes after his father's death in 1828, but essentially respected the page order established by his father.  After Javier's death in 1854, the albums passed in turn to his son, Mariano Goya y Goicochea, before being acquired by Federico de Madrazo together with his brother-in-law Román Garretta y Huerta.  It seems it was Madrazo who removed Goya's drawings from the three larger volumes assembled by Javier, splitting them into groups to be either sold or kept for his own collection.  Those that he chose to keep were renumbered, disregarding the original order of the pages, and pasted down onto distinctive sheets of pink paper (see two of the drawings in the Krugier-Poniatowski collection: 'Visiones' and A hunter and his dog on the alert, lots 27 and …), and these pages were in turn bound into three new albums.  (For a full account of the later history of the Albums, after Goya’s death, see the 2001 Hayward Gallery, London, exhibition catalogue, Goya, drawings from his private albums, pp. 24-25). 

The eight original albums were first extensively reconstructed in 1973 by Pierre Gassier (Les Dessins de Goya, Les Albums, Fribourg 1973), building on the basis of his 1970 monograph on the artist, co-authored by Juliet Wilson, which included all the album sheets known at that time.  The standard classification of the sheets and the albums, using letters from A to H, was, however, first established much earlier, by Eleanor Sayre in her pioneering studies on Goya’s albums, written in the late 1950s (see in particular E. Sayre, 'An Old Man Writing. A Study of Goya's Albums', Boston Museum Bulletin, LVI, 1958, pp. 116-36).  With great intuition and a keen understanding of Goya's motivation, Sayre outlined a very original, and still entirely valid, way of looking at this great variety of images and subjects, describing these as Goya's ‘journal-albums’.  She wrote: ‘Goya in his fifties …. evolved a singular use for drawing albums. They were not notebooks containing a casual assembly of portrait heads, drapery studies and compositions sketches.  Neither were they any longer sketchbooks preserving the intermittent record of places he saw and picturesque figures which might be used again. They had been transmuted by him into journals -- drawn not written -- whose pictorial entries of varying length pertained predominantly to what Goya thought rather than what he saw’. 

‘Loco’- ‘Calabozo’
This remarkable sheet, Loco, and also the following lot, Young Woman in white fallen to the ground, are among the hugely powerful, extraordinary late works of Goya that originate from the last two of the artist's Private Albums, now known as Bordeaux albums I and II (traditionally albums 'G' and 'H'). The drawings were made while the artist was in exile in Bordeaux, between the time of his arrival there together with his companion Leocadia Weiss in the autumn of 1824 and his death in 1828.

The present, immensely strong image of a man armed with a stick, eyes wide open in a violent yet distressed expression, arm raised and ready to strike, has been linked, because of the title, ‘Loco’ (Madman), as well as the image, to the group of drawings by Goya depicting people in lunatic asylums.  The subjects of album G are very varied, but it contains fifteen such studies of mentally ill people, described by Goya with incredible subtlety and skill, in what have become some of the artist’s most revered images. His acutely accurate depictions of these subjects suggests Goya was deeply interested in mental illness, and also that he must have obtained access to the closed institutions where these people were held, to observe them at first hand. 

Still legible, however, beneath the inscription Loco is the artist's first idea for the drawing's title: Calabozo (The Dungeon).  In fact, Goya placed this sheet among the earlier images of album G, rather than within the later sequence of drawings of the mentally ill, and it seems that he initially conceived this as an image of a prisoner, whose circumstances have led to madness and extreme violence.  At some later stage, though, once the layout of the album had been determined, he seems to have felt that the furious madness expressed by the man was in fact the essential driving force of this image, and that his physical location and the origins of his madness were less significant, changing the drawing's title accordingly (though not, as on some occasions, its numbering).  This is an illuminating example of the relationship between words and images in Goya's album drawings, so many of which have titles inscribed by the artist, and of the challenges the artist faced in capturing the essence of his visual messages in words.  All the drawings in Album 'G' have short captions of this type, in many cases just a single key word, and these frequently ironic titles initiate a different kind of relationship with the drawing, involving the viewer both visually and intellectually in Goya’s complex emotions. 

The pages of this album are all numbered by Goya at the upper corner, the highest number being 60, and are all executed on French paper in black crayon, a choice of medium that is in contrast with the pen and ink and/or wash that the artist used throughout the preceding albums.  In her 2001 exhibition catalogue, Juliet Wilson-Bareau carefully analysed Goya’s various and creative techniques, and the great sophistication in his choices of paper and media, and she suggests (op. cit., p. 22) that this choice of black chalk for the Bordeaux album drawings could have offered the aging artist a medium that was versatile, yet also easier to control.  Another factor, though, could have been Goya's late interest in lithography, a technique of printmaking with which the vibrant and pictorial effects of chalk, at least as he used it, had much in common.  As Wilson-Bareau wrote (ibid., p. 145): 'The drawings, in black chalk or crayon, constitute a brilliantly inventive set of ‘newcaprichos’, as Goya himself intimated in his letter to his friend Ferrer in Paris...’    

As Pierre Gassier noted, the treatment of the cell in which the figure finds himself in the present drawing can be compared with the setting seen in two of Goya’s other drawings depicting madmen, from the same album, 'Loco Africano' (G. 34) and 'Loco' (G. 36), in both of which the human figure also stands out more or less brightly lit, against a very dark area of black chalk (Gassier, op. cit., 1973, pp. 565-66, reproduced pp. 532, 534).  Sigrid Achenbach, writing in the Krugier-Poniatowski exhibition catalogues, points out, though, that unlike the other two images mentioned by Gassier, the flight of stairs included in the present composition clearly identifies this space as a prison.  Here, the artist depicts a man in a state of profound mental distress while trying to free himself from his captivity, and the use of intense light to sculpt the figure emerging from the darkness behind further heightens the powerful drama of the scene.  With astonishing skill and dexterity in the use of the chalk, the image is worked out with extreme freedom, but closer examination reveals, as is so often the case in Goya’s drawings, that the artist has in fact made significant changes to the composition, in particular to the position of the man’s arms, which were initially behind his back.  Such continuous reworking and revising of his drawings is a characteristic and fascinating aspect of Goya’s draughtsmanship. His incredible ability to work out his developing thoughts while actually drawing, and his extreme confidence in being able to transform his images during this creative process, to give form to his ultimate ideas (see also Visiones, lot 27 below) mark Goya as perhaps the first truly modern artist, for whom art was fundamentally an expression of his innermost thoughts.  Here, Goya chooses to express himself in a particularly extreme and dramatic way, and the 'Loco', with his wild and desperate gesture, is one of the strongest and most iconic images of the artist’s final years.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres described drawing as the “probity of art” and his work features strongly in Krugier’s private collection. In Three studies for the figure of Stratonice, Ingres works towards the final, eloquent depiction of the figure of Stratonice in his painting, Antiochus and Stratonice, commissioned in 1834 by the Duc d’Orléans, and completed in 1840. With its pensive mood, great technical variety and instinctively brilliant mise-en-page, this drawing - in some ways strikingly modern - is as profoundly beautiful and revealing as any that Ingres ever made. It captures the essence of his genius and shows how he created forms that, to quote Baudelaire, naturally attain the ideal (est. £350,000-450,000/$600,000-800,000). 

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 - 1867), Three studies for the figure of Stratonice. Est. £350,000-450,000/$600,000-800,000. Photo: Sotheby's

signed Ingres (lower left) and inscribed in various places with notations regarding lighting; pencil and black chalk, with stumping, on paper; 39.4 by 28.4cm., 15 1/2 by 11 1/4 in.

Provenance: Private Collection, Paris
Gallery Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York
John R. Gaines, Louisville, Kentucky (sold: Sotheby's, New York, 18th November 1986, lot 27)
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Exhibited: Louisville, Kentucky, The J.B. Speed Art Museum, In Pursuit of Perfection: The Art of J.A.D. Ingres, 1983, no. 17
New York, Jan Krugier Gallery, The Presence of Ingres, Important Works by Ingres, Degas, Picasso, Matisse and Balthus, 1988, no. 28
Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin & Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 69, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, 1999, no. 81, illustrated in colour in the cataogue
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no. 95, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La passion du dessin. Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2002, no. 86, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Vienna, Albertina Museum, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no. 14, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 80, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Note: In this astonishingly beautiful sheet of studies, deeply classical yet in many ways also strikingly modern, Ingres works towards the final, eloquent depiction of the figure of Stratonice in his painting, Antiochus and Stratonice, commissioned in 1834 by the Duc d’Orléans, and completed in 1840 (fig. 1). To the right of the sheet he studies, in an unusual and evocative combination of pencil and black chalk, the entire, nude figure, exploring two different positions for her left leg. The technique in much of this figure is extremely refined, with delicate pencil strokes creating fine modulations of tone, but the face and shoulders are delineated very differently, with bold, almost sharp, strokes of black chalk that give the whole figure a great intensity of expression, and a subtly exotic aspect. Beside the woman’s shoulders and waist there are, characteristically, a few notes regarding lighting and colour (‘clair’, 'demi teinte'), which draw us still further into the artist’s creative process. To the left of the main figure, Ingres studies again, and in slightly more detail, the figure’s right arm, breasts and left shoulder, and then, in the lower left part of the sheet, he repeats her face, this time making extensive use of stumping to create continuous tonal gradations and therefore a greater sense of lighting and three dimensionality – an impression reinforced by the fact that the artist has lightly written the word ‘lumière’ on the figure’s forehead. With its pensive mood, great technical variety and instinctively brilliant mise-en-page, this drawing is as profoundly beautiful and revealing as any that Ingres ever made.

From the very outset of his long career, Ingres was clearly strongly drawn to the subject of Antiochus and Stratonice, taken from Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius, the text of which he copied in his Notebook X. With its fashionably classical setting, yet totally contemporary themes of erotic, somewhat oedipal desires, political intrigue and generational conflict, the story was ideally suited to the cultural milieu of the time, and Ingres’ teacher, Jacques-Louis David, chose it for the painting with which he won the Prix de Rome in 1774. Plutarch’s text also provided the basis for Méhul’s ‘comédie héroïque,' Stratonice, which premiered in May 1792, and was revived regularly under the Empire. Ingres is known to have owned a copy of the script of this production, and even before his departure for Rome, he made two drawings of the subject. Established in Rome, Ingres announced in January 1807 that he would make a painting representing the story of Stratonice, but the appearance of this work is unknown, as the painting disappeared following the sale of the artist’s effects after his death in 1867. It is generally thought, though, that it followed the composition of a drawing in the Louvre (RF 1440). Two other early drawings of the subject survive, in Montauban and Boulogne, but Ingres’ next major exploration of the theme came only in 1834, when the Duc d’Orléans commissioned him to paint the subject, as a pendant to Delaroche’s painting, The Death of General Guise. Presumably in connection with this commission, Ingres painted the unfinished oil sketch now in Cleveland, in which we see for the first time the distinctive pose of Stratonice that the artist explores in the Krugier-Poniatowski drawing. This composition was then developed into the more complex and elaborate final painting, delivered to the Duc d’Orléans in 1840, and now in Chantilly (fig. 1). This was not, though, the end of the artist’s interest in this evocative subject. In 1858-60 he made a revised version of the earlier, simpler Cleveland sketch, executing a painting in oil on paper, which in 1983 was in a Philadelphia collection. Finally, Ingres made a reversed variant of the Chantilly painting, executed in a complex combination of oil, graphite and watercolour on paper laid down on canvas, a work, now in the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, which is dated 1866, just one year before the artist’s death.

Given that Ingres was an artist who drew constantly throughout his career, and that he explored the subject of Antiochus and Stratonice a number of times over a period of almost 70 years, it is not, perhaps, surprising that there are many surviving drawings relating to his various versions of the subject. The great corpus of Ingres drawings in Montauban contains no fewer than 115 such studies (Vigne, 1995, nos. 37-151), and others are also to be found in various collections around the world. One that deserves particular mention, though, in relation to the Krugier-Poniatowski drawing is a fine sheet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 63:66), which is a drapery study for the figure of Stratonice, showing her in more or less exactly the same pose as in the present drawing, but fully clothed (fig. 2). The comparison of the two drawings highlights the way that Ingres, in any drawing, focussed almost clinically on certain aspects of the subject in hand. In the New York drawing of Stratonice the figure’s features and emotions hardly exist, and the focus is entirely on the rendering of the forms and lighting of the drapery – treated with utter brilliance, but without any attempt to address the emotional aspects of the subject. In the Krugier drawing, by contrast, the twin foci are the pathos of the story, and the physical beauty of the protagonist, Stratonice. When a prodigiously gifted draughtsman like Ingres turns his attentions to those aspects of a subject, it is not surprising that the resultant drawing is one of the most moving and beautiful that he ever made.