Pink Paper – European Drawings – 1400-1900

Pisanello
Allegory of Luxuria
ca. 1426
drawing
Albertina, Vienna

Filippino Lippi
Head of Elderly Man
ca. 1495
drawing
Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig

Girolamo Romanino
Standing Soldier with Plumed Hat
ca. 1519-35
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Parmigianino
Winged Victories
ca. 1531-35
drawing
Princeton University Art Museum

Hans Holbein
Portrait of William Parr, later Marquess of Northampton
ca. 1538-42
drawing
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Peter Candid
Two Studies of a Standing Man with a Sword (Alexander the Great)
ca. 1601
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Peter Paul Rubens
Portrait of the Artist's Daughter, Clara Serena
ca. 1623
drawing
Albertina, Vienna

Palma il Giovane
Portrait Head of a Man
before 1628
drawing
Harvard Art Museums

Guercino
Apollo
ca. 1637
drawing
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Pietro Testa
Study for Allegorical Figures of Virtues
ca. 1642-44
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

attributed to Giovanni Lanfranco
Study of Foreshortened Figure
before 1647
drawing
Princeton University Art Museum

Giacinto Gimignani
Figure Study
before 1681
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Carlo Maratti
Portrait of Faustina Maratti
1686
drawing
Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta
Portrait of a Boy pointing upward
ca. 1740-45
drawing
Albertina, Vienna

Edgar Degas
Dancer Seated
1873-74
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Chromatic Intensity

Porcelain vase
rose enamel
Qing Dynasty (19th century)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

"Matthew, just back from a meeting of the Royal Ceramics Society, was arranging his collection. . . . He had bought two large mahogany display cases into which he was now putting some favorite pieces. He had removed two semicircular tables and fitted the cases into the alcoves in the the hall. It did not look too museum-like. The Sung and Ting dishes were all in a crowd on the drawing-room table. He had decided to make a selection of a number of favorites to keep with him and to lend the rest to the Fitzwilliam Museum for the present. The selection was proving very difficult. He stood holding a famille noire teapot tenderly by the spout. Of course Ming and Ting were greatest and Sung doubtless greatest of all, but for a weightless charm which was perfect without being sublime it was impossible to better Ching." 

– from An Accidental Man by Iris Murdoch (Chatto & Windus, 1971)

Porcelain bottle
iron-red enamel
Qing Dynasty (18th century)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Porcelain bowl
group of bats, iron-red enamel
Qing Dynasty (19th century)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Porcelain water-pot
copper-red glaze
Qing Dynasty (19th century)
Sir David Percival Collection, British Museum

Porcelain vase
iron-brown glaze
Northern Song Dynasty (1000-1127)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Porcelain bowl
inscribed and dated, coffee-colored glaze
Qing Dynasty (1672)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Porcelain cups
yellow glaze
Qing Dynasty (1723-1735)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Porcelain vase
pear-shape, apple-green enamel
Qing Dynasty (1662-1722)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Porcelain vase
pear-shape, turquoise glaze
Qing Dynasty (1662-1722)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Porcelain dish
turquoise glaze
Qing Dynasty (17th century)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Stoneware dish
blue and purple glaze
Ming Dynasty (1368-1398)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Stoneware bowl
sky-blue glaze, with purple
Yuan-Jin Dynasty (1115-1300)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Stoneware cup-holder
duck-egg blue glaze
Northern Song Dynasty (11th-12th century)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Stoneware model of an egg
white-ware, opaque white glaze
Republic (1912-1949)
Sir Percival David Collection, British Museum

Works by Manet owned by Degas

Édouard Manet
Madame Manet on a Blue Sofa
ca. 1874
pastel
Louvre

Édouard Manet
Woman with a Cat
ca. 1880
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery, London

In 1997 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted an exhibition and published a well-illustrated catalog in an effort to reassemble some portion of the personal art collection of Edgar Degas, dispersed in a series of sales after the artist's death in 1917. The Private Collections of Edgar Degas (available here from the Museum as a free e-book) explores the artist's relationships with several other 19th-century giants of painting – Ingres, Delacroix, Cézanne, Daumier, Morisot, Gauguin, Pissarro, Cassatt, and of course the friend and rival Édouard Manet, acknowledged master of Impressionist brush-work. Today's selection is restricted to the Manets once owned by Degas, who asserted that the Blue Sofa in pastel at top was one of his three favorite pictures in the world (the other two favorites unfortunately not named).

Édouard Manet
study for The Departure of the Folkestone Boat
1869
oil on canvas
Swiss private collection

Édouard Manet
study for The Execution of Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico
ca. 1867-68
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Édouard Manet
Gypsy with cigarette
19th century
oil on canvas
Princeton University Art Museum

Édouard Manet
Berthe Morisot in mourning
1874
oil on canvas
Private collection

Édouard Manet
Cats' Rendezvous
1868
lithograph
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Édouard Manet
Seated woman wearing a soft hat
ca. 1875
wash drawing
Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, San Francisco

Édouard Manet
Olympia
1867
etching, aquatint
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Edgar Degas
Édouard Manet leaning on a table
ca. 1864-68
wash drawing
Louvre

 
Manet and Degas painted, drew, and etched each other repeatedly. This friendly and creative habit could also lead to conflict. Degas painted Manet below, lounging on a sofa and listening to his wife play the piano. Degas gave the painting to Manet. It hung in the Manet apartment until Manet grew dissatisfied with his wife's likeness, which he came to regard as unflattering. (Manet's own painting of his wife at the piano in exactly the same position is included at bottom for comparison, although Degas never owned it.) With the boldness of a very close friend and fellow-painter, Manet simply sliced off a strip of the painting and excised his wife's face. When Degas saw the mutilation, he angrily took back the painting. There is a photograph of it hanging in the Degas apartment in its truncated state, but then at a later date Degas added a strip of canvas the same size as the strip Manet sliced off. Evidently Degas intended to restore the painting to its original appearance, but never carried the intention through. With its right end blank, it now hangs in a provincial museum in Japan.

Edgar Degas
Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet
ca. 1868-69
oil on canvas
Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan

Édouard Manet
Madame Manet at the Piano
1867-68
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay

Painted Portraits of the 18th century at the Prado

Jean Ranc
Isabel Farnese, Queen of Spain
1723
Prado

Jean Ranc
Philip V, King of Spain
1723
Prado

The tradition of the royal portrait in Spain was imported from France, where visual prototypes of grandeur had been codified once and for all under Louis XIV. French, Italian, and other foreign painters tended to monopolize courtly portraiture in Spain until late in the 18th century, when Goya ascended.

Jean Ranc
Fernando VI as a child
1723
Prado

Jean Ranc
Charles III as a child
1724
Prado

Louis Michel Van Loo
Philip V, King of Spain
ca. 1739
Prado

Louis Michel Van Loo
Isabel Farnese, Queen of Spain
ca. 1739
Prado

Louis Michel Van Loo
Philip V and Isabel Farnese
ca. 1743
Prado

Louis Michel Van Loo
Cardinal Infante Luis Antonio de Borbón
ca. 1737
Prado

Clemente Ruta
Infanta Isabel de Borbón
1741
Prado

Clemente Ruta
Infanta Isabel de Borbón
1745
Prado

Jean Baptiste Oudry
Don José de Rozas y Meléndez de la Cueva, Count of Castelblanco
ca. 1716
Prado

"You should, my friend, compare me to those undisciplined hunting dogs who run indiscriminately after whatever game flies up before them; but as the subject has been raised, I must pursue it and consult one of our most enlightened artists about it. This ironic artist turns up his nose when I broach matters of the technique of his craft, as will be seen in a moment; but if he contradicts me, in the matter of the ideals of his art, I will have obtained my revenge. I would ask this artist  –If you'd selected as a model the most beautiful woman known to you, and had rendered with the utmost care all her facial charms, would you think you'd represented beauty? If you answer me positively, the youngest of your students will refute you, and tell you that you'd produced a portrait. But if there's a portrait of a face, then there's a portrait of an eye, there's a portrait of a neck, of a throat, of a stomach, of a foot, of a hand, of a big toe, of a fingernail, for what is a portrait if not the depiction of a being in all its individuality? And if you do not recognize the portrait of the fingernail as rapidly, as confidently, and as unmistakably as the portrait of the face, this isn't because it doesn't exist, but because you've studied it less; because there is less of it; because its individualizing marks are smaller, more trifling and more fugitive. But if I turn my attention to this problem, if you do likewise, you will know more about it than you might think. You have grasped the difference between the general and the particular even in the least significant portions, for you wouldn't dare tell me you have ever, at any time since you first took up the brush, bound yourself to rigorous imitation of each and every strand of hair. You've adduced some and eliminated others; otherwise you would not have produced an image of the first order, a copy of the truth, but rather a portrait or a copy of a copy ..." 

– Denis Diderot, from the Salon of 1767, translated by John Goodman, Yale University Press, 1995

Jean Baptiste Oudry
Lady Mary Josephine Drummond, Countess of Castelblanco
ca. 1716
Prado

Mariano Salvador Maella
María Luisa de Parma, Queen of  Spain
ca. 1789-92
Prado

Mariano Salvador Maella
Froilán de Berganza
1798
Prado

Mariano Salvador Maella
Carlota Joaquina, Infanta of Spain, Queen of Portugal
1785
Prado