Jan Lievens, son of a Leiden embroiderer, showed artistic talent at an early age. After initial training in his native city, the young painter was an apprentice, between the ages of ten and twelve, in Pieter Lastman’s atelier in Amsterdam. Back in Leiden, in 1628 he met Constantijn Huygens, a man of letters, patron of the arts and secretary to two Princes of Orange; this proved to be a turning point in Lievens’s career and led to international aspirations. He moved to London in 1632, and to Antwerp three years later. He then returned to the Netherlands, where he undertook various prestigious commissions in The Hague and Amsterdam.¹

Although 17th- and 18th-century literature ensured that Lievens’s work was remembered, in the 19th century he was overshadowed by the prestige of his famous contemporary Rembrandt. Both had been pupils of Lastman, four years apart – Lievens first – before the “two young and noble painters from Leiden” became friends and engaged in an artistic dialogue, as is attested to by their many stylistic affinities during the second half of the 1620s.² It was not until the 1970s that Lievens’s personal style regained recognition through the work of Rudolf E. O. Ekkart, Rüdiger Klessmann and Sabine Jacob, which led to the first monographic exhibition at the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Brunswick, in 1979.³

Subsequent studies by Werner Sumowski and Pieter Schatborn added to our knowledge of Lievens’s work, particularly his prints and drawings, until an international exhibition in 2008 brought wider and long-overdue awareness of the artist’s outstanding talent.⁴ Coinciding with the exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2011, studies by Gregory Rubinstein were instrumental in distinguishing between the graphic works of Lievens and Rembrandt from the late 1620s and up to Lievens’s departure for London in 1632; the similarities made it particularly difficult to tell them apart in studies of figures combining black and red chalk.⁵

Attributed to Lievens by Sumowski and Schatborn, then published by Bernhard Schnackenburg in 2016, our Saint John the Evangelist can be dated to his years in Leiden; Schnackenburg dates it more precisely to circa 1629. For a long time, it was associated with a second drawing – the whereabouts of which are no longer known – depicting Saint John with a variation in the position of his arms. Both are stylistically very close to a study for a Saint Peter, now in the Albertina Museum, Vienna, which was first published in 1932. That, too, is in black chalk and possesses the same monumental character despite its smaller dimensions (ill.).⁶

Preparatory drawings relating directly to a print or painting are relatively rare in the artist’s oeuvre, and these sheets are not an exception. They may be studies in their own right, recalling Odoardo Fialetti’s engravings of religious figures, published in Venice in 1626.⁷

The life and work of Anton Clemens Lünenschloss, court painter to the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg from 1719 until his death in 1763, are documented in a collection of 1300 drawings in the Martin von Wagner Museum.¹ After studies in Düsseldorf and Antwerp, Lünenschloss spent almost twenty years in Italy under the protection of the Elector of the Rhine Palatinate. He moved to Rome in 1703, after spending time in Venice and Florence, and attended the Academy of Saint Luke and, in all likelihood, the atelier of Carlo Maratti.² He then lived in Naples from 1708 to 1717, where he spent most of his time copying the great frescoes of Giovanni Lanfranco, Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, as the collection in the Martin von Wagner Museum attests. In Würzburg, he decorated ceilings for the Residenz from the 1720s onwards, before Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s famous contribution shortly after 1750.³

From his stay in Naples, the Martin von Wagner Museum holds a sheet with two landscapes drawn en plein air − perhaps, judging by the crease in the paper, a page from a sketchbook (ill. below). It is executed in an economical light-brown wash and is reminiscent of French or Dutch landscape painters active in Rome in the mid-seventeenth century − Gaspard Dughet or Lünenschloss’s contemporary, Alessio de Marchis. Dated 1717, it depicts the Magdalene Bridge with Vesuvius, steam rising from its crater, in the background on the left and Sorrento on the right, with comments and captions in Italian and German.

And indeed, from April 1717 onwards, activity on Vesuvius intensified until the eruption the following June. Lünenschloss witnessed this impressive event, which he has depicted in the large-format drawing presented here. Although he must have completed the work in his studio, he captured the composition from a vantage point between Torre Annunziata and Trecase. He gives a very concrete description of the eruption, describing the two mouths of the volcano, the appearance of the lava and the direction of the various flows, all of which are precisely captioned in a cartouche.

While observing this natural phenomenon, Lünenschloss also witnessed the behaviour of the population, adding an element of social satire to his drawing: while the nobility and the bourgeoisie have flocked from Naples to gaze at the eruption, the rural inhabitants have had to abandon their homes, which have been devastated by the lava flows.⁴

Lünenschloss made a second, signed drawing of the 1717 eruption. The point of view is from a slightly more northerly direction and from further back, so the Magdalena Bridge can be seen in the background on the left.⁵ These two very finished works were probably produced for commercial reasons, as mementos for clients wishing to have a picture of the intriguing phenomenon.

Domenico Morelli entered the Real lstituto di Belle Arti in Naples in 1836, at the age of thirteen.¹ His career was inextricably linked to the Neapolitan institution, which he went on to reform in the late 1870s along with the painter Filippo Palizzi – his alter ego and “antithesis”. But he also became a leading artistic figure in Risorgimento Italy.²

In 1844, he won first prize in a painting competition and a grant that enabled him to continue his studies in Rome. But the revolutions of 1848, which reverberated throughout Italy and Europe, provided an opportunity for him to shake off the academic stranglehold of the Institute, whose principles were still based on a classical ideal inherited from the late eighteenth century. In 1851, he escaped from Bourbon Naples and moved to Florence, where in 1855 he achieved his first critical success with The Iconoclasts. This painting reflected the painter’s intention to “represent figures and things, not seen, but both true and imagined”, thus paving the way for a form of historical verismoin his work.^3 4

The choice of historical and literary sources for Morelli’s works, as well as his compositions, were fundamentally influenced by his friendship with the historian and politician Pasquale Villari. The two men exchanged ideas throughout their lives. Villari, a freethinker, introduced Morelli to the works of Dante, Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi, as well as to English literature in the form of Shakespeare, Walter Scott and Lord Byron.

From the late 1860s, they turned their attention to Middle Eastern history and the Christian and Islamic religions. Morelli researched rigorously, reading Ernest Renan in particular, and acquiring objects from the East and photographs of Palestine from the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema.⁵ But when he met Mariano Fortuny y Marsal in the early 1870s, his Oriental subjects began to pay less heed to historical references and became pretexts for purely formal studies.

In 1877 Morelli produced an Odalisque which was acquired by the collector Giovanni Maglione (ill. below).⁶ Our study of two oriental women is related to this painting, despite their variations and the different natures of the two images. The oil painting is infused with an atmosphere of seduction that is not present in the watercolour study, where the focus is more on the interplay of colour and light; the whiteness of the drapery on the figure in the foreground is superbly rendered from the blank reserve of the paper.⁷ The use of this technique harks back perhaps to the style of art in which Fortuny was so skilled.⁸

Drawing was an essential part of Morelli’s creative process, enabling him to translate his ideas into images. A whole generation of artists followed in his footsteps; they adopted the medium as well as his style, which is recognisable above all by the spontaneity of his use of pen and ink.

Filipp Maljavin spent a few years as a novice and icon painter at the Saint Panteleimonmonastery at the foot of Mount Athos before enrolling at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1892; after his studies there, he became a student in Ilya Repin’s workshop.¹ He was involved with ‘The World of Art’ (Mir iskusstva), a group founded in 1898 that spearheaded the secessionist system and played a significant role in shaping the Russian avant-garde. His friends Konstantin Somov and Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva were founder members, but Maljavin never became a member himself. At the turn of the century, he exhibited extensively in Russia and Europe: at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, where he received a gold medal for Laughter – a painting acquired the following year by the Galleria Internazionale d’arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro; in 1901 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale; and, in 1903 and 1904, in Berlin.²

A few years later, he was one of a selection of Russian artists that Serge Diaghilev presented at the 1906 Salon d’Automne in Paris. Following Repin, his “rich and powerful” art, which combined his talents as both draughtsman and colourist, made a great impact on the French public.³ By the time he emigrated to Paris in 1924, Maljavin had already established a reputation and identity as a painter of the Russian peasant soul. That same year, Léonce Bénédite acquired a monumental canvas, Russian Peasant Women (ill. 1), for the Musée du Jeu de Paume. It had been presented in the artist’s first solo exhibition at the Galerie Charpentier.⁴

Maljavin also produced numerous portraits of Russian peasants as well as of high society figures (he was dubbed the “Slavic Besnard” by critic Raymond Bouyer).⁵ Around 1920, on the strength of the popularity of paintings in which he portrayed the faces of rural Russia, Maljavin was invited by the Bolshevik authorities to create a gallery of portraits of party members, and in particular the senior figures: Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Anatoly Lunacharsky.⁶

Although these drawings never became paintings, the artist guarded them faithfully after his exile:

“There is no disputing that [the portraits] are historically valuable – and even very much so! And the Bolsheviks themselves are hardly aware they are good! Personally I treat my own work with care, and these drawings particularly, (…) they are in a safe place.”⁷

Even Pablo Picasso owned a portrait of Lenin, as he confided to Mikhail Alpatov in 1960.⁸

There is a second portrait of our blue-spectacled model, wearing a Red Army uniform and decorated with a star (ill. 2). Although his identity is unknown, there seems to have been a certain complicity between the artist and his subject, whose face betrays a hint of playful provocation. In just a few strokes and with skilful use of coloured pencils, Maljavin has managed to capture the personality of this proud young member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

When Maljavin died, his studio became the property of his daughter Zoia Bounatian, before being acquired, for the most part, by a Monegasque dealer in the early 1950s. It is possible that this drawing, which more recently was part of an Italian collection, originates from the same source.⁹

Although Albert Decaris is one of the leading figures of original engraving in the 20th century, towards the end of his life, the artist confessed that he had become an engraver “by chance”.¹

In 1915, Decaris enrolled at the École Estienne, where they mainly taught reproductive engraving. After that, he moved on to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where, in 1919, he won the Prix de Rome for engraving, a bursary which enabled him to become a pensionnaire at the Villa Medici in November of the same year. He spent several years working and studying there, and became friends with the sculptor Alfred Janniot, who was close to the artists known collectively, along with Jean Dupas, as the Bordeaux school.

From the 1930s, when luxury art books came into vogue, Decaris produced illustrations for collectors’ editions. Over the course of his career, he illustrated a wide range of texts, including works by Shakespeare, Cervantes and Chateaubriand, and poems by Pierre de Ronsard, André Chenier and Verlaine.² At the same time, he produced hundreds of engraved compositions, mostly large plates, ranging in size from Raisin (50 x 64 cm) to Grand Aigle (74 x 105 cm). Decaris also engraved more than 500 designs for postage stamps.

Men of letters feature prominently in Decaris’s gallery of engraved portraits, 19th century French Romantic poets in particular (Alfred de Vigny, Gerard de Nerval, Victor Hugo, Rimbaud and Verlaine). He made two large copperplate engravings, each slightly different, of Baudelaire.³ Both are bust-length depictions of the writer, in pensive, melancholic mood, standing in front of a window overlooking the sea – an evocation of his famous poem L’Invitation au voyage. The sketch for the portrait of Baudelaire, painted in broad brushstrokes in the format of the print, establishes all the motifs of the final composition. It has been reproduced on the plate without any intermediate stages or corrections, demonstrating the artist’s consummate technical skill. His fine, precise chiselling has produced subtle reliefs and rich blacks in the print.⁴