Presented here is a selection of 20th century drawings in stock.  Please click on a thumbnail to view further information on the work, as well as an enlarged image of the entire drawing. Six thumbnail images are shown per page; click on the red page number at the lower right to view another page.

MAXWELL ARMFIELD

Ringwood 1881-1972 Dorset

Three Feathers

Tempera on board.

Signed with the artist’s monogram and numbered OP / 253 in white gouache at the upper right.

253 x 305 mm. (10 x 12 in.)

Maxwell Armfield was largely self-taught as an artist. Under the influence of Joseph Southall, he began experimenting with painting in tempera, although he only began taking up the medium with more seriousness around 1910. His first significant one-man exhibition was held at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1908, and a review in The Times noted the artist as ‘a man of originality and promise…[he] is said to be very young: but he is also very versatile…his gifts are undoubted.’ Armfield was a prolific and accomplished illustrator and decorative artist, and also found the time to publish a number of books of poetry, travel accounts and technical guides such as the Manual of Tempera Painting, published in 1930. Although his work was largely forgotten after the Second World War, Armfield lived to see a reassessment of his oeuvre take place in the 1970s. Paintings by the artist are in the collections of the Tate, the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, the Southampton City Art Gallery, and elsewhere.

The present work is numbered by the artist as Opus 253, which would suggest an approximate date of 1948; it was first exhibited the following year. Writing a few years later, Armfield described the particular appeal of tempera, noting that ‘only in this apparently most material and restricted medium could I learn to express in this age, those fundamental things which could not at the present time find acceptance in a direct or ostensible way.’ In another publication, Armfield wrote, ‘Tempera because of the exigencies of material is specially suitable for smallish pictures, gay and rich in colour…the peculiarities of the medium itself render it most suitable for the presentation of flowers, fruit, and the small beasts naturally associated with them: for sky, pebbles, and generally, the smaller details of nature...’

CHRISTOPHER BRAMHAM

Born 1952

The Ducks III, Richmond

Watercolour, gouache and pastel on paper.

Signed, titled and dated Ducks 3 / Spring 1996 / C. Bramham on the backing board.

1613 x 750 mm. (63 1/2 x 29 1/2 in.)

Born in Yorkshire in 1952, Christopher Bramham studied at the Bradford College of Art and the Kingston-upon-Thames Art School. A friend of Lucien Freud, whom he met in 1982 and who was instrumental in bringing his work to greater public attention, Bramham has devoted his mature career to landscape painting. He had his first one-man exhibition in 1988, and over the next several years exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in London. Throughout the 1990s, his preferred subject matter was suburban London landscapes, and in particular views from the window of his home in Richmond in Surrey. Studied at different times of the day and in various seasons, the streets and scenery of suburban Richmond are depicted in Bramham’s paintings with a devotion that belies the apparent mundanity of the subject. In 1999 the artist left London to settle in Cornwall, and his landscapes took on a new dimension, with depictions of farmhouses and rural views.

This monumental and impressive sheet, drawn in the spring of 1996, is a remarkable tour de force of pastel and watercolour, and depicts the view from the artist’s studio in Richmond. This drawing belongs with a large group of paintings and pastels, executed in the second half of the 1990’s, focusing on the angled view from the artist’s studio window down into his garden, with its ducks and greenhouse. When the present work was exhibited at the Yale Center for British Art in 2000, it was noted that, ‘though executed in gouache and pastel, mediums that invite spontaneity and loose strokes, Bramham has not deviated from his usual, laborious style. The odd aerial perspective is testimony to the artist’s practice of painting or drawing what he sees from his upper-story window in Richmond—the ducks, in fact, are family pets…Devotion to and love of the subject matter is what keeps Bramham so intently focused. In painting the world literally at his doorstep, with care and consideration, he discovers the strange beauty of nondescript streets, rows of garages, and railway embankments. It is this ability to render the familiar fresh and new that gives Bramham’s work its power.’

PATRICK CAULFIELD

London 1936-2005 London

A Jug

Pencil.

Signed with initials PC at the lower right.

297 x 209 mm. (11 5/8 x 8 1/4 in.)

In 1960 Patrick Caulfield was admitted to the Royal College of Art, where his fellow pupils included R. B. Kitaj, David Hockney and Allen Jones. While still at the Royal College of Art, Caulfield’s work was exhibited at the Young Contemporaries exhibitions in London in 1961, 1962 and 1963. At this time Caulfield began to produce the first of many screenprints, and printmaking was to become an important aspect of his artistic production. Apart from paintings and prints, Caulfield also produced designs for posters, wall hangings, book covers, tapestries, ceramics and murals, as well as sets and costumes for stage productions at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. A reserved and introspective man, Caulfield worked very slowly, and throughout the last thirty years of his career only rarely produced more than two or three paintings and a few prints each year. At the end of 2002 Caulfield was found to be suffering from cancer of the mouth and throat, and two operations left him unable to speak. Despite his frail state, he was able to complete one large major painting in 2004 before his death the following year.

This fine sheet, drawn in 2003, shows that the artist’s skills as a draughtsman remained formidable even during his illness. As his friend the art historian Marco Livingstone recalled, after Caulfield underwent a major operation for the cancer diagnosed in November 2002, ‘more than a year passed before he again felt strong enough and sufficiently motivated to return to painting, having made only a few small but typically beautiful pencil drawings in the meantime.’ The motif of a jug or pitcher had appeared—either individually or as elements in a larger still life—in Caulfield’s work throughout his career.

HENRI DELUERMOZ

Paris 1876-1943 Paris

Studies of an Eagle

Brush and black ink and brown wash, with touches of white heightening, on reddish-brown prepared paper.

Signed with a monogram and dated .hD.1906 in black ink at the lower right.

Inscribed with colour notes brun rougeâtre, autour du bec et / des yeux (jaune), and duveter soigneussement la tête / trop mou.

273 x 398 mm. (10 3/4 x 15 5/8 in.)

A painter, illustrator and engraver, Henri Deluermoz was a pupil of Alfred Roll and Gustave Moreau. He became one of the finest animal painters of his day, with a particular penchant for depictions of wild animals. He also painted Provençal landscapes, equestrian and bullfight scenes, and produced designs for tapestries, mural decorations, and book illustrations. (Among the books he illustrated were editions of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book and Henri de Montherlant’s Les Bestiaires.) Deluermoz did not send any paintings to the Salon until 1909, when he was already in his thirties, although thereafter he exhibited there regularly, and also showed at commercial galleries in Paris between 1913 and 1919.

This drawing is a relatively early work by the artist. Deluermoz had spent the early years of his career sketching in the Jardin des Plantes and the Jardin d’Acclimation in Paris. In 1905 he settled in Orange in Provence, where he was engaged on a large-scale decorative mural project, and began a series of travels around the Midi. This drawing, dated 1906, was probably drawn at the Jardin Zoologique in the gardens of the Palais Longchamp in Marseilles. Another drawing of the same period—a study of the wings of an eagle—is also in stock.

MAURICE DENIS

EDMUND DULAC

Toulouse 1882-1953 London  

Venise  

Watercolour.

Signed Edmund / Dulac in watercolour at the lower left.

354 x 272 mm. (13 7/8 x 10 3/4 in.) [sheet]

ELIOT HODGKIN

London 1905-1987 London

Five Oyster Shells

Tempera on board.

Signed and dated Eliot Hodgkin 12.i.61 in pencil at the lower left.

248 x 382 mm. (9 3/4 x 15 in.)

Eliot Hodgkin studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and had, by the middle of the 1930s, established as a painter of still lives and landscapes, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy. Within a year or two of his first one-man exhibition, held in a London gallery in 1936, Hodgkin had begun working in egg tempera, and many of his finest works were painted in this demanding medium. As he wrote in 1967, ‘Tempera has no attraction for me simply because it was used by the Italian primitives, most of whose work does not greatly appeal to me. I use it because it is the only way in which I can express the character of the objects that fascinate me. With oil paint I could not get the detail without getting also a disagreeable surface: moreover I should have to wait while the paint dried before continuing.’ Although he turned down the opportunity of becoming an Academician in 1959, he continued to show at the Royal Academy throughout his career, exhibiting a total of 113 paintings at the Summer exhibitions between 1934 and 1981. Owing to worsening eyesight, Hodgkin gave up painting in 1979.

In 1957, in response to an enquiry from the editors of The Studio magazine, Eliot Hodgkin provided a succinct description of his lifelong interest in still life painting: ‘In so far as I have any conscious purpose, it is to show the beauty of natural objects which are normally thought uninteresting or even unattractive: such things as Brussels sprouts, turnips, onions, pebbles and flints, bulbs, dead leaves, bleached vertebrae, an old boot cast up by the tide. People sometimes tell me that they had never really ‘seen’ something before I painted it, and I should like to believe this…For myself, if I must put it into words, I try to look at quite simple things as though I were seeing them for the first time and as though no one had ever painted them before.’ As he further noted nearly twenty years later, in a letter written to Brinsley Ford, ‘I like to show the beauty of things that no one looks at twice.’

ALBERT HUYOT

Paris 1872-1968 Paris

Collage on the Theme of the First World War

Black chalk, pencil, oil and mixed media collage on grey paper from a large sketchbook.

Signed, dated and inscribed A. Huyot 1917 / Souvenir de Poperinghe at the lower centre.

340 x 488 mm. (13 3/8 x 19 1/4 in.)

A pupil of Diogène Maillart and Gustave Moreau, Albert Huyot’s first paintings were done in a generic Post-Impressionist manner indebted to the example of the Nabis, but he soon became influenced by Cubism. He exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Tuileries, and also participated in the Grande Exposition in Brussels in 1910; in the same year he also spent some time in Russia. Huyot was a friend of Henri Matisse, and around 1912 his work reveals the influence of Fauvism; André Derain was another particular influence. After 1920, however, Huyot seems to have abandoned the rigour of his earlier work in favour of landscape painting. An exhibition of his work was held at the Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris in 1926.

The Belgian town of Poperinghe was the main military centre for Allied forces in Flanders during the First World War, and was surrounded by camps, headquarters, hospitals and supply depots. A few kilometers west of Ypres, the town was frequently the recipient of heavy German artillery bombardment but remained in Allied hands for most of the war. A military cemetery remains in the town today.

HUMPHREY JENNINGS

Walberswick 1907-1950 Poros

The Purple Yacht

Pencil, black chalk and watercolour on oatmeal paper.

Stamped with the Jennings studio stamp, not in Lugt, on the verso.

314 x 240 mm. (12 3/8 x 9 1/2 in.)

One of the leading documentary filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s, Humphrey Jennings was also active as a painter, draughtsman, photographer and poet. As an old friend, writing shortly after Jennings’s untimely death, noted of him, ‘He always regarded himself as, before everything, a painter; film-making was of secondary importance and the writing of poems an occasional mode of expression; and it is significant that Humphrey himself said, early last year, that he had just begun to be sufficiently satisfied with his work to feel that the time had come for an exhibition. He had mastered his style.' As early as 1929, before he had started working at the GPO Film Unit, Jennings had written in a letter to his wife, ‘I should hate doing films really…simply I want to draw’, and in 1937 a one-man exhibition of his paintings was held at the London Gallery.

Relatively few paintings and drawings by Humphrey Jennings are signed, dated or titled by the artist, and only a handful of his works are today in public collections. Like his paintings, Jennings’s drawings are characterized by a spare, almost Oriental, use of line. As Kathleen Raine recalled, ‘Sometimes he would paint some apparently naively simple, realistic object—like a matchbox; or, approaching the problem from another point of view, only a few brushmarks, of infinite delicacy of touch and subtlety of colour, on canvases largely left bare—so left because every brushmark must be made with meaning, deliberately placed according to a complex imaginative operation, involving both conscious thought and instinctive sensibility…French in visual perception, English in his sense of the poetic image, Chinese in his philosophy of how an action (painting in particular) should be performed, he sought simultaneously for three kinds of truth; in his mature work, so it seems to me, all these are achieved.’ This watercolour may be dated to around 1949, and would appear to be a study for a small oil painting on canvas by Jennings, of identical dimensions and dated 1949-50.

R. B. KITAJ, R.A.

Cleveland 1932-2007 Los Angeles

Portrait of Philip Roth

Charcoal on handmade paper.

775 x 570 mm. (30 1/2 x 22 1/2 in.)

Throughout his career, R. B. Kitaj was always particularly highly regarded as a draughtsman. In 1981, the art critic Robert Hughes noted of the artist that ‘Of late, he has also emerged (alongside David Hockney and Avigdor Arikha) as one of the few real masters of the art of straight figure drawing in Europe or, for that matter, in the world…Kitaj draws better than almost anyone else alive, taking on all the expressive and factual responsibilities of depiction and carrying most of them through.’

Kitaj met Philip Roth in 1985, when the writer and his wife Claire Bloom were neighbours of the artist in Chelsea, London. Roth became a good friend, and his writings influenced and inspired much of Kitaj’s thinking, particularly on the question of Jewish identity. As Kitaj wrote in his First Diasporist Manifesto, published in 1989, ‘One outcome of my study of this strange people of mine is that painting, Diasporist painting in my own life, begins to assume some of the Jewish attributes or characteristics assigned to that troubled people. The listing of traits would be endless and funny. For the moment I will leave all that to my buddy Philip Roth (b.1933) and his great book The Counterlife, which is quite encyclopedic on these questions. I think that what the Jews promise, paintings may be made to promise.’ Indeed, the First Diasporist Manifesto opens with a quote – ‘The poor bastard had Jew on the brain’ - from Roth’s The Counterlife, alongside a reproduction of the present portrait drawing.

Drawn in London in 1985, soon after Roth and Kitaj first met, the present sheet was, according to Kitaj, done in ‘about six sessions’. Loaned from the artist’s own collection, the drawing was included in Kitaj’s retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1994, which later travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Despite the generally poor reviews for the exhibition as a whole, the present sheet was singled out for praise by several critics. (One noted that ‘Works like…a magnificent portrait of Philip Roth seemed to me the strongest works in the show.’) Among comparable large-scale portrait drawings by Kitaj is a study of Lucian Freud, today in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

ESTEBAN LISA

Hinojosa de San Vicente 1895-1983 Buenos Aires

Recto: Composition

Verso: Composition

Oil on cardboard.

299 x 228 mm. (11 3/4 x 9 in.)

One of the pioneers of abstract painting in Latin America, Esteban Lisa was born in Spain and emigrated to Argentina in 1907. Largely self-taught as an artist, Lisa is thought to have destroyed much of his youthful work, and his earliest known paintings date from the early 1930’s and reveal a gradual tendency towards abstraction. By around 1935, he had begun to produce a distinctive body of abstract paintings; works which were quite alien to the preference for figurative painting among the artists and collectors of his day in Argentina. Indeed, Lisa’s style is of particular interest in that it developed in almost complete isolation from the avant-garde modernism of Europe and America.

Lisa’s abstract paintings are characterized by their small scale and intimate nature. His lifelong devotion to abstraction resulted in several changes of direction in his painted output as his career progressed, from Cubist-like compositions of fragmented planes of colour and geometric shapes in the late 1930’s, through the more organic forms and clashing colours of his work of the 1940’s to the spirited paintings of the 1950’s. For the artist, painting had always remained a purely private exercise, and he never exhibited or sold any of his work; indeed, he rarely showed his paintings to anyone. At the time of his death in 1983, therefore, Lisa’s small abstract paintings remained unknown to all but his family and a handful of students. Since the artist chose never to exhibit his works in his lifetime, Lisa’s work has only recently been accorded much critical attention. Indeed, it was not until 1987 – four years after his death – that the first significant exhibition of his paintings was held, in Buenos Aires. This was followed in the 1990’s by museum and gallery exhibitions in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, as well as in Madrid, Barcelona, London and New York. The appearance of such a significant and highly individual body of abstract paintings by an artist all but unknown to scholars and curators of contemporary art was, for many, an event of considerable interest.

The present, double-sided sheet is an early work by the artist, and may be dated to between 1936 and 1940. It is a particularly fine and typical example of Lisa’s abstractions of this period, which have been aptly described as ‘quiet meditations on color and form…[in which] rectangles, squares, triangles, and trapezoidal planes of muted color fit together like shards of stained glass.’ At this stage of his career the artist painted on small, thin pieces of cardboard of a uniform size, often using both sides of the board to create two independent, finished compositions, as in the present work. The way in which the artist allows the rough, textured surface and colour of the cardboard to show through the composition is also typical of Lisa’s paintings of the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. Marking the start of his lifelong dedication to abstraction, Lisa’s small paintings of the second half of the 1930’s and the beginning of the 1940’s, typified by the present sheet, are among his most beautiful and elegiac compositions.

EGON SCHIELE

Tulln 1890-1918 Vienna

Portrait of a Child (Anton Peschka, Jr.)

Black crayon. The upper left corner of the sheet previously torn and reattached.

Signed and dated EGON / SCHIELE / 1918 in pencil at the lower right.

381 x 283 mm. (15 x 11 1/8 in.)

Drawn in the last months of Schiele’s brief career, the present sheet is a portrait of the artist’s young nephew, Anton Peschka, Jr. The son of his younger sister Gertrude (Gerti) Schiele and Anton Peschka, a painter and close friend of the artist, the young Anton, known as ‘Toni’, was born on December 27th, 1914. Within a few months Schiele had begun to make drawings of the baby. Schiele continued to make drawings of his nephew and, as the boy grew older, Schiele began to develop ideas for a painted portrait of him, and to this end produced several charming drawings of the child in 1917. The present sheet is one of only three known portrait drawings of Schiele’s young nephew to date from 1918. Of the other two drawings, likewise drawn in black crayon alone, one shows him seated on his mother’s lap, while in the other he is shown in much the same way as in this drawing, seated and facing forward. This is indeed how he appears in Schiele’s painting of 1918, which was left unfinished at the artist’s death in October of that year. In the painting, as in the present sheet and other drawings of the young Toni Peschka at the age of two or three, the child is depicted wearing a dress, which was not uncommon for small boys at that time.

In this intimate portrayal of his young nephew (who, like his father and uncle, was to become a painter and a student at the Akademie in Vienna), Schiele was able to capture something of the essence of childhood. It has been noted that, ‘If Schiele felt most at ease with himself as a model, he gradually discovered that children could be nearly as congenial. Since he was (in his own words) an ‘eternal child’…it is understandable that he would relate more readily to children than to adults... Schiele’s skill in working with young models derived from his ability to put them totally at ease, to allow them simply to be who they were.’ Of the drawings produced in the last year of the artist’s life, Jane Kallir has written; ‘Always the speedy worker, Schiele had finally found the perfect line. In 1917 and 1918 he was usually able to capture his subjects with a single, virtually unbroken sweep of his crayon. In his works on paper, he became more and more focused on the qualities of drawing as such, and therefore relatively few of his 1918 studies are colored. Instead he was increasingly interested in sculpting volume… Schiele had no need, as formerly, to redraw or embellish faulty contours…he was in complete control, and in these drawings Schiele achieved an unprecedented degree of accuracy.’

KYFFIN WILLIAMS, R.A.

Llangefni, Anglesey 1918-2006 Anglesey

Wil Ifan

Pen and grey ink and grey wash.

Signed KW. at the lower right.

420 x 297 mm. (16 1/2 x 11 3/4 in.)

ERICH WOLFSFELD

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