Attributed to Piero del Pollaiuolo | Portrait of a Young Man | Black chalk, pen and brown ink on paper | 360 x 228 mm | Sotheby's Sale 25 Jan. 2012, lot 27

One of the works they compare lot 27 to is a drawing here in Rome at the Istituto Nazionale della Grafica. The Rome drawing is now assigned by the Istituto to Maso Finiguerra (a collaborator of the Pollaiuolo’s) although in the past it has been attributed to Francesco Pesellino, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and just simply 15th century Florentine school.  The Sotheby’s cataloguers refer to the Rome drawing as by the Circle of Pollaiuolo. Just below is the Rome drawing and, at least to me, it looks as though it could be the very same sitter. Here is a link to the Istituto’s Maso Finiguerra drawing, where the image is of a better quality.

Maso Finiguerra | Profile of a Young Man | Pen and bistre ink, brush and brown watercolor, on ivory paper | 225 x 193 mm | Istituto Nazionale della Grafica, Rome

Stefano da Verona Circle | Standing Male Nude | Early 15th century | Pen and brown ink on laid paper | 187 x 129 mm | Uffizi | Florence

The other, a much later drawing, shows Thomas Bewick at work on his banged up MacBook Pro. His pet duck is playing possum.

Johnny Millais | Portrait of Thomas Berwick | 1891 | Photo of book plate showing brown ink repro of 250 x 178 mm drawing

Attr. Antimenes Painter | Black Figure Amphora with Heracles Scene and Olive Gathering | 520 BC | 40.6 cm. high | British Museum | London

Images of olives are not as common as you would think. It could be that they were so present, and common, that it wouldn’t have made sense to depict them. At least, for Mediterranean artists. Van Gogh, who grew up in the Netherlands, was fascinated by olives. At the Saint-Rémy asylum, he painted them in oils and drew them in ink. Here is a drawing in reed pen and brown ink, with the lines so fluid, they look as if they could be done with a brush.

Vincent Van Gogh | Saint-Rémy Olives | 1889 | Reed pen and brown ink | Van Gogh Museum | Amsterdam

Olive oil is slow drying, and easily becomes rancid, making it a poor choice for a medium in oil painting. Cennino Cennini in his Libro dell’Arte recipes mentions linseed oil (writing olio di semenza di lino or olio di lin seme) most frequently. In Chapter 25, the only time Cennini uses the word olive (ulivo), he uses olive oil to grease a stone slab in the preparation of tracing paper. In Chapter 187, he calls it edible oil (olio da mangiare) and uses it to grease a wax figure before covering it in gesso, giving the reader the choice of using lampante oil (olio da bruciare). He sometimes tells his readers to use the oil of their choice, and sometimes does not specify what kind of oil should be used.

One thing that olive oil and drawings share, is that they should not be kept in the light. I’ve heard experts in olive oil say that a bottle kept in the light for a week is unfit to eat. So–storage in boxes, drawers, and cupboards for both drawings and olive oil–just miles apart.

Jan van Bijlert | Detail – Saint Luke the Evangelist | Oil on Canvas | 93.6 x 77.4 cm. | Christie's Amsterdam 13 April 2010, lot 103

This detail from Jan van Bijlert (Utrecht 1597/8-1671) painting of St. Luke the Evangelist shows the saint using a large knife to make the first cut in making a pen. Penknives, and they are named for cutting quill pens, are now generally known as small folding knives that fit in the pocket, like pocketknives. What’s interesting to me is that the feathers have been cut off, the most decorative part has been removed, for a wholly utilitarian pen. Jacques de Gheyn’s drawing in Berlin, just below, shows both a quill and the knife, crossed on the table. The implication is that one needed the pen to trim the tip on a regular basis.

Jacob de Gheyn II | Woman and Child Looking at a Sketchbook | Pen and brown ink, brush and wash on laid paper| c.1600 | Staatliche Museen | Berlin

Thomas Jefferson, who was carried on a vast correspondence (est. of 20,000 letters) complained of the time involved in readying and repairing his quill pens and was happy when metal pens became available–until he wasn’t because of their rusting. Here is a drawing of Jefferson’s for a machine to make pasta. His handwriting is wonderfully legible, this coming from someone who types everything, even grocery lists since I cannot read my own writing.

Thomas Jefferson | Maccaroni Recipe and Press Design | No date | Library of Congress | Washington, DC

Collection	Country	City/Loc.	No. of Drawings	No. of Drawings Online	Notes
Accademia Carrara, Ambrosiana, Brera, Poldi Pezzoli, and other Lombard Collections	Italy	Lombardy Region		3,223	Site of the Beni Culturali, Lombardy
Albertina, Grafische Sammlung	Austria	Vienna	50,000		5,000 prints and drawings online. Drawings not broken out.
Ambrosiana, Biblioteca	Italy	Milan	12,000	8,315
Art Institute of Chicago	USA	Chicago	11,500	6,797
Ashmolean Museum - Oxford Univ.	UK	Oxford		5,090
Basel Kunstmuseum	Switzerland	Basel			300,000 prints, drawings, and watercolors. 2513 online
Biblioteca Nacional	Spain	Madrid	45,000
Bologna – Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe	Italy	Bologna	9,000	192
Boston Museum of Fine Arts	USA	Boston		712
British Museum	UK	London	50,000
Cleveland Museum of Art	USA	Cleveland	3,733	3,733
Cologne – Wallraf-Richartz	Germany	Cologne		1,000	1,000 19th century drawings in database. 75,000 prints and drawings in coll.
Courtauld Inst. of Art	UK	London		7,260
Detroit Institute of Fine Arts	USA	Detroit		2,500	35,000 prints, drawings, photographs, watercolors, posters and artists books
Dresden – Staatliche Kunstsammlung	Germany	Dresden		377	500,000 works on paper
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts	France	Paris	65,000	33,694	20,000 drawings and 45,000 architectural drawings
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts	USA	San Francisco			70,000 works on paper
Fitzwilliam Museum - Cambridge University	UK	Cambridge		17,406	40,000 paintings, drawings, and prints
Flemish Art Collections – Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, the Groeninge Museum Bruges and the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent	Belgium	Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent	40,000
Getty Museum	USA	Los Angeles	700	700
Harvard University Art Museums - Fogg, Busch-Reisinger etc.	USA	Cambridge		24,451	Fogg has 12,000 drawings.
Istituto Nazionale della Grafica	Italy	Rome		7,132
LA County Museum of Art	USA	Los Angeles
Leiden University	Netherlands	Leiden		12,489
Louvre	France	Paris	140,000	140,000
MAK - Österreichisches Museum fuer angewandte Kunst/Gegenwartskunst	Austria	Vienna		16,932	Wiener Werkstätte drawings
Metropolitan Museum of Art	USA	New York	15,000	23,871	56,663 prints and drawings
Morgan Library	USA	New York	10,000	7,444	Strangely, no images in database
Museum of Modern Art	USA	New York	10,000	5,960
National Gallery of Canada	Canada	Ottawa		11,136	24,000 prints and drawings. 5,595 drawings with images
National Gallery of Denmark	Denmark	Copenhagen	60,000	21,463
National Gallery of Scotland	UK	Edinburgh	20,000	525
National Gallery, Washington, DC	USA	Washington DC		32,107	1,953 with images
National Library of Ireland	Ireland	Dublin			100,000 prints and drawings
National Museum	Sweden	Stockholm	see note	21,235	500,000 prints and drawings. 2,000 French drawings of Carl Gustaf Tessin.
Philadelphia Museum of Art	USA	Philadelphia		652	150,000 prints, drawings, and photographs
Prado, Museo Nacional del	Spain	Madrid	6,300	556
Princeton University Art Museum	USA	Princeton	7,000	1,133
Rijksmuseum	Netherlands	Amsterdam		3,495	800,000 prints, drawings, and photographs
Royal Academy of Arts	UK	London		1926
Royal Collections - Windsor etc.	UK	Windsor	40,000	1,072
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium	Belgium	Brussels		2,018
Smith College Museum of Art	USA	Northampton	1,600		Smith shares database w. area colleges
Tate	UK	London		48,041	Unique Works of Art is phrase used on site.
Uffizi and other State Museums in Florence	Italy	Florence		3,780	145,000 records of paintings, sculptures etc. drawings not broken out. Uffizi has 120,000 prints and drawings.
Victoria & Albert	UK	London			1,000,000 objects online. Data for drawings not broken out.
Walters Art Museum	USA	Baltimore		900	19th c. French Drawings
Yale University Art Gallery	USA	New Haven	8,174	8,174

Collection marks, whether of an individual collector or an organization such as a museum, library, or those tasked with the dispersal an artist’s estate, show ownership. A drawing’s provenance, or ownership history, is traced through these marks. Frits Lugt in 1921 published the standard reference Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes (a supplement was published in 1956, and an expanded online version is due in 2010). The marks that he cataloged are arranged alphabetically (most marks involve initials); by symbol type, for example geometric figures; animals; those that are difficult to understand; idiosyncratic mounts and mats; and by examples of handwriting with emphasis on inventory systems. Entries for important collectors and their marks are fairly detailed, listing the choicest prints and drawings and sale dates (Lugt’s other great contribution to art history was his Répertoire des Catalogues de Ventes Publiques).  Lugt assigned a number to each mark, and catalog or auction entries on drawings with a collector’s mark,  will give the collector’s name and a Lugt number, say Pierre-Jean Mariette (Lugt 1852 or more simply L. 1852) and will note in what color ink the mark is stamped and where the mark is located.

I made the holiday card above in about 2000 with the assistance of clever friends who were able to scan the collection marks I’d chosen from Lugt and I then arranged the letters to read “Season’s Greetings.” I remember being very pleased with myself (seems pitiable now) going to the photocopy shop and printing from a disk rather than with bits of paper pasted down with a glue stick and whiteout covered seams. I don’t have a copy of Lugt with me, but the marks I recognize as being by important collectors are the apostrophe, made with a star, of Nicholas Lanier (1588 – 1666) ; and the palette with the letter “R” which is of the painter Jonathan Richardson Senior (1665 – 1745). Both of these collectors are associated with more than one mark.

Marks appear both on the recto and verso, or front and back, of drawing sheets. Marks are the least disfiguring if they are on the back or on the edges away from the drawn images. Some stamps are embossed and are known as “blind stamps” and are more unobtrusive than the more usual inked stamps. Occasionally marks are in the central part of the sheet, within the lines of the drawing, and are applied like the stamps of vengeful bureaucrats. Presumably the owners feared theft and that a stamp in the middle would discourage thieves, not giving them the opportunity of trimming off a mark on the edge. Nowadays most collectors do not mark their drawings because marks are distracting and disfiguring and one can document one’s collection with photographs.

A mark of an important collector adds value to a drawing. Of course, collection marks are easily faked, and have been. The falsifier Hebborn would draw them freehand, but for the unscrupulous dealer, getting an artisan to duplicate a stamp is not difficult–far, far easier than finding someone to counterfeit banknotes, for example. The marks that are most faked are those of the greatest collectors. With ever more precise measuring instruments, and if there were time and interest, marks could be evaluated for authenticity.

26 March 2010 – Lugt is now online and what a wonderful tool. Here is the Lugt start page.