Vivante Drawings

Solander boxes are used for the storage of drawings and other works on paper. They are hard shelled cases, made of basswood and covered with acid-free boards and treated pebbled cloth. Their rigidity is important and allows them to be stacked.  A pair of metal latches keep them tightly shut and they can have a handle or not. They are also lined with acid-free paper. The box opens so that the top of the box can lie flat, flush with the deeper section of the box. Nowadays, the more descriptive name “clamshell case” is often used, but this is a shame because it distances them from the 18th century Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander, who devised this storage box for dried plants and who worked at the British Museum.

Solander Boxes

Solander was a student of Carolus Linnaeus, one of Linneaeus’s apostles, who traveled from Uppsala to England in 1760 to help others understand Linnaeus’s system of classifying plants and animals, where, simply put, the genus and species names are paired. As he had not finished his degree before going to London, he probably meant to return to Sweden.

Portrait Medallion of Daniel Solander | Modelled by John Flaxman | Manufactured by Wedgewood & Bentley | Jasper ware | 1775/80 | 3.3 inches high | British Museum | London

Solander was very social and had an easy time inserting himself in London–James Boswell said of Solander “Throw him where you will, he swims.” He became Assistant Librarian at the British Museum in 1663, working on cataloging the herbarium of Hans Sloane, a founder of the museum. (The British Museum’s plant and animal collections were transferred between 1880 and 1883 to the Natural History Museum.) He interrupted his work at the museum in 1668 when he traveled with Captain James Cook and his good friend and patron Joseph Banks  across the Pacific. For Cook the main purpose of the trip was to study the Transit of Venus from Tahiti, something the French had done a few years earlier. For Banks and Solander, it was to collect plant specimens and to a lesser degree animal subjects. Their most significant work was done in New Holland or Australia. Botany Bay was named for the great variety of plants Banks and Solander found there, most of them completely new to them.

Two draftsmen were hired for the voyage, Alexander Buchan who worked mainly on recording views, people, and artifacts and Sydney Parkinson who worked on the scientific drawings of flora and fauna.  Buchan died early on. The crew of the ship Endeavor collected plants during the day and Parkinson would produce rough sketches with color notes. In the evenings Solander and Banks studied, described, named and recorded where their specimens were collected, while Parkinson worked further on the drawings, following Solander’s instructions, highlighting which parts of the plants should be recorded with the most care for classification purposes. Over 500 of Parkinson’s drawings can be seen on the Natural History Museum’s website here. Parkinson died on the way back to England in 1771.  Whether solander boxes were used on this trip or whether they were developed later at the British Museum isn’t known.  Solander assumed his old post at the British Museum in 1771 and was then promoted to Keeper of Natural and Artificial Productions.

Daniel C. Solander    1733 – 1782

1733 Born in Piteå, in northern Sweden on 19 February 1733.
1750 Enrolls in Sweden’s University of Uppsala, with the idea of studying law before meeting Carl von Linné or Carolus Linnaeus (1701 – 1778) whereupon he begins studying natural history and becomes one of Linnaeus’s top students.
1756 Edits Linnaeus’s Elementa Botanica.
1760 Linnaeus, asked in 1758 by English naturalists to send a student to aid their work,  recommends Solander and he arrives in London in June 1760.
1762 Linnaeus recommends Solander for professorship in St. Petersburg, but Solander prefers staying in Britain.
1763 Appointed Assistant Librarian at the British Museum to catalogue nautral history collections (BM founded by Act of Parliament in 1753 and first exhibits and reading rooms open in 1759).
1764 Meets Joseph Banks and become lifelong friends. Elected Fellow of Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science.
1768 – 1771 Sails on the Endeavour to New Holland or Australia with Captain James Cook, Joseph Banks, Sydney Parkinson and crew. Sail from England to Rio de Janeiro, Tierra del Fuego, Tuamotu Islands, Society Islands, New Zealand, Australia, Batavia (Java), Cape Town and back to England.
1771 Becomes Banks’s Secretary and moves in with Banks.
1772 Travels with Joseph Banks to the Hebrides, Iceland, Orkneys, and Scottish Highlands.
1773 Reinstated at the British Museum and then promoted to Keeper in the Department of Natural and Artificial Productions.
1782 Suffers a stroke on 8 May 1782 and dies on 13 May 1782.

This post was prompted by a reader’s comment that  Jan Van Eyck would have loved using digital cameras, Photoshop, and other current visual aids.

Canaletto, the 18th century Venetian painter of views, used the camera obscura (two of his devices are in the Museo Correr, Venice) to produce rapidly traced drawings of the buildings and views he might later paint. The four drawings shown here are, because they are traced drawings, a little lifeless.

Canaletto | Four Sheets of Views of the Campo San Giovanni e Paolo, Venice | Pen and Brown Ink on Cream Paper | Gallerie dell'Accademia | Venice

A camera obscura is, as it sounds, a dark chamber or box. It has a small aperture, through which the image of the externally lit subject is projected upside down onto the opposite wall of the room or box. Later refinements included lenses and mirrors to sharpen and right the upside down images. There has been much written about whether the artists Caravaggio and Jan Vermeer used the camera obscura in creating their pictures. (As a curious aside, no drawings have been convincingly attributed to either Caravaggio and Vermeer.) One reason for thinking these artists used a camera obscura is because of the remarkable clarity and detail in their work. The painter David Hockney goes so far as to claim that artists as early as Jan Van Eyck used optical aids. There is absolutely no documentation showing that Van Eyck, Caravaggio, or Vermeer used such devices.

Many artists try to assist other artists (and possibly further their own reputation) by writing about the practice of art. Dürer in his Underweysung der Messung or Instruction in Measurement uses the following woodcut as an aid for teaching perspective.

Albrecht Durer | Draftsman Drawing a Reclining Woman | Woodcut | 1525| Graphische Sammlung Albertina | Vienna

The woodcut shows an artist viewing his subject through a window, compartmentalized into squares, so that each square could be methodically understood and then recorded on the gridded drawing paper.

One much used device was the Claude Glass. Named after the 17th century artist Claude Lorrain, it came into use in the 18th century. The Claude Glass is a darkened, slightly convex mirror. It functions as a view finder and, because of its tinted nature, it creates an artfully cohesive tone, suggesting the dreamy effect of a Claude landscape under yellowed varnish.

Claude Glass | 5-1/2 inches | Freeman's | Philadelphia | 2 March 2007, lot 603

It was used by artists, both professional and amateur and also by people who just wanted to see what fashion told them was a more perfect landscape. There is a drawing in the British Museum by the artist Thomas Gainsborough which shows an artist, possibly a self-portrait,  holding a Claude Glass in one hand and drawing implement in the other, to record what he was seeing on the paper on his lap.

Thomas Gainsborough | Artist wiith a Claude Glass (Self-Portrait?) | Pencil on Cream Laid Paper | 184 x 138 mm. | c. 1750 | British Museum | London

Gainsborough had another interesting way of working, that of collecting plants and using them in his studio to create miniature landscapes. His friend the painter Joshua Reynolds tells us about Gainsborough:

“He even framed a kind of model of landscapes on his table; composed of broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees and water. How far this latter practice may be useful in giving hints, the professors of landscape can best determine. Like every other technical practice, it seems to me wholly to depend on the general talent of him who used it. Such methods may be nothing better than comtemptible and mischievous trifling; or they may be aids.”

The works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, knight … : containing his Discourses, Idlers, A journey to Flanders and Holland, and his commentary on Du Fresnoy’s art of painting / printed from his revised copies, (with his last corrections and additions) In three volumes. To which is prefixed An account of the life and writings of the author by Edmond Malone, esq. …, 3d ed. corrected, London 1801, vol. II, p. 154.

If we were collecting drawings centuries ago, at least in Italy, we would probably have assembled our drawings as Padre Sebastiano Resta (1653 – 1714) had–using albums and writing pertinent information right by the drawings. A major drawback of keeping drawings in albums, or laid down on mounts,  is that a good many drawings are double-sided and by pasting drawings down, you lose one side. (Discovering that you have another drawing on the verso of a laid down drawing is similar to the thrill of discovering that there are two layers to the chocolate box.)

Padre Sebastiano Resta | Libro d'Arabeschi | Album of Drawings | Biblioteca Comunale | Palermo

Most people now keep their drawings in mats and information is stored apart. FileMaker Pro and Access are two databases that can be used for storing this type of information. Since I’m always worried about losing information, whether by corrupted programs or computer failure, it would be wonderful if one could use Google docs to keep all the information together, both fields and images. This would  be useful for accessing information from computers at libraries and anywhere. Once I finish this post, I’m going to write to suggest the idea to Google.

The following is a list of possible fields for catalog entries or fact sheets.

• Creation Place
• School
• Century
  
• Artist’s Name
• Birth Place
  
• Birth Date
• Death Date
  
• Death Place
  
• Image Recto
• Title Recto
• Date of Work
  
• Media Recto
• Insciption Recto
• Image Verso
• Title Verso
• Date of Work
  
• Media Verso
• Inscription Verso
• Carrier/Drawing Support
• Size in Millimeters/Inches
• Watermark Image
  
• Watermark Reference
• Inventory Number
  
• Acquired from
• Date
• Price
• Provenance
• Lugt Image
• Lugt Number
• Exhibitions
  
• Bibliography – Real
• Bibliography – Related
• Notes/Correspondence

Two amazing 15th century drawings are Jan Van Eyck’s St. Barbara (Royal Museum, Antwerp) and Giovanni Bellini’s Lamentation (Uffizi, Florence). Both are on gesso covered panels and painted with fine, fine brushes. The Bellini is a large work and measures 74 x 118 cm., and the Van Eyck small at 31 x 18 cm.  They are often referred to as grisaille paintings. To me they are much more drawings than paintings, and if I were a drawings curator at the Uffizi or in Antwerp, I’d surely agitate to have them in my department. The limiting of drawings to paper or animal skin supports seems too arbitrary.

Jan Van Eyck | St. Barbara | 1437 | Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten | Antwerp

Giovanni Bellini | Lamentation | Tempera on Panel | 74 x 118 cm. | c. 1490 | Galleria degli Uffizi | Florence

Bellini | Lamentation | Detail

Scholars are undecided as to whether these are finished or unfinished works. To modern eyes, it would seem insane to do such detailed works, only to be covered with paint. (The colored paint in the sky of the Van Eyck work was added later, not by Van Eyck.) Fifteenth century painters were meticulous in their preparation, but to this extent?

The possibilities:

– Unfinished, meant to be completed with paint

– Meant to be exactly as they are

– Meant to be used as teaching/workshop models

Or, maybe we’re dealing with instances of “quit while you’re ahead.”

The French win. Of the three websites on my bookmarks toolbar for researching drawings, two are French: Joconde and the Louvre. The other is the British Museum. I return to these again and again. You’d think that America, the land of computing and the World Wide Web, would have magnificent, complete resources, but no.  German electronic resources are also uneven.

The legacy of Diderot and the state structure of French museums have made their research websites remarkably strong.

The Louvre has 140,000 drawings online. For results, each page delivers 5 entries, mostly with thumbnail images that are sufficiently readable (unlike the BM, where the thumbnails are a bit small). If there are too many results, say for Stefano della Bella (there are 688 results or 138 pages) and it becomes laborious going through them all,  I then switch to Joconde which gives 100 results per page, and includes the Louvre and other state collections. The Louvre’s images are richer, so I weave back, via inventory number (listed under oeuvres),  to view the better images.

• Louvre Search

• Joconde Search

The British Museum’s database is also close to heavenly. Results include prints which can be good, but also overwhelming.

• British Museum Search

Between 1984 and 1986, I worked as curator for Ian Woodner’s collection, and what I remember most about him was how he cooed at drawings, especially the most recently acquired and the ones he was about to buy. It was visceral, you’d see him start, move closer to the sheet, and then coo.

Woodner was a tall man, had good skin color from being in the sun, and had attractive white hair, sometimes quite long. He wore double-breasted suits with twin back vents, colorful suspenders, and occasionally fuchsia pocket squares. A little more eccentric was his use of eyeliner at night and the very strong tuberose and gardenia perfume called Fracas. He was handsome, even in his 80s.

He grew up in Minnesota, studied architecture at the University of Minnesota, and then Harvard. However, he was much more a real estate developer than an architect. I never remember his sketching out building plans or praising any particular architect, never mentioned White or Wright, and never bought any old master architectural drawings for his collection. A couple of times when we were out on the New York streets, I remember his saying how much he liked skyscrapers because of the reflections of sky and clouds in the glass. His buildings, mostly rental apartment buildings, were never very high or full of glass, they were maybe a bit ordinary, but there were many of them, and they paid for his collecting.

By 1984, when I went to work for him, he’d been collecting for some thirty years. He was born in 1903 and died in 1990. Much of his collection had been bought from the Schab Gallery on 57th Street. Frederick Schab had sold him his star Benvenuto Cellini drawing of a Satyr, many other good drawings, and also many lesser works. I felt lucky in that Konrad Oberhuber had recently come on the scene, advising Woodner on acquisitions, and involving his students in writing the catalog entries for the Woodner shows at the National Gallery in Washington, the Getty, and the Kimbell. (Oberhuber was a remarkable teacher and Harvard professor, who later went on to become the Director of the Albertina in Vienna. Many people had no idea they were interested in drawings until they’d met him.) The notoriety Woodner was receiving through the exhibitions, propelled him to buy more drawings. It seemed that every week, and sometimes every day, dealers and auction house representatives would come to his office hoping to interest him in a drawing.

Woodner’s collection was very broad, he didn’t take the more conventional and modest path taken by many collectors, that of concentrating on just one school, say French 18th century drawings. Instead he had drawings from all over Europe, from the 14th century forward. He had a taste for wonderfully awkward drawings. His early drawings, his Germans and Goyas and Redons were most interesting because of their standing outside of our usual sense of beauty.

Probably the artist he most admired was Odilon Redon and he had a large collection of Redon drawings, prints, pastels, paintings and watercolors. His own pastels and watercolors, mostly of flowers or landscapes, were strongly influenced by Redon. Here in Italy, they call vibrant colors “accesi” meaning turned-on or electrified, and that’s a way of describing Woodner colors. His garden on Long Island, where he painted on the weekends, had beds of seriously bright flowers and a peacock house.

He had a preference for large drawings, but also had many small sheets. The display of drawings was very important to him. He liked being involved in the matting of the drawings and always wanted the windows larger and played with the back color of the mats, hoping to make the drawings appear bigger. He had an excellent relationship with his daughter Andrea, or Andy, and she came to the office every week. She had a very easy way of explaining things, and this is when I learned to add and subtract fractions for mats.

Once, an important visitor was coming, maybe a museum director, but I can’t remember who it was. When prominent visitors came, works would be transported to his apartment from Morgan Manhattan, a storage company, and invariably the frames would be dinged and show ugly white nicks from the trip across town. After we’d hung the transported works, Woodner suddenly had the idea of using instant coffee and water to inpaint the white gesso areas and so we set to work and he joked, “Even if they don’t look good, the smell is wonderful.”

He’d drift away if anyone started talking about iconography. He was much more interested in how a drawing was made, made from the artist’s viewpoint. Woodner had, as so many successful men are allowed to have, a bad temper. It was generally around the real estate people that he’d let go–turn bright red and fulminate. He’d also become furious with Walter Strauss, the not very successful publisher of the Illustrated Bartsch and a kind of fixer for Woodner (the Lubomirski and Koenigs drawings were procured by Strauss). Visiting curators would sometimes witness his anger and combativeness if they expressed any doubts about his Hans Holbein the Younger portrait (now in the National Gallery and inventoried as after Holbein) or a Crucifixion he was certain was by Dirk Bouts (also National Gallery, and now given to the Master of the Coburg Roundels). He would get angry if other people weren’t seeing what he was seeing. While this seemed strange to me at the time, now it doesn’t. Those interested in old masters can get very exercised about attribution questions.

Woodner wasn’t particularly keen on seeing other people’s drawings, or visiting public collections and going through boxes. He was focused on what was his and what he could get. He kept a small library, apart from the larger office library, in a studio next to his apartment in the west 60s. Since he had trouble sleeping, he liked to look at exhibition catalogs and find drawings that were owned privately and see if anything could be done to shake them loose. He also loved looking through sale catalogs, whether old or new.

There was something very stable and reassuring about working at Woodner’s offices. The real estate people were genuinely kind and amusingly puzzled by these expensive pieces of paper called drawings for which they’d create stretch payment schedules. The place, with its plastic wood furniture, was strangely pleasing. It was endearing to see Woodner with Paula Vial, his business partner, having lunch together. Woodner with his burnt grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch (also burnt toast for breakfast) and always thinking towards the next acquisition.

Although it’s rare to see drawings displayed in paintings before the 17th century, there are visual clues as to how paper could be appended to walls. For smaller sheets of paper, dabs of red sealing wax, as in this portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, anchor paper to wall.

Hans Holbein the Younger | Portrait of Georg Gisze (Detail) | Oil on Panel | 1532 | Staatliche Museen | Berlin

Hans Holbein the Younger | Portrait of Georg Gisze | Oil on Wood Panel | 1532 | Staatliche Museen | Berlin

For larger pieces of paper, such as maps, the paper would be affixed to a linen backing and then both hung and weighted with a rod, as in this Vermeer painting in Amsterdam.

Johannes Vermeer | Woman Reading A Letter | 1662-63 | Rijkmuseum | Amsterdam

The map in Vermeer’s painting was made from a few sheets of paper joined together. Paper molds were never longer than arm’s length and so for large projects many sheets would be fastened together.

I just visited the Museo Horne in Florence and saw this 1590 woodcut by Andrea Andreani based on a Domenico Beccafumi design. The woodcut is made up of eight sheets and is framed, but not matted. It appears to be varnished and the frame has no glazing. I haven’t found out when this was framed, but this type of framing, treating the woodcut as if it were a painting, dates back to the early 16th century, when Jacopo de’ Barbari, Dürer, and Titian introduced giant multiple sheet woodcuts.

Andrea Andreani after Domenico Beccafumi | Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law | Woodcut | 1590 | Museo Horne | Florence

The reason so many old master drawings remain, and in a good state of preservation, is that they were kept in albums. Giorgio Vasari (1511 – 1574), sometimes considered the first collector of drawings, kept his drawings in what is known as his “Libro de’ Disegni.” The Libro had at least five volumes.  It must have seemed quite natural to keep drawings in albums. So many drawings were bound together to form model books and precious illuminations were integral to bound manuscripts. For artists, portable books of drawings would have been great assets to bring to commission sites.

It is very rare to see drawings, the objects themselves, in paintings before the 17th century. An occasional St. Luke can be seen working on a portrait of the Virgin, sometimes in drawing, but usually in painting. Lorenzo Lotto’s Lucretia (1530-32) shows a woman holding a drawing of her namesake, not because she was a collector of drawings, but as a way of likening her to that virtuous Roman heroine, who killed herself rather than live with the shame of being raped by the Etruscan enemy.

Lorenzo Lotto | Lucretia | Oil on Canvas| 1530 -32 | National Gallery | London

It wasn’t until the 17th century that non-artists started collecting drawings in significant numbers and we start seeing the display of drawings in kunstkammer paintings. In this example of Frans II Francken drawings are displayed, mostly unframed, alongside paintings, sculptures, and natural history specimens.

Frans II Francken | Collector's Room | Oil on Wood | 1620-25 | Kunsthistorisches Museum | Vienna

Once drawings started being displayed on walls, great losses started to occur. Sunlight hitting, with flies and dust landing at will, contributed to losses. Fortunately, collecting drawings became so engrossing and many collectors so avid that they would have to find space saving methods of storage, including passepartouts, portfolios, boxes, and albums for their growing collections. Probably the greatest losses came from casual collections that had but few drawings.

Flax Plant (Linum Usitatissimum), Univ. della Tuscia Botanical Garden, Viterbo

The flax plant, or linum usitatissimum, is a key plant for the fine arts: linen rags to produce paper, linen canvas for paintings, and linseed oil as a medium for oil paints.

Flax was one of the first plants to be cultivated and easily adapts to different climates. (Archaeologists have recently found dyed wild flax fibers in Georgia that are about 34,000 years old. Here is NYT link.) Russia is now the largest producer of flax. Other countries with favorable cool climates where flax grows well are Belgium (known for the finest linen and artists’ canvas), France, the Netherlands, and Ireland. But, Egypt and Italy also produce linen and have for thousands of years. Turin’s Egyptian Museum has many beautifully preserved lengths of linen as well as the linen wraps of mummies.

Ancient Linen at Torino's Museo Egizio

The longest Etruscan text, the Liber Linteus Zagrabensis, is also the only example of an ancient linen codex. It dates to 250 BC and although Etruscan has not been deciphered, it seems the book is a liturgical calendar.  It’s thought that it was made near Chiusi, in Etruria, and from there somehow traveled to Egypt. It survived as mummy wrappings and has been reconstructed to its original form, an accordion folded codex. Both the codex and the mummy are in Zagreb’s archaeological museum.

Linen, the textile, as well as the paper made from linen rags, is exceptionally strong, very supple, and folds remarkably well. Although supple, it retains its shape, being inelastic. It has the ability to absorb water and still feel dry.   These characteristics, at least partly, explain why centuries old drawings can be so well preserved.

US banknotes are made from linen and cotton rags. Their lifespan, about 20 abuse-filled months (it’s estimated that a dollar bill can be folded 4,000 times before tearing), is a good deal longer than that of other currencies. Linen becomes stronger in water than when dry, and bills accidentally left in pockets launder perfectly.

Flax grows thigh high and has pretty blue to almost white flowers with five petals.  The plant reaches maturity in about 100 days. In Italy, it is planted in the early spring and harvested in June. In colder climates, it’s planted later. Egypt’s warmer climate would make flax a winter crop.

Flax in Flower (Linum Usitatissimum) at the Univ. della Tuscia's Botanical Garden, Viterbo

Once mature, the whole plant, with the roots, is lifted from the ground. The process in readying the fiber for weaving is very involved and it is hard to imagine that for millennia nearly all families grew flax, retted it, scutched it, spun it, wove it, and then created garments. By the Middle Ages, Viterbo, a city in Northern Lazio, had a thriving flax industry.  The area’s thermal springs originally attracted the Etruscans, and the Romans built elaborate baths there. Bullicame, the name of the springs and shallow pools closest to the city, those where prostitutes bathed according to Dante, were also used to rett or macerate flax stems. Retting frees the fibers from the woody center of the stem. The heat of the water accelerated the retting process.

Bullicame's 55°C Water Was Used to Rett Flax

Where water is unavailable, flax is allowed to rett in the field, the dew and rain act to release the fibers, just more slowly. After this the flax is allowed to dry and then it is scutched, or beaten. In the process the precious flax strands are separated from the tow, the shorter fibers.  I realized how right the terms “tow-headed” and “flaxen-haired”  were when I saw this photograph of Egyptian flax in the ad of an Egyptian online flax merchant.

Advanced Group Ad for Egyptian Flax