January 2009

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

Early July is Old Masters week in London, but even here the masters get more and more modern with the auction-house sales now including British 18th- and 19th-century paintings and drawings, and the 45 shows in dealers’ galleries that make up Master Drawings in London (5-11 July) expanding its scope to include everything from the 15th century to the present day. As if to illustrate the point, one of the stars of the latter is an early Lucian Freud on offer by Stephen Ongpin Fine Art. Boy in a Red and Blue Jacket (Fig. 1), executed around 1945 in pencil, coloured chalks and pastel – tellingly, on brown Ingres paper – is a tour-de-force from the precocious young artist. His economy and sureness of line speaks volumes of the venality and menace of the 13-year-old Charlie, whom Freud first met when the boy broke into his studio. How different from the painterly, fleshy acres of Freud’s record-breaking Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, discussed overleaf.

Of the drawings, the discoveries of the season are the three Goya sheets offered by Christie’s on 8 July. From the artist’s private albums, these drawings were last recorded at auction in Paris in 1877 and are in exceptional condition. They Go Down Quarelling, from the so-called Witches and Women album, features four women fighting as they fly through the air, one smiling broadly as she pulls the hair of another, who screams out in pain (estimate £800,000-£1.2m). Another outlines the story, in words and pictures, of the revenge on the 18th-century Saragossa official Lampiños, who was stitched inside a dead horse (£600,000-£800,000).

Of the paintings, Chrisitie’s lands another coup in the form of Watteau’s La Surprise (Fig. 3), which was found in the corner of a drawing room in a British country house during a valuation last year. Painted around 1718 and previously known through a contemporary engraving and a copy now in the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace, its first owner was Nicolas Henin, one of the artist’s closest and most constant friends. This lush small panel, a fête galante – a genre the artist invented – reveals Watteau once again turning to Rubens for the sources of his figures. What will excite collectors and curators even more is that the painting is in untouched ‘country house’ condition. It comes to the block on 8 July with an estimate of £3m-£5m.

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