Portrait Drawings and Watercolors

Original Magazine Illustration for a magazine like Harper's, Vanity Fair, Life, Look, and Judge Shinn was an American realist painter and member of the Ashcan School. He also exhibited with the short-lived group known as "The Eight," Work is framed in an attractive gilt frame Morris Weiss collection...

Pencil and watercolor portrait of a person in loose period clothing displaying nervous energy and vibrant demeanor by P.B. Faurnier, 1833. Signed lowe...

Date: 1907-1910 Medium: Pastel on Board Dimensions: 22.00" x 28.00" Signature: Signed Lower Right Stuart Travis did many early Vogue magazine covers. Signed with an address on ...

Academic Study of the Head of Paris by Canova (plaster copy) 57 cm x 46.5 cm Charcoal pencil drawing on matte paper. Excellent conservation conditions. Plaster casts from nineteenth...

Unsigned. Presented in a black painted wooden frame. On paper.

Young shepherd and his lamb. Watercolor enhanced with white gouache, signed and dated 1836. Framed and under glass. Period frame. Small gaps in stucco on the frame Watercolor: 17 x 1...

This charming mid-19th-century watercolour by British artist John George Indermaur (1818-1862) depicts four children, a chaise lounge, and footstool. It was shown at the Royal Societ...

A very delicately painted portrait miniature on marble of a distinguished looking gentleman. Superb detail and colour - a very striking piece and a rare example of a work by this fir...

A very delicately painted small scale portrait on marble of a handsome young gentleman. Superb detail and colour - a very striking piece and a rare example of a work by this first ra...

A fine 19th century silhouette of a Victorian gentleman, captured in profile with top hat & cane. Smartly mount in period Maplewood veneer fram...

A fine portrait of a young sea captain holding a telescope. The portrait appears to have been completed by two different hands. We believe the study of the head and face, completed i...

Watercolour on paper Image size: 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (11.5 x 9 cm) Mounted and framed This is an arresting image featuring a head and shoulders portrait of a bearded man wearing a ...

This exquisite early 19th-century drawing depicts a demure young lady wearing a dress with voluminous ‘gigot’ sleeves, necklace and elaborate bonnet. It’s...

Charcoal and grey wash on paper Image size: 14 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches (37.5 x 36 cm) Provenance Private collection, Washington DC. C.G. Sloan & Co., Sept. 1980. This charcoal portrait...

This drawing, pencil on paper 35,5 x 25,5 cm without frame, is signed and dated "Arturo Banti 21. Gennaio 1876." on the left in sanguine. It's a typical "Academia", so a study on a naked figure in a plastic pose to exercise on the portraying of the body. It belongs to the juvenile career of this Tuscan...

This charming late 19th-century portrait by British artist Eden Upton Eddis (1812-1901) depicts a young Muriel Paget Bowman (c.1876-1928), the daughter of Sir William Paget Bowman, a...

This recently rediscovered expressionist drawing by László Moholy-Nagy is part of a small group of drawings made by the artist early in his career, in Vienna and Berlin. The use of interlaced curves, typical of the artist's technique, gives this hieratic portrait a magnetic radiance, while the absence of any connection with the rest of the body evokes a profane Holy Face. 1. From Hungary to Chicago, the ardent life of László Moholy-Nagy Moholy-Nagy was born in Borsod, now known as Bácsborsód in Southern Hungary, in July 1895. He studied law in Budapest in 1913, when he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army to serve as an artillery officer on the Italian and Russian fronts. While serving at artillery observation posts, Moholy-Nagy was able to execute numerous drawings, recording his traumatic war experience, on the reverse of military-issued postcards which he could easily carry with him. In 1917, he was seriously wounded and hospitalized. The following year (around 1918 at the age of 23), he abandoned his plans to become a lawyer in favour of a career as an artist, with the encouragement of his friend, the art critic Iván Hevesy. The drawings executed in those early years reveal Moholy-Nagy's powerful Expressionist lines. In his autobiography of 1944, Abstract of an Artist, Moholy-Nagy explained his early figurative style, writing that contemporary art in those days was too chaotic and that and all the '-isms' were incomprehensible and puzzling to him. He was, however, experimenting with Dadaist compositions already in 1919 and then moved to Vienna and later to Berlin, where he would soon make his first works in his Constructivist style of the early 1920s. In Berlin he met photograph and writer Lucia Schultz who became his wife the next year. In 1922 he met Walter Gropius. During a vacation on the Rhome with Lucia, she introduced him to making photograms on light-sensitized paper. Walter Gropius invited him to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923 where he replaced Paul Klee as Head of the Metal Workshop. The Bauhaus became known for the versatility of its artists and Moholy-Nagy was no exception: throughout his career, he became proficient in the fiels of photography, typography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, film-making and industrial design. In 1928 Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus and established his own design studio in Berlin. He separated from his first wide Lucia in 1929. In 1931 he met actress and scriptwriter Sibylle Pietzsch. They married in 1932 and has two daughters, Hattula (born 1933) and Claudia. After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, he was no longer allowed to work there. He moved his family to London in 1935. In 1937, on the recommendation of Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago to become the director of the New Bauhaus, but the school closed in 1938. Moholy-Nagy resumed doing commercial design work, which he continued for the rest of his life. In 1939 Moholy-Nagy opened the School of Design in Chicago, which became in 1944 the Institute of Design, becoming part of the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1949. Diagnosed with leukemia in 1945, Moholy-Nagy died of the disease in Chicago in 1946. 2. Description of the artwork This drawing presents us with a frontal representation of a man in his thirties, whose penetrating gaze seems to stare at us. The face is highly symmetrical and is modelled by curved black lines. The very high forehead and the slightly dilated left pupil reinforce the very expressive character of the face. Like the Holy Face which appeared on the cloth stretched out to wipe Christ's face by Saint Veronica, only the model's face is represented on the cardboard piece. The curved lines that define the face, hollowing out the temples, the eyelids, the cheeks and the area around the mouth, create a kind of magnetic radiation around a median point located between the eyebrows. In some respects, this face may evoke one of the most famous representations of the Holy Face: the extraordinary engraving by Claude Mellan...

FREDERICK SANDYS (1829-1904) Reine Chapman and her Pug Signed, inscribed and dated u.l.: Reine Chapman 1881/F Sandys Coloured chalks on pale blue ti...

This intimate work by Camille Pissarro represents a period of significance for the Impressionist master. The early 1880s was a time of great experimentation for the artist, after he spent much of the preceding decade devoted to landscape painting. Shifting focus, he embarked on a series of works in a range of media dedicated to the human figure - particularly peasant women. In watercolor, gouache, pastel, and print, Pissarro captured the rural female and the minute moments of domestic life. Depicting a peasant woman tying her scarf, Paysanne Nouant son Foulard displays the harmony of color and composition that typifies his work of the 1880s. Composed of a symphony of color and strokes of paint, the work exemplifies the plein air technique of Pissarro's best Impressionist canvases. A true master of his art, no other artist successfully chronicled rural peasant life quite like Pissarro. Counted among the most respected artists of the 19th century and widely considered the father of Impressionism, Pissarro’s works experienced a surge in interest in the early 2000s. This is reflected in Pissarro’s new auction record of over $32.1 million, set at a 2014 Sotheby’s auction in London, which far surpassed his previous record of $14.6 million. Born in St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies, Pissarro was sent to school in Paris at the age of 11, where he first displayed a talent for drawing. In 1855, having convinced his parents of his determination to pursue a career as an artist rather than work in the family shipping business, he returned to Paris where he studied at the Académie Suisse alongside Claude Monet. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Pissarro moved to England. With Monet, he painted a series of landscapes around South-East London and studied English landscape painters in the museums. When he returned home to Louveciennes a year later, Camille discovered that all but 40 of the 1500 paintings he had left there - almost 20 years of work - had been vandalized. In 1872, Camille settled in Pontoise where he remained for the next 10 years, gathering a close circle of friends around him. Gauguin was among the many artists to visit him there and Cézanne, who lived nearby, came for long periods to work and learn. In 1874, Pissarro participated in the first Impressionist exhibition...

After Maurice-Quentin de La Tour A Portrait of the Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) Pastel on paper This fine19th century pastel portrait of the philosopher Rousseau is directly drawn from the original by La Tour now in the Musee Antoine Lecuyer...

A stunningly rendered, evocative portrait of an elderly Roman woman, painted by Rinaldo Werner in 1870 (as written on the painting itself. He lived from 1...

Signed on bottom right by Eugène Lacoste, the design of the Opera of Giuseppe Verdi. This artwork is shipped from Italy. Under existing legislation, any artwork in Italy created ove...