Pencil Portrait Drawings and Watercolors

Graphite on paper Image size: 11 ¾ x 8 ½ inches (30 x 21.5 cm) Original frame This superbly-drawn portrait highlights the artist’s undeniable skill as a portrait artist, particularl...

Graphite on paper Image size: 10 1/2 x 14 1/4 inches (26.5 x 36 cm) Mounted A fine pencil drawing and a stunning example of a 1930s Art Deco portrait.

A pencil sketch by famed American Modernist Joseph Stella, who burst on to the American scene at the epochal Armory Show of 1913 and whose work is today in the collections of every m...

François-Édouard Picot (French, 1786 – 1868) Ancient Greek Comedy Play • Pencil Drawing on laid paper behind decorative matting, visible image, ca. 10.5 x 15.5 cm • Modern Glased frame, ca. 27 x 33 cm • Signed "Picot fecit" lower left • As we photographed through glass, there are reflections in the images Worldwide shipping is complimentary - There are no charges for handling & delivery Here we have the somewhat unusual, yet typical subject matter François-Édouard Picot was interested in depicting. Shown is a scene from an ancient Greek comedy play. The previous owner has noted on the back, that this image was copied from an ancient Greek stone relief. François-Édouard Picot was born on the 10th of October in 1786 in Paris, France. He studied with various masters and became well known for his historical and mythological subjects. In 1812 he won the second prize in the Prix de Rome competition and after that success, went on to exhibit at the Paris Salon, where in the year 1819 he won a first-class medal for his neoclassical L'Amour et Psyché, which today hangs in the Louvre in Paris. He regularly exhibited his work in the salon up to 1839. He taught several young great artists at his elitist studio and was known for accepting only very few students, which included William Bouguereau, Gustave Moreau, Cabanel and Paul Seignac...

Joseph-Marie Vien (1716-1809) ‘Ambassadeur de Siam’ and ‘La Sultana Reine’ Both titled lower centre, the drawing of the ambassador inscribed with colours intended for the prints, e...

Collections: With Ellis Smith, London; Private collection, to 2015. Literature: G.C. Williamson, John Downman A.R.A., his Life and Works, p. lviii no's. 2 and 3, p. xxxi. Exhi...

'Mon Colonel', pencil and crayon on paper, by noted French artist, Auguste Chabaud (circa 1914-1918). A delightfully simple drawing of a French Army colonel in profile along with clo...

France, early 20th century Head of a faun bears a monogram "P H" on the lower right Pencil on paper 24.5 x 13 cm In a period frame (in good condition except a small loss on the upper...

Pierre-Georges Jeanniot (1848–1934) Portrait of Henri Rochefort ready for a duel, Pencil on paper Signed and titled lower left 28 x 21 cm In good condition : the left and right bord...

This is a unique artwork. This is an original Hyman Bloom drawing of fellow artist and his very good friend Martin Sumers.I believe this was drawn at the “variations of a theme” at Sumers gallery in NYC. The last two photos show a poster and a card from their shows. it is not included in this listing, it is just for provenance. Provenance: Acquired from the Sumers estate collection. Hyman Bloom (March 29, 1913 – August 26, 2009) was a Latvian-born American painter. His work was influenced by his Jewish heritage and Eastern religions as well as by artists including Altdorfer, Grünewald, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Blake, Bresdin, James Ensor and Chaim Soutine. He first came to prominence when his work was included in the 1942 Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Americans 1942 -- 18 Artists from 9 States". MoMA purchased 2 paintings from the exhibition and Time magazine singled him out as a "striking discovery" in their exhibition review. His work was selected for both the 1948 and 1950 Venice Biennale exhibitions and his 1954 retrospective traveled from Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art to the Albright Gallery and the de Young Museum before closing out at The Whitney Museum of American Art in 1955. In a 1954 interview with Yale art professor Bernard Chaet, Willem de Kooning indicated that he and Jackson Pollock both considered Bloom to be “America’s first abstract expressionist”, a label that Bloom would disavow. Starting in the mid 1950s his work began to shift more towards works on paper and he exclusively focused on drawing throughout the 1960s, returning to painting in 1971. He continued both drawing and painting until his death in 2009 at the age of 9 Hyman Bloom (né Melamed) was born into an orthodox Jewish family in the tiny Jewish village of Brunavišķi in what is now Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire At a young age Bloom planned to become a rabbi, but his family could not find a suitable teacher. In the eighth grade he received a scholarship to a program for gifted high school students at the Museum of Fine Arts. He attended the Boston High School of Commerce, which was near the museum. He also took art classes at the West End Community Center, a settlement house. The classes were taught by Harold Zimmerman, a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, who also taught the young Jack Levine at another settlement house in Roxbury. When Bloom was fifteen, he and Levine began studying with a well-known Harvard art professor, Denman Ross, who rented a studio for the purpose and paid the boys a weekly stipend to enable them to continue their studies rather than take jobs to support their families. He took Bloom and Levine on a field trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Bloom was impressed by the work of Rouault and Soutine and began experimenting with their expressive painting styles. In the 1930s Bloom worked sporadically for the Public Works of Art Project and the Federal Art Project (WPA), He shared a studio in the South End with Levine and another artist, Betty Chase. It was during this period that he developed a lifelong interest in Eastern philosophy and music, and in Theosophy. He first received national attention in 1942 when thirteen of his paintings were included in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States, curated by Dorothy Miller. MoMA purchased two of his paintings from that exhibition, and he was featured in Time magazine. The titles of his paintings in the exhibition reflect some of his recurring themes. Two were titled The Synagogue, another, Jew with the Torah; Bloom was actually criticized by one reviewer for including "stereotypical" Jewish images. He also had two paintings titled The Christmas Tree, and another titled The Chandelier, both subjects he returned to repeatedly. Another, Skeleton (c. 1936), was followed by a series of cadaver paintings in the forties, and The Fish (c. 1936) was one of many paintings and drawings of fish he created over the course of his career. Bloom was associated at first with the growing Abstract Expressionist movement. Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, who first saw Bloom's work at the MoMA exhibition, considered Bloom "the first Abstract Expressionist artist in America." In 1950 he was chosen, along with the likes of de Kooning, Pollock, and Arshile Gorky, to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. That same year Elaine de Kooning wrote about Bloom in ARTnews, noting that in paintings such as The Harpies, his work approached total abstraction: "the whole impact is carried in the boiling action of the pigment". In 1951 Thomas B. Hess reproduced Bloom's Archaeological Treasure in his first book, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase, along with works by Picasso, Pollock, and others. Both de Kooning and Hess remarked on Bloom's expressive paint handling, a key characteristic of Abstract Expressionist painting. As abstract expressionism dominated the American art world, Bloom became disenchanted with it, calling it "emotional catharsis, with no intellectual basis." In addition, instead of moving to New York to pursue his career, he opted to stay in Boston. As a result he fell out of favor with critics and never achieved the kind of fame that Pollock and others did. He disliked self-promotion and never placed much value on critical acclaim. Many of Bloom's paintings feature rabbis, usually holding the Torah. According to Bloom, his intentions were more artistic than religious. He began questioning his Jewish faith early in life, and painted rabbis, he claimed, because that was what he knew. Over the course of his career he produced dozens of paintings of rabbis...

Georges Antoine Rochegrosse (1859-1938) A man sitted, Study for the decoration of the Salle des fêtes (Ballroom) of the Exposition Internationale, Paris 1900 Pencil and charcoal on...

'The Roman Bath', pencil on art paper (circa 1960s), School of Rome. Three broad-shouldered men make their way through the sultry corridors of the Hammam in...