1910s Portrait Drawings and Watercolors

Giolitti is a Modern Artwork realized by Gabriele Galantara (Montelupone, 1865 - Rome, 1937) in 1905 ca. Original pen drawing on paper. Mint conditions. Giolitti is a very inte...

Early in the artist's career most likely for Vogue Magazine. Signed lower left. Helen Dryden (1882–1972) was an American artist and successful industrial designer in the 1920s and 1...

This Illustration Boudoir style Illustration by Female Illustrator Suzanne Meunier was done on an assignment for a French Postcard. It's a very early ...

Charcoal on paper, signed and dated (lower right), 33cm x 24cm, (66cm x 56cm framed). The work is framed behind UV glass and stepped gilded frame. Bortnyik was a painter and graphi...

115 years after they were created, one can view these silhouettes differently than the artist’s intent. After all, the genesis of this work was an editorial illustration for Life Magazine to showcase elaborate women’s hats. They were done for a commercial assignment with a deadline, and picky editors were overseeing the final work. Today, they have a dual meaning. These charming silhouettes are abstractions as much as they are representations. Moreover, each one is a compact little gem stuffed with observational detail. Golden Age female illustrator Jesse Gillespie's mastery of technical skill, is apparent in minute details and composition. Young women, old women, pendants, necklaces, feathers, and laced vails all contribute to the works understated complexity. The identity of the subjects are revealed by small areas of exposed neck and chin. As the viewers eyes goes from left to right - all six silhouettes read as fashion hieroglyphs in a sentence with a visual rhythm and cadence. . Initialed JG lower right., Matted but not framed. Published: Life Magazine, March 17th, 1910. Provenance: Honey and Wax Bookstore ________________________________ From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jessie Gillespie Willing (March 28, 1888 – August 1, 1972) was an American illustrator during the Golden Age of illustration. She was considered the foremost silhouette illustrator of her time, although she did traditional illustration as well. Willing illustrated for books and magazines including Life, The Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Home Companion, Mother and Child, McClure's Magazine, Childhood Education, the Sunday Magazine, Association Men (the magazine of the YMCA), Farm and Fireside, Every Week, Children: The Magazine for Parents (which became Parents Magazine), and the American Magazine. She is perhaps most well known for her work for the Girl Scouts. Early life Willing was born in Brooklyn on March 28, 1888 to John Thomson Willing (August 4, 1860 – July 8, 1947)[1][2] and Charlotte Elizabeth Van Der Veer Willing (December 1, 1859 – March 4, 1930).[3] Thomson Willing was a noted illustrator and art editor. He was also well known for finding new artistic talent. Jessie Willing was the eldest of three children. Her brother Van Der Veer (November 30, 1889 – January 14, 1919), who died of pneumonia at the age of 29, was an advertising agent.[4] Her sister Elizabeth Hunnewell Willing (July 26, 1908 – August 15, 1991) was one of the first women to graduate from the Philadelphia Divinity School.[5][6] Elizabeth married the Rev. Orrin Judd, rector of St. Mary's Episcopal Church, on September 22, 1931, and was active in church work.[citation needed] The Willing family moved to the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia in 1901 or 1902. Jessie Willing attended the Stevens School, from which she graduated in 1905. She then went on to attend the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts from 1906 to 1907.[7][8] Career Willing used her middle name Gillespie as her professional surname. She also often signed her illustrations J.G.[9] The story goes that the art editor of Life magazine was in Thomson Willing's office when he was the art editor of the Associated Sunday Magazine syndicate. Thomson Willing had some of Jessie's artwork on his desk, which the Life editor saw and admired. He asked for the artist's information so that he could give her freelance work. Thomson Willing did not want to be accused of nepotism so he persuaded Jessie to use Jessie Gillespie as her professional name, which she did.[10][11] In addition to her extensive illustration work, Willing was also the editor of Heirlooms and Masterpieces from 1922 to 1931 and the art editor of Jewelers' Circular-Keystone from 1933 to 1939.[12] She specialized in jewelry publicity and advertising. In 1966 she won the Gold medal of the Printing Week Graphic Arts Exhibit in Philadelphia for her Christmas catalog for J.E. Caldwell Co., Philadelphia. Willing was a member of the Plastic Club of Philadelphia,[13] the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and the National Arts Club of New York.[14] She was an honorary life member of the National Arts Club[15] and served on its Board of Governors from 1941-1970. In 1963, she received the Gold Medal of the National Arts Club in recognition of 32 years of selfless devotion.[15] Additionally, she was the national director of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 1943 to 1946.[15] Previous to this she served as the Program Chairman of the AIGA and in that position she put together a travelling exhibit on the "history of narrative art from the first recorded picture story to the comic book of the twentieth century."[16][17] Illustrations in books With Tongue and Pen--Frederick Bair, et al. (MacMillan, 1940) Masoud the Bedouin--Alfred Post Carhart (Missionary Education Movement, 1915) The Path of the Gopatis--Zilpha Carruthers (National Dairy Council, 1926) The Schoolmaster and His Son: A Narrative of the Thirty Years War--Karl Heinrich Caspari (Lutheran Publication Society, 1917) On a Rainy Day--Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Sarah Scott Fisher (A.S. Barnes and Co., 1938) Book of Games for Home, School and Playground--William B. Forbush and Harry R Allen...

Young boy at Loemboeng, 1918 Signed with initials and dated, bottom right Black chalk on paper, 25.7 x 10 cm Literature: W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp, Zwerftochten door Timor en Onderhoori...

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 ...

Medium: Watercolor and Gouache with Graphite on Paper Mounted Signature: Signed Lower Right "I Should Worry." Cover illustration for Judge magazine, pu...

The work represents a carefully rendered and meticulously observed environmental portrait of a young girl absorbed in study in front of a book case. It celebrates the intelligence of womanhood from a woman's perspective. Initialed in cartouche lower right literature: "The Silver Pencil", Hardy, Harper's Monthly, June 1912, pg. 22 Elizabeth Shippen Green (September 1, 1871 – May 29, 1954) was an American illustrator. She illustrated children's books and worked for publications such as The Ladies' Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post and Harper's Magazine. Education Green enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1887 and studied with the painters Thomas Pollock Anshutz, Thomas Eakins, and Robert Vonnoh.[2] She then began study with Howard Pyle at Drexel Institute where she met Violet Oakley and Jessie Willcox Smith. New Woman As educational opportunities were made more available in the 19th century, women artists became part of professional enterprises, including founding their own art associations. Artwork made by women was considered to be inferior, and to help overcome that stereotype women became “increasingly vocal and confident” in promoting women's work, and thus became part of the emerging image of the educated, modern and freer “New Woman”.[4] Artists "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman...

Walt Lauderback like Dean Cornwell represents the pinnacle of the Golden Age of American Illustration. Based on the signature, this watercolor of a family with dog on boat appears ...

CONRAD FELIXMÜLLER 1897 - 1977 Dresden 1897 - 1977 Berlin (German) Title: Two Men Zwei Männer, 1919 Technique: Monogrammed India Ink Drawing on thin JW Zanders Laid Paper Paper ...

Signed pencil on paper portrait drawing by Italian artist Amedeo Clemente Modigliani. The portrait is of Berthe Lipchitz who was the wife of Modigliani's friend, the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. This work is a study for "Portrait of Jacques & Berthe Lipchitz" which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. Signature: Signed lower right Dimensions: Framed: 26.75"x18.25" Unframed: 18.75"x12.25" Provenance: The collection of Leopold Survage The collection of Dimitri Snegaroff The collection of Leopold Zborowski Galerie Charpentier - Paris 1958 Private french collection Galerie Pierre Levy - Paris Private collection - United Kingdom Exhibited: Galerie Charpentier - Cent Tableaux de Modigliani - Paris, 1958 Les Peintres de Zborowski - ~Foundation L'Hermitage, Lausanne 1994 Amedeo Modigliani Exhibition - Museo d'Arte Moderna, Lugano 1999 Amedeo Modigliani was born into a middle-class Jewish family and was the brother of Eugenio Modigliani, who later became the leader of the Italian socialist workers’ party prior to the rise of fascism. Modigliani suffered from poor health as a child and contracted pleurisy in 1895, followed in 1898 by typhus with pulmonary complications, which culminated in tuberculosis in 1901. He moved to Livorno to study under Guglielmo Micheli, who had himself been a pupil of Giovanni Fattori, one of the Macchiaioli group of painters who worked in strong colour patches (macchie) to achieve vivid light and colour effects; their approach came as a reaction against academic art in Italy and, in much the same way as the French Impressionists, they advocated painting from nature rather than aspiring to communicate any particular message or ideology. In 1902, Modigliani enrolled at the academy of fine arts in Florence. He travelled to Rome and Venice in 1903, where he devoted the bulk of his day to visiting museums. At around this time he started to read Dante, dreaming no doubt of the Vita Nuova; he also devoured the works of Leopardi, Carducci, d’Annunzio, Spinoza and Nietzsche. In 1906, Modigliani moved to Paris, lodging at the Rue Caulaincourt. At that juncture, nothing about him appeared to presage the brilliant career that was to follow. His arrival in the artists’ quarter, then known colloquially as the maquis - the labyrinthine tangle of narrow streets around today’s Avenue Junot in Montmartre - went virtually unnoticed by the artists already living and working there, including Picasso, Braque and Derain. Modigliani’s painting made next to no immediate impact and he was recognised primarily on account of his frail constitution, flashing eyes, innate elegance and intellectual prowess. He was accepted in the community that was Montmartre but never belonged to any particular ‘set’ or circle, and there is no record of his ever having been invited to Pablo Picasso’s studio, the famous ‘wash house’. The literate and highly articulate Modigliani opted instead for the companionship of Maurice Utrillo, an instinctual painter of whom it could charitably have been said that his conversation was, at best, limited. Nonetheless, Modigliani and ‘Litrillo’ (as Utrillo was commonly known to the street urchins - the ‘p’tits poulbots’) began to frequent the cabarets and dance halls of the Butte de Montmartre, and the nefarious hashish dens - post-Baudelaire ‘institutions’, frequented in the main by out-of-work writers and talentless artists. Modigliani developed an addiction, which, compounded by his alcoholism, took its toll. It also transformed him from an artist of limited ability into one devoid of bourgeois scruples. In his monograph, Modigliani: Sa Vie et Son Oeuvre, written in 1926 shortly after Modigliani’s death, André Salmon hinted at a ‘pact with the devil’. While somewhat overstating the case, this rather unpromising painter from Livorno metamorphosed virtually overnight into an artist of rare ability and sensitivity. The turning-point came in 1907, when Modigliani met Paul Alexandre, a doctor who befriended him, took him under his wing and purchased some of his work. The banal paintings he had turned out in Montmartre were suddenly superseded by exceptional works, produced first in Montmartre ( Cellist, 1909), and then in Montparnasse. In Montparnasse, Modigliani started to move in artistic circles, meeting Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall, Jules Pascin and others, all of whom lived and worked in the building in the Rue Vaugirard known as ‘La Ruche’ (‘the beehive’). Then, in the Cité Falguière, he met the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who encouraged him to take up sculpture, which he did, between 1909 and 1913. In 1914, several dealers, including the erstwhile poet Léopold Zborowski and the collector Paul Guillaume, tried with little success to market Modigliani’s paintings. From 1914 to 1916, Modigliani was caught up in a tempestuous affair with the English poet and journalist Beatrice Hastings. In 1917, however, he met Jeanne Hébuterne at the Colarossi Academy, who became his constant companion and model, and who gave birth to their daughter Jeanne in 1918. In 1918 and 1919, Modigliani and Jeanne spent time in Nice on the Côte d’Azur but by 1920 he was suffering from tubercular meningitis. His friends, Kisling and the Chilean Ortiz de Zarate, brought him and a pregnant Jeanne back to Paris, where he died on January 20 1920 in the Hôpital de la Charité. His last words were reputed to be: ‘Cara Italia’. Modigliani’s brother, by this time a socialist member of parliament, telegrammed instructions to ‘bury him as befits a prince’. Jeanne Hébuterne, a budding twenty-year-old painter, killed herself and her unborn child on the day of Modigliani’s funeral by jumping to her death from a fifth-floor window. Modigliani’s first paintings were undistinguished portraits in the Impressionist manner. After moving to Paris in 1907, his early work was influenced by the Swiss-born lithographer Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pablo Picasso, the latter then in his ‘blue’ period. From the onset, Modigliani’s principal preoccupation was the human figure. After the artistic (and literal) limbo of Montmartre, when his output was confined to a few Expressionist-like paintings of street life, the theatre and the circus, Modigliani suddenly erupted on the scene in 1909 with Cellist, a robust, well-constructed and vividly coloured canvas that utterly exceeded all prior expectations. He had not taken part in the protracted debates that took place nightly in Picasso’s studio, but he had superficially assimilated the Cubist ideas developed by Picasso and Georges Braque. Above all, Modigliani had been influenced by African art, which was a key feature of the Cubist movement. He succeeded in treading a fine line between the coolly analytical Cubist approach and the all-too-common European perception of African art as a succession of exaggerated facial grimaces. It would appear that Modigliani had always been attracted to sculpture as a discipline. The friendly encouragement he received as of 1909 from Brancusi no doubt intensified his interest and reinforced his attempts to achieve a sustained simplicity of line and form. In 1910, he befriended the Russian artists Alexander Archipenko and Jacques Lipchitz, both of whom recorded Modigliani’s distaste for modelling in clay (which he referred to as ‘mud’), on the grounds that it degraded the art of sculpture. Like Brancusi, Modigliani believed in working directly, carving from wood in the case of two extant pieces, and from (sand)stone in others, with the exception of a few bronzes which were, presumably, modelled in clay before being cast into bronze. His sculpture was influenced by archaic and non-western cultures - early Graeco-Roman, African and Khmer - as well as heads carved on columns adorning the façades of Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals (Modigliani rarely sculpted a rear view of his figures). Up to approximately 1912, his sculptures take the form of tall cylinders, usually with elongated heads and shallow relief indentations or projections to indicate the hairline, facial features and neck. He departed from this style only infrequently, most notably in a small number of pieces believed to have been sculpted in 1913, which are characterised by a compressed, cubistic format and shallower and less distinct features. Modigliani eventually abandoned sculpture, presumably because of his general health and circumstances, and possibly due to the fact that his sculptures sold for even less than his paintings. During the years that he devoted to sculpture, Modigliani is recorded as producing only thirty canvases, although after 1913 his sculpture became reflected in his painting. Following his Montmartre days, Modigliani’s work developed in both quantitative and qualitative terms, presumably helped by the relative stability of his relationship with Jeanne Hébuterne. The first paintings after his short-lived sculptural phase saw him revert briefly to Neo-Impressionist pointillism, followed by a episode marked by Cubism, which was mainly evident in portraits of friends and fellow artists living and working in Montparnasse: Henri Laurens; Juan Gris (1915); Jacques Lipchitz and his Wife; Chaim Soutine; Léopold Sauvage; Paul Guillaume; Max Jacob; Béatrice Hastings con Capello (all 1916); Mlle Modigliani (1917); Léon Bakst; Léopold Zborowski; Concierge’s Son; Adolescent (1918); Mademoiselle Lunia Czechowska; Madame Zborowska; Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1919). A large number of other portraits exist among his drawings, most of which were executed impromptu in the street or cafés. These quickly drawn portraits often exhibit an urgency and surprising lucidity. Examples include Portrait of the Gypsy Painter Fabiano de Castro; André Salmon (1918); Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1919); and Lada, Author; Mario, Composer (1920). Whatever his shortcomings, Amedeo Modigliani ranks as one of the 20th-century’s greatest painters of the female form. The bulk of his painted nudes were produced in 1915-1916 (prior to that date they were predominantly drawings), and are taken from every walk of life, such as a regular at a Montparnasse café, or a waitress at the soup kitchen where he ate his meagre meals. In each instance, he invested his models with an almost aristocratic hauteur. This is exemplified in a number of paintings (usually based on numerous prior drawings): Flower Girl; Blonde Lady; Sleeping Nude (1917); Blonde Nude; Young Woman; Maria (1918); Pink Nude; Reclining Nude; Nude on a Divan; Woman with a Fan (1919); and Young Woman in a Chemise; Reclining Nude (1920). Modigliani painted his subjects in elongated, elliptic ovals: the swell of a breast, the pronounced curve of the pelvis, the fullness of the thigh, the symmetrically oval face and the graceful arabesque of the body. Facial features are reduced to a bare minimum, with the eyes typically empty, like those of a statue. He employed colour as a constructive material in much the same way as stone in sculpture, juxtaposing muted pinks, ochres and pale browns against discreet background tones supplied by décor and garments. The overall effect is to yield a flat image devoid of chiaroscuro but which captures the essence of a subject. It has often been remarked that his women, with their elongated heads and long, graceful necks, generally tilted to one side, possess a melancholy beauty akin to that of the Siena Madonnas (reproductions of which Modigliani kept pinned on his studio wall), which accounts for Modigliani’s soubriquet as the ‘painter of sorrows’. From 1917, the majority of his nudes, characterised by a more pronounced elongation of the female body and lighter palette, were modelled by Jeanne Hébuterne and Luna Czechowska. Very few artists have been the subject of so many monographs and biographies as Modigliani; the selection appended to this entry indicates only some of the more important of these. Too much, perhaps, has been made of his life as an artiste maudit, of his ‘accursed’ yet colourful life rather than the quality of his work. Some critics have detected in him an artist of great and persistent intellectual curiosity; others emphasise that he was a ‘gentleman to the end’ and stress his physical frailty, ignoring the fact that this was an integral component of his creativity. More seriously, his posthumous fame amongst the public at large acts both for and against him, as if his subsequent popularity has become a yardstick of his artistic ability. The mannerism of his style ensures that a ‘Modigliani’ is instantly recognisable, but his success in adapting Cubism and African art to a language and palette that are entirely his own places him squarely at the heart of the modern movement. Amedeo Modigliani’s work has featured in numerous group exhibitions, including: Paris in 1908, when he showed his Jewess and three other canvases; the Salon des Indépendants in 1910; and the Salon d’Automne in 1912, where he exhibited examples of his sculpture. His posthumous inclusion in the 1922 Venice Biennale was regarded in Italy as a complete fiasco, prompting the critic Giovanni Scheiwiller to paraphrase Charles Baudelaire’s remark to the effect that, ‘we know that precious few will understand us, but that shall be sufficient’. In 1917-1918, the Berthe Weill Gallery organised a one-man show at the instigation of Zborowski but, on the order of the then chief of police, some of Modigliani’s sensual nudes were withdrawn on account of alleged indecency. On 20 December 1918, the Paul Guillaume Gallery exhibited several paintings by Modigliani alongside others by Matisse, Picasso and Derain. All other exhibitions of Modigliani’s work have been held since his death. They include those at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris (1922); Galerie Bing (Paris, 1925 and 1927); Marcel Benhelm Gallery (Paris, 1931); Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels, 1933); Kunsthalle Basel (1934); American-British Art Center (New York, 1944); Galerie de France (Paris, 1945 and 1949); Gimpels Fils Gallery (London, 1947); Cleveland Museum of Art (1951); Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1951); Cantini Museum (Marseilles, 1958); Palazzo Reale (Milan, 1958); Galerie Charpentier (Paris, 1958); Chicago Arts Club (1959); Cincinnati Art Museum (1959); Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Rome, 1959); Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1961); Perls Galleries (New York, 1963 and 1966); Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art (1968); Musée Jacquemart-André (Paris, 1970); Musée St-Georges (Liège, 1980); Tokyo Arts Centre (1980); Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1970; a comprehensive exhibition of Modigliani’s sculptures...