Paul César Helleu

Lady Carnarvon.

c.1901

Important and rare etching by G. De Nittis. Good condition with fine tonal contrasts. Slight foxing all over the sheet . 1st state - before the ink veiling. Edition unknown. "This d...

Jan Pieter Veth (1864 - 1925) was a Dutch portrait painter and academic. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Veth was one of the most popular portrait painters in...

New York, Associated American Artists, 1950. Drypoint and aquatint on cream wove paper, 5 7/8 x 3 15/16 inches (150 x 100 mm), full margins. Signed and numbered 48/50 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Stephen Sholinsky...

Trajan is an original contemporary artwork realized in 1973. Black and white drypoin etching. Hand signed on the lower margin. Numbered on the lower left. Edition of 216/261. Ref...

Etching and drypoint on cream laid paper, 4 x 3 3/8 inches (102 x 86 mm), 1/4 inch margins. Signed in the plate, lower left corner. The 3rd state (of 6), after the rounding of the pl...

Etching with drypoint on cream wove paper, 11 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches (297 x 347 mm), full margins. Signed in pencil and numbered 32/40, lower margin. Minor mat tone and several small lo...

"Bessie Smith" - Musician's Portrait Etching on Paper (A/P) Clean and modern drypoint etching of a jazz singer Bessie Smith by Maria Bennett (American, 20th Century). The singer is ...

Etching with engraving and drypoint printed in brownish black ink on cream laid paper with a partial heraldic A and fleur-de-lis watermark, 5 5/8 x 4 1/4 inches ( 341 x 107 mm), full...

Paris: 1861 Etching, drypoint, and engraving on cream laid paper, 6 x 4 1/4 inches (152 x 108 mm), full margins. Dog-eared left corner, extending 3-inches into the sheet, but well ou...

"Mlle Landsberg" (grade planche, pl. 16), 1914 Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954) Signed and Numbered Lower Right Edition 12/15 Image size: 7 7/8 x 4 5/16 inches Sheet size: 17 11/16 x 12 1/2 inches With frame: 19 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches Henri Matisse came from a family who were of Flemish origin and lived near the Belgian border. At eight o'clock on the evening of December 31, 1869, he was born in his grandparents' home in the town of Le Cateau in the cheerless far north of France. His father was a self-made seed merchant who was a mixture of determination and tightly coiled tension. Henri had no clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He was a twenty-year-old law clerk convalescing from appendicitis when he first began to paint, using a box of colors given to him by his mother. Little more than a year later, in 1890, he had abandoned law and was studying art in Paris. The classes consisted of drawing from plaster casts and nude models and of copying paintings in the Louvre. He soon rebelled against the school's conservative atmosphere; he replaced the dark tones of his earliest works with brighter colors that reflected his awareness of Impressionism. Matisse was also a violinist; he took an odd pride in the notion that if his painting eye failed, he could support his family by fiddling on the streets of Paris. Henri found a girlfriend while studying art, and he fathered a daughter, Marguerite, by her in 1894. In 1898 he married another woman, Amelie Parayre. She adopted the beloved Marguerite; they eventually had two sons, Jean, a sculptor and Pierre who became an eminent art dealer. Relations between Matisse and his wife were often strained. He often dallied with other women, and they finally separated in 1939 over a model who had been hired as a companion for Mme. Matisse. She was Madame Lydia, and after Mme. Matisse left, she remained with Matisse until he died. Matisse spent the summer of 1905 working with Andre Derain in the small Mediterranean seaport of Collioure. They began using bright and dissonant colors. When they and their colleagues exhibited together, they caused a sensation. The critics and the public considered their paintings to be so crude and so roughly crafted that the group became known as Les Fauves (the wild beasts). By 1907, Matisse moved on from the concerns of Fauvism and turned his attention to studies of the human figure. He had begun to sculpt a few years earlier. In 1910, when he saw an exhibition of Islamic art, he was fascinated with the multiple patterned areas and adapted the decorative universe of the miniatures to his interiors. As a continuation of his interest in the "exotic", Matisse made extended trips to Morocco in 1912 and 1913. At the end of 1917, Matisse moved to Nice; he would spend part of each year there for the remainder of his life. A meticulous dandy, he wore a light tweed jacket amd a tie when he painted. He never used a palette, but instead squeezed his colors on to plain white kitchen dishes...