The Neil and Sharon Phillips Collection: Drawings & Prints 1440 - 1940

We are grateful to Stijn Alsteens and Maryan Ainsworth of the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and Fritz Koreny of the Albertina, Vienna, for their help in the cataloguing of this drawing.

Graf was the most original and gifted artists of the early Renaissance in German-speaking Switzerland. His early work was influenced by Martin Schongauer, whose engravings he copied and adapted. Graf's prints encompass over 450 woodcuts, only eight engravings, sixteen nielli, and what is considered to be the earliest extant dated etching.

Jonathan Bober has proposed the attribution to Boccaccino and 'finds probability' that is it by the Cremonese painter, who was in Venice in the mid-1520s. Dr. Bober points to 'the eccentricity that makes Cremonese drawings its own species.' Dr. Bober specifies the following as characteristic of Boccaccino's drawings: 'the plastic insistence in the face' that 'dissolves towards the perimeter' of the head. In expressing his 'strong confidence' that the drawing is by Boccaccino, Dr. Bober refers to two comparable drawings by Boccaccino in the Uffizi, also on blue prepared paper (see nos. 49 and 55 in Disegni Cremonesi del Cinquecento, 1999, M. Tanzi, Florence).

The name of Martin van Heemskerck had long been given as the author of this drawing, but the attribution has not stood up to recent scholarship.
Prof. Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann has suggested instead that Jacob Matham may have been the author of the sheet, which seems to have been based upon an antique prototype.

Lépicié was influenced by his father's friend, Chardin, who in an earlier age of scholarship probably would have been given as the author of this drawing. Etienne Jeurat, the painter and engraver, has been proposed more recently as an alternative to Lépicié.

Andrew Robison directly relates this sheet to a drawing in the National Gallery, Washington (no. 1983.27.1), to one in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (no. 1937.147), and another in the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (Inv. No. 272). The latter two are on the verso of etchings by Piranesi. He dates it to the mid-1760's.

To be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné by Dr. Robison.

On a scientific expedition to observe the transit of Venus in Baja California, Mexico, Alexandre-Jean Noël and the other Europeans found the native Indians' food "impossible, especially for a Frenchman." Only sixteen, Noël served as the expedition's draftsman, documenting natives, lizards, and the mission in San José del Cabo in watercolor views. Some time after his return, the secretary of the Académie Royale recommended purchasing Noël's Mexican drawings for the royal collection. The purchase was approved, and Noël's drawings of "all that is curious in costume, drawn on the spot and with truth by an artist who has some talent" are now in the Musée du Louvre.

Having been an Académie pupil before his journey, Noël returned to Paris and settled down into a more conventional career. He painted and drew landscapes, cityscapes, and seascapes and exhibited at the Salon from 1800 to 1822. His carefully drawn and precisely accurate paintings record the architectural monuments of Paris and Rouen, while small figures busy with their particular occupations animate his landscapes. He specialized in marine subjects: seaports, naval battles, storms at sea, and shipwrecks. He later traveled to Spain and Portugal, where he painted their harbors; an album of these views remains in a Lisbon collection. (From the Getty Museum website)