Our summer exhibition, French Masters on Paper, from Degas to Matisse, brought together a remarkable private collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works on paper, shown publicly for the first time in over a generation. Spanning more than sixty years, the exhibition included works by some of the most celebrated artists of modern French art, including Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Gustave Caillebotte, Édouard Vuillard and Henri Matisse.
The exhibition charted the rising status of works on paper in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century France, from preparatory studies for finished paintings to artworks conceived in their own right. Through drawings in charcoal, pastel, ink and watercolour, it explored how Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists increasingly embraced drawing as an independent form of artistic expression, breaking down the traditional distinction between painting and works on paper.
Held at John Mitchell Fine Paintings in Mayfair from 14 June to 7 July 2023, French Masters on Paper, from Degas to Matisse was presented in collaboration with London Art Week.
A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue accompanied the show.
Catalogue
Introduction by James James Astley Birtwistle:
The great artists who spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries travelled a huge imaginative distance. The journey was unparalleled, and not since the Renaissance had so much ground been covered in a lifetime. The sixty-year career of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) illustrates this transition best of all, from his early paintings of modest realism, through to the triumph of the gouache découpées (cut outs) of his final decade. Today, Impressionism and PostImpressionism, the two avant-garde movements in Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century, are as mainstream and well-liked as ever. At the time of writing the National Gallery in London is holding a Post-Impressionism exhibition, After Impressionism - Inventing Modern Art, and the Royal Academy will host Impressionists on Paper this coming autumn.
The Impressionists, who held eight exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, sought to depict everyday life, as opposed to historical, religious or mythological subjects. The Post-Impressionists, who began to exhibit from the mid-1880s onwards, looked for less prosaic ways to describe reality and veered towards symbolism and the mythic. Though the two movements had different aims, they were united in their pursuit of a new visual language with which to express themselves.
Inspiration had to be found outside of the ridged academic forms that had dominated French art until the mid-nineteenth century, and this extended to the physical materials they used. Drawing on paper, whether with pencil, ink, charcoal or pastel, had been used as a means of preparation for painting in European art for centuries, and the practice was still widely acknowledged in the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist era. Since the mid-seventeenth century the official body for training French artists had been the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, founded in 1648. The Académie promoted a strict learning process with students starting by making copies of prints and drawings, then progressing to drawing plaster casts (usually copies of antique statuary), and eventually to drawing from life models with poses in accordance with classical taste.
The Académie was denounced at the time of the French Revolution, but later reinstated as the Académie des Beaux-Arts, with the teaching overseen by the École des Beaux-Arts. The training was rigorous and helped many young artists to become skilled draftsmen, the most promising of who went on to receive commissions for the church and state and to exhibit in the official Salon exhibitions. The downside to this system was that creativity was stifled to conform to a classical taste that became increasingly irrelevant as the century went on. In 1863 the École was reformed by the government to broaden admission and encourage a greater freedom of expression with new techniques and ideas. Places at the École were highly sought after and an entrance examination was required for admission. Those that failed to obtain a place could look to private academies to receive training, such as the Académie Suisse on the Île de la Cité, where Monet trained, or the more famous Académie Julian, founded in 1868, which could count Vuillard and Matisse amongst its protégés. These independent academies admitted women and were run on a commercial basis. They were popular with avant-garde artists, especially those who failed to gain admission to the École des Beaux-Arts or, having done so, found it uninspiring.
Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists continued to use drawing in the traditional way, as a preparation for finished paintings, but they also experimented using ink, watercolour, pastel, charcoal, conté crayon, gouache, and peinture à l’essence (oil paint diluted with turpentine) to make pictures destined for exhibition on their own. The modern style of painting was executed at speed and not highly finished, which meant that the visual gap between oil paintings and drawings had narrowed, making it easier to break down the existing hierarchies, and the subservience of drawing to painting.
Intellectually, the less finished paint surface of the Impressionist style was understood to be more appropriate for capturing the essence of modern life, a fleeting glimpse into a passing moment, as seen in the many studies of ballerinas by Degas. For the Post Impressionist groups such as Les Nabis, whose central figure was Vuillard, mediums like pastel for example proved the ideal tool for creating strong atmosphere, while eschewing pictorial illusionism.
As the nineteenth century progressed the public’s interest in drawings increased with dedicated exhibitions being held at the annual Salon at the Palais des Champs-Elysées, as well as displays of Old Master drawings at the Musée du Louvre and the École des Beaux-Arts. Major journals such as L’Art and La Vie Moderne commissioned drawings (see p. 6) and arranged and promoted exhibitions. The dealers of the age like Paul Durand-Ruel and Georges Petit were quick to capitalise on the public interest for drawings, encouraging their artists to concentrate on works on paper, which were less costly and time consuming to create than traditional easel paintings, and could be produced in greater volumes.
Thus, works on paper in their many forms became an essential component of the avant-garde movements at the turn of the twentieth century in France. The pictures in this exhibition cover the rise of Impressionism, with the earliest being a drawing by Caillebotte from 1878, through to the mature work of Matisse, with his exquisite ink portrait from 1944. The collection showcases the rising status of works on paper, as well as being testament to the refined taste and astute selectivity of the private collector who assembled them. It is our great privilege to be exhibiting these French drawings for the first time in a generation and we are delighted to present them in collaboration with London Art Week.
Press
Antiques Trade Gazette
Private Collection offers French Masters, by Frances Allitt, July 2023
'In Mayfair, John Mitchell Fine Paintings offers nine French works on paper from a private collection at prices ranging from £25,000-450,000. French Masters on Paper, from Degas to Matisse includes Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works covering the years from 1878-1942. In the catalogue the gallery’s James Astley Birtwistle writes that the collection “showcases the rising status of works on paper” as well as the taste of the collector.'