Catalog: Fine Art: Drawings: Pen (3)

Original French master portrait of a woman wearing braids from a portfolio of drawings dated 1847. Displayed in a giltwood frame.

An original vintage Chinese ink painting of a Running Horse in the manner of Xu Beihong signed to the center right. Ink on a mottled colored paper presented matted and in a thin wood frame. Overall framed size 16.5" W x 23.5" H x 1.0" D. In good condition minor surface wear and very light crease to the paper. The most influential Chinese artist and art educator in twentieth-century China, Xu Beihong is widely known as the father of modern Chinese painting. Born into a poor family in 1895 in Yixing, Jiangsu Province, he learned Chinese classics and traditional Chinese painting from his father, a self-taught artist. Xu Beihong gained a government scholarship to study in France and attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts. Between 1919 and 1927, he studied sketching and oil painting in France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland. Returning to China in 1927, he successfully integrated Western painting methods and techniques with traditional Chinese painting in order to develop Chinese painting. He demonstrated two fundamental ways to improve Chinese painting: “focusing on human activities” and rejuvenating the tradition of “learning from nature.” His creative work and extensive teaching offered a new direction for Chinese artists and art educators. He was the first to systematically incorporate high-standard Western sketching from life and oil painting into the curricula at China’s major art institutions. From 1927 until his death in 1953, Xu Beihong trained several generations of students. Many became accomplished artists and leading art educators who have continued to influence Chinese art in the twenty-first century. Since 1954, more than 1200 of his original drawings, sketches, oils, and Chinese ink brush paintings have been kept and displayed by the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum in Beijing.

Original pencil drawing a portrait of a man by Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, signed monogram lower right. Best known as Balthus, a French painter in the second half of the 20th century, famous for his somewhat disturbing paintings of pubescent girls and for his association with some of the greats in modern art, including Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. Balthus painted figures and landscapes in a more traditional style than his cubist and surrealist contemporaries, and throughout his career was supported primarily by other artists and dealers. He claimed to be a count, but he was also known to be a prankster who fabricated biographical details while keeping his real life story a mystery. Image site measures 8 x 10 Inches overall paper 11 x 17 inches. Minor staining top left. Provenance a private collection and sold at Sotheby's lot 7767, Impressionist and Modern Art, New York, Thursday, February 21, 2002