June 2025
Sunday, June 1
Trois Crayons celebrates the art of drawing from the 15th to the 21st century. From in-person exhibitions and collaborative events to our monthly newsletter and social media activity, we connect the global drawings community.
Coming Up
Greetings from Trois Crayons HQ where we are busy readying for our second annual exhibition, Tracing Time, which returns to No.9 Cork Street from June 26 to July 5. Read on for details, preview highlights, and a taster of the events programme which will be available for registration on Friday.
Regular newsletter service resumes with a round-up of this month’s leading news stories, upcoming events and exhibitions listings, a ‘Drawing of the Month’ from the Clark Art Institute, provided by William Satloff, and the customary selection of literary and audio highlights, which is followed, as ever, by the ‘Real or Fake’ section.
In addition to the exhibition, the Trois Crayons Museum Forum will launch next month. For more details and to learn how to get involved, see here.
For next month’s edition, please direct any recommendations, news stories, feedback or event listings to tom@troiscrayons.art.
TRACING TIME
26 JUNE - 5 JULY 2025
FRIEZE NO.9 CORK STREET
Tracing Time will bring together over 35 international galleries and more than 250 works, doubling in scale since its 2024 debut. Spanning from the 15th century to the present day, the exhibition will feature drawings by artists including Hans Rottenhammer, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, J.M.W. Turner, Auguste Rodin, Gustav Klimt, Jean Cocteau, and Françoise Gilot. New participants this year include Wildenstein & Co. (New York), Rosenberg & Co. (New York), and Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd (London), among others.
Tiepolo (Galerie Eric Coatalem)
Depero (Enrico Frascione Antiquario)
Solomon (Alexander Clayton-Payne)
The basement auditorium will host a programme of talks and panels featuring leading voices in the field. Topics include curating historic women artists, contemporary drawing practices, innovative approaches to Italian Renaissance drawings, and focused discussions on the drawings of Constable, Watteau, and Gibbs. In partnership with London institutions, the programme also includes off-site museum tours and exclusive print room visits. All events are free with advance registration, opening on Friday.
Weekdays 10:00 – 18:00
Weekends 11:00 – 17:00
Free Entry
Opening Reception (Vernissage)
Wednesday 25 June 18:00 – 21:00
RSVP to rsvp@troiscrayons.art
NEWS
In Art World News
Following the opening of the Royal Academy of Arts’ long-running Summer Exhibition – an annual showcase of newly created work first held in 1769 – London will soon become the focal point for the pre-modern art world. From 23 June to 4 July, the newly established Classic Art London will bring together 18 leading dealers in Old and Modern Master paintings, drawings, sculpture, and works of art across a network of Central London galleries. For more exhibitor information, please see here. Concurrently, the Treasure House Fair returns to the Royal Hospital Chelsea from 26 June to 1 July, presenting a wide range of historic and decorative art. The season continues with Classic Week at Christie’s, running from 1 to 9 July, while Sotheby’s Old Masters sales follow from 2 to 4 July, as part of TheSummer Season, with public viewings at their New Bond Street galleries from 28 June.
In Exhibition, Auction and Art Fair News
21 May – 6 June – “Alfred Stevens: Sea, Sky and Shore” at John Mitchell Fine Paintings (London).
5 June – “Bretagne Mystique” opens at Le Cloître de l’Art (Paris).
6–8 June – London Gallery Weekend (London). A citywide event featuring 126 participating galleries, with a focus on modern and contemporary works. Full programme available at londongalleryweekend.art.
12–15 June – “Open Gallery Weekend” at Galerie Lowet de Wotrenge (Antwerp).
12 June – “Jean-Baptiste Lavastre” opens at Galerie La Nouvelle Athènes (Paris).
19 June – 31 July – “Paul Nash: The Spirit of Place” at Daniel Katz Gallery (London).
24 June – 25 July – “Two Centuries of British Drawings and Watercolours” at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art (London).
24 June – 5 July – “Recent Acquisitions” at Day & Faber (London).
2 July – “Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries” at Sotheby’s, 10:00 (London).
2 July – “Old Masters to Modern Day Sale: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture” at Christie’s, 11:00 (London).
2 July – “Old Masters, 19th Century Paintings and Drawings from a Private Collection: Selling without Reserve”, at Christie’s, 16:00 (London)
3 July – “Old Master Paintings, Old Master Works on Paper, and 19th Century Paintings Day Auction” at Sotheby’s, 10:00 (London).
Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
On display at The Metropolitan Museum until 2 Sep 2025 as part of City and Country: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints
In Lecture and Event News
4 June – Virtual Course: "In Rembrandt’s Studio" (Roundtable at 92Y, New York). A three-session online course with Nadine Orenstein, Drue Heinz Curator in Charge of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The course focuses on Rembrandt’s portraiture, landscape, and religious works as gateways to his broader career. Trois Crayons readers receive 50% off with code DRAWINGS50 at checkout. Register here.
5 June – Panel: Stanisław Wyspiański: ‘a kind of Polish William Morris, to whom no form of art came amiss’ (London). Hosted at the Foyle Suite, British Library. Tickets are £10 and the event begins at 6pm.
5 June – Curator Tour: Victorian Treasures with Hannah Lund (London): A tour of the newly opened exhibition, Victorian Treasures, at Leighton House. Tickets are £20 and the tour runs from 1-2pm.
6–8 June – Festival: “Le vrai, le faux” (Fontainebleau). The Festival d’Histoire de l’Art will take place at the Château de Fontainebleau and across the town, exploring themes of authenticity and illusion in art history. The full programme is available on the FHA website. Highlights include Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey’s lecture on the forgeries of Fragonard drawings by the astronaut Alexandre Ananoff.
9 June – Conference: “Renaissance Architectural Drawing Beyond Paper” (Rome).Hosted at Villino Strogonoff, this one-day event explores alternative media and supports in early modern architectural drawing.
14 June – Lecture: “A Closer Look: Master drawings in the Achenbach Collection” (San Francisco). Furio Rinaldi, curator of drawings, prints, and photographs at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, presents in the Gunn Theater at the Legion of Honor at 1pm. Free admission, no reservation required. The event will also be livestreamed.
18 June – Conference: “Brueghel & Van Balen, artistes & complices” (Lille). A lecture on the current exhibition on Brueghel and Van Balen at the Musée de Flandre, Cassel. The lecture will be held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille. Attendance is free but reservation is required.
27-29 June – Conference: “Gardens and Empires” (London). This two-day international conference at the Pigott Theatre, British Library, includes talks about the impact and influence of empires in gardens all over the world including East Asia, India, North America, South America, Australia, the Caribbean and Europe. Tickets are £40.
10-11 July – Conference: “The Global Baroque: European Material Culture between Conquest, Trade and Mission, 1600-1750” (York). A British Academy Conference held at King’s Manor, University of York. The conference is free to attend but places are limited. The registration deadline is June 15.
In Literary and Academic News
New publication – Rab Hatfield, Soul and Body in Michelangelo – due out this month.
New publication – Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent: The Charcoal Portraits – forthcoming this month.
New publication – Filo d’Arianna, the second issue of the journal, edited by Franco Moro, has been released.
New publication – Master Drawings, Vol. 63, No. 2, focusing on landmark nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British artists and collectors is now available.
New publication – Marco Bolzoni, Pellegrino Tibaldi: Le Storie di Polifemo.
Call for applications – Study Course “Drawings in Theory and Practice” (Vienna): Summer course focused on the study of drawings across disciplines; dates: 28 July – 1 August.
Call for applications – Short-Term Fellowships, The Medici Archive Project (Florence):Twelve fellowships for archival research in Florence; application deadline: 15 June.
Call for papers – The Stradanus Project Symposium, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (New York): Symposium dates: 6–7 November; submit 150–200-word abstract, CV, and affiliation to stradanus_symposium@si.edu by 15 June.
Call for papers – Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana, Vol. 49: Now accepting submissions.
In Acquisition News
Engelien Reitsma-Valença, two self-portraits: acquired by the Jewish Historical Museumand the Rijksmuseum from Colnaghi Elliott Master Drawings.
Louis Albert Guislain Bacler d'Albe, a landscape: acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Art; exhibited by Marty de Cambiaire at Master Drawings New York, reported in La Tribune de L’Art.
Maurice Quentin de La Tour, a pastel portrait: acquired by the Musée du Louvre, reported in La Tribune de L’Art.
André Le Nôtre, a garden plan for the Château de Chantilly: donated to the Château de Chantilly’s collection.
Christophe Civeton, a drawing of Orléans from the Loire: donated to Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans, reported via Instagram announcement.
Henri Fantin-Latour, an early self-portrait: acquired by Metropolitan Museum of Art from Talabardon & Gautier and currently on display as part of a new exhibition highlighting recent acquisitions, City and Country: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints.
Annibale Carracci, a red chalk life drawing: gifted to the Morgan Library & Museum and currently on display as part of a new exhibition, A Celebration: Acquisitions in Honor of the Morgan's Centennial.
EVENTS
Jean-Jacques de Boissieu, Brustbild eines älteren Mannes, 1779, Feder in Braun; Foto: Christoph Müller Stiftung / Kilian Beutel
On display at Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, until 24 Aug 2025 as part of Das alles bin ich!” Christoph Müller’s Gift, Part 1.
This month we have picked out a selection of new and previously unhighlighted events from the UK and from further afield. For a more complete overview of ongoing exhibitions and talks, please visit our Calendar page.
UK
Wordlwide
DRAWING OF THE MONTH
William Satloff, former Graduate Curatorial Intern at the Clark Art Institute, has kindly chosen our 21st drawing of the month
Claude Lorrain (1604/5?–1682)
A View of Sant' Agnese Fuori le Mura, 1650–55
Pen and brown ink with black chalk and brown wash on beige laid paper. Clark Art Institute, Acquired by the Clark, 2007.5.13
In the seventeenth century, the Eternal City offered a smorgasbord of ancient and modern architectural wonders. One can appreciate why so few artists sought out the early-medieval basilica of Sant’Agnese fuori le mura (Saint Agnes Outside the Walls), which, as its name suggests, was located in the outskirts of Rome. Claude Lorrain drew the site twice in the early-to-middle 1650s, around the same time as Pope Innocent X established Sant’Agnese fuori le mura as a titular church for a cardinal-priest, on the 5th of October, 1654.
In the Clark Art Institute’s drawing, Claude employed several, subtle pictorial strategies that, taken together, obscure any sense of temporal specificity and imbue the scene with an enigmatic air of grandeur. Upon first examination, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the church in the middle ground, captured in fine detail with pen and brown ink. We look past the haze of lightly-applied wash in the bottom corners, the diminutive traveler figures in the foreground, and the dark, blurry foliage hugging the right edge of the sheet as Claude’s crisp architectural linework pulls us in. We trace the contours of the Byzantine-style church up its sturdy masonry walls and along the sloping diagonals of its timber roofs. We get the sense that Claude viewed the church from below, as he shows the church’s campanile (belltower) surging up beyond the skyline. Perhaps also due to his vantage point — though more likely for dramatic effect — the artist increased the size of the distant Alban Hills. In the 1650s, the land around Sant’Agnese fuori le mura had been deforested and subdivided for pastures. Compared with Claude’s other drawing of the church (in the British Museum, 1895,0915.905) which shows a herd of goats grazing, we begin to see the fantasy at work in the Clark’s drawing. Claude has run back the clock, sending us back to an ancient age when the forest was lush, the foliage was dense, and the land was wild. Upon closer inspection, the travelers in the foreground appear to be wearing togas. In this drawing, time is not ruled by logic. The land is primordial, the figures are classicised, and the seventh-century structure is set adrift in the deep time of the Roman Campagna.
A View of Sant’ Agnese Fuori le Mura is one of sixteen drawings by Claude Lorrain that the Clark Art Institute purchased in 2007. Thirteen of the drawings — including the View of Sant’ Agnese — come from the famous “Wildenstein Album.” Following Claude’s death in Rome in 1682, his heirs organised his drawings into albums to sell. Queen Christina of Sweden, a passionate art enthusiast living in Rome at the time, purchased several of these albums, later passing some on to her friend, the Italian Prince Livio Odescalchi. From Odescalchi’s descendants, albums were dismembered and scattered throughout Europe, several making their way into royal collections in France and Poland, as well as the private collections of Pieter Teylers in Haarlem and William Cavendish, the Second Duke of Devonshire. In the late 1950s, an album of previously unknown drawings by Claude surfaced with London dealer Hans Calmann. After privately selling several individual sheets, Calmann sold the remaining 60-drawing album to Georges Wildenstein. A few years later, Wildenstein sold the album to Norton Simon, who unbound the sheets for an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1971. In the early 1980s, Simon sold half of the album to the London dealer Agnew’s, who sold thirteen of the finest drawings to the Manhattan real-estate entrepreneur and Old Masters collector Peter Jay Sharp. The Clark acquired its sixteen Claude drawings from Sharp’s heirs.
Claude Lorrain’s A View of Sant' Agnese Fuori le Mura is in the exhibition Pastoral on PapeR at the Clark, Williamstown, Massachusetts, through June 15.
Real or Fake
Can we fool you? The term “fake” may be slightly sensationalist when it comes to old drawings. Copying originals and prints has formed a key part of an artist’s education since the Renaissance and with the passing of time the distinction between the two can be innocently mistaken.
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College
Although these two drawings were made over a century apart, they have always belonged together. Both are ‘signed’ by Cornelis Visscher (1628/29 - 1658), although one is in fact a later reproduction. In 1991 the drawings were acquired by Maida and George Abrams and in 2018 they were promised as a gift to the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. But which is the original and which is the later version? Why might the latter have been made and what might their shared provenance imply?
Scroll to the end of the newsletter or click here for the answer.
Resources and Recommendations
to listen
Art of The Deal – Sir Joseph Duveen
Jo McLaughlin provides an introduction to the life and times of Sir Joseph Duveen, the legendary art dealer who, at the turn of the 20th century, brought British aristocratic taste to America and introduced the concept of branding into the art world.
to watch
‘MDNY 2024 Inaugural Lecture: Botticelli Drawings’ with Furio Rinaldi
The Drawing Foundation offers an excellent archive of recorded events from across the calendar year. In January 2024, Furio Rinaldi, Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, delivered a talk on the drawings of the Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445–1510), held in conjunction with the opening of his landmark exhibition on the subject. The exhibition was the first and most extensive to examine the central role that drawing played in Botticelli’s art and workshop practice.
to read
The pastel frenzy: the history of a medium that is both painting and drawing by Kirsten Tambling
Is it a painting or a drawing? Pastel has long occupied an in-between status, typically worked on paper or vellum and sometimes mounted on canvas like a painting. In this short history, Kirsten Tambling traces the medium’s rise, fall, and revival - from its 18th-century heyday with Rosalba Carriera in Italy, Maurice Quentin de La Tour and Jean-Étienne Liotard in France, and John Russell in Britain, to its decline after the French Revolution and resurgence with Edgar Degas. The article concludes with its continued relevance today in the hands of artists such as Paula Rego and Claudette Johnson.
answer
The original, of course, is the left-hand image.
Despite the meticulous fidelity of Abraham Delfos’ copy after Cornelis Visscher’s original drawing – right down to the signature – it is unlikely that the drawing was created with the intent to deceive.
Provenance records reveal that both drawings once belonged to the influential Amsterdam collector and pioneer of drawings reproductions Cornelis Ploos van Amstel (1726-1798). This shared origin and an inscription on the back suggests that van Amstel may have commissioned Delfos to copy Visscher’s drawing, which was in his collection. Delfos was known to have received commissions to copy artworks in his friends’ collections, as well as those which were coming up at auction.
Delfos, an engraver, draughtsman, and art dealer from Leiden, was instrumental in founding the city’s drawing school, Ars Aemula Naturae. Though well connected and active in Leiden’s art world, his work found little commercial success in his lifetime and has since received limited critical attention. By contrast, Van Amstel played a key role in popularising reproductive images, helping to elevate their status in the 18th century. Thanks in part to his efforts, reproductive drawings came to be viewed as autonomous artworks — a legacy for which he is recognised today.
