Prints and drawings - Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute - Old Masters in the Clark Collection, part 2

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1997 by James A. Ganz

In October 1958, less than a week after his arrival as the first curator of prints and drawings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, William J. Collins, wrote:

It will be a year or more before we will know definitely just what is already in the Clark Collection. I would guess that there are some 5000 or so prints and drawings and until they are unpacked and catalogued there is no possibility of considering any additions to the collections.(1)

Like Peter Guille, the director of the institute from 1955 to 1966, Collins was a former art dealer, and as head of the print department at M. Knoedler and Company in New York City, he had sold many works to Robert Sterling Clark over a period of thirty years and had become one of his most trusted dealer-advisers.

Collins overestimated the size of the collection, which in fact consisted of 466 drawings and 1,378 prints. During his tenure, Collins concentrated on organizing, cataloguing, and exhibiting these works on paper. In 1959 he established a print and drawing gallery devoted to a rotating selection of works surveying the history of prints "from Mantegna to Arms" and drawings "from Durer to Zorn."(2) This task was facilitated by Clark's catholic taste, for although he clearly favored the nineteenth-century French school, his diverse collection of works on paper encompassed both the Renaissance and the early twentieth century.

Sterling Clark amassed a small but outstanding group of drawings dating to before 1800, with an obvious commitment to acquiring important master drawings. One of his earliest acquisitions was the delicate silverpoint shown in Plate II, falsely annotated "Leonardo da Vinci," and now convincingly attributed to his Milanese pupil Giovanni Boltraffio. The drawing was once owned by the painter Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680), and Clark bought it from the London dealer Colnaghi in 1917. In the first decades of this century that venerable firm became Clark's prime source for drawings. Other significant drawings of the Italian school that he bought from Colnaghi include works by Perugino (c. 1450-1523), Fra Bartolommeo (1472-1517), and Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530).

Clark's taste in Renaissance drawings extended beyond the borders of Italy and embraced the most important northern European artist of the period, the German painter and engraver Albrecht Durer. It has been speculated that the sensitive and highly individualized likeness shown in Plate I is that of one Of the first journeymen to join Durer's workshop in Nuremberg, Germany.(3) The Sheet of Studies with Sketches of Animals and Landscapes [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VI OMITTED] is perhaps the most beloved of Durer's drawings in America. Clark bought it in 1919, when it was discovered backing an engraving that had been sold earlier from Wilton House in England. The sketch page most probably records animals Durer saw during a visit to the zoological garden in Brussels, Belgium, with the addition, on his return to Germany, of alpine landscape motifs.(4)

As is the case with the Renaissance drawings, Clark collected a small number of important seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish drawings. Peter Paul Rubens is represented by three drawings in three mediums: Hercules Strangling the Nemean Lion in chalk, Venus and Cupid in pen and ink (bought as a Van Dyck), and Portrait of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel in brush and wash [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED]. The latter, one of the institute's greatest treasures, was made when Rubens was in London in 1629-1630. It is a preparatory study for the oil painting of the earl that is now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Of the three drawings Clark bought as being by Rembrandt, two retain their attributions to the master. The landscape in Plate VII, like so many of Rembrandt's landscapes, challenges our ability to perceive the human element amidst the natural world. The sheet has been prepared with a thin brown wash to impart a warm tone in a retardataire technique that recalls the work of Hercules Seghers (1589 or 1590-c. 1638) and earlier Renaissance masters (see Pls. I, II).(5)

The Clark collection achieves greater depth in eighteenth-century drawings of the Italian and French schools. Sterling Clark bought a group of pen and wash studies by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the greatest Venetian painter of the century, and by his son Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. The elder Tiepolo's Liberation of Saint Peter [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE V OMITTED] exhibits the calligraphic handling of pen and ink and freely applied washes that are the hallmark of his style. The more tightly conceived and studied drawing by his son shown in Plate IV is from a series of large biblical drawings begun in the 1780s that represents the younger Tiepolo's greatest legacy as a draftsman.(6)

Early eighteenth-century France is represented by three drawings by Jean Antoine Watteau that show his skillful use of red, black, and white chalk on the same sheet. His evocative Studies of a Flutist and Two Women (P1. VIII) is a compilation of figures related to drawings and paintings Watteau executed between 1712 and 1716. From the turn of the nineteenth century there is one of the finest of a series of chalk drawings Pierre Paul Prud'hon made of his model Marguerite for an unrealized monument commission (PI. IX).(7) It is in a remarkable state of preservation, with the paper retaining much of its original blue gray color.