Good on Paper

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2025

Good on paper

On “Paper, Color, Line,” at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

“Paper, Color, Line: European Master Drawings from the Wadsworth Atheneum,” the exhibition now on view in Hartford, Connecticut, goes against every diminished expectation of what a major museum show today ought to be.1 Just consider the words in its subtitle. European? Master? Drawings? All from the museum’s permanent collection? Swish that vocabulary around your palate like you’ve just supped some pre-phylloxera wine—you probably assumed such old-vine vintages had been long since emptied from the cellars of contemporary politicized discourse. Then book yourself a train to Hartford, as I did, or drive, fly, or walk, and rejoice in the opportunity to see an exhibition whose sole purpose is to rekindle the art of close looking. Such connoisseurship informed the creation of this drawings collection a century ago. It still does today. While you are at it, stay on for the other highlights from the Wadsworth’s permanent collection, on view here in one of the country’s oldest museums, with both Old Master and modern treasures and a grand salon-style paintings hall. The leaders of this museum once envisioned the Wadsworth as a pilgrimage site for important art. It might just be that way again.

“Paper, Color, Line” is the initiative of Oliver Tostmann, the Wadsworth’s Susan Morse Hilles Curator of European Art. His exhibition of over sixty works on paper from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, selected from the museum’s holdings of 1,250 drawings, watercolors, pastels, and collages, serves not only to put these rare sheets back on display. It also presents the opportunity for a wholesale reassessment of this overlooked aspect of the Wadsworth’s permanent collection, along with advancing the essential restoration, reconditioning, and remounting of these fragile objects. Just as important for the endurance of this project, even after this exhibition comes down, has been the production of a sizable catalogue, the Wadsworth’s first publication dedicated to its European drawings collection. The scholarly entries here are all written by Tostmann himself, unencumbered by the synthetic stuffing we might find from guest contributors. Supplementing the exhibition’s informative wall labels, his catalogue delves deep into each drawing on view as well as the history of how they all happened to end up in Hartford.

In terms of the narrative arc it traces of American museum-making, the Hartford chapter of this story can be surprisingly compelling. Founded in 1842 by Daniel Wadsworth (1771–1848) on the grounds of his family home at the center of Hartford, open to the public since 1844, the Wadsworth predates the establishment of other major East Coast art institutions by more than a generation. The Atheneum bills itself as the oldest continuously operating museum in the United States. Enlarged through the philanthropy of local Gilded Age grandees, including the Colt family and none other than John Pierpont Morgan, himself Hartford-born, this institution grew expeditiously during the early decades of the twentieth century but has struggled since. The museum’s current concatenation of architectural styles, from neo-Gothic to Beaux-Arts to International Style to bunker Brutalism, speaks to the highs and lows of its civic fortunes.

Giuseppe Cesari, called Cavaliere d’Arpino, The Discovery of Romulus and Remus, 1596, Red chalk, Charles H. Schwartz Fund, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

Drawings began entering this collection with one of Daniel Wadsworth’s earliest bequests. Tostmann introduces his survey with a pair of pastels by the British artist James Sharples of George and Martha Washington, each created circa 1798 and accessioned by the institution in 1848. (A tool of the trade, especially relevant here but useful whenever reading a wall label, is to note a work’s accession number. More often than not, the number begins with the year the work entered a collection, followed by a period and a second number indicating the order of its accession in that given year. Sharples’s George Washington and Martha Washington carry accession numbers 1848.18 and 1848.19, respectively.)

The Sharples pastels were first owned by Daniel Wadsworth’s father, Jeremiah, a sea captain and statesman who represented Connecticut in the Continental Congress and the House of Representatives. He was also a friend and confidant to George Washington. A plaque erected at the corner of the museum notes that Colonel Wadsworth entertained Washington on that spot in 1775. In 1780, Washington returned to the Wadsworth home with Lafayette, General Knox, and Governor Trumbull for their first meeting with Count Rochambeau and Admiral Verney in order to “concert joint military and naval plans.” The rest, as they say, is history. Tostmann surmises that young Daniel must have met the Father of our Country during one of Washington’s many return visits to Hartford, a fact that gives these portraits and their bequest to the new museum, founded on the very spot where Washington turned the spindle of the world, extra significance. It is interesting to note that Governor Trumbull’s son, the painter John Trumbull, became Daniel Wadsworth’s closest mentor and joined Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church as his artistic advisor.

For the next eighty years, drawings entered the Wadsworth in fits and starts, including via a gift of sixty European prints and drawings in 1914 by the descendants of Cassius Welles. That all changed in 1927 with two auspicious arrivals. One was a $1.1 million bequest from the estate of Frank Sumner, a donor whose family had deep roots in Hartford, which established a significant acquisitions fund for paintings. The second was the appointment of A. Everett Austin Jr. (1900–57), the brilliant young director known as “Chick” Austin, just twenty-six years old at the time, who knew how to leverage this gift for the museum’s great benefit—and interpreted the Sumner bequest to include the acquisition of drawings as well as paintings.

Léon Bakst, Costume Design for Vaslav Nijinsky as the Faun, from “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune,” 1912, Graphite, tempera, watercolor & gold paint on illustration board, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

Austin arrived as the Atheneum’s first academically trained director, having graduated from the fabled museum course offered by Edward Waldo Forbes and Paul J. Sachs at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum. (For more on Sachs and the story of another one of his graduates, Perry Rathbone of the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Boston mfa, see “The Boston Perry,” my review in the October 2024 issue of The New Criterion.) Tostmann credits Sachs with instilling in Austin a special appreciation for drawings, which he pursued energetically during his tenure at the Wadsworth. Such acquisitions continued after his retirement in 1944 under his immediate successor, Charles C. Cunningham, who served as director until 1966. In part, these purchases were strategic. Even with the Sumner fund, Austin could be easily outspent for top-flight oils by larger institutions. When it came to works on paper, not always by name-brand artists, he stood a fighting chance. His acquisition budget simply went further with drawings than paintings.

Beyond mere finances, however, Austin put in practice the lessons he had learned from Sachs in valuing drawings qua drawings. Sachs lectured often about the importance of drawings. He collected his thoughts in a 1951 publication called The Pocket Book of Great Drawings—tracing a line from the disegno of Giorgio Vasari to an appreciation of drawings as the locus of artistic understanding:

Drawing is, indeed, the fundamental element in all great picture making, just as grammar is at the root of all good writing. . . . A great drawing . . . instantly brings to us the thought, the emotion of the artist at the time of creation. . . . It is in his drawings that the artist makes his most spontaneous statements, and enables us to follow his thought in the very act of creation.

We can just about hear Sachs’s words in Austin’s and Cunningham’s ears as we survey the Wadsworth’s highlights, mostly presented by Tostmann chronologically by their year of creation. As quoted by Sachs, Vasari himself called drawing “the necessary beginning of everything [in art], and not having it, one has nothing.” One of the first sheets up is Vasari’s own Jupiter Sacrificing on the Island of Naxos (1557, acquired by the Wadsworth in 1948). This ethereal drawing of pen, ink, and brown-ink wash, with lead white over graphite underdrawing, “demonstrates not only Vasari’s economical and pragmatic work habits,” writes Tostmann, “but also his erudition, succinct storytelling, and technical skill.”

Giorgio Vasari, Descent from the Cross, ca. 1550, Pen, ink wash & chalk on paper, Purchase through the gift of James Junius Goodwin, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

In acquiring both drawings and paintings, Austin largely looked beyond the household names of the High Renaissance to the art of the Baroque, which he championed much as Sachs had done. The Holy Family (ca. 1760, acquired 1930) by Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Tiepolo, depicts a tender embrace in a liquid sheet of rippling line. “In all of his prolific work,” Sachs said of Tiepolo, “we delight in the illusion of Italian sunlight which suffused his rapid sketches as it does his vast compositions. . . . The light beloved of all Venetians shines on his pages with a brilliant whiteness.” In this deft work of pen and brown ink with gray wash, the untouched areas of cream paper are allowed to shine with their own light of the world.

Another highlight of highlights here is Honoré Daumier’s The Departure of the Clowns (Le déplacement des saltimbanques) (ca. 1866–67, acquired 1928). Austin spent far more on this drawing, $16,000, than he would even on drawings by Cézanne or Renoir—no doubt again encouraged by Sachs. “No man who ever lived was more of a translator of life into contemporary, everyday terms by means of masterly drawing,” Sachs wrote of the illustrative Daumier:

His ability to depict through facial expression—punctuated by the emphasis of gesture—fleeting and conflicting human emotions is unequalled. In the whole field of art there are no finer examples than those by Daumier of drawing from memory.

Austin and Cunningham are not the only ones to thank for establishing this farsighted drawings collection—which includes outstanding works by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Gustave Courbet, Gustave Doré, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Egon Schiele, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and the Leipzig School’s Werner Tübke, as well as an essential suite of designs for the Ballets Russes by Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova, and Mikhail Larionov. A stunning Ingres, the Portrait of the Architect Louis-Pierre Haudebourt (ca. 1814–18), is not an Austin acquisition at all but a 2023 bequest by Susannah Shickman that would have no doubt pleased both Austin and Sachs. In this dashing portrait—“animated by the contrast between Haudebourt’s highly finished face and the loosely sketched body,” says Tostmann—we readily appreciate what Sachs called Ingres’ “accounts of the outer rather than the inner man.” Ingres, Sachs continued, displays a

rare combination of subtle intuition, skillfully minute delineation, and fidelity to appearance which gives his drawings their special character and charm—a charm not unlike that of the characters in the novels of Jane Austen.

The Ingres acquisition reminds us that drawings continue to be an active interest at the Wadsworth. A Helmeted Warrior with Two Separate Studies of His Head, and Two Other Studies (ca. 1645, acquired 2024), a sketch by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino, appeared just a year ago on the Upper East Side wall of Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co during Master Drawings New York, a part of the city’s essential week for Old Master dealers (see my “Brown in town” in the March 2024 issue of The New Criterion). Such ongoing Old Master acquisitions speak to the continued foresight of the Wadsworth in not simply going in for the latest contemporary bauble, as well as the cultural value of a healthy marketplace for art.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Portrait of Louis-Pierre Haudebourt, Pencil on paper, Bequest of Susannah Shickman, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

Just a final note for when you arrive in Hartford: the display of these drawings could look better. Spanning the walls of a bright-yellow room, with landlord paint covering the electrical outlets, the linear arrangement does not reward visitors as much as it should or help them slow down for the careful viewing these works deserve. Drawings are best presented in domestic scale, with alcoves and seats to aid in their unfolding discovery. When Austin inaugurated his Avery Memorial wing at the Wadsworth in 1934, he installed a drawings center right on the ground floor, with desk and chairs available for close study. These rooms were torn out in the 1970s at a time when the Wadsworth had tossed aside its entire interest in collecting European works on paper. With that interest rekindled today, why not bring these rooms back? This is the ultimate hope for “Paper, Color, Line”—that an essential line of inquiry has now been drawn from the connoisseurship of Sachs and Austin to the museum world of today and beyond.

1. “Paper, Color, Line: European Master Drawings from the Wadsworth Atheneum” opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, on January 16 and remains on view through April 27, 2025. 

Brown in Town

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2024

Brown in Town

On the Winter Show, Master Drawings New York, “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction,” “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of the Grolier Club” & “Masters Week.”

In late January, The Winter Antiques Show returned to the Park Avenue Armory. Correction: make that “The Winter Show.”1 Five years ago, as this venerable exposition fell under new management on its sixty-fifth anniversary year, the word “antiques” was struck from its title. Like that brown furniture in your grandmother’s attic now scented with camphor and racism, the past has lost its market value to the present. Against the mystery cult of the new, who dares to appear antique?

And so, much of The Winter Show in recent years has felt like Terminal D Duty Free. Aisles of bangles, baubles, and beads make the presentation an ahistorical muddle. Maybe this is the point. How better to get “younger collectors interested in material culture at large,” in the words of expo leadership, at the Young Collectors Night DJ party? Fortunately, it has not all been out with the old and in with the new for what remains arguably America’s most important antiques fair. Now seventy years old, The Winter Show’s ten-day assembly of dealers should be seen as an heirloom event—one dedicated to benefiting the East Side House Settlement, now in the South Bronx, as it has since the fair’s founding in the 1950s.

John Vanderlyn Jr., Santa Claus, 1845, Oil on canvas, Jeffrey Tillou Antiques, New York.

Beyond the gewgaws, this year’s Winter Show presented a welcome homage to its own past. Mixed in among the booths of some seventy dealers, an exhibition titled “Focus: Americana,” curated by Alexandra Kirtley of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, brought together pieces from several of the show’s historical exhibitors, some of whom still participate, and others who left long ago. Taken together, this fascinating assembly spoke to the importance of The Winter Show in raising the profile of American antiques over its seven-decade run and made the case for their value today.

Highlights here were many, including a tall case clock by Major Timothy Chandler, circa 1810, along with a fire screen “with framed theorem still life,” circa 1830, both on view from David A. Schorsch–Eileen M. Smiles Fine Americana. Olde Hope offered up a pine overmantel panel with a vernacular painting of a white house from New York or New England circa 1820–40. Levy Galleries brought a Hepplewhite mirror with an original floral finial and an eglomise-gilded panel of a farm landscape, made in New York circa 1795. Jeffrey Tillou Antiques presented a portrait of Santa Claus “painted in 1845 by John Vanderlyn for the cabin on the river steamer Santa Claus—owned by Ezra Fitch,” according to a label on its verso. Allan Katz Americana brought a whirligig of a New York Seventy-ninth Infantry Regiment Highlander in tartan parade attire, the only known such carving in existence, from circa 1860–80. Meanwhile Kelly Kinzle Antiques presented “Richard Andrus, His Horn Made at Roxbury October 5th 1775,” a decorated powder horn attributed to the Simsbury Carver. Also from Kinzle was a miniature wall clock of mahogany and painted glass signed by David Brown, circa 1820, and a harvest face-jug by Charles Decker—an expressionist example of Tennessee’s Keystone Potter circa 1875. Altogether, the presentation of “Focus: Americana” revealed the wonder and strangeness of American craft, with pieces that rose to the level of fine art while retaining their folk traditions.

Simsbury Carver, Richard Andrus, His Horn Made at Roxbury October 5th 1775, 1775, Horn, Killy Kinzle Antiques, New Oxford, Pennsylvania.

With fewer collectors deeply invested in historical periods and styles, the hope today is that buyers will at least view such antiques as stand-alone works that can be mixed into more contemporary, Instagrammable settings. As with “Focus: Americana,” it was reassuring to see two current dealers dedicated to colonial, British, and American antiques flanking the show’s entrance. On one side, Cove Landing presented a George I “Mulberry Wood’’ bureau cabinet, circa 1725, with a mottled veneer that would put an abstract expressionist to shame. Meanwhile, across the entry hallway, Levy Galleries displayed a Chippendale tall case clock, circa 1770, next to a Federal eagle-inlaid tall case clock, circa 1800. Inside the booth, a Federal table attributed to the workshop of Thomas Seymour, circa 1805–12, spoke to the increasing interest in furniture designed for “lady’s work.”

Hirschl & Adler Galleries brought its own worktable “in the Sheraton Taste,” circa 1810, attributed to Thomas Seymour, with a similarly suspended fabric workbag for yarn and linen. This piece was paired with a burled-elm pier table with tole columns, circa 1815–19, along with paintings and watercolors by Thomas Cole and Edward Hopper. Nearby, Daniel Crouch Rare Books displayed John Mitchell’s fascinating Map of the British and French Dominions in North America, published in 1755, along with other cartographic curios, including the Adrian Naftalin collection of maps of the—checks notes—Jewish Holy Land.

Pierre Bonnard, L’Escalier, ca. 1932, Oil & gouache on paper, Jill Newhouse Gallery, New York.

Rounding out these attractions was a pair of George III reverse-glass cabinets featuring Grand Tour vignettes, circa 1780, attributed to Ince and Mayhew, from Hyde Park Antiques; a sixteenth-century bowl with a painting of John the Baptist by Pontormo at Robert Simon Fine Art; a stag hunt by John Wootton and other sporting scenes at Red Fox Fine Art; fifteenth-century books at Les Enluminures; a circa 1932 oil-and-gouache of a pet dog by Pierre Bonnard at Jill Newhouse Gallery; and artifacts by Northwest Coast Indians at Tambaran Gallery. Such a collection of historical objects is almost enough to make you forget our present circumstances.

The Winter Show serves as a pendant to New York’s annual auctions for historical art and antiques, which take place the following week. Squeezed between the two is Master Drawings New York, an initiative that brings national and international galleries to the Upper East Side, where they partner with local venues for wall space.2 Now in its eighteenth season, this year Master Drawings New York came under the leadership of Christopher Bishop, a New York gallerist with an eye for misattributed work. Employing a similar sense of connoisseurship to this undervalued gathering of galleries and collectors, Bishop introduced a new level of organization and scholarship to the endeavor that presented a welcome abundance of work in seemingly every available corner of the neighborhood—with only a few days to see it all.

Lorenzo Balidessera Tiepolo, A Young Man Wearing a Studio Cap, Resting His Head on His Left Hand, ca. 1755, Black & red chalk, Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co., New York.

Clustered in galleries around the Metropolitan Museum and continuing down to Sixty-fourth Street, twenty-six exhibitors mounted these special exhibitions of works on paper from the fifteenth century to the present. Highlights this year included, at Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co., a portrait of the young Henry William Mathew by John Flaxman, dynamic studies by Il Guercino, drawings by Boucher and Corot, and an unpublished drawing by Lorenzo Baldissera Tiepolo. Abbott and Holder brought over forty-eight British works on paper from its London-based showroom, including a capriccio landscape by Robert Adam, a visionary bedroom sketch by William Blake, and a delicate J. M. W. Turner watercolor once owned by John Ruskin—along with a handsome printed catalogue. Colnaghi Elliott Master Drawings presented orientalist portraits by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Leopold Carl Müller alongside an exhibition of portraits and seascapes by the Spanish master Joaquín Sorolla. Meanwhile David Nolan Gallery, in collaboration with Donald Ellis, presented “Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865–1900,” an exhibition of seventy-five sketches by Arapaho, Cheyenne, Hidatsa, Kiowa, and Lakota artists from the nineteenth century.

The book trade remains a welcome gateway to the cultures of the past, with much of it accessible to a range of readers and collectors. Judging by the crowds at recent New York book fairs, the hard copy has become only more attractive in our digital world for its tactile pleasures and literary delights, while providing the ultimate backup to our evanescent bits and bytes. As collecting institutions have become radicalized by identity politics (see “A library by the book,” my essay in The New Criterion of December 2022), personal libraries are more essential than ever before.

Cover, spine & back cover of The Whole Book of Psalmes, 1643. Photo: Nicole Neenan / Grolier Club.

Last September, the upstart Empire State Rare Book and Print Fair set up shop for the first time inside St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue. The show was a welcome competitor to the more established (and woker) International Antiquarian Book Fair, put on every April by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. An extra pleasure of its ecclesiastical venue was hearing Paolo Bordignon, St. Bart’s organist and choirmaster, perform on the fair’s opening night.

This season, just up the street, the Grolier Club, America’s oldest society of bibliophiles, founded in 1884, continued its run of significant public programs with two must-see exhibitions on view at once. “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction,” installed in the second floor gallery, was a page-turner.3 With more than ninety books from the Grolier member Jeffrey Johnson’s collection of early detective novels, the exhibition featured standouts ranging from the first American edition of Memoirs of Vidocq (1834), to the first collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (1892), to Agatha Christie’s first novel (1920). Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Anna Katherine Green were among the list of accomplices in a thrilling show that was criminal to miss. Especially appreciated was Johnson’s own testimony, provided in wall labels, of his discoveries as a collector.

A gallery view of “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction” at the Grolier Club, New York. Photo courtesy of the Grolier Club.

Meanwhile, on view through April in the club’s main exhibition hall, “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s–2020,” reveals the Grolier’s advancement of bookbinding as both collecting interest and craft.4 Thanks to the creation of the society’s own bindery in the late nineteenth century, for example, club members no longer had to send their rare books off to France for treatment. Drawing on the society’s holdings, the exhibition pairs the club’s own work with a hundred examples of rare bindings, starting with a circa 1473 brass-and-pigskin volume of The Jewish Wars by Josephus and Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius, through a jeweled miniature Whole Booke of Psalmes (1673), on up to a gilded freehand design by Ulrich Widmann from 2019. Most rewarding are those bindings that speak to the contents within, for example, Ernest Lefébure’s Embroidery and Lace of 1888, with boards covered in green ribbed silk embroidered in delicate floral patterns.

To cap off the antiques season, in late January Sotheby’s filled out its multiple floors on York Avenue with its “Masters Week” sales.5 These days, works by, or of, non-whites and non-men are the hot commodities. Institutional buyers must pursue “diversity” or risk dei ire. That explains the run-up in prices for the saccharine paintings of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, who has been achieving records at auction for her work as a female Old Master (Old Mistress?). At the same time, institutions must be seen delivering up their permanent collections to the deaccessioning of the vanities. In the latest Sotheby’s sales, the Metropolitan Museum offered paintings from its “permanent” collection by George Romney, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Henry Raeburn, and Johann Liss. With proceeds meant to “benefit the acquisition fund,” we might assume those returns will not be used to purchase more Romneys, Reynoldses, and Gainsboroughs.

Gustav Bauernfeind, The Western Wall, ca. 1890, Oil on canvas, Private collection.

Nevertheless, it may be good to get such art into the hands of collectors who will value it, and it is a pleasure to see these works as they go up for sale. In the February 1 auction titled “Master Paintings & Sculpture Part I,” The Western Wall (ca. 1890), a painting by Gustav Bauernfeind, bore detailed witness to the historical importance of that holy site. Equally interesting was a charming Swabian School altarpiece of Saint Ursula, circa 1480–90, which at one time passed through the hands of the Monuments Men, who restituted the work from the clutches of Hermann Göring. In “Master Paintings Part II,” a Veronese oil of the creation of Eve, circa 1570–80, sold off by the Art Institute of Chicago after nearly a century in its collection, could have been yours for the price of New York’s worst studio apartment. In the February 2 sale of “Old Master and British Works on Paper,” a sketchbook drawing of a bridge near Epsom by John Constable, circa 1806, was estimated at $5–8,000 but ended up selling for much more. Meanwhile, the sale of “Master Sculpture & Works of Art” remained particularly undervalued, with fourteenth-century ecclesiastical French sculpture going for four digits.

In fact, it is worth noting that the highest jump of Masters Week was the sale of six gym shoes once worn by Michael Jordan. As that suite of sneakers sold for eight million dollars, no Old Master can hope to be like Mike.

1.   The Winter Show was on view at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from January 19 through January 28, 2024.

2.   Master Drawings New York was on view from January 27 through February 3, 2024.

3.   “Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction” was on view at the Grolier Club, New York, from November 30, 2023, through February 10, 2024.

4.   “Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s–2020” opened at the Grolier Club, New York, on January 17 and remains on view through April 13, 2024.

5.   “Masters Week” was on view at Sotheby’s, New York, from January 26 through February 3, 2024.