Sotheby’s Presents The Line of Beauty: Drawings from The Collection of Howard and Saretta Barnet Offering Italian, French, Spanish, German & British Drawings Spanning 500 Years of Western Art

NEW YORK, 7 December 2017 – Sotheby’s is honored to present The Line of Beauty: Drawings from the Collection of Howard and Saretta Barnet in a dedicated auction on 31 January 2018 in New York, highlighting Sotheby’s annual Masters Week sales.

The superb collection of 28 drawings, formed over a period of some 40 years by the New York couple Howard and Saretta Barnet, is unique for its combination of small overall size, great chronological span and exceptionally high quality. Making their selections with razor-sharp aesthetic judgement, the Barnet’s very carefully assembled a group of drawings that tells the story of five centuries of the art of drawing in Western Europe, each of the very highest quality and beauty. Spanning from an early Renaissance landscape, drawn around 1500 by Fra Bartolommeo, to the rare and penetrating portrait of fellow-artist Balthus, drawn by Lucian Freud in 1989, the collection also includes magnificent drawings by the great 17th-century landscape master, Claude Lorrain, by the five top draughtsmen of 18th-century France and Italy (Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, Tiepolo, Guardi), by the most visionary of Spanish artists, Goya and Picasso, and by two of the giants of 19th-century French art, Ingres and Degas. Despite being very different from each other in date, geographical origin, technique, style and function, these drawings reflect a powerful, consistent taste.

The collection will be on view in our New York galleries from 26 – 31 January 2018, alongside our public exhibitions of Master Paintings.

Gregory Rubinstein, Head of Sotheby’s Old Master Drawings Department, commented: “The sale of the Barnet Collection offers not only a unique and liberating insight into what makes a great drawing, but also gives another generation of collectors the opportunity to acquire works of the very highest quality, which have been off the market for several decades. Rarely, if ever, can a more perfectly chosen collection have been formed, in any collecting field.”

He continued: “The greatest masters of Western European art, from Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo to Rembrandt, Goya and Picasso, all began every work of art that they made, in every medium, with drawings. Through drawings, they worked out how they would approach their projects, and developed their ideas. Drawings open a magical door, through which we can pass into the very heart of the creative process – we are transported in time, to the very moment when the artist was working out what he or she was going to do, and that moment, whenever it occurred, thereby becomes part of the present, not the past. This timeless and universal quality is also fundamentally modern, and drawings from all periods can be equally revelatory to artists and collectors of today – to anyone fascinated by the process of making art.”

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE COLLECTION
Fra Bartolommeo holds a distinct and distinguished position amongst the classic painters of the Renaissance. The present drawing, an exquisite and highly rare landscape drawing, depicting a View of Fiesole (estimate $600/800,000), has an absolutely impeccable provenance; given by Fra Bartolommeo to his fellow artist Fra Paolina da Pistoia, before subsequently entering the celebrated collection of the Florentine art historian Nicolo Gabburi. Dating to circa 1508, this drawing can be considered among the earliest pure landscape studies in European art and like the other surviving landscape studies by the artist, the majority of which are in museum collections, this sheet appears to have been drawn directly from nature.

Parmigianino was a prodigiously talented painter, draughtsman and print maker, whose career spanned the Mannerist period. His drawings are continuously sought after by collectors and connoisseurs, and justifiably recognized for their outstanding quality. The present work, a double sided drawing, is no exception to this rule and depicts two separate studies of “Shepherds for an Adoration” on the recto and “Two putti among foliage” on the verso (estimate $300/500,000). The drawing also contains a charming musical score on the recto, perhaps explaining why it once belonged in the collection of Nicolas Lanière, who was appointed in 1618 as “Master of the Musick” to Prince Charles, who would later become King Charles I of England.

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