What drew me in was the proportions of where the eyes, nose, and lips sit on the head. Loomis said beauty is beauty of proportion, and he built diagrams around exactly this kind of measurement. I’d also picked up from Alon Bement’s The Energetic Line in Figure Drawing that a head in profile carries its own proportional logic, separate from a three-quarter or frontal view. The way Leonardo grids the profile out with measuring lines is ultimately what Bement references, and what I was thinking about.

Leonardo da Vinci, The proportions of the head, and a standing nude (detail — the sheet also carries a faint nude figure study, cropped out here), c. 1490, pen and ink over metalpoint on blue prepared paper, Royal Collection Trust — public domain.

I think the hair came out well, another thing I’m trying to figure out.

I didn’t know when I drew it that the sitter was already dead by the time Botticelli painted her — an idealisation, not taken from life. I’ve always thought Botticelli’s faces look quite similar to one another, and very feminine as a rule; this one, though, has an almost masculine edge to it that surprised me, more visible in my tracing. Whatever that detachment is, I think it’s there in the original, and maybe even more so in my tracing, closer to ethereality than portraiture, as Botticelli intended.

The painting. Ritratto di giovane donna (known in English as Idealised Portrait of a Lady, or Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as Nymph), Sandro Botticelli, c. 1480–1485. Mixed technique on poplar wood, 81.3 × 54 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main (inv. 936). Strict profile, in the tradition of ancient coins and cameos — the necklace she wears references an actual Medici-collection cameo, tying the sitter to that circle without painting a literal likeness.

The sitter. Simonetta Vespucci, celebrated Florentine beauty and the mistress of Giuliano de’ Medici, died young (1476) years before this was painted — which is why the museum calls it an “idealised” portrait rather than a portrait from life: Botticelli is painting her as a mythological nymph, a posthumous ideal, not a sitting. Her married name comes from Marco Vespucci, a distant cousin of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci — the same family the Americas are named after.

The artist. Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), Florentine painter, Renaissance workshop of the Medici court. Public domain: died over 500 years ago.

Sandro Botticelli, Ritratto di giovane con medaglione (Young Man Holding a Roundel), c. 1480 — public domain. Sold for $92.2 million at Sotheby’s in 2021, the auction record for a Botticelli.

Image credits. Sandro Botticelli died in 1510, Leonardo da Vinci in 1519 — both public domain by any measure. All photographs are faithful flat reproductions of public-domain 2-D artworks and carry no separate copyright of their own (US: Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel, 1999; EU: Copyright Directive 2019, Art. 14). The Simonetta Vespucci image is downloaded directly from the Städel Museum’s own collection site, per their stated public-domain terms — mention: “Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.” The Leonardo profile study is a crop (head and proportion grid only) of The proportions of the head, and a standing nude (RCIN 912601, Royal Collection Trust), sourced via Wikimedia Commons under a PD-old tag — the full sheet also contains a faint figure study. The Ritratto di giovane con medaglione image is sourced via Wikimedia Commons, tagged public domain.

Links

• Ritratto di giovane donna — Städel Museum — museum catalogue entry, image, PD terms
• Sandro Botticelli — Wikipedia
• The proportions of the head, and a standing nude — Royal Collection Trust — museum catalogue entry, full sheet
• File on Wikimedia Commons — license, source image
• Alon Bement — Wikipedia — teacher of Georgia O’Keeffe, author of The Energetic Line in Figure Drawing
• Ritratto di giovane con medaglione — Wikimedia Commons — file page, license, source
• Sotheby’s: record $92.2 million sale — auction press release

This is Muybridge, a woman doing a waltz. I was hesitant, I don’t want to draw so many, but then I thought — this is the whole thing, I can do a minimum line. So I wondered: what is the minimum line needed to convey this motion? There’s motion here.

Plate 195 is twenty-four exposures of a woman dancing a waltz, shot from two synchronized camera angles running in parallel down the sheet. Published by the University of Pennsylvania; this particular scan comes from the Boston Public Library’s Rare Books Department, one of several institutions holding original prints of the plates.

I thought it’s probably good to draw the weighted side. So I traced out a little bit of what it used to be, with the weighted side. Another interesting thing is that what we really need is the weighted side and the minimum line. She seems to have shifted her weight to the other side. The weight comes from Alon Bement’s guidance. He emphasized that the first and most important line is the one carrying the weight, which gives a drawing balance and realism, lost if we don’t prioritize it.

Just the weighted line — I don’t think we’re seeing enough to make out that this is a figure in some of the individual lines, but these are a group.

I don’t quite understand what Muybridge was searching for, really — there’s the horse, of course, which I think is amazing, and I’ll probably also do a cat one. Even the horse is flying, as we have motion, the weight of the being must move, the animal causes its weight to shift and move, and so tracing teaches the origin and basis.

Image note. The source plate (Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 1887) is public domain in the US, and the Boston Public Library’s digitized copy on Wikimedia Commons is marked public domain. It is not reproduced on this page, see the link below to view the original.

Links

• Animal Locomotion, Plate 195 — Wikimedia Commons — the full 24-frame plate
• Eadweard Muybridge — Wikipedia

Sargent drew it around 1883, alongside a watercolor of the same subject from about the same date — same haircut, same steady, serious expression, full length instead of just the head. This drawing is graphite, committed lines, his younger sister looking straight back at him — he was twenty-seven, she was thirteen. The Met has held the drawing since 1950, when Violet herself, by then Mrs. Francis Ormond, gave the museum hundreds of her brother’s works. This one never had a client.

John Singer Sargent, Violet Sargent, c. 1883, watercolour and pencil on paper, 45.1 × 21.6 cm — private collection. Public domain.
I traced this on the same sheet as the two Tonnis “Female Warrior” pieces and wasn’t sure at first which post it belonged in. I felt there was power in their gazes that linked them together, but as Sargent for me this drawing stands on its own.

With this drawing and my tracing, I meant especially to focus on just the basics of the eyes and jawline — I got something useful out of it. He understood the lines of her face and eyes at such an early age, but also her power as an entity, which is more important to me. I suspect Violet liked this drawing, and kept it for that reason. It’s not market pricing but a drawing from brother to sister.

Image credits. John Singer Sargent died in 1925 — public domain by any measure (life + 70 and beyond). Violet Sargent is held in The Met’s American Wing, New York (accession 50.130.87), which has designated this image public domain under its Open Access policy.

Links

• Violet Sargent (drawing) — The Metropolitan Museum of Art — full-resolution Open Access image and the 1950 Ormond gift provenance
• Violet Sargent (watercolor) — Wikimedia Commons — the companion piece discussed above, still in a private collection
• John Singer Sargent — Wikipedia

La Scapigliata · Raphael’s Madonna del Prato

There’s something almost metallic though maybe I overworked La Scapigliata. Leonardo always pulls me toward the anatomical side; in a way, my tracing reads with a slightly different expression than his, less joyous and more neutral. I don’t think there was any difference in ease compared to the Mona Lisa, but this one was clearer to work with.

The painting. La Scapigliata — Italian for “the dishevelled woman” — is a small, unfinished panel: an unidentified woman’s head, gazing down, hair spreading loose behind her, worked up only far enough to show Leonardo’s process rather than a finished portrait. Attribution to Leonardo himself (rather than a pupil) is generally accepted but not unanimous among scholars. Held at the Galleria Nazionale in Parma since 1826.

The artist. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Florentine polymath — painter, draftsman, anatomist, engineer. Public domain by any measure: died over 500 years ago.

Left: my tracing. Right: Raphael, Madonna del Prato, 1506, oil on panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna — public domain.

By contrast, I like the spareness of del Prato. I did more work on her left eye than her right — imbalance I’m not sure entirely fails. I think my tracing has the dimensionality Raphael’s painting has, though his is smoother and more convincingly real; mine may be going more directly at what Tsao’s face-patch research points to — the specific orientation the eyes are read from — than his does. I don’t normally look at Raphael much; his forms are rounder and smoother than what I usually gravitate toward.

The painting. Madonna del Prato, painted in Florence within months of Raphael’s arrival there in 1504–05, aged 23. The Madonna, the infant Christ, and the infant John the Baptist are arranged in a pyramid linked by their gazes — a composition indebted to Leonardo, whom Raphael was absorbing closely at the time. In the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, since 1891.

Leonardo da Vinci (attribution disputed), Salvator Mundi, c. 1500 — public domain. Sold for $450.3 million at Christie’s in 2017, still the auction record for any painting.

Raphael, Testa di una Musa (Head of a Muse), c. 1510–11, black chalk — public domain. Sold for £29.2 million (~$47.8M) at Christie’s in 2009, the record for any Old Master drawing — Raphael’s paintings are all in museums, so his drawings are where his market moves.

Image credits. Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519, Raphael in 1520 — both public domain by any measure. All four source photographs are faithful flat reproductions of public-domain 2-D artworks and carry no separate copyright of their own (US: Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel, 1999; EU: Copyright Directive 2019, Art. 14). The Testa di una Musa and Salvator Mundi images are sourced via Wikimedia Commons, tagged public domain — the Salvator Mundi attribution to Leonardo (rather than his workshop) is debated among scholars, noted in the caption above.

Links

• La Scapigliata — Wikimedia Commons — file page, license, source
• Madonna del Prato — Wikimedia Commons — file page, license, source
• Madonna del Prato — Kunsthistorisches Museum — museum catalogue entry
• Testa di una Musa — Wikimedia Commons — file page, license, source
• Guinness World Records: most expensive Old Master drawing — £29.2 million, Christie’s, December 2009
• Salvator Mundi — Wikimedia Commons — file page, license, source
• Salvator Mundi — Wikipedia — sale history, attribution debate

This is the one I tried in color first. I started with green, because that’s close to how she handles the light where her face meets the background in the actual painting — but on its own it was too faint to read, so I went over it with black. On the two eyes specifically I reversed the order, black under green instead of over, because the eyes needed to hold more weight on the page than anywhere else — though I’m not entirely sure why that felt right.

I left off the eye-socket shadow initially, but added a line along the top of the nose, one at the base of the nostril, and a black line marking the boundary between the two lips. Then one ridge line, low across the cheek — not invented, but lifted straight from one of her own value transitions, there to help the shadow orient the face.

I’m trying to add as little as possible, incrementally — doing a little, then stopping, stepping back, judging if there’s too much missing, and if so, what’s the least I can add. Then iterating.

There’s a psychological spareness, I think, that comes with age — we don’t care for the ebullience of youth, just the basics. We’ve lost too many brain cells to the stresses of life, haha!

Helene Schjerfbeck painted herself for over sixty years — from a young woman in the 1880s to her skeletal studies in her last months, working days before she died in 1946. This 1895 painting is still fully representational, but spare, with nothing but the face expressing. Her market took a long time to catch up with her work: a 2008 Sotheby’s London sale of Tanssiaiskengät (Dancing Shoes), estimated at £500,000–700,000, sold for roughly £3 million (about $6 million) — and her Royal Academy retrospective in 2019 introduced her properly outside Scandinavia for the first time.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Dancing Shoes (Tanssiaiskengät), 1882, oil on canvas — the painting behind that 2008 record sale, private collection since. Public domain.

Image credits. Helene Schjerfbeck died in 1946 — public domain in countries with a life-plus-70-years term (Finland included, since 2017), and in the US as a pre-1931 work. Self-Portrait (1895) is held at Ekenäs Museum Center EKTA (Länsi-Uudenmaan maakuntamuseo) in Ekenäs (Tammisaari), Finland.

Links

• Self-Portrait, 1895 — Wikimedia Commons — full-resolution image; held at Ekenäs Museum Center EKTA, Finland
• Dancing Shoes, 1882 — Wikimedia Commons — the 2008 record-sale painting discussed above
• Helene Schjerfbeck — Wikipedia

Two tracings so far from Christiaan Tonnis’s Female Warrior series — different pieces, different years, both pulling at something different in the line.

Extinction · Cutting Edge of Will

This is Female Warrior #14, “Extinction,” by Tonnis. I think he actually may have put it into Creative Commons — Wikimedia says as much about the image. It’s an incredible piece, genuinely one of my favorites.

This one’s face is so beautiful and perfect. The red line — the stroke running from the brush down to her forehead — is precise and so painful. Perfect. I’m reminded of her even walking around different places today.

I didn’t know how I was going to be able to draw this. So much of it has to do with this almost shadeless quality, the air around the figure, the eyelashes.

It’s amazing how the arm of the inside girl connects to — has something to do with — the neck of the other girl, the main girl. There are these little features, and the expression too. I didn’t know how I was going to do all of it, plus the lines of the turban, so I decided to just suggest it rather than fully render it.

For this one I dug out my colored Micron pens. This whole thing is intense — so much going on. He fully draws the hand itself, which is interesting on its own — the fingers are just gorgeous, so perfectly done. He works on so many levels — he even put in the fingernails. Fingernails have a special status, I think, because they orient the hand.

Since I had my colors out, I thought about using blue for the inside girl — I’ll do that next. She’s at an angle, she faintly emerges, and then the dress.

I added a little contour to hold the turban together. He’s using shading inside the other woman too — I put her hands at the bottom of the cheek, which is kind of interesting.

Her expression is symbolic, funny, kind of off — the whole piece is piercing.

It seems like I want to take this, scan it, and add to it again. Maybe next time I’ll try a version with more color. I just love this piece.

Left: my tracing. Right: Christiaan Tonnis, Female Warrior #17 “Cutting Edge of Will”, graphite pencil on paper, 1992 — CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Another female warrior — Cutting Edge of Will. I find the shape next to the lips so intriguing. I’ve been looking for an inner image here, like in Extinction, and I haven’t found one — though I suspect there is one. The longer I look at it, the more I notice: the black fluid running alongside the nose, which I only realized was fluid once I saw the shape it takes crossing past her lips. The possible body of water at the bottom. The noisiness of the lines above her head. There are subtle blocks, like pieces of tape, in pairs at the center. The walls behind her could be a prison, or a mental hospital — though his title talks about will.

This one has a lot of scribbles on it — holding lines, covering the face, and it’s hard to tell which lines are which. It’s an implied line, even down to the jaw.

I just absolutely love her mysterious eyelashes — could they even be people? He’s got these remarkable shapes along the nose. There’s a hand again, perfect, with fingernails, little blocks; I drew the hand next, it was so hard to see.

Perhaps it’s a kind of hatching, but I noticed that around the eyes, it’s less scribbled — that’s where I started, afterwards hesitantly adding the eyelashes in blue this time.

There’s similarity between the two faces, in the eyelashes especially, and some link in the environment around them — I don’t want to force connection. On their own, these faces are simple, maybe even transcendent, like a Jungian archetype. They don’t look like warriors to me, not in the face — but the red, the blue, and the haze around them say otherwise. Maybe they’re warriors on a different plane.

Strangely, before I scanned these I thought neither one had turned out well. Then I saw them in the diptych, next to his, and I like them now. For Extinction, though, I think it’d be interesting to try the inner woman again in a different color sometime.

Image credits & sources. Christiaan Tonnis is the copyright holder for both pieces and self-published them to his own Flickr feed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0; Wikimedia’s FlickreviewR bot verified each license before mirroring to Commons — Extinction on 18 March 2010, Cutting Edge of Will on 21 June 2020. This isn’t a public-domain claim, it’s the artist’s own choice to release the work this way. Because both sources are CC BY-SA 2.0, the tracings/diptychs in this post are offered under the same license: CC BY-SA 2.0, adapted from Christiaan Tonnis, Female Warrior #14 “Extinction” (1981) and Female Warrior #17 “Cutting Edge of Will” (1992). (I saw that Christiaan had commented on Flickr: a woman named Alisha had used #17 on her mental health blog, and credited him for it. He thanked her, calling her article touching and true.)

Links

• Female Warrior #14 “Extinction” — Wikimedia Commons — file page, license, source
• Female Warrior #14 on Flickr — original upload
• Female Warrior #17 “Cutting Edge of Will” — Wikimedia Commons — file page, license, source
• Female Warrior #17 on Flickr — original upload
• Christiaan Tonnis — Wikimedia Commons artist page

Drawing · Tasting notes

The Neolucida XL is interesting — but finicky.

It has a shade slide, which helps when the sky and notebook are bright but the bottle and yard aren’t quite as bright. The image is very sensitive to the angle you’re looking through. You have to be standing over it on a table. Ergonomically challenging. Scale is controlled by how far the apparatus is from the paper — no zoom knob.

It helps with proportion; Loomis said beauty is beauty of proportion. I did one without the Lucida first, then remembered I had it. The one without felt better in some ways — more Morandi. But I consider the Lucida important; Hockney mentioned Ingres used it and so its important to me. I drew a quick draft without it, but when I tried to stitch the San Gabriels behind the bottle I failed — the perspective didn’t work. With the Lucida, this kind of logic and proportions are exactly right.

What drawing or tracing with a camera lucida doesn’t have is as much of you and your mind inside the process. The image passes more quickly through you tracing from the bottle to the paper through a half-mirror, in a narrow, clear way. A fun tool. A good tool. But one of many.

I want to study more Morandi — there’s something about that minimalism. Why is he drawing only bottles and pots? He’s looking for something simple, and so am I.

Forest has a nice example in his book — a photo he took of water reflecting on a mountain. From my table in the yard here I can see a fence and the San Gabriel mountains. But the composition from this angle isn’t very good. This is where my table is, and where it’s shady enough at this point in the day.

Found Vallein Tercinier through an AMA on r/cognac — Dan, marketing at Croizet, writing about what the labels don’t tell you. Asked which names come up when glasses get poured after hours, he named Tercinier. “Fascinating, slightly offbeat parcels, especially in older releases.” Wine-Searcher showed one result in LA — Wine House.

Beautiful, smooth, clean, flammable — gorgeous gasoline vapor, if there was such a thing. And there is; that’s what it is. I love this one. Like Ardbeg’s medicinal bandaids: bad and good at once, but smoother — doesn’t reach as hard.

It’s so dry — the chalk, the Petite Champagne. Very dry, but still has the fruit. Incredibly complex. Almond, toasted oak — hazelnut. Ugni Blanc — and the VSOP is speaking to an age.

Drinking from a Glencairn. Just the nose: alcohol — what Dan called vapour. Noticeable, appealing, not overdone.

On the next sips, maybe plum, dark ink. More depth, more bitter. And then the perfume — a tininess, a sharpness, pleasant. You feel it more than you taste it — per Dan.

The VS is open too. Absolutely lovely, but fewer layers — more wine distillate, less age.

Haven’t opened the Hors d’Age yet. That’s where I’d expect rancio. Dan’s description from the same thread: “Walnut, dried fig, antique wood, leather, mushroom, old books, a touch of soy sauce — but in vapour form. More about mood than flavour. You feel it more than you taste it.” Will report back.

Links

• Neolucida XL — camera lucida drawing tool
• Giorgio Morandi — Wikipedia
• Museo Morandi — Google Arts & Culture — free online collection
• Vallein Tercinier — Domaine des Forges, Chermignac
• Wine House, LA
• Frédéric Forest — artist, Art of the Line in Drawing
• r/cognac AMA — Dan at Croizet — what the labels don’t tell you

What made me stop was the face, the eyes, the beauty. It’s a crop, and the crop is more intense, more focused, extraordinary, but it leaves off some kind of grandeur, the fullness of the mystery. It really does bring in the interest on the face; the full is better for larger format, but the crop just grabs.

The painting is Philip de László’s Portrait of Doña Graziella Patiño de Ortiz Linares, 1928 — oil on canvas, up at Christie’s Paris on 23 September 2026, the hero image of the sale dispersing Graziella Patiño’s own four-decade collection. Its estimate isn’t public yet — the sale’s headline lots are listed “estimate on request.” De László (1869–1937) was the society portraitist of his day, and described his method as “drawing with the brush”: skull structure first, alla prima, wet in wet, no overworking. I drew with a pen, over his brush.

Graziella, 1928

Reduce his loaded, tonal oil down to a single contour, and somehow the beauty remains — a testament to his balance and his understanding of the anatomy and the geometry. But his luminousness is gone, of course, replaced with a spareness. It’s a decision of where that line goes; it’s not hard to discern, but in some way it has my judgement.

The line highlights the structure. Indeed, as he drew the head with the brush, he may have had an underdrawing to guide him; I suppose these are my guesses of those guides.

Tracing this face, somehow the lines I drew captured not nothing — and there weren’t many. He made many subtle judgements, but they surface in ways that are detectable with a pen. Where did the line fight me? Nowhere; it was easy, clean. He has a consistency, an understanding of geometry.

How much of the form did my lines actually extract? I think the tracing captures the face very well — the structure. De László did preparatory drawings, which perhaps this is uncovering, though I am also adding the shading. The neck in the painting is much smoother than my line, but we see he accomplished a lot of 3-D form with his render, and I think the dress adds a surprising boost to the 3-D-ness.

Is it a study, an homage, or its own drawing? It is all three, in that order. I find de László very educational because of his approach.

Graziella, 1931

The 1931 study — de László Catalogue Raisonné, no. 6879.

László painted another portait of her a few years later, they were obviously fans of each other. Less dramatic, flair, red, instead more peaceful, mature, subtle.
We see the face form so clearly here, and shares much with the 1928.

Edwina Mountbatten

Lady Louis Mountbatten (Edwina Ashley), 1924 study — public domain (Creazilla).

In Edwina, again, that balanced and revealed face — structure and form: clean, strong. In the line I couldn’t also capture the remarkable tranquility of her expression, which he does with smoothness and with the clarity and breadth of his brush and paint mixtures.

Helen Beatrice Myfanwy Hughes

Helen Beatrice Myfanwy Hughes (“Myfanwy”), 1931 — Catalogue Raisonné, no. 5701. It sold at Christie’s in 2017 for £137,000, against an estimate of £15,000–25,000.

With Myfanwy, when I try to draw it just in lines, I have to pick certain lines, even cutting across values that he may have used. This very dramatic blonde hair, so I’m drawing it just as a silhouette. The hair is extraordinary, its silhouette makes clear the glamor and the structure are already inherent, and that he is decorating and enlivening her overall person with the beautiful brushing of the hair.

When I look at just the tracing — yes, he did a tremendous amount, but the silhouette, and just what we do have, is interesting. He’s done something with the gesture, and the person, that’s remarkable. The dress, how it falls, is one of the signals of 3-D form — kind of masked, but there.

This is not something you see — and I think it is worth even more. It’s about glamor, yes, but so much more than that: we can feel László’s sensing of Myfanwy’s personality, her emotion, and his technicality is exceptional.

Graziella — after Dalí, 1942

Traced from Dalí’s *Mrs. Ortiz de Linares*, 1942 — Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí catalogue P 569.

While painting this, Dalí wrote to Graziella describing it as the third stage of a personal trilogy: “Sadism, Masochism, and now Idealism.”

A different setting — the sky is open, she’s wearing a black veil. The arm curled against her chest is anatomically precise; the other extends away, not a typical posture. The cloud at her figure gives depth.

The smile has a Mona Lisa quality — it’s in the lips. My tracing is not comparable to Dalí’s execution. Also note Dali carefully painted her eyes.

Further I traced the veil as its own shape but also needed to find the body through it. Knowing now that Dalí was carrying the Madonna alongside the sadomasochistic, taking Dali at his word (of course), I see his depiction of her veil protectively — perhaps protective of her. His choice of this contrast invokes the neurological basis of violence and sexuality in brain anatomy immediately.

She’s clearly older here, nearly two decades after de László’s 1928. Perhaps that contributes to Dalí’s trilogy — though Michelangelo’s Pieta Madonna is much younger.

Calligraphy practice

Image credits & sources. De László paintings are public domain — he died in 1937, so copyright has expired (author’s life + 70; also pre-1930 US publication); faithful flat reproductions of public-domain art carry no new copyright (US: Bridgeman v. Corel, 1999; EU: Copyright Directive 2019, Art. 14). The Dalí is copyright Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (Dalí died 1989; not public domain until 2060); only my tracing appears here.

• Doña Graziella Patiño de Ortiz Linares, 1928 — Catalogue Raisonné 6875 · Christie’s sale, 23 Sept 2026
• Graziella Patiño, 1931 study — Catalogue Raisonné 6879
• Lady Louis Mountbatten (Edwina Ashley), 1924 study — Catalogue Raisonné 3520 · public domain at Creazilla
• Helen Beatrice Myfanwy Hughes, 1931 — Catalogue Raisonné 5701 · sold Christie’s lot 6062540, estimate £15,000–25,000, realised £137,000
• Public-domain basis: Philip de László (1869–1937), Wikipedia
• Mrs. Ortiz de Linares (Dalí), 1942 — Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, catalogue P 569 · Sotheby’s London 2013, lot 68 (letter source)

Matisse drew his study on 19 November 1935 in Nice and it was auctioned recently. What caught me looking at the charcoal was her face. I hadn’t seen the oil painting until after working on the post — I’d only been working from the charcoal. Now, seeing the finished one, I especially think there’s something valid about looking at the lines: his colors are blocks, textured of course, but still blocks delineated by the contours. The face is angled differently, which is very interesting, and the eyes are a little different too. The hat was never the point, so I’m glad I got rid of it. It’s strange to me that he didn’t do the veil — I think he could have — but I kind of like that he didn’t.

There are actual hard lines in his study. The contour of her shoulder, the edge of the coat. Then around them — and sometimes right next to them — this soft, rubbed tone. That technique is estompe: you lay down charcoal and then rub it with a paper stump to spread and soften it. Then you erase to get the lights back. The highlights aren’t where you left the paper bare, but where you took charcoal away after the fact. So the luminosity in her face, that sense of light coming through comes from subtraction not absence.

I did one before where I was looking more at what his lines actually were. This time, a little after Nagel, I’ve tried reducing.

I started with the eyes, and even there I backed off a little. I spent a lot more time on the hat on my previous attempt — this time I’m trying to keep it to a minimum.

The face was harder to see before; this time it’s clearer, and the neck, and the upper part of the jacket. Then the hair, because I think the hair matters. One problem: how do I get the hat down to a minimum? He gives it a little hair himself.

One thing you can really see: some of his lines, especially on the jacket, are really long — literally one line from the top of the sheet down to the bottom. You know he knows exactly what he’s doing; people don’t just do that unless they do.

I don’t have any shading, I made the hat too busy on my last attempt, and I don’t know how to make it transparent-ish, but the hat is solid anyway. So I draw a single line for the outer silhouette. That diamond pattern — her necklace — is maybe the most interesting part, but if I draw all of it, it’s already too much. I considered the cross-contours, but decided against them — just the necklace, and stop there.

I might do another one with even fewer lines, without the veil, just the face.

What’s most interesting about the face: there really are eyelids here, pupils, everything. There’s an angularity to how he builds the form — he’s making a point, then just a couple of shading lines.

The other place he’s got a lot of line is the nose. I’m purposely avoiding that — like Nagel — because it’s the center of the face, and you don’t need the shading there to know it’s in place. If the nose sat on the silhouette edge you’d have to draw it. Right now, you don’t.

The subject is Lydia Delectorskaya, who was Matisse’s studio assistant. She’d been working for him for a couple of years before he one day looked up from what he was doing and said don’t move — and that was that. She ended up in at least eighty paintings.

As a line drawer, it has tension. My instinct is to trust the contour, the lines of light and shade and anatomy. Matisse is adding smoke, the line is there, but the tone that makes you feel the coat is heavy, that her face is three-dimensional, that there’s a window somewhere to the left.

I do think the line gave me the positions and orientations I wanted. The charcoal was unclear intentionally, which is nice — and that’s something I’d say I lost somewhat, though I have obscured an eye, and there’s the veil too.

Sotheby’s had the Matisse charcoal in their Masterpieces from the Lewis Collection sale — Lydia (Étude pour Portrait au manteau bleu), executed 19 November 1935 in Nice. Estimate £1.5–2m. One of five studies for a finished oil, Portrait au manteau bleu.

It sold 24 June 2026 for £3.75m (~$4.9m) — nearly double the high estimate.

The lot page is here (auction links go dead — don’t count on it). Bridgeman Images catalogues a related but different Matisse charcoal of Lydia from the same year — not this exact sheet. More on Matisse at henrimatisse.org.

Image credits & sources. Matisse died in 1954 — public domain (author’s life plus 70, expired 2025), and faithful flat reproductions of public-domain art carry no new copyright (US: Bridgeman v. Corel, 1999; EU: Copyright Directive 2019, Art. 14). The charcoal study itself has no open/freely reusable reproduction available (Sotheby’s is JS-rendered and login-gated for results; Bridgeman is paywalled stock), so the diptych above pairs the tracing with the finished oil instead. Portrait au manteau bleu image via Wikimedia Commons.

Links

• Masterpieces from the Lewis Collection — lot page — Sotheby’s (results require login; may go dead over time)
• $63.5 M. Modigliani Nude from Joe Lewis Collection Leads Sotheby’s London Double-Header Auction — ARTnews, price realized for the Matisse
• Lydia, 1935, charcoal on paper — Bridgeman Images; a related but different Matisse charcoal of Lydia from 1935, not the exact sheet sold
• Portrait au manteau bleu — Wikipédia — the finished oil
• Portrait of Lydia Delectorskaya — henrimatisse.org