The new collector: old master and nineteenth-century drawings.(Julius Held)

Executed in a variety of mediums--pen and ink, graphite, chalk, crayon, ink wash--many drawings are preliminary studies for finished paintings or other works, including sculpture, architecture, decorative objects, and stage design. As such, they often convey the excitement of a work in progress, and this is even more palpable when the finished work is known and extant. Moreover, unlike an artist's paintings, drawings are usually much more affordable, although big names still carry big price tags. It pays to scout the byways of the drawings market for more affordable treasures by lesser known artists.

That is exactly what one knowledgeable collector did. Julius, Held (1905-2003), a revered art historian at Barnard College, was an authority on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, and the author of important books on Rembrandt and Rubens. Collecting on a professor's salary made him resourceful; he had to judge drawings on their artistic merits, relying on his aesthetic instincts and his vast knowledge to acquire satisfying works.

Let us look at two fine drawings from the Held collection that sold at Christie's New York on January 27 and January 30, respectively. Both were priced with auction estimates well under $5,000 because their artists, though famous in their lifetimes, are not household names today: Latona Turning the Lycian Peasants into Frogs by the Bolognese painter Marcantonio Franceschini (Fig. 1), and a stage design reputedly for Vinccnzo Bellini's opera La Straniera attributed to the nineteenth-century Italian stage designer Alessandro Sanquirico (Fig. 2).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Franceschini

Franceschini was an extremely popular painter of largescale decorative works, particularly frescos and altar-pieces for palaces and churches in Bologna, Genoa, and Rome (including designs for some of the mosaics in Saint Peter's). His patrons included Prince Johann Adam Andreas I (r.1684-1712) of Liechtenstein, for whose Gartenpalais in the Rossau area of Vienna he painted two large-scale cycles of the myths of Venus and of Diana between 1691 and 1709.