STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art is based in Mayfair in London and specializes in drawings, watercolours and oil sketches dating from the 15th to the 21st centuries.

With over thirty-five years of experience as a dealer and agent in the field, Stephen serves a client base comprised of private collectors, museums and first-time buyers across the globe.

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art has sold drawings and watercolours to over fifty international museums. The gallery mounts wide-ranging annual exhibitions twice a year, accompanied by scholarly catalogues, and participates in art fairs in London, Maastricht, Paris and New York.

Provenance

• The second Vente Degas, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 11-13 December 1918, lot 199 (‘Le Vésuve’, sold for 2,000 francs to Pellet)
• Gustave Pellet, Paris
• Marcel Guérin, Paris
• Eberhard Kornfeld, Bern (Lugt 913b), his mark on the backing board
• Thence by descent

The present sheet is one of a group of some three dozen pastel-worked monotype landscapes executed by Degas between 1890 and 18922.

It was in October 1890, while staying at the home of the painter and printmaker Georges Jeanniot in the village of Diénay, near Dijon in Burgundy, that Degas began to produce a new series of colour monotype landscapes, many enriched with pastel. Although he had first made pastellized monotypes a decade or so earlier, the ones produced at Diénay, and in the months following, were in a larger format, and were more technically audacious. Degas worked on the plates using diluted oil paint, creating effects by rubbing the medium with cloths or brushes, sometimes using the end of a brush handle or his finger to create lines or other forms.

Some twenty-five of Degas’s landscapes executed in pastel over monotype, including the present sheet, were exhibited at the Paris gallery of his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in November 1892. This was to be, in fact, the only true one-man exhibition held in Paris in Degas’ lifetime.