Sarah McMillan’s Specialist Picks: 5 Lots to Watch in Old Master Through Modern Prints

Ahead of her first sale as the lead specialist for Old Master Through Modern Prints, Sarah McMillan shares five works to watch in the October 17 auction.

Hendrick Goltzius, Icarus from The Four Disgracers,” 1588.

Icarus is the result of a collaboration between Goltzius and Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem and part of the series The Four Disgracers that depicted mythological figures who tried to enter the realm of the gods and failed. In each work, including the present etching, Goltzius views the human form from a different direction, using the swelling and tapering line typical of mannerist engraving and exemplified in his work to create movement within space. Interestingly, there may have also been a political message to this work. Created when the Netherlands was under Spanish rule, and Philip II had just lost a battle with the British, the hubris of the Icarus is seen as directly relating to the failure of the Spanish crown.    

Samuel Palmer, Christmas (Folding the Last Sheep), 1850. 

Palmer, one of Britain’s great Romantic painters, took up etching in 1850, joined the Etching Club, and worked in the medium for the rest of his life. He took great care in creating his prints, working them through various states and making such demands of the printers that one complained he would “sooner see the Devil himself than Palmer with a plate to proof.” During this time, he completed only 13 etchings and left another four unfinished. The etchings are painstakingly composed with intricate linework that allows the white of the sheet to cast a brilliance of light over the deep tones of the composition. Christmas (Folding the Last Sheep) was made during his first year experimenting with the medium and explores the pastoral landscape and life in the countryside of Devon and Cornwall.  

Rufino Tamayo, El Leñador, 1930.

Many collectors may be familiar with Tamayo’s iconic images of watermelons and dogs and his contribution to the history of printmaking with the creation of the Mixografia. This early work, alongside two other early woodcuts in the sale, illustrates his earliest engagement with printmaking. It was likely made while he was living in New York in the late 1920s. With deep cuts into the block, he highlights the woodcut technique, mimicking and evoking how the woodcutter himself strikes the logs.  

Lill Tschudi, Sledging, 1931.  

Tschudi was a Swiss artist associated with the Grosvenor School and studied with them from 1929-30. She was a champion of printmaking, who decided to focus on the medium after seeing linocuts by Norbertine Bresslern-Roth as a child. One of the few women in the movement (along with Sybil Andrews), she adopted their style of blending Futurism, Cubism, and Vorticism to highlight the dynamism of modern life. Tschudi also focused on the organic movement of the human form by often choosing sporting as her subject. Such is the case in Sledging, which illustrates the athletes at full tilt speeding down a steep mountain.  

Robert Motherwell, Untitled (A la pintura) 

Motherwell’s A la pintura portfolio took him four years of work to complete at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). In addition to the folio of 21 unbound intaglio prints issued in an edition of 40, over 240 unique trial proofs signed by Motherwell were made during his time working on the project. These proofs rarely come to the market, the present example being one of them, and it presents an opportunity to collect a rare work from the artist’s printmaking oeuvre.