Highlights of Master Drawings NY and Classic Week at Christies – New York 2025

January 29, 2025

Highlights of Master Drawings NY and Classic Week at Christies – New York 2025

Winter weather in the Northeast may discourage some gallery goers, but Master Drawings New York is worth braving the cold to see some of the finest drawings on display anywhere in the United States. This year’s event includes 29 galleries exhibiting “exceptional and rare works on paper from the 15^th to the 21^st centuries, as well as paintings, sculpture, and photography.” This year’s dates are February 1 – 8, 2025, with a preview opening reception Friday, January 31st, 2025, from 3pm – 8pm.

Running concurrently are viewings at Christie’s New York during Classic Week, which also feature works on paper in addition to antiquties and many works by old masters from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Viewings for auctions including “Important Classic and Decorative Art” and “Old Master and British Drawings” both begin January 31st.

Here are some 19th century highlights from this year’s events:

Master Drawings New York

Rosa Bonheur

The Rosa Bonheur drawing above is a preparatory sketch for the painting titled The Horse Fair in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

From the Metropolitan Museum website:

This, Bonheur’s best-known painting, shows the horse market held in Paris on the tree-lined Boulevard de l’Hôpital, near the asylum of Salpêtrière, which is visible in the left background. For a year and a half Bonheur sketched there twice a week, dressing as a man to discourage attention. Bonheur was well established as an animal painter when the painting debuted at the Paris Salon of 1853, where it received wide praise. In arriving at the final scheme, the artist drew inspiration from George Stubbs, Théodore Gericault, Eugène Delacroix, and ancient Greek sculpture: she referred to The Horse Fair as her own “Parthenon frieze.”

The drawing will be exhibited at:

Graham Shay 1875
717 East 67th Street, No. 1A
New York, NY 10065

Mariano Fortuny Marsal

This Mariano Fortuny Marsal drawing will be exhibited at:

Christopher Bishop Fine Art
1046 Madison Ave Suite 2N
New York, NY 10075

Dante Gabriel Rosetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Jane Morris, 1868, Colored chalk on paper, 34 1/2 in x 28 in

William Bell Scott described Jane Morris as ‘…the ideal personification of poetical womanhood. In this case the hair was not auburn, but black as night; unique in face and figure, she was a queen, a Proserpine, a Medusa, a Circe – but also, strangely enough, a Beatrice, a Pandora, a Virgin Mary.’ She was indeed an extraordinary looking woman, who became Rossetti’s great muse and love after Lizzie Siddal, and was as pervasive a presence in Rossetti’s later work as Lizzie had been in his early watercolours and drawings. It is Jane’s face that we see in many of his most famous oil paintings: Aurea Catena, Reverie and La Pia (all 1868), in Mariana (1870), Pandora (1871), Proserpine (versions 1871-82), Venus Astarte (1877), La Donna della Finestra (1879), and in The Day Dream (1880). William Rossetti said ‘It seemed a face created to fire his imagination, and to quicken his powers – a face of arcane and inexpressible meaning.’¹

This Rosetti drawing will be exhibited by:

The Maas Gallery
at Shepherd W & K Galleries
58 East 79th Street
New York, NY 10075