Jacques Majorelle, Portrait of a Man from Kayes Wearing a Fulani Fibre Hat, 1945, gouache and pastel on paper, 59 × 49 cm.

Only two years before the strike, Jacques Majorelle travelled along this railway while undertaking the first of his three journeys through West Africa. Having landed in Dakar on 1 November 1945, he boarded a train for Bamako later that month, travelling through Diourbel, Kaffrine and Tambacounda before reaching Kayes, where he executed the present portrait. Sembène’s novel and Majorelle’s drawing approach the same geography from fundamentally different positions and should not be made to illustrate one another too neatly, however their proximity nevertheless places the portrait within the documented history of a railway that linked the Atlantic port of Dakar with the interior of French West Africa and would, shortly afterwards, become the site of a major confrontation over racial and professional inequality.

Majorelle was already closely associated with North Africa when he undertook the journey. Born in Nancy in 1886, he was the son of Louis Majorelle, the furniture designer and important member of the École de Nancy whose work helped to define French Art Nouveau. Jacques initially studied architecture and decoration at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nancy before moving to Paris in 1903, where he attended the Académie Julian and pursued painting. Following earlier journeys to Egypt, Spain and Italy, he travelled to Morocco in 1917 and established himself in Marrakech, which remained his principal home for much of the rest of his life.

His paintings of Marrakech, the kasbahs of the High Atlas and the landscapes of southern Morocco established his reputation as an Orientalist painter, while his house, studio and botanical garden would eventually make his name familiar far beyond the history of painting. Begun during the 1920s and developed over several decades, the garden incorporated plants gathered from different parts of the world, while the studio designed by Paul Sinoir in the early 1930s was subsequently painted in the intense ultramarine now known as “Majorelle blue”. The fame of the Jardin Majorelle has since become central to the artist’s public reputation, although painting remained his principal professional activity and led him far beyond Marrakech.

The journey of 1945 marked the beginning of a new geographical phase in Majorelle’s career. He travelled first to French Sudan, a colonial territory corresponding substantially to present-day Mali, before visiting Guinea in 1947 and Ivory Coast in 1952; during the final journey, he also spent time in Senegal, Guinea and French Sudan. Kayes, Bamako and Bougouni were among the principal places in which he worked during the first expedition, producing portraits, markets and scenes of communal life in gouache and pastel. These works extended his long-standing interest in African subjects into regions with histories and cultural traditions distinct from those he had encountered during nearly three decades in Morocco.

Majorelle left Agadir in a military aircraft accompanied by his daughter Jika, travelling through Mauritania before landing in Dakar. Jika returned to Marrakech after approximately two weeks because of growing political tensions, while Majorelle continued alone by train towards Bamako. The route followed one of the principal pieces of colonial infrastructure in French West Africa: the eastern section of the railway, connecting Kayes with Bamako and Koulikoro on the Niger River, was completed in 1904, while the line running westwards from Kayes towards Thiès and Dakar opened in 1924, creating a continuous rail connection between the Niger and the Atlantic coast.

Kayes had already played a significant part in the establishment of French rule in the region. Situated on the Senegal River, it became the capital of French Sudan during the territory’s first period under that name in the 1890s, before the administrative centre was transferred to Bamako in the early twentieth century. By the time Majorelle arrived in 1945, the town remained an important point on the route between Dakar and Bamako, connecting river and railway transport near the western boundary of French Sudan.

The inscription at the lower right of the present work, “Kayes 45 / J. Majorelle”, situates the portrait securely within this first journey. Although the sitter’s identity has not been recorded, his distinctive fibre hat associates his dress with Fulani traditions found across West Africa and the Sahel. Majorelle’s attention is directed not towards the activity of a market or communal gathering, as in many works produced during his travels, but towards the presence of a single individual, whose assured bearing and direct gaze give the portrait an immediacy unusual within the artist’s larger West African compositions.

This concentration upon an individual sitter also distinguishes the drawing from the stylised female figures with which Majorelle’s African work is frequently associated. The flowing robe, beaded necklace and elaborate hat provide the principal elements of the composition, but they are subordinated to the modelling of the face, where carefully graded passages of pastel articulate the brow, cheekbones and nose. The scale of the sheet, measuring 59 by 49 centimetres, allows the figure to assume a commanding presence, while the combination of gouache and pastel gives Majorelle both the opacity of painted colour and the directness of drawing.

The portrait belongs to a period in which Majorelle’s palette and technique were adapting to the subjects encountered during his West African journeys. Gouache and pastel on toned paper allowed him to combine areas of saturated colour with passages of more restrained modelling, retaining the chromatic intensity for which his Moroccan work had become known while developing a more concentrated approach to portraiture. The fibre hat, animated by ochre, rust and dark blue, supplies the work’s most pronounced colour accents, while the close framing maintains attention upon the sitter himself.

The date of the portrait places it at the beginning of a period of profound political change. The Dakar–Niger railway strike began in October 1947 and continued into 1948, mobilising railway employees and the communities upon which they depended across French West Africa. French Sudan became the autonomous Sudanese Republic within the French Community in 1958 and subsequently joined Senegal in the Mali Federation, which became independent in June 1960; following the dissolution of that federation, the Republic of Mali proclaimed its independence in September of the same year. The portrait therefore predates the strike by two years and Malian independence by fifteen, preserving Majorelle’s encounter with Kayes at a decisive moment in the modern history of the region.

The present work is accompanied by a certificate from the Comité Jacques Majorelle. Its dated and located inscription establishes its place within the artist’s first West African journey, connecting it to the route that carried him from Dakar towards Bamako and to the wider group of works produced in Kayes, Bamako and Bougouni during 1945. Combining the geographical specificity of a travel drawing with the scale and concentration of an independent portrait, it records Majorelle’s close attention to a single sitter while occupying an important place within the expansion of his practice beyond the Moroccan subjects upon which his reputation had first been established.

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Britain participated in the same process through collecting, scholarship and the formation of public museums. Several works from Louis-Philippe’s gallery entered the National Gallery following the 1853 sale, including Zurbarán’s Saint Francis in Meditation, while collectors and travellers brought Spanish paintings into collections across the country. William Stirling Maxwell’s Annals of the Artists of Spain, published in 1848, was the first scholarly history of Spanish art in English. Its extensive use of documentary and biographical material helped establish a more historically grounded understanding of Spanish artists and the institutions and patrons for whom they worked.

The term “Spanish Golden Age” now provides a convenient description for the extraordinary concentration of artistic production associated principally with seventeenth-century Spain, but it can also obscure the differences contained within it. The courtly world of Velázquez in Madrid was distinct from the commercial and devotional culture of Seville in which Zurbarán and Murillo worked, while Ribera spent almost his entire career in Spanish Naples. El Greco, born in Crete and initially trained in the tradition of icon painting, absorbed the art of Venice and Rome before developing his mature practice in Toledo. To study the Spanish school is therefore to examine a network that extended across the Spanish Habsburg territories and the wider Catholic world, rather than a single, uniform national tradition.

These questions form the background to the latest episode of Colnaghi Talks, in which we are joined by Daniel Sobrino Ralston, CEEH Associate Curator of Spanish Paintings at the National Gallery. Reflecting on the development of his career and his work with Spanish paintings, Ralston discusses the experience of studying works across collections and the ways in which curatorial research can reshape the histories attached to familiar artists. The conversation considers the particular demands of the Spanish Golden Age, from questions of attribution and provenance to the relationship between paintings and the architectural or devotional settings from which they have often been removed.

We invite you to watch the latest episode, available here, and to follow the series as it continues on our YouTube channel.

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Georges Clairin (Paris 1843–1919 Clohars-Carnoët), Sarah Bernhardt as Tosca, pencil on paper, dedicated and signed lower left ‘à mon ami Dussart / G. Clairin’ and inscribed ‘croquis fait pendant une des répétitions / de la Tosca’, 33.5 × 19 cm (13¼ × 7½ in.).

Clairin’s inscription, croquis fait pendant une des répétitions de la Tosca, establishes the drawing as a record of the play in rehearsal rather than a later reconstruction of Bernhardt’s performance. It captures a moment in the history of Tosca before Sardou’s work had been displaced by the opera it inspired, when Floria Tosca belonged, above all, to Bernhardt and the role was understood through her voice.

Sardou’s La Tosca opened at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin on 24 November 1887, with Bernhardt in the title role, Camille Dumény as Mario Cavaradossi and Pierre Berton as Baron Scarpia. The production ran for 129 consecutive performances, and although its mixture of political history, sexual violence and melodrama provoked hostility from some critics, its theatrical effectiveness was never seriously in doubt. Sardou had become the most accomplished exponent of the pièce bien faite, or well-made play, in which information is carefully withheld, reversals are precisely timed and apparently incidental details return with decisive consequences. In La Tosca, this mechanism was applied to a recent and still politically charged historical setting, namely Rome in June 1800, during the brief restoration of papal authority and the confusion surrounding Napoleon’s victory at Marengo.

The play’s political structure was considerably more elaborate than that of the later opera. Cavaradossi’s support for the Roman Republic and Scarpia’s service to the restored Bourbon and papal order place their conflict within the violent reversals that followed the French invasion of Italy, while the premature report of Napoleon’s defeat at Marengo, followed by news of his victory, determines the fate of the principal characters. When Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica adapted the play for Puccini, much of this historical material was removed, compressing Sardou’s five acts into three and concentrating attention upon the triangle between Tosca, Cavaradossi and Scarpia. Puccini had sought the rights as early as 1889, but it was only after seeing Bernhardt perform the play in 1895 that the project acquired new urgency.

The role had been conceived for an actress whose fame already extended far beyond the Parisian stage. By 1887 Bernhardt had left the Comédie-Française, established her own touring company and developed an international public that followed her performances across Europe and the Americas. Her celebrity depended upon theatre, but it was sustained by an unprecedented circulation of images. Nadar photographed her in her principal roles; painters including Clairin and Louise Abbéma represented her both on stage and in private life; later, Alphonse Mucha’s posters would turn her elongated figure into one of the defining images of the fin de siècle.

Clairin occupied a privileged position within this carefully constructed visual world. He and Bernhardt met in 1874, when she was already emerging as one of the leading actresses of her generation and he was an established Salon painter; an early romantic relationship developed into a friendship that lasted until Clairin’s death in 1919. His monumental portrait of her, exhibited at the Salon of 1876 and now in the Petit Palais, established much of the imagery through which she would be understood: the slender figure, the exotic interior and the movement between indolence and self-display. Bernhardt kept the painting throughout her life, while Clairin continued to represent her over the following decades in portraits, allegories and theatrical roles.

The present drawing belongs to a more private category of image. Rather than translating Bernhardt’s celebrity into the more formal language of Salon portraiture, it records Clairin’s access to the rehearsal room where theatrical gesture was tested before being presented to the public. The action occurs at the climax of Sardou’s fourth act, after Tosca has killed Scarpia when he attempts to claim her as the price of Cavaradossi’s release. She finds two candles and places them beside the body converting the site of violence into an improvised funerary tableau before taking the safe-conduct from Scarpia’s hand. A photograph produced by the Nadar studio in 1887 records the same arrangement.

The drawing also belongs to the history of Bernhardt and Clairin’s friendship. In the same year that La Tosca opened, Bernhardt established her retreat on Belle-Île-en-Mer, where Clairin became a regular guest and maintained his own workspace, and their relationship moved continually between theatre, artistic practice and domestic life. Bernhardt was herself a sculptor and painter who exhibited at the Salon, while Clairin served as both portraitist and instructor (the conventional distinction between artist and model consequently describes their collaboration only imperfectly). His images contributed to her public identity, but they were also made within a friendship in which drawing was a shared practice.

Bernhardt continued to tour La Tosca long after its Paris premiere, carrying Sardou’s play through Europe and the Americas even after Puccini’s opera had begun its own international career. During a performance in Rio de Janeiro in 1906, she injured her right leg while making Tosca’s final leap from the parapet of the Castel Sant’Angelo, an injury that contributed to the eventual amputation of the leg in 1915. She nevertheless returned to the stage, adapting roles to be performed seated and continuing to tour during the First World War. Few parts were more closely identified with her or demonstrate more clearly the degree to which her theatrical authority depended upon the physical extremity of performance.

Clairin dedicated the sheet à mon ami Dussart, possibly the painter Léon Dussart, a former student of Paul Delaroche, and it may have passed directly from the rehearsal room into the possession of a fellow artist. The drawing preserves a performance that can otherwise be recovered only indirectly, while documenting the collaboration through which Bernhardt transformed Sardou’s heroine into one of the defining theatrical figures of the late nineteenth century.

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The novel offers an unusually vivid example of how the surviving traces of ancient Egypt can preserve more than its monumental history, allowing individual voices, family disputes and the structures of everyday life to re-emerge. As Fragments enters its final week, four works in the exhibition consider a related process of recovery, from two remnants of Egyptian funerary culture to nineteenth-century photographs that record the monuments themselves and the modern history of their rediscovery.

Re-united wooden fragments of the coffin of the Samaref Priest Horudja, Egyptian, Late Dynastic Period, 26th Dynasty, c. 664–525 BC, sycamore fig or acacia wood, 47.9 × 13.6 × 5.4 cm (18⅞ × 5⅓ × 2⅛ in.).

The Twenty-sixth Dynasty, during which this coffin was made, occupied an uncertain place in histories of Egyptian art. Earlier scholarship tended to regard the first millennium BC as a period of belated imitation, in which artists returned to the achievements of the Old and Middle Kingdoms because the capacity for invention had been exhausted. Since Bernard V. Bothmer’s Egyptian Sculpture of the Late Period, however, the so-called Saite Renaissance has been understood in more exact terms, namely as a deliberate and highly selective engagement with the past, undertaken at a moment when rulers based at Sais had reunited Egypt after successive periods of political division and foreign domination. Archaism, in this context, was a means of establishing continuity, placing contemporary kings, officials and priests within an institutional history that reached back to the beginnings of the Egyptian state.

The coffin of Horudja belongs to this culture of historical self-consciousness. Its finely cut hieroglyphs preserve part of the ḥtp-dỉ-nsw, the offering formula that had appeared on Egyptian funerary monuments since the Old Kingdom and would remain in use into the Roman period. Addressed here to Osiris as “Foremost of the Westerners”, the great god and Lord of Abydos, it asks that Horudja receive bread, beer, cattle, birds, clothing and “all good and pure things”. Such texts are easily mistaken for records of offerings that had already been made, whereas their purpose was prospective and active. Through inscription and recitation, the goods named in the formula were made perpetually available to the deceased, even when the ceremonies once performed at the tomb had ceased.

Horudja’s title of Samaref, literally “he who loves him”, places him within the same concern for ritual and familial continuity. The Samaref priest assumed the position of the devoted son within the cult of the dead and was associated with the Opening of the Mouth, the ceremony through which the faculties of the mummy or cult image were restored. Related fragments identify Horudja’s mother, Khaatirbint, as a musician of Heryshef, the principal god of Heracleopolis, situating the family within a hereditary priestly community in which religious authority, social status and the obligations owed by one generation to another were closely connected.

The two surviving sections have themselves undergone a modern history of separation and recovery. Both were acquired by Chakib Slatine in Paris in 1975 and entered the same private collection two years later, but were subsequently dispersed, the upper section appearing at TEFAF in 2020 and the lower at auction in Paris in 2023. Their matching grain, dimensions and continuous inscription have now allowed them to be reunited for the first time in more than fifty years. The original coloured glass paste that filled the hieroglyphs is no longer preserved, although comparable inlay survives on the coffin of Djedthutiefankh in Turin and on a related wooden strip published by Hans Wolfgang Müller from the Kofler-Truniger Collection.

Mummy case, Egyptian, Ptolemaic Period, 320–30 BC, cartonnage, 42 cm (16½ in.) high with stand.

The conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 BC and the establishment of the Ptolemaic dynasty created one of the most complex societies of the Hellenistic Mediterranean. Alexandria became a Greek-speaking royal capital whose library and Mouseion embodied the intellectual ambitions of the new regime, yet beyond the court the administration of the country continued to depend upon Egyptian temples, landholding networks and hereditary priesthoods. The Ptolemies therefore ruled through several political languages at once: they were Macedonian kings within the wider Hellenistic world, but appeared as pharaohs on Egyptian temple walls, where their authority was expressed through forms that were already ancient when Alexander entered Egypt.

The persistence of Egyptian funerary imagery under Greek rule was not, therefore, the survival of an unchanged native tradition beneath an imported political culture. As Marsha Hill has argued, Ptolemaic art is better understood through the varying forms of continuity and exchange produced by particular regions, patrons and functions. Funerary practice remained one of the contexts in which Egyptian conventions exercised their greatest authority, not least because burial depended upon a coherent account of the body, divine protection and rebirth that had been developed over many centuries.

This fragment formed part of a cartonnage covering placed over the chest of a mummy. By the Ptolemaic period, such coverings were commonly assembled from separate masks, collars, torso panels and foot cases, each physically independent but joined through a continuous iconographic programme. The surviving wing probably belonged to Nut, Isis or Nephthys, although the interchangeability of their attributes makes a certain identification impossible. Isis and Nephthys had mourned and restored Osiris after his murder by Seth, and their protection could consequently be extended to every deceased person assimilated to him; Nut, as the goddess of the sky, received the setting sun into her body and gave birth to it again at dawn, providing an equally powerful model for the regeneration of the dead.

The significance of the image lay not simply in what it represented, but in what it was expected to accomplish. Egyptian funerary images participated in the rites they depicted, and, as such, the painted wing extended divine protection over the mummy just as an inscribed offering formula secured provisions for the deceased. Even in its present fragmentary state, the panel preserves the central action of the lost composition, in which the vulnerable human body was placed beneath the wings of a deity and incorporated into the repeated restoration of Osiris and the daily renewal of the sun.

Antonio Beato (c. 1825–1906), The Pillars of Upper and Lower Egypt, Karnak, albumen print, 26 × 20 cm (10¼ × 7¾ in.).

Photography entered Egyptology at almost the same moment that the discipline acquired the means to read its principal sources. Champollion announced his decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822; less than two decades later, the invention of photography offered what appeared to be an equally decisive advance in the recording of monuments. The first generation of photographers working in Egypt, among them Maxime Du Camp and Francis Frith, repeatedly contrasted the supposed accuracy of the camera with the subjectivity of the traveller’s sketch, establishing a claim to documentary authority that would remain central to archaeological photography. Yet their images were also shaped by the conventions of the picturesque, the practical demands of travel and a European market already familiar with Egypt through the Description de l’Égypte, antiquarian publications and Romantic literature.

Antonio Beato belonged to the generation that transformed this experimental practice into an established commercial industry. Having worked with his brother Felice across the Mediterranean and in India, he settled in Luxor, where his permanent studio placed him within easy reach of Karnak and the other major sites of Upper Egypt. His albumen prints were purchased individually or assembled into albums by travellers on the Nile, so that the same image could operate at once as archaeological record, commercial souvenir and evidence of a journey completed.

The two pillars photographed here were erected under Thutmose III, who ruled from approximately 1479 to 1425 BC, and stand in the Hall of Annals at Karnak. Carved with the lotus and papyrus, the heraldic plants of Upper and Lower Egypt, they gave monumental form to the union of the Two Lands under pharaonic rule and remain unique in Egyptian architecture as freestanding heraldic pillars (rather than columns intended to support a roof). Their position within the temple associated them with a broader programme through which Thutmose III recorded his military campaigns and represented the territorial extent of his kingship.

Beato’s photograph has acquired a documentary value its first purchasers could not have anticipated, since it preserves the appearance of Karnak before subsequent excavation and restoration altered both the monument and its surroundings. It should not, however, be treated as a neutral transcription of the site. The carefully chosen opening in the ruined wall isolates the pillars, while the inclusion of two Egyptian figures establishes their scale, devices that belong as much to the visual language of nineteenth-century travel photography as to archaeological record-making. The image documents an ancient monument, but it also documents the historical process through which that monument became portable, reproducible and readily available to a European audience.

Jean Pascal Sébah (1872–1947), Ascending the Pyramid, albumen print, signed and titled in the negative.

By the later nineteenth century, the ascent of the Great Pyramid had become one of the prescribed experiences of travel in Egypt, repeated in guidebooks, travel narratives and the albums through which visitors organised the memory of their journey. Its apparent drama depended upon a well-established local economy: because the pyramid’s stone courses could approach a metre in height, travellers were pulled from above and pushed from below by teams of Egyptian guides whose knowledge and physical labour made the climb possible. Importantly, the image of solitary European achievement was, in practice, a managed collective performance.

The photograph is numbered, titled Ascension de la Pyramide and signed “J. P. Sébah” in the negative, placing it within the commercial catalogue of one of the most successful photographic firms of the Ottoman world. Pascal Sébah founded his studio in Constantinople in 1857 and opened a Cairo branch in 1873; following his death, the business was continued by his son Jean Pascal and, from 1888, in partnership with Polycarpe Joaillier. The difficulty of assigning some images securely to father or son reflects the structure of studio production itself, in which negatives remained commercial property and could be printed long after the original exposure, while the Sébah name functioned as a guarantee of authorship at the level of the firm rather than the individual photographer.

The ascent also belonged to the literature through which Egypt was made familiar to readers who had never visited it. Amelia Edwards began A Thousand Miles up the Nile, published in 1877, with Cairo and the pyramids before following the course of her journey south towards the temples of Upper Egypt. Her book combined the conventions of travel writing with increasingly serious archaeological observation, and the public success it achieved contributed to the foundation of the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1882. Tourism generated the encounter, literature transformed it into cultural authority, and organised excavation converted that authority into an academic institution. Photography occupied a central place within the same process, supplying images that appeared to confirm and stabilise what the traveller had seen.

Ascending the Pyramid is particularly striking because the labour normally subordinated to the traveller’s achievement occupies the centre of the composition. The European climber advances only through the coordinated actions of the men positioned above and below him, while further guides wait among the blocks and at the summit. The photograph therefore records two histories simultaneously: that of the Fourth Dynasty monument built for Khufu in the twenty-sixth century BC, and that of the nineteenth-century tourist industry that turned physical access to the monument into a saleable experience. Another impression in the Library of Congress attests to the image’s wider circulation, through which this highly organised encounter came to stand for the direct experience of antiquity itself.

Discover Fragments in its final week and explore all featured works on our website.

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The prominence of hospitality in the Homeric poems is particularly significant because it lies at the intersection of two profoundly different historical worlds. The events traditionally associated with the Trojan War belong, if they preserve any historical memory at all, to the Late Bronze Age of the eastern Mediterranean. Homer himself, however, is generally thought to have composed the Odyssey several centuries later, during the late eighth or early seventh century BC, after the collapse of the Mycenaean palace system and the disappearance of the Linear B script. Between these two periods, the political and social landscape of Greece underwent a profound transformation marked by the abandonment of the great palatial centres and the gradual emergence of new forms of political organisation and artistic expression. The Odyssey is therefore neither a contemporary account of the Mycenaean world nor a straightforward reflection of Homer's own society. Rather, it is the product of a long oral tradition in which older memories and inherited traditions were continually reshaped through the cultural assumptions of a later age. The centrality of xenia belongs to this later poetic tradition, although the practices of feasting and receiving guests that underpin it almost certainly have much older antecedents.

The rediscovery of the Bronze Age during the nineteenth century fundamentally altered scholarly understandings of the Homeric epics. Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Hisarlik and Mycenae first demonstrated that a sophisticated civilisation had flourished in Greece centuries before the Classical period, whilst the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s confirmed that the Mycenaeans spoke an early form of Greek. Although these discoveries did not prove the historical accuracy of the Homeric poems, they transformed the questions scholars could ask of them.

It is within this context that pottery assumes a particular importance. Few categories of archaeological material illuminate the ancient Greek world with such consistency or abundance. Unlike monumental sculpture, which survives only sporadically for these early periods, ceramic vessels accompany almost every aspect of domestic, religious and social life. They record changing artistic traditions, technological developments, patterns of trade and, perhaps most importantly, the rituals through which Greek society understood itself. Drinking cups, mixing bowls and water vessels are material witnesses to the practices that Homer describes with such remarkable consistency throughout the Odyssey.

The five vessels brought together at Colnaghi London offer an opportunity to consider that material world more closely. They belong to the broader archaeological landscape within which the poem was composed and imagined, revealing the forms, functions and artistic traditions that shaped everyday life in the Greek world from the Late Bronze Age to the early Archaic period.

Kylix, Greek, Mycenaean, ca. 14th century BC. Terracotta. H. 17 cm (6¾ in.).

Kylix, Greek, Mycenaean, ca. 14th century BC. Terracotta. H. 12.4 cm (4⅞ in.).

Dating to the fourteenth century BC, these two Mycenaean kylikes belong to a period of considerable cultural expansion on the Greek mainland. Their elegant, low stems distinguish them from many contemporary examples and anticipate the proportions of later Greek drinking cups, whilst their painted decoration reflects a visual language inherited from Minoan Crete but transformed through distinctly Mycenaean innovations. Particularly striking is the increasing tendency towards abstraction that characterises Mycenaean pottery of this period. Rather than depicting recognisable figures, the painted motifs privilege rhythm, symmetry and repetition, dissolving the boundaries between vegetal and marine forms into highly ordered decorative schemes.

Krater, Greek, Proto-Geometric Period, ca. mid-9th century BC (CG 7204). Terracotta. H. 21.9 cm (8⅝ in.).

This Proto-Geometric krater, used for mixing wine with water before serving, exemplifies the period’s preference for carefully ordered geometric decoration. Concentric circles, horizontal bands and stylised deer-head handles replace the more fluid ornament of the Bronze Age, reflecting the emergence of a new decorative language that would come to define early Iron Age Greek ceramics. Its function is equally revealing. Greek wine was ordinarily diluted with water before consumption, and the krater occupied a central position within communal drinking, mediating the rituals of feasting and hospitality that continued to shape Greek social life.

Eleven Wheel-Made Black Slipware Vessels, Cyprus, Cypro-Geometric Period III, ca. 850–750 BC. Terracotta. Various dimensions.

This group of wheel-made Black Slipware vessels, produced in Cyprus between approximately 850 and 750 BC, illustrates the remarkable refinement achieved by Cypriot potters during the Cypro-Geometric period. Unlike earlier hand-modelled examples, these vessels were thrown on a potter's wheel, producing increasingly regular and symmetrical forms. Their characteristic black slip, applied over buff or reddish-brown clay, demonstrates the technical sophistication that came to define Cypriot ceramics of the period.

Hydria, Greek, Crete, ca. 700 BC. Terracotta. H. 36.8 cm (14½ in.).

Produced in Crete around 700 BC, this hydria belongs to the period in which Homer is generally believed to have composed the Odyssey. Designed for collecting and transporting water, its broad shoulder, narrow neck and three handles combine practical efficiency with elegant proportion, whilst its decoration of scrolling tendrils, foliate motifs and concentric circles reflects the continuing vitality of geometric ornament in the early Archaic period. As one of the characteristic vessel types of the Greek world, the hydria speaks not only to the practical demands of everyday life but also to the domestic rituals that formed the backdrop to the scenes of hospitality so carefully described throughout the Homeric epics.

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There is a paradox at the heart of every fragment. It is defined by absence, yet it survives. Its incompleteness demands imagination, inviting us to reconstruct what has disappeared whilst simultaneously encouraging us to appreciate what remains. As Walter Benjamin observed, every surviving work of culture also bears witness to destruction. Fragments are therefore not simply documents of artistic achievement but of history itself, carrying the traces of conquest, devotion, restoration, neglect and time.

Far from being regarded merely as damaged objects, fragments have occupied a central place in the history of collecting. Renaissance humanists prized the broken marbles emerging from the soil of Rome, displaying ancient torsos, heads and reliefs in gardens and studioli where they were admired alongside complete sculptures. Artists drew them obsessively. Michelangelo is said to have believed that a single antique torso could teach more than a finished statue, while Raphael measured the ruins of ancient Rome in an effort to recover the principles of classical architecture.

The eighteenth century transformed fragments into the foundation of a new discipline. The excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii fuelled Europe’s fascination with antiquity, whilst Johann Joachim Winckelmann constructed the earliest history of Greek art largely through surviving fragments, finding in broken sculpture what he famously described as “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.” At the same time, Piranesi’s dramatic engravings of Roman ruins spread an image of antiquity defined as much by survival as by loss, inspiring generations of Grand Tour travellers and collectors.

Yet fragments have never belonged exclusively to antiquity. Throughout the Middle Ages, the smallest relics of saints were preserved with extraordinary reverence, their authority resting precisely in their partial survival. Centuries later, Romantic writers would find in ruins and fragments powerful symbols of memory, transience and imagination. John Ruskin argued passionately against restoration, insisting that every weathered surface and missing stone formed part of an object's authentic history, urging readers to "watch an old building with anxious care" and to value its stones "as you would the jewels of a crown."

Our online exhibition Fragments continues this long history. Spanning antiquity to the twentieth century, the exhibition brings together sculptures, drawings, photographs and devotional objects to explore how incomplete works of art have continually been collected, studied and reimagined.

Sarcophagus Fragments of a Lion Hunt; a Rider on Horseback; and an Amazon, marble. Respectively: 54 × 36 cm; 34 × 52 cm; 42 × 27 cm.

Among the earliest works in the exhibition are three Roman marble sarcophagus reliefs dating to the second century A.D., each surviving from what would once have been richly carved funerary monuments. During the High Roman Empire, marble sarcophagi increasingly replaced cremation urns among the imperial elite, their four sides adorned with elaborate relief cycles depicting mythology, hunting scenes and military exploits. Amazonomachies, lion hunts and heroic battles transformed death into an allegory of courage, virtue and triumph over chaos, allowing the deceased to be associated with the moral ideals of the classical past.

Baule artist (Côte d'Ivoire), late nineteenth–early twentieth century, Seated Figure (bolo-bian), wood.

Among the Baule peoples of present-day Côte d'Ivoire, bolo bian ("spirit husband") figures occupied an important place within systems of divination and healing. Commissioned as receptacles for benevolent nature spirits, they were cared for through offerings and ritual attention, enabling diviners to establish and maintain a harmonious relationship between the spiritual and human worlds. Their idealised features, carefully ordered scarification and composed seated posture do not represent individual likenesses but embody cultural ideals of beauty, dignity and spiritual authority. Beyond its cultural significance, the present sculpture possesses an exceptional collecting history. It passed through the hands of several of the twentieth century's most distinguished Parisian collectors and dealers of African art, including Pierre Vérité, whose pioneering scholarship and collecting helped establish African sculpture within the canon of modern art, before entering the collections of Olivier Le Corneur and Jean Roudillon.

Joseph van Aken (Antwerp, 1699–London, 1749), A Statue of Venus, black chalk with touches of white chalk on blue paper, 42 × 22.9 cm.

Born in Antwerp but active for most of his career in London, Joseph van Aken belonged to a generation of artists for whom the study of antiquity remained fundamental to artistic training. This elegant chalk drawing records the celebrated Venus Genetrix, a Roman sculptural type ultimately derived from a lost Greek original, illustrating the complex chain through which classical models survived across the centuries. Drawings such as this were far more than exercises in observation. Before photography and plaster cast collections became widespread, they formed an essential means by which artists studied, preserved and disseminated the forms of ancient sculpture. Van Aken's sensitive handling of black and white chalk demonstrates the continued authority of the antique within eighteenth-century artistic practice, when fragments and Roman copies frequently served as the principal means through which the art of Greece was encountered.

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989), Female Torso, 1978, silver gelatin photograph, 50.8 × 40.6 cm.

Few twentieth-century photographers engaged with the legacy of classical sculpture as consistently as Robert Mapplethorpe. Produced in 1978, Female Torso isolates an ancient marble fragment against a deep black ground, transforming an archaeological survival into an autonomous sculptural image. By treating the weathered torso with the same precision and controlled lighting that characterise his portraits and studies of the human body, Mapplethorpe deliberately dissolved the distinction between ancient marble and living flesh. The photograph belongs to a wider body of work in which classical sculpture served as both subject and ideal. Rather than presenting the fragment as evidence of loss, Mapplethorpe celebrated its formal completeness, demonstrating how the language of antiquity continued to shape artistic practice well into the twentieth century.

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The new site brings together every aspect of Colnaghi’s activity within a single structure, allowing visitors to move easily between artworks, exhibitions, fairs, publications, restoration and news from the gallery.

Every exhibition, past and present, is now available online, with installation photography, curatorial texts and selected works. Fair presentations have likewise been brought together into a single archive, making it possible to revisit our stands and the works exhibited at each event.

All of our catalogues and publications are now collected in one place, from exhibition catalogues and digital publications to all editorial content, creating a single library that can be browsed online.

Colnaghi is also one of the few international galleries with an in-house restoration department. The new Restoration section offers an overview of the department, its areas of expertise, and the role conservation continues to play in the care, study and presentation of works of art.

Selected works are now available to purchase directly through the website. While many works continue to be offered by enquiry, a growing selection can now be acquired online through our new e-commerce platform.

The Insights section brings together news from across the gallery, alongside our weekly newsletter, which you are reading now.

Explore Our New Website

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Yet the picture frame has occupied an uneasy position within art history. Simultaneously indispensable and frequently overlooked, it has often been replaced, separated from the paintings it once accompanied or regarded as a decorative adjunct rather than an historical object in its own right. A frame may preserve evidence of patronage, collecting, restoration and changing practices of display just as readily as the painting it surrounds, reminding us that the history of an artwork extends beyond its painted surface.

It is this history that forms the subject of the latest episode of Colnaghi Talks. Joining us is Michael Gregory of Arnold Wiggins & Sons, one of Britain's foremost specialists in historic and reproduction picture frames. Drawing on more than four decades of experience in the study, making and restoration of historic frames, Gregory reflects on the evolution of European frame styles, the craftsmanship behind their making, and the relationship between paintings and the frames through which they are encountered.

We invite you to watch the latest episode, available here, and to follow the series as it continues on our YouTube channel.

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Per Tellander (Swedish, 1879–1951), Lake, forest, and tree, oil on panel, 44 × 33 cm.

Painted around 1915, this work belongs to the generation of Nordic artists who reimagined the northern landscape as a symbol of spiritual purity and national identity. A member of the pioneering modernist group De Unga ('The Young Ones'), Tellander developed a deeply personal vision that united National Romanticism with the new expressive language of early twentieth-century painting, placing him within one of the defining artistic movements of Scandinavian modernism.

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Helene Schjerfbeck (Finnish, 1862–1946), Head of a Man (Christ), 1898, pencil on paper, 11.5 × 9.5 cm.

Today recognised as one of the defining figures of Nordic modernism, Helene Schjerfbeck has recently been the subject of a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reaffirming her place within the international history of modern art. This intimate drawing is a study for her Resurrection of Christ altarpiece of 1898 and belongs to the decisive moment in which she began developing the pared-back, psychologically charged language that would come to define her mature work.

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August Johnsson (Swedish, 1873–1900), Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile, possibly Alma Ekberg, oil on canvas, 48.2 × 40.5 cm.

Although his career was tragically cut short at the age of twenty-seven, August Johnsson was widely regarded as one of the most gifted young Swedish painters of his generation, receiving the prestigious Hertliga Medal at just twenty-five. Having destroyed much of his own work before his death, his surviving paintings are exceptionally rare, preserving the legacy of one of the leading voices of the so-called 'Scanian twilight' generation at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Magnus Enckell (Finnish, 1870–1925), Autumnal scene in Vääksy, 1912, mixed media on canvas, 54 × 42 cm.

Regarded by the Ateneum Art Museum as one of the most significant artists of Finland's Golden Age, Magnus Enckell stands among the leading figures of Nordic modernism. Painted in 1912, at the moment he emerged as leader of the influential Septem group, this work belongs to the pivotal period in which Finnish painting embraced a new language of colour and Post-Impressionist light, establishing Enckell at the forefront of the country's artistic renewal.

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Moving Stillness: Nordic Painting and Drawing from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Early Modern Period is on view at Colnaghi London until 31 July 2026.

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Kylix, Greek, Mycenaean, ca. 14th century B.C., terracotta, h. 12.4 cm (4 7/8 in.).

Created during the fourteenth century B.C., at the height of Mycenaean cultural expansion, this kylix belongs to one of the earliest traditions of Greek drinking vessels. Its elegant form marks a transitional moment in Aegean ceramic production, preserving elements of earlier mainland pottery while anticipating the shapes that would define the Greek symposium. The abstract decoration likewise reflects the Mycenaeans' growing interest in ordered, symmetrical design, an important development in the visual language of Bronze Age Greece.

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Kylix, Greek, Mycenaean, ca. 14th century B.C., terracotta, h. 17 cm (6 3/4 in.).

Produced in the fourteenth century B.C., this kylix exemplifies the remarkable sophistication of Mycenaean painted pottery. Inspired by the vegetal and marine ornament of Minoan Crete, Mycenaean artists transformed these motifs into increasingly abstract compositions, laying the foundations for a distinctly Greek decorative tradition. Its proportions and balanced design foreshadow the drinking vessels that would become central to Greek convivial culture for centuries to come.

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“Carian Wild Goat Style” Trefoil Oinochoe, Eastern Greek, ca. late 7th–early 6th century B.C., terracotta, h. 19.1 cm (7 1/2 in.).

Belonging to the celebrated Carian Wild Goat tradition, this oinochoe was produced in southwestern Anatolia during the late seventh or early sixth century B.C., when the eastern Greek world was absorbing artistic influences from across the eastern Mediterranean. The style represents one of the most distinctive regional expressions of the Orientalising period, reflecting an age in which commerce, migration and cultural exchange reshaped Greek visual culture.

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Black-figure Eye Cup, Greek, Attic, ca. 530–520 B.C., terracotta, d. 36.8 cm (14 1/2 in.).

Fashioned in Athens around 530–520 B.C., this eye cup belongs to one of the most recognisable forms of Archaic Greek pottery. Created for the symposium, the ritualised drinking party at the heart of elite social life, such vessels united craftsmanship, performance and belief. Their painted eyes were understood to possess an apotropaic function, while, when raised to the lips, the cup transformed its user into a theatrical mask: the handles became ears, the foot a comic snout, and the painted eyes an extension of the drinker's own. It is a striking expression of the wit and performative culture that characterised the Greek symposium.

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Black-figure Neck Amphora, Greek, Chalcidian, ca. 530–520 B.C., terracotta, h. 21.9 cm (8 5/8 in.).

Produced in one of the Greek colonies of southern Italy during the late sixth century B.C., this amphora belongs to a remarkable period of artistic and cultural expansion across the Mediterranean. As Greek settlers established prosperous new cities beyond the Aegean, they carried with them the techniques and visual traditions of the mainland, while local workshops developed distinctive regional styles. Chalcidian pottery stands among the finest expressions of this dialogue between migration, trade and artistic innovation in the Archaic world.

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Antonio Ponce (Valladolid 1608–1677 Madrid), Still Life with a Basket of Fruit and Tray with Sweets, ca. 1640, oil on canvas, 43.8 × 77.7 cm (17 1/4 × 30 5/8 in.).

Painted in Madrid during the flourishing of Spain's Golden Age, this work belongs to a period in which the bodegón emerged as one of the defining genres of seventeenth-century painting. A documented pupil of Juan van der Hamen, Antonio Ponce helped elevate the still life beyond simple representation, developing a refined and highly personal style that appealed to the sophisticated tastes of the Habsburg court. Today, he is recognised as one of the principal figures in the second generation of Spanish still-life painters, whose work shaped the evolution of the genre.

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In Vino Veritas: The Visual Rhetoric of Wine is on view at Colnaghi London until 31 July 2026.

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In Vino Veritas examines the changing role of wine within the Western visual tradition. Bringing together archaeological material, sculpture, and painting, the exhibition traces a shift from the communal and ritualised culture of antiquity to the increasingly allegorical and reflective functions wine assumed within Renaissance, Baroque, and still-life traditions.

Byzantine, Amphora with Leopard Handles, c. 6th century AD, bronze, 38.1 cm high (15 in.).

Produced at a moment when Byzantine culture continued to absorb and reinterpret the visual inheritance of antiquity, this amphora illustrates the persistence of Dionysian imagery long after the Christianisation of the Eastern Mediterranean. The object occupies the intersection of classical tradition, luxury metalwork, and the material culture of wine.

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Greek, Funnel Strainer, Early Hellenistic period, late 4th–early 3rd century BC, bronze, 21 cm diameter (8 1/4 in.).

Associated with a group of luxury objects discovered near Amphipolis, this strainer belongs to the highly developed drinking culture of the Hellenistic world. Such objects formed part of the symposium, one of the most influential social institutions of antiquity and a model that continued to shape European attitudes towards wine for centuries.

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Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Fuendetodos 1746–1828 Bordeaux), Sacrifice to Priapus, 1770 or 1771, oil on canvas, 40.4 × 30.3 cm (15 7/8 × 11 7/8 in.).

Executed during Goya's Roman period, this painting belongs to a small corpus of works produced during the artist's formative encounter with Italian antiquity. Its subject reflects the eighteenth-century revival of classical paganism, a phenomenon that profoundly shaped artistic production in Rome during the decades preceding Neoclassicism's full emergence.

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Moving Stillness: Nordic Painting and Drawing from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Early Modern Period

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a period of profound transformation within Nordic art. As artists increasingly engaged with Symbolism, National Romanticism, and emerging modernist tendencies, landscape and everyday life became sites through which questions of national identity, perception, and artistic expression could be explored.

Olof Jonas Grafström (Attmar 1855–1933 Stockholm), Sami in the Kvikkjokk Valley, 1882, oil on canvas, 105 × 179 cm (41 1/3 × 70 1/2 in.).

Painted at the height of Scandinavian interest in the northern territories, this work belongs to a broader cultural movement that positioned Lapland as a defining component of Nordic identity. Its acquisition by King Oscar II shortly after completion reflects the growing national significance attached to representations of the far North.

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Hugo Simberg (Hamina 1873–1917 Ähtäri), The Model Warming Up, c. 1906, oil on canvas, 67 × 43 cm (26 3/8 × 16 15/16 in.).

Produced during the same period as the artist's celebrated commissions for Tampere Cathedral, this painting demonstrates Simberg's increasing interest in everyday subjects. The work occupies an important position within Finnish art of the early twentieth century, when Symbolist concerns were increasingly being redirected towards the observation of modern life.

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Gustaf Fjæstad (Stockholm 1868–1948 Arvika), The Snow, 1920–21, oil on canvas, 134 × 174 cm (52 3/4 × 68 1/2 in.).

Among the most celebrated interpreters of the Nordic winter, Gustaf Fjæstad achieved considerable international acclaim during his lifetime, with collectors ranging from King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy to major European institutions. Painted during the mature phase of his career, The Snow exemplifies the distinctive synthesis of Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and landscape painting that established Fjæstad as one of the defining figures of early twentieth-century Scandinavian art.

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In Vino Veritas: The Visual Rhetoric of Wine and Moving Stillness: Nordic Painting and Drawing from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Early Modern Period are on view at Colnaghi London until 31 July 2026.

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Jacob Jordaens (Antwerp 1593–1678 Antwerp), The Triumph of Minerva, c. 1655–1660, red and black chalks, watercolour and bodycolour over charcoal on a sheet composed of three subsidiary sheets on laid paper, 38 × 60 cm (15 × 23 5/8 in.), with the collection mark of Sir Joshua Reynolds lower right.

Executed around 1655–60, The Triumph of Minerva belongs to the final decades of Jordaens’s career. The composition centres on Minerva, goddess of wisdom, crowned by Time and holding the shield of Medusa and the palm of victory. Around her gather Mercury, Hercules, Bellona, Fame and a multitude of allegorical figures, while Mars sits defeated in the foreground, his armour and weapons scattered beneath him. As Roger-Adolf d’Hulst observed, the drawing constitutes an allegory of peace and prosperity, celebrating the triumph of wisdom over conflict and the flourishing of civic life that follows the end of war. The figure presenting tribute to Minerva has even been interpreted as a personification of the city of Antwerp itself.

The subject was particularly resonant in the decades following the Treaty of Münster of 1648, which brought an end to the Eighty Years’ War. Across the Southern Netherlands, peace was celebrated not only as a diplomatic achievement but as the necessary condition for commerce, stability and artistic production. Jordaens’s drawing reflects this broader political culture. Mercury, the god of commerce, appears among the assembled figures, while Fame sounds her trumpet above. Together they articulate a vision of civic prosperity restored through peace. The composition presents a world in which trade, learning and the arts thrive under Minerva’s protection once the destructive forces of war have been subdued.

By the time this drawing was executed, Jordaens occupied a position of extraordinary prominence within Antwerp. Having entered the Guild of Saint Luke in 1615 as a waterschilder, or watercolour painter, he went on to establish one of the most successful workshops in the city. During the 1630s he collaborated on major decorative projects associated with the Habsburg court, including the celebrations organised for the entry of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp and the decoration of Philip IV’s hunting lodge. Following Rubens’s death in 1640, Jordaens emerged as Antwerp’s leading painter, producing altarpieces, mythological scenes, tapestry designs and monumental decorative programmes for patrons across Europe.

Scholars have suggested that The Triumph of Minerva may have been conceived in relation to one of the large decorative commissions executed for the Guild of Saint Luke around 1665, of which only fragments survive today. If so, the subject would have carried a particular significance. As Antwerp’s historic guild of artists and craftsmen, the institution embodied the close relationship between civic prosperity and artistic production. The triumph of Minerva over Mars would have served as an eloquent visual statement of the conditions under which culture itself could flourish.

The drawing is equally important for what it reveals about Jordaens’s working methods. Executed in red and black chalk with watercolour and opaque bodycolour over charcoal, the sheet is composed of three subsidiary sheets joined together. Comparison with related versions has demonstrated that the composition was once larger and subsequently trimmed. A closely related drawing in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and a studio copy preserved in Antwerp indicate that additional figures and passages of landscape originally extended beyond the present boundaries of the sheet. Such evidence offers a rare insight into Jordaens’s creative process, revealing how compositions were expanded, revised and reconfigured during their development.

The work also possesses an exceptional collecting history. It once belonged to Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy and one of the most influential collectors of Old Master drawings in eighteenth-century Britain. Reynolds’s collector’s mark remains visible at the lower right of the sheet, bearing witness to the drawing’s early recognition as an important example of Flemish draughtsmanship. In the twentieth century it entered the collection of Professor Roger-Adolf d’Hulst, the foremost scholar of Jordaens and author of the landmark catalogue Jordaens Drawings (1974), which remains one of the foundational studies of the artist’s graphic work.

The drawing has long occupied a distinguished place within Jordaens scholarship. It was exhibited in Antwerp as early as 1905 and later featured in major exhibitions devoted to the artist, including presentations at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Museum Plantin-Moretus and the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen. Its acquisition by the Flemish Community therefore represents a significant moment in the preservation of Flemish cultural heritage, ensuring that a major work by one of Antwerp’s greatest artists is now permanently accessible to the public in the city where it was conceived more than three and a half centuries ago.

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At the centre of this world stood Infanta María Luisa Fernanda de Borbón, Duchess of Montpensier.

Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer, Portrait of the Duchess of Montpensier, 1853, signed and dated, oil on canvas, 193 × 116 cm (76 × 45 5/8 in.).

Painted in 1853, Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer’s portrait presents the twenty-one-year-old duchess standing on the terraces of the Palacio de San Telmo only a few years after the political collapse of the July Monarchy in France and the exile of the Orléans family from Paris. More than a court portrait, the painting documents the establishment of a new political and cultural sphere in Seville, where the Montpensiers attempted to reconstruct, on Andalusian soil, something of the ceremonial prestige and dynastic visibility they had lost in France.

The marriage of María Luisa Fernanda to Antoine d’Orléans, Duc de Montpensier, had itself emerged from one of the great diplomatic episodes of nineteenth-century Europe. Negotiated during the so-called ‘Spanish Marriages’ crisis of the 1840s, the union formed part of a broader contest between Britain and France over influence within the Spanish succession. Louis-Philippe viewed the marriage as an opportunity to strengthen Orléanist influence in Spain, while British diplomats feared precisely such an expansion of French dynastic power. The double wedding of Queen Isabel II and her younger sister María Luisa Fernanda in October 1846 consequently provoked diplomatic outrage in London and permanently strained relations between the July Monarchy and Britain.

The diplomatic calculations underpinning the marriage were, however, rapidly overtaken by events elsewhere in Europe. The revolutions of 1848 swept Louis-Philippe from the French throne, abruptly ending the political ambitions of the Orléans dynasty. Forced into exile, the Duke and Duchess of Montpensier relocated permanently to Spain and, by 1849, established themselves in Seville at the Palacio de San Telmo on the banks of the Guadalquivir. Contemporary observers would soon refer to their household as a corte chica - a ‘little court’ - whose influence extended far beyond Andalusia itself.

It was within this context that Bécquer painted the present portrait. The Duchess appears dressed entirely in black silk and lace, wearing a mantilla in the Sevillian style and holding a painted fan together with a folded lace pañuelo.

The costume was not simply fashionable court attire and likely functioned simultaneously as mourning dress (following the earlier death of Ferdinand Philippe, Duke of Orléans) and as a carefully constructed expression of aristocratic Andalusian identity. The Montpensiers understood quickly that political legitimacy in Spain depended not merely upon dynastic prestige, but upon cultural assimilation into Sevillian life and ceremony.

The immense black dress itself emerged from the flourishing luxury trades patronised by the Montpensier household after their arrival in Seville. The lace garments were produced by the tailor Domingo Margarit, who maintained workshops in Madrid and Barcelona and corresponded directly with San Telmo regarding designs and materials. Contemporary archival records reveal the extraordinary expense of these commissions, with vast quantities of fabric required for the construction of the layered skirts and flounces. Accessories visible within the portrait (gloves, fans, parasols) were supplied by merchants on Calle Sierpes, then the commercial centre of elite Sevillian consumption.

Such details matter because the Montpensiers actively reshaped the economic and cultural life of the city around them. During the 1850s, the couple invested heavily in urban development, landscape design and river transport between Seville and Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where they constructed a lavish summer palace surrounded by botanical gardens. The Guadalquivir became central to this aristocratic geography of movement and display. In the background of Bécquer’s portrait, the faint masts of steam vessels emerge along the riverbank, a significant reference to the navigation projects and modern transport networks financed by the Duke himself after the collapse of the state-run river company in 1852.

The painting thus stages a revealing juxtaposition between tradition and modernity. On the one hand, the Duchess appears enveloped in the visual language of ‘old Spain’: mantilla, lace, mourning ritual and aristocratic restraint. On the other, the world surrounding her was being transformed by precisely the forms of industrial modernity - steam navigation, urban redevelopment, infrastructural investment - through which displaced European dynasties attempted to secure renewed relevance after 1848.

The Palacio de San Telmo itself became one of the great centres of artistic and literary patronage in nineteenth-century Spain. French writers including Prosper Mérimée, Théophile Gautier and Alexandre Dumas circulated through the Montpensier court, while Sevillian painters received major commissions from the ducal household. The collection assembled at San Telmo included both Spanish Old Masters and contemporary works, helping transform Seville into an important centre of Romantic artistic production during the middle decades of the century.

Few artists benefited more directly from this environment than Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer. Born in Seville in 1817, Bécquer emerged as one of the leading painters of Andalusian Romanticism and costumbrismo. His relationship with the Montpensiers began shortly after their arrival in the city and continued uninterrupted for decades. By the early 1850s he had effectively become the principal painter associated with San Telmo, producing portraits, genre scenes and historical paintings for the ducal residences while also serving as drawing master to the young infantas. Queen Isabel II would later appoint him honorary Pintor de Cámara, consolidating his position within the artistic establishment of mid-century Spain.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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A Marble Portrait Head of a Woman, Roman Imperial, Early Hadrianic period, c. AD 120–130, marble, H. 22.8 cm (9 in.).

Among the exhibition’s most striking antiquities is a marble portrait of a young woman dating to the Hadrianic period. While modern audiences often approach Roman portraiture as an exercise in realism, Roman sculptural traditions pursued something more complex. Portraits functioned not simply as records of appearance but as vehicles through which social position and cultural affiliation could be made visible.

The reign of Hadrian represented one of the most intellectually ambitious moments of the Roman Empire. A passionate admirer of Greek culture, Hadrian initiated a broader programme of classicising revival across architecture, sculpture and imperial imagery. Women of elite Roman society became increasingly implicated within this visual culture. Hairstyles in particular functioned almost as declarations of allegiance to court fashion, disseminating imperial ideals throughout the empire with remarkable speed. The elaborate braided coiffure visible here, arranged in waves of tightly controlled curls and gathered into a plaited turban across the crown, follows styles associated with imperial women such as Sabina, Hadrian’s empress.

Ancient writers frequently describe the extraordinary labour involved in constructing such arrangements. Hairdressers employed curling irons, imported hair and intricate braided structures requiring hours of work. To Roman audiences, these styles signalled education, wealth and social legitimacy. What appears decorative to modern viewers would have functioned as a visible expression of status itself. Even the surviving traces of pigment remind us that Roman sculpture originally existed in vivid colour rather than the monochrome marble surfaces later celebrated by Renaissance classicism.

Portrait of a Woman from Arles, Jean-Baptiste Isabey, 1837, pencil on paper, 15.5 × 12.2 cm (6⅛ × 4¾ in.).

By the nineteenth century, adornment increasingly became entangled with ideas of memory and cultural identity. Jean-Baptiste Isabey’s Portrait of a Woman from Arles belongs to a period in which regional costume acquired almost mythological significance within the European imagination.

Across nineteenth-century Europe, industrialisation and political upheaval transformed patterns of everyday life with unprecedented speed. In response, artists and writers increasingly turned toward regional traditions and local customs, treating them as repositories of authenticity at a moment when modernity seemed to threaten older forms of identity. Provence occupied a particularly important position within this imagination. Women from Arles (the celebrated Arlésiennes) became renowned for distinctive dress and repeatedly appeared within literature and visual culture as symbols of elegance and provincial beauty.

Isabey himself occupied an extraordinary position within French artistic life. Trained by Jacques-Louis David and later serving Napoleon’s court, he had spent decades constructing images of aristocratic and political authority. Executed late in his career, the present drawing retains the remarkable delicacy that had defined his earlier work. Fabric, ribbons and ornament dissolve into an intricate network of pencil marks, demonstrating a precision associated with miniature painting.

Yet beyond its technical accomplishment, the portrait reveals something larger about nineteenth-century attitudes toward costume itself. Dress increasingly became understood not merely as clothing but as a visible expression of cultural memory. Ornament here functions less as embellishment than as a way of imagining identity itself.

Mask (Pwevo), Lwena artist, Angola, late nineteenth–early twentieth century, wood, fibre and beads, H. 31.2 cm (12¼ in.).

If Roman portraiture transformed the body into an expression of political identity, the Lwena pwevo mask reveals adornment functioning within an entirely different system of meaning. Created in Angola during the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, the work belongs to a much older artistic and ceremonial tradition in which masks occupied a central place within social and spiritual life.

Historically, masks of this kind formed part of elaborate masquerade performances associated with initiation, community ritual and ancestral belief systems. Unlike the European sculptural tradition, where objects often became detached from their original contexts and viewed as autonomous works of art, such masks acquired meaning through movement, music and performance. Their significance emerged through use.

The pwevo specifically represents idealised female beauty, despite historically being worn by male performers. The resulting tension between embodiment and representation reveals a highly sophisticated understanding of identity as something performed rather than fixed. Deeply incised geometric motifs mark the face, while the sculptor preserves the grain and colour of the wood itself. Years of ritual handling have produced the rich patina visible today, creating a surface upon which time itself has become inscribed.

Twentieth-century European artists would later encounter African sculpture and celebrate its formal innovations, particularly its movement between abstraction and observation. Yet objects such as this remind us that these works existed within complex ritual systems long before they entered Western narratives of modernism.

The Art of Adornment remains on view at Colnaghi London until 10 June.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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The Art of Adornment, which opened this week at Colnaghi, explores these enduring histories of ornament and display. Produced in collaboration with Sonia Petroff, the exhibition brings together antiquities, portraiture and jewellery across more than three millennia, placing historical objects alongside Petroff’s distinctly Roman vocabulary of gilded surfaces, mythological motifs and sculptural jewellery.

Born into a Bulgarian aristocratic family before fleeing Europe during the Second World War, Sonia Petroff later settled in Rome, where she established herself as one of the more distinctive jewellery and accessories designers working within postwar Italian couture. From the 1960s until her retirement in 1990, Petroff designed for Valentino, Balmain and Nina Ricci, in addition to cultivating an international private clientele drawn to her highly recognisable visual language of gilded metalwork, enamel, semi-precious stones and natural motifs. Produced by Roman artisans, her jewellery drew heavily upon Mediterranean culture, mythology and the natural world, combining the theatrical glamour of postwar Rome with a broader historical fascination for ornament and display. Relaunched in 2018 by Maria Leoni-Sceti, Petroff’s niece by marriage, the house continues to preserve both the archival designs and the distinctly cosmopolitan sensibility upon which the brand was originally established.

Bee Belt (Yellow) by Sonia Petroff, 24K gold overlay, brass, enamel, and genuine Italian leather, made in Italy and handcrafted by artisans.

Falena Choker (Blue) by Sonia Petroff, 24K gold overlay, brass, enamel, and Swarovski crystals, made in Italy and handcrafted by artisans.

One of the exhibition’s earliest works is an exceptional Hellenistic gold armlet dating from the late fourth to early third century B.C., centred upon an elaborate Herakles knot. Constructed from hammered gold sheet and enriched with delicate beaded-wire filigree imitating acanthus leaves, lotus buds and palmettes, the bracelet belongs to the centuries immediately following the death of Alexander the Great, when the newly expanded Hellenistic world produced unprecedented exchanges between Greek, Egyptian and Near Eastern artistic traditions. Goldsmithing during this period became increasingly elaborate, characterised by technical virtuosity, miniature detail and highly naturalistic ornament. Particularly remarkable are the repoussé appliqués decorating the surface of the armlet, including miniature doves, a lion and a rare frontal representation of Pan shown piping.

Armlet with a Herakles Knot, Greek, Hellenistic, late 4th–early 3rd century B.C., gold, diameter: 12.3 cm (4⅞ in.), width: 2.7 cm (1½ in.), weight: 77.5 g.

The Herakles knot itself carried extensive symbolic associations throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. Probably Egyptian in origin before later entering Greek visual culture, the motif became associated with fertility, healing and protection, while its connection to Herakles linked it more broadly to heroic strength and dynastic legitimacy. Alexander the Great and the Macedonian kings adopted the knot within royal iconography, allowing objects of this kind to function simultaneously as luxury jewellery and political symbol. Its scale indicates aristocratic ownership, intended to encircle the upper arm of an elite Greek woman, while the extraordinary density of decoration reflects the Hellenistic fascination with abundance and surface.

Questions of costume and idealisation emerge differently in Olof Johan Södermark’s unfinished Young Woman in Italian Costume. Painted during the artist’s repeated stays in Rome throughout the 1820s and 1830s, the work belongs to a broader nineteenth century northern European fascination with Italy, particularly amongst Scandinavian and German artists travelling south in pursuit of classical precedent, Renaissance painting and the perceived authenticity of Mediterranean life. Rome functioned during this period as a centre of artistic pilgrimage, where painters sought both technical training and proximity to antiquity itself.

Olof Johan Södermark, Young Woman in Italian Costume, oil on canvas, 60.5 × 48 cm (23¾ × 19 in.).

Italian regional costume occupied a particularly important place within this culture of artistic travel. To northern European painters, traditional Italian dress came to symbolise an idealised continuity between the contemporary Italian population and the classical past. Södermark’s sitter therefore exists somewhere between portrait and cultural fantasy, shaped by the nineteenth century romantic tendency to imagine Italy as a site of beauty, sensuality and pre-modern authenticity untouched by industrialisation. The unfinished state of the work only intensifies this atmosphere. Södermark’s underdrawing remains visible beneath the painted surface, while sharply articulated folds of red and white fabric recall the sculptural drapery of Renaissance painting, particularly Venetian and Roman traditions encountered by the artist during his years in Italy.

A third highlight is Franz Winterhalter’s portrait of Adelina Patti as Rosina in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, painted in 1863 at the beginning of Patti’s extraordinary rise to international fame. Following her triumph at the Théâtre Italien in Paris, Napoleon III reportedly commissioned the portrait himself, presenting it to the singer together with a diamond and ruby brooch. Patti was only nineteen at the time, though already one of the most celebrated performers in Europe, moving rapidly through the cultural circles of Paris, London, Vienna and St Petersburg at a moment when opera occupied a central place within nineteenth century aristocratic and imperial society.

Franz Xaver Winterhalter, A Portrait of Adelina Patti as Rosina in Rossini’s opera “Il Barbiere di Siviglia”, 1863, signed and dated lower left “F Winterhalter / 1863,” oil on canvas, 110 × 78 cm (43¼ × 30¾ in.).

Winterhalter himself had become the definitive portraitist of European court culture under the July Monarchy and Second Empire, producing images for Queen Victoria, Empress Eugénie and numerous aristocratic families across the continent. His portraits helped define the visual language of nineteenth century glamour through their extraordinary handling of satin, lace, jewellery and flesh. In the present work, Patti appears luminous, poised and entirely conscious of the effect she produced upon audiences while Rosina’s theatrical identity begins almost to merge with Patti’s own celebrity persona.

Unlike the formal dynastic portraits more commonly associated with Winterhalter, the painting retains an unusual freshness and immediacy, preserving Patti at the precise moment her fame was beginning to harden into myth. The portrait captures the emergence of modern celebrity culture, in which theatre, fashion, portraiture and public image increasingly collapsed into one another.

The Art of Adornment remains on view at Colnaghi London until 10 June.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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As such, viewed from a sufficient distance, art history begins to resemble a history of packing. The movement of artworks, however, tends to disappear from view once it has been successfully completed. The crate arrives intact, the installation opens on time, and the infrastructure behind it recedes into the background precisely because nothing has gone wrong. As with restoration or cataloguing, the highest level of expertise often appears effortless to everyone except those responsible for it.

That unseen work is the subject of the latest episode of Colnaghi Talks, our YouTube series exploring the specialist practices that sustain the art world and shape how artworks are handled, studied and experienced over time.

In this episode, we are joined by Madeleine Galbraith, Head of Operations at Colnaghi, alongside Zak Warboys and Rupert Sloane of Regency Shipping, for a discussion centred on the movement of artworks and the logistical systems that support international exhibitions, collections and sales. Together, they examine the relationship between galleries and shippers, and the degree to which trust, preparation and communication determine the success of even the most carefully planned projects.

Drawing on firsthand experience, the conversation explores the realities of coordinating complex international shipments, managing installations across multiple venues and responding to the unexpected challenges that inevitably arise when moving fragile and historically significant works. What emerges is a portrait of logistics as a discipline built on foresight, organisation and deeply established professional relationships.

We invite you to watch the latest episode, available here, and to follow the series as it continues on our YouTube channel.

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Yet this dependence on performance has always been shadowed by a persistent anxiety. If identity can be assumed, can it also be falsified? If the self is something that appears, what guarantees its truth? The very systems that stabilise authority through repetition and display also introduce the conditions for scepticism, since what can be convincingly staged can, by the same logic, be strategically misrepresented. These questions emerge wherever systems of representation become sufficiently elaborate to sustain doubt about their own procedures, and they recur with particular force in cultures that invest heavily in ritualised forms of appearance, where the distinction between enactment and essence is both necessary and difficult to secure. Mythological traditions across geographies and periods register this instability with notable consistency through figures of substitution, duplication, and transformation: deities who adopt human form in order to intervene in mortal affairs, hybrid beings that traverse the boundary between animal and human states, and the recurring motif of the changeling, in which outward familiarity conceals an altered or displaced identity.

It is from this premise that Colnaghi New York’s upcoming exhibition Leonor Fini: A Practice of Transformation takes its form, a trans-temporal dialogue between the work of Leonor Fini and Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and African ritual objects that foregrounds a shared language of metamorphosis and spiritual agency, on view from 13 May to 26 June 2026.

Leonor Fini (1907–1996), Set Design for La Mégère apprivoisée, 1957, signed lower right “L. Fini”, collage, pencil, and watercolour on paper, 32 × 53 cm (12 5/8 × 20 7/8 in.)

One of the most compelling works in the exhibition is a stage design by Leonor Fini for La Mégère apprivoisée (1957), produced during a period in which she was extensively engaged in scenography for theatre, opera, and ballet across Europe. Executed in pencil, collage, and watercolour on paper, the sheet is a preparatory design for a theatrical production based on William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, first performed in the late sixteenth century and widely staged in modern adaptations throughout the twentieth century. The play centres on the courtship and contested ‘taming’ of Katherina and belongs to a longer European tradition, from the classical myth of Pygmalion to its modern reformulations in works such as My Fair Lady, in which identity is treated as something to be shaped, corrected, or performed through discipline, display, and repetition. Fini’s work for the stage during the 1950s forms a distinct part of her broader practice, which included collaborations with major cultural institutions and reflects her involvement with performance, costume, and set design as parallel fields to her work in painting and drawing.

Leonor Fini (Buenos Aires 1907 – Paris 1996), Sketches for Mask Designs, signed lower right “Leonor Fini” and numbered upper left “218”, pen and ink on laid paper highlighted with colour, 36.5 × 27.5 cm (14 3/8 × 10 7/8 in.)

A further group of works in the exhibition is represented by a sheet of mask studies. Executed in pen and ink on laid paper, the drawing belongs to her great engagement with masks across both her independent work and her activity in theatre and costume design from the 1940s onwards. Fini’s interest in masking extended beyond the stage into a broader exploration of disguise and the instability of the face as a fixed marker of identity, themes that recur throughout her practice and informed projects such as the 1951 publication Masques de Leonor Fini.

Mask, nyoho, Eket-Ibibio artist, Nigeria, late 19th–early 20th century, wood, h. 18 cm (7 in.)

From this focus on the mask as a constructed and mobile surface, the exhibition turns to an Ekpo mask of the Ibibio and Eket peoples of southeastern Nigeria, where masking operates within a defined political and religious system rather than as an artistic or theatrical device. Within Ibibio society, the Ekpo association functioned historically as both a governing and judicial body, with masked members acting as agents of enforcement on behalf of elders and ancestral authority. The term ‘Ekpo’ itself refers to ancestral spirits and masks are understood not as representations but as the means through which these spirits assume visible form, allowing them to intervene directly in the affairs of the living. Their appearance during the annual Ekpo season regulated daily life, suspending ordinary activities and imposing strict behavioural codes, while the masquerades themselves were authorised to punish transgressions and maintain social order. The distortion of facial features, often exaggerated or deliberately unsettling, is therefore not expressive in a purely aesthetic sense but forms part of a codified system designed to produce fear, recognition, and compliance, reinforcing the authority of both the ancestors and the society that mediates them. This early Nyoho mask has a distinguished provenance coming from the dealer Julius Carlebach and the collection of Ruth and Ernst Anspach of New York.

Ndeemba mask, Yaka artist, Democratic Republic of the Congo, late 19th–early 20th century, wood, fiber, pigments, h. 48.3 cm (19 in.)

The exhibition further includes a Yaka initiation mask from the south-western regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, produced within the context of male initiation rites that structure the transition from youth to adulthood among Yaka-speaking communities. Among the Yaka, circumcision schools, often held outside the village, function as extended periods of instruction during which initiates are separated from ordinary social life and prepared for reintegration as adult men, a process marked at its conclusion by masked performances. Masks of this type, commonly referred to as Ndeemba, appear in these final ceremonies and are presented in groups, accompanied by dance and music, to signal the end of seclusion and the return of initiates to the community. Their construction follows established conventions, including a carved wooden face with an upturned nose and stylised features, combined with a substantial raffia collar that obscures the body of the performer, who holds the mask before the face using an internal handle rather than wearing it directly. These objects are typically made for a specific initiation cycle and are not preserved for repeated use. Their function is within a time-bound ritual sequence rather than as durable or accumulative forms. The mask marks a collective and socially recognised transformation embedded within a structured system of instruction, performance, and return.

Statuette of a Siren, Greek, Boeotian, ca. 450–400 B.C., terracotta

Also included in the exhibition is a Boeotian terracotta statuette of a siren, dated to circa 450–400 B.C., which situates the theme of transformation within the established conventions of Greek mythological representation. Such figures belong to a broader class of hand-modelled terracottas associated with cult and votive practice, commonly produced and deposited in sanctuaries or burial contexts. In ancient sources, sirens are described as creatures whose song lured sailors to their deaths, a tradition recorded in the Odyssey attributed to Homer and noted by Strabo, who refers to sanctuaries dedicated to them in South Italy and Sicily. The figure’s hybrid form reflects a standardised type within Greek visual culture, through which mythological beings were rendered in material form and circulated within both religious and commemorative contexts.

Statuette of a Griffin, Hellenistic Greek, ca. 2nd–1st century B.C., bronze, h. 6.6 cm (2 1/2 in.)

This bronze statuette of a griffin dated to the Hellenistic period, circa 2nd–1st century B.C., reflects a long-standing iconographic tradition established in the Greek Archaic period. The griffin, a composite creature combining leonine and avian elements, appears frequently in Greek art from the seventh century B.C. onwards and is closely associated with votive practice, most notably in the form of griffin-head attachments dedicated at sanctuaries such as Olympia. Objects of this type, including small-scale bronzes, formed part of a wider material culture in which mythological creatures were standardised and reproduced across different media, functioning within religious, decorative, and symbolic contexts. The persistence of the griffin type into the Hellenistic period demonstrates the continuity of these visual forms, which remained legible and culturally operative across several centuries of Greek artistic production.

Amulet of a Cat, Egyptian, Late Period, 700–30 B.C., bronze, 6.6 cm (2 1/4 in.)

Also included in the exhibition is an Egyptian bronze amulet in the form of a cat, dated to the Late Period (700–30 B.C.), a time in which small-scale votive objects of this kind were produced in large numbers and closely associated with the cult of Bastet. Bastet, typically represented as a cat or as a woman with a feline head, was a major deity linked to protection, fertility, and domestic life, and her worship was centred at sites such as Bubastis in the Nile Delta. Bronze cat figures and amulets were commonly dedicated in temples or deposited as offerings, often in conjunction with the well-documented practice of animal mummification, in which cats were bred, consecrated, and interred as votive gifts. Objects of this type functioned within a clearly defined religious framework, serving as tangible expressions of devotion and as intermediaries between the individual and the divine.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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These new questions reshape how we approach the works themselves. Rather than asking what these paintings reveal about Western fantasies of the East, one may wonder the following: where did artists actually go? What could they see, and what remained closed to them? How did architectural and social barriers shape what ended up on canvas? The threshold thus becomes both a literal subject and a way of understanding the partial, mediated nature of cross-cultural encounter.

These paintings reveal threshold spaces where cultures intersect, souks where Europeans bought souvenirs such as carpets and Islamic armour, city gates where traders and travellers negotiated entry, and even, in one instance, a wonderful reversal showing Turkish merchants arriving in Venice. These were not just Western fantasies but real places of negotiation and exchange. The paintings that follow move from the historical and panoramic inwards: from the epic threshold of the Puerta de Elvira to the intimate genre scenes and portraits of individual figures, from the strictly controlled doorways of sacred spaces to the open rhythms of city life, from distant landscapes to the harem, that ultimate threshold where observation gives way entirely to imagination.

From Travel to Studio

The paintings in this section offer something rare in Orientalist art: proximity. These works bring us close enough to observe individual faces, the texture of fabric, architectural details, interior luxury, and the intimate rituals of everyday life.

Rudolf Ernst (1854-1932), born in Vienna but working primarily in Paris, assembled an extensive collection of ceramics, tiles, textiles, carpets and weapons following his 1880 journey to Constantinople. His Chubuk Smoker depicts a figure absorbed in the ritual of smoking the long Turkish pipe, in a sumptuous interior scene surrounded by the intricate tile work Ernst had collected and studied in his Paris studio. Like Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), whose father-in-law, the renowned art dealer Adolphe Goupil (1806- 1893), had supported Ernst’s early career, Ernst painted not from direct observation but from carefully assembled props and photographs, constructing plausible Oriental scenes in European workshops. Ernst amassed his tiles and exotic props from travels to North Africa, Spain and Istanbul; he even pursued a career as a ceramicist from 1900 onwards. The Chubuk Smoker reveals how these artists’ Eastern subjects were mediated through European collecting practices, the ‘Orient’ reassembled tile by tile in Parisian ateliers.

Rudolf Ernst (1854—1932), Chubuk Smoker, Oil on panel, 64.5 x 81 cm.

A Reverence for Sacred Spaces

While commercial streets and domestic interiors allowed certain proximities, albeit mediated by studio practice or social custom, sacred spaces imposed thresholds of an altogether different order. Mosques were active places of worship, and access required official permission and respect for Islamic ritual. David Roberts (1796-1864) was the first professional British artist granted permission by Muhammad Ali Pasha (r. 1805-1848) to sketch inside Cairo’s mosques, but only after shaving his side-whiskers, abandoning his hog-hair paintbrushes (considered ritually impure), and adopting Arab dress. Such permission was exceptional. Most artists depicted mosques from approaches and thresholds: doorways framing glimpses of interiors, shoes removed at entrances, and guardians controlling access.

The German painter Gustav Bauernfeind (1848-1904), who had trained as an architect, first travelled to the Middle East in 1880-1881 and made two further journeys during this decade. His architectural training shaped his particular attention to buildings. When he encountered Damascus’s Umayyad Mosque in December 1888, he noted in his diary:

‘Today I explored the city and discovered the entry gate to the Great Mosque, a very gratifying motif.’

However, as a non-Muslim, he was forbidden to enter the holy site. He recorded negotiating with the mosque’s wardens to obtain informal permission to sketch the forecourt, not inside the prayer hall but merely at the threshold. At the Door of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, we see exactly what Bauernfeind could access through this special permission. A guardian sits at the entrance, his posture casual but authoritative. Shoes are scattered across the worn stone floor, evidence of worshippers who have entered barefoot. The ornate doorway frames a view into the mosque’s interior, but the architectural composition places us firmly at the entrance. This was what he was permitted to observe.

Gustav Bauernfeind (1848—1904), At the Door of the Umayyad Mosque, c. 1889-91, Watercolour on cardboard, 50 x 38 cm.

Carl Cowen Schirm’s (1852-1928), View of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, 1884, revered as the third holiest site in Islam, showcases where controlled access became possible. In the early nineteenth century, the esplanade surrounding Al-Aqsa was entirely closed to non-Muslims. Access began to change under Ottoman rule in 1839, though visitors still required special permission to enter even these outer zones. The esplanade itself served as a transitional space between the outside world and the prayer hall, used for communal worship, ritual purification at its fountains, and social gatherings. It was a sacred space, but not the innermost sanctuary.

Carl Cowen Schirm came from the middle class of Wiesbaden in Hesse and studied chemistry and physics in Bonn before entering the Karlsruhe Art Academy in 1874, where he was a pupil of the Norwegian landscape painter Hans Fredrik Gude (1825—1903). There he met Eugen Bracht (1842—1921) and Adolf von Meckel (1856—1893), who, like him, were among the most interesting Orientalist painters in Germany. In 1876, Carl Schirm and Eugen Bracht went on a study trip to the Luneburg Heath, where they found beautiful moorland and woodland landscapes to inspire them. Two years later, Carl Schirm joined his teacher in Scotland and Wales where they explored other landscapes. The idea of a trip to the Orient took shape between the three friends at this time, and in 1880 they set off for Syria, visiting the shores of the Caspian Sea and Mount Sinai, which provided them with extraordinary new motifs. In contrast to Bracht and Meckel, Carl Schirm's Orientalist works occupied only a small place in his landscape corpus, but the quality of the works from his Orientalist period is remarkable and ‘they are among the most impressive works in German painting of the late nineteenth century’ according to the specialists Martina Haja and Günter Wimmer.

Carl Cowen Schirm (1852—1928), View of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, 1884, Oil on canvas, 55 x 37.5 cm.

The paintings that followed documented varying degrees of access. In the genre scenes and portraits, the artist mainly observed ‘types’. Sacred spaces were more restrictive, with guardians at their gateways, sometimes allowing artists to depict views glimpsed from doorways; though in some instances, exceptional access was granted thanks to diplomatic intervention. These paintings are not just a story of Western observation and Eastern subjugation but a negotiation of partial access, strategic restriction and genuine crossing. They remind us to ask not just what was painted but how artists gained, or failed to gain, access to what they depicted.

Beyond the Threshold: Revisiting Orientalism II is currently on view at Colnaghi London through May 29, 2026.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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Any account of the relation between myth and the image might reasonably begin with the Greeks, who, among other contributions, proposed that ‘man is the measure of all things’. Attributed to Protagoras and often taken to summarise a broader sophistic confidence in human judgement, the aphorism has long sustained the assumption that the subject occupies a stable position from which the world can be known, represented and assess. Yet the claim sits somewhat uneasily within the broader intellectual and mythological traditions in which it circulates. Greek mythology, for instance, offers no shortage of figures for whom the human is anything but the measure, while biblical tradition likewise presents a world in which human limits are repeatedly exposed.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, this tension acquires a new urgency. Developments in psychoanalysis begin to challenge the assumption of a coherent and self-transparent subject, while at the same time new forms of image-making reconfigure the image as something that no longer simply reflects the world, but intervenes in the conditions under which it is perceived. It is within this shifting framework that the work of Leonor Fini may be situated. Born in Buenos Aires in 1907 and raised in Trieste, Fini arrived in Paris in 1931 where she entered into the artistic and literary circles associated with Surrealism. Following her arrival in Paris, elements drawn from classical mythology, fantasy and symbolic imagery begin to enter her compositions alongside portraiture. This interest develops in parallel with her work for theatre and costume in the 1940s and 1950s, where masks, disguise and transformation become central concerns. By the 1960s and 1970s, these themes reappear in a more reduced form in her drawings and illustrations.

The drawings presented here which will form part of our upcoming exhibition Leonor Fini: A Practice of Transformation at Colnaghi New York, on view from May to June 2026, belong to a later phase of Fini’s practice in which her engagement with mythological material is revisited in a more concentrated manner.

Leonor Fini (1907 – 1996), Metamorphoses d’Ovide, Signed lower right ‘Leonor Fini’, Ink and watercolour on paper, 50.8 x 33.02 cm.

Executed in the 1970s, the sheet titled Metamorphoses d’Ovide is structured around a pre-existing printed text, into which the drawn elements are subsequently introduced. Rather than organising the image according to a single episode, the figures are dispersed along the lower margin, extending laterally across the page and remaining only partially defined. Their arrangement does not correspond to a stable narrative sequence but follows the progression of the text itself, which relates to the episode of Circe in Book XIV of Metamorphoses.

In this passage, Circe transforms the companions of Ulysses by administering a potion that alters their outward form while leaving their consciousness intact. Ovid describes the process in stages. First, the body gradually changes, its limbs contracting, voices breaking into animal sounds and human posture giving way to a different mode of movement, even as recognition persists internally. The emphasis falls not on a single moment of change, but on the successive alteration of bodily features, described across the unfolding lines of the text. The figures in the lower register correspond to this sequence in a general way, appearing in successive states and remaining only partially defined without being fixed to a single point within the narrative.

Leonor Fini (1907 – 1996), La chambre d’écho, Ink on paper, 27.2 x 21 cm.

Fini’s engagement with Ovid extends beyond Metamorphoses d’Ovide to individual figures drawn from the poem. La Chambre d’écho takes up the episode of Echo in Book III, where the nymph is deprived of independent speech, falls in love with Narcissus, and is finally reduced to voice alone. Since Ovid reserves the scene of reflection for Narcissus, the partial head set opposite Fini’s profile figure does not correspond directly to the text. It may be read as a transfer of Narcissus’s image to Echo; equally, it may be understood as a visual analogue to echoing speech, an answering form rather than a reflected one. The drawing does not insist on either interpretation. What it does preserve from Ovid is the sense that Echo cannot appear as a complete and self-sufficient figure, but only through repetition, return, or remainder.

If there is a figure within Greek myth against which the claim that ‘man is the measure of all things’ might readily be tested, it is the sphinx. As a composite being, neither fully human nor fully animal, it does not correspond to a single, stable form and therefore cannot be easily measured within a system that takes the human as its standard. Instead, the sphinx leaves the human to account for the claim.

Leonor Fini (1907 – 1996), Studies for sphinxes and heads (recto and verso), Ink on paper, 27 × 21 cm.

Ovid’s reference to the sphinx in Book VII of Metamorphoses is very brief. Associated above all with the Theban cycle, she is typically described with the head of a woman, the body of a lion and the wings of a bird, stationed outside the city and confronting those who pass with a riddle. The terms of that encounter are simple: those unable to answer are destroyed, while the correct response (given by Oedipus) brings about her death. In our drawing, the sphinx is presented as a series of related forms distributed across the page. A central female body is surrounded by multiple heads, each turned in a different direction and rendered with varying degrees of definition. The line moves continuously between them, so that no single figure is fully isolated from the others.

Leonor Fini, Sphinx (Inv: LF/ WPO46), Ink on paper, 29.7 × 20.8 cm.

Elsewhere, the sphinx appears as a single and more contained body. A female torso is joined to the crouching body of an animal, with the hind legs drawn beneath and the tail extending outward in a loose, continuous line. The head remains the most defined element with facial features more clearly articulated than the rest of the body, which is indicated through abbreviated contour. One wing is raised, though its outline is not fully resolved and the line begins to loosen as it moves away from the central mass of the figure.

Leonor Fini, Two studies for sphinxes (inv. 176), ink on paper, 29.7 × 21 cm.

The answer to the riddle is ‘man’ and it is sufficient to bring about the sphinx’s end and with it a provisional confirmation that man may just be the measure of all things. The sphinx disappears, and the terms of the problem are, in principle, resolved. It is a satisfactory conclusion, at least within the limits of the narrative. In Fini’s drawings, however, the figure remains and continues to exceed the terms in which the answer was given. It is not, it seems, so easily disposed of.

For further information, provenance details, or acquisition enquiries, please contact the gallery.

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That is the premise of Colnaghi Talks, our new YouTube series, which brings together conversations with specialists from across the art world, and considers the field through the range of practices that sustain it. Each episode takes up a specific area of work, examining how decisions are made, what kinds of evidence are used, and how different forms of expertise shape the way artworks are studied, handled and understood over time.

Our first episode features Helen Loveday, a leading paper conservator and technical art historian whose work centres on manuscripts and works on paper. An accredited member of the Institute of Conservation, she has over 30 years of experience and is known for her research on Islamic paper and paper history.

In this episode, we explore the hidden life of artworks on paper and the role of conservation as a form of technical art history. Through real examples, Loveday discusses how conservators read material evidence, judge condition and navigate the ethical questions involved in treatment. The result is a conversation about how works survive, and how conservation changes what we know about them.

Further conversations will follow, each taking up a different aspect of the field and extending this line of inquiry. We invite you to begin with the first episode, available here, and to follow the series as it develops on our YouTube channel.

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Colnaghi continues to celebrate the dialogue between past and present.

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