LONDON.- Katrin Bellinger, celebrating twenty-five years as a respected dealer in Master Drawings in Munich and at Colnaghi in London, will present an important group of drawings at Le Salon du dessin at the Palais de la Bourse, Place de la Bourse, Paris, from Tuesday, 23 to Monday, March 23, 2010. This major event attracts museum curators, collectors and lovers of drawings to Paris to meet the top dealers in the field.

Katrin’s group of some thirty drawings will focus mainly on works by French and Italian artists, most of which come from two private collections and have not been seen on the market for over 30 years. Some of the best-loved French 17th and 18th century painters will be represented. A black chalk drawing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), a pupil of Boucher, will be shown in Paris, which illustrates Ariosto’s 16th century epic poem, Orlando Furioso: Sacripante is Foiled while Attempting to Ravish Angela, one of 176 known drawings from the series.

Visitors to Katrin Bellinger’s stand will also find a group of drawings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1697-1770) including St Anthony Holding the Christ Child, pen and brown ink and wash heightened with white over black chalk, dating from 1730-5. This finished drawing is executed in Tiepolo’s bold brush technique revealing all the characteristics of his early maturity. No painting of the composition is known; it was almost certainly made as an independent work in its own right but should be seen within the context of the devotional paintings that concerned Tiepolo in the 1730s. It is arguably one of Tiepolo’s most moving renderings of the subject, showing perhaps the most popular scene from the life of St Anthony of Padua (1195-1231), the Lisbon-born Augustinian who became a great follower of St Francis of Assisi, and is based on an event described in the Liber miraculorum, a book of circa 1360 that gives an account of St Anthony’s life. Other works by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo include a brush and brown ink drawing of a standing Oriental figure and Venus at the Forge of Vulcan.

A number of drawings by Giovanni Battista’s son, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804), include The Meeting of Jesus and Zacchaeus, in pen and wash over black chalk. Always sensitive to potential humour, Domenico has fun with the confrontation between the diminutive Zacchaeus and Jesus, a face-to-face encounter that stresses the ‘eyewitness’ dimension to Luke’s text. Other works by the artist include Angelica and Medora carving their names on a Tree Trunk and two delightful drawings of putti.

Outstanding amongst other Italian works will be a pen and brown ink and wash drawing of two warriors by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino (1591-1666), which has a distinguished provenance going back to the sale of the collection of Baron Dominique Vivant-Denon in Paris on 1 May 1826. Guercino is regarded as one of the most significant Italian artists of the Baroque period and is renowned for his fluent draughtsmanship and inventive approach to subject matter.

Katrin Bellinger began dealing in Master Drawings in Munich in 1995 and held her first exhibition in London in 1987, followed by regular shows, some focusing on themes particularly close to her heart such as Drawing in Florence in 1991 and Drawings related to Sculpture in 1992. In 1993 Katrin acquired her first work by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, for the Getty Museum in Los Angeles when it was sold at Christie’s in London for £4.18 million, a record at the time for a drawing. She was to break that record when in 2000 she purchased another Michelangelo, Studies for the risen Christ from the collection of Sir Brinsley Ford at Christie’s for £8.14 million.

Over the years Katrin has enriched the collections of many European museums and print rooms including the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London, as well as the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the USA. In addition she has encouraged and assisted many private collectors in the building of their collections. In 2002 Katrin Bellinger joined forces with Konrad Bernheimer at Colnaghi where she now runs the Old Master Drawings department. While Katrin celebrates 25 years in the business, Colnaghi, London’s oldest commercial art gallery, celebrates its 250th anniversary in 2010.