Stephen Ongpin Fine Art (SOFA)

14/02/2025

This dynamic duo together again!

11/02/2025

Coming soon to 82 Park Street.

10/02/2025

08/02/2025

Today is the final day of our exhibition in New York. Alongside this stunningly beautiful large gouache by Jacques Majorelle are drawings and watercolours by Giovanni Boldini, Annibale Carracci, John Robert Cozens, Lynne Drexler, Sam Francis, Giovanna Garzoni, Theodore Gericault, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Gwen John, Paul Klee, Parmigianino, Giambattista Piazzetta, Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, Giulio Romano, Salvator Rosa, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo, Taddeo Zuccaro and many others. Oh, and nearly twenty drawings by Guercino. Open on Saturday from 11 to 5.

Sent from my iPhone

05/02/2025

Where would I be without these two?

19/01/2025

06/01/2025

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682-1754), The Apostle Saint Simon Zelotes. Black and white chalk, with stumping, on faded blue-grey paper. 385 x 307 mm. (15 1/8 x 12 1/8 in.) Another drawing from our summer catalogue of Italian Drawings from Private Collections that we will be showing in New York for Master Drawings week is this superb example of one of Piazzetta’s most celebrated works as a draughtsman; independent, large-scale and highly finished studies of heads drawn in black and white chalks on sizeable sheets of blue or buff Venetian paper. This drawing was reproduced in an engraving, in the same direction, by the printmaker Marco Pitteri, which was published in Venice in 1742. The print was one of a series of fifteen half-length bust-length images - based on drawings or paintings produced by Piazzetta between c.1736 and 1742 - of God the Father, Christ, the Virgin and the twelve Apostles. Pitteri’s engravings proved very popular and were later reissued by Pitteri himself, while also being reproduced by other printmakers in the form of mezzotints.

05/01/2025

Coming soon.

28/12/2024

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino (1591-1666), The Virgin and Child with a Pot of Lilies. Red chalk. 296 x 232 mm. (11 5/8 x 9 1/8 in.) Another drawing from our forthcoming exhibition of Guercino drawings for Master Drawings New York is this lovely sheet in red chalk. Datable to the late 1630s or the 1640s, this highly finished drawing is likely to have been intended as an autonomous work of art, as is further suggested by the framing lines in red chalk. The medium of red chalk, which he exploited with great skill to achieve subtle gradations of texture and tone, was an essential part of Guercino’s draughtsmanship for most of his career, and such finished drawings as this were certainly popular with later collectors. In terms of subject, medium and style, this drawing can be likened to an equally finished red chalk study of The Virgin and Child with a Book and a Pot of Pinks, in the collection of the Morgan Library in New York. Coming soon to

26/12/2024

After a successful showing in London this summer, SOFA will be bringing its exhibition ‘Felicità d’Invenzione: Drawings by Guercino’ to New York for Master Drawings New York week next month. Five years in the making, the exhibition includes twenty drawings by Guercino, one of the most prolific and talented draughtsmen of 17th century in Italy, with drawings from every stage of his long career, from the 1610s to the 1660s. The drawings, in pen, ink, charcoal, red and black chalk, highlight the artist’s versatility as a draughtsman and his skill across different mediums. The exhibition includes numerous studies for paintings, as well as independent drawings such as landscapes, academies and head studies, many of which have not previously been exhibited or published. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, scholarly catalogue, with essays on the artist’s drawings and the history of the collecting of them.

Among the Guercino drawings to be exhibited is this large compositional study of The Virgin of the Rosary with Saints Dominic and Catherine of Siena. Only recently rediscovered in a French private collection, this important drawing can be related to two major altarpiece commissions of the same subject, undertaken by Guercino in the late 1630s and early 1640s. Until now, the appearance of this drawing has only been known from a later copy of it by the 18th century Florentine engraver Francesco Bartolozzi in the Albertina in Vienna.

04/12/2024

Our Winter exhibition Christmas Tea is now in full swing!

19/11/2024

A drawing attributed to the Milanese artist Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (1467-1516), after an angel in Leonardo’s painting of the Virgin of the Rocks in London. Part of the exhibition of Italian Renaissance drawings from the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam currently at the Fondation Custodia in Paris.