Sir John Edward Poynter, P. R. A. (British, 1836-1919), Study for 'Thrown' Drapery, probably for a painting of Andromeda of 1872, graphite with black and white chalk, on green prepared wove paper, unsigned, but with studio stamp in the form of the artist's monogrammed initials lower right, 13 15/16 in. x 9 7/8 in., in a modern mount, extensively inscribed. Provenance: Colnaghi's, London, 1961; James R. Lamantia, New Orleans and New York. Note : This drawing is inscribed on the mount ""Study of 'Thrown' Drapery-painting Captive Andromache."" But the very famous painting of Captive Andromache (the widowed wife of Prince Hector of Troy) is not actually by Poynter, who is certainly the author of this stunning sheet. It is rather the acknowledged masterpiece of Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896): it was painted in 1888, and is now at the Manchester City Art Gallery. More than a decade and a half earlier-in 1872/79-the increasingly prominent Poynter (though the younger of the two artists, and already deeply influenced by those of Leighton's paintings which he had seen in Rome in 1853-54) had been commissioned by Edward Montagu Stuart Granville, 3rd Baron and 1st Earl of Wharncliffe, to produce four large canvases to decorate his billiard room at Wortley Hall in Yorkshire (all now unfortunately destroyed). One of these is Medievalizing in content, but the other three are classical; and it must have been the Perseus Rescuing Andromeda (of 1872) among these, to which a member of Colnaghi's evidently meant to refer-apparently only orally-when he told Lamantia the origin of this splendid sheet. Those classical paintings for Wortley Hall did in fact incorporate the actively fluttering draperies and frieze-like arrangements of Leighton's mature works (prefiguring those of the latter's confusingly-named Andromache of sixteen years later); and indeed the windy sea-coast setting of Poynter's lost Andromeda is in actual fact more likely as a context for this drawing's magisterial wind-blown swirl than the elegiac quietness of Leighton's great painting of 1888 In any event, the Wortley paintings did earn for Poynter his election as a member of the Royal Academy in 1876; he became Director of the National Gallery from 1894 to 1904, and President of the R. A. from 1896 to 1918 He was also knighted in 1896, and created a baronet in 1902; he is buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. References: Alison Inglis, ""Poynter,"" Grove Dictionary of Art, Jane Turner, ed., London, 1996, 34 vols., vol. 25, pp. 406-407; Stephen Jones, ""Leighton,"" ibid., vol. 19, pp. 103-104."