Gallerist Stephen Ongpin on drawings: ‘It’s like looking over the shoulder of the artist’

Agostino Carracci used to scrub out and clean his cooking pots with his own drawings. Worse still, Gustav Klimt lined his cat’s litter tray with them. ‘With some artists, it’s amazing anything is left, really,’ says Stephen Ongpin, the genial director of Stephen Ongpin Fine Art.

This apparent disregard for preparatory work can make life inordinately difficult for a gallery specialising in master drawings, watercolours and oil sketches. Ongpin is careful to omit the word ‘old’ from master drawings. ‘A great drawing is a great drawing, whether it is by a Renaissance painter or Lucian Freud,’ he says, gesturing to the works on the wall behind him. There is a study of a street urchin by John Singer Sargent, a sunrise by John Ruskin and a glorious pen-and-ink sketch of a leopard by the 19th-century naturalist Aloys Zötl.

‘We know very little about Zötl,’ says Ongpin. ‘He came from a small town in Austria and never travelled anywhere. Many of his drawings came from books and his imagination. André Breton considered him a proto-Surrealist.’

Unlike paintings, drawings were rarely commissioned, paid for or recorded, so information about many of the works that pass across Ongpin’s desk is frustratingly scarce. They are seldom signed or dated, and have often been removed from sketchbooks, making attribution difficult. The result is a considerable amount of painstaking detective work.

‘On average, it takes about two to three years from acquisition before we feel confident enough in our research to exhibit a drawing for the first time, publish it in one of our catalogues and show it to clients,’ he says.

Take the preparatory studies by the 18th-century French artist François Boucher mentioned in the video above. Ongpin was able to match the figures to the background of Venus at the Forge of Vulcan, commissioned in 1746 for Louis XV and now in the Louvre. ‘It is interesting to see how detailed these drawings are for figures that are very small in the painting and are almost hidden in the background,’ he says. ‘And to be able to have two drawings by Boucher for the same important painting — a royal commission, no less — is a bonus.’

Born in America and raised in the Philippines, Ongpin came to Britain as a teenager. ‘I had never been inside an art gallery or a museum, but I was intrigued enough to tick the box for art history on my A-level choices,’ he says. After studying history of art at the University of Manchester, where he became ‘obsessed with Michelangelo and Monet’, he moved to New York and, after a brief internship at Christie’s, took a job as a porter at Colnaghi’s New York gallery.

‘On my first day, I was asked to unframe a painting by Claude and walk it down Madison Avenue to be photographed,’ he recalls. ‘I couldn’t believe it.’

Being a porter was the perfect apprenticeship. ‘You are kind of invisible,’ he says. ‘I was always in the background, listening.’ After working his way up at Colnaghi in New York and then London, he went on to head the Old Master Drawings department there and later at Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd in London, before establishing his own business in 2006.

His appreciation of drawings lies in their intimacy. ‘It’s like looking over the shoulder of the artist and watching them work out their ideas on paper,’ he says. His first love is 16th-century Italian drawings, especially by Florentine artists. ‘Vasari is a much better draughtsman than he is a painter,’ he says. Yet he longs to own a Jasper Johns.

In the early years, around 70 per cent of Ongpin’s clients were American. ‘They still make up the majority,’ he says. However, there are now far more high-net-worth collectors in Asia and Europe than there were a few decades ago, while art fairs such as Frieze Masters have encouraged buyers from all over the world.

‘I also find it fascinating that some of the greatest collectors of drawings are artists. Giorgio Vasari was one of the first, but there’s Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, Degas and, today, Jasper Johns and Glenn Brown. They are looking at other artists and learning how they did things. Gauguin once said that drawings were his “secrets”. I think that is true.’

Today, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art occupies an elegant townhouse in Mayfair, with four floors of exhibition spaces and a well-stocked library. The gallery team are currently hanging a display of architectural drawings on the ground and first floors, whose walls are painted a deep Farrow & Ball Hague Blue.

‘I really love the colour,’ says Ongpin. ‘Every drawing, from whatever period, looks good on it.’

To celebrate 20 years of Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Christie’s is offering just over a hundred works from the Ongpin collection in Lines of Vision on 2 July 2026.

‘I wanted to mark the occasion in some way,’ he says, ‘and hopefully introduce a new audience to the world of drawings. It is a great way to start a collection, because the prices are not crazy.’

According to Noël Annesley, Christie’s specialist in Old Master Drawings, Ongpin has ‘an international reputation for scholarship and connoisseurship’. He adds: ‘It’s the breadth of his vision. The present collection reflects that remarkable range, from a luminous Turner landscape to works by Helen Frankenthaler, Picasso and Giacomo Balla.’

Looking back over the past 20 years, is there a standout moment? ‘There are many, but I think one would have to be when we exhibited at Frieze Masters Seoul in 2023,’ says Ongpin. ‘Most of the other galleries there were showing contemporary art, but we brought mainly 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century drawings. Within hours, our stand was completely packed, and they had to put in an airport-style queuing system, with barriers and everything.

‘People were so excited to see drawings by Picasso, Cezanne and Degas, because they rarely get access to those kinds of works on paper in Asia. Visitors to the fair would queue for up to 40 minutes just to get on our stand! By the last day, people were running to find us as soon as the doors opened. That was my Taylor Swift moment.’

Lines of Vision: Celebrating 20 Years of Stephen Ongpin Fine Art is on view at Christie’s in London until 2 July 2026

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