Provenance:B.C. Holland Gallery, Chicago, Illinois.Exhibited:Chicago, Illinois, Holland Gallery, Exhibition of Balthus Drawings, September 23 - October 18, 1966.Literature:Virginie Monnier and Jean Clair, Balthus: Catalogue Raisonné of the Complete Works, Paris, 1999, pp. 486-487, no. I 1557 (illustrated).Lot Note:Between 1933 and 1935, Balthus produced a series of illustrations for a rare edition of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s tempestuous 1847 novel that had enthralled him since boyhood.The story’s spectral beauty lingered in him well into adulthood, taking shape in a suite of evocative ink drawings—one of which appears here. In this double-sided rendering, the star-crossed lovers, Heathcliff and Cathy, are portrayed as children frolicking in the wild expanse of the moors—those windswept lands that would awaken and doom their fated love.The 14 dreamlike sketches Balthus executed offer a glimpse into the intimate terrain of the artist's inner world: obsessive, poetic, and strange. They echo the fervid emotional landscape of Brontë’s prose, while foreshadowing the central motif of desire that would come to define his life’s body of work.