Seven paintings by William Bouguereau lead Sotheby's European Art Auction in New York...
Francisco Cruz
Owner, Francisco Filipe Cruz - Cultural Marketing. Cultural Sponsorship
Sotheby’s announced their annual spring auction of European Art in New York on 22 May 2018. Led by seven paintings by William Bouguereau, the auction will offer 88 exceptional works that showcase the diversity of the collecting category. The sale also includes exceptional examples by Émile Renouf, Albert Edelfelt and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot – many of which are from distinguished private collections and resurfacing at auction for the first time in over a century. The exhibition opens to the public on 19 May, alongside the exhibitions of American Art, Master Paintings and Important Design.
WILLIAM BOUGUEREAU: MASTER OF FRENCH ACADEMIC PAINTING
The May auction will include seven works by William Bouguereau, including La bourrique (The Pony-back ride) from 1884, which is being sold to benefit the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (estimate $2/3 million). Painted during the height of the artist’s commercial success, the work captures two young girls in a moment of play and is a testament to Bouguereau’s emotional and artistic intuition.
Bouguereau’s L’agneau nouveau-né (The Newborn Lamb) from 1873 is another highlight being sold to benefit the Berkshire Museum (estimate $1.5/2 million). Painted nearly life-size, The Newborn Lamb once hung prominently in the reception room of Alexander Turney Stewart’s 55-room New York mansion on the corner of 34th Street and 5th Avenue, alongside Hugues Merle’s Shakespearean painting Hamlet and Ophelia, also featured in the sale (estimate $250/350,000). The auction will also include two additional works sold to benefit the Berkshire Museum: Faubourg de Constantinople (estimate $700,000/1 million) by Alberto Pasini and Charles-François Daubigny’s Paysans allant aux champs (estimate $70/100,000).
Before asserting himself as the most influential champion of French Academic painting, William Bouguereau demonstrated a deep respect for Classicism and the Antique, drawing inspiration from the frescoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum as well as Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. His monumental suite of four paintings, Les quatre saisons is the artist’s earliest recorded gold-ground decoration, and among the very few early commissions to remain in private hands, having been passed down through generations of the same family for more than 150 years (estimate $600/800,000).
REUNIONS & REDISCOVIERIES
The auction will reunite two masterpieces formerly hung at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C.: Émile Renouf’s The Helping Hand (estimate $300/500,000) and Frederick Arthur Bridgman’s The Procession of the Bull Apis (estimate $500/700,000). From its debut at the Paris Salon of 1881, The Helping Hand was an immediate public success and secured Renouf’s international fame as one of the greatest Realist painters of the 19th century. For over 100 years, it captivated viewers at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery, with its sentimental subject of a weathered fisherman and his fresh-faced companion rowing out to sea and its monumental scale – measuring over 7 feet across.
As the first of Frederick Arthur Bridgman’s paintings to enter a public collection in America, and the last major historical genre painting he would create for nearly a decade, The Procession of the Bull Apis is regarded as one of the artist’s most important early works. Bridgman’s archaeological precision and exotic subject matter, inspired by numerous trips to Egypt and North Africa and a profound devotion to scholarly research, immediately compelled comparisons to the Orientalist paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bridgman’s teacher and mentor in Paris in the 1860s.
The sale will also unveil, for the first time at auction, Giuseppe de Sanctis’ painting of 6th-century Byzantine Empress Teodora (estimate $100/150,000). De Sanctis’ composition follows late-19th century popular culture’s interests in Byzantine history, exemplified by playwright Victorien Sardou’s 1884 play Théodora, which portrayed the era as one of regal decadence and seductive power. De Sanctis was inspired by the architecture and objects of Byzantium, most prominently displayed in the mosaics on the wall and the tiles of the floors which are reminiscent to those at the Basilica San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, where two famous mosaics of Justinian and Theodora exist today. Its exhibition today is its first in over 130 years, marking an important rediscovery for the artist.
Moreover, this auction brings to light an exciting work by Albert Edelfelt that has been unseen in public in over half a century. Painted in 1882, Au Jardin is a magnificent example of plein air naturalism, a genre the artist came to define with friend Jules Bastien-Lepage (estimate $250/350,000). In 1923, the painting was acquired by Edward Franklin Albee II, grandfather of playwright Edward Franklin Albee III, who, together with his partner Benjamin Franklin Keith, built the Keith-Albee theater circuit which dominated the American entertainment industry of the early 20th-century. The painting’s emergence today adds an important new element to the artist’s oeuvre and is a testament to the long-lasting international appeal of one of Finland’s greatest artists.
VICTORIAN & BRITISH PAINTINGS
The May sale also features an exceptional selection of works by British artists, including Dame Laura Knight, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John William Godward and John Atkinson Grimshaw. The group is led by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Love’s Jewelled Fetter (estimate $500/700,000). A tour-de-force of 19th-century painting and among Alma-Tadema’s most striking compositions – depicting two beautiful patrician women lounging amongst a mountainous coast studded with Roman villas – Love’s Jewelled Fetter was painted during an extraordinary period for the artist and the same year that he presented Spring (1894, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) at the Royal Academy.
The auction also offers an extraordinary oil painting by the great English Victorian-era artist John Atkinson Grimshaw. A prime example of the artist’s trademark nocturnal cityscapes, A November Night from 1874 exhibits all the hallmarks of Grimshaw’s mature style and the pleasure he took in depicting a street built for the emerging middle classes of Victorian England (estimate $250/350,000).
LEADERS OF THE BARBIZON SCHOOL
Furthermore, the sale will offer a wonderful array of paintings by the leaders of the Barbizon school, including Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny and Jules Breton. The group is led by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s picturesque landscape Les bouleaux des marais de Boves (estimate $300/400,000), which last appeared at auction in 1889.
William Bouguereau, Les Quatre Saisons: Le Printemps, L'été, L'automne, L'hiver, oil on canvas, each, 72 7/8 by 35 3/8 in. 185 by 90 cm. Estimate $600/800,000. Courtesy Sotheby’s.
William Bouguereau, Les Quatre Saisons: Le Printemps, L'été, L'automne, L'hiver, oil on canvas.
efore asserting himself as the most influential champion of French Academic painting, William Bouguereau demonstrated a deep reverence for Classicism and the Antique, drawing inspiration from the frescoes of Pompeii and the Herculaneum as much as he had from Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. His monumental suite of paintings, Les quatre saisons, is evidence of this, and among the very few of his early commissions to remain in private hands, having been passed down through generations of the same family for more than 150 years.
Bouguereau was a precocious talent and showed enormous promise from his early childhood in La Rochelle. At the age of twelve he was sent to live with his uncle Eugène from whom he earned an appreciation of art and religion. He moved to Pons in 1839 to study the priesthood at a Catholic college, where he also had the chance to train in painting and drawing under Louis Sage, who had studied under Ingres. Young Bouguereau returned to his family in 1841, who were now living in Bordeaux, and after registering in the local art school was quickly recognized as a star pupil among his fellow aspiring artists. Enterprising and ambitious, he resolved to attend the Académie Julien and at the age of twenty he sold portraits, thirty three in all, to fund his move to Paris where joined the studio of François-Édouard Picot and honed his skills of Academic painting. 1850 marked a dramatic turning point for the intrepid artist, when he was awarded the coveted Prix de Rome, affording him three years at the Villa Medici. There he continued formal lessons and, perhaps more importantly, was granted first hand access to the works of the Renaissance masters, as well as Classical antiquities from the Greek and Etruscan eras. Bouguereau also took an interest in Classical literature, and this exposure would influence his artistic production, both technically and conceptually, for the rest of his career.
In this 60-Second Gallery, bask in the golden splendor of William Bouguereau’s 'Les Quatre Saisons’. The artist's natural instinct for contour and reverence for classicism are on full display in this majestic personification of the four seasons. One of the few of his early commissions left in private hands, ‘Les Quatre Saisons’ establishes the artist as the preeminent French Academic painter of his time. 'Les Quatre Saisons: Le Printemps, L’été, L’Automne, L’Hiver’ has spent the last 150 years in the Monlun Family Collection and will now be revealed as a highlight of Sotheby’s European Art Auction on 22 May in New York.
After three years in Italy, Bouguereau returned to France eager to find work to pay his debts and help his family. Before his departure he had firmly established his reputation by exhibiting Egalité devant la mort (1848, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and his Neo-Classical masterpiece, Dante et Virgile (1850, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) at the Paris Salon. This success was followed by one of his first major commissions which came from his cousin, Jeanne Louise Seignette, who had married the wealthy banker and arts patron, Paul Monlun, in La Rochelle. Les quatre saisons was produced for their music pavilion, a freestanding octagon-shaped beaux-arts gazebo at their summer residence in nearby Angoulins (fig. 1). They also commissioned a series of four large encaustic murals, representing the times of day (Private Collection, France) and a portrait of Jeanne Louise and her 6-year-old daughter, Elisa (fig. 2, Private Collection, France). Her daughter would eventually inherit Les quatre saisons as a part of her dowry when she married a lieutenant dragoon returning from the war in Prussia, and moved to Ain, far from La Rochelle on the Swiss border, in 1871.
Les quatre saisons are Bouguereau’s earliest recorded gold ground decorations. Typically reserved for sacred subjects and devotional pieces, Bouguereau was conscious of the warm glittering effect that gold leaf would have amidst residential gas lighting (it is worth noting that the artist would continue to adapt sacred motifs to elevate secular subjects for the next fifty years, see lot 25). Bouguereau prepared his canvases with a thick coat of gesso, made up of gypsum and glue, in order to prepare a smooth surface. Onto this he would apply an earth toned medium called "bol" lending the gilded surface a warm glow. Once the gold was smoothly applied, he stenciled an elaborate geometric pattern across all of the canvases’ backgrounds, emulating a richly embroidered textile or tile mosaic. Les quatre saisons' radiance must have prompted other grand commissions, including decorations for the home of Anatole Bartholini, Rue de Verneuil, Paris (1855-56, three of which are now displayed in the residence of the American Ambassador in Paris) and the extensive murals in the Émile Pereire house, 35 rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, Paris (1857-58, now the British Embassy, the decorations having joined various private collections). Bouguereau decorated two rooms for Pereire (and Alexandre Cabanel a third), repeating the convention of the four seasons on gold grounds seen in the present work. Upon seeing these, the contemporary critic, Clément de Ris, observed:
Bouguereau has a natural instinct and knowledge of contour. The eurythmie of the human body preoccupies him, and in recalling the happy results which, in this genre, the ancients and artists of the sixteenth century arrived at, one can only congratulate M. Bouguereau in attempting to follow in their footsteps… Raphael was inspired by the ancients when he drew the design in his room [reference to the Stanze in the Vatican], and no one accused him of not being original. In the same way, in taking Raphael as a point of departure, M. Bouguereau shows that modern sentiment could accommodate itself to an ancient form (as quoted in Wissman, p. 24-25).
De Ris could easily have been describing the Monlun’s Quatre saisons, for while their individual arrangement is wholly original, Bouguereau draws inspiration from the Antique. He was eager to employ the education and exposure that he had received abroad, and hovering figures, scantily clad in flowing robes, were a consistent element in Roman wall painting. However, it is the drawings he made while traveling throughout Italy that would have inspired the symbolism and specific configurations of each figure. The allegory of L'été (Summer), carrying the bountiful harvest of golden wheat, is likely derived from the comparable Roman sculpture in the Uffizi (fig. 3); the riotous maenad of L'automne (Autumn), seen in profile wielding a thyrsus, refer to ancient classical reliefs (fig. 4), with fluttering legs and leopard skin lifted from ancient representations of dancing satyrs; the tightly wrapped face of L'hiver (Winter) might have been borrowed from the mosaic tile pavements in the Bignor Roman Villa (fig. 5, now in West Sussex, United Kingdom), showing the four seasons personified as female busts; and with one arm dramatically raised and other holding her robe, Le printemps (Spring) combines two ancient Greek statue types, the Aphrodite Pontia-Euploia and Aphrodite Fréjus (fig. 6)
Bouguereau continued to win important public and private commissions throughout his long career, and Les quatre saisons, the earliest examples, provide rare insight into the foundation of his artistic vision and ongoing quest to create extraordinary objects of beauty.
Courtesy