The Spirit of Impressionism - Richard Green

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The Spirit of

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147 New Bond Street London W1S 2TS Telephone: +44 (0)20 7493 3939 Fax: +44 (0)20 7499 3278 Email: paintings@richardgreen.com


The Spirit of

IMPRESSIONISM

All paintings in this catalogue are for sale Exhibition opens Wednesday 13th November 2013 at 147 New Bond Street, London W1S 2TS Monday – Friday 10am – 6pm, Saturday by appointment Telephone: +44 (0)20 7493 3939 Cover detail: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Petite baigneuse, cat. no. 11

www.richardgreen.com


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The Spirit of

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CONTENTS

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Eugène Boudin Eugène Boudin Eugène Boudin Camille Pissarro Camille Pissarro Henri Fantin-Latour Alfred Sisley Alfred Sisley Berthe Morisot Federico Zandomeneghi Pierre-Auguste Renoir Pierre-Auguste Renoir Pierre-Auguste Renoir Pierre-Auguste Renoir Pierre-Auguste Renoir Pierre-Auguste Renoir Gustave Caillebotte Gustave Caillebotte Eva Gonzalès Henri-Edmond Cross Henri Le Sidaner Henri Le Sidaner Pierre Bonnard Henri Manguin Raoul Dufy

Trouville, scène de plage Cale d’embarquement sur la Meuse à Rotterdam Venise, l’entrée du Grand Canal, la Salute et la Douane La gardeuse d’oies Le marché Les Halles, Paris Chrysanthèmes Printemps à Veneux Bords du Loing près de Moret Jeune fille étendue Enfant jouant à la poupée Petite baigneuse Vase de roses et dahlias Nature morte au fruits Jeune fille au chapeau de paille Vase de roses Femme dans un paysage Portrait de Madame Anne-Marie Hagen Petit bras de la Seine, effet d’automne La fenêtre Printemps rose Les roses sur la maison, Gerberoy Le bouquet à la fenêtre, Villefranche-sur-Mer Le corsage rayé Le fond du golfe de Saint-Tropez vu de la plaine de Grimaud Le bassin de Deauville


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FOREWORD

Impressionism changed the way that we look at the world. For the first time, the sensation and emotion behind sight was explicitly bound up with the way that paint was applied to canvas. Impressionism began in Paris, but rippled out through Europe and across the Atlantic, as well as drawing foreign artists such as Federico Zandomeneghi (cat. 10) to the French capital. It mutated in the most vivid, exciting way, from the early experiments of Eugène Boudin (cats. 1–3), to the Post-Impressionism of Bonnard (cat. 23) and Dufy (cat. 25). All but one of the artists in this catalogue is French and many of them knew one another – a web of creativity that extends from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. They painted portraits and still life, but the dominant genre is landscape, portraying the length and breadth of France from the bustling urban market of Pissarro’s Les Halles (cat. 5) to the dreamlike Provençal spring of HenriEdmond Cross’s Printemps rose (cat. 20). Some artists toured constantly at home and abroad in search of new motifs. Others, like Alfred Sisley in Moret-sur-Loing (cat. 8) and Henri Le Sidaner in Gerberoy (cat. 21) drew inspiration from the familiar scenes around the domestic paradises that they constructed, sometimes to draw the sting of financial difficulties or critics’ indifference. Renoir, towering founder-figure of Impressionism, wove through his landscapes, portraits and still lifes (cats. 11–16) a passionate delight in existence and in the qualities of paint. As he simply put it: ‘Painting is done to decorate walls. So it should be as rich as possible. For me a picture…should be something likeable, joyous and pretty’. The beauty of Impressionist paintings, as well as their questing spirit, gives them an appeal that will never fade. The fascinating field of Impressionism is constantly being enriched by new scholarship, catalogue raisonnés and exhibitions. We are indebted to Mme Sylvie Brame, Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville, François Lorenceau, the Fondazione Enrico Piceni, Patrick Offenstadt, Sophie Pietri, Dr Joachim Pissarro, MarieCaroline Sainsaulieu, Robert Schmit, Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts and the Wildenstein Institute. Richard Green

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EUGENE BOUDIN Honfleur 1824 – 1898 Deauville

Trouville, scène de plage

Signed lower left: E. Boudin; dated lower right: Trouville 80; inscribed lower centre: à Madame Vinton Souvenir 1890 Trouville. Oil on panel: 8 ¾ × 16 ¾ in / 22.2 × 42.5 cm Frame size: 15 ½ × 23 ½ in / 39.4 × 59.7 cm In a Louis XIV style carved and gilded frame

p ro v en a nce

Mrs Frederick Porter Vinton (1855–1929), Boston Kraushaar Galleries, New York Helen Greene Perry (1911–1996), Cleveland, OH Private collection, USA e x h i b i ted

On loan to Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996 l i ter at u re

Robert Schmit, Eugène Boudin, Paris 1973, vol. II, p.28, no.1313, illus.

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EUGENE BOUDIN Honfleur 1824 – 1898 Deauville

Trouville, scène de plage

The son of an Honfleur sailor and largely self-taught as a painter, Eugène Boudin was a crucial precursor of Impressionism with his insistence on painting en plein air. He encouraged Monet to paint out of doors in the late 1850s and took part in the First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874. A man of the sea through and through, Boudin took much of his inspiration from the ocean and coastline of Normandy, where he grew up. He is most celebrated for his ‘Crinolines’, small oil on panel views of fashionable families on the beach. Boudin first visited Trouville in 1861 or 1862 and returned there every summer for the rest of his life, wintering in Paris, which he disliked. Over forty years he saw the place develop from a quiet fishing village into a busy port which attracted chic visitors from the metropolis, drawn to its Casino and fine hotels. Boudin developed his beach scenes in the 1860s and returned to the theme over the following decades. He was praised for tackling a subject from ‘modern life’, that of the bourgeoisie at play. The critic Ernest Chesneau wrote in 1867: ‘Nobody apart from M. Boudin has seen or painted the joyous intermixing of colours of these elegant costumes, the rustling of the fabrics in the breezes from the sea, the contrast, so specific to our own time, of what is most mobile and inconstant with the eternally grandiose spectacle of the Ocean….Spending the summer season by the sea is a wholly new craze….M. Boudin is the first to have captured and preserved for us this piquant aspect of modern life, and he has done it artistically, without being distracted by small details’.1 Boudin commented in a letter of 1868: ‘[I have been congratulated] for daring to include the things and people of our own time in my pictures, for having found a way of making acceptable men in overcoats and women in waterproofs….But don’t the bourgeois, who stroll on the jetty towards the sunset, have a right to be fixed on canvas, to be brought to the light?’.2 Boudin’s beach scenes of the 1860s use strong, clear colours and quite precise detail. By 1880, when Trouville, scène de plage was painted, he was more interested in conveying atmosphere through broken, flickering brushstrokes which envelop the frieze of holidaymakers in the sparkling coastal light. The ladies, all in elegant bonnets to protect their coiffures from the sea breezes, are dressed in fashionable black or white. The family groups are distinguished by their huge sunshades, gaily coloured in blue, red and white, punctuating the composition and leading the eye across the throng. We can hear the rustling of the silks and the chatter of the crowd perched on chairs in their Sunday best at the coast, Parisians braving nature

1 Les Nations rivals dans l’art, Paris 1868, p.334, quoted in London, Royal Academy of Arts, Impressionists by the Sea, 2007, p.25. 2 Quoted in Impressionists by the Sea, p.25. 3 See Schmit, op. cit., vol. I, p.xliv; London, National Gallery, Americans in Paris 1860–1900, exh. cat. by Kathleen Adler et. al., p.262. 4 Schmit no.1313, 1508, 2470 and 2549 (Trouville, le port, 1889, inscribed à son ami F. Vinton; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI).

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for the health-giving properties of sea air. A child in a red dress crouched with her playmate on the sand and two or three chairs kicked over in the foreground, hint at a more joyously spontaneous life. Boudin often inscribed his small panels for his friends and patrons. The present work is inscribed à Madame Vinton Souvenir 1890 Trouville. Annie Pierce (1855– 1929) married the American artist Frederic Porter Vinton (1846–1911) in 1883 and the couple travelled widely in Europe. Frederic Vinton trained with William Rimmer in Boston. In 1875 he studied with Léon Bonnat in Paris, in 1876 with Frank Duveneck in Munich, and the following year with Jean-Paul Laurens back in Paris, before setting up a successful portrait studio in Boston in 1878. He was a friend of William Merritt Chase, with whom he went to Spain in 1882. Vinton’s landscapes were influenced by the Barbizon School and the French naturalist painters, but he was also an early advocate of the Impressionists and promoted their works to Boston collectors.3 On their trip to France in 1889–90 the Vintons met Pissarro, Sisley and Boudin, who inscribed three works to Frederic and this one to his wife.4

William Merritt Chase, Mrs Frederic Vinton, 1880. Oil on canvas. Museum of Art/Washington State University Permanent Collection. Gift of Charles and Virginia Orton. 45.1.21.


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EUGENE BOUDIN Honfleur 1824 – 1898 Deauville

Cale d’embarquement sur la Meuse à Rotterdam

Signed and dated lower right: 80 E. Boudin Oil on panel: 13 7/8 × 10 3/8 in / 35.2 × 26.4 cm Frame size: 20 × 16 in / 50.8 × 40.6 cm In a Louis XVI style fluted frame p ro v en a nce

Jeanne and Fernand Moch (1863–1945), Paris; by descent To be included in the Troisième Supplément to the Catalogue Raisonné de l’Oeuvre Peint d’Eugène Boudin by Robert Schmit

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EUGENE BOUDIN Honfleur 1824 – 1898 Deauville

Cale d’embarquement sur la Meuse à Rotterdam

Eugène Boudin’s genius expressed itself in coastal scenes and capturing the myriad moods of the sea. Pursuing en plein air ‘the simple beauties of nature’, he often expressed his frustration when trying to evoke the ever-changing sea and sky. ‘I feel this vastness, this delicacy, the brilliant light which transforms everything to my eyes into magical brushes and I can’t make my muddle of colours convey this’.1 Boudin was fascinated by harbour scenes, depicting the busy ports of Le Havre and Honfleur with a sure eye for the details of ship structure and rigging. Cale d’embarquement sur la Meuse à Rotterdam dates from 1880, when Boudin was employing a broader, dancing brushstroke which creates atmosphere without sacrificing his understanding of the handsome merchant vessels. The upright format adds to the towering elegance of the vessels against a blue, cloud-flecked sky. The flickering brushwork, with its subtle understanding of shades of white and grey, strong shadows and juxtapositions of warm and cool colours, evokes the exhilarating light and freshness of the coast. Boudin visited Rotterdam, Dordrecht and Scheveningen in 1880, impelled by his friendship with the Dutch-born painter Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819–1891). Boudin had met Jongkind at Trouville in 1862; they later painted in Isabey’s studio and at Saint-Siméon farm near Honfleur. Boudin was inspired by the freedom and vigour of Jongkind’s marines, which, like Boudin’s own work, presaged Impressionism. Rotterdam, situated on the delta of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt and then as now one of the largest ports in the world, provided a feast of motifs. In 1880 Boudin’s work was critically acclaimed but had brought him only a modest income. Early the following year the entire contents of his studio was bought by Paul Durand-Ruel, successful champion of Monet, Sisley and Pissarro, ushering in a new era of prosperity for this quiet and self-effacing genius. This painting was owned by the Rheims industrialist Fernand Moch (1863–1945), co-founder of Etablissments Moch and Odelin, one of the leading wool trading firms in France. Fernand Moch and his wife Jeanne built up a superb collection of Impressionist and Modern works, including paintings by Monet, Renoir, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso.

1 Quoted in Vivien Hamilton, Boudin at Trouville, Glasgow 1992, p.9.

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EUGENE BOUDIN Honfleur 1824 – 1898 Deauville

Venise, l’entrée du Grand Canal, la Salute et la Douane

Signed and dated lower left: E. Boudin / Venise 95. /15 juin Oil on canvas: 19 7/8 × 29 ¼ in / 50.5 × 74.3 cm Frame size: 27 ½ × 37 in / 69.8 × 94 cm In a Louis XIV style carved and gilded frame p ro v en a nce

Collection Gérard, Paris Me. Chevalier, Paris, 5th May 1902, lot 9; where bought by a French private collector; by descent e x h i b i ted

Paris, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Exposition des oeuvres d’Eugène Boudin, January 1899, no.50 l i ter at u re

G Jean-Aubry, Eugène Boudin d’après les lettres et les documents inédits, Neuchâtel 1968, p.241, no.132, illus. (wrongly dated 1893) R Schmit, Eugène Boudin, Paris 1973, vol. III, p.315, no.3440, illus.

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EUGENE BOUDIN Honfleur 1824 – 1898 Deauville

Venise, l’entrée du Grand Canal, la Salute et la Douane

After the death of his beloved wife Marie-Anne in 1889, Boudin travelled more widely, seeking mild climates to escape the pains of advancing age, but also for new artistic stimulus. In 1890 he went to the south of France. Boudin visited Venice in 1892, 1894 and 1895, finding in that lagoon city the same challenges which fascinated him on the Normandy coast: how to translate into a painting with truthfulness ever-changing sky, water and atmosphere. Here he takes up a viewpoint made famous by Canaletto: the entrance to the Grand Canal, with the Punta della Dogana and the side of Santa Maria della Salute. To the left is the Giudecca, with the dome of the Zitelle echoing the larger domes of the Salute. Whereas Canaletto’s crisp handling describes every detail of the architecture and provides a powerful sense of recession, Boudin is concerned with the ‘impression’ on the eye of light hitting stone and brick and fragmenting into filaments of colour on the lagoon. Iconic monuments are woven into the overall atmosphere. In this Boudin was inspired by Francesco Guardi, whose paintings he had copied in the Louvre in the late 1860s. He commented on Guardi’s ‘prodigious capability….The lightness of his execution. A gestural quality down to the finest detail’.1 A dancing lightness of touch and perfect command of the brush are evident in the present painting by Boudin. Georges Jean-Aubry writes of these late works: ‘It is indeed wonderful to see the delicacy, the even more intimate poetry, and the increased simplicity with which he transcribes the perceptions which nature evoked in him’.2

Eugène Boudin, Santa Maria della Salute and the Dogana, Venice, signed and dated 20th June 1895. Oil on canvas. Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove, Glasgow. © Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums) / The Bridgeman Art Library.

In the present work Boudin shows a blue sky with drifting, hazy clouds, in keeping with his intuition that Venice was a northern city with soft light. He wrote to Durand-Ruel on 20th June 1895, five days after this painting was made: ‘I am occupied in doing some views of Venice, a magnificent place, as I have no need to tell you, but somewhat disguised by the customary painters of the country, who have shown it under a blazing sun. In fact, Venice, like all luminous landscapes, is grey in colour, and its atmosphere is gentle and misty. And the sky is clothed in clouds like one of our Norman or Dutch skies, although the heat is intense at times. It is true that since I have been here it has been stormy all the time’.3 Boudin’s is not an overtly tourist Venice: the shawled women in the foreground gondola are clearly locals and the Giudecca canal is crowded with shipping. Boudin responds to the bustling maritime life of the city, just as he had responded to the busy port of Le Havre and the more tranquil fishing village of Honfleur. At the studio sale in 1899 after Boudin’s death, his views of Venice fetched especially high prices. Nineteenth century Venice drew many famous visitors, who were attracted both to its glittering public face as well as to the romantic melancholy of a city-state from which power had long since ebbed. Wagner wrote much of Tristan on the Grand Canal; Henry James finished The Aspern Papers in Palazzo Barbaro by the Accademia Bridge. John Singer Sargent painted dank backstreets and working-class lives as well as grand façades. Venice showed a different face and yet kept her mystery to every creative spirit who approached her.

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1 Quoted in Paris, Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins, Boudin, Aquarelles et Pastels, 1965, p.78. 2 Eugène Boudin, London 1969 (English translation), p.180. 3 Quoted in G Jean-Aubry, op. cit., p.122.


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CA MILLE PISSARRO Saint Thomas 1830 – 1903 Paris

La gardeuse d’oies

Signed and dated lower left: C. Pissarro . 1888 Gouache, watercolour and pencil on silk: 10 ½ × 15 7/8 in / 26.6 × 40.4 cm Frame size: 16 × 21 ½ in / 40.6 × 54.6 cm In a Louis XIV style carved and gilded frame p ro v en a nce

Jeanne and Fernand Moch, Paris; by descent l i ter at u re

LR Pissarro and L Venturi, Camille Pissarro, son art-son oeuvre, Paris 1938, vol. 1, p.278, no.1424; illus. vol. II, pl.277 To be included in the Catalogue Critique des Pastels et Gouaches de Camille Pissarro being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts has confirmed that this gouache is an autograph work by Camille Pissarro

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CA MILLE PISSARRO Saint Thomas 1830 – 1903 Paris

La gardeuse d’oies

In 1884 Camille Pissarro moved with his family to Eragny, a small village on the river Epte about seventy-two kilometres north-west of Paris. He stayed there for the rest of his life, buying his spacious, comfortable house in 1892 after eight years renting it. Pissarro painted about 350 oils and many pastels, gouaches and watercolours of the countryside around Eragny and its people. Although he travelled from the village looking for new motifs and undertook painting campaigns in urban areas such as Rouen, London and Paris, the paintings of Eragny give a sustained, intense and affectionate portrait of Pissarro’s environment. La gardeuse d’oies reflects a theme which preoccupied Pissarro in the 1880s and 1890s: countrywomen going about their daily lives. The goose girl sits tranquilly under a tree as the morning sun casts a glorious haze over the meadows and irradiates the outline of each of her charges. In 1888 Pissarro was at the height of his enthusiasm for Pointillism. Although already in his fifties, his open, enquiring mind had led him to seek instruction from Signac and Seurat, both three decades his junior. La gardeuse d’oies is organised in a modified Pointillist technique, with touches of complementary colour – blue and red, for example, in the skirt of the goose girl – juxtaposed to create mass and contrast. Whereas the distant landscape dissolves in sunlight, through the interweaving of gold, green, apricot and blue, the girl herself has a calm, sculptural quality, created as she is through bolder, cooler hues, reinforced by the velvet shadows of the overarching tree. The movement is all in the cackling geese and the eddies of the pond, described in more fluid strokes. Pissarro is masterly in his admixture of the textures of gouache and watercolour; the silk ground that he sometimes favoured gives an extra luminosity to the painting. Richard Brettell has noted ‘a kind of relaxed beauty in fieldwork’ in Pissarro’s paintings of rural tasks.1 Unlike Realist painters such as Millet, Pissarro did not see agricultural work as ‘difficult, demeaning, and without leisure’.2 His goose girl – healthy, sturdy, beautiful and self-contained – is the serene centre of her world. A respect for the lives of countryfolk and the importance of rural life was implicit in Pissarro’s Anarchist beliefs. Writers such as Peter Kropotkin had argued that progress in agriculture would feed burgeoning populations without the need for unending, backbreaking labour. Brettell comments: ‘With fertilizers, crop rotations, and fallow periods, the land in areas such as Normandy and the region surrounding Paris could be made to produce more than enough food to feed not only the rural community but all French citizens’.3 La gardeuse d’oies, like most of Pissarro’s Eragny paintings, proclaims the dignity of countryfolk as well as the unsullied beauty of their landscape.

1 Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute/San Francisco, Legion of Honour, Pissarro’s People, exh. cat. by Richard R Brettell, p.171; essay on ‘Rural Leisure’, pp.171–181. 2 Brettell op. cit., p.172. 3 Ibid., p.172.

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CA MILLE PISSARRO Saint Thomas 1830 – 1903 Paris

Le marché Les Halles, Paris

Signed and dated lower left: C. Pissarro . 1889 Watercolour: 11 ½ × 9 in / 29.5 × 23 cm Frame size: 19 × 17 in / 48.3 × 43.2 cm In a Louis XIII style carved and gilded rose corner frame p ro v en a nce

Mme Briere, 1946 Mrs Gertrude Meyer, New York Perls Galleries, New York and Hollywood Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London, 1983; from whom bought by a UK private collector e x h i b i ted

London, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, Nineteenth Century French Drawings, 15th June–15th July 1983, no.32 London, Hayward Gallery, Camille Pissarro: Impressionism, Landscape and Rural Labour, 1990, no.49 To be included in the Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings by Camille Pissarro being prepared by Dr Joachim Pissarro

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CA MILLE PISSARRO Saint Thomas 1830 – 1903 Paris

Le marché Les Halles, Paris

Markets were a consistent theme in Camille Pissarro’s oeuvre from the 1870s, becoming especially important from the mid-1880s, when he made more compositions with large-scale figures. He produced market scenes in a variety of media: oils, gouaches, watercolours, pastels, drawings and prints, exploring the rich interaction of human relationships that they afforded.1 In the early 1880s Pissarro’s dealer Paul Durand-Ruel found it harder to sell Impressionist landscapes and encouraged his stable of artists to tackle genre scenes in less expensive media such as watercolour and gouache, something to which the brilliantly versatile Pissarro responded without any loss of inspiration. Of all his market scenes, only one is a large-scale oil, the 32 7/8 × 25 5/8 in Poultry market at Pontoise, 1882, in the Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena, CA. The majority are oils of a modest scale, or works on paper.

The watercolour is organised around tones of blue and green, which convey the idea of cool morning light and emphasise the freshness of the fruits of the earth. Pissarro’s use of watercolour is subtle and allusive, from the intricacies of the goods on the market stall to the coloured shadows on the white apron which give such animation to the foreground figure. Despite the apparent chaos of the crowded market, Pissarro’s draughtsmanship leads the eye surely through the throng into the far distance. Animated humanity is kept in check by the severe lines of the Parisian apartment blocks which tower over the shoppers, allowing a brief glimpse of a cloud-flecked sky.

As a sympathiser with the philosophy of Anarchism, Pissarro despised the machinations of Capital that brought poverty and misery, but approved of food markets, where the peasant producers sold to consumers at a fair price determined by haggling. Shopping at the market was part of the rhythm of family life; Richard Brettell comments that to this day ‘the intimacy of food shopping’ is a treasured part of French culture, even in cities.2 Pissarro’s wife Julie, of sturdy Burgundian country stock, was a skilled housekeeper and a shrewd market-bargainer, as well she might be, given her large family’s precarious financial position. Pissarro painted the markets at Pontoise, where the family lived from 1874 to 1884, and at Gisors, the nearest town to Eragny, where they settled in 1884. Although he revelled in country life, Pissarro also searched for urban settings to fulfil his restless desire for new motifs. Meetings with his dealer Durand-Ruel and faithful attendance at the Impressionist and other exhibitions brought him regularly to Paris. Although previously this watercolour was thought to be a depiction of the Marché Saint-Honoré, Dr Joachim Pissarrro considers that it shows the most famous of Paris markets, Les Halles in the 1st Arondissment, the city’s central market from medieval times. Known as the Ventre de Paris (Belly of Paris) and the subject of Emile Zola’s novel of that name, it was reconstructed in the 1850s with the graceful, soaring iron arches which are such a feature of this watercolour. A watercolour and charcoal drawing titled Le marché, which again shows arches beyond the heads of the stallholders, has also been identified by Dr Pissarro as Les Halles. Urban markets are much rarer in Pissarro’s oeuvre than the smaller, openair markets of Pontoise and Gisors. Le marché Les Halles, like most of Pissarro’s market paintings, employs a vertical format and moves close to the densely-packed, bustling figures. In the foreground, a stallholder presides over an array of vegetables. The market woman’s Junoesque figure, snowy white apron and air of magisterial confidence contrast with the sharp-boned, smartly-dressed Parisian who eyes her wares: a contrast between the healthy countrywoman and the neurasthenic city dweller. The comfortable curves of an adjacent market woman reinforce this impression of peasant wellbeing.

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1 See Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute/San Francisco, Legion of Honour, Pissarro’s People, exh. cat. by Richard R Brettell, pp.219–239, Chapter 10 The Market Economy. 2 Brettell op. cit., p.222.


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H E N R I FA N T I N - L AT O U R Grenoble 1836 – 1904 Buré

Chrysanthèmes

Signed and dated upper left: Fantin / 1875 Oil on canvas: 27 ½ × 24 in / 68.5 × 62.2 cm Frame size: 39 ½ × 37 in / 100.3 × 94 cm In an antique Louis XIV carved and gilded frame p ro v en a nce

Edwin Edwards (1823–1879), London Obach & Co., London M Bonjean, France, acquired by 1906 F & J Tempelaere, Paris Van Gogh, Amsterdam E Heldring, Amsterdam, acquired by 1910 Goudstikker, Amsterdam, 1928 M Knoedler & Co. Inc., London Private collection, 1956 Susan L Brody Associates, Ltd., New York Private collection, USA, acquired from the above in 1995 e x h i b i ted

Paris, Palais de l’Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Exposition de l’oeuvre de FantinLatour, 1906, no.80, entitled Chrysanthèmes pompoms Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Tentoonstelling van Schildereijen en Aquarellen, 1910, no.74 Barnard Castle, Bowes Museum, Painting Flowers: Fantin-Latour and the Impressionists, 14th April–9th October 2011, exh. cat. by Emma House and David Ingram, p.41, no.18; illus. in colour p.4 l i ter at u re

Madame Fantin-Latour, Catalogue de l’oeuvre complet de Fantin-Latour, Paris 1911, no.762, p.82 To be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the work of Henri Fantin-Latour currently being prepared by Galerie Brame & Lorenceau

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H E N R I FA N T I N - L AT O U R Grenoble 1836 – 1904 Buré

Chrysanthèmes

Henri Fantin-Latour was renowned for his still lifes of flowers, which he painted from the 1860s until his death in 1904. Calm and contemplative, they expressed his shy and retiring nature. Although he was on good terms with the Impressionist painters, Fantin’s approach to art was fundamentally different from them. He once remarked that he had ‘a horror of movement, of animated scenes, and the difficulty of painting in the open air with sun and shade’.1 Fantin-Latour painted his flowers in the studio, usually against a simple piece of grey cloth or cardboard, which emphasised the delicate balance of his compositions. In this painting of Chrysanthèmes, the flowers seem artlessly arranged, yet Fantin-Latour has an exquisite understanding of the light on the varying levels of flowers and the dark shadows of the foliage. He balances with superb skill rich red and pink blooms and the deep blue vase with white and yellow flowers. The bouquet exists solidly in space, a symphony of rounded forms. In the 1870s, the decade of Impressionism, Fantin-Latour was at the height of his powers. His painterly treatment of the asters and the understanding of their structure came not only from an awareness of the exuberant brushwork of the Impressionists, but also from years of studying and copying the Old Masters during his academic training. His rich, assured technique is influenced both by Chardin and by Venetian masters such as Titian. Gracefully and objectively, Fantin-Latour translates the essence of the flowers into paint. This painting belonged to Edwin Edwards (1823–1879), one of Fantin-Latour’s staunchest patrons. Fantin-Latour had met Edwards while staying with his friend and mentor James McNeill Whistler’s sister in London in 1859. Edwards, a former King’s Proctor and keen amateur painter, shared with Fantin-Latour a passion for music. He bought many of Fantin-Latour’s still lifes and became in effect his English dealer, in 1871 clearing the artist’s studio of sketches, still life and flower pieces after the privations of the Franco-Prussian war and establishing a buoyant market for his work in England. After Edwards’s death Fantin-Latour maintained a friendship with his wife Ruth, a gifted pianist.

1 Quoted in Edward Lucie-Smith, Fantin-Latour, Oxford 1977, p.22.

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ALFRED SISLEY Paris 1839 – 1899 Moret-sur-Loing

Printemps à Veneux

Signed lower left: Sisley Oil on canvas: 28 ¾ × 35 ¼ in / 72.9 × 90.7 cm Frame size: 37 ½ × 45 ½ in / 95.2 × 115.6 cm In an antique Louis XIV carved and gilded frame Painted in April 1880 p ro v en a nce

Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Paris, acquired from the artist in April 1882; Paul Durand-Ruel, Paris, acquired from the above, 1901; by descent to a private collection, Paris by 1959; Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Paris, acquired from the above, 16th January 1962 Sam Salz, Inc., New York, acquired from the above, 23rd January 1962 Stephen Richard and Audrey Currier, by 1967; their estate sale, Christie’s New York, 16th May 1984, lot 18 (bt. Howard B Keck) Howard B Keck, Los Angeles; his sale, Sotheby’s New York, 6th November 1991, lot 4; where acquired by a private collector, USA e x h i b i ted

Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Exposition de tableaux de Monet, Pissarro, Renoir & Sisley, April 1899, no.134 (titled Le Printemps and dated 1878) Paris, Chambre Syndicale de la Curiosité des Beaux-Arts, L’art français au service de la Science française: exposition d’oeuvres d’art des XVIIIè, XIXè et XXè siècles, April–May 1923, no.224 (titled Printemps and dated 1878) Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Cinquante ans de peinture française, 1875–1925, May–July 1925, no.75 (titled Les pommiers en fleurs and dated 1882) Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Tableaux de Sisley, February–March 1930, no.7 (titled Paysage and dated 1872) Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Exposition de tableaux par Alfred Sisley, January–February 1937, no.29 (dated 1882) l i ter at u re

G Geffroy, Sisley, Paris 1923, pl.8 (titled Le Printemps) G Geffroy, Sisley, Paris 1927, pl.24 J Jedlicka, Sisley, Bern 1949, p.30, no.22, illus. pl.22, titled Frühling V Gilardoni, L’Impressionismo, Milan 1951, p.152, no.43, illus. pl.43, titled Primavera and dated 1878 F Daulte, Alfred Sisley: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Lausanne 1959, no.356, illus. (with incorrect provenance) The Comité Sisley confirms the authenticity of this painting, which will be included in the new edition of the Catalogue Raisonné of Alfred Sisley by François Daulte, being prepared at Galerie Brame & Lorenceau

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ALFRED SISLEY Paris 1839 – 1899 Moret-sur-Loing

Printemps à Veneux

Alfred Sisley was perhaps the most dedicated landscapist of the Impressionist group, gentle and subtle: the critic JK Huysmans wrote approvingly of his ‘pretty, smiling melancholy’. Born to prosperity into an English merchant family which had flourished in France, Sisley’s comfortable world crumbled with his family’s disapproval of his liaison with Eugénie Lescouezec and when his father’s business failed in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. For the rest of his life Sisley painted for a living. He pursued his art with the utmost integrity, exploring different types of landscapes, wherever possible in front of the motif, in all sorts of weather. 1879 was a hard year for Sisley. He did not exhibit in the fourth Impressionist exhibition and was rejected by the Salon. Early the following year he moved with Eugénie and their children from Sèvres to the more rural setting of VeneuxNadon, at the junction of the Seine and the Loing, about seventy-five kilometres from Paris. The family rented a house on Rue de By near the railway station, a lifeline for essential trips to Paris to see exhibitions and buy supplies. Sisley would find inspiration in the area, settling finally at nearby Moret-sur-Loing, until his death in 1899. Printemps à Veneux reflects Sisley’s delight in a new season and a new location, sharing with Small meadows in spring – By, c.1880 (Tate Britain, London) and Orchard in spring – By, 1881 (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam) a ‘vitality of handling and exuberance of subject matter that strike a new note in Sisley’s work.1 Richard Shone writes of Sisley’s ‘visual greed’ as he explored his surroundings in the spring of 1880: ‘He began with views of Moret itself seen from a hillside to the north….He then proceeded with more intimate, close-up views of the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau and its adjoining fields; the paths and clearings along the left bank of the Seine near his house; the little port and village of St-Mammès…. he turns this way and that, tasting the numerous possibilities on offer and testing his carefully acquired self-knowledge against the opportunities of new light, space, configurations of land and sky, and a whole new range of effets and feelings’.2 Printemps à Veneux brilliantly combines strong composition with a complex handling of paint which expresses the energy of spring. A diagonal of trees leads the eye into the landscape from foreground right to left up the gently curving slope. Sisley alternates bands of bright green vegetation with the brown-pink of the warming soil to sweep the view round to a whitewashed, red-roofed cottage. The branches of the apple trees froth with anarchic blossom and net the bright blue sky. Sisley retains the tension between deep, naturalistic recession and a delight in the picture surface. By this stage in his career he was extremely skilled in the variation of touch and colour both to evoke the effects of nature and to convey his emotional response to a landscape. Staccato dabs of pure colour conjure up the complexity of the trees. A swift dash of vermilion on the trunk of the nearest tree brings the bark to life, while bold violet strokes in the right foreground convey

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cool spring shadows. Over the sky’s pulsating radiance – bright, but not yet hot – drift fluffy clouds shadowed with Sisley’s keynote pale lilac. Three small figures, as well as the two discreetly placed houses, remind us that this land is inhabited and lovingly cultivated. Within months of Sisley’s move to Veneux, the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel gained financial backing which enabled him to resume his support for the Impressionists. Between 1880 and 1885, Durand-Ruel bought as many as forty-five canvases a year from Sisley, giving him some financial stability and enabling him to respond to the glorious country round Veneux and Moret with less worry over how he was to feed his family. Durand-Ruel bought Printemps à Veneux in April 1882 and included it in an important Exposition de tableaux de Monet, Pissarro, Renoir & Sisley in April 1899, three months after Sisley’s death. Although he did not achieve the worldwide acclaim that Monet reaped in his lifetime, Sisley’s subtle and highly sympathetic painting makes him a worthy friend and companion of these three giants of Impressionism. After seeing Sisley for the last time in January 1899, Monet wrote to Gustave Geoffroy: ‘He is a truly great artist and I believe he is as great a master who has ever lived’.3

1 Richard Shone, Sisley, London 1992, p.134. 2 Shone op. cit., p.128. 3 Quoted in London, Royal Academy, Alfred Sisley, ed. MaryAnne Stevens, 1992, p.280.


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ALFRED SISLEY Paris 1839 – 1899 Moret-sur-Loing

Bords du Loing près de Moret

Signed lower left: Sisley Oil on canvas: 28 ¾ × 36 ¼ in / 73 × 92 cm Frame size: 39 × 47 in / 99.1 × 119.4 cm In an antique Louis XIV carved and gilded frame Painted in 1892 en g r av ed

l i ter at u re

By P-M Roy in 1899

Julien Leclerq, ‘Alfred Sisley’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. 21, March 1899, illus. p.231 Théodore Duret, Histoire des Peintres Impressionnistes, Paris 1906, illus. p.91 Jules Lieure, ‘La Gazette des Beaux-Arts et la Gravure’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. 75, 1933, no.2, pp.351–364 François Daulte, Alfred Sisley. Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint, Lausanne 1959, no.795, illus. Raymond Cogniat, Sisley, Munich 1978, illus. p.78 Charlotte van Regenmortel, Benno Tempel et al., Miracle de la couleur. Impressionnisme en post-Impressionnisme, Zwolle 2003, no.14, illus. p.158 Munch e lo spirito del Nord (exhibition catalogue), Villa Manin, Passariano, 2010, illus. p.18

p ro v en a nce

Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris Wildenstein & Co., Paris & New York Mrs Norman B Woolworth, New York Galerie Hopkins Custot, Paris; from whom acquired in 2000 by the Triton Foundation, The Netherlands e x h i b i ted

New York, Wildenstein & Co., Sisley, 1966, no.64, illus. New York, Acquavella Galleries, Four Masters of Impressionism, 1968, no.51, illus. in colour Brescia, Museo di Santa Giulia, Monet, la Senna, le ninfee. Il grande fiume e il nuovo secolo, 2004–05, no.35, illus. in colour The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Buitenleven. Franse Negentiende-eeuwse Landschappen uit de Collectie van de Triton Foundation, 2005 Passariano, Villa Manin, L’età di Courbet e Monet, 2009–10, no.112, illus. Giverny, Musée des Impressionnismes, L’impressionnisme au fil de la Seine, 2010, no.35, illus. in colour Tokyo, The National Art Centre / Dazaifu, Kyushu National Museum / Nagoya, Nagoya City Art Museum, Van Gogh. The Adventure of becoming an Artist, 2010–11, no.72, illus. in colour Wuppertal, Von der Heydt-Museum, Alfred Sisley. Der wahre Impressionist, 2011–12, illus. in colour Brussels, Sjraar van Heugten, Avant-gardes 1870 to the Present: the Collection of the Triton Foundation, 2012, p.71, illus. in colour

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The Comité Sisley confirms the authenticity of this painting, which will be included in the new edition of the Catalogue Raisonné of Alfred Sisley by François Daulte, being prepared at Galerie Brame & Lorenceau


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ALFRED SISLEY Paris 1839 – 1899 Moret-sur-Loing

Bords du Loing près de Moret

Alfred Sisley’s work in the last decade of his life was devoted to the subject of Moret-sur-Loing near Fontainebleau. He had written to Monet in 1881, ‘It’s not a bad part of the world, rather a chocolate-box landscape’.1 After a brief sojourn there in 1882–3, Sisley returned to the picturesque old town in 1889, staying first in the rue de l’Eglise. From 1891 until his death in 1899 – the longest that he had ever settled anywhere – he lived with his companion Eugénie and daughter Jeanne at 19 rue Montmartre, a house with a pretty, high-walled garden and an attic studio. Moret offered medieval bridges and churches, and a gently meandering river lined with poplars that splintered the sunlight through a lattice of leaves. He painted it in every mood, wherever possible in front of the motif, from high summer to snowy weather.

Hidden within the serenity of Sisley’s painting is a reminder that it was made in the final decade of the nineteenth century, when even seemingly timeless places such as Moret were within a couple of hours’ train journey from Paris. At the vanishing point of the poplars can just be glimpsed the railway viaduct at SaintMammès, subject also of Sur le Loing, c.1892 (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona), in which the poplars have been shifted to the right and the viaduct is much more prominent.4 Sisley shows us nature, but it is nature guided by the hand of man: the poplars were planted to shade the riverbank for those working and walking along it. Human activity is discreetly introduced with the three strollers on the path, the pleasure boat and the distant vessel with white sails dissolving in the sunlight.

Bords du Loing près de Moret is one of a group of works painted around 1892 which takes as its subject the poplars along the Loing. Roger Fry commented on Sisley’s ‘infallible instinct for spacing and proportion’. The serried ranks of slender trunks lead the eye deep into the landscape, while the leaves give a sense of movement and catch colour and light. Sisley, like Caillebotte, is interested both in the geometry and the freedom of nature. His brushwork is subtly modulated to express both individual textures and the overall atmosphere, from tight commas of colour to express the rustling poplar leaves, to dry, dragged paint conveying the haziness of the clouds. The thrust of the poplar trunks towards the light is evoked by variations in the bark, violet at the bases and magenta as the upper branches catch the afternoon sun.

Sisley’s whole response to Moret reflects a feeling of harmony between man and nature. As Richard Shone comments, Moret provided ‘Old flour and tanning mills clustered along the bridge; the river, scattered with tiny islands, seemed more like a moat protecting the houses and terraced gardens that, on either side of the sturdy Porte de Bourgogne, in turn defended the pinnacled tower of the church. Add to this the tree-lined walks along the river, the continuous sound of water from the weir and the great wheels of the mills, the houseboats and fishermen, and there was, as every guide-book exclaimed, ‘a captivating picture’, a sight ‘worthy of the brush’ ”.5 Sisley’s long stay in Moret ensured not only that the town provided an infinite number of subjects, but that there was real emotional investment in his depictions. His subtly-modulated Impressionist brushwork not only seeks truthfully to convey ever-changing nature, but, in the words of MaryAnne Stevens, ‘[contains] both the physical and emotional significance of places with which [Sisley] established a personal as well as an artistic accord’.6 As Shone says, ‘all the best works from the last decade of Sisley’s life are concentrated round this beguiling reach of the Loing’.7

The lightly-clouded blue sky sets the tone for the whole picture, with its landscape of greens and blue-greens, violets, pinks and soft greys. In a famous comment to his friend, the art critic Adolphe Tavernier, Sisley explained that the sky was ‘never merely a background….Not only does it give the picture depth through its successive planes (for the sky, like the ground, has its planes), but through its form, and through its relations with the whole effect or with the composition of the picture, it gives it movement. What is more beautiful indeed than the summer sky, with its wispy clouds idly floating across the blue? What movement and grace! Don’t you agree? They are like waves on the sea; one is uplifted and carried away’.2 This echoes John Constable’s comment that the sky was ‘the chief ‘Organ of Sentiment’ and links Sisley with the great naturalist painters of the earlier part of the century. A lifelong inhabitant of France but from an English merchant family (he was a British citizen for most of his life), Sisley was sent to London on business as a young man and would have seen the Constables in the National Gallery. Another influence was Meindert Hobbema’s Avenue at Middelharnis, 1689 (National Gallery, London), which is the prototype for the dramatic recession of the poplars and the fascination with a manicured, productive landscape. Few of the Impressionists showed much interest in the wild wastes which had captivated an earlier, Romantic generation. Sisley may also have been influenced by his friend Claude Monet’s Poplars on the Epte series of 1891, although Sisley had already explored the theme of poplars in a painting of 1888, The poplar avenue at Moret: cloudy day, morning (private collection).3

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1 Quoted in London, Royal Academy/Paris, Musée d’Orsay/Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery, Alfred Sisley, ed. MaryAnne Stevens, 1992–3, p.222. 2 Quoted in Stevens, op. cit., pp.10–11. 3 Daulte op. cit., no.674. See Royal Academy Sisley 1992–3, pp.212–3, no.59, illus. in colour. 4 Daulte no.798. See Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Alfred Sisley: Poète de l’Impressionisme, 2002–3, pp.236–7, no.59, illus. in colour. 5 Richard Shone, Sisley, 1992, p.159. 6 Lyon exh 2002–3, op. cit., p.356. 7 Shone op. cit., p.159.


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BERTHE MORISOT Bourges 1841 – 1895 Paris

Jeune fille étendue

Stamped with the signature lower left: Berthe Morisot Oil on canvas: 25 5/8 × 32¼ in / 65.6 × 81.9 cm Frame size: 35 ¼ × 42 in / 89.5 × 106.7 cm In an antique Louis XIV carved and gilded frame Painted in 1893 p ro v en a nce

l i ter at u re

Estate of the artist, 1895 M Gorce, Paris Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie, Paris, acquired from the above in November 1929; Durand-Ruel Galleries, New York, acquired from the above in April 1946 Sam Salz, Inc., New York; Mr and Mrs Philip Levin, New York, acquired from the above in April 1968; Collection of Janice Levin, a gift from the above in 2001

M Angoulvent, Berthe Morisot, Paris, 1933, p.147, no.568, illus., entitled Sur la chaise longue M-L Bataille and G Wildenstein, Berthe Morisot, Catalogue des peintures, pastels et aquarelles, Paris 1961, p.46, no.340, fig. 339 A Higgonet, Berthe Morisot’s Images of Women, Cambridge 1992, pp.242–3, no.103, illus. A Clairet, D Montalant and Y Rouart, Berthe Morisot, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Montolivet 1997, p.282, no.343, illus.

e x h i b i ted

New York, Durand-Ruel Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings by Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, October–November 1930, no.18 New York, Durand-Ruel Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings by the Master Impressionists, October–November 1934, no.15 London, M Knoedler & Co., Inc., Berthe Morisot, Madame Eugène Manet, May– June 1936, no.9 New York, Durand-Ruel Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings by Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, October–November 1939, no.2 New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Collects, July–September 1968, p.17, no.134 Washington DC, National Gallery of Art / Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum / South Hadley, MA, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Berthe Morisot Impressionist, September 1987–May 1988, pp.163–164, no.96, illus. in colour New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, A Very Private Collection: Janice H. Levin’s Impressionist Pictures, November 2002–February 2003, p.16, no.3, illus. in colour Birmingham, AL, The Birmingham Museum of Art and touring, An Impressionist Eye: Painting and Sculpture from the Philip and Janice Levin Foundation, February 2004–January 2005

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BERTHE MORISOT Bourges 1841 – 1895 Paris

Jeune fille étendue

In Jeune fille étendue Berthe Morisot portrays an enchanting scene of a young girl reclining on a sofa absorbed in a daydream. The reflective nature of this painting is highly characteristic of Morisot’s later period, when she painted solitary, beautiful young women in the rooms of her new apartment on the rue Weber in Paris. ‘In the summer of 1893 Morisot hired one of Renoir’s models to portray such reverie more explicitly than ever before. Posed in a white dress that registers every coloured nuance of the ambient light, the model reclines on an Empire chaise longue decorated with a swan’s neck motif. Resting her head on her right hand, she looks off at nothing in particular, perhaps dreaming of a different time or place…’.1 The blonde model is Jeanne Fourmanoir; this is the largest of three related images that Morisot painted of her in the drawing room of her home. Morisot executed a closely-cropped preliminary pastel drawing for Jeune fille étendue to refine the model’s features. The full-length version, entitled Sur la chaise longue (private collection),2 provides a setting for the daydreaming woman and reveals the object of her attention: a painting of the artist’s daughter, Julie, playing the violin. In her later years Morisot had become skilled in creating poetic images of beautiful young girls gazing out of a painting, as if in deep contemplation. Charles Stuckey comments: ‘Although Morisot’s art often portrayed her immediate surroundings, family members, and friends, it was often a form of escape, and the goal of her ostensibly mundane pictorial ideas was to record the experience of reverie that transcends routine appearances’.3 In the present painting, Morisot departs from her earlier portrayals of women in a variety of domestic scenes. As her choice of subject matter evolved in the 1890s, her approach became less formal. Her application of paint was smoother, the line strengthened and the contours were more defined. An artist of remarkable depth and skill, Berthe Morisot sought throughout her life to record the beauty and fragility of life. She once said: ‘My own ambition was limited to wanting to capture something of what goes by, just something, the smallest thing’. Jean-Marie Rouart defines her legacy thus: ‘To the light of Impressionism, Berthe Morisot added that of happiness; the kind of happiness that seems to belong to a paradise lost, with its harmony, sweetness and gracefulness… In her vision, there is the desire to break with Realism in favour of the illuminations and enchantments which light up the everyday, without giving into the mundane which weighs so heavily on existence’.4

1 Charles Stuckey in exh. cat. Berthe Morisot – Impressionist, op. cit., p.163. 2 Clairet op cit., p.282, no.344, illus. 3 Stuckey ibid., p.163. 4 Clairet ibid., p.10.

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FEDERICO Z ANDOMENEGHI Venice 1841 – 1917 Paris

Enfant jouant à la poupée

Signed lower left: Zandomeneghi Pastel on paper: 21 ½ × 18 in / 54.6 × 45.7 cm Frame size: 31 × 28 in / 78.7 × 71.1 cm In a Louis XV style carved and gilded frame Executed circa 1890–1900 p ro v en a nce

Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, acquired from the artist on 20th February 1901 as deposit no.10020 and entered into stock on 11th June 1901, no.6438; transferred to Durand-Ruel, New York as stock no.2598; Jeptha Homer Wade II (1857–1926), acquired from Durand-Ruel on 17th December 1901 Private collection, USA, from circa 1960 (possibly acquired in an estate sale); Private collection, Ohio (acquired from the above); by descent This pastel has been authenticated by the Fondazione Enrico Piceni and registered in the archive as no.174

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FEDERICO Z ANDOMENEGHI Venice 1841 – 1917 Paris

Enfant jouant à la poupée

This charming pastel was executed in the last decade of the nineteenth century, when Federico Zandomeneghi, nicknamed the ‘Vénitien’, was well established in Paris and represented by Paul Durand-Ruel, champion of the Impressionists. Throughout the 1890s he explored the theme of the feminine, depicting young women bathing, at their toilette, taking tea with friends or reading. He also explored the world of childhood in paintings such as Les belles images1 and Enfant regardant sa poupée,2 paralleling the intimate works of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt and music such as Bizet’s Jeu d’enfants (1871). The pastel medium, pioneered by Zandomeneghi’s friend and sparring partner Degas, is particularly appropriate for Enfant jouant à la poupée, which captures the delicate, yet intense and private world of childhood. The artist’s viewpoint hovers above the young girl seated on the floor, approaching, but not invading her inviolable space. Her body forms a triangle of rapt concentration and the elegantly-dressed doll, ‘walking’ forward, seems imbued with the life that the girl’s childish imagination has given it. The oblique viewpoint, as well as the witty parallels between the adult and dolls’ chairs, cut off by the picture frame, attest to Zandomeneghi’s study of Japanese prints. He exploits the softness of pastel to convey the child’s flawless skin and the exquisite coloured shadows within her white dress. Enfant jouant à la poupée superbly balances warm and cool colours, the vivid blue of the girl’s stockings and the patterned blue and green wallpaper contrasting with the warmth of her skin and her striking red hair. Zandomeneghi, like Paul Helleu, was especially fond of red-haired models, the vibrant colour providing the keynote around which many of his compositions are based. Despite his sensitivity to textures, Zandomeneghi’s outlines remain ‘classically clear’: ‘In his pictures, the outline is never a purely decorative appendage, common destiny in many post and neo-Impressionist paintings, but clearly delineates the planes, the lines of perspective, and irradiates from one focal point’.3 Although influenced by the Impressionists, he proudly forged his own unique style which retained elements of his Italian heritage, from the colourism of Venetian Renaissance painting to the shimmering eighteenth century pastel portraits of Rosalba Carriera.

1 Private collection; see Fondazione Enrico Piceni, Federico Zandomeneghi. General Catalogue. Updated and augmented new edition, Milan 2006, no.502, colour plate LXX. 2 Private collection; Zandomeneghi 2006, op. cit., no.719. 3 Enrico Piceni, Zandomeneghi, 1990 edition, ed. Maria Grazia Piceni Testi with Roberto Capitani, p.63.

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Durand-Ruel introduced Zandomeneghi to the New York public in January 1901, a reviewer noting of this show: ‘Especially interesting are the pastels in which the artist has done some of his most careful work and got some of his best results. In the use of his colors in the pastels he is as lavish as he is studious, with results of a fullness and body which works in pastel do not always have’ (The New York Sun, 11th January 1901). American collectors responded enthusiastically to Zandomeneghi. Enfant jouant à la poupée was sold by Durand-Ruel in New York in December 1901 to the financier Jeptha Homer Wade II (1857–1926), grandson of Jeptha Homer Wade I (1811–1890), founder of Western Union. Like his grandfather, JH Wade II was a keen collector and a co-founder of the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1913. He gave textiles, jewels, enamels and paintings to the museum and established a substantial purchasing fund. The Zandomeneghi was acquired by another American private collector circa 1960 and has remained in American private collections for over a century.


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PIER R E- AUGUSTE R EN O IR Limoges 1841 – 1919 Cagnes

Petite baigneuse

Signed lower right: Renoir Oil on panel: 3 ½ × 2 5/8 in / 9 × 6.7 cm Frame size: 10 × 19 in / 25.4 × 22.9 cm In an antique Louis XIV carved and gilded frame Painted circa 1876 p ro v en a nce

Bignou Gallery, Paris & New York Sam Salz, New York; from whom acquired in 1954 by Alexander Lewyt (1908–1988) and Elizabeth Lewyt e x h i b i ted

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts/Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais/London, Hayward Gallery, Renoir, 1985–86, p.209, no. 37, illus.; illus. in colour p.74 To be included in the forthcoming catalogue critique of the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute from the François Daulte, Durand-Ruel, Venturi, Vollard and Wildenstein archives To be included in Volume V of the Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et acquarelles de Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville, to be published by Editions Bernheim-Jeune

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Enlarged image

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PIER R E- AUGUSTE R EN O IR Limoges 1841 – 1919 Cagnes

Petite baigneuse

This jewel-like painting, made circa 1876 at the height of his Impressionist phase, is an example of Renoir’s liking for very small formats, which gives the work the intensity of a miniature without sacrificing freedom of brushwork and acute observation of colour, light and nature. He did, after all, begin his career working on a small scale, as an apprentice to a porcelain painter. There is extraordinary life and immediacy within the small format of the Petite baigneuse. Renoir describes the multicoloured shadows on the model’s skin as she sits in dappled sunlight under a tree. He blends the filaments of colour with a dreamlike sensuality, evoking heat, languor and the long tradition of the European nude in which his art is steeped. Renoir was particularly interested in painting figures in the dappled sunlight of woods and parks in this period, for example in The swing, 1876 and Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, 1876 (both Musée d’Orsay, Paris). In Petite baigneuse, the pink and gold highlights of the model’s skin are set against the deep green and blue shadows of the trees, but there is a blurring of the boundaries between human and landscape, so that the young woman seems truly a wood nymph. Petite baigneuse is related to a larger painting of circa 1875–6, Etude.Torse de femme au soleil (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which Renoir showed at the second Impressionist group exhibition in 1876.1 It shares with Petite baigneuse the same intensity of blue-green shadows and rosy flesh and the almost abstract treatment of the background. Vollard and Jamot identify the model as Anna, whose full name was Alma Henriette Leboeuf (1856–1879). In a letter to Dr Gachet, physician to and patron of several of the Impressionists, Renoir urges the doctor to visit Anna. Sadly, she died on 18th February 1879, aged twenty-three. The Leboeuf family owned paintings by Renoir until the 1930s. Petite baigneuse was from 1954 in the collection of the inventor and entrepreneur Alexander Lewyt (1908–1988) and his wife Elizabeth. Mr Lewyt invented the vacuum cleaner which bore his name and the Lewyt Corporation made items for the Allies, including radar scanners, in the Second World War. The Lewyts built up a superb collection of works by Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, Bonnard, Renoir and others, many of which they donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

1 Oil on canvas 32 × 25 ½ in / 81 × 65 cm. Boston/Paris/London, Renoir, op. cit., pp.208–9, illus.; illus. in colour p.75.

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Etude. Torse de femme au soleil, c.1875–76. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library.


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Vase de roses et dahlias

Signed lower right: Renoir. Oil on canvas: 16 ¼ × 12 ½ in / 41.3 × 31.8 cm Frame size: 25 × 21 ½ in / 63.5 × 54.6 cm In an antique Louis XV carved and gilded frame Painted circa 1883–84 p ro v en a nce

Jacques Dubourg, Paris Jean Levy; his sale, Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, 17th May 1978, lot 42; where acquired by Nathalie P & Alan M Voorhees; donated by them to the Richmond Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA in 1994 To be included in the catalogue critique of the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute from the François Daulte, DurandRuel, Venturi, Vollard and Wildenstein archives To be included in vol. V of the Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles de Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville, to be published by Editions Bernheim-Jeune

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PIER R E- AUGUSTE R EN O IR Limoges 1841 – 1919 Cagnes

Vase de roses et dahlias

Renoir began his career painting flowers on porcelain. All his life they represented the fecundity and rich hues of the natural world, while their shapes and variety enticed him to daring improvisation. Renoir’s still lifes afforded him the opportunity to focus solely on colour and form, without the distraction of composition and perspective. With his light, swift touch, Renoir took great pleasure in the sensuous qualities of oil paint and often considered still life painting to be a welcome break from his larger projects. He declared: ‘Painting flowers lets my brain rest. It does not cause the same tension of spirit as when I face a model. When I paint flowers, I put down tones, I boldly try values, without having to worry about losing a canvas’. Renoir was particularly fond of roses, whose full, rounded shapes he likened to the female form. He would often use up the paint still on his palette to sketch a few roses. When Vollard expressed his astonishment at this, Renoir replied: ‘this is research into skin tones that I am doing for the nudes’.1 This bouquet is composed chiefly of tightly-packed, rounded flowers which explode from a spherical vase. Renoir’s brushwork delves into the overlapping whorls and pink shadows of the roses, while the curled petals of the darker dahlias are more crisply executed. The bouquet shimmers against a pearly background which floods the whole painting with light. This radiance is characteristic of Renoir’s flower paintings of the mid-1880s; his later flower still-lifes employ a more saturated, pink-salmon palette. The warm colours of the flowers are contrasted by the blue-green foliage and the cool blue and white vase, its globe shape harmonizing with the shape of the roses. Everywhere are soft lines and melting, malleable colour, a celebration of Renoir’s love of the natural world and his love of paint.

1 Quoted in Gilles Néret, Renoir. Painter of Happiness, 2001, p.408.

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Nature morte au fruits

Signed lower left: Renoir . Oil on canvas: 8 7/8 × 13 in / 20.5 × 33 cm Frame size: 16 × 21 in / 40.6 × 53.3 cm In a Louis XV style carved and gilded swept frame Painted circa 1900 p ro v en a nce

Ambroise Vollard, Paris Galerie de l’Art Moderne, Paris; from whom acquired by a European private collector in the 1950s; by inheritance e x h i b i ted

Geneva, Musée de l’Athenée, De l’impressionisme à nos jours, 1960 l i ter at u re

A Vollard, Tableaux, pastels & dessins de Pierre-Auguste Renoir, vol. II, Paris 1919, illus.; revised edn. San Francisco 1989, p.301, no.1461 To be included in the forthcoming catalogue critique of the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute from the François Daulte, Durand-Ruel, Venturi, Vollard and Wildenstein archives

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Nature morte au fruits

Unlike his Impressionist contemporaries Monet, Manet and Sisley, Renoir did not paint still lifes until the latter part of his career. With his light, swift touch Renoir took great pleasure in the sensuous qualities of oil paint and often considered still life painting to be a welcome break from his larger projects. From around 1880 he began to concentrate more on painting flowers, fruit and everyday objects. He found that these still lifes afforded him the opportunity to focus solely on colour and form. Renoir advised Manet’s niece Julie to paint still life ‘in order to teach yourself to paint quickly’.1 The numerous works, often elaborate and ambitions, which he executed in this genre over the course of his career attest to his sustained interest in still life as an end in itself. Indeed, it was in his still life compositions that Renoir pursued some of his most searching investigations into the effects of light and colour on objects and surfaces. Renoir told his biographer, Albert André, that it was in his small-scale still lifes that ‘he put the whole of himself, that he took every risk’.2 Light pervades Nature morte aux fruits, suffusing the scene with an atmospheric radiance. The rich red and yellow hues of the apples are highlighted with luminous areas of white, while the greens and yellows to the left suggest a view onto a garden. The present work demonstrates how Renoir increasingly sought to reconcile the tenets of Impressionism with the structure and permanence of the classical tradition. The sophisticated light effects neither dissolve the contour of the objects nor mitigate their mass. Indeed the apples and lemon seem to gain in substance and clarity from the light filtering across the canvas. Discussing Renoir’s pictorial dialogue with Chardin, Charles Sterling’s statement of Renoir’s achievement in still life could well describe the present painting: ‘Nurtured on the traditions of eighteenth-century French painting, Renoir…carried on the serene simplicity of Chardin. Pale shadows, light as a breath of air, faintly ripple across the perishable jewel of a ripe fruit. Renoir reconciles extreme discretion with extreme richness, and his full-bodied density is made up, it would seem, of coloured air. This is a lyrical idiom hitherto unknown in still life, even in those of Chardin. Between these objects and us there floats a luminous haze through which we distinguish them, tenderly united in a subdued shimmer of light’.3

1 Quoted in J Manet, ed. R Roberts, Journal, 1893–1899, Paris 1987, p.190. 2 A André, Renoir, 1928, p.49. 3 C Sterling, Still life in painting from Antiquity to the Present Time, Paris 1959, p.100.

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Peaches on a plate, c.1902–5. Oil on canvas. © National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection.


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PIER R E- AUGUSTE R EN O IR Limoges 1841 – 1919 Cagnes

Jeune fille au chapeau de paille

Signed upper right: Renoir . Oil on canvas: 12 × 7 7/8 in / 30.5 × 20 cm Frame size: 17 × 13 ½ in / 43.2 × 34.3 cm In an antique Louis XIII carved and gilded rose corner frame Painted circa 1908 p ro v en a nce

Roger G Gompel Collection, Paris; by descent in a private collection, France To be included in the forthcoming catalogue critique of the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute from the François Daulte, Durand-Ruel, Venturi, Vollard and Wildenstein archives To be included in vol. V (1st Supplement) of the Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles de Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville, to be published by Editions Bernheim-Jeune

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PIER R E- AUGUSTE R EN O IR Limoges 1841 – 1919 Cagnes

Jeune fille au chapeau de paille

Renoir painted some of the most superb female portraits of his era, rivalling Titian and Rubens in his ability to evoke the essence of the feminine. Jeune fille au chapeau de paille, with its sensuous handling of paint, rich palette, and themes of flowers and blossoming girlhood, epitomizes the glories of Renoir’s later work. It was painted circa 1908, the year that he moved with his wife Aline and children to a newly-built villa at Les Collettes near Cagnes-sur-Mer, west of Nice. Although in poor health, plagued by arthritis, Renoir revelled in the Provençal light and the timeless agricultural rhythms of the region. A contented family life, beautiful house and garden and a sympathetic circle of friends resulted in an outpouring of joyous paintings. The young girl in this painting, with her abundant corn-gold hair, retroussé nose and full, red lips, conforms to Renoir’s ideal of femininity. There are no angular lines anywhere on this canvas; the paint caresses the forms, or hovers shimmering above them. ‘I paint flowers with the colour of nudes, and I paint women in the same pink tones as the flowers’, Renoir commented.1 Salmon pink blends into shell pink and into highlights of creamy white, describing the girl’s dewy skin and graceful form. The flowers in her charming straw bonnet underline the association with springtime freshness and radiance. This painting was formerly in the collection of Roger G Gompel, Director of the Paris-France Society, a company that owned several department stores including Les Trois Quartiers and Aux Dames de France. He built up a distinguished collection of Impressionist works in the first half of the twentieth century, which included Degas’s pastels At the milliner’s, c.1882 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and The star, 1879–81 (Art Institute of Chicago).

1 Quoted in Paris, Grand Palais/Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Philadelphia Museum of Art, Renoir in the 20th Century, 2009–10, exh. cat. by Sylvie Patrie et. al., p.294, cat. 59, note 6.

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PIER R E- AUGUSTE R EN O IR Limoges 1841 – 1919 Cagnes

Vase de roses

Signed lower right: Renoir Oil on canvas: 12 3/8 × 11 1/8 in / 30.8 × 28.3 cm Frame size: 18 ¾ × 17 ½ in / 47.6 × 44.4 cm In a Louis XV style carved and gilded frame Painted circa 1910 p ro v en a nce

Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939), Paris; acquired from his estate by the Carstairs Gallery, New York; from whom bought on 4th February 1952 by Alexander Lewyt (1908–1988) and Elizabeth Lewyt To be included in the forthcoming catalogue critique of the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute from the François Daulte, Durand-Ruel, Venturi, Vollard and Wildenstein archives To be included in vol. V of the Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles de Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville, to be published by Editions Bernheim-Jeune

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PIER R E- AUGUSTE R EN O IR Limoges 1841 – 1919 Cagnes

Vase de roses

‘I want my reds to be sonorous, to sound like a bell; if it doesn’t turn out that way, I put more reds or other colours till I get it’.1 Red is the keynote of this Vase de roses, depicting Renoir’s favourite flower. He painted still lifes throughout his career, but roses – heavy, sculptural, complex, sensuous, pulsating with colour and breathing delicious scent – are the flowers most closely associated with him. He likened the curves of the rose to the female form and told Ambroise Vollard, who owned this very painting, that his many studies of roses were linked to ‘researches in flesh tones which I make for a nude’.2 Renoir’s models wear roses in their hats or entwined in their hair, inhabiting a perpetual summer of fecund youthfulness. In Vase de roses the flowers fill the composition, evoked in whirls and eddies of rapid brushwork. As well as delighting in the natural world, Renoir is intoxicated by the possibilities of paint itself. Depicting flowers gave him an especial freedom. The vitality of this painting is achieved by interweaving the myriad red and pink tones of the roses with the cool blue colours of the vase and the blue-green leaves which enfold them. Vase de roses was owned by Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939), friend and biographer of Renoir and one of the most influential dealers in Impressionist paintings. From 1952 it was in the collection of the inventor and entrepreneur Alexander Lewyt (1908–1988) and his wife Elizabeth, along with the exquisite Petite baigneuse (cat. no. 11).

1 Renoir quoted in Boston, Museum of Fine Arts/Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais/London, Hayward Gallery, Renoir, 1985–86, p.283. 2 Quoted in Renoir 1985–6, ibid., p.283.

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PIER R E- AUGUSTE R EN O IR Limoges 1841 – 1919 Cagnes

Femme dans un paysage

Stamped with signature lower right: Renoir . Oil on canvas: 12 5/8 × 18 3/8 in / 32 × 46.6 cm Frame size: 21 × 26 ½ in / 53.3 × 67.3 cm In a Louis XV style carved and gilded swept frame Painted in 1911 p ro v en a nce

Private collection, Paris Richard Green, London, 2007 Private collection, USA l i ter at u re

Messrs. Bernheim-Jeune, L’atelier de Renoir, San Francisco 1989, no.430, pl.138 To be included in the forthcoming catalogue critique of the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute from the François Daulte, Durand-Ruel, Venturi, Vollard and Wildenstein archives To be included in Volume VI of the Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles de Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville, to be published by Editions Bernheim-Jeune

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PIER R E- AUGUSTE R EN O IR Limoges 1841 – 1919 Cagnes

Femme dans un paysage

‘Memory and recollection; the guidance of the past; nature mediated, its particularities expunged’:1 Colin Bailey’s summary of the qualities of Renoir’s landscapes of the 1880s also applies perfectly to Femme dans un paysage, painted in 1911. Interweaving sunlight and shadow, the substantial and the insubstantial, figures and landscape, it evokes Renoir’s deepest feelings about the South of France, where he had spent long periods of time since the beginning of the twentieth century. From 1903 he went with his family to Cagnes, just west of Nice, seeking a warm winter climate after the onset of arthritis. He bought the estate of Les Collettes there in 1907 and built a large house the following year, where he lived for the rest of his life. Renoir never painted his handsome, modern house, capably presided over by his wife Aline, a country girl at heart. He preferred to depict the old, red-tiled farmhouse on the estate, the olive groves and woodland that filtered the intense Mediterranean light. Like Picasso, Renoir responded to Provence’s classical, pagan, unfettered past, painting monumental nudes that recall the carefree nymphs of Roman mythology. His children ran wild in his tangled gardens. Renoir declared: ‘In this marvellous country, it seems as if misfortune cannot befall one; one is cosseted by the atmosphere’.2 Femme dans un paysage partakes of this Arcadian spirit. A young woman in a straw hat is enfolded in a landscape created from shimmering dabs of colour, purples, pinks and reds held in tension with cool, blue-green shadows. A sunlit pathway provides a horizontal dynamic to confront the vertical thrust of the tree trunks. The small canvas breathes languid, herb-scented air and fills with the noise of cicadas. René Gimpel described the frail, arthritic Renoir in these years as ‘all unyielding angles, like the unhorsed knights in a set of tin soldiers’.3 His spirit was undimmed, however, and in the landscape of Cagnes he had found his Paradise.

1 Colin B Bailey in London, National Gallery/Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada/Philadelphia Museum of Art, Renoir Landscapes 1865–1883, 2007–8, p.75. 2 Quoted by John House in London, Hayward Gallery/Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais/Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Renoir, 1985–6, p.268. 3 Quoted by Virginie Journiac in Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Renoir in the 20th Century, 2010, p.93.

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G U S TAV E C A I L L E B O T T E Paris 1848 – 1894 Gennevilliers

Portrait de Madame Anne-Marie Hagen

Signed and dated lower right: G Caillebotte / 79 Oil on canvas: 28 × 21 ¾ in / 71.1 × 55.2 cm Frame size: 40 5/8 × 33 ¼ in / 103.2 × 84.5 cm In an antique Louis XV carved and gilded swept frame p ro v en a nce

Private collection, Rheims To be included in the catalogue critique of the work of Gustave Caillebotte being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute This painting is recorded as an autograph work of Gustave Caillebotte in the archives of the Comité Caillebotte

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G U S TAV E C A I L L E B O T T E Paris 1848 – 1894 Gennevilliers

Portrait de Madame Anne-Marie Hagen

Born into a wealthy Normandy family, Gustave Caillebotte was a lynchpin of Impressionism, exhibiting with the group from 1876 to 1882. He inherited a fortune from his father in 1874 and had no need to sell his paintings, but was a generous benefactor to fellow artists. Caillebotte amassed a superb group of Impressionist works which he bequeathed to the French nation in 1894; today they form the core collection of the Musée d’Orsay. Because he had no need of promotion by a dealer such as Durand-Ruel, who spread the gospel of Monet and his circle, many of Caillebotte’s own paintings remained in the collection of his family and friends. It was not until the 1970s that his work attracted serious scholarly attention and he was revealed as one of the most innovative and original painters of the Impressionist group. His output was relatively modest – he died aged just fortysix – and his financial independence enabled him to choose more radical subjects than some of his contemporaries. Caillebotte used his family and friends as models in his paintings of modern life; most of his portraits are of people with whom he had a close connection. This serene work depicts his companion Anne-Marie Hagen,1 who appears in a number of his paintings, most famously as the fashionably-dressed woman on the bridge in Le Pont de l’Europe, 1876 (Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva).2 Caillebotte modelled for the flâneur at the fulcrum of this work: a few steps ahead, he glances back at this lady, so that it is not certain whether they are together, or whether he is admiring a stranger. The status of Anne-Marie was similarly shadowy and elusive. Caillebotte’s haut-bourgeois family disapproved of his having a mistress; to the world he was a bachelor-about-town, living with his brother Martial on the Boulevard Haussmann. Simplicity, stillness, intelligence and affection inform this portrait. The uncluttered but shimmering background and subtly modulated tones of purple, blue and rose emphasise Madame Hagen’s elegance and self-possession. Discreet jewellery – gold bracelets, a diamond ring, earrings – offsets her sober, well-cut dress. The predominant palette, as so often in Caillebotte’s interior scenes and portraits, is cool, while the caressing, varied brushwork creates a figure that is vividly real. Completely relaxed, Anne-Marie gazes trustingly at the artist, inhabiting the space with an easy intimacy. Caillebotte himself was modest and generous; a critic wrote of him in 1882 that he ‘lives very quietly, detests compliments, asks only to defend his school, and would never want to carry off a victory’.3 After Martial married in 1887, Caillebotte moved permanently with Charlotte Berthier, who seems to have replaced Anne-Marie in his affections in the mid-1880s, to the house that he had bought at Petit-Gennevilliers in 1880. There they lived in a flower-filled domestic paradise that Caillebotte often painted in his later years. Roses in the garden at Petit Gennevilliers, c.1881–83 (private collection), shows Charlotte tending the flowers, the architect of all this well-ordered beauty.4

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It has been argued by some art historians that Anne-Marie Hagen is the same young woman as Charlotte Berthier, who appears in Caillebotte’s Will of 1883, giving her a FFr. 12,000 annuity, and in a codicil of 1889 leaving her the house at Petit-Gennevilliers.5 As Charlotte can be firmly identified as the young woman portrayed in Renoir’s 1883 painting Mlle Charlotte Berthier (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), it is clear that she and Anne-Marie were indeed different women. Exquisitely dressed in a winter costume, Anne-Marie Hagen appears in a Portrait de jeune femme dans un intérieur (portrait de Mme H), 1877 (private collection).6 She is holding a fan in the unfinished oil Portrait de jeune femme (private collection).7 La femme à la rose, 1884 (formerly Robert Orchard Collection; private collection),8 the last known representation of her, like the present work shows AnneMarie in a frontal pose against a plain background, in a dark dress which contrasts with the vivid burgundy rose at her throat. Kind brown eyes, creamy skin and strong, capable hands are features both of this and our 1879 portrait. As in our portrait and Le Pont de l’Europe, one can see the glint of the same gold bracelet on her left wrist. Although she inhabited the territory of the ‘kept woman’, Caillebotte shows Anne-Marie not as a sensual plaything but as an intelligent and dignified human being, a much-loved life’s companion, despite his family’s disapproval.

Gustave Caillebotte, Le Pont de L’Europe, 1876. Oil on canvas. Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva / The Bridgeman Art Library. 1 The identification of the present painting as a portrait of Anne-Marie Hagen was kindly made by Sophie Pietri of the Wildenstein Institute (communication of January 2013). 2 Marie Berhaut, Gustave Caillebotte: Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures et Pastels, Paris 1994, pp.84–85, no.49, illus. 3 Quoted in Kirk Varnedoe, Gustave Caillebotte, New Haven and London 1987, p.10. 4 London, Royal Academy, Gustave Caillebotte: the Unknown Impressionist, 1996, illus. p.176. 5 Varnedoe op. cit., p.197. 6 Berhaut op. cit., p.94, no.59, illus. Sold Christie’s London, 7th February 2005, lot 19. 7 Berhaut p.96, no.63, illus. 8 Berhaut p.181, no.287, illus. Sold Christie’s New York, 8th November 2012, lot 432.


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G U S TAV E C A I L L E B O T T E Paris 1848 – 1894 Gennevilliers

Petit bras de la Seine, effet d’automne

Signed and dated lower right: G. Caillebotte Oil on canvas: 25 ¾ × 21 ¼ in / 65.4 × 54 cm Frame size: 33 5/8 × 29 ½ in / 85.4 × 74.9 cm In a Louis XV style carved and gilded swept frame Painted in 1890 p ro v en a nce

Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939), Paris; Drouot, Paris, 27th November 1940, lot 40 Sotheby’s Parke Bernet, New York, 23rd October 1975, lot 266 Sotheby’s New York, 9th November 1995, lot 200; Fondation Corboud, Germany Private collection, Switzerland e x h i b i ted

Tokyo, Tobu Museum of Art/Obihiro, Hokkaido Obihiro Museum of Art/ Okayama, The Okayama Prefectural Museum/Nara, Nara Prefectural Museum of Art, Monet, Renoir et les Impressionistes, 11th July–23rd December 1998, no.33, illus. in colour Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Miracle de la Couleur, 8th September–9th December 2001, pp.406–7, illus. in colour (lent by the Fondation Corboud) Lausanne, Musée de l’Hermitage, Caillebotte. Au Coeur de l’Impressionisme, 2005, pp.146, 187, no.86; illus. in colour p.166 (lent by the Fondation Corboud) l i ter at u re

Marie Berhaut, Caillebotte, sa vie et son oeuvre, La Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris 1978, p.211, no.386, illus. Marie Berhaut, Caillebotte, sa vie et son oeuvre, Catalogue raisonné des peintures et pastels, Paris 1994, p.225, no.414, illus.

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G U S TAV E C A I L L E B O T T E Paris 1848 – 1894 Gennevilliers

Petit bras de la Seine, effet d’automne

In 1881 Caillebotte inherited his father’s fortune and moved to Petit-Gennevilliers on the Seine west of Paris, where he could indulge his passion for yachting. The Seine is a major theme in his later paintings, both the busy river bank of Sunday bathers and canotiers, immortalised in Guy de Maupassant’s novella Mouche (1890), and the quiet backwaters explored only by aficionados of the river. The present painting is one of a group made between 1884 and 1893 that depicts a branch of the Seine at Colombes, today filled in. It is taken from the tip of l’île Marande looking in the direction of Bezons, with the rive de Colombes on the left.1 The choice of an upright format and a high horizon enhances the sense of a secret, inviolable space, although the scene was not far from the bustling industrial suburb of Argenteuil. The only sign of human presence is the whitewashed, red-roofed cottage at the right, which is reduced to a rapid notation of quick strokes. Caillebotte is mesmerised by the reflections on the water, with the intense blue river invaded by the colours of the autumn leaves. The sky reaches down to the Seine with an equally intense blue that forms a haze of violet at the horizon. It is one of those perfect, poignant autumn afternoons that will be chased away on the morrow by a gust of bad weather. The painting was inspired by works such as Monet’s 1879 Seine at Vétheuil (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen),2 another upright composition with a ribbon of river lighting up the centre of the work. Caillebotte’s composition is more radical, however, with its determinedly ‘anti-picturesque’ intensity and the tension between the deep recession of the landscape and the importance of the picture plane. His brushstrokes are fierce and fluid and the detail of nature is subsumed into a desire to confront bold blocks of colour: blue and emerald, yellow-green and blue. Caillebotte joys in the decorative, rather than descriptive, qualities of paint, just as Monet does in paintings of the 1880s such as Le bras de Jeufosse, automne, 1884 (private collection), which also explores a peaceful backwater of the Seine.3 Caillebotte took the example of his Impressionist friends and came to his own highly original conclusions: ‘il dégage de l’oeuvre des artistes qu’il juge significatifs les éléments de compositions les plus originaux et les pousse jusqu’à leur extrême limite’.4 The vivid juxtaposed brushstrokes, such as the flecks of red and yellow that make up the left foreground trees, or the tree in the central distance, composed of slashes of green on a gold ground, reflect Caillebotte’s awareness of the developments of Neo-Impressionism. He remains, however, proudly original. In the stillness of Petit bras de la Seine, effet d’automne there is a touch of the mystery and gentle melancholy that makes Caillebotte’s work so compelling. Petit bras de la Seine was in the collection of the art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939), champion of Renoir, the Post-Impressionists and Picasso. After his sudden death in a car crash in 1939, Vollard had no direct heirs and his fine collection was divided between his extended family of ‘natural’ heirs and his close friends the de Galéa family, who received two-thirds of the paintings. Vollard requested that the works should be sold off piecemeal at auction. Petit bras de la Seine was sold at Drouot, Paris on 27th November 1940, lot 40, probably consigned by M. de Galéa.5

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Claude Monet, Le bras de Jeufosse, automne, signed and dated 1884. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

1 2 3 4

For other versions of this view, see Berhaut 1994, op. cit., nos.413, 415, 416. Daniel Wildenstein, Monet: Catalogue Raisonné, 1996, vol. II, p.210, no.537, illus. in colour. Wildenstein 1996, op. cit., vol. II, pp.342–343, no.917, illus. p.340. Lausanne, Musée de l’Hermitage, Caillebotte. Au Coeur de l’Impressionisme, 2005, chapter ‘Caillebotte and the Seine’ by Rodolphe Rapett, p.146. 5 See Art Loss Register report.


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E VA G O N Z A L E S 1849 – Paris – 1883

La fenêtre

Signed lower left: Eva Gonzalès Oil on canvas: 21 7/8 × 18 7/8 in / 55.6 × 47.9 cm Frame size: 33 × 29 in / 83.8 × 73.7 cm In its original Barbizon style fluted composition frame Painted circa 1865–70 p ro v en a nce

Eva Gonzalès sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 20th February 1885, lot 36 (FFr. 75) Private collection, France Private collection, Paris e x h i b i ted

Paris, Salons de La Vie Moderne, Eva Gonzalès, January 1885, no.27 l i ter at u re

Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu and Jacques de Mons, Eva Gonzalès 1849–1883: Etude Critique et Catalogue Raisonné, Paris 1990, no.24, illus.; illus. p.274

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E VA G O N Z A L E S 1849 – Paris – 1883

La fenêtre

Eva Gonzalès was born in 1849 in Paris into a talented family. Her father, Emmanuel Gonzalès, was a famous novelist,1 and her mother, a talented harpist,2 guided the education of their two daughters with the lilt of her mezzo-soprano voice. After a childhood steeped in literature and music, notably opera,3 Éva Gonzalès headed towards an artistic career. She chose painting and on 3rd January 1866 joined the atelier of Charles Chaplin,4 fashionable portraitist of the grand bourgeoisie and Parisian aristocracy. It was unthinkable at the time for a young girl of good family to attend the atelier of Edouard Manet: he had shaken the Establishment with his painting Olympia, exhibited at the Salon of 1863. With this work, rejected at the time, the artist opened the way for the Impressionists and became the precursor of modern art. Yet Eva became his student, his only pupil, in February 1869.

Now presented in the catalogue of the Salon des Artistes Français as the pupil of Charles Chaplin and Edouard Manet, Eva Gonzalès received praise and encouragement from the most important critics and authors, even Alexandre Dumas himself. She led her artistic career in the shadow of Edouard Manet whose ideas she embraced, refusing, as he did, to participate in the Impressionist exhibitions. The official arena of the Salon was hers, and her artistic career, fired with intelligence and strong determination, led her to be recognized as a pioneer of modern art. She always maintained a very feminine inclination for soft colours, used here in La fenêtre, but she eventually learned how to use bursts of red and green in service to a new pictorial writing used in La lecture au jardin. What would she have painted had she lived longer? Her paintings, as rare as they are beautiful, are a testament to her passion.

La fenêtre was executed circa 1865–1870, during which Gonzalès initially followed the teachings of Charles Chaplin, with whom she remained until May 1867; she then worked on her own before attending the studio of Manet. This painting shows the qualities of subtlety and flexibility of her brush. The two little girls, quietly sitting on a balcony, pose in pink and blue-striped dresses. One holds a book, the other a doll. The brush of the artist skilfully conveys the soft texture of fabrics, the craftsmanship of the wrought iron balcony and behind, the foliage of the wisteria. Through the branches, one can see two Medici vases surmounting the pillars of a gate, and to the left, the silhouette of a large house.5

Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu

In the foreground, notice the stack of books, including one with a yellow cover (probably E Dentu editions)6 at the foot of the girl in pink. The artist portrays here a delicate still life. Her dexterity is revealed in the execution of the still, open white pages. Through books, Eva Gonzalès pays tribute to her father, whom she worshipped and admired. Featuring as a school book in La fenêtre, the book becomes bedtime reading in Le réveil (catalogue raisonné no.81). It can be the main subject of the painting, as is the case with the novel hidden in a musical score in En cachette (no.90). It is also a chromatic counterpoint in Sous le berceau (Honfleur) (no.108): the yellow book re-enlivens the ensemble with raw colour against cool green and blue tones. Finally, found on the knees of the sitter in La lecture au jardin (no.115), a masterpiece of Eva Gonzalès, the book takes on the leading colours of the painting: red for the cover and green for the band. La fenêtre can be compared to a pastel executed in 1873–1874, called La nichée,7 and exhibited at the Salon of 1874. The artist uses in both cases the same pale blue and pink tones creating a melody that the art critic Castagnary was quick to point out: ‘A girl in a pink bathrobe sits in front of her dressing table [covered with a blue cloth] and looks upon a teeming litter of puppies in a basket. It’s fair, bright and full of seductive harmony; Miss Eva Gonzalès has an education as a colourist and it shows at first sight. There is a sense in what she puts into each production. Nothing vulgar, nothing ill-mannered: grace in its utmost simplicity and naturalness. These are happy qualities that cannot fail to achieve the best results’.

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1 Emmanuel Gonzalès (1815–1887) is today forgotten. 2 Eva Gonzalès made a painting of her mother playing the harp (Sainsaulieu catalogue raisonné op. cit., no.55). 3 Eva Gonzalès painted in 1874 Une loge aux Italiens (cat. rais. no.61), with her sister Jeanne and Henri Guérard, Manet’s engraver, posing as the couple in the opera box. Eva married Henri Guérard in 1879. 4 1825–1891, painter and engraver. 5 An oral tradition records that the little girls were the children of the caretakers of the Château de Dampierre, the property of the Duc de Luynes. Eva Gonzalès was probably introduced to Dampierre either by Charles Chaplin or by her father Emmanuel Gonzalès, President of the Société des Gens de Lettres. Thanks to this office, Emmanuel Gonzalès was received in all the salons of Paris. 6 This publisher, celebrated in the nineteenth century, published Emmanuel Gonzalès. 7 Bought by the French State at the sale of 1885 after Gonzalès’s death. Today the pastel is in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.


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HENRI-EDMOND CROSS Douai 1856 – 1910 Saint-Clair

Printemps rose

Signed and dated lower right: Henri Edmond Cross 09 Oil on canvas: 28 ¾ × 36 ½ in / 73 × 92 cm Frame size: 37 7/8 × 45 3/8 in / 96.2 × 115.3 cm In a Louis XIV style carved and gilded pastel frame Painted between September 1908 and April 1909 p ro v en a nce

Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris Count Harry Kessler (1868–1937), Weimar Gustave Coquiot (1865–1926) Private collection, Paris William Beadleston Inc., New York; from whom acquired in 1984 by Veronique (1932–2012) and Gregory Peck (1916–2003) l i ter at u re

Artist’s stock ledger Felix Fénéon, Bulletin de la Vie artistique, Paris, 15th May 1922, p.229 Felix Fénéon, Bulletin de la Vie artistique, Paris, 1st June 1922, p.254 and in accompanying pamphlet Lucie Cousturier, ‘HE Cross’, L’Art Décoratif, Paris, March 1913, illus. p.131 Isabelle Compin, HE Cross, Paris 1964, no.222, illus. p.329 Andrea Pophanken, Die Moderne und ihre Sammler: Französische Kunst in deutschem Privatbesitz vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, Berlin 2001, p.88 To included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Henri-Edmond Cross being prepared by Patrick Offenstadt under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Institute

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HENRI-EDMOND CROSS Douai 1856 – 1910 Saint-Clair

Printemps rose

Printemps rose is a joyous celebration of Henri-Edmond Cross’s love affair with the South of France, where he had lived since 1891 in Saint-Clair near Saint-Tropez. The Impressionists’ preoccupation with colour and light was pushed in new, radical directions by artists such as Theo van Rysselberghe, Paul Signac, George Seurat and Cross himself. Cross’s Neo-Impressionist style, like Seurat’s Divisionism, was influenced by the colour theories of the French chemist Eugène-Michel Chevreul. This painting was made between September 1908, after Cross returned from a tour of Tuscany and Umbria, and April 1909, shortly before he left for Paris to consult doctors about his failing health. Cross had been deeply moved by the pure colours and exquisite line of Italian early Renaissance works by artists such as Piero della Francesca (c.1415/20–1492). Something of this purity translates into Printemps rose. By this stage, Cross had long freed himself from strict adhesion to colour theories and ‘was no longer concerned with representing the reality of a landscape, but in recomposing it by means of his imagination’.1 He wrote to Matisse in 1906: ‘my aspirations are drawing me more and more towards a kind of musical art. So you can see I’m a long way from the reconstitution of nature or realism. I want my spontaneous, instinctive conception of the image to be above all one of harmony’.2 Printemps rose evokes this sense of harmony with the leitmotif of the almond trees, a froth of pink blossom, framing the composition and fringing the blue ocean which is flecked with the sails of yachts. The dazzling pink of the right-hand almond is haloed by an umbrella pine whose cool blue-green shadows contrast with it. Cross uses fluid dabs of paint, very different from the careful dots of the Divisionists, to make the picture surface pulsate with life. The blue Mediterreanean sky is translated into a primrose radiance, so bright is the spring light. Yet there is nothing harsh or angular in the painting, which indeed is reminiscent of a composition by Debussy. This painting was in the collection of the actor Gregory Peck, star of Roman Holiday (1953), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and many other celebrated movies, and his French wife Veronique. The Pecks acquired a carefully-chosen group of works, including paintings and sculptures by Georges Rouault, Aristide Maillol and Fernand Léger. Their daughter Cecilia commented: ‘[they] only bought paintings that mattered deeply to them….Encountering the luminous Henri Cross landscape upon entering the living room was like sipping a glass of champagne on the way into a wonderful party, of which my parents hosted so many’.

1 Françoise Baligand in Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Cross et le néo-Impressionisme: de Seurat à Matisse, 2011, p.101. 2 Cross to Matisse 26th November 1906, Archives Matisse, quoted Baligand op. cit., p.94.

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Gregory Peck. Private Collection. © Look and Learn / Elgar Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library.


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HENR I LE SIDA NER Port-Louis 1862 – 1939 Versailles

Les roses sur la maison, Gerberoy

Signed lower left: Le Sidaner Oil on canvas: 26 × 32 ¼ in / 66 × 81.9 cm Frame size: 34 × 40 in / 86.4 × 101.6 cm In a Louis XIV carved and gilded frame Painted in 1917 p ro v en a nce

Galeries Georges Petit, inv. no.3085 and 9592 Newhouse Galleries, New York, 1928 Private collection, USA Parke Bernet Galleries, New York, 3rd November 1978, lot 513, illus. Richard Green, London, 1978 Private collection, North America e x h i b i ted

Paris, Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, Salon, 1918 l i ter at u re

Yann Farinaux-Le Sidaner, Le Sidaner: l’Oeuvre Peint et Gravé, Paris 1989, p.154, no.380, illus.

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HENR I LE SIDA NER Port-Louis 1862 – 1939 Versailles

Les roses sur la maison, Gerberoy

In 1901 Henri Le Sidaner went to Gerberoy, about six miles north-west of Beauvais in Picardy, in search of a house around which he could develop a garden. The area had been recommended to him by Rodin. Le Sidaner was enchanted by the ‘old sleepy town, steeped in history and gentle nostalgia’,1 where William the Conqueror had fought his unruly son Robert Curthose and which had been besieged in the Hundred Years’ War and the sixteenth century Wars of Religion. Le Sidaner rented a small cottage which in 1910 he bought and began to enlarge, adding a garden of terraces, Italianate balustrades and pavilions, overlooking halftimbered houses, cobbled streets and the rolling countryside beyond. The house was bitterly cold and Le Sidaner spent only one winter there, retreating otherwise to the comforts of Versailles, the South of France or elegant European cities such as Venice and London. In the summers Gerberoy was his paradise and the inspiration for many paintings depicting the soft grey, rambling lanes and nooks of his garden illuminated with oblique light. It became as important to him as Giverny to Monet or the garden at Marquayrol to Henri Martin. This painting shows the house of Le Sidaner’s gardener Alfred, a key figure in the artist’s life who helped to create the rose-wreathed terraces. Alfred’s house appears again in a painting of 1923, La maison du jardinier (private collection)2 and another of 1936, La maison d’Alfred au clair de lune (private collection).3 In the present work Le Sidaner employs a modified Impressionist technique to subtle effect, grounding the composition in juxtaposed tones of lilac and blue-green, with warmer colours seeping in from the bricks, tiles and pale pink roses. Late, raking sunlight filters from a bend in the road through a lattice of leaves. The warmth and peace of a summer afternoon fill the deserted street. Architecture is softened by the lazy spread of climbing roses. After the turn of the century Le Sidaner rarely included figures in his paintings, preferring, as with his oblique light, to imply rather than to show overtly. The critic Maurice Hamburger commented that the artist ‘has consistently and deliberately refused to paint spectacular works, preferring instead little-known places or the most intimate aspects of well-known sites. Le Sidaner has sensed that beauty, like happiness, consists above all in inner harmony, calm and simplicity’.

1 Farinaux-Le Sidaner op. cit., p.14. 2 Ibid., p.189, no.485. 3 Ibid., p.281, no.772.

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HENR I LE SIDA NER Port-Louis 1862 – 1939 Versailles

Le bouquet à la fenêtre, Villefranche-sur-Mer

Signed lower left: Le Sidaner Oil on canvas: 36 ¼ × 28 7/8 in / 92 × 73.2 cm Frame size: 45 ½ × 38 in / 115.6 × 96.5 cm In a Louis XIV style carved and gilded pastel frame Painted in 1928 p ro v en a nce

Georges Bergaud, by 1928 Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 28th February 1936, lot 80 Henri Gougerot (1881–1955), Paris Hôtel Drouot, 21st March 1955 Christie’s London, 13th May 1955, lot 118 Galerie Fricker, Crespières Gemälde-Galerie Abels, Cologne, by October 1955 Charles Z Offin (1900–1990), New York; given by him to the City College of New York in 1990 e x h i b i ted

Paris, Musée Galliera, Rétrospective Le Sidaner, 1948, no.8 Cologne, Gemälde-Galerie Abels, Peintres français modernes, October 1955 l i ter at u re

Camille Mauclair, Henri Le Sidaner, Paris 1928, p.199, illus. Yann Farinaux-Le Sidaner, Le Sidaner: l’Oeuvre Peint et Gravé, Paris 1989, p.248, no.668, illus.

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HENR I LE SIDA NER Port-Louis 1862 – 1939 Versailles

Le bouquet à la fenêtre, Villefranche-sur-Mer

Henri Le Sidaner first stayed at Villefranche-sur-Mer, a couple of miles east of Nice, in 1910. Like many artists based in the north of France, including Cross, Signac and Bonnard, he was enraptured by the light of the Midi. Le Sidaner, however, had childhood memories of luxuriant vegetation and intense light, as he had spent his first ten years on the island of Mauritius. In the 1920s Le Sidaner made annual visits to Villefranche, staying at the Hôtel Welcome in the Old Port, overlooking the bay. This magical painting of 1928 combines two favourite themes: a view from a window looking out and the intense, mysterious state of twilight. As the sun goes down, blue light fills the bay and yellow-painted boats glow chartreuse, while the low rays make the orange of the flowers in the foreground stand out more brightly. As so often in Le Sidaner’s works, human presence is implicit – but not overt – in the bobbing boats and the single cup and pot. Paul Signac commented of Le Sidaner: ‘his entire work is influenced by a taste for tender, soft and silent atmospheres. Gradually, he even went so far as to eliminate from his paintings all human figures, as if he feared that the slightest human form might disturb their muffled silence’.1 Le Sidaner employs his own highly original interpretation of Neo-Impressionist technique, juxtaposing touches of contrasting colours, such as the pink and blue of the foreground tablecloth and the green and blue of the water. Local colours are heightened to enhance the mood. The violet shadows of the tablecloth join with the violet that washes around the window frame and onto the balcony, dissolving form and enhancing the sense of a dreamlike, hot twilight. This use of colour to manipulate mood as well as to record natural phenomena shows the influence of Symbolism in Le Sidaner’s mature works.

1 Quoted in Farinaux-Le Sidaner, op. cit., p.31.

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PIERRE BONNARD Fontenay-aux-Roses 1867–1947 Cannet, Alpes-Maritimes

Le corsage rayé

Signed lower right: Bonnard Oil on canvas: 25 ¼ × 18 in / 64 × 46 cm Frame size: 33 × 26 in / 83.8 × 66 cm In an antique Louis XIII carved and gilded frame Painted circa 1922 p ro v en a nce

Paul Rosenberg, Paris Leon Delaroche, Paris, 10th May 1938; by descent Private collection, Europe, 1998 Richard Green, London, 2006 Private collection, USA e x h i b i ted

London, Richard Green, Visions of Impressionism, 2007, no.24, illus. in colour l i ter at u re

J and H Dauberville, Bonnard, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Paris 1973, vol. III, p.140, no.1153, illus.

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PIERRE BONNARD Fontenay-aux-Roses 1867–1947 Cannet, Alpes-Maritimes

Le corsage rayé

Perhaps best known for his intimate interiors, Pierre Bonnard had begun painting private domestic scenes as early as 1889. Throughout his career he continued to record scenes from his intimate world, frequently inspired by his companion and muse Marthe de Méligny. In these works he endeavoured ‘to draw the spectator into a painting on a contemplative journey, in which familiar objects are encountered as though for the first time, forming unexpected relationships and assuming new meanings’.1 By the 1920s Bonnard’s palette had developed from dark, earthy tones to a brighter, more vibrant combination of reds, blues and whites. The flat planes of colour seen in his earlier works are replaced by a more varied, dappled application of paint which served to create depth and intensity. Le corsage rayé is an expression of Bonnard’s love of colour. The background and white tablecloth are described by a subtle, carefully blended variety of pastel tones including azure, ochre, violet and teal green, which creates a powerful contrast with the intense scarlet of Marthe’s brightly lit, striped blouse. For Bonnard, ‘Light, in combination with colour, became a key factor in the organization of a painting. Objects are broken up by light in patterns of colour across the surface, and the dialogue between object and colour, colour and pattern, pattern and surface, surface and pictorial depth becomes part of the content of the painting’.2 Bonnard met his lifelong companion, the beautiful Marie Boursin, in 1893. He encountered her on the boulevard Haussmann in Paris when she introduced herself as sixteen-year-old Marthe de Méligny, the daughter of artistocratic Italian parents. It was not until after their marriage some thirty years later that Bonnard discovered her real identity; in truth she was a farmer’s daughter from the Midi and had been twenty-four at their first meeting. Described as ‘voluptuous’ and ‘almost risqué’, Marthe became central to Bonnard’s work, appearing in one hundred and fifty paintings and over seven hundred sketches. In Le corsage rayé Marthe is seated at a table in a pensive, reserved mood; her face is turned away from the viewer, her eyes avoiding direct contact with the painter. Although Bonnard depicted her throughout her life in the most intimate situations, Marthe was known to be shy and reserved. Antoine Terrasse, the artist’s great-nephew, recalled that she would carry an umbrella to shield herself from attention when out in public. The intimate nature of this painting is intensified by the fact that during this period Marthe was aware that Bonnard was engaged in a rather public affair with Renée Monchaty. Crushed by her partner’s infidelity, she further withdrew from public life. This contemplative pose, in which she appears immersed in her own thoughts, creates a deeply personal and private painting. The striped red blouse that Marthe is wearing in Le corsage rayé appears in a number of works from the 1920s, including Reine Natanson et Marthe Bonnard au corsage rouge (Dauberville no.1403; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris); Femme tenant un chien (Dauberville no.1156; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC) and Le corsage rouge (Dauberville no.1319; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris).

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1 Nicholas Watkins, Bonnard, London 2002, p.52. 2 Watkins op cit., p.171.


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HENRI M ANGUIN Paris 1874 – 1949 Saint-Tropez

Le fond du golfe de Saint-Tropez vu de la plaine de Grimaud

Signed lower right: Manguin Oil on canvas: 21 5/8 × 28 ¾ in / 60 × 73 cm Frame size: 32 × 37 in / 81.3 × 94 cm In a Louis XIV style carved and gilded frame Painted in summer-autumn 1921 p ro v en a nce

Bought from Manguin by Marcel Bernheim in March 1923; Galerie Marcel Bernheim, Paris Private collection, France, since circa 1955 l i ter at u re

Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu, Henri Manguin Catalogue Raisonné de l’Oeuvre Peint sous la Direction de Lucile et Claude Manguin, Neuchâtel 1980, p.240, no.690, illus. (dimensions wrongly given as 65 × 81 cm)

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HENRI M ANGUIN Paris 1874 – 1949 Saint-Tropez

Le fond du golfe de Saint-Tropez vu de la plaine de Grimaud

Henri Manguin was a pupil with Matisse, Marquet, Rouault and Camoin in the studio of Gustave Moreau, a liberal teacher who sensed the ferment of originality in these young men: he told them that he was the bridge over which they would pass. They sprang to notoriety at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, with paintings in which vivid, anti-naturalistic colour is used as a vehicle to express emotion. Perspective, paramount since the Renaissance, was jettisoned in favour of eddying black lines and a pulsating picture plane. The outraged critic Louis Vauxcelles dubbed these artists ‘fauves’ (wild beasts). Manguin first discovered the South of France in 1904, when he was invited to Saint-Tropez by Signac. From the 1920s, like his friend Matisse, he divided his time between Paris and the South of France, renting, then buying, a house called l’Oustallet at Saint-Tropez. Le fond du golfe de Saint-Tropez vu de la plaine de Grimaud, taken from a viewpoint about five miles west of Saint-Tropez, was painted in the summer or early autumn of 1921. By this time Manguin had moved away from the hot, clashing colours of his Fauve period to achieve a harmonious, interlinked palette. Here he weaves greens, blues, blue-greys and violet with touches of primrose, soft pink on the distant hills and the orange-red of tiled roofs, giving a sense of lush warmth as the summer reaches its climax and the vendange approaches. Manguin delighted in high viewpoints viewed through a lattice of foreground trees and with a glimpse of the brilliant blue waters of the Golfe de Saint-Tropez as a central focus. The graceful balance of this composition, the subtle tension between naturalistic recession and the liveliness of the picture plane, owes a debt to Cézanne. The landscape is articulated through receding horizontal bands of blue-green vegetation and, beyond the brilliant bar of azure water in the Golfe, the soft blue-grey of the distant mountains. The use of a repoussoir tree and graduated bands of receding natural features goes back beyond Cézanne to Claude Lorrain (c.1604/5–1682), pioneer of French landscape tradition. Like Cézanne, Manguin was awed by the classical timelessness of the landscape of the South and quite naturally summoned the ghost of his great seventeenth century predecessor when evoking the magic of his Provençal home.

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R AOUL DUF Y Le Havre 1877 – 1953 Forqalquier

Le bassin de Deauville

Signed and dated lower left: Raoul Dufy 1938 Oil on canvas: 13 × 32 ¼ in / 33 × 81.9 cm Frame size: 20 ½ × 40 in / 52.1 × 101.6 cm In its original gilded cassetta frame p ro v en a nce

Dr Maurice Girardin (1884–1951), Paris; by inheritance e x h i b i ted

Paris, Galerie Europe, Hommage à Raoul Dufy, May–June 1967, no.14, illus. l i ter at u re

Maurice Laffaille, Raoul Dufy: catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, vol. II, Geneva 1973, p.370, no.898, illus.

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R AOUL DUF Y Le Havre 1877 – 1953 Forqalquier

Le bassin de Deauville

Raoul Dufy exulted in the theme of pleasure sailing all his life. Most of his subjects – horse racing, dancing, concert-going, sea bathing – celebrate the joy of existence. The sea was a constant background to his childhood in Le Havre and its shifting, ambiguous quality was an ideal metaphor for his way of forming a picture. In Le bassin de Deauville the delight lies in the play between flatness and recession, patterns on the picture surface and ‘realistic’ space. The yachts, created with a seemingly childlike naivety with a few strokes of the brush, are in fact placed with perfect poise so that they evoke both panorama and depth. Dufy grounds the whole composition in blue, his favourite colour. ‘In an interview given at the end of his life, [Dufy] stated that blue was the only colour that retains its distinctiveness, whatever its degree; that it never changes, whatever the shade or variation’.1 The freedom of the yachts, which float about our field of vision, is contrasted with the monumental buildings of the port behind, crisply defined in a network of black lines. The stubby, grubby steamship at the left, a typically witty touch, also serves to underline the grace of the sailing ships. Le bassin de Deauville was made in 1938, when Dufy had refined his style to a point where he could convey its essence with the chicest, most economical of means. By this time he was internationally celebrated, with shows in London, Basle, New York and Chicago that year. In 1937 he had had great success with his vast painting La fée électricité, exhibited at the Exposition Internationale in Paris. Despite its immense size, it was described by New York Herald Tribune critic John Ashbery as achieving ‘a truly Mozartian lightness’.2 One might say the same of the present painting. This painting was formerly owned by Dr Maurice Girardin (1884–1951), a dentist by profession who purchased his first work – a Signac view of Venice – in 1914. Girardin amassed a large collection of contemporary paintings from artists who frequently became friends, including Georges Rouault, Marcel Gromaire, Raoul Dufy, Vlaminck, Utrillo, Lipchitz and Zadkine. In 1920 he founded Galerie La Licorne at 110 Rue de La Boétie, promoting the work of young talents. Girardin bequeathed over six hundred works to the Ville de Paris, which today are kept in the Palais de Tokyo. Dufy’s Le bassin de Deauville has descended in Dr Girardin’s family.

1 Charles Sala, ‘Raoul et Jean Dufy’ in exh. cat. Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet, Raoul et Jean Dufy: Complicité et Rupture, 2011, p.84. 2 Quoted in Musée Marmottan Monet 2011, op. cit., p.180.

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RIC HARD GREEN AT 147 NEW BOND STRE ET

We are delighted to welcome visitors to The Spirit of Impressionism, the first exhibition at Richard Green’s newly-refurbished gallery at 147 New Bond Street. Occupied by our family firm since 1998, the Georgian building was once the home of Admiral Lord Nelson. 147 New Bond Street is the setting for a changing display of outstanding paintings from the Dutch Golden Age to Post-Impressionism. In 2011 it was complemented by Richard Green’s specially commissioned premises at 33 New Bond Street, designed to show our collection of twentieth century Modern and Contemporary Masters. The refurbishment at 147 New Bond Street has been masterminded by Philip Hooper of Colefax & Fowler with the close involvement of the Green family. ‘We wanted a classical ethos with a contemporary twist’, says Jonathan Green, Deputy Executive Chairman, ‘to make our clients feel welcome and relaxed when they come to buy paintings’. Comfortable chairs and sofas and intimate lighting create a modern, more personal approach and the way that paintings are hung takes inspiration ‘from the way that our collectors live with their pictures’. Philip Hooper has introduced some elements of drama, such as darker spaces with wall hangings in richly-textured bronze silk and teal-green broadcloth, to show off the Old Masters. The atmosphere of the gallery is enhanced by the superb antique furniture collected by Richard Green over fifty years, including seventeenth century Thomas Tompion clocks and a rococo table by Paul Saunders that formerly graced the library at Longleat House. The elegant eighteenth century chairs have been reupholstered in unexpected fabrics, including a Moroccan-inspired weave, a stylish twist that refreshes the rooms while keeping a sense of heritage and continuity. Employing subtle colours not far removed from those used in the previous colour scheme, Philip Hooper’s philosophy has been ‘to refurnish the gallery so that clients would be aware of a lighter atmosphere, but not be quite sure what the changes were. I think this is exceptionally successful in the Nelson Gallery where the mirrors in the roof light and the remodelling of the panelling look completely at ease with the space, giving it a new dignity and proportion’.

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TER M S AND CONDITIONS

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THE SPIRIT OF IMPRESSIONISM

4. PAYME NT 4.1 The Price shall be as stated on the Invoice. Payment shall be made in full by bank transfer or cheque and is received when Seller has cleared funds. 4.2 Full payment of the Price shall be made to Seller within 30 days of receipt of Invoice. Interest shall be payable on overdue amounts at the rate of 3% per annum above Royal Bank of Scotland Base Rate for Sterling. 4.3 Until full title to the Work has passed, Buyer shall not sell, export, dispose of, or part with possession of the Work. 4.4 Until full title to the Work has passed, Buyer shall hold the Work unencumbered as Seller’s fiduciary agent and bailee and shall: (1) keep the Work at Buyer’s premises separate from the property of Buyer and third parties and identified as Seller’s property and properly stored with adequate security measures; (2) keep the Work comprehensively insured for not less than the Price, have Seller’s interest noted on the policy and provide a copy of such notification to Seller; and (3) preserve the Work in an unaltered state, in particular not undertake any work whatsoever and shall take all reasonable steps to prevent any damage to or deterioration of the Work. 4.5 Until such time as full title to the Work has passed, if Buyer is in breach of clauses 4.3 or 4.4; or (1) Buyer (if it is more than one person, jointly and/or severally) shall enter into, and/or itself apply for, and/or call meetings of members and/or partners and/or creditors with a view to, one or more of a moratorium, interim order, administration, liquidation (of any kind, including provisional), bankruptcy (including appointment of an interim receiver), or composition and/or arrangement (whether under deed or otherwise) with creditors, and/or have any of its property subjected to one or more of appointment of a receiver (of any kind), enforcement of security, distress, or execution of a judgment (to include similar events under the laws of other countries);or (2) Seller reasonably apprehends that any of the events mentioned above is about to occur in relation to Buyer and notifies Buyer accordingly; or (3) Buyer does anything which may in any way adversely affect Seller’s title in the Work, then Seller or its agent may immediately repossess the Work and/or void the sale with or without notice and Buyer will return the Work to Seller’s nominated address (at Buyer’s sole risk and cost), or, at Seller’s option, Seller may enter the premises where the Work is kept to regain possession. 5. RE P RE SE NTATI O N OF S ELLER 5.1 Seller confirms that, to the best of its knowledge and belief, it has authority to sell the Work. 5.2 Buyer agrees that all liability of Seller and all rights of Buyer against Seller in relation to the Work howsoever arising and of whatever nature shall cease after the expiry of five years from Delivery. This paragraph does not prejudice Buyer’s statutory rights. 5.3 Notwithstanding anything in this Agreement to the contrary, Seller shall not be liable to Buyer for any loss of profits, loss of revenue, goodwill or for any indirect or consequential loss arising out of or in connection with this Agreement, whenever the same may arise, and Seller’s total and cumulative liability for losses whether for breach of contract, tort or otherwise and including liability for negligence (except in relation to (i) death or personal injury caused by Seller’s negligence or (ii) fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation by Seller) shall in no event exceed the Price. 5.4 All representations made by Seller as to the authenticity, attribution, description, date, age, provenance, title or condition of the Work constitute the Seller’s opinion only and are not warranted by Seller. Seller accepts no liability as a result of any changes in expert opinion or scholarship which may take place subsequent to entry into this Agreement.


6. C O PY R I GH T All copyright in material relating to the Work vesting in Seller shall remain Seller’s. Seller reserves the right to exploit all such copyright. 7. E XPO RT A N D LO CA L TA X E S 7.1 Where the Work is to be exported from the UK by Buyer, this Agreement is conditional on the granting of any requisite export licence or permission, which the parties shall use reasonable endeavours to obtain. 7.2 Where the Work is, or is to be exported from the European Union and VAT has not been charged because, by reason of such intended export, the Work is zero rated or not subject to VAT, both parties shall take all necessary steps to ensure that there is compliance with the time limits and formalities laid down by HM Revenue & Customs and that such documentation as is required, including any necessary proofs of export and Bills of Lading are fully and properly completed. Buyer shall indemnify Seller against any claims made against Seller for VAT or any other expenses or penalties imposed by reason of Buyer’s failure to observe and comply with the formalities referred to herein. 7.3 Unless otherwise stated on the Invoice, Buyer shall be responsible for all Local Taxes.

9. A RB I TRATI O N 9.1 All claims and disputes relating to, or in connection with, the Agreement are to be referred to a single arbitrator in London pursuant to the Arbitration Act 1996. In the event that the parties cannot agree upon an arbitrator either party may apply to the President of the Law Society of England and Wales for the time being to appoint as arbitrator a Queen’s Counsel of not less than 5 years standing. The decision of the arbitrator shall be final and binding. 9.2 Save that Buyer acknowledges Seller’s right to seek, and the power of the High Court to grant interim relief, no action shall be brought in relation to any claim or dispute until the arbitrator has conducted an arbitration and made his award. March 2006

“Richard Green” is a registered trade mark of Richard Green Old Master Paintings Ltd in the EU, the USA and other countries.

Asking prices are current at time of going to press – Richard Green reserves the right to amend these prices in line with market values

8. G E N E R A L 8.1 Buyer shall not be entitled to the benefit of any set-off and sums payable to Seller shall be paid without any deduction whatsoever. In the event of non-payment Seller shall be entitled to obtain and enforce judgement without determination of any cross claim by Buyer. 8.2 Both parties agree that in entering into the Agreement neither party relies on, nor has any remedy in respect of, any statement, representation or warranty, negligently or innocently made to any person (whether party to this Agreement or not) other than as set out in the Agreement as a warranty. The only remedy for breach of any warranty shall be for breach of contract under the Agreement. Nothing in the Agreement shall operate to limit or exclude any liability for fraud. 8.3 The benefit of the Agreement and the rights thereunder shall not be assignable by Buyer. Seller may sub-contract its obligations. 8.4 Any notice in connection with the Agreement shall be in writing and shall be delivered by hand or by post to Seller’s registered office at the time of posting or to Buyer to the Invoice Address, and shall be deemed delivered on delivery if by hand or on the third day after posting if posted. 8.5 In the case of a consumer contract within the meaning of the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977, these conditions shall not apply to the extent that they would be rendered void or unenforceable by virtue of the provisions thereof. 8.6 No amendment, modification, waiver of or variation to the Invoice or the Agreement shall be binding unless agreed in writing and signed by an authorised representative of Buyer and Seller. 8.7 Neither Seller nor Buyer intends the terms of the Agreement to be enforceable by a third party pursuant to the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999. 8.8 The Agreement and all rights and obligations of Seller and Buyer under it shall be governed by English Law in every particular and, subject always to the prior application of the arbitration provisions set out in clause 9, both parties agree to submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the English Courts.

11 3


R ICHAR D GR EEN Richard Green has assisted in the formation and development of numerous private and public collections including the following:

UNITED KINGDOM Aberdeen: City Art Gallery Altrincham: Dunham Massey (NT) Barnard Castle: Bowes Museum Bedford: Cecil Higgins Museum Canterbury: Royal Museum and Art Gallery Cheltenham: Art Gallery and Museum Chester: The Grosvenor Museum Coventry: City Museum Dedham: Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum Hampshire: County Museums Service Hull: Ferens Art Gallery Ipswich: Borough Council Museums and Galleries Leeds: Leeds City Art Gallery Lincoln: Usher Gallery Liskeard: Thorburn Museum London: Chiswick House (English Heritage) Department of the Environment The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood The Museum of London National Maritime Museum National Portrait Gallery National Postal Museum Tate Britain The Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum Lydiard Tregoze: Lydiard House Norwich: Castle Museum Plymouth: City Museum and Art Gallery Richmond: London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and Orleans House Gallery St Helier: States of Jersey (Office) Southsea: Royal Marine Museum Stirling: Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum York: York City Art Gallery

CANADA Fredericton: Beaverbrook Art Gallery Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts Cincinnati, OH: Art Museum Gainesville, FL: Harn Museum of Art Houston, TX: Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation Los Angeles, CA: J Paul Getty Museum New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art New York, NY: Dahesh Museum Ocala, FL: The Appleton Museum of Art Omaha, NE: Joslyn Art Museum Pasadena, CA: Norton Simon Museum Rochester, NY: Genessee County Museum San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library St Louis, MO: Missouri Historical Society Sharon, MA: Kendall Whaling Museum Toledo, OH: Toledo Museum of Art Ventura County, CA: Maritime Museum Washington, DC: The National Gallery The White House Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Winona, MN: Minnesota Marine Art Museum Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum BELGIUM Antwerp: Maisons Rockox Courtrai: City Art Gallery DENMARK Tröense: Maritime Museum

EIRE Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland FRANCE Compiègne: Musée National du Château GERMANY Berlin: Staatliche Kunsthalle Darmstadt: Hessisches Landesmuseum Hannover: Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe: Staatliche Kunsthalle Speyer am Rhein: Historisches Museum der Pfalz HOLLAND Amsterdam: Joods Historisch Museum Rijksmuseum Utrecht: Centraal Museum SOUTH AFRICA Durban: Art Museum SPAIN Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de Sun Fernando Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional del Prado SWITZERLAND Zurich: Schweizerisches Landesmuseum THAILAND Bangkok: Museum of Contemporary Art

Catalogue by Susan Morris. Photography by Sophie Drury and Beth Saunders. Graphic Design by Chris Rees. Published by Richard Green. © 2013 All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated (without the publisher’s prior consent), in any form of binding or other cover than in which it is published, and without similar condition being imposed on another purchaser. All material contained in this catalogue is subject to the new laws of copyright, December 1989. Printed in England by Hampton Printing (Bristol) Ltd.


33 New Bond Street London W1S 2RS Telephone: +44 (0)20 7499 4738 Fax: +44 (0)20 7495 3318 Email: paintings@richardgreen.com



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