PERBURUAN BANTENG

(Wild Bull Hunt, La Chasse au Taureau Sauvage) Painted: 1855

Artist: Raden Saleh (1807 or 1811-1880)

Sold: January 27, 2018, Vannes, France

Price: €7.2 million (US$8.8 million)

Dimensions: 110 x 180cm

Raden Saleh Sjarif Boestaman is regarded as Indonesia’s first modern artist and was the first to study in Europe. Born of Arabic paternal descent into Javanese nobility, he spent time with a circus animal tamer and received a scholarship to study in the Netherlands. He lived abroad for almost 23 years in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland, Scotland and Italy. Hunting was a major theme of his work, showing chaotic conflict between humans and animals. Perburuan Banteng includes a self-portrait: Raden Saleh is on the brown horse in the centre. This oil painting is believed to have been commissioned by a 19th-century sugar and coffee trader, Jules Stanislas Sigisbert Cezard. It was later sold, inherited several times and then rediscovered in the cellar of a French home in August 2017. At auction, bidding opened at the reserve price of EUR200,000 and closed at EUR7.2 million. The winning bidder was an anonymous art collector from Indonesia. Many of Raden Saleh’s works were lost in a fire at an exhibition of colonial art in Paris in 1931. At least one was stolen from Indonesia’s National Art Gallery in the 1990s in an inside job. There are about 30 of his known works in Indonesia, including six in the presidential collection at the Istana Merdeka state palace.

Other top sellers: In 1996, The Deer Hunt (1846) sold in Singapore for S$3.08 million (US$1.8 million). Two of Raden Saleh’s other works, Lying in Wait (1849) and Lions and a Snake Fighting outside a Grotto in a Tropical Landscape (1839) also went under the hammer in the 1990s for over US$1.2 million each.