Susan Moore previews sales in Paris and reviews Asia Week in New York
A view of Tivoli by Claude-Joseph Vernet comes to the block in Paris later this month, as does a stellar table by Charlotte Perriand. In September, a pastel portrait of a bespectacled Benjamin Franklin did well, while Asia held sway in terms of both lots
With no auctions of blue-chip Impressionist, modern or contemporary art on the horizon in New York at the time of writing, there is an opportunity to look elsewhere in the world for November sales. Paris and London, in particular, offer a variety of discoveries and auction debuts.
Few Old Master painters were more sensitive to the atmospheric effects of water, light and vapour than Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–89). During his two decades in Italy, from 1734–53, he made his reputation as a landscape and marine painter, giving his imagination full rein to produce poetical evocations of the country’s celebrated sites for the increasing number of visitors making their Grand Tour. Vue de Tivoli, Le Matin was one such image, but painted for François de Régny, French consul in Genoa, after the artist had been recalled home by the Crown to paint the seaports of France. In this large-scale view, we see the classical ruins and cascades of Tivoli – combined with elements of Spoleto – all cast in the highly particularised delicate light and shadows of early morning, the staffage of figures in the foreground typically lively and well observed (Fig. 1). Unknown to scholars since the early 19th century, the canvas will be unveiled at Sotheby’s Paris on 19 November (estimate €600,000–€800,000).
Jean-François Millet (1814–75) makes a nod to that marine tradition in his A Fishing Boat, painted after the siege of Paris and Napoleon III’s surrender to the Prussian army in 1870, when the artist and his family left Barbizon for his native Normandy. There is no Vernetstyle tempest or elegiac classical allusion here
but a simple boat and two fishermen, slowly returning home at dusk after a storm, the fading light reflected in the broadly painted waves. Not seen on the market since 1952, the painting comes to Artcurial’s auction of Old Masters and 19th-century art on 18 November with expectations of €400,000–€600,000.
Charlotte Perriand’s furniture from a minimalist house near Toulouse, designed by Pierre Debeaux in 1970–72, makes its debut at Sotheby’s Important Design sale on 24 November. The highlight here is her freeform ‘Eventail’ table, made for the library in lustrous dibétou wood – an African walnut – and comprising wide rectangular panels in the shape of an open fan. Only one other example is known: a pinewood prototype that Perriand made for her own chalet in Méribel. Estimate €700,000–€1m.
Jean Prouvé’s ‘Présidence’ desk from 1948 (€220,000–€300,000) and a signed lamp by the Wiener Werkstätte master Dagobert Peche (€50,000–€70,000) are among a further tranche of some 460 works to come to market from the eclectic collection of the late Baroness Marion Lambert, presented by Christie’s Paris on 17–18 November. Appropriately enough for a pioneering collector and patron of contemporary photography, this sale of contemporary art and design also includes the likes of J.D. Okhai Ojeikere’s Hairstyles series (1968–75; estimate €15,000–€20,000). The sale is expected to fetch €4m–€6m, part of which will go to charity.
In London, meanwhile, Morton & Eden’s sale on 4 November of coins, medals and banknotes flourishes an apparently unique bronze plaquette newly attributed to the Venetian Renaissance sculptor Antonio Lombardo (c. 1458–1516; Fig. 3). This small but fine relief represents a personification of Victory inscribing a shield, the winged standing figure of a type found on Roman coins and on the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. Beside her is what may be a flaming artillery projectile. The art historian Jeremy Warren has attributed the piece to Antonio Lombardo and identified the probable subject as an allegory of the victory of Lombardo’s patron, Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, at the Battle of Ravenna on 11 April 1512. At this battle the duke, interested in the development of ordnance, made the first use of this flaming projectile, designed to explode in deadly flying fragments when launched. So pleased with it was he that he used it as his emblem. Estimate £40,000–£60,000.
Hidden away in a private collection since it was first painted, Seated Figure and Reflection is a small, intimate oil-and-pencil on card, signed and dated by Barbara Hepworth in 1947. This immediate post-war period, when marble was in short supply, also led to the artist’s famous oil-and-pencil hospital drawings. This study resurfaces at the Modern British & Irish Art sale at Bonhams on 18 November (£70,000–£100,000).
It is also Asia Week in London. Christie’s Important Chinese Art auction on 3 November presents a particularly striking pair of chariot fittings from the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (4th–3rd century BC), each in the form of a dragon pursuing a phoenix, the claws of the sinuous monster hooked into the body of the mythical bird. The conception is typically ingenious and the whole skilfully detailed and sumptuously inlaid in gold and silver (£600,000–£1m). From the later Western Han dynasty of the 3rd–2nd century BC comes a yellow jade belt hook, the zoomorphic decoration here incorporating a single-horned mythical beast and longtailed stylised bird (£660,000–£880,000). The latter is part of a consignment from an unspecified princely collection.
The Fine Japanese Art sale at Sotheby’s on the same day includes a woodblock print by Toshusai Sharaku (active 1794–95; Fig. 2). Only 28 published prints are known to have survived from the first period of the artist’s brief nine-month career, featuring close-up and expressive depictions of actors in Kabuki plays. Included here is Arashi Ryuzo II portraying the moneylender Ishibe Kinkichi in the play Hana Ayame Bunroku Soga; the threat of his aggressive gesture in rolling up his sleeve in order to strike his victim Bunzo is comically counterbalanced by the ineptitude indicated by the expression on his mask. To suggest an actor in the spotlight, Sharaku sets his figure against a dark mica-sprinkled ground. Published in 1794, the print bears the collector’s seal of Theodor Scheiwe (£150,000–£200,000).
A highlight of Sotheby’s Important Chinese Art sale on 4 November is a deceptively simple imperial moonflask, whose porcelain masters challenged themselves with its unusual shape, size and glaze. The Yongzheng emperor was fascinated by antiquity, and this large piece looks back to both archaic bronzes for its flask form and Ge ware – one of the Five Great Wares of the Song dynasty – for its crackled, creamy-grey glaze. (Estimate £150,000–£250,000.)
The European and Asian Works of Art sale at Olympia Auctions on 18 November includes a fine collection of some 40 Islamic tiles dating from the 16th to 18th centuries, most of them from Damascus. Taking their cue from the Ottoman workshops of Iznik in particular, they feature comparable stylised motifs of tulips, palmettes, lotus and saz leaves, freely painted in a distinctive palette of cobalt blue, turquoise, green and black. Sold individually, with estimates starting at £400, the group is expected to realise up to £60,000. o
Asian bidding and buying dominated the salerooms in September. It was, of course, Asia Week in New York, where all of Sotheby’s sales exceeded their pre-sale estimates, realising . m, while Christie’s total of m for its series of eight live and four online auctions more than doubled last year’s results. Yet Asian buying also had a significant impact on the European auctions. At the two-day sale of the collection of Commandant Paul-Louis Weiller at Christie’s Paris on – September, three bidders competed to the end to secure arguably the finer version of Nicolas de Largillière’s beguiling portrait known as La Belle Strasbourgeoise ( ). For once, the use of the word ‘iconic’ was deserved in this case, for the variant portrait of the same wide-hatted young woman serves as the poster-girl of the Musée des BeauxArts in Strasbourg. Estimated at , – m, Christie’s version was claimed for . m by a telephone bidder from Asia.
More of a surprise, perhaps, was the price paid for a Roman sculpture based on an even better known, and endlessly replicated, work – the marble figure of the naked Aphrodite, carved by Praxiteles in around
BC (see Contents, p. ). One of the most celebrated sculptures of antiquity, the ‘Knidian Aphrodite’ is here a tactile Venus carved in around the nd century AD. Expected to fetch , – , , the torso changed hands for , . Also exceeding expectations was Joseph Ducreux’s fine pastel portrait of Benjamin Franklin (sold for , on an estimate of , – , ; Fig. ), long believed to have been the work of JeanBaptiste Greuze. The oval portrait was made soon after the scientist and ambassador for the newly independent United States of America arrived in Paris in . It is a forthright image of Franklin, informally dressed in fur-trimmed blue coat with his long grey locks free-flowing – a far cry from the powdered wigs and formal attire of the court of Versailles. It may also be the only image of him wearing his spectacles.
This was a sale which also featured some important French decorative arts, and these mostly sold on target. A silver soup tureen by Jacques-Nicolas Roettiers of fetched , , and a royal commode from around , made by Jean-Henri Riesener for the Fontainebleau apartments of Madame Royale, the eldest daughter of Louis XVI, changed hands for the extraordinarily modest sum of , . Less illustrious French furniture and other applied arts sold for figures also unimaginable a few decades ago. The sale was per cent sold by lot, per cent by value. Initially there was not such good news for the collection of Michael Smurfit, offered as
part of Sotheby’s Irish Art sale in London on
September. Here the group and the sale’s top lots – Louis Le Brocquy’s Travelling Woman with Newspaper and John Lavery’s portrait of Lady Evelyn Farquhar – failed to find buyers. They were, however, among the six lots from the collection sold after the sale ( of the sold during it). Eliciting the most enthusiastic response in the various-owner section were canvases by the self-taught Gerard Dillon. His deliberately naïve evocation of life on the west coast of Ireland, Tory Island ( ), almost doubled expectations to sell for , , while The Dreamer (c. – ; Fig. ) more than doubled its estimate, finding a new owner for , . The artist’s previous auction high was set in
at , . Both canvases were making their auction debut. Even without the aftersales, the auction was -per-cent sold, the highest rate since the dedicated Irish sales were relaunched in .
There was further evidence of the power of the iconic image in New York. At Christie’s sale of Japanese and Korean Art on September, an impression of Katsushika Hokusai’s most celebrated woodblock print, Under the Well of the Great Wave off Kanagawa, was offered at , – , and sold for . m. Christie’s saw its best results for Indian and Southeast Asian art for more than a decade, largely thanks to a last-minute consignment of a private Japanese collection of Gandharan sculpture. There were no doubts as to which would be the top lot. This was a much published and exhibited grey schist group of the Buddha Shakyamuni surrounded by a retinue of bodhisattvas, carved in deep relief and one of the few figural works from ancient Gandhara with a dated inscription, probably relating to the rd or th century (Fig. ). It was the only lot of the sale with a provenance outside its country of origin earlier than the mid s, so it was hardly a surprise that this museum-quality piece should soar way beyond its estimate of
, – , – but how much beyond was something of a surprise. The . cm high carving changed hands for a mighty . m, a record for a Gandharan work of art. Some
. m was found for the large but chill standing figure of a bodhisattva, and almost m for the sensitively carved monumental bust of another. The green schist aniconic buddhapada, or footprint of the Buddha, fetched
, , times its low estimate. Most of the architectural pieces sold on target, although five works failed to sell.
Even more successful was the sale of Part I of the James and Marilynn Alsdorf Collection on September, which was per cent sold and realised more than three times the lower end of the auction estimate. A new record for a south Indian sculpture was set when a Cholaperiod bronze figure of Shiva Tripuravijaya sailed four times over its pre-sale estimate and sold for . m. A Chinese marble head of Buddha from the Sui dynasty ( – ) had a similar success, selling for . m, while an album of landscapes and calligraphy attributed to Zhang Ruitu ( – ), estimated at , – , , fetched . m. The sale totalled m. Part II realised . m and was per cent sold by lot, per cent by value, while the online offering totalled , and was per cent sold by lot, per cent by value. The star lot here was a Tibetan or Mongolian conical helmet of the th or th century damascened in silver with dragons amid clouds; it sold times over predictions for , .
The level of interest in the Alsdorf Collection and the various-owner sale of Chinese ceramics and works of art prompted Christie’s to live-stream the sales in both its New York and Hong Kong salerooms. At the latter sale, a large limestone standing Buddha of the Northern Qi dynasty ( – ), notable for its serene expression, soared five times over estimate to sell for . m. There were also strong prices for early blue-and-white porcelain of the Yongle period ( – ). An imposing dish decorated with auspicious flowers and bearing the collector’s mark of the Mughal Emperor, Shah Jahan, and a date corresponding to – was, unsurprisingly, particularly favoured. Estimated at
, – , , it changed hands for . m. The . m sale was per cent sold by lot, per cent by value.
The most expensive lot of Asia Week was a Chinese archaic bronze that appeared at Sotheby’s on September (Fig. ). This was very probably created for a royal patron, and had a notable documented modern provenance, having belonged to Adolphe and Suzanne Stoclet. The type of embellishment used for this fang hu, or ritual vessel, of the Warring States period ( – BC) is so exceptionally rare that it is virtually unknown, hence its great fascination. A complex tour-de-force, the bronze is a rich brocade of curling inlaid silver, circular bosses embellished with gold and, most extravagant of all, plaques of polychrome glass ‘eyes’. Estimated at . – . m, it was bought after a -minute bidding battle for . m. This was one of Asia Week’s star lots, sent to New York before the new . per cent trade tariffs on Chinese art imported into the US came into effect. o