MARKET NEWS
If there is a correction taking place in the art market, collectors of Rodin bronzes appear not to have noticed. This has already been an annus mirabilis for Rodin sculpture records – the market’s response, as it were, to the opening of the splendidly restored Musée Rodin in Paris. First, there was the extraordinary £11.6 million paid by Oslo dealer Ben Frija at Sotheby’s for a rare, lifetime cast of the leaping female nude Iris. Equally interesting has been the performance of bronzes which, until recently, have been treated as inferior by the market. At Bonhams, one of the casts of Eternal Springtime made by the large Barbedienne foundry during the artist’s later years to supply demand, and considered by purists to be inferior in quality to posthumous castings by the smaller Rudier foundry, sold for £938,500 – a record for a Barbedienne cast of this subject. Then last week in Paris, a 1927 cast of his famous
Le Baiser sold for €2.2 million (£1.7 million), which is a record for a posthumously cast bronze of this subject. “Early and late lifetime casts and posthumous casts are all different markets,” says Jerome leBlay, the author of the Rodin catalogue raisonné. “But when new buyers from emerging economies come in, they just want the subject, regardless of the casting date and difference in quality. Carlos Slim, one of the richest men in the world, has a cast of
The Thinker in his museum, but it’s a mere reproduction.”
A painting of the great philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau that was found unattributed and in dilapidated condition at Bonhams last year has been confirmed as the work of the 18th-century French rococo artist and friend of Madame de Pompadour, Jacques Guerin. Catalogued as a portrait of Rousseau by an unknown 18th-century French artist, and thought to hail from the Rousseau Portalis family, it was bought by art dealer Nicholas Bagshawe and his wife, the art historian Kendall Bagshawe, for a few thousand pounds. While the painting was being cleaned and conserved, a not inexpensive operation they undertook believing it had potential, a signature emerged from the darkness. Guerin is known for two portraits of Madame de Pompadour in the Louvre, and a conversation piece, attributed to him, in the Rothschild collection at Waddesdon Manor. “It’s a valuable new addition to Rousseau iconography,” says Bagshawe, who will exhibit the painting at the Chelsea Old Town Hall Art-DesignAntiques Fair next month. Price: £65,000.