is a masterpiece by Vincent van Gogh completed in the village of Auvers‑sur‑Oise in France,
where he spent the final two months of his life. Poised
to set a new auction record, the luminous, vigorously
worked canvas is among the most exceptional PostImpressionist paintings ever to come to the market.
Painted circa 24 May 1890, just days after Van Gogh’s
arrival in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, where he would
spend the final two months of his life, the work belongs
to a period of extraordinary creative intensity. Having
spent the previous year confined to the psychiatric
asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Van Gogh arrived
in Auvers with a renewed sense of optimism, writing of
the “beautiful greenery in abundance” and his conviction that “the desire to work will devour me and make
me insensible to everything else and in a good mood.” In
the weeks that followed, he painted with astonishing
urgency, completing a series of emotionally charged,
visually arresting works that rank among the most celebrated and sought-after of his career.
The painting’s provenance is equally distinguished.
Following Van Gogh’s death in July 1890, the work passed
to his brother Theo, then to Theo’s widow Johanna van
Gogh-Bonger and their son Vincent Willem. Having
remained in the family’s possession for some time, it
then entered the collection of the publisher Samuel
Fischer – visionary founder of S. Fischer Verlag which
first published literary legends Thomas Mann, Hermann
Hesse and Arthur Schnitzler. A subsequent celebrated
owner was George “Buddy” Gard de Sylva, American
songwriter, film producer and co-founder of Capitol
Records. In 1953, the painting was purchased by Harriet
Harris-Jonas, whose collection was so celebrated that
The Metropolitan Museum of Art would arrange tours
for their patrons to see it at her Fifth Avenue apartment.
Acquired by the Blaquiers from Wildenstein in 1975, the
work has not been publicly exhibited since.
“Between 1888 and 1890, Cézanne created two series of works that are among the most magnificent
as well as the most enigmatic in his entire oeuvre. The first consists of images of the artist’s son
Paul as Harlequin… the second group shows the young professional model Michelangelo di Rosa,
known to art history as ‘Boy in the Red Vest’. In both of these series Cézanne, now fifty years old,
explored the theme of maturing youth. In 1888 his son Paul was seventeen years old; the intimate
relationship between the painter and his only child is documented in a number of portrait studies,
yet never before had he produced a major painting of his son.”
ART HISTORIAN FELIX BAUMANN
Arlequin belongs to a very rare group of Harlequin
paintings Paul Cézanne made between 1888 and 1890,
a sequence of only four works that has long been recognized as one of the most impressive portrait projects
of the artist’s career. The only example from this series
remaining in private hands, this painting – unseen in
public since 1975 – is poised to establish a new auction
record for the artist when it is offered at Sotheby’s in
November.
The series was inspired by the joyous Mardi-Gras carnival processions that were so familiar to Cézanne from
his childhood in Aix-en-Provence where, as a boy, he
had relished dressing up and taking part in these lively
annual masquerades. Though this subject captivated
artists from Watteau to Picasso, Cézanne’s approach is
subtly different: each iteration strays further from the
comedic servants’ theatrical history, focusing instead
on the figure’s stillness rather than their performance.
Across the Harlequin series, the face of the sitter
becomes markedly abstracted, mirroring Cézanne’s
broader artistic journey while at the same time hinting
at the evolving relationship between a father and his son,
poised on the brink of adulthood. Though Cézanne’s
harlequin still wields his wooden sword and is dressed
in the iconic red and black diamond checkered outfit
and white cocked hat, he bears an empty expression,
atypical of his charming, comedic Commedia dell’Arte
counterpart.
Like the other paintings in this collection, Arlequin has
passed through the hands of a succession of notable
art collectors and gallerists, including Ambroise Vollard;
Durand-Ruel; Paul Rosenberg; Wildenstein and Lefevre
gallery in London, from whom it was purchased by the
Blaquiers in the 1970s. For some two decades – from
1936 onwards – the painting hung on the walls of
Merton Hall in Cambridge, the Rothschild family home,
before its acquisition by the Lefevre Gallery.
Though it has not been seen in public since 1975, the
painting was previously exhibited in the many of the
greatest Cézanne exhibitions ever staged, including at
the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1907; at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York in 1929; at Tate in London in
1954, and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952.
Only one other version of Arlequin has ever appeared at
auction before – a smaller example from 1890, now in
the Pola Museum of Art in Kanagawa. When that painting was offered at Sotheby’s London in 1988, it realised $8.2 million – then the second highest price ever
achieved for the artist at auction.
Arlequin belongs to a group of 15 large-scale figure paintings - executed between 1888 and 1896 and encompassing the Harlequin and Boy in the Red Vest series,
alongside the celebrated Card Players and Smoker
compositions – that together represent the apex of his
figurative achievement, and which are held almost without exception in the world’s foremost museum collections. Of this exceptional body of work, only one other
painting has come to market in recent times: The Card
Players, now in the Qatari national collection, reportedly
acquired in 2011 for $250 million – then the highest
price ever recorded for a work of art.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
En Canot (Jeune fille à la barque)
Estimate Upon Request
Painted in 1877 – the year Renoir and his fellow artists
formally adopted the term “Impressionist” at the Third
Impressionist Exhibition – En Canot (Jeune fille à la
barque) is one of only a handful of Renoir’s celebrated
boating scenes from the 1870s that remains in private
hands.
Never before seen at auction, En Canot was painted in
the same extraordinary years that produced Renoir’s
masterwork Bal du moulin de la Galette, today housed at
the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Both paintings celebrate, in
similar style, the sun-dappled pleasures of Parisian life
in a way that defines Renoir’s most celebrated works.
The sitter is believed to be Marguerite “Margot”
Legrand, one of Renoir’s favorite models from this time,
who appears in many of his finest Impressionist masterpieces including Bal du moulin de la Galette, (Musée
d’Orsay) and La Tasse de chocolat (Louvre Abu Dhabi).
Measuring nearly a metre in width, En Canot is the largest 1870s work by Renoir, and the most important of
any type by the artist, to come to market in over twenty
years.
Acquired directly from the artist by Charles Haviland,
the Limoges porcelain manufacturer and close friend
of Renoir, the painting subsequently passed to the celebrated Parisian patrons and dealers Josse Hessel and
Jean‑Henri and Jacques Laroche, before entering the
collection of Albert D. Lasker, the American businessman instrumental in shaping modern advertising.
“The forthcoming Renoir exhibition at the National Gallery in London will be the most significant
UK showcase of the artist’s work in two decades. It is focused precisely on the mid-1860s to mid1880s period from which En Canot dates, and on Renoir’s enduring themes of friendship, leisure
and joy. Few paintings in private hands sit more naturally within that story.”
HELENA NEWMAN
Sotheby’s Chairman, Europe & Chairman, Impressionist & Modern Art Worldwide
Camille Pissarro
La Place du Théâtre-Français et l’avenue de l’Opéra, soleil d’après-midi en hiver
Estimate Upon Request
Never before offered at auction and unseen in public since 1958, Pissarro’s 1898 painting La Place du
Théâtre-Français et l’avenue de l’Opéra, soleil d’aprèsmidi en hiver belongs to the celebrated series of Paris
cityscapes that the artist produced during the final decade of his career, widely considered among the most
important achievements in Impressionism.
Painted during the artist’s third stay in Paris the work
is one of a select group of canvases depicting the Place
du Théâtre-Français and the avenue de l’Opéra, where
Pissarro turned his attention from the rural subjects
that had established his reputation to the rhythms of
modern urban life.
Working from the elevated vantage
point of his hotel window at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre,
he captured the constantly shifting effects of light and
atmosphere across the grand boulevards of Baron
Haussmann’s redesigned Paris, transforming the city
into a dynamic stage of movement and color.
Among the finest examples of this series remaining in
private hands, and executed in the largest format used
for his Paris streetscapes, the painting exemplifies
Pissarro’s ability to unite architectural grandeur with
the fleeting impressions of modern experience.
La Place du Théâtre-Français et l’avenue de l’Opéra, soleil
d’après-midi en hiver bears an exceptional provenance,
having passed through some of the most distinguished
collections of the twentieth century, including those of
Leigh B. and Mary Lasker Block and the renowned collector and museum founder Norton Simon.
Edgar Degas, Avant la courseNot publicly exhibited since 1968, Avant la course is one
of the largest fully-worked pastels depicting horseracing by Edgar Degas remaining in private hands. Never
before seen at auction, it is also the most significant
horseracing pastel to come to market in at least forty
years.
Horses were among Degas’s most celebrated and
enduring subjects – one he returned to for nearly the
entirety of his working life. Here he captures the tense
stillness of the moments before a race, the horses
arranged in such a way that the composition reads as a
fleeting glance rather than an orchestrated scene.
Degas was one of the most innovative pastelists of
the modern era, and Avant la course ranks among his
finest achievements in the medium: the pastel is built
up in dense, successive layers, capturing the sheen of
the horses’ coats and the vivid colour of the jockeys’
silks, while creating a remarkable sense of depth, light
and atmosphere.
Acquired as early as 1895 by Harris Whittemore, a
prominent Connecticut-based industrialist and one of
the first American collectors of Impressionist art, the
pastel later entered the collection of Sidney F. Brody
and his wife, Frances Lasker Brody – two of the most
important collectors of Modern art in Los Angeles, and
driving forces behind the foundingof the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Paul Gauguin
Fleurs dans une coupe (Flowers in a Cup)
Dated to 1899–1901, Fleurs dans une coupe belongs to
a small group of still lifes Gauguin painted during his
final years in Tahiti. These works, painted, according to
Gauguin, entirely from his ‘crazy imagination’, represent
his last sustained engagement with a subject that had
long served as a laboratory for his boldest experiments
in colour and form.
Here the composition fuses the human and the natural:
the dense foliage and fruit are arranged with the rhythm
of a reclining figure, the loose folds of white cloth echoing those to be found both in Gauguin’s nudes and in
Manet’s Olympia, the most talked-about painting of his
generation.
The painting also reveals Gauguin in dialogue with
one of the artists he most admired. He had owned
Cézanne’s Compotier, verre et pommes since the 1870s,
once telling a fellow painter he would part with it only
“after my last shirt,” and here, in the radical use of space
and considered arrangement of objects, he pays homage to the artist he admired so much.
Other major still lifes from this period are now held at
the Israel Museum, the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, the Ny
Carlsberg Glyptotek, the Bührle Foundation in Zurich,
and the State Hermitage – together forming a body of
work now recognised as among the icons of Modernism.
“He presents flowers and fruits in the same way as people, with vivid immediacy and a sensuous
fascination; whether animate or inanimate, everything in creation is a part of nature.”
ART HISTORIAN INGO F. WALTHER
Claude Monet
Le Jardin des Tuileries
Estimate Upon Request
1876 marked the year that Monet began to turn his
attention from the idyllic landscapes that had previously preoccupied him to the newly built boulevards of
Paris and the sweep of city life. Le Jardin des Tuileries,
one of Monet’s celebrated Impressionist Paris scenes,
belongs to a suite of four views painted that year from
the same vantage point: a fifth floor apartment on the
Rue de Rivoli - lent to Monet by one of the great patrons
of Impressionism, Victor Chocquet - from which he
could absorb the full expanse of Baron Haussmann’s
newly designed modern metropolis, or ‘spectacular
Paris’, as Monet described it.
Works by Monet depicting Paris rarely appear on the
market, with the majority housed in museum collections – of the four views painted from Chocquet’s
apartment, Le Jardin des Tuileries is one of only two
remaining in private hands, with other examples from
this series residing in the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée
Marmottan Monet, Paris.
The painting was shown at the
Third Impressionist exhibition in 1877 which marked
the high point of Impressionism in its presentation of
the central tenets of the movement. After a phenomenal period of creativity, Monet returned to Argenteuil
and almost completely gave up the depiction of Paris,
devoting himself for the rest of his life to pure landscape
painting.
The painting comes to auction with distinguished provenance, having passed through the hands of Ernest May,
a successful Parisian financier and banker who was a
leading supporter of the Impressionists from around
1875 onwards, and Joseph Stránský, the Czech conductor, composer and collector who succeeded Gustav
Mahler as conductor of the New York Philharmonic,
before being acquired from Wildenstein and entering
the Blaquier-Arrieta Collection in 1979.
Derain, Bateaux au port de Collioure
A dazzling kaleidoscope of colors and brushstrokes,
Bateaux au port de Collioure stands as one of the most
emblematic expressions of André Derain’s Fauve vision.
It belongs to what are widely regarded as the artist’s
most daring and pictorially innovative canvases, produced during his watershed sojourn in Collioure on the
French Mediterranean coast in the summer of 1905
with his mentor and friend Henri Matisse. One of the
best examples of Derain’s revolutionary Fauvist output
remaining in private hands, it comes to auction for the
first time in almost thirty years.
There is another pioneering Fauve painting elsewhere
in the sale: Maurice de Vlaminck’s fiery
Nature morte
à la cruche bleue (1906–07), offered at auction for the
first time and revealing the first stirrings of his interest
in Cézanne.
Further complementing this collection is
Alfred Sisley’s early Impressionist landscape
La Seine à
Port-Marly, from 1873, together with Camille Pissarro’s
snowy
Maison de Piette à Montfoucault from 1875
and
Toulouse-Lautrec’s
Femme assise de profil vers la
gauche from 1890.
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Sotheby's will also present a selection of works from Armand Hammer’s storied private collection, with proceeds to benefit the Armand Hammer Foundation. The series of sales, beginning with the Modern Evening Auction in New York this November, offers collectors and institutions a rare opportunity to acquire paintings that once formed part of one of the twentieth century's most celebrated private collections. The selection of 12 works is estimated in the region of $25–37 million. Proceeds from the sales will benefit the Foundation's mission, building upon the tradition of public good that Dr. Armand Hammer established during his lifetime.
The group of works is led by Edgar Degas' Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes) and Mary Cassatt's Summertime, a jewel-toned view of leisure on the water, poised to set a new auction record for the artist. Together with works by Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and more, the November sales will showcase the breadth and quality of Dr. Hammer's collecting vision and his enduring appreciation for many of the defining figures of nineteenth and early twentieth-century art.
Edgar Degas
Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes)
Estimate
10,000,000 - 15,000,000 USD
Mary Cassatt
Summertime
Estimate
7,000,000 - 10,000,000 USD
