“These are two of the finest works either artist made, painted within a few years of each other, and unseen for half a century. For a generation that has known these paintings only through the pages of catalogues raisonnés, they have become almost mythical. To offer either one would be a career highlight. To offer both, in a single sale, is something truly extraordinary.” JULIAN DAWES Sotheby’s Vice Chairman, Head Of Impressionist & Modern Art, Americas
“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.
En Canot (Jeune fille à la barque)
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
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.
Not 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
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
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.
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.
Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes)
Estimate
10,000,000 - 15,000,000 USD
Summertime
Estimate
7,000,000 - 10,000,000 USD
