Bouguereau’s Pietà For Sale
William-Adolphe Bouguereau (November 30, 1825 – August 19, 1905) Pietà (1876) 230 × 148 cm (90 1/2 × 58 1/4 in). For sale at Christie's Auction House, NY.
A friend sent me this link today. There are other masterworks at the auction. It is worth a visit.
Beauty Holding Back Time by Donato Barcaglia
Donato Barcaglia (Italian, 1849-1930) La Giovanezza che Tenta di Arrestare il Tempo, or Beauty Holding Back Time. White marble. 89 BY 59IN.
Yesterday, I visited Sotheby’s in London to preview its nineteenth-century painting auction. Before I could get to the paintings, I was stopped and dumbstruck by La Giovanezza che Tenta di Arrestare il Tempo, or Beauty Holding Back Time, by Donato Barcaglia (Italian 1849-1930).
Barcaglia created the work when he was only 27. It was his “coming out” or graduate work, made at the end of his studies and, therefore, meant to showcase the accumulated skills of his years in the Roman Academy. An instant popular and critical success, Beauty Holding Back Time travelled to Florence, Philadelphia, and Milan before being collected by Michael Alexander Wilsone Swinfen Broun (1858-1948), a Colonel in the British Army, and taken to England.
The breadth and depth of Barcaglia’s artistic arsenal, especially at such a young age, is impressive. He exhibits command the material by conveying a large variety of textures (e.g. young skin, old skin, clothing, feathers, hair, wood, metal) and making it appear to defy gravity. As was common for Academic painters and sculptors from the period, Barcaglia mixes his understanding of the ideal, or antique, human form in his depiction of Youth, with Naturalism, as seen in the wings of Father Time.
According to a sculpture dealer in London I know, Beauty Holding Back Time is the most important nineteenth-century statue to reach the market in nearly 25 years. It is estimated at only £150,000 to £200,000. I write “only” because, if it were a painting of similar importance by Gerome or Bouguereau from the same period, it would be estimated at well over £1 million.
Victorian & Edwardian Paintings at Sotheby’s (London)
A good friend and scholar once told me that an expert was only as good as the number of paintings he or she had seen. With that in mind, he suggested that I attend every possible auction in London.Hundreds of paintings are sold at auction each week in London.
Each Sunday, I visit auction previews at Sotheby’s, Christie’s (King Street and South Kensington), and Bohnams. It is a wonderful education.
This week, Sotheby’s is holding it’s annual Summer auction of Victorian & Edwardian (i.e. late nineteenth and early twentieth-century) Paintings. Below are a few of the works on view online and in person until July 15.
Lot 37: John William Waterhouse, R.A., R.I. (1849-1917) Tristam and Isolde (1916)
Oil on canvas. 41 1/2 BY 31 1/2 IN.
Would that I owned such a painting! This was the jewel of the show and, at £500,000 to £1,000,000, the most expensive.
If you are like me, you grew up with Waterhouse’s paintings of Arthurian and mythological characters. Seeing one in a museum in my native Utah was unheard of. My experience was limited to books.
Since moving to London, I have seen many of Waterhouse’s works, both in museums and at auction houses. Each time, I feel like a child again.
I have never been disappointed by a Waterhouse painting. His characters seem fully-realized and familiar in that they are in harmony with my own imagination. Above all, he is a storyteller.
In this painting, Waterhouse paints Tristam–somtimes spelled “Tristan”–and Isolde, characters that first appeared in the twelfth century, but were made famous by Sir Thomas Mallory’s L’Morte d’Arthur. The story has strong parallels with Romeo and Juliette. (Many believe that Shakespeare adapted the story for his play.)
In it, Tristam (on the left) is the heir to an English Throne, and Isolde (on the right) is the Queen of Ireland. A case of mistaken identity leads the two to fall in love without knowledge of the politics of their kingdoms, which are at war. Tristam and Isolde eventually die young in a doomed attempt to patch together the hatred that surrounds them.
When the story of Tristam and Isolde was made into an opera by Richard Wagner in 1865, it became a popular subject for painting and literature in Europe. The opera was first performed in England in 1882 and subsequently painted by the English painters Rossetti and Millais.
Waterhouse’s version is wonderful in it’s simplicity. While elements of the story–the castle of Cornwall, the boat carrying the lovers to their doom, a bottle and cup of poisoned wine–are all present, the figures of Tristam and Isolde dominate the painting.
Many nineteenth-century painters were able to create translucent and realistic skin, but few ware able marry that ability to making sharp and realistic features. As a result, many paintings from the period and in this auction, seem vague or out of focus. Waterhouse was able to both capture realistic skin and specificity of features and, in so doing, surpass the the ability of a photograph by making the skin seem to glow and the figures alive. Isolde seems so full of nervous energy that is is difficult to not look her in the eye.
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, O.M., R.A. (1836-1912) A Roman Artist, The Art of Drawing. Watercolor and bodycolor on paper. 12 BY 11 1/4 IN. Lot 34.
This is one of several paintings done by Alma-Tadema to represent painters in the ancient world. Alma-Tadema’s paintings conjured the ancient world at a time when the British Empire regarded itself as the new Rome. This was painted during a period of Alma-Tadema’s own rise in prestige. Therefore, it is possible he was trying to make a statement about his–and other artists’–role in the Empire
Artists in Rome and Greece were highly regarded. In this work, the painter depicted in a expensively decorated studio: exotic tiger skin on the mosaic floor, paint brushes in a large, Grecian urn, fluted columns on the wall.
We know that there were many Roman painters. Some of their works survive in frescoes and recorded descriptions, but we know little about the actual painting methods and materials they used. It is interesting to see Alma-Tadema’s own interpretation of an artist working on a imaginatively stretched canvas without an easel.
Lot 67: Sidney Richard Percy (1821-1886) View of Cader Idris, North Wales. (1878) Oil on canvas. 24 BY 38 IN.
This painting reminded me of a conversation I had with the artist Jacob Collins. Collins was in the process of establishing the Hudson River School of Painting, based on the principles of the original, nineteenth-century school.
Those principles exalted a scientific approach to painting that married visual perception with an understanding of natural phenomena. An example Collins used to describe the approach was the formation of clouds at various heights of the atmosphere. “Different formations of clouds occur at different altitudes; therefore, it would be wrong to paint a Cumulo-nimbus at the same height as stratus.”
Until that conversation, I had never considered the careful attention paid to those details by artists. (Years of schooling in the Impressionist mode of thinking–just paint was you observe–precluded the idea that something should be studied beyond the visible values of color and light.)
Sidney Richard Percy would have been in good company with Collins. His meticulous detail in the placement and color of the natural world are as beautiful as they are accurate. It would be easy for some to dismiss this kind of painting obsolete in a world of so many wonderful nature photographers, but seeing the painting in person conjured feelings of peace that I have rarely felt while looking at a photograph.
The shepherd in the center and foreground of the painting is the jumping off point for an exploration of a well-designed journey through the painting. My eyes darted to the sheep in the top right, and then the bottom right. I was carried to the lake and, then the pass through the mountains. I followed the mountains to their heights and landed on the cloud that echoes the shape of the farthest peaks. Without realizing the time, I had taken a five minute journey through a Wales. The result was equivalent to the same amount of time spent in meditation or prayer.
Sotheby’s Nineteenth-Century Auction Deserves a Good Look and Read
I spent Sunday afternoon at the preview for Sotheby’s 19th Century European Paintings auction in London. (The auction will take place on May 30, together with nineteenth-century Scandinavian works.) I was so overwhelmed with the quantity and quality of paintings, that I went back this morning to take a second look.
While there, I had a wonderful time with Adrian Biddell, Head of the Nineteenth-Century Department, Claude Piening, Senior Director, and the specialist Marta Enille. They were each generous, showing me their personal favorites and sharing a wealth of information that, due to other considerations, cannnot fit into an auction catalog.
In a classroom setting, I once asked well-respected scholar what the difference between a museum catalog and auction catalog is. Her answer: “Length.” Several of the pieces at the auction merit the kind of in-depth, drawn-out study than an auction catalog (or blog) can’t give. For my part, I hope that many of these paintings resurface after the auction in order to be seen and written about at greater length.
I have pictured a few pieces here that I liked. They are not all the most highly valued ones at the auction, but they set off a spark in me.
Heroische Landschaft Mit Regenbogen (Heroic Landscape with Rainbow) by Joseph Anton Koch (42 3/4 X 37 3/4 in.)
In Heroische Landschaft mit Regenbogen, as in his other heroic landscapes, [. . .] Koch showed that neoclassicism could and should seamlessly blend into Romanticism and have ideological motivations. The picture spirits the viewer into a timeless, bygone realm populated by shepherds and shepherdesses.
This is the last of four copies of this painting by Koch. The other three are in major museums.
Far from being his premiere pensée, it was painted over a decade after the first version. Instead of spontaneity, it shows a mature structure not found in the other three.
As in Poussin’s work–a comparison made by Piening in the catalog–the viewer is carefully drawn into the depth of the painting and shown around through visual devices (e.g. paths, figures, mountain slopes) that makes it difficult to look away. The clouds mimic the hills, which mirror the buildings.
While the composition shows lessons learned from Poussin and Claude, the rich coloring borrows from a Northern European tradition seen in landscapes by Rubens and Brill.
It is a wonderful and strange combination of the two traditions, Classic and Northern landscape.
The Presentation by José Tapiró (Spanish, 1836-1913) 19 1/2 X 27 1/2 in. watercolor and gouache on paper.
This is not a major painting by a major painter, but it sings. It is one of many Orientalist paintings and sculptures at the auction.
The painting depicts a group of young boys pretending to be guards with shaved branches instead of guns. It appears to be fun and games until a canon in the middle ground of the painting indicates that they are on the ramparts of a defended city.
It is beautifully composed and technically stunning, reflecting Tapiró’s academic training in Reus, Barcelona, and Rome.
Each boy tells a story in his face. While looking at it, I found myself remembering childhood friends I thought I’d forgotten, but who just needed a little prodding from this piece to float back to the surface.
The Watchful Eye–The Vigil by Salvador Sánchez Barbudo (Spanish, 1857-1917) 58 X 100 1/2 in.
This is another Spanish painter who studied in Rome.
It is the kind of painting that an interior designer would find difficult because it is not, as one once told me, “optimistic.” This is a painting where the artist’s skill is immediately evident.
I have to admit that I feel very little emotional connection to this painting. For my part, the title gives too little information to make the narrative clear, but the subject isn’t interesting enough to make me curious about much else than the composition.
I was totally fascinated by its construction. As Marta Enille pointed out to me, the woman is beautifully done. But it is the sprawled-out figure of the man that fascinates me. The difficult, angular pose of the unconscious man and woman in profile could easily have been done another way or less convincingly. It seems effortless in person.
It is perfectly large painting. Any smaller and it would have made the sprawled figure of the man unconvincing; any larger and he would have seemed unreal.
David Apres le Combat (David After the Battle) Jean-Antonin Mercié (French, 1845-1916) 44 in.
According to the catalog, this work was:
modified during [Mercié's] sojourn in Rome at the French Academy and was undoubtedly an extremely bold statement which begged comparison with seminal works of the Renaissance by Verrocchio, Donatello and Michelangelo. However, Mercié’s youthful hero, with his effete charm and overtones of orientalism, could never be mistaken for a Renaissance work. It was exhibited at the Salon of 1872.
The picture hardly does it justice. In person, I felt refined in its presence. Rather than effete, it seems regal, serene.
It seems to me that every narrative has its own convincing medium. This is yet another proof that David and Goliath is best seen in 3D.
Les Deux Soeurs (The Two Sisters) by Charles Giron (Swiss, 1850-1914) 172 X 248 3/4 in.
Of all the paintings I have seen this year, I was least prepared for this. I spent over an hour dwarfed by it. It is nearly 15 feet tall and 21 feet long with figures in actual scale. As a result, the viewer is appropriated into the painting without need for imagination.
It needs to be seen to be believed.
According to Claude Piening, who researched the painting for the sale, it showed in the 1883 Paris Salon “causing reams of commentary” at the time.
This painting could be subtitled “the beginning of the end of history painting.” It is done in the scale of classical history paintings championed by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, even at this late date. The background features classical columns, but the scene is entirely contemporary — real people in everyday clothing and events.
The central narrative is of two sisters, one with three children and a husband obviously accustomed to manual labor and the other sister in silk clothing and a horse-drawn carriage. The poorer sister shoots an accusatory finger towards the other, as if publicly calling her out as a girl-for-hire.
No one but the two women and the husband seem to understand the deep emotional nature of the moment. The flower woman, in a masterfully painted effect, holds a string in her mouth as she ties a bouquet for a customer, the traffic continues its pace, and the children seem to be unaware of the conflict.
I have contacted several people about this painting in hopes that, at least, I can find it an appreciative home with visitation rights.