Sotheby's New York announces 19th century European art auction in November
Sotheby's New York announces 19th century European art auction in November
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| Sotheby's New York announces 19th century European art auction in November | |
 Jean-Baptiste- Camille Corot, Ronde D’Amours; Lever De Soleil. Est. $900,000/1.2 million. Photo: Sotheby's. | |
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NEW YORK, N.Y.- Sotheby’s New York sale of 19th Century European Art on 4 November 2011 will present a number of rare opportunities for collectors across diverse collecting categories. The auction will be a showcase for the best of the eclectic artistic styles that flourished throughout the 19th century: Barbizon school, Academic realism, Belle Époque opulence, Victorian and Edwardian romanticism, early Impressionism and Sporting art. The sale will be on exhibition in Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries beginning 28 October, alongside the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale and the Important Russian Art auction. Following Sotheby’s November 2010 sale of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Finding of Moses for a record $35,922,500 and its May 2011 sale of The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra: 41 B.C. for $29,202,500, the upcoming November auction will feature four works by the iconic artist. The group will be highlighted by Alma-Tadema’s A Spring Festival (On the Road to the Temple of Ceres), which has belonged to both Malcolm Forbes and J.P. Morgan and which is currently on offer from The Forbes Collection (est. $1/1.5 million). The work imagines a celebratory procession of flower-crowned revelers dancing from the Convent of Ceres, shown in the background, towards the Temple of Ceres. The painting is still housed within the artist’s original tabernacle frame, inscribed with a translation of Virgil’s Georgics that sets the rhythm and tone of the active composition – staged in Alma-Tadema’s characteristically theatrical style. Education of the Children of Clovis (School of Vengeance, Training of Clotilde’s Sons) is Alma-Tadema’s most accomplished composition on his early Merovingian subjects – the Frankish people who ruled Gaul from the 5th through mid-8th centuries (est. $1/1.5 million). The artist depicts Queen Clotilde sitting on her throne, watching her two oldest sons as they are trained in ax throwing. The exercise had a specific purpose: Coltilde commanded her children to avenge the murder of her parents by her uncle Gondobald, king of the Burgundians. While the revenge plot is bloody, Alma-Tadema challenges historians’ characterizations of the Merovingians as barbaric counterparts to the Roman Empire by setting the training ground within a sumptuous courtyard. Other masterpieces in the sale from the Victorian and Edwardian period will include works by Edward Robert Hughes, John William Godward and Charles Burton Barber. Within the impressive range of six works in the sale by French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Ronde d’Amours; Lever du Soleil is an exceptional highlight (est. $900,000/1.2 million). The painting was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in 1855, following the critical success of the artist’s 1850 Salon entry La Danse des nymphes that inspired critics to hail Corot as the greatest landscape painter of the age. Another milestone of Corot’s oeuvre included in the fall sale is Mantes, les bords de la Seine au pied du pont, considered to be Corot’s earliest view of the Gothic cathedral in Mantes, a town 30 miles west of Paris (est. $500/700,000). |
