un the title “Miniature portraits, a European collection”, a very special set of one hundred lots put together by a passionate collector will be auctioned off on July 14th at Artcurial in Paris. In the days before photography, the miniature was the only way to keep family members, friends or loved ones close at hand. The upper classes of the bourgeoisie or the nobility would order a self-portrait as a gift or a portrait of a familiar person from painters, lined the miniatures with delicate frames, had them set as decorative pendants, attached to boxes and snuffboxes. In addition to anonymous artists or unknown sitters, for whom estimates are set at 700 to 900 euros, the estimated prices increase depending on the painter and the person portrayed. The highest price of 12,000 to 18,000 euros is expected for a precious frame with eight tiny portraits of Louis-Marie Sicard’s royal family.
Under Louis XV. and Louis XVI. The art of the miniature reached a high point with painters such as Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin, François Dumont and Pierre-Adolphe Hall. The refinement goes to the limits of representation: a medallion by Hall, which shows the treasurer of the Count of Artois sitting at his desk in the smallest detail, proves it (estimate 8000 to 12,000 euros). Among the first female miniaturists was Rosalba Carriera at the beginning of the 18th century; a medallion by the hand of the Venetian depicting a “Young woman with a wreath of flowers in front of a mirror” is valued at 3,000 to 4,000 euros.
Christie’s is offering some rediscovered works among 55 lots at the Old Masters sale on June 15 in Paris. First and foremost is a “Still Life with Flowers and Pineapple” by Anne Vallayer-Coster, one of the most important painters of the 18th century. She was admitted to the very virile “Académie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture” in 1770 at the age of only 26 and had great success with her still lifes, portraits and genre scenes. Marie-Antoinette took her under her royal wing, had her portrayed and given drawing lessons. The lush still life with a bouquet of flowers, which comes under the hammer at Christie’s with an estimate of 600,000 to one million euros, was painted in 1783 and is considered a masterpiece, also in the eyes of the artist, who always kept it to herself. The painting has only been publicly exhibited once at the Salon of 1783, but is mentioned many times in art literature. According to the register, it was acquired by a “Coster” at the posthumous auction of the Valayer-Coster couple’s collection in 1824, so it stayed – but for how long? – in the family. In the second half of the 1940s, the current owner’s father bought it somewhere “in eastern France”. Such an unclear indication of provenance casts a shadow over the masterpiece.
Another top lot will be a rediscovered painting by the Spanish baroque painter Jusepe de Ribera, who lives in Naples. The half-body depiction of “Saint Jerome”, dated 1648 in the signature, appears like a counterpart to “Saint Jerome with Angels” from the Neapolitan Museo di Capodimonte. Again, the indications of origin remain vague, with an estimate of 500,000 to 800,000 euros: the previously unknown painting, which is being auctioned together with the Toulouse auctioneer Marambat-Malafosse, was acquired by the grandparents of the current owner in the 1930s, according to the catalogue. Even with a historically important painting such as the Diderot portrait by the Russian painter Dmitri Grigoryevich Lewizki (150,000/250,000), one is surprised that only a sale at Sotheby’s in 1997 is given as provenance. An almost identical Diderot portrait by Lewizki, albeit of impeccable provenance, hangs in Geneva’s Musée d’art et d’histoire. Did he paint it twice? Like the Geneva version, the painting offered at Christie’s is dated to the winter of 1773/1774, when the French encyclopaedist was in Saint Petersburg at the invitation of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great.
However, a clear provenance can be given for an also rediscovered, imagined landscape of ancient ruins by Pierre Patel the Elder. It is estimated at 400,000 to 600,000 euros and can be dated to around 1650 by comparing it with a preliminary study by Patel from the Fondation Custodia collection. The origins of the panel painting of a “Virgin and Child” by the Flemish painter Bernard van Orley were also carefully researched. The Renaissance painting turned out to be a forced sale by the Hamburg couple Henry and Hertha Bromberg, who had to flee Germany in 1938. A compromise has been reached with the heirs and a lawful sale can now take place (150,000/200,000).
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