First Look: Highlights from Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale

First Look: Highlights from Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale

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  After Fernand Léger, La Lecture.
  Estimate: £300,000–500,000.

  La Lecture was executed by the mosaicist Heidi Melano at the behest of Fernand Léger after his 1924 painting of the same title. Léger's composition is structured around a series of contrasts and repetitions; there are echoes and tensions between horizontal and vertical masses, as well as rounded and angular forms.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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  Amedeo Modigliani, Femme à la robe décolletée allongée sur un lit (Anna Akhmatova).
  Estimate: £400,000–600,000.

  Beautiful, pure and concise, the present work is exemplary of the distinctive style for which Modigliani is celebrated. The sitter of this work is the celebrated Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who shared an intense emotional and intellectual intimacy with the artist.
  
  Modigliani's  Nu couché (sur le côté gauche) was recently sold at Sotheby’s in New York for a record-breaking $157.2 million — the highest price ever achieved at Sotheby’s for a work of art.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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  James Ensor, Les Pochards (The Drunkards),
  Estimate: £700,000–1,000,000.

  Les Pochards (The Drunkards) depicts two world-weary Flemish men in the throes of advanced inebriation; the man on the right sunk into a drunken stupor, whilst his companion gazes blankly out into the middle distance. The subject matter was one that Ensor explored more than once, having produced a work in 1883 of the same title; it was also an extremely personal one, having witnessed his father struggle with alcoholism. 
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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  Rik Wouters, Femme en forêt, chapeau bleu à la main, bras levé. Estimate: £280,000–350,000.

  Executed in 1914, Femme en forêt, chapeau bleu à la main, bras levé is a striking example of Wouters’ daring and unique artistic style. The treatment of light and space in this expressive work reflects the inspiration Wouters found in two leading artistic lights of the late 19th century: Paul Cézanne and James Ensor. The sitter is his beloved wife Nel, the only female model Wouters ever painted.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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  Kees van Dongen, Vue de Cannes, Le Suquet.
  Estimate: £350,000–550,000.

  Vue de Cannes, Le Suquet depicts the picturesque old quarter of Cannes, celebrated for its winding cobbled streets and charming architecture. Van Dongen illustrates the scene from a particularly striking birds’ eye perspective, allowing the sweeping expanse of the wider bay in the background to be glimpsed in the distance.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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  Jean Metzinger, Violon et flûte.
  Estimate: £300,000–400,000.

  Violon et flûte is a highly significant example of Jean Metzinger’s Cubist work from 1919. Having co-authored the seminal Du Cubisme published in 1912, Metzinger proceeded to master the Cubist idiom, fracturing representation with dramatic confidence. In the background of the composition, behind the oval form, are two distinct planes of light and dark, framing the scene with the notion that flat colour has the power to construct pictorial space.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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  Jacques Lipchitz, Arlequin à l'accordéon.
  Estimate: £500,000–700,000.

  After arriving in Paris from his native Lithuania in 1909, Jacques Lipchitz became the leading Cubist sculptor, after surrounding himself with key figures of the movement, such as Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. Belonging to a series of works depicting musicians and varying instruments, the present work is particularly notable for its accordion: the formal similarities between an accordion that is being played and that of the prominent Cubist trope of an open fan are immediately evident.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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• 

  Alfred Sisley, Vieille chaumière aux Sablons.
  Estimate: £400,000–600,000.

  Vieille chaumière aux Sablons was painted in 1885, one of the most prolific years in Sisley’s career. It depicts the landscape surrounding Veneux-les-Sablons, a village situated at the junction of the Seine and Loing rivers in the Ile-de-France region, where Sisley lived from 1883 to 1889. Sisley applied his paint in quick brushstrokes in varying directions, and in this way creates a richly textured surface saturated with colour, exemplary of the most successful Impressionist paintings.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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  Edgar Degas, Homme nu assis – recto, Étude d’hommes – verso.
  Estimate: £150,000–200,000.

  This elegant drawing was once a part of the celebrated collection of David Daniels. Assembled with tremendous passion, taste and discernment over a period of forty years, Daniels’ collection included a large number of drawings and pastels by Degas, many of which were produced during his time at the French Academy in Rome.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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• 

  Henri Matisse, La Villa Bleue, 1918.
  Estimate: £250,000–300,000.

  Painted in Nice in 1918, La Villa Bleue depicts an elegant white villa within the rolling hills that surround the Mediterranean Sea. Matisse’s first trip to the South of France took place in 1904 and on a second trip to Nice in 1917, the artist decided to spend his time there fully, enthralled by the power of light and his new-found artistic freedom.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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  Egon Schiele, Liegende (Reclining Woman), 1913.
  Estimate: £200,000–300,000.

  Egon Schiele’s early watercolours and drawings of nude or scantily clad women are some of the most technically refined and provocative images in the history of Western Art. While these raw and often vulnerable depictions of young women caused a great deal of scandal during Schiele's lifetime, the artist’s more prescient contemporaries, including fellow Austrian Gustav Klimt, recognised the unmatched sophistication in his rendering of the human form.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London

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  Edgar Degas, Après le bain, femme s'essuyant.
  Estimate: £120,000–180,000.

  The charcoal study is an archetypal example of one of Degas’ most cherished subjects. Après le bain, femme s'essuyant captures the routine practice of a woman drying herself after bathing; a subject of increasing fascination for the artist throughout the 1880s and 1890s.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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• 

  WestImage - Art Digital Studio

  Henri Matisse, Le Pont.
  Estimate: £250,000–350,000.

  Painted circa 1901, a year that marks a turning point in Henri Matisse’s career, the present work announces the daring palette and bold brushwork that would characterise the height of Matisse's Fauve years. Exemplary of his proto-Fauve works, Le Pont reveals the precise nature of Matisse’s genius as a colourist.
  
  Read Fauvism: 7 Things You Need to Know.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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  Camille Pissarro, Paysannes ramassant des herbes, Eragny. Estimate: £400,000–600,000.

  Dating from 1886, Paysannes ramassant des herbes, Eragny was painted in Eragny, a small village on the banks of the river Epte. Pissarro and his family moved to Eragny, situated some three kilometres from Gisors, in the spring of 1884. In 1892 Pissarro, with the financial help of Claude Monet who lived in the neighbouring Giverny, purchased the house his family had been renting for the previous eight years; the house exists to this day, in a street named after the artist.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pommes, 1898.
  Estimate: £200,000–300,000.

  The still life genre allowed for a certain degree of improvisation that portraiture, most often associated with the Pierre-Auguste Renoir, could limit. In Pommes, one can see how the subject matter allowed for experimentation with light, colour and form.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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  Jan Toorop, Portret van Miss J. Pontifex Hall (Portrait of Miss J. Pontifex Hall).
  Estimate: £60,000–80,000.

  Jan Toorop was a Dutch-Indonesian painter. Born on the island of Java, he left Indonesia for the Netherlands aged 11, where he later enrolled at the Rijksakademie (the State Academy of Fine Arts) in Amsterdam. It was during the 1890s that the artist developed his distinctive Symbolist style, depicting his subjects in willowy guises and working in fine and intricate lines, often floral and curvilinear, inspired by Javanese motifs.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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  Raoul Dufy, La Baie des Anges à Nice.
  Estimate: £350,000–550,000.

  Raoul Dufy’s bold palette and gestural brushwork is rooted in the rhetoric of Fauvism. Dufy’s vistas of the Côte d’Azur are imbibed with lucid Mediterranean light, and seem to capture the lively hum of the Riviera with its ebb and flow of elegantly-dressed visitors. The present work shows the renowned stretch of coastline in Nice, La Baie des Anges, running along the right side of the composition, giving primacy to the warm blue spectrum of sea and sky which dominates the centre of the work.
  
  Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
  20 June | London
  

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• • 

    Type: story

    Category: Impressionist & Modern Art

    Impressionist & Modern Art Week
  • 

    Type: story

    Category: Impressionist & Modern Art

    At $157.2 Million, Modigliani's Greatest Nude Is Also the Most Expensive Painting Ever Sold at Sotheby's
  • 

    Type: story

    Category: Impressionist & Modern Art

    Fauvism: 7 Things You Need to Know
  • 

    Type: story

    Category: Impressionist & Modern Art

    Pablo Picasso’s Tender Portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter Fetches £27.3 Million
  • 

    Type: slideshow

    Category: Impressionist & Modern Art

    Colourist Works from the Harrison Collection