19th Century European Art

Over the last year or so there have been some worryingly disappointing results at London and New York auctions of 19th century British and Continental pictures. Bidding in London at Bonhams’ (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) November 19 sale of 19th Century Paintings, however, exhibited some much-welcomed signs of renewed solidity, with 64 per cent of the 182 lots finding buyers.

Sotheby’s and Christie’s October sales of 19th Century European Art in New York told, or at least seemed to tell, very different stories of the current state of the market for high value Orientalist and genre painting.

FRANCE: Millon & Associés (17.5/ 13.5% buyer’s premium) June 26 sale included two watercolours taken from an album of drawings by Eugene Delacroix, which the artist presented to Count Charles de Mornay on their return from Morocco in 1832.

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller’s small 1832 child portrait of the future Kaiser Franz Joseph as a Small Grenadier playing with toy soldiers, right, panel 13 x 11in (33.5 x 28cm), led the Wiener Kunst sale in Vienna on June 11 with a low-estimate €150,000 (£97,000).

Every picture tells a story, but in the case of Théodore Chassériau’s large portrait of Comtesse de Latour-Maubourg, it was condition as much as content that revealed the artist’s state of mind at the time.

A large desert Caravane by Victor Huguet (c.1895), 4ft 4in x 6ft 8in (1.31 x 2.02m) and inspired by Fromentin, led the Delorme-Fraysse picture sale on February 12 with €82,000 (£51,200).

BELGIUM (£1=BFr63): Antwerp's Campo Vlaamse Kaai enjoyed a pleasant pre-Christmas surprise at their two-day sale on December 11/12 when A Hostage, a large work by Edmund Blair Leighton (1853-1922) measuring 3ft 8in by 4ft 10in (1.12 x 1.48m), featuring a girl leaning on a wall, gazing wistfully out to sea, raced to BFr3.1m (£49,200) against an inexplicably low estimate of BFr8000-12,000.

DENMARK: IN September last year, Copenhagen auctioneers Museumsbygningen (25% buyer’s premium) created a stir by achieving DKr1,000,000 (£85,470) for an oil study of a nude by Wilhelm Marstrand (1810-1873) dating from January 3, 1833, the day on which Professor C.F. Eckersberg and five pupils made the first ever paintings of a female life model at the Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

FRANCE: CAVALIER arabe traversant un gue, by Eugene Delacroix, sold for F16.5m (£1.54m) plus 10 per cent buyer’s premium at Gros and Delettrez in collaboration with eauctionroom in Paris on June 18.

FRANCE: POLICE today appealed for help in tracing up to 100 bronzes and other antiques which were stolen in a £1m burglary at a Paris Gallery in June 1998.

UK: TWO brothers involved in an international conspiracy to dispose of two stolen Old Master paintings have had their sentences upheld in the Appeal Court.

UK: Maria Szantho (b. 1898-?) was a Hungarian artist who specialised in glamour girl nudes which crop up with some regularity in the salerooms, generally at prices between £500-3000.