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Old Masters and 19th Century Art
|
- Sale 6380
Live
| Philadelphia
Nov 4 | 12:00 PM EST
Live
| Philadelphia
Sale 6380
| Philadelphia
| Philadelphia
Estimate$7,000 – $10,000
Provenance:
Sotheby's, London, sale of December 14, 2016, lot 60.
Acquired directly from the above sale by the present owner.
Lot Essay:
Paul Joseph Victor Dargaud was a French artist who created many landscape, genre, and still life paintings, but was most well-known for his scenes of Paris. He was particularly skilled at representing architecture, in which he rendered each structure and building with incredible accuracy, detail, and proportion. Fascinatingly, he created a series of works to demonstrate the various stages of the construction of the Statue of Liberty in Paris.
L’Hotel de Ville de Paris is a stunning depiction of the administrative center of the city. The current building was ordered by King Francis I around 1533 and finished in 1628. Situated along the Seine, L’Hotel de Ville serves as the official mayoral office and hosts the local government. This Italian Renaissance-style building has witnessed numerous momentous occasions, including the arrival of Queen Victoria in Paris in 1855, but it is its own part in history that makes is so fascinating. At the close of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, a group of protestors from the Paris Commune set fire to L’Hotel de Ville, in objection to France’s surrender. Nothing but the shell of the building remained. It was reconstructed, but larger, maintaining the sixteenth century facade while updating the interior to represent late nineteenth century extravagance, even including a replica of the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles. The building’s reconstruction does not try to contrive a sense of pure, untouched Renaissance charm. Rather, the grandiose interior serves as a reminder of what the building has endured.
The present work by Dargaud effectively immortalizes the version of Paris that was right in front of the artist. It considers the transient, ever-shifting nature of the modern cityscape, with its architecture as it exists in a single moment of time, acknowledging the possibility of change. Even the sturdiest, most muscular structures are subject to fire, literal or metaphorical. Permanence is a fragile illusion, but Victor Dargaud’s art comes close.
Framed: 30 1/2 x 39 in.
Minor deposits of surface dirt and dust; canvas is loosely backed with linen, with edge lining around the margins; a fine network of craquelures throughout the surface; slight buckling to the upper right canvas corner; faint stretcher bar marks around the image perimeter and extending vertically through the center; areas of inpainting in the upper right corner of the sky, primarily only visible under strong light. Under UV light: the aforementioned area of inpainting in the upper right corner fluoresces; thin lines of inpainting along the upper center and upper left edges to address stretcher bar marks; a few minor strokes dots of inpainting within the sky and the Hotel de Ville facade and roof; a larger area of inpainting in the lower left corner, to the right of the figures, approximately 2 x 3 1/2 inches in areas, possibly indicating a previous repair; one small spot of inpainting in the bridge, to the right of the "69," as well as a few small spots along the lower right corner edge; small dots of inpainting around the lamppost in the center left. Additional images available upon request.
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