WESTLAKE, TX.- Gallery 19C will be among the 260 galleries exhibiting at TEFAF Maastricht in March 2024. With an exclusive focus on European Paintings from the nineteenth century, Gallery 19C is one of the few galleries to showcase the rich potential that exists in this rewarding field of collecting. This year’s edition of the fair marks the gallery’s fourth appearance at TEFAF Maastricht. Past fairs have included sales to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and a highlight from 2023 was the exhibition of Lord Leighton’s only known oil study for his iconic masterpiece Flaming June, which was purchased at the fair and donated to Leighton House in London. The history of the oil sketch and the story of its acquisition by Leighton House will be a feature article in TEFAF’s Museum Stories series in March.

Gallery 19C * TEFAF Maastricht * March 2024 * Stand 328

For TEFAF’S 2024 edition, Gallery 19C will feature a rare, early painting by Alfred Sisley. Painted in 1868, Sisley’s À la Lisière de la Forêt de Fontainebeau shows a large tree, its branches bursting with vibrant green leaves. Perhaps it is spring or early summer; a young man leans against the trunk of the tree, reading a book while the figures of a couple can be seen embracing in the distance. Although three people populate the scene, the subject is all about the massive tree. The idea of painting a tree as the primary focus had precedent in two contemporary paintings: Gustave Courbet’s The Oak of Flagey of 1864 (Courbet Museum, Ornans) and Monet’s majestic The Bodmer Oak, painted in 1865 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). However, the young Sisley is more daring; his tree takes up the entire surface of the painting, in other words, Sisley has painted a “close up”. The leaves are large and lush painted with overlapping dabs and splashes of various shades of vibrant green. Patches of sunlight reflect on the trunk and branches of the tree. This is a Sisley we have not seen before. His paintings from the 1860s are very rare. During the Franco-Prussian War, Sisley’s house in Bougival was occupied by the Prussian army, and most of his work from the 1860s was likely destroyed during the bombardment of the Paris suburbs that followed.

The renewed popularity of French artist Rosa Bonheur was underscored by her 2022 retrospective at the Musée d’Oray and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux. Gallery 19C will feature Le Taureau Gris, Rosa Bonheur’s “portrait” of a young bull in a landscape, an apt subject for the artist, who once exclaimed, “As for males, I like only the bulls I paint.” Among the other French artists represented by Gallery 19C will be Paul Baudry, Henri Gervex, Henri Lehmann, Léon Lhermitte and Jean Georges Vibert, as well as Italian painter Federico Zandomeneghi and the American Impressionist J. Alden Weir. Additionally, following a recent thematic exhibition at the gallery in Westlake, Texas, collectors, and aficionados of German nineteenth century art will be pleased to see a selection of Nazarene paintings, including works by Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow, Joseph Führich, Eduard Julius Bendemann, Julius Benno Hübner, Franz Ittenbach and Alexader Maximillian Seitz.

TEFAF runs from March 9-14 at the MECC Maastricht.