PARIS.- This Autumn sees
Sotheby’s France invite aesthetes on a voyage to the shores of the Orient. The 123-lot sale on October 23, retracing the key periods of this unique pictorial movement, unveils different facets of an Orient that was a subject both of dreams and exploration, and an endless source of fantasy and fascination. Connoisseurs will encounter such great 19th and 20th century itinerant artists as Jacques Majorelle, Adolf Schreyer, Herman-David-Salomon Corrodi and Etienne Dinet. European Sculpture and Islamic Art will also feature strongly.
The sale celebrates the Nude with some fifteen paintings of sumptuous, sensuously reclining odalisques: women exuding great sensuality, magnified as goddesses of a distant Orient and a source of endless fantasy.
Young Woman on a Terrace by Frederick-Arthur Bridgman is the outstanding work in the ensemble. It is thought to be the left-hand part of a large triptych entitled The Pirate of Love painted for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889. It is unique in Bridgman's oeuvre in terms of its size and status as phase one of a three-part composition. It shows a young beauty dreamily reclining in the rays of the evening sun, oblivious to a man ogling her from behind a low wall (est. €100,000-150,000 / / $130.000-195.000).
These nudes, painted in academic style, follow the masterly example of Ingres’ Odalisques in achieving a synthesis between realistic treatment of the flesh and an erotic idealization of the body’s lines and curves. Charles-Zacharie Landelle’s magnificent 1864 painting Le Réveil (est. €10,000-15,000 / $13.000-19.500) represents a young woman reclining in a voluptuous pose recalling Ingres’ famous Odalisque with a Slave (1839/40) in the Fogg Museum at Harvard. François-Léon Comerre’s luminous Odalisque Allongée shows a milky-skinned young woman lasciviously displaying her provocative nudity in the luxuriant decor of what looks like a Turkish bath. The model’s quasi-virginal whiteness, combined with her delicate features, in no way undermine the painting’s erotic impact (est. €10,000-15,000 / $16.000-24.500).
The sale also includes four large, highly decorative paintings by Italy’s Massimiliano Gallelli, thought once to have adorned a Monaco residence and offering a veritable ‘invitation to dream.’ Artists based in North Africa, and who liked to immortalize everyday scenes there, will also be featured, among them Adolf Schreyer and Herman-David-Salomon Corrodi – the latter with a pretty, softly lit Market Scene probably painted in Biskra, Algeria (est. €35,000-50,000 / $45.400-65.000).
Another painting made in situ is Jacques Majorelle’s Souk El Khemis or ‘Thursday market,’ depicting the weekly market at the town gates where country women came to sell their expertly woven rugs. These were often black or ochre in colour and, when spread out on the ground, created the vivid splashes of intense colour that so appealed to the artist (est. €30,000-40,000 / $38.900-52.000).
In his spectacular and technically superb Conversation Beneath A Doorway, Austria’s Rudolf Ernst shows men conversing against a background richly decorated with Indian, Ottoman and Hispano- Mauresque motifs. The work showcases Ernst’s gift for evoking a mysterious, dream-like Orient (est. €100,000-150,000 / $130.000- 195.000).
European sculpture features terracottas by Friedrich Goldscheider and polychrome bronzes from the Franz Bergmann factory in Vienna. There will be two further high-quality bronzes: an enigmatic Oriental Smoker (c.1885-90) by Gaston Veunevot Leroux (est. €10,000-15,000 / $13.000-19.500); and Charles Cordier’s magnificent 1866 Femme Fellah Voilée , carried out in the wake of an ethnographic expedition to Egypt, and subtly revealing the model’s generous curves (est. €15,000-20,000 / $19.500-26.000).
The sale’s Islamic Art section includes works from various French private collections, with silver from 19 th century Ottoman Turkey; a rare, important 16th /17th century Hispano-Mauresque amphora from Andalusia (est. €30,000-40,000 / $38.900- 52.000); and a 14th century Timurid tile from Central Asia.
