60 19th June 2010
DAUMIER IN NEW YORK
A SMALL cache of two drawings and eight bronzes by the 19th century French realist artist Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) enlivened the opening European section of the Doyle New York (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) art auction on May 5. All the works had come from the estate of Albert H. Gordon, the investment mogul and veteran of the 1929 Wall Street crash, who died last year aged 107, and had been entered direct from his family. Mr Gordon had a particular leaning
towards the written works of Trollope and the art of Francisco de Goya and the slightly later Honoré Daumier who shared Goya’s taste for satirical subject matter. In the auctioneers’ April sale of books and prints, four Goya bullfighting lithographs discussed and pictured in ATG No 1933, March 27 were among the sale highlights ranging in price from $60,000-85,000 (£41,380-£58,620).
Most of the Daumiers offered here
were caricatures of French celebrities which he was renowned for lampooning. Three of them had a 1966 auction provenance to the Palais Galleria, Paris while all bar one of the bronzes were
limited edition casts by the Barbedienne foundry. Like all Daumier bronzes, these were posthumously cast (in this case between 1927 and 1952). All found takers. There was strong
European interest and particularly from German buyers, noted Doyle’s specialist Elaine Banks Stainton, who were drawn initially to the sale by the presence of some German bronzes. While some of the lots were secured by the New York trade she felt most were destined to end up in Europe. Doyle’s highest expectations were for /4
an 8 x 53 in (20 x 14.5cm) pen and wash
study of a barrister addressing the court. It is thought to be a study for the central figure in Daumier’s painting Le Pardon and had an old provenance back to the sales of the Franck Lamy and Victor Simon collections in 1912 and 1939 respectively. However, this sold shy of its $70,000- 110,000 estimate at $45,000 (£31,035). Conversely, a pencil, crayon and
charcoal study of L’Amateur d’Estampes (The print collector) shown here, easily outpaced its modest $8000-12,000 guide when a German bidder paid $55,000 (£37,930) to secure it.
Like the drawing of the barrister, it was a study for a painting. In this instance ‘the
Right: a pencil and crayon study of
L’Amateur d’Estampes by Honoré Daumier – $55,000 (£37,930) at Doyle New York.
collector’ appears in three works by Daumier of the same title, one of them now in the Musée du Petit Palais. It also came with a lengthy provenance back to 1914, when it was sold at auction in Paris from the collection of M. Claude Roger Marx, with subsequent sojourns in galleries and collections in New York,
Berlin and Zurich. The most expensive bronze was a
Valsuani cast self-portrait bust, numbered 7 out of an edition of 12, from the Galleria sale which outstripped its $30,000-50,000 guide to take $75,0000 (£51,725) from a French buyer.
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