TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
'Touching' Gauguin masterpiece to go under hammer in Paris
Change Size
The back of French artist Paul Gauguin's artwork (AFP/File)
A
n early masterpiece by artist Paul Gauguin -- which has only been seen in public twice in nearly 140 years -- will be auctioned in Paris next month.
"Pissarro's Garden" is a touching tribute to the older Impressionist master, Camille Pissarro, who Gauguin called his "dear teacher".
It shows a figure hidden under an umbrella outside an old country cottage near Pontoise, which is now a suburb of Paris.
The highly unusual painting from 1881 also has two Gauguin self-portraits on the back, showing how hard-up the young painter was after he quit his comfortable life as a stockbroker under Pissarro's influence to concentrate on art.
Sotheby's said experts are convinced the man in the painting is Pissarro, who "often painted beneath an umbrella, as portrayed in many works and images showing the artist in Pontoise.
"This is more than a landscape, it is Gauguin's homage to his teacher... and is a testament to the friendship between two great figures of modern art," it added.
Gauguin bought Pissarro's work before he took to painting himself and often stayed in Pontoise as he learned technique from the old master, who also helped launch the young man's career.
They were so close, in fact, that in 1880 they did a double self-portrait, where each drew the other.
'Striking modernity'
The drawing is now part of what is arguably the world's finest collection of Impressionist art at the Orsay Museum in Paris.
Christophe Duvivier, who heads the Pissarro Museum in Pontoise, said "with Pissarro Gauguin learnt to see landscape and summarize it".
Read also: Christie's Hong Kong to auction rare 1871 Raden Saleh painting
Aurelie Vandevoorde, Sotheby's French head of Impressionist and Modern Art, said the picture is "very innovative for the time and very different to what other Impressionists were doing in this period."
The "modernity" of the small Gauguin self-portraits on the back make it even more of a stand-out piece, she insisted.
"Their modernity is striking, with Gauguin's extremely piercing look. We can see he is already moving away from Impressionism, prefiguring the art of the beginning of the 20th century," Vandevoorde added.
The painting -- which has an estimate of between 600,000 and 900,000 euros ($1 million) -- has been in the same family collection since the 1920s, Sotheby's said.
It has only been seen twice in public: once in France in 1964 and in a hit US show, "Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse", at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2015.
