Victor Di Gesu

'Still Life', Paris, Louvre, Salon d'Automne, Academie Chaumière, LACMA, SFAA

Circa 1955

Signed verso 'Di Gesu' for Victor Di Gesu (American, 1914-1988) and painted circa 1965. Winner of the Prix Othon Friesz, Victor di Gesu first attended the Los Angeles Art Center and...

Signed lower right, 'V. Isbrand' for Victor Isbrand (Danish, 1897-1989) and painted circa 1945. A dramatic, Post-Impressionist still-life showing a group of items including a fluted, Japanese porcelain vase holding an informal arrangement of variegated daisies, a lobed Imari bowl with fruit and a Japanese woodblock print set...

Signed oil on board interior by French Les Nabis painter Edouard Vuillard. The work depicts a room with a large window, outside of which are bare trees. Inside the room are three chairs and a patterned rug on the floor. Signature: Signed lower left Dimensions: Framed: 20"x13" Unframed: 13"x6" Provenance: Prince Antoine Bibesco (1878-1951) - Special Envoy of Romania to the United States Piasa Encheres - Paris Lot no. 88 - 8th April 2005 - Sold EUR 118,000 hammer price Acquired at the above by Thomas Gibson Fine Art - London Acquired by the previous owner from Thomas Gibson Fine Art - TEFAF Maastricht November 2005 Literature: This work is included in the catalogue rasionne of the work of Edouard Vuillard under Ref Volume II No. 172 - illustrated and described Access to the raisonne online can be found at the Wildenstein Plattner Institute website. The work is described as being executed in the period 1899 to 1904 by Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval Édouard Vuillard attended the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, where he made friends with Maurice Denis, Lugné-Poe, and Ker-Xavier Roussel, later his brother-in-law. He studied in Maillart’s studio; for six weeks came under the tutelage of Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; and later under William Bouguereau and Robert at the Académie Julian, where he became closely linked with the Nabis group (from the Hebrew word for ‘prophet’). He met Marcel Proust in 1902. From 1908, he taught at the Académie Ranson. In 1937, he was elected member of the Institute. At first, Édouard Vuillard painted small subjects, disciplined and proficient, qualities for which the prestigious École Française was famous. His earliest still-lifes (1888) are astonishing in their decisiveness and subtlety. His empathy for the object had already compelled him to soften its appearance; the object, which, by virtue of its bright or glossy presence, remained the nonego and the ‘thing represented’ for so many others. ‘Intimacy’ developed immediately between the painter and this modest environment; inhabiting it every day enabled him to celebrate its splendour, and it was to remain his favourite environment. But he was already alternating between small portraits and still-lifes, which gained recognition because of their natural qualities and dignity of tone: a rare combination in a beginner. About 1890, influenced indirectly by Paul Gauguin, all the certainties which the self-styled Nabis painters had contented themselves with suddenly collapsed. Everything was called into question again: both the linear layout of the picture and its colour scheme; the choice of subject and its material aspect; its manufacture and its purpose. Vuillard’s paintings at that time show surprising, bold innovations and an arbitrary power, which one would expect 15 or 20 years later at the height of the Fauvist period. The preoccupation with an internal geometry set them apart from earlier studies. From then on, the paintings were based on forms, lines, and colours. Vuillard made concessions. He produced a portrait or interior with its furniture and its wallpapers, in which the family inhabiting it, evolves. Treated with flat areas of colour and solid shades of ochres, reds, blues, and saffron yellow, without modulation, they seem to prefigure certain paintings by Henri Matisse and Roger de La Fresnaye. In 1891, Édouard Vuillard painted an Elegant Lady, a silhouette seen from the back; a long vertical shape starting from the hair decorated with brown feathers; there is a kind of pink cloak, the tight and never-ending black skirt, erect in front of a half-open, bright orange door in a green wall, from where the light of another vertical shape emerges, which is bright yellow, and is reflected in red on the parquet at the feet of the elegant lady. This painting meets his concerns about the actual moment of creating ‘harmonies corresponding to our feeling’, and by virtue of its almost geometric structure, its drawing entirely free of detail, its light effects and colour harmonies, very much prefigures aspects of the future Abstraction movement and is oddly reminiscent of the final period of Nicolas de Staël. All too often, Édouard Vuillard is only admired in his role as the harmonist, the serene contemplator who combines an exquisite sense of nuance, rhythms, and values with the most acute observation. These singular investigations, these three-dimensional meditations including a table, a folding metal cot...

"In the Pink" The lush, enfolding petals of the pink peony form a round ball that slowly unfurls into an expansive rose-like flowering. These beautiful flowers are so treasured becau...