Lot n° 131
Estimation :
7000 - 8000
EUR
Albert LEBOURG (Montfort-sur-Risle, 1849... - Lot 131 - Vermot et Associés
Albert LEBOURG (Montfort-sur-Risle, 1849 - Rouen, 1928)
A windmill near Rotterdam
Oil on canvas, 39,5 x 64,5 cm
Signed lower left, located Rotterdam, dated 1896, dedicated: "To Madame and Commandant Lassalle, affectionate tribute."
History:
- Jean-Pierre Osenat sale, Fontainebleau, June 30, 2019, lot n° 155
- Hermitage Fine Art Monaco sale, 28 October 2020, lot n° 501
- Cornette de Saint-Cyr sale, Paris, December 7, 2021, lot n° 2
Our landscape is to be compared with a painting on the same theme offered at Éric Pillon Enchères in Versailles, on May 13, 2012, lot n° 39 : oil on canvas entitled Mill near Rotterdam, 47 x 73,5 cm, signed, located Rotterdam, 1896, lower left. The structure of the mill, with a circular platform, is similar.
A Norman Traveler
A student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, he began his career as a teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts in Algiers until 1876, before attending the studio of Jean-Paul Laurens in Paris in 1878-79. That same year, he joined the Impressionists and exhibited with them in 1879 and 1880 alongside Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, as well as at the Salon between 1883 and 1895. The artist's numerous trips in France, notably to the Île-de-France, Normandy and Auvergne, Lake Geneva and La Rochelle, as well as abroad to Holland, Belgium and Algeria, resulted in over two thousand landscapes.
Holland, an inspiring flat country
From the fall of 1895 to the beginning of 1896, Albert Lebourg visited Holland with the painter Horace Mélicourt. He brought back several landscapes with mill(s), including this one. As in other similar works, we find a road in perspective that invites the viewer to virtually walk through the landscape in the company of locals. The imposing mill, with its typical platform structure, is in the foreground of a diagonal that guides the eye to the painter's favorite motif: the setting sun, delicately blazing in the clouds. The tones are declined around the solar star, from orange to mauve, whose last rays flush the surrounding countryside and the canal at the foot of the mill. Lebourg is here in the vein of his colleague Claude Monet, with whom he exhibited some fifteen years earlier, during the Impressionist exhibitions.
The following year, in 1897, the Société nationale des Beaux-arts will present several works from his stay in Holland.
Critical Fortune
When the artist died, a laudatory article by Maurice Feuillet in the Gaulois Artistique of January 24, 1928, p. 82, summarized his career as follows: "After Manet, Sisley and Degas; Renoir, Gauguin and Pissarro; after Monet and Guillaumin, he was the last of this famous impressionist phalanx. Animated by the faith that creates miracles, they have opened our eyes.
Albert Lebourg is in the collections of the Musée d'Orsay, the Petit-Palais and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, to mention only the most important ones.
Expert : Virginie Journiac, Art Historian, Expert approved in Works of Art by the CECOA, the FNEPSA and the CEDEA.
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