Lot 407: ATTRIBUTED TO YOKOYAMA TAIKAN (1868-1958) The Pon

ATTRIBUTED TO YOKOYAMA TAIKAN (1868-1958) The Pont Saint Michel, Paris, Meiji era (1868-1912), circa 1908 or earlier, probably after Albert Marquet (1875-1947) Unmounted, ink on silk, depicting the Pont Saint Michel, Paris, the Pont Neuf in the background, to the left the Quai des Grands Augustins, to the right the Quai des Orfèvres and the Palais de Justice, inscribed at lower left Taikan with seal. 39.8cm x 55.3cm (15 5/8in x 21¾in).

Provenance: Galerie Bailly, Paris. Purchased in 1994 directly from the above by the present owner. The masterly brushwork and in particular the handling of ink wash in the trees and the foreground river suggest that this Parisian scene is very likely the work of Nihonga titan Yokoyama Taikan, one of the dominant figures in early- to mid-twentieth-century Japanese art. It is fascinating to discover that the painting is very close, in nearly every detail including the position of mobile elements such as people, carts, buses and boats, to a work by Albert Marquet (1875-1947), Fauviste painter and lifelong friend of Henri Matisse, whose studio at 19 Quai Saint Michel Marquet took over, working there for most of his career. From the studio, Marquet painted innumerable views of the Pont Saint Michel; of these one in particular, in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/detail. php ID=62871), dating from 1908, features a post in the foreground and tall wooden structures at top right, perhaps the scaffolding for an incomplete wing of the Palais de Justice. These details, absent from later versions such as that in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1910, inv. no. M.61.41.2; http://collections.lacma.org/node/233410), are faithfully reproduced in Taikan’s version (in fact, he exaggerated the post’s height). Taikan appears to have visited Paris only once, in June 1905, but it is interesting to note that around 1906 Marquet ‘under the influence of Japanese brush paintings . . . devised a remarkably animated and spontaneous form of India ink drawing’ (http://www. tate.org.uk/art/artists/albert-marquet-2332). Conceivably, then, Taikan met Marquet during his brief stay in the French capital and introduced him to the potential of Japanese ink. It is even possible, perhaps, that the present lot is the original version of the Pont Saint Michel view, one that Marquet would repeat for the next four decades. For Taikan’s European travels, see Kokuritsu Shinbijutsukan (The National Art Centre, Tokyo), Botsugo gojunen Yokoyama Taikan: Aratanaru Densetsu e (Yokoyama Taikan Fifty Years On: A Legend in the Making), Tokyo, Kokuritsu Shinbujutsukan and Asahi Shinbunsha, 2008, p.197.