Lot 218: f - CHARLES BARGUE FRENCH, 1826-1883

PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR

MARCHAND ORIENTAL

35 by 24cm., 13 3/4 by 9 1/2 in.

signed and dated BARGUE / 71 l.r.

oil on panel

We are grateful to Gerald Ackerman for his assistance in cataloguing this work, which will be illustrated in colour in the new edition of his catalogue raisonné on the artist.

PROVENANCE

Julius Weitzner, New York
Probably, Gump Department Store, San Francisco (by 1945)
Possibly, Goupil
Possibly, Knoedler, NY (purchased from the above)
Purchased by the aunt of the present owner in New York in the 1960s; thence by descent

LITERATURE

Gerald Ackerman, Bargue-Gérôme 'Drawing Course', Paris, 2000, p. 300, no. 39, catalogued and illustrated (incorrectly dated to 1877)

NOTE

Painted in 1871, and predating a similar composition by the artist (see Ackerman no. 38, p. 300) by six years, this is one of Bargue's earliest recorded orientalist works.

Until now, Marchand oriental was known only from old black and white photographs. One of them, in the archives of the Getty Museum, bears a stamp, From the Julius Weitzner file, on the reverse, along with a handwritten inscription to someone at Gump's department Store in San Francisco, which reads:

"The Oriental Antique Vendor" by Charles Bargue. Less than 20 paintings known by this most exquisite highly finished artist who died so young. This is a must! For windows - [it] ties up nicely with Gumps general atmosphere. Put in window with similar art objects, jades, etc.

This may be a note from a dealer (Weitzner) trying to sell the painting to Gump's, or it may have been written by a Gump member of staff as a memo to another employee on how to use the painting in a window display. The store's archives were destroyed in a fire in 1974, and there is no evidence that Gumps ever owned the painting.

Both stylistically and conceptually, Bargue had much in common with Jean-Léon Gérôme, with whom he shared a studio in the 1870s. His contemporaries also compared him to Eugène Delacroix and Eugène Fromentin. Bargue's extremely rare works became known for their high and exquisite finish. In the less than forty paintings which he executed during his lifetime, Bargue developed a rich, sonorous colour scheme of deep, merging tones.

In an unpublished letter of 1987 Ackerman discussed Bargue's individuality as follows: 'it is not just his skill in painting fine detail that makes him so wonderful, it is his control of his hues. His details are always painted in subtle agreement with the light or shadow that discloses or surrounds them. Bargue's mastery of light and dark enables him to place every object exactly in space, so that it is seen precisely in terms of its relationship to the light source and to every other article.'

Bargue's paintings were very popular with wealthy collectors in the United States during his lifetime, and his works have subsequently found their way into the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Malden (Massachusetts) Public Library and the Payne Art Centre in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.