Gallery France Online

Claude Monet, Meules, 1890Sold for: $110.7 million at Sotheby’s (May 14, 2019)

Sotheby’s 2019 auction of Impressionist and Modern Art in New York saw Claude Monet’s Meules achieve nearly twice its pre-sale estimate. It also surpassed Monet’s previous auction record for Nymphéas en fleur, which sold for $84.6 million in May 2018. Meules is part of Monet’s notable Haystacks series, one of the most recognizable from the artist’s oeuvre.
Regards, Gallery France

Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Evening sale on 19 Junefeatures a magnificent workby Pissarro that narrowly escaped theft by the Nazis.


Pissarro's series paintings of Paris in the late 1890s are amongst the supreme achievements of Impressionism, taking their place alongside Claude Monet’s series of Rouen Cathedral, poplars and grain stacks and the later waterlilies.


CAMILLE PISSARRO, LE BOULEVARD MONTMARTRE, FIN DE JOURNÉE, ESTIMATE £3,500,000–5,000,000



This painting has a dramatic story. Formerly owned by Alfred Sommerguth, a Jewish businessman who built his fortune through his leadership of the German tobacco conglomerate Loeser & Wolff, it nearly fell victim to the Nazi theft of Jewish property carried out during the late 1930s. While many of the works in the Sommerguths’ extensive art collection were looted by the Nazis, Alfred and his wife Gertrud managed to ship 22 of their best paintings, including this one, to Switzerland, where they were loaned to the Sturz…

Over the course of his long career, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919) continually turned to the human figure for artistic inspiration.



The body—particularly the nude—was the defining subject of Renoir’s practice, from his days as a student copying the old masters in the Musée du Louvre to the early twentieth century, when his revolutionary style of painting inspired the masters of modernism. In recognition of the centenary of Renoir’s death, the Clark Art Institute and the Kimbell Art Museum present Renoir: The Body, The Senses. This exhibition is the first major exploration of Renoir’s unceasing interest in the human form, and it reconsiders Renoir as a constantly evolving artist whose style moved from Realism into luminous Impressionism and culminated in the modern classicism of his last decades. Co-organized by Esther Bell, Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Chief Curator at the Clark, and George T. M. Shackelford, Deputy Director at the Kimbell, the exhibition will be on view a…

Dr Carmen Bambach believes the polymath likely only did small retouchings to the work.

The Salvator Mundi on display at Christie’s auction rooms in London. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP


One of the world’s leading experts on Leonardo da Vinci has criticised Christie’s auction house for wrongly suggesting in its cataloguing of the Salvator Mundi that she was among scholars who had attributed the picture to the Renaissance master. Dr Carmen Bambach, who is a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, told the Guardian: “That is not representative of my opinion.” In 2008, she had been among scholars invited by the National Gallery in London to view the painting. In 2017, Christie’s New York sold it for a record-breaking $450m (£356m), having listed her in its cataloguing as among scholars whose “study and examination of the painting … resulted in a broad consensus that the Salvator Mundi was painted by Leonardo”. But, in her forthcoming four-volume study of the polymath – a …

Darida paints Brancusi by Claudia Moscovici Alexandru Darida was born in 1955 in Romania. He benefited from an extensive artistic training. He studied at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Romania, the Liberal Academy of Art in Rome and the American Academy of Art in Chicago. His work has been featured in Municipal Galleries and the National Museum of Art in Bucharest, Romania. It has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Formello-Rome International Prize for painting. The artist was born in Transylvania, the region best known in the West for its ruthless ruler, Vlad Tepes, and the myth of Dracula that it later inspired. Yet his is not a regional work, but an art that recaptures the timeless magic and imagination of fairy tales. His iconographic paintings, though they retain an Eastern European feel, transcend any particular place and time, in the same way the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm did during the eighteenth-century and the Romantic poetry of Romania’s national poet, Mihai E…