19th Century European Art Sale features a previously unrecorded Courbet masterwork

NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s bi-annual 19th Century European Art sale on 9 May 2013 will feature an encyclopedic look at the period, featuring masterworks by Gustave Courbet, Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, Jean Béraud, William Bouguereau, Jean-Léon Gérôme, among others. A major highlight of the sale is a previously unrecorded nude by Gustave Courbet, Nu Couché (est. $600/800,000, above), painted in 1866, the same year he painted the famed L’Origine du monde. This painting is a third version of two known works dated 1866; the others are currently at the Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur, and Mesdag Museum, The Hague. The theme of the female nude was at the forefront of Courbet’s creative output in the 1860s. This model is voluptuous and sensual, not only in her recumbent pose, but also in how her form is defined by the richly painted surface. Highlights of the sale will be on view in our York Avenue galleries beginning on 3 May 2013.

The cover of the May catalogue features a modern composition by Jean Béraud, Leaving Montmartre Cemetery (est. $600/800,000) from 1876, which showcases the bohemian energy of Paris in the late 19th century. The painting depicts a group of mourners walking along the Boulevard de Clichy and is clearly influenced by the asymmetrical compositions of Japanese ukioy-e prints with large expanses, diagonal forms cutting across the canvas, and dark figures used as graphic interjections. The modernity of this work is particularly timely with the recent success of the exhibition, Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity, currently at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which prominently features several works by Béraud.

Gustave Courbet, Nu Couché, 1866. Est. $600/800,000. Photo: Sotheby’s.

A further highlight of the sale is a painting by the most important Spanish Impressionist painter, Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, Palacio de Carlos V, Alcázar de Sevilla (est. $300/500,000). Painted in 1908, during his first trip to the gardens at the Alcázar, it is one of a series that was enormously popular when exhibited and sold at the Hispanic Society of New York in 1909, there purchased by Miss Dorothy Whitney, one of the wealthiest women in America and well-known philanthropist, social activist and avid art collector. This painting has been requested for a major 2014 exhibition at the Meadows Museum, Sorolla and America.

Six works by French painter William Bouguereau are also featured in our May sale. The stunning Moissonneuse (est. $600/800,000), is among Bouguereau’s most sophisticated and elegant single-figure compositions. In 1868 when Moissonneuse was painted, Bouguereau was at the peak of his technical virtuosity and about to become one of the most popular and sought-after artists of his generation. Similarly, Bouguereau’s Au bord de la Mer (est. $500/700,000) features a young peasant girl in a landscape, the artist’s best-known and most treasured imagery. The painting has been in the same American private collection for over a century.

The sale also features Victorian paintings by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John Atkinson Grimshaw and John William Godward, as well as an exceptional group of Orientalist works, including masterpieces by American artists Frederick Arthur Bridgman and Edwin Lord Weeks, as well as important works by Jean-Léon Gérôme.