Bernard Boutet de Monvel

Collection Yves Plantin, Galerie du Luxembourg;

Hi sale, Art Auction France, Paris, 23 November 2015, lot 493.

S.-J. Addade, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Paris 2016, p. 310, repr.

Executed in 1936, this profile of William Adams Delano occupies almost the entirety of a circular format, against which the silhouette of the “Little Ipswich” estate appears, strangely reduced in scale and rendered in the manner of an architectural drawing. The face is painted with extreme finesse and hyperrealistic precision. In his constant pursuit of objectivity, Boutet de Monvel “scratches into the still-wet paint with a fine point to delineate the sitter’s hair,” allowing the viewer to distinguish each individual strand (S.-J. Addade, 2016, op. cit., p. 284). Similar incisions mark the forehead, nose, and cheek. He pushes photographic realism to the extreme, deeply incising the wrinkles into the flesh and capturing the reflection of light in the eye.

Boutet de Monvel inscribed William Delano’s profile within a circle drawn with a compass. He favored this format, which was inspired by fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance portraits, including those by Piero della Francesca, which he discovered during his trip to Italy in 1904. Many of his close-up portraits, sometimes frontal but often in profile, are similarly enclosed within a circular format (see, for example, previous lot).

The “Little Ipswich” estate visible in the background alludes to William Delano’s profession as a renowned American architect. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he founded the firm Delano & Aldrich with Chester Holmes Aldrich. The firm soon received major commissions from New York’s elite, who wished to build country estates on Long Island where they could spend the summer months. “Little Ipswich,” in Woodbury, Long Island, was built in 1927–1928 for interior decorator Ruby Ross Wood and her husband, Chalmers Wood. It is highly representative of the Neoclassical and academic style of the Delano & Aldrich firm. The house was demolished in 1995.