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Impressionist & Modern Art Highlights Come to Hong Kong Ahead of London Sales

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Ahead of sales in June, highlights from the upcoming Impressionist & Modern Art Evening and Impressionist & Modern Art Day sales in London will be displayed at an exhibition at Sotheby's Hong Kong from 4-6 June. This will include works by Claude Monet, René Magritte, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Click through for more.

Past Auction
Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale
19 June 2019 | 7:00 PM BST | London
Past Auction
Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
20 June 2019 | 10:30 AM BST | London

Impressionist & Modern Art Highlights Come to Hong Kong Ahead of London Sales

  • Claude Monet, Nymphéas, 1908.
    Estimate £25,000,000–35,000,000
    La Nouvelle Peinture: A Distinguished Family Collection

    ‘It took me some time to understand my water lilies. I planted them purely for pleasure; I grew them with no thought of painting them. […] And then, all at once I had the revelation – how wonderful my pond was – and reached for my palette. I’ve hardly had any other subject since that moment.’

    Claude Monet
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  • Henri Matisse, Vase d'anémones, 1946.
    Estimate £4,000,000–6,000,000
    Property from the Collection of Enrico Donati, New York

    Coming from the estate of the esteemed artist and collector Enrico Donati, Vase d’anemones is a vibrant example of Henri Matisse’s late still-life paintings. It reflects Donati’s sophistication of taste and his vision in the promotion of European Modern and Surrealist Art in 20th century America.
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  • Camille Pissarro, Le Boulevard Montmartre, fin de journée, 1897.
    Estimate £3,500,000–5,000,000
    Depicting the busy Parisian street with its pavement, buildings and trees bathed in a warm glow of the setting sun, Le Boulevard Montmartre, fin de journée is an outstanding work from one of the most important series of Pissarro’s urban views. The excitement and spectacle of the city at the fin-de-siècle is brilliantly evoked by the artist’s handling of paint and the elegant composition.
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  • René Magritte, La magie noire, 1946.
    Estimate £2,500,000–3,500,000
    Property of a Private Collector

    La magie noire of 1946 is one of the purest and most elegant examples of the now-celebrated theme that preoccupied Magritte in the 1940s: that of a female nude in an unidentified landscape. The model for this series was the artist's wife Georgette Berger and her image is depicted in a classical manner, abiding by the laws of conventional beauty and proportion.
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  • Pierre Bonnard, Nu assis, jambe pliée, circa 1909.
    Estimate £800,000–1,200,000
    Property of a Distinguished Private Collection

    In Nu assis, jambe pliée Bonnard depicts Marthe, his longtime companion and muse, who inspired a majority of his paintings of nudes in interior settings. Discussing Bonnard's portrayals of Marthe, Sarah Whitfield wrote: 'Marthe is almost always seen in her own domestic surroundings, and as an integral part of those surroundings.’ (S. Whitfield, 'Fragments of Identical World', in Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 17).
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  • Alfred Sisley, Les bords du Loing à Moret, 1886.
    Estimate £1,000,000–1,500,000
    Property from an Important UK Private Collection

    Capturing the splendor of nature, Sisley uses quick and lively brushstrokes to capture the gentle movement of the trees in this summery pastoral depiction of the banks of the Loing. This painting was first owned by the British-American collector Desmond Fitzgerald, an influential engineer in both the development of railroads in the West, and later water works in major American cities. A supporter of French and American Impressionists, Fitzgerald became a close friend of Monet and frequently visited the artist in Giverny.
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  • Marc Chagall, La calèche volante, circa 1925.
    Estimate £2,000,000–3,000,000
    Property from a Private Swiss Collection

    Depicting a characteristic wooden house reminiscent of Chagall’s native Vitebsk, La calèche volante is a smaller version of a painting of the same title, now in the collection of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. A night-time scene suddenly flooded with bright light, this image has been linked to the sun god rising in his chariot, combining the everyday with the magical.
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  • Claude Monet, Printemps à Giverny, effet du matin, 1885
    Estimate £4,000,000–6,000,000
    La Nouvelle Peinture: A Distinguished Family Collection

    Printemps à Giverny, effet du matin was executed during a period when the astoundingly rich and diverse landscape surrounding Monet’s home became his primary motif. Having moved his large family to the rural hamlet of Giverny in the spring of 1883, the artist found here a retreat where he could dedicate himself to explorations of the natural world.
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  • Camille Pissarro, Les meules et le clocher de l'église à Eragny, 1884
    Estimate £1,200,000–1,800,000
    La Nouvelle Peinture: A Distinguished Family Collection

    Painted in 1884, Les meules et le clocher de l’église à Eragny is a beautifully rich and textured depiction of the landscape surrounding Pissarro’s home. Pissarro moved to Eragny with his family in the spring of 1884 and was to remain there until his death in 1903. Eragny was for the artist a pastoral idyll that provided copious painterly inspiration allowing Pissarro to eventually move away from his more Impressionist paintings and into the Neo-Impressionist works that dominated his art in the late 1880s and early 1890s.
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  • Pablo Picasso, Homme à la pipe, 1968
    Estimate £5,500,000–7,500,000
    Property from a Distinguished Private Collection

    Conceived on a grand scale and painted with real energy and invention, Homme à la pipe is a striking example of the artist’s mature work. Painted in the autumn of 1968, the male figure, who is immediately recognisable as one of the musketeers that reappear throughout the paintings of this decade, is realised in quick, confident brushstrokes. The emphatic swirls of paint that fill the background contrast with the strong verticals of the pipe and chair,
    creating a powerful dynamic within the composition.
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  • Joan Miró, Peinture (L'Air), 1938
    Estimate £10,000,000–15,000,000
    Property from a European Private Collection

    Painted in 1938, Peinture (L’Air) is populated by playful creatures and animate shapes painted in bold primary tones and resonating with vibrant energy. The figures have been liberated from the oppressions of the terrestrial realm and given the freedom of the sky. Through the simplification of flat forms and the application of pure colours Peinture (L’Air) shows Miró moving in the direction of his celebrated series of Constellations, begun two years later in 1940.
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  • Picasso, Le Peintre. Buste de profil, 1967
    Estimate £1,000,000–1,500,000
    Property from a Private Swiss Collection

    This intimate depiction of a handsomely-bearded gentleman painted in 1967 is from the dashing musketeer series that Picasso undertook in the 1960s. Le Peintre. Buste de profil does not relinquish his vital identity as a painter but creates an inner world without boundaries, time or place, a direct reaction to his old age, where physical delight in the real world was sadly diminishing. Brimming with painterly verve and stylish invention, the spontaneous brushstrokes are manipulated in order to present a person with a startlingly vivid presence.
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  • Edgar Degas, Quatre danseuses, circa 1902.
    Estimate £250,000–350,000
    Property from a Distinguished Private European Collection

    An elegant example of Degas’s fascination with the medium of dance, Quatre danseuses is a tender example of Degas’s ability to capture snapshots of intimacy outside of the meticulously practiced routine of ballet. Degas’s fascination with the subject matter first developed in the 1860s as he would regularly attend the ballet, opera and the circus. These spectacles of performance provided Degas with an endless source of inspiration and he delighted in sketching the performers in the flesh as he saw them.
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  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Panneau de fruits et fleurs, 1915.
    Estimate £250,000–350,000
    Property from an Important American Collection

    In Renoir’s Panneau de fruits et fleurs the artist pays close attention to light and shadow in his sumptuous fruit and floral arrangement. Painted in 1915, this work formed part of a large painted border which Renoir had initially intended to use as a decorative frame for his Portrait of Madame de Galea (1915). Panneau de fruits et fleurs now stands alone as an exquisite example of the artist’s mastery of the still-life genre and the impressionist techniques that he and Claude Monet introduced at Impressionist exhibitions in Paris.
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