Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna. Nature in Art, between Fra Beato Angelico, Leonardo and Corot,

 Perugia, Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria

15 March – 15 June 2025

More than eighty works by the greatest Italian and European artists tell the story of the revolution launched by Saint Francis’s Canticle of the Sun, in the year that marks its eighth centennial.

Exceptional loans have been made by the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, the Mauritshuis, the Vatican Museums and Italy’s leading public museums, constituting a journey through masterpieces from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

From 15 March to 15 June 2025, the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia will be hosting the exhibition Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna. Nature in Art, between Fra Beato Angelico, Leonardo and Corot, on the occasion of the eighth centennial of the composition of the Canticle of the Sun by Saint Francis of Assisi. Not only one of the very first works of poetry in old Italian, it was also the first expression of a new relationship with Nature, to which the saint spoke for the first time in terms of intimacy, in an ecological ideal, in the etymological sense of the term, that was to exert an incredible influence on art from the thirteenth century onwards.

Curated by Costantino D’Orazio, Director of the National Museums of Perugia – Umbria Regional Directorate of National Museums, together with Veruska Picchiarelli and Carla Scagliosi, art historians responsible for the collections at the National Gallery of Umbria, and held under the patronage of the Region of Umbria and of the Municipality of Perugia, with the support of the National Committee for the Celebrations of the Eighth Centennial of the Death of Saint Francis of Assisi and a contribution from the Perugia Foundation, the exhibition will present more than eighty works, comprising paintings, drawings, etchings, sculptures and printed volumes by some of the most famous artists from Italian and European art history, such as Pisanello, Michelino da Besozzo, Paolo Uccello, Jan van Eyck, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Leon Battista Alberti, Albrecht Dürer, Lorenzo Lotto, Dosso Dossi, Giambologna, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Domenichino, Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Giambattista Piranesi, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and many more, whose masterpieces are milestones that mark the crucial changes in how the figurative arts tackled and reflected man’s relationship with Nature in the course of the centuries.
The aim is to furnish a profound, evocative account of the diverse nuances with which Creation has been observed by human sensitivity and interpreted in artistic vision.

“With this undertaking, the National Gallery of Umbria stands confirmed as a museum on an international level capable of building a dialogue with other leading museums in Italy and abroad”, states Costantino D’Orazio. “This process of networking not only contributes to maximising the value of our collections, but is also capable of stimulating studies and research projects that will offer visitors an experience that speaks to everyone, one where they will all find plentiful reasons for coming back and recommending us to their friends and acquaintances.”

THE MASTERPIECES ON SHOW

The most significant works on show in Perugia will include the formidable 

Last Judgement by Fra Angelico, on exceptional loan from the Museum of the Basilica of San Marco in Florence, while the Gallery of the Accademia in the same city will be sending the enigmatic 

Thebaid by Paolo Uccello, here also accompanied by the Predella with the Miracle of the Profaned Host from the National Gallery of the Marches in Urbino, also by Paolo Uccello.

THE ARTWORK IN DETAIL:

From the Galleries of the Accademia in Venice will come the celebrated 

Saint Jerome by Piero della Francesca, which will dialogue with the same subject painted some fifty years later by 

Lorenzo Lotto, now usually housed in the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome.

Four drawings by Pisanello (from the Louvre) will detail the approach to nature of this great exponent of international Gothic art, a pioneer among artists for his scientific observation.

Michelino da Besozzo’s Madonna of the Rose Garden, an iconic version of nature depicted as unreal in its perfection, will illustrate late Gothic figurative culture. 

Just a short while afterwards, yet already in the full flush of Humanism, come the fundamental volumes of Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura, Luca Pacioli’s Summa de aritmetica and Piero della Francesca’s De Perspectiva pingendi, triggering an epoch-making revolution by codifying the perspective system as a means to achieve a realistic representation of space. 

There will be a special focus on Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, with two sheets being loaned to Perugia by the Ambrosian Library in Milan, to investigate the maestro’s contribution to the study of the flight of birds, both through his observations of nature and through his reconstruction of flight in the form of a machine.

The role of Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili will be to tackle the theme of the symbolic value of natural elements, which was also explored by such artists as 

Dosso Dossi, with his Melissa from the Borghese Gallery in Rome, 

Paris Bordon, with the Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist from the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu, 

Federico Barocci, creator of an emotional rendering of the Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, which will come from Fossombrone, and 

Correggio, whose Portrait of a Man Reading will be loaned by the Sforza Castle in Milan.

Visitors will then be immersed in idealised visions of nature as seen in the works of champions of classical and Baroque painting, from 

Annibale Carracci, with his Vision of Saint Eustace, to 

Giovanni Lanfranco’s Assumption of Magdalena, from the Museum of Capodimonte in Naples. 

The pivotal moment of the advent of a modern approach to the natural sciences, in the classification of living species (including the ones found in the New World), will be illustrated by the passage from the collections typical of the Wunderkammer, or Cabinets of Curiosities, to the publications of Ulisse Aldrovandi, while the scientific and astronomical discoveries of the early seventeenth century will be represented by the exceptional manuscript of the Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo Galilei, which is now preserved in the Central National Library in Florence.

There will be a rich section investigating nature as it is represented in landscape painting from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, featuring works of artists of enormous importance to art history, such as Nicolas Poussin, William Hamilton, Donato Creti – with two exceptional loans from the Vatican Museums – Claude Lorrain and Giambattista Piranesi, culminating in the exhibition’s finale, entrusted to the 

Marmore Waterfall (Waterfall at Terni), painted by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot.

THE SECTIONS OF THE EXHIBITION

The visit to the exhibition will start with an investigation of Mother Nature, the generous earth, as modelled by the labour of man, whose depiction starts from the remotest centuries of the Middle Ages, progressing through the cycles of the months and the activities that take place in them.
An extensive section will be devoted to the representations of Creation, in other words Nature construed as the space occupied by mankind, where the divine will stands revealed. As the Middle Ages evolved into modernity, landscape and views acquired the status of autonomous genres, as the method of linear perspective and of the central vanishing point was devised and subsequently fully theorised.
In addition to their sensitive manifestations of Creation, artists allowed themselves to be seduced by oneiric, imaginative visions of a nature that was impossible in its perfection or its monstrosity. Scenarios of wonder accompany their reproductions of Eden or of the Kingdom of Heaven, for example in Michelino da Besozzo’s Madonna of the Rose Garden and in the Paradise in Fra Angelico’s Last Judgement.

The most enigmatic aspects of Nature will be analysed by an entire section of the exhibition, which sets out to investigate man’s inner turmoil when faced with indomitable, overpowering forces, as his reverential fear of the fury of the elements typical of mediaeval sensitivity gave way to the sense of bewilderment, terror and tension towards infinity when faced with Nature of the nineteenth century, which experienced the last, intense period of great landscape painting.

Throughout the exhibition will run a transverse thread that concentrates on the animal kingdom, whose dignity as a living, sentient creature was recognised for the first time, thanks to Saint Francis. In mediaeval figurative culture, it was because of the most celebrated episodes from the saint’s life – his Preaching to the Birds and the Taming of the Wolf of Gubbio – that these creatures ceased to be iconographic attributes, abstract symbols of vices or virtues, or figures playing mere walk-on parts instrumental to a narrative, to become leading characters in the story.

The experience found in the National Gallery’s immersive room will focus on the Canticle of the Sun, which the public will be able to explore, so as to rediscover the meaning of this masterpiece: a prayer, but also an ode to the sublime beauty of Nature, just as it is portrayed in the works on show in the exhibition.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Moebius, with essays by the exhibition’s curators and numerous other scholars (Costantino D’Orazio, Davide Rondoni, Sofia Menconero and Leonardo Baglioni, Giacomo Calogero, Veruska Picchiarelli, Carla Scagliosi, Lucia Corrain, Giuseppe Cassio), whose aim is to investigate and develop on one of the most fascinating, yet still partly unpublished, episodes in art history

Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

 The Kimbell Art Museum 

 March 30–June 22, 2025

Also:

Albuquerque Museum

Minneapolis Museum of Art

Further stops will be announced. 

This exhibition brings together more than seventy paintings and sculptures from the collection of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Germany’s distinguished modern art museum. It traces the German experience in the visual arts from the last years of the German Empire, World War I and the liberal Weimar Republic that followed to the rise of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II. Paintings and sculptures by artists including Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter, and Christian Schad show how modern art played an important role in the discourse during these critical decades in twentieth-century political history and how politics, at the same time, influenced the visual arts. Most of the works on view in this exhibition have never before been shown in the United States. 

“This is the first special exhibition ever held at the Kimbell devoted to painting and sculpture in Germany during the fraught, tumultuous first half of the twentieth century,” said Eric Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “We are grateful to the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin for the opportunity to provide this experience in Texas.”

The exhibition leads visitors through the great shifts in art and politics that took place between 1910 and 1945 in six thematic sections, beginning with Expressionism. In the first decade of the twentieth century, artists challenged the status quo of German art, painting and sculpting roughly drawn and vividly colored works. The Expressionists’ works were political in their objection to the conservative taste of their times, and specifically that of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Many German Expressionist artists were given prominent places in German museums in the wake of the first World War but were later often banned under Hitler. This gallery will include Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Self Portrait with a Girl, 1914-15, and Emil Nolde’s 1909 Pentecost, among paintings by other influential artists.

The next section features the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a movement that typified the modern style of the 1920s. These artists rejected the seemingly crude brushwork and dissonant colors of Expressionism, seeking to adapt to a new post-war social order in the liberal climate of the so-called Weimar Republic, the democratic government that was ushered in at the end of World War I and lasted until Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933. Their paintings were often marked by careful draftsmanship, sober brushwork, and a kind of hyper-realism that gave a modern interpretation of the traditions of German Renaissance art. This section includes works by artists who may be less well-known to American audiences but who have long been celebrated in Germany and recognized by artists and historians worldwide. Among them are Kate Diehn-Bitt, Kurt Günther, Franz Radziwill, and Christian Schad, whose 1928 painting Sonja is among the most famous icons of the movement. 

From this rediscovery of realism, museum visitors move to galleries featuring the International Avant-Gardes that found favor in the 1910s and ‘20s, when modern art from across Europe was exhibited in Germany. At this time, more than ever before, art from abroad was featured in museums and commercial galleries. In this exhibition, portraits of three influential art dealers will join works by the foreign artists they promoted: Afred Flechtheim by the painter Otto Dix; Herwarth Walden by the sculptor William Wauer; and Heinrich Thannhauser, in the painting by Lovis Corinth from the Kimbell’s own collection. This section of the exhibition includes works by such European artists as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Oskar Kokoschka, and Marianne von Werefkin. 

The exhibition next reveals ways that Modes of Abstraction entered and influenced German art in the years between the world wars. For example, the Cubism of Picasso, Georges Braque, and Léger exerted a strong influence in Germany, on painters such as Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Gabriele Münter, and Georg Muche, whose works are displayed here. Feininger, Klee, and Muche were on the faculty of the Bauhaus, the famed art school, along with Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Schlemmer, also featured in this section of the exhibition. 

Politics and War demonstrates how artistic movements engaged directly with modern society and, by extension, with political issues. Some artists did so quite explicitly: George Grosz, in his famous 1926 Pillars of Society, blatantly ridiculed the establishment—political, military, and religious. The works in this gallery plot the course of events that led from Germany’s defeat in 1918 to the rise of militant nationalism in the 1930s, to a second world war, and to the Nazi atrocities that shocked nations worldwide. Examples include Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s mournful bronze sculpture Fallen Man, and Horst Strempel’s magnum opus, Night Over Germany, a denunciation of the Nazis’ barbarism in the form of a Christian altarpiece.

The exhibition concludes with an epilogue titled Before and After. This gallery includes works by some artists who had been exiled, who had been labeled as “degenerate,” or who were otherwise grappling with the political and humanitarian realities of post-war Germany, from the point of view of their art before the war and their history in the post-war era. Among the works seen in this concluding chapter of the exhibition are Max Beckmann’s melancholy 1942 Self Portrait in a Bar and Salvador Dalí’s Portrait of Mrs. Isabel Styler-Tas, painted in exile in Beverly Hills, California, in 1945. 

“The works in this exhibition are powerful, masterful,” said George T. M. Shackelford, deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “And the stories that they tell about their turbulent times are gripping.” 

 

ORGANIZATION AND CATALOGUE

Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin has been organized by the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, in cooperation with the Kimbell Art Museum. The curators of the exhibition are Dieter Scholz, George T. M. Shackelford, and Irina Hiebert Grun.

The richly illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition is edited by George T. M. Shackelford, Irina Hiebert Grun, and Joachim Jäger, with major contributions by Dieter Scholz, Irina Hiebert Grun, and George T. M. Shackelford, and commentary on each work by a wide variety of German scholars. 

IMAGES

Christian Schad, Sonja, 1928
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025, Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Jörg P. Anders

Conrad Felixmüller, Der Redner Nr. 1 Otto Rühle / The speaker No. 1 Otto Rühle, 1920/1946
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2025, Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Klaus Göken

Max Beckmann, Selbstbildnis in der Bar / Self-Portrait at a Bar, 1942
© Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Andres Kilger

Wilhelm Lachnit, Arbeiter mit Maschine / Worker with machine, 1924-1928
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2025, Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Jörg P. Anders

Horst Strempel, Nacht über Deutschland (1. Skizze) / Night over Germany (1st sketch), 1945-46
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2025, © Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Karin März

George Grosz, Stützen der Gesellschaft / Pillars of Society, 1926
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025, Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Kai Anette Becker

Karl Hofer, Die Schwarzen Zimmer (Version II) / The Black Rooms (Version II), 1943
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2025, Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / André van Linn

Rudolf Belling, Kopf in Messing / Head in Brass, 1925 
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015, Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Selbstbildnis mit Mädchen / Self-Portrait with Girl, 1914–1915
© Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / André van Linn

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Feldgrau schafft Dividende / Field grey creates dividend, 1931/1961
© Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

Book Edvard Munch Portraits

Edvard Munch Portraits
06/03/2025
Hardback
£35
By Alison Smith (Editor) and Knut Ljøgodt (Contributor)

Edvard Munch Portraits is a new publication from the National Portrait Gallery that offers a rare and insightful look into the portraiture of one of the most influential artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This comprehensive exhibition catalogue brings together 60 of Munch's most significant portraits, providing an unparalleled exploration of his creative evolution, personal relationships, and the dramatic shifts in the cultural landscape that shaped his art.

Although Edvard Munch is often best known for his iconic work The Scream, his portraits are a powerful yet often underexplored aspect of his legacy. Throughout his life, Munch produced a vast array of portraits of friends, models, patrons, and especially himself, capturing the nuances of human emotion and psychological depth. From early sketches to later, more mature pieces, these portraits reveal Munch's mastery of diverse media, including painting, drawing, and printmaking.

Evening, Edvard Munch, 1888. Oil on canvas. Photo © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza; The Brooch. Eva Mudocci, Edvard Munch, 1902. Lithograph. © Private collection, courtesy Peder Lund; Model with a Green Scarf (Sultan Abdul Karim). Edvard Munch, 1916. Oil on canvas © Photo: Munchmuseet.

This publication shows how portraiture was central to his art and vision. It informed Munch’s early naturalist style, his mysterious Symbolist works of the 1890s and the vibrant, painterly works he became famous for following his return to Norway in 1909.

“Munch often painted those close to him: family members, friends, artists, writers and patrons. They give us an insight into the people he knew and the milieux he frequented – artistic and intellectual circles that would be defining for Munch’s development as an artist.”
Knut Ljøgodt, Director of the Nordic Institute of Art in Norway.

This publication features full-colour reproductions of Munch's most important portraits, with detailed essays by leading scholars Dr Alison Smith, former Chief Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, now Director of Collections and Research at the Wallace Collection, and by Knut Ljøgodt, Director of the Nordic Institute of Art in Norway.

“Looking at the portraits separately from Munch’s landscapes and more schematic ‘ideas’ pictures, encourages us to consider him as a social being, not just an outsider driven by his own neuroses and suspicion of people.”
Dr Alison Smith, Director of Collections and Research at the Wallace Collection.

Both authors examine the artist’s distinctive approach to capturing both external likeness and internal emotional states. The book essays explore the broader implications of Munch’s portraiture, providing readers with insight into his artistic journey, psychological landscape, and profound impact on modern portraiture.

In Edvard Munch Portraits readers will gain an in-depth understanding of the turbulent times in which Munch lived – ranging from the bohemian artistic circles in Oslo to the German and Norwegian patrons who helped establish his international reputation.

The book offers a close look at the artist’s family, his circle of friends, and the deeply personal experiences that shaped his vision, influencing the way he saw and represented others but also offers some insight into Norway in the 1900s and the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany, that went on to invade Norway and declare Munch and many other modernist artists, as ‘entartet’ (degenerate).

“As Munch’s works were confiscated from German museums and private collections, many found their way back to Norway, while several portraits were hidden by descendants of the sitters.”
Dr Alison Smith, Director of Collections and Research at the Wallace Collection.

Edvard Munch Portraits is published to accompany the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, opening 13 March 2025, which will be the first exhibition in the UK to focus on this important, but sometimes overlooked, aspect of his works.

The book is available online for pre-order and gives deep insight into the artist's family and bohemian social circles, along with his German and Norwegian patrons and the friends who helped establish his reputation.

The hidden anatomy of the kiss: Klimt’s red discs through a medical and artistic lens

  

Caption

(From left) Illustrations of red blood cells from various animals, as depicted in The Evolution of Man(1903) by German physician and evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel; the resemblance between human red blood cells and the red circles in The Atlas of Human Histology and Microscopic Anatomy(1902) by German anatomist Johannes Sobotta; and a color illustration of blood cells from Meyer's Encyclopedia(1902), which was found in Klimt’s study room.

Credit

KU medicine

Professor Im Joo Rhyu, director of the Korea University Graduate Program for Convergence & Translational Biomedicine and faculty member in the Department of Anatomy, recently led a study investigating the medical and artistic significance of the red, blood cell-like forms in Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. Collaborating with Professors Hyunmi Park, Dae Hyun Kim, and Hwamin Lee from Korea University College of Medicine (KUCM) and Sungkyunkwan University Master's student Daeun Kwak, the research team delved into medical literature from Klimt’s fin de siècle era—the turn of the 19th into the 20th century—to uncover why these striking red discs found their way into the artist’s most iconic work.

 

A close examination of The Kiss reveals clusters of red, disc-shaped forms on the woman’s chest and knees—shapes that, to a medical eye, strikingly resemble red blood cells. These elements breathe vitality into the painting, intertwining the biological function of red blood cells with the psychological intensity of the colour red. The study proposes that the lovers’garments narrate a three-day cycle of life’s creation, enriched with physiological symbolism.

 

One key historical link is Karl Landsteiner, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who discovered the ABO blood group system. His groundbreaking 1901 paper appeared in the Austrian medical journal Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift, where Professor Emil Zuckerkandl—a close friend of Klimt—served on the editorial board. Notably, in 1903, at Klimt’s request, Zuckerkandl delivered an anatomy lecture for artists, shaping Klimt’s evolving artistic approach (Dissecting Klimt, Im Joo Rhyu, 2024). Furthermore, Klimt is known to have owned a widely circulated German encyclopaedia, Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon, which featured colour illustrations of blood cells—suggesting that such imagery may have influenced his work.

 

 

Further reinforcing this interpretation, the woman’s arms in The Kiss form a shape reminiscent of a heart. The red discs on her chest appear strategically placed near this symbolic heart, evoking the rhythmic pulse of life coursing through her body and the new life she carries. Meanwhile, the red discs on her knee seem to represent menstrual blood—a subtle yet powerful emblem of fertility and reproductive vitality. This suggests that Klimt deliberately incorporated menstruation as an intrinsic element of human development, elevating it to a central motif within his visual narrative.

 

To examine the impact of these red, blood cell-like forms, the research team created a modified version of The Kiss, titled Kiss, RBC Knockout Kiss, in which the red discs were removed. They then surveyed 300 visitors at the 2022 Ulsan International Art Fair (UiAF), presenting both the original and altered versions. Viewers described the original painting with words like intensity, splendour, vitality, beauty, and young love, whereas the modified version evoked impressions of monotony, stillness, and lifelessness.

 

Professor Rhyu remarked, “Klimt’s The Kiss is a masterpiece that not only captures the ecstasy of love but also seamlessly weaves together art and medicine.”He added, “By transforming the scientific knowledge of his time into an artistic metaphor, Klimt created a work that continues to mesmerise audiences. The fusion of science and culture remains not only relevant but essential in shaping our understanding of both art and the human experience.”

 

This research builds upon the team’s earlier study, published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2021, which explored human developmental symbolism in The Kiss. That study concluded that the patterns and motifs in the figures’garments metaphorically represent sperm, eggs, and fertilisation.

 

The findings of this latest study were published in the Journal of Korean Medical Science under the title “Medico-Artistic Analysis of Red Blood Cells in Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss.” (10.3346/jkms.2025.40.e19)

---

DOI

10.3346/jkms.2025.40.e19 

Christie's Collection Henri Canonne April 9

 Christie’s is pleased to announce the auction of an exceptional group of works from the former Collection Henri Canonne – the legendary Impressionist collector taking place in Paris on April 9 at 4 PM. As a prelude to the evening sale – one of the most prestigious of the season and a highlight of Christie’s 20th-21st Century Art Week – the Ancienne Collection Henri Canonne - Une Leçon Impressionniste auction will take a center stage. Alongside the Salon du Dessin, PAD Paris and Art Paris, Christie’s 20th-21st Century Art Week, which also includes the sale of a distinguished collection of modern and contemporary art, will further contribute to this vibrant moment for the Paris art market. The Ancienne Collection Henri Canonne - Une Leçon Impressionniste sale builds on the success of the April 2024 season. With total sales reaching €24.5 million, Christie’s Paris reaffirmed its position as a premier destination for the sale of masterpieces in this category. 

Henri-Edmond Canonne (1867-1961) was a Parisian pharmacist and industrialist who owed his reputation to his famous Valda throat lozenges – first marketed in 1902 from his pharmacy on Rue Réaumur. A major breakthrough in the fight against respiratory infections, these lozenges revolutionized the over-the-counter drug market. 

Beyond his success as a bold entrepreneur, Canonne was also a discerning and visionary art collector. 

From the 1920s onwards, as Impressionism gradually gave way to new avant-garde movements, Canonne assembled one of the finest Impressionist collections of his time. Captivated by Monet’s Giverny landscapes and plays with light, he acquired no fewer than 40 major works by the artist, including 17 of his most iconic water lilies. Yet, his sharp eye extended beyond established figures such as Monet, Sisley and Renoir. He embraced the bold color experiments of Neo-Impressionists such as Signac and Cross, as well as the broader heirs to the Impressionist movement, from the Nabis such as Bonnard, Vuillard and Roussel, to the Colorists of the early 20th century.  

Constantly reassessing his choices and tastes, Canonne did not hesitate to sell certain works to acquire new ones. This dynamic culminated in 1939 with a landmark sale at the Galerie Charpentier, still considered one of the most significant collector’s auctions of the early 20th century. Today, paintings from his collection hang on the walls of the  some og the world’s most prestigious museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Kuboso Memorial Museum of Arts in Osaka.  

On April 9, the auction will bring back into the spotlight rare masterpieces that have remained hidden from view for over 80 years, offering a striking testament to the renowned Canonne taste.  

Among them, two portraits by Pierre-Auguste Renoir showcase his talent for capturing both the grace and intimacy of his models: 

Jeune fille appuyée sur la main, painted in 1894 (€2.2-3.2 million) 

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
La leçon d'écriture
signed 'Renoir' (upper right)
oil on canvas
16¼ in. x 12 5/8 in. (41.3 x 32 cm.)
Painted in 1885

and La Leçon d’écriture, painted in 1905 (€2-3 million). In this work, the young Claude Renoir – the youngest of the artist’s children – attempts to write under the watchful eye of the Renoir family’s faithful nanny, Gabrielle Renard. 

A twin version of this work is in the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia – renowned for its exceptional holdings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s masterpieces. This version was also acquired from the French art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. 

Landscapes are another defining theme of this collection, exemplified by 

Le quartier de l’Hermitage, Pontoise by Camille Pissarro (€800,000-1.2 million), painted in the same year of the First Impressionist Exhibition. The sale also features a selection of landscapes by Maurice Utrillo, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy and Paul Signac. 

The sale is completed with an intimate painting by 

Pierre Bonnard, Femme à demi-nue or Nu se coiffant devant la glace (€350,000-550,000) painted around 1915, and a series of watercolors by 

Johan Barthold Jongkind representing his various stays in France, with estimates starting at €1,000.   

IMAGES

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