Leon Bonvin
Still Life with Wildflowers in a Blue and White Faience Vase
Estimate
60,000 - 80,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Léon Bonvin
(Paris 1834-1866 Meudon)
Still Life with Wildflowers in a Blue and White Faience Vase
Pen and brown ink with watercolor and gouache, brown ink with gum arabic in the background;
signed and dated in pen and brown ink, lower left: L. Bonvin 1858; and on the verso of the mount, in graphite: Leon Bonvins ("s" crossed out by another hand) and en cartel ta Teinte
225 by 150 mm; 8⅞ by 5⅞ in.
Galerie Tempelaere, Paris (according to the catalogue raisonné);
Private collection, France;
sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, Millon & Associés, 9 April 1998, lot 11;
with W. M. Brady & Co., Inc., New York, by 1999,
where acquired by Diane A. Nixon
New York, The Morgan Library & Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, 2007, no. 84 (entry by Jennifer Tonkovich);
Paris, Fondation Custodia, Drawn to the Everyday. Léon Bonvin 1834-1866, 2022-23, no. 26
Gazette de l'Hôtel Drouot, 18 December 1998, p. 35;
M. Guichané and G. Weisberg, Léon Bonvin: Drawn to the Everyday, 1834–1866, Paris 2022, pp. 128 & 227, no. 26
Dating to 1858, this exquisite still-life was probably created in the Bonvin family’s inn at Vaugirard, a small village then on the outskirts of Paris. The composition is strikingly elegant, the simple arrangement of wildflowers – consisting of ox-eye daisies, dandelions, salvias and grasses – hailing, almost certainly, from the nearby fields.
Bonvin, the half-brother of François Bonvin (1817-1887), originally set the flowers in a modest glass cup, before adapting this partially, with blue, white and yellow gouache, to describe a classically inspired oblong vase. Lighting his subject strongly from the left, the dense tones of the background inject the image with a great intensity. Furthermore, Bonvin manages to convey a sense of the passing of time and the transience of nature by deliberately showing certain flowers in full bloom and others that are beginning to wilt.
In both subject and sensibility, Léon Bonvin’s composition reveals a deep kinship with 17th-century Dutch and Flemish still-life painters whose exacting observation and quiet lyricism he emulates. Equally, his refined handling and meditative tone attest to the influence of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779), whose pictures - newly celebrated among the French realists - offered a model for transforming the simplicity of everyday life into enduring beauty.
You May Also Like
