Sotheby’s announces another work directly descended from an artist’s family. This time it’s Courbet:
the company will present for sale a painting by Gustave Courbet never before offered on the market. Le Ruisseau de Plaisir-Fontaine, dans la vallée du Puits Noir, painted in 1864, comes to auction from a French Private Collection and its provenance can be traced unbroken through the same family to the artist, and a sitter for Courbet’s masterpiece L’Enterrement à Ornans (Burial at Ornans). Claude-Hélène-Prosper Teste (1801 – 1869) was Mayor of Ornans and a friend of Courbet, and the first owner of the present work. The painting will be offered in Sotheby’s sale of 19th Century European Paintings in London on 20 November 2012 with an estimate of £200,000-300,000.
The auction will also feature La Marseillaise by Jean Béraud, which comes to the market from a European Private Collection with an estimate of £500,000-700,000. In contrast to the absence of human presence in the painting by Courbet, La Marseillaise is a spirited work which epitomises Parisian life at the height of the Belle Époque. Depicting Bastille Day in 1880, it shows workers, artists, students and shopkeepers chanting the Marsellaise as they march from the Place de la Bastille west along the tricolore-draped rue St. Antoine.Béraud’s paintings were so synonymous with the Paris Belle Époque that at the turn of the century a scene of Parisian life came to be known as a ‘Béraud’.
