Albert LEBOURG (Montfort-sur-Risle, 1849 - Rouen, 1928) - Lot 117

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  3. Albert LEBOURG (Montfort-sur-Risle, 1849 - Rouen, 1928) - Lot 117
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Lot n° 117
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Result : 5 700EUR
Albert LEBOURG (Montfort-sur-Risle, 1849 - Rouen, 1928) - Lot 117
Albert LEBOURG (Montfort-sur-Risle, 1849 - Rouen, 1928) Sunset in Holland [Rotterdam] Oil on canvas 47 x 62,5 cm Signed lower left and dated 1896 History : - Chapelle-Perrin-Fromentin sale catalogue of 5 March 1978, Versailles, Palais des Congrès, lot n° 22 with reproduction, [n. p.] - in the same private collection since 1978 This work by Albert Lebourg, acquired in 1978 at a sale in Versailles under the appraisal of Georges Heim-Gairac, was part of a high-class auction. Important landscape painters among whom our artist but also Paul-Désiré Trouillebert and Hippolyte-Camille Delpy, with river banks, and Charles-Euphrasie Kuwasseg. Our landscape is to be compared with a painting on the same theme offered at Sotheby's during a sale of Impressionism and Modern Art, May 18, 2020, lot 80: oil on canvas entitled Holland, Canal and Mills, 46.3 x 65 cm, signed A Lebourg, dedicated to "my friend Roger Milès souvenir bien amical" (art historian and critic), dated Rotterdam, 1896, bottom left. A Norman traveller A student at the Rouen School of Fine Arts, he began his career as a teacher at the Algiers School of Fine Arts until 1876, before attending the studio of Jean-Paul Laurens in Paris in 1878-79. That same year he joined the Impressionists and exhibited with them in 1879 and 1880 alongside Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, as well as at the Salon between 1883 and 1895. The artist's numerous trips in France, notably to the Île-de-France, Normandy and Auvergne, Lake Geneva and La Rochelle, as well as abroad to Holland, Belgium and Algeria, resulted in more than two thousand landscapes. Holland, an inspiring flat country From the autumn of 1895 to the beginning of 1896, Albert Lebourg visited Holland with the painter Horace Mélicourt. He brought back this rural landscape of great delicacy of tone, composed around shades of blue, grey, mauve and orange-pink. The skilful arrangement of the scene leads the viewer's eye to literally wander through this flat country of farms and mills. We follow the natives along the path that leads them to a building often depicted in drawings and paintings from this period. But it is above all the declining sun, through the clouds, that attracts the eye in an almost hypnotic way. The sky, which occupies more than half of the canvas, is a real "sunset impression". In fact, Lebourg is here in the vein of his colleague Claude Monet, with whom he exhibited some fifteen years earlier, during the Impressionist exhibitions. Like Monet, the play of light was fundamental for the painter, who chose to depict particular moments of the day: at sunset, at dusk, at dawn... The thick brushstrokes, however, do not detract from the cottony aspect of the sky, so characteristic of the artist's style. The following year, in 1897, the Société nationale des Beaux-arts presented several works from his stay in Holland. Critical Fortune When the artist died, a glowing article by Maurice Feuillet in the Gaulois Artistique of January 24, 1928, p. 82, summarized his career as follows: "Albert Lebourg has just died in Rouen. For seven years now, paralyzed, deprived of the joy of painting, he had no other consolation than to roll his armchair near the window. After Manet, Sisley and Degas; after Renoir, Gauguin and Pissarro; after Monet and Guillaumin, he was the last of this famous impressionist phalanx. Driven by the faith that creates miracles, they have opened our eyes. Albert Lebourg is in the collections of the Musée d'Orsay, the Petit-Palais and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, to mention only the most important ones. Expert : Virginie Journiac, Art Historian, Expert approved in Works of Art by the CECOA, the FNEPSA and the CEDEA
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