Offered by Galerie Delvaille
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French furniture of the 18th century & French figurative paintings
Oil on canvas, signed lower left "A. Lebourg Alger 1875"
Dimensions: 19 cm x 22 cm / With frame: 32.3 cm x 35.3 cm
Provenance: Private Collection since 1970
(Acquired at the Palais Galliera on December 2, 1970, from auctioneer Maître Couturier, expert Mme Caillac)
Previously sold at the Hôtel Drouot on February 26, 1926
Albert Lebourg was a French Impressionist, a leading figure of the Rouen School. The Musée d'Orsay, like other major museums, holds numerous works by this crucial artist. The publication of the catalogue raisonné by Wildenstein, awaited for half a century, and the incomprehensible absence of a national exhibition in France, partly explain the relatively low market value of his work. But the average value of his paintings also stems from a significant body of work, particularly in the last 20 years of his life. While his painting was modernist and visionary from 1870 onward, his Impressionist touch gave way to a more conventional gentleness in some of his works. Albert Lebourg's beautiful oil paintings are executed with thick impasto, often using a palette knife, and vibrant colors. While price variations between works by different artists are normal, Albert Lebourg is one of those painters for whom certain criteria are decisive.
Albert Lebourg received academic training in Rouen and exhibited in 1872 at the Rouen Municipal Salon alongside Corot, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and Ziem. At only 23 years old, the president of the Algiers Fine Arts Society offered him a position as a drawing teacher. Lebourg was captivated by the light of North Africa and developed a free and expressive painting technique there. Back in Paris, Lebourg exhibited at the 4th and 5th Impressionist Exhibitions in 1879 and 1880. His preferred subjects were river landscapes.
Our painting: This work dates from Albert Lebourg's earliest and most sought-after period. He was in Algiers in 1875 and was already offering his expertise at the School of Fine Arts when he was only 27 years old. Absent from the capital and without connections to the Impressionists who participated in the first exhibitions of this nascent movement, Lebourg was, at this time, entirely visionary, naturally adopting a modernist approach. The paint is applied in broad, flat areas that foreshadow Post-Impressionism.
Works by Lebourg in Museums:
Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum, Carnavalet Museum, Petit Palais, Museum of Fine Arts of Angers, Caen, Dunkirk, Lille, Rouen, Marseille….
