Firmin-Girard’s Flower Market Painting

Marie-François Firmin-Girard (1838-1921), Le Quai aux Fleurs, 1875, oil on canvas,
39 1/2 by 57 in., Private Collection

Marie-Francois Firmin-Girard (1838-1921) really hit the posthumous jackpot the other day with one of his paintings, arguably his masterpiece.  Although I hadn’t paid much attention to his work before, it seems his paintings are very popular with art lovers who frequent the auctions of 19^th Century European paintings in New York City.

I went to Sotheby’s two Sundays ago with a friend to view the latest auction, and when we arrived by escalator at the 4^th floor exhibition gallery, the first painting we encountered was Firmin-Girard’s Le Quai aux Fleurs, a stunning, panoramic view of a bustling Parisian flower market.  The picture is painted with formidable academic precision throughout, but Firmin-Girard employs a subtle, stippled manner of applying the paint and keeps all the colors grayed down, which gives the work a softly harmonious look, much like an impressionistic painting.  The details of the background buildings, the perspective and other particulars of the scene are faithfully and accurately recorded, as we discovered by our very close inspection of the painting for about 15 minutes, give or take.   It’s a spectacularly gorgeous work of art, filled with a sense of light and air.

We weren’t the only ones who loved this painting, apparently.  Estimated to fetch $300,000 to $500,000 at auction, when the hammer came down on Friday, May 9, it had been sold for $3,021,000, a record price for a work by this artist.  A similar Firmin-Girard flower market painting, Autumn Market at Les Halles, was sold at Sotheby’s in 2011 for “only” $254,500, up from its estimated price of $80,000 to $120,000.  And at Christie’s on April 29, 2013, Firmin-Girard’s A Flower Seller on the Pont Royal, sold for $243,750, failing to reach its estimate range of $250,000 to $350,000.

It is obvious to me after looking at those last two paintings and a number of Firmin-Girard’s other works on the Internet that none of them approach the magnificent perfection of Le Quai aux Fleurs.  There is always something lacking in his other compositions, it seems to me.  I think the balance of elements and the color harmonies are not as satisfying in his other paintings.  And when he emphasizes the figure in other paintings, he’s just not as successful as many of his academic contemporaries.  Firmin-Girard had a thriving career from the outset, though, creating history paintings, genre scenes and landscapes.  But his many flower market scenes are his best work by far, in my opinion.

Sotheby’s tells us that Firmin-Girard’s submission of Le Quai aux Fleurs to the Paris Salon of 1876 propelled him to international fame.  The painting was hung at a prominent spot at the entrance to the Salon and was so popular that police were required to control the throngs of onlookers.  It has been held in private collections ever since and presumably was last seen by the public in 1950 on loan to an exhibition called “So This is Paris” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

In a Sotheby’s blog called “European Discoveries,” Polly Sartori, head of Sotheby’s 19^th Century European Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture Department, writes a little about this painting, which was put up for auction this year from the collection of Charles S. Whitehouse (1921-2001), a career American Foreign Services Officer and U.S. Ambassador to Laos and Thailand in the 1970s.  “I have probably sold a total of twenty paintings by Firmin-Girard over the years, but nothing could compare to this picture,” she writes.  “We now know that Firmin-Girard’s Paris flower market was a star of the Paris Salon of 1876. Contemporary reviews recount that the painting was so popular that it was difficult to see because of the crowds standing in front of it, marvelling at the remarkable detail – elegantly dressed Parisians only rivalled by the variety of colourful flowers filling the vendor’s carts.  One of our favorite details is the marchand de coco, or the man with the tall apparatus on his back, which dispensed a cool drink of licorice and lemon flavoured water into the silver cups dangling from his waist.”

Firmin-Girard was just 16 when he began studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  He also studied in the workshops of Charles Gleyre, a Swiss academic painter whose students included Monet, Renoir and Whistler, and Jean-Leon Gerome, another of Gleyre’s students. He debuted at the Paris Salon in 1859 at the age of 21 with three paintings.  In 1864 his painting of a classical theme was purchased by Princesse Mathilde, said to be the single most influential collector in Paris at the time.  His success in fashionable French society was thus assured, they say.  In case you were wondering, as I was, Mathilde Laetitia Wilhelmine Bonaparte was a daughter of Napoleon's brother Jerome Bonaparte and his second wife, Catharina of Wurttemberg, daughter of King Frederick I of Wurttemberg.  There’s much more about the Princesse, and it’s a good story right there, if you are interested in royal machinations.  

From his studio in the Boulevard Clichy in Montmarte, Firmin-Girard produced a wide variety of subjects on commission for wealthy patrons, but his most popular subjects were elegant scenes from contemporary life. His paintings remain popular today, perhaps because they combine fine academic drawing and principles of composition with soft, imperceptibly textured surfaces that are so unlike the glossy, smooth surfaces of stalwart followers of the 19^th Century academic tradition like Bouguereau and Gerome. 

And everybody loves to closely examine paintings that contain finely executed details in abundance, especially when they are created by a skilled artist like Firmin-Girard and are not in the least photographic in appearance.  As the novelist and art critic Louis Enault wrote in 1878 in discussing Firmin-Girard and the British artist Frederick Goodall, the smallest details give their paintings “a character of extraordinary strength and truth."

Firmin-Girard, Autumn Market at Les Halles, oil on canvas, 32 3/4 by 46 in., Private Collection

Firmin-Girard, The Flower Seller on the Pont Royal with the Louvre Beyond, 1872, oil on canvas, 27½ x 37 in., Private Collection

 

Firmin-Girard, Market in Charlieu, oil on canvas, 28 1/2 by 40 in.,  Private Collection

Firmin-Girard, The Japanese Toilette, oil on canvas, Private Collection

Firmin-Girard, Ulysses and the Sirens, oil on panel, 3.3 by 4.6 in., Private Collection

Frederick Goodall R.A. (1822-1904), The Opium Bazaar, Cairo, 1863, oil on panel, 16 ¼ by 24 ¼ in., Private Collection

Frederick Goodall R.A., A New Light in the Hareem, 1884, Oil on Canvas, 48 by 84 in., Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England

 

On Hal Wolpoff's Passing

Harold Wolpoff, Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas,  23 x 35 in. framed, Dawson &Nye Auctioneers and Appraisers

Harold Wolpoff, A Marsh Landscape, Oil on Canvas, 28 x 32 in. Framed, The Boulder Art Gallery, Fitchburg, MA

Although I didn’t know him well, I’ve sometimes wondered what happened to Harold “Hal” Wolpoff.   I could be wrong, but I heard many years ago that he had been living in a trailer in Gloucester, MA, where he had settled to paint seascapes and village scenes like many other artists have done over the years.

Some of the finest plein air painters of the 20^th Century were headquartered in Gloucester and neighboring Rockport, two famous artists’ colonies on Cape Ann.  Their boldly painted, superbly designed and accurately drawn work stole the show at many auctions of American paintings in New York City, in my humble opinion.  Their paintings were usually hung side by side in a stunning demonstration of how terrific a sunlight effect on canvas can look when interpreted by painters who know what they are doing.   I haven’t seen such superb groupings in recent years.  Maybe collectors are actually holding on to these plein air masterpieces instead of trying to cash in on their “investments.”  Three of the finest painters were Emile Gruppe, Anthony Thieme and Aldro T. Hibbard, the greatest painter of snow I’ve ever seen.  Somebody said the snow other artists paint is just white paint, but Hibbard paints snow, or words to that effect.  Hibbard, who studied with Joaquim y Sorolla y Bastida, the greatest painter of sunlight effects the world has ever known, produced hundreds of beautifully designed and colored sunlit snow scenes.  It required a superhuman effort to create them directly from nature in sub-freezing temperatures.

Hal Wolpoff was not in their class, but I’m sure he thought otherwise.  Hal was one of many artists who passed through the Saturday members’ painting class I’ve attended at The Art Students League for the past 30-plus years.  He worked in pastels the few times he attended the class in the 1980s and really knew how to produce clouds of pastel dust with his bravura technique.  I still fondly recall his complimenting me on an oil painting sketch I had worked on one morning with some degree of success.  Hal wasn’t very free with praise for artists, so I was pleased to accept his compliment.  In an earlier blog post about another artist who was also somewhat amusingly self-centered, I recalled the time they both showed up at lunchtime in the League cafeteria and sat far apart so they had plenty of room to elaborate on their respective careers without risking a clash of personalities.

After a career in radio broadcasting, Hal decided to quit and become a painter – but not until he was in his early 40’s, I believe.  He studied portrait painting with Everett Raymond Kinstler, and maybe William Draper, at the League and soon sailed out on his own, with considerable confidence in his ability to make a living as an artist. 

I don’t have much information about Hal stored in my porous memory bank. I’ve forgotten most of the stories I heard from him and about him.  But if you have the November 1982 issue of American Artist magazine, you can get a pretty good impression of the man from one of those interviews that the artist and writer Charles Movalli produced frequently for that magazine in the 1970s and 80s. 

Some library website gives you a bit of a tease on that interview with Hal, but no more:  “The article features painter Harold Wolpoff.  His studio, over The Framery on School Street, and the orderliness of his palette are described. He explains his inability to paint by numbers as he finds color arbitrary, with the relationship of colors making color. He labels his "Self-Portrait with Felt Hat" as an impressionistic-expressionistic work and recalls the story behind the painting. He believes that there is no way to teach a person how to paint since a good artist only suggests things to open the eyes and the mind.”  I believe Hal won some award for that portrait, which I recall as being a wonderful job of painting.

I apparently tossed my copy of that issue of the magazine, so the interview wherein Hal “discusses how he captures his sitter’s character in his oils” is just a dim memory for me. “I'm a people painter,” he told Movalli.  “I don’t do the ‘standard’ portrait.’”  As I recall, Hal was not afraid to voice his candid opinions about art and other artists.

Hal gets another Internet mention in The New York Times on May 30, 1983 when he was doing the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit that Memorial Day weekend.  The show’s organizer had said the artists would be screened again by a jury for the Labor Day show.  “On lower Fifth Avenue, Harold Wolpoff of Maplewood, N.J., and his paintings were snug in a homemade shelter of chicken wire and plastic. He said the second screening would be fine with him ''as long as it's our peers - other artists, not just academics.''

Hal did the show for a few years, and I used to stop by his display and listen to him talk – and talk -- about his work and the art world.  I did the show one year myself, in 1982.  I put together a big folding screen in ramshackle fashion with laths, chicken wire and burlap to display my paintings, which I hung by drapery hooks.  What a lousy mess!  I somehow wheeled all the stuff by foot on a big, borrowed hand truck some 60 blocks from my Upper Westside apartment to the Village on opening day of the Spring and Fall shows and stored everything in rented space in a basement nearby, which had stairs so narrow and low that you could barely maneuver walking down them.  Now the outdoor shows all force you to have expensive, uniform aluminum display racks.  No more chicken wire.  And that’s a good thing. 

These outdoor art shows aren’t for city dwellers like me, without vans and companions to help with the heavy lifting.   I remember getting furious when one woman lured me in with praise for my work and then told me about “pentimento” she “noticed” in one of my paintings!  I got off easy, considering what some other exhibiting artists have heard from sidewalk kibitzers.  I hate selling paintings directly to the public.  I sold my first-prize painting for a crisp $100 bill on the first day of the Spring show and the buyer walked off with it so I didn’t even have it to display the following days of the show – just the ribbon, which was made better than the painting.  No, I wasn’t cut out to do outdoor art shows to pay the rent.

So the other day I was thinking of Hal and looked for him on the Internet.  There wasn’t much more than what I’ve discussed above about his painting career.  But I was surprised and saddened to come across something more telling about him.

In a June 17, 2013 Letter to the Editor of the Ocala (FL) Star Banner, a reader remembers Hal touchingly in response to that newspaper’s Memorial Day tribute to veterans of the Armed Forces.  Ruth McIntyre of Silver Springs, FL, knew Hal for only a short time, but it was long enough for her to get a pretty good handle on the man. 

“I’d like to tell you about one such veteran I was honored to meet not too long ago,” Ms. McIntyre wrote.  “He lived alone and was a very private person. He refused to have a phone because his privacy might be invaded through it. He had very few friends for that same reason. And some said he was grouchy and rude. At nearly 90, I figure he had the right to be grouchy and rude if he wanted to. He’s been through enough to make him that way. He was not only a WWII veteran and proudly wore his “WWII Vet” hat saying so, but he was a world-renowned artist as well. 

“He had held one-man shows in galleries all over Europe and in the northeast United States. His paintings sold for many dollars because they were quite good. I had known Harold Wolpoff only three weeks when he was found near death in his humble home. He was taken to a local hospital where he eventually died, alone, just like he lived.

“My heart was so sad and the tears continued to fall because I saw nothing of his death in the Ocala Star-Banner — no death notice or funeral plans. Didn’t anybody at the hospital know who he was? Didn’t anybody know he was to be honored with a military burial service? Somehow it was made known who he was and he got the military burial he so justly deserved.

“Look him up on Google and read his story. We’ll all be old and possibly grumpy someday, but nobody I know deserved to be the way he was, dead and buried without any notice at all. May God rest his soul.” http://www.ocala.com/article/20130617/OPINION02/130619766

Thanks to Ms. McIntyre's sympathetic and moving letter of tribute, I now know what happened to Hal, and that he was himself right up until the end.  Sadly, however, you won’t find much about Hal’s artwork or art career on the Internet if you Google his name -- just a few images of paintings that were put up for auction over the years.  I’m sorry I couldn’t find the self-portrait that was reproduced in American Artist magazine, but I did find the self-portrait shown above. 

Hal was born in 1924 and died on May 6, 2013, just short of his 89^th birthday.  He was a technician for the Army Air Force in World War II and is buried at the Veterans Administration Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell.  I’ll bet some of the older painters up around Rockport and Gloucester could tell you some good stories about him.  Maybe they know how he chanced to relocate to Florida.  He was quite a character.  But he loved painting.  I know that much about Hal.