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| 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 19th 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 4th 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
19th 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 19th Century academic tradition like Bouguereau and
Gerome.
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Firmin-Girard, Autumn Market at Les Halles, oil on canvas, 32 3/4 by 46 in.,
Private Collection
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Firmin-Girard, The Flower
Seller on the Pont Royal with the Louvre Beyond, 1872, oil on canvas, 27½ x 37
in., Private Collection
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Firmin-Girard, Market in Charlieu, oil on canvas, 28 1/2 by 40 in., Private Collection
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| Firmin-Girard, The Japanese Toilette, oil on canvas, Private Collection |
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Firmin-Girard, Ulysses and the Sirens, oil on panel, 3.3 by 4.6 in., Private Collection
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| Frederick Goodall R.A. (1822-1904), The Opium Bazaar, Cairo, 1863, oil on panel, 16 ¼ by 24 ¼ in., Private Collection |
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| Frederick Goodall R.A., A New Light in the Hareem, 1884, Oil on Canvas, 48 by 84 in., Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England |
