High Bids for Prud'hon and Foujita

The beautiful pierre noire drawing with white chalk highlights by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758–1823), which appeared on the cover of La Gazette no. 23, bears witness to a doomed love story. As reported on page six of that issue, it is a study for the young woman in the bow of the boat in the painting Le Rêve du bonheur (The Dream of Happiness) by Constance Mayer (1775–1821). The dream came true for a collector who acquired the drawing for €69,120, giving a happy ending to a romantic tragedy. Another connoisseur bought Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita’s Bouquet de fleurs dans un vase en étain (Bouquet of Flowers in a Pewter Vase), a beautiful and rather unusual work in the artist’s oeuvre that attests to his closeness to nature, which is not surprising for an artist from Asia. But it also recalls that he studied paintings of flowers by past artists, starting with the great Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573–1621) and Pierre Joseph Redouté (1759–1842). The dainty anemones fetched €291,840.

Attributed to Claude Vignon (1593–1670), the oil on canvas portrait (60.5 x 50 cm/23.82 x 19.68 in) of Khizir Khayr ad-Dîn, better known as the famous pirate Barbarossa (1466–1546), fetched €99,840. born into a family of potters, he and his brothers were corsairs. Barbarossa sowed chaos in the Mediterranean before taking control of Tunis in 1534. After Suleiman the Magnificent, the sultan of the Sublime Porte, appointed him head admiral of his fleet, which had over 100 galleys, he became the Ottoman Empire’s most feared warlord.