The Achilles Feel…

Eighty lots that once belonged to Achille Fontaine are leaving his family home in Saint-Omer, where they were housed until now. This manager of a cotton mill in northern France had an almost uncontrollable passion for objets d'art. A Bohemian spendthrift by nature (“I hoard our money when we travel, I use our poor silver sparingly, and you just scatter it about,” his wife Augustine would quietly lament), he was always roaming the art galleries. He even went to Italy and bought the Cernuschi collection for 100,000 francs, chartering a whole train to take it back to Lille before selling it off piece by piece for a pittance. Venetian Madonna Today, his pieces are being sold by his heirs. They include this white marble “Madonna and Child”, whose very simple composition shows two figures from the waist up behind a parapet, emerging from a flat background. The eye focuses entirely on the Madonna and Christ…