ALBERT BESNARD (1849-1934), attribué Lot n° 65

Elegant woman in profile, 1904 Oil on canvas signed and dated on the right. Size: 102 x 70.5 cm Provenance: Private collection, Vienna Austria. Painter of genre, portraits and mural compositions, also painter with gouache, watercolorist and pastellist, he comes from a family of artists, whose father was a student of Ingres and whose mother was a distinguished miniaturist. It is therefore understandable that the young artist was initiated very early on, first by Jean-François Brémond, then by Alexandre Cabanel and Sébastien Cornu at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He made his debut at the 1886 Salon where his talent as a portraitist was immediately apparent, even though the influence of impressionism was felt in his career as a decorator, which did not fail to make headlines. He was responsible for the decoration of several Parisian monuments such as the ceiling of the Salon des Sciences at the Hôtel de Ville de Paris, the chemistry amphitheatre at the Sorbonne, the ceiling of the Comédie Française and the cupola of the Petit Palais. Among his many portraits, we can mention those of his wife, his children, Princess Mathilde, the actress Réjane, Cardinal Mercier and Madame Roger de Jourdain. His engraved work includes more than two hundred etchings, some of them in the form of a series. His best compositions combine the memory of the Italian Masters with the influence of the Impressionists, or rather Burne-Jones, and use daring lighting and the play of reflections that critics, more academic than himself, described as "fireworks". As proof of his immense aura, Paul Albert Besnard was appointed director of the Villa Medici in Rome, succeeding Carolus-Duran, before taking over the direction of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris after a state funeral. Public collections: The Louvre and Musée d'Orsay Paris, Hermitage Museum Saint Petersburg, Pushkin Museum Moscow, Metropolitan Museum New York, Art Institute Chicago, Fine Arts Museum San Francisco, National Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum Washington, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Portrait Gallery London, State Museum Florence, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium Brussels, Museum of Fine Arts Düsseldorf and in many other national and international museums Bibliography: Frantz Jourdain: Le peintre Albert Besnard, Paris 1888. Roger Marx : Albert Besnard, Paris A. Hennuyer 1893. Camille Mauclair : Albert Besnard, L'homme et l'œuvre, Paris, Delgrave 1914. Chantal Beauvalot: Albert Besnard, Catalogue of the Eugène Boudin Museum Exhibition, Honfleur 2008.