Auction Results from Christie’s
The enormous canvas by Hubert Robert, Le pont sur le torrent , found no buyer at Christie’s sale of Old Master & 19th Century Paintings, Drawings, and Watercolors (sale 2282); nor did works by Pater and Gainsborough. But there certainly were some bright spots: a lovely painting by Jean Baptiste Oudry of The Watchful Doe (Biche aux Augets) sold for over $1 million, surpassing its high-end estimate of $900,000, and Panini’s View of Piazza del Popolo, Rome went for $1.2 million (well beyond its $800,000 estimate). Most of the media attention, however, goes to the Getty Museum, which acquired Boilly’s Entrance to the Turkish Garden (1812).
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As reported by Art Info:
NEW YORK—This morning’s auction at Christie’s of Old Master & 19th Century Paintings, Drawings, & Watercolors, a rather selective affair, was given a bit of high drama thanks to buyers at Los Angeles’s Getty Museum. The museum, which also set tongues wagging earlier this month with its announcement that director Michael Brand would be stepping down, turned heads by acquiring the auction’s cover lot, Louis Leopold Boilly’s lively Paris street scene The Entrance to the Turkish Garden Café (1812), for a record-shattering $4,562,500. The work had been estimated at $3 million to $5 million. The sale crushed the previous auction mark for Boilly, set at the same house in January 1994, when Carnival on the Boulevard du Crime (1832) made $937,500. “It is arguably the artist’s greatest picture,” said Scott Schaefer, senior curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, moments after the sale, “and we paid the same price the seller did 20 years ago.” . . .
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Rethinking the Rococo within the Social History of Art
Histoire sociale de l’art, histoire artistique du social / 1680-1730: Amsterdam, Paris
Institute national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, Thursday 29 January 2010
Under the direction of Philippe Bordes, France’s INHA (Institute national d’histoire de l’art) has embarked upon a program to reconsider the relationship between art and society within the context of the social history of art. An anthology of key texts will be published later this spring (along with an extensive bibliography to be made available online), and in December 2010 the INHA will host a final symposium to wrap up the project. This week the fourth workshop in the series tackles the subject through the eighteenth century, 1680-1730: Amsterdam, Paris (the site includes a PDF with useful bibliographies).
Session A
2:00 Philippe Bordes (INHA), Introduction
2:10 Mary Sheriff (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), “What is the Interpreter’s Desire? Rococo Art, Society, and the Social History of Art”
2:40 Discussion with Jean-François Bédard (Syracuse University), Magnus Olausson (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), and questions from the audience
3:10 Charlotte Guichard (laboratoire IRHIS de l’Université de Lille 3), “Coquilles: objets frontières et communautés de goût”
3:25 Anne Perrin-Khelissa (Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, Paris), “le miroir: objet de luxe, objet de consommation privée, objet soumis à la critique artistique”
3:40 Malcolm Baker (University of California, Riverside), “Histories and Societies in the plural : Francis van Bossuit and the endurance of art”
4:10 Discussion with Jean-François Bédard, Magnus Olausson, and questions from the audience
Session B
5:00 Melissa Hyde (University of Florida), “Rosalba Carriera and Quentin de la Tour, or What is the Matter with Rococo Pastel Portraiture?”
5:20 Jan Blanc (Université de Lausanne), “Réflexions sur les espaces sociaux dans la Hollande du XVIIème siècle: le cas des maisons de poupées”
5:35 Katie Scott (Courtauld Institute), “Histoire rocaille du social?”
5:55 Discussion with Jean-François Bédard, Magnus Olausson, and questions from the audience
Enfilade 
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