Enfilade

Alexandre-François Desportes, Still Life of the Remnants of a Meal with a Lunging Cat, detail, ca. 1720s, oil on canvas, unframed: 74 × 92 cm (Lot 26, estimate: $200,000–300,000).

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This Wednesday at Sotheby’s (with viewing still available Monday and Tuesday) . . .

A Scholar Collects
Sotheby’s, New York, 31 January 2024, 10am, (Sale N11437)

Sotheby’s is honored to present A Scholar Collects, a sale [of 41 lots] comprised of paintings, drawings, and sculpture from the collection of the preeminent scholar Joseph Baillio. A visionary art historian who specializes in the art of eighteenth-century France, Baillio is most well-known for his expertise in the pioneering woman artist Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. His landmark exhibitions on her life and career—first in 1982 in Fort Worth and then in 2016 in New York, Paris, and Montreal—were triumphant in catapulting her to the forefront of scholarship and furthered her indelible mark on the history of art.

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From Neil Jeffares’s accompanying essay on Baillio:

Neil Jeffares, “Joseph Baillio: An Appreciation.”

For most of us the name Joseph Baillio is synonymous with Mme Vigée Le Brun, the artist to whom he has devoted so much of his career and whose reputation now stands at a peak unimaginable before the famous exhibition he organized in the Kimbell Art Museum in 1982. You will of course have a clearer recollection of the vast and astonishing monographic show Joseph presented in the Grand Palais in Paris in 2015 (before moving to New York and Toronto). And we all await the magnum opus, the catalogue raisonné (already signaled in the 1982 catalogue), as the apotheosis of this labor.

But there is so much more to Joseph than just one artist—or even the circle of talent that grew around her . . .

As much as reevaluating and contextualizing familiar masterpieces, Joseph’s work has been the painstaking combination of archival and visual clues to give back the identity of pictures that have been hidden or lost. And he has done that countless times . . .

The full essay is available here»

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of the Duchesse de Guiche, née Louise Françoise Gabrielle Aglaé de Polignac, 1784, pastel on two joined sheets of paper laid on canvas, 80 × 64 cm (Lot 19, estimate: $500,000–700,000).