Mon Atelier by Lucy Attinger, sold by Elliott Fine Art.
Elliott Fine Art sold three of its pictures to international museums including Mon Atelier by Swiss artist Lucy Attinger (1859- 1928. The 15 x 18in (38 x 45cm) oil on canvas, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1889, shows the artist at the Académie Julian sketching the viewer. It is one of only two known paintings of a women-only life class at the Académie Julian, the leading international school for women artists at the time.
The painting was bought by the North Carolina Museum of Art for a ‘high five-figure sum’.
Dealer Will Elliott ’s exhibition on the Belle Époque, staged during the last LAW (December 3-10), included two other pictures that have gone to US institutions. Another work by Attinger, Profile study of a Native American, a gouache on card, was sold for close to five figures to the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Ohio.
The Platzburschen Wilhelm Völcker and Ludwig Dörr, a pen and ink double portrait by Gerhardt Wilhelm von Reutern (1794 1865), was acquired by the J Paul Getty Museum also for a high five-figure sum.
Fellow LAW exhibitor Patrick Bourne & Co announced the acquisition by The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, of Father and Son by Winifred Nicholson, a purchase made with the help of The Arts Council England/ V&A Purchase Grant and support from Art Fund. The museum called it a “lively, subtly subversive, image of maternal love”, which helped in expanding and “more actively displaying its collection of art by women”.
Institutional acquisitions are notoriously slow moving, often involving multiple viewings, fundraising and additional research, so the gap between an item’s first exposure and a purchase can be wide.
For example, a picture displayed at Ben Elwes Fine Art during LAW 2020, The Captured Runaway by William Gale, was bought by The Bowdoin College Museum in Maine but was only announced as on public display in February. The gallery has also sold a painting by Swedish artist Anna Boberg to the Art Gallery in Ontario.
Another institutional sale was recently announced by Crispian Riley Smith from the online-only edition of Master Drawings New York 2020.
A drawing of the seven founders of the Félibirge movement by Edouard- Antoine Marsal (1845-1929), including the founder of The Museon Arlaten in Provence, sold to the museum itself.
