CAN YOU PAY $500,000?!

Christie’s will offer a work of Caillebotte ‘Still Life with Oysters’.
(Special thanks for informing me)

Still Life with Oysters >>

The colors are bluer than I imagine.

Please show me if you get it!
I wish a Japanese art museum obtains it.

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??Sale Information??
Sale 7735
Impressionist/Modern Art Evening Sale
23 June 2009
London, King Street

??Estimate?? (Set Currency)
??250,000 – ??350,000 ($409,000 – $572,600)

??Lot Description??
Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894)
Nature morte aux hu???tres
signed ‘G. Caillebotte’ (upper left)
oil on canvas
15 x 21 5/8 in. (38 x 55 cm.)
Painted in 1881

??Lot Condition Report??
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??Special Notice??
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 15% on the buyer’s premium

??Pre-Lot Text??
PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE SWISS COLLECTION

??Provenance??
Martial Caillebotte, Paris.
Ambroise Vollard, Paris, circa 1900.
Anonymous sale, Sotheby’s, London, 2 April 1981, lot 310.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

??Literature??
F. F??±n??±on, ‘Les impressionnistes en 1886’, in Oeuvres, Paris, 1948, no. 2, p. 88.
M. B??±rhaut, Gustave Caillebotte, catalogue des peintures et pastels, Paris, 1951, no. 166.
M. B??±rhaut, Caillebotte, sa vie et son oeuvre, catalogue raisonn??± des peintures et pastels, Paris, 1978, no. 180, p. 55 (illustrated p. 142).
M.J. de Balanda, Gustave Caillebotte, Lausanne, 1988, p. 110 (illustrated p. 111).
M. B??±rhaut, Gustave Caillebotte, catalogue raisonn??± des peintures et pastels, Paris, 1994, no. 195 (illustrated p. 148).
N. Broude (ed.), Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, 2002, p. 207 (illustrated fig. 70, dated ‘ca. 1880-1882’).
Exhibited
Paris, Galeries Durand-Ruel, Exposition r??±trospective d’oeuvres de Gustave Caillebotte, June 1894, no. 68.
Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Le pain et le vin, 1954, no. 25.
Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Gustave Caillebotte, Urban Impressionist, September 1994 – January 1995, no. 91 (illustrated p. 240, dated ‘1880-1882’); this exhibition later travelled to Chicago, The Art Institute, February – May 1995 and Los Angeles, County Museum of Art, June – September 1995.
Lausanne, Fondation de l’Hermitage, Caillebotte, au coeur de l’impressionnisme, June – October 2005, no. 52 (illustrated pp. 102 and 111, dated ‘1880-1882’).

??Lot Notes??
Gustave Caillebotte painted Nature morte aux hu???tres in 1881, during a period when he focussed intensely on the still life as a subject. The picture entered the collection of Caillebotte’s brother Martial and was exhibited in the artist’s posthumous retrospective in 1894 before being acquired by the legendary dealer Ambroise Vollard. The work shows a single place setting at a small table, with a bottle of wine, a folded napkin, lemons and oysters, which had become an expensive delicacy due to overfishing, already served. The table is viewed from the other side, from a raised perspective, with the viewer placed in the position of some passer-by, perhaps even the waiter. Meanwhile, the artist’s signature is placed by the chair, implying that the seat may subsequently be occupied by Caillebotte himself. In his analysis of this painting, Douglas W. Druick suggested that this ambiguity, ‘can be seen as alluding to [Caillebotte’s] dualism as artist-worker and bourgeois collector within the economy of the Impressionist enterprise. Once again he embodied the oppositional dynamic that is at the heart of his most original contributions to the painting of modern life’ (D.W. Druick, ‘Caillebotte’s Still Lifes’ in Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris, New Brunswick, 2002, pp. 205-07).

Of the various artists associated with Impressionism, only Paul C??±zanne made the still life a major part of his pictorial explorations of reality. Nevertheless, it provided Caillebotte with a crucial forum for pictorial experimentation, hence Druick’s statement that, ‘Caillebotte’s occasional engagements with the subject of still life in the late 1870s and early 1880s produced some of the most provocatively original compositions within his oeuvre’ (ibid, p. 197). Caillebotte explored the theme on several occasions throughout his career, especially in two significant still life campaigns: the first in 1881-82 when Nature morte aux hu???tres was painted, the second in his flower pictures of the early 1890s. The still life, which before moving to moving to Petit Gennevilliers he often infused with an urban twist, allowed him to explore innovative compositions, as is demonstrated in this view of a place setting from the ‘wrong’ side of the table. These compositions were in part based on his experiments with and observations of photography, resulting in their appearing as snap-shots, vignettes of everyday life in Paris, in this case perhaps in a brasserie; the artist’s combination of subject matter and composition in Nature morte aux hu???tres, lends it a vivid immediacy, using techniques similar to his celebrated 1879 picture, Le d??±jeuner, which also treated the subject of food and the consumer. Its realism and honesty appear to place it at a distance from the overly-composed still life paintings of oysters of the Dutch Old Masters or even from Manet’s sensual and glamorous Hu???tres et champagne painted only a few years earlier, revealing Caillebotte bringing his own unique vision to the subject, discarding all precedents and achieving a singularly modern vision, a glimpse of life from the point of view of the Parisian fl???neur so celebrated by Charles Baudelaire.
It is not only a striking portrait of everyday life of modern Paris, but a portrait of the artist’s life as well. The new personalisation of still life, using props from the artist’s domestic environment (pipes, newspapers and playing cards) was later championed by Braque, Picasso and Matisse, whose use of such everyday objects was crucial to the experiments of the early 20th Century avant-gardes.

??quoted from Christie’s??