Freeman’s biannual European Art & Old Masters

 Freeman’s biannual European Art & Old Masters auction brings the best of the Continent, England, and Scotland to market, and this February 14 is led by 

La Fleur Préférée (Lot 58), a striking life-size outdoor portrait of a farm girl by William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

Offered with an estimate of $400,000-600,000, the painting was executed in 1895, at the height of Bouguereau’s career, and boasts an extensive provenance, having originally been bought directly from the artist. The work comes to Freeman’s directly from a private collection in North Carolina and has been in US collections for over a century, underscoring the artist’s longstanding popularity among Americans. This quintessential canvas is an unmissable opportunity for Bouguereau collectors.

Also on offer in the February 14 sale is Deux Mères de Famille (Lot 59), a mother and child scene by Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau, an important 19^th-century French painter. This fresh-to-market work was exhibited at the Salon in 1888. Gardner Bouguereau was an early and influential Parisian expatriate, one of the first American women to exhibit at the Salon, and the wife of William-Adolphe.

IMPORTANT CANVASES, WITH IMPRESSIONISM AND POST-IMPRESSIONISM ON FULL DISPLAY

European Art & Old Masters brings to market a range of distinguished paintings, including Pont-Aven (Lot 74), a lively cityscape by the noted French Post-Impressionist Gustave Loiseau. Also on offer is Canal in Spring by Frits Thaulow (Lot 64), who combined Impressionism with naturalism to execute landscapes with an aesthetic all his own—initially in his native Norway, then primarily in France.

Daniel Ridgway Knight’s romantic riverside scene The Signal (Lot 60), a highlight of European Art & Old Masters, foregrounds the artist’s traditional, academic attention to detail and his focus on perhaps his most popular subject matter: peasant women. 

James Tissot’s Sur la Plage (Lot 56), an enigmatic seaside scene, highlights the lush theatrical dress in which the artist often costumed his models.

MASTERWORKS ACROSS CENTURIES

Freeman’s February 14 auction features several centuries of artistic production, with some works—like an elegant chalk-on-paper portrait of a woman by the studio of Paolo Veronese (Lot 8)—dating back as early as the sixteenth century. Other esteemed works by Old Masters in the sale include the oil-on-copper Crying Madonna attributed to Carlo Dolci (Lot 10), and a selection of portraits of the Campbell family by William Aikman (Lots 18-21).