Helsinki Winter Sale presents Albert Edelfelt

Helsinki Winter Sale presenterar

"View from the Artist's Studio in Paris" by Albert Edelfelt

Estimate: 280 000 - 320 000 EUR

Edelfelt traveled to Paris in May of 1874 to start studying with the history painter Jean-Leon Gérôme at the art academy, École des Beaux-Arts. He formed close friendships with young artists, the most important of whom was Jules Bastien-Lepage, a champion of realistic Plein-air painting. Generally, the contacts Edelfelt made in Paris were of fundamental importance in view of his future career.

The history painting “Queen Blanka”, created before the Paris Salon 1877, can be described as Edelfelt’s breakthrough. The work was a great success at the World Exhibition the following year and it quickly became one of the most loved works of art in the Nordics.

In the same year, Edelfelt completed another painting with a historical motif in the Paris studio, the considerably more dramatic "Duke Karl disgraces the corpse of Klas Fleming". This painting, too, was well received, but Edelfelt realized that a final breakthrough at the Paris Salon required him to depart from history painting, which was already considered passé. In this spirit, the work “Conveying the Child's Coffin (A Child's Funeral)” was created, where Edelfelt describes how different people express their grief. The painting expresses psychological realism but is carried out according to plain-air painting’s principles. At the Salon in Paris 1880, the painting is awarded a medal in the third class, the first one of its kind to be awarded to a Finn. The artist had been correct in his assumption and the path to international fame was now open to him.

The result of this development is particularly striking in two relatively large works that were created in Paris, in the spring of 1895. The first, "Carneval de Paris", which depicts a red-haired woman at a restaurant window, and "View from the artist's studio in Paris", which is now for sale at the Helsinki Winter Sale. Both of these works were carried out shortly after Edelfelt, together with Anders Zorn, visited the opera singer Jean-Baptist Faure, who owned one of France's preeminent private collections of modern paintings. Edelfelt was totally enthralled by the numerous fine works by Eduard Manet that were part of the collection and it is clear that both the restaurant scene and the view from the studio bear traits of Manet's art.

In "View from the artist's studio in Paris" the impressionistic traits are prominent, albeit more controlled than in "Carneval de Paris". This freshly designed cityscape, with its apparent airiness and lush, light-filled color harmonies, makes the work one of the most central representatives of Edelfelt's coloristic painting. It captured the moment of city life, the depth emphasized by the narrowing street and the somewhat dramatic cloud formations all contribute to the painting's unique expressiveness.

However, at this time Edelfelt had to endure negative or unsympathetic criticism in his home country for this painting, as well as for most similar works. When the painting, which partly foreshadows Magnus Enckell's later painting, was exhibited at the Finnish Artists' Exhibition in the fall of 1895, it was considered to "look almost like a chromolithography print". Only about twenty years later was the outside world ready for more modern work from Edelfelt's production and the painting found its buyer in the physician and entrepreneur Carl Wilhelm Rosenlew through Edelfelt's widow Ellan von Born and Bäcksbacka's Art Salon.