Sale 6616, Lot 69 Georges Seurat (1859-1891) Le tas de pierre (cesseurs des pierres), circa 1884 Oil on canvas Estimate: £600,000-900,000	Dr Dreesmann's paintings and drawings offer a fascinating overview of the major Impressionist and Modern movements. This, the first of the five auctions of the Dreesmann Collection, includes some 180 works. The scope of artists represented in the collection is astonishing: from the first generation of Impressionists (Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley), through the major Post-Impressionists (Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Vuillard), to masters of the Modern movement (Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Chagall, Marc). In spite of the increasingly disparate nature of the Impressionist group, the early 1880s was a propitious time for Renoir. In the autumn of 1880 he met his future wife, Aline; while in the professional sphere he was enjoying the valuable support of his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. La promenade, executed during these years, reflects Renoir's increasing inclination towards the human figure, and to the Baudelairian motif of the flâneur, the disengaged male observer of modern life, here watching a fashionably dressed young woman. The modernity of the scene is emphasized by the framing of the image: the man is seen only from the back and remains a faceless 'everyman'. The first owner of La promenade was Ambroise Vollard, the dealer who championed the avant-garde, with whom Renoir became friendly in the 1890s. Such was Vollard's regard for this picture that he chose to illustrate it in his biography of Renoir published in 1919. Following a tempestuous row with his parents, van Gogh moved to The Hague in late 1881. Over the following months, he enjoyed a relatively settled and productive period and the drawing Sien: facing left dates from the spring of 1883. Van Gogh's brother, Theo, encouraged Vincent at this time to experiment with a new medium of 'mountain chalk', a sort of waxy pencil which would allow him greater depth in his hatching and starker contrast in his tones. Both are evident in the present work. The sitter is Sien, a former prostitute van Gogh had met at the end of 1882. Sien and her small daughter soon began to model for van Gogh who, showing characteristic generosity, invited them both to live with him. The image of stonebreakers recurs in the early career of Seurat, inspired, like van Gogh, by Millet's celebration of working men and women. Executed in the buoyant tonality of his early phase, Le tas de pierre sets complementary colors side-by-side in anticipation of Seurat's later Pointilliste, or divisionist, technique. It is deliberately left unclear as to whether his subjects are rural workers or laborers toiling in the banlieu of Paris, a modern-day theme the Impressionist group had sanctioned. Seurat, however, reacted against the improvisatory nature of the Impressionist style. He sought out quotidian motifs that he could render in a timeless, monumental way, sharing Cézanne's ambition to create an art that would stand comparison with the Old Masters. Moving forward from the 1880s into the 1920s, another work from the Dreesmann Collection which makes its own claims for timelessness is George Braque's Les cabines pavoisées. Like Monet, another native of Normandy, in his middle years Braque was drawn towards the dramatic, chalky cliffs of the region's coastline that he had first encountered as a boy. From the late 1920s onwards he spent a part of every year at a house he had built for himself at Varengeville, his valued retreat from the pressures of life in Paris. Here he began his series of small-scale beach landscapes of which Les cabines pavoisées is a prime example. Landscape had been crucial in Braque's formulation of Cubism in the years before 1910, but it disappeared from his repertoire until these beach pictures of twenty years later. The quietly lyrical pattern and simple construction of Les cabines pavoisées, while indebted to the rigors of Braque's Cubist still lifes, also recall his work as a ballet designer for Diaghilev. The four works discussed above are merely a foretaste of the range on offer in the Dr Anton C.R. Dreesmann Collection. For any collector further investigation will reap handsome rewards. Conor Jordan is a specialist in the Impressionist and Modern Art department, Christie's London. Back to top