John Moran Auctioneers Announces Inaugural Two-Session American and European Fine Art Sale -- 100-lot European Session highlighted by a major work by Frederic Arthur Bridgman
-- 200-lot American Session to feature a select group of top California and American painters
-- Works from the
News-Antique.com - Mar 14,2012 - -- 100-lot European Session highlighted by a major work by Frederic Arthur Bridgman
-- 200-lot American Session to feature a select group of top California and American painters
-- Works from the mid-17th century to the late 20th century consigned from private collections
Pasadena, CA— John Moran Auctioneers is delighted to announce their April 17, 2012 Fine Art Auction, a major sale featuring a spectacular large work by Orientalist painter Frederic Arthur Bridgman (1847 – 1928). The event will mark a new chapter in the history of the family-owned house. For the past forty years collectors and connoisseurs nationwide have known Moran’s as an important venue for sales of California and other regional American Impressionist schools. Answering demand from a growing and increasingly global market while continuing to build upon their success in their traditional specialty, Moran’s is expanding their fine art sale’s content to include European works dating from the 17th to the mid-20thcentury, to be offered alongside American and California works in a separate, same-day session.
The debut European session is brilliantly led by the Bridgman painting, ‘’Arabian Street Scene’’. Bridgman was born in Alabama but is more strongly associated with France. He moved to Paris as a young man, studying in the studio of pre-eminent French Orientalist Jean-Leon Jerome. Under Jerome’s influence he chose to specialize in scenes of the Middle East, and made numerous trips to Spain and North Africa, particularly Algeria and Egypt. His detailed depictions of the region’s scenery, architecture, people and costumes earned him immense popularity and a reputation as the most talented American artist in the genre. With interest revived in part by recent major museum exhibitions and scholarly studies, works by Bridgman are again enjoying a buoyant market, appreciated for their technical mastery and recording of a fascinating world that has largely disappeared. Created at the peak of Bridgman’s career in 1882, the ‘’Arabian Street Scene’’ is a theatrically staged piece hosting a large cast, serving up the feast of exotic imagery and fanciful effects that collectors of Orientalism crave. With bravura contrasts of light, color and texture, Bridgman guides the viewer’s eye through the dusty street in a procession of deeply receding planes from one group of figures and animals to another, each group forming a vignette telling its own story within the whole. A large work measuring 34 x 53.5 inches, the mesmerizing ’’Arabian Street Scene’’ arrives at Moran’s from an important private collection in San Marino, CA where it has been held for several generations, and is offered with an estimate of $300,000 - $500,000.
Moran’s sale abounds with opportunities for collectors of 19th century European art to acquire classic works by notable artists at all price points, including an oil depicting a guitarist serenading a lady on a veranda by Gabriel Puig Roda (1865 – 1919 Spanish) (estimate: $4000 – 6000), an ornate interior scene by Jean Paul Sinibaldi (1857 – 1909 French) (estimate: $3000 – 5000), and a snowy scene of Russian Cossacks, ‘’War and Peace’’,
