A LA VERA DEL SENA || Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat



Bernard Boutet de Monvel (French painter, sculptor, engraver) 1881 - 1949
Félix Boutreux sur les Quais (Monsieur Félix Boutreux on the Quais de Seine), 1943
oil on canvas
85 x 64 cm. (33.5 x 25.25 in.)
signed lower right BERNARD / B. DE MONVEL
private collection

Catalogue Note Sotheby's
In 1943, Boutet de Monvel painted approximately ten pictures on the theme of “Bouquinistes”, famous book sellers on the quays in Paris. Félix Boutreux (1869-1952), both ceramist and painting restorer, was a friend of Boutet de Monvel’s. See previous lots for other compositions on the same subject.

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Bernard Boutet de Monvel was a French painter, sculptor, engraver, fashion illustrator and interior decorator, he was born in Paris' IVth district on 9 August 1881 and died in a plane crash on the island of São Miguel in the Azores on 28 October 1949.

Son of the painter and children's illustrator Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1850–1913), Bernard Boutet de Monvel was raised in both Paris and Nemours, and he set his sights on becoming a painter from the age of sixteen. First off, he became a student of Luc-Olivier Merson (1822–1867), with whom he took courses from the Easter of 1897, before also going on to study sculpture with Jean Dampt (1854–1946), from the autumn of that same year.
In the autumn of 1898, Louis McClellan Potter (1873–1912), an American painter who was also a student of Merson, introduced him to etching. Bernard Boutet de Monvel, who had taken up with the printer and engraver Eugène Delâtre (1854–1938) at the time, then turned his attentions to colour etching using the 'au repérage' method (with a separate plate for each colour), the technique for which had only just been rediscovered.