Notes

Bernard Buffet’s Le Château et le Loire of 1973 is a magnificent painting that spotlights the lustrous scenery of a chateau and farmstead along the banks of the gleaming Loire River. The picture plane is bathed in radiant sunlight and the bright green conifers and shrubs glisten with specks of gold and yellow reflected light. The artist has brilliantly captured that uncanny sense of stillness just before or after a storm when there is not a breath of wind in the air, yet the presence of the storm is very much extant.

Buffet, a French painter born in Paris in 1928, was a precocious young talent and at the age of 15 in 1943 he was admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He had his first solo exhibition in 1947 and in 1949 and at the age of 19, was awarded the prestigious Prix de la Critique.

Best known for his representational work he soon experienced a meteoric rise to celebrity status for his distinctive style of highly structured works of elongated, spiky forms, sombre colours, and flattened spaces that communicated the austerity and instability of post-war Europe. Vehemently opposed to abstraction, at a time of innovation in the contemporary, his critical acclaim eventually began to waver but there is much-renewed interest in his work.

Provenance

Galerie Maurice Garnier, Paris.

Everard Read, Johannesburg.

Acquired by Gavin and Jane Relly, thence by descent.

Literature

The current lot is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Everard Read.