Dominic Fine Art

24/05/2024

Still life by the 19 year old Auguste Lauzet (1863-1898), in the 17th century sail loft above my gallery.

29/03/2024

Self Portrait at 19 – Eduardo Cortés y Cordero(1837-1903)
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Signed: “E. Cortes Paris 1856” - Oil on Canvas, 76.5 x 64.3cm (30 x 25”)
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The following painting is a passing zenith in the quiet career of Eduardo Cortés, who came to Paris in 1855, did a decent impression of Eugene Delacroix, before returning home to Seville.
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Marketing men (and women) will be the first to tell you that concise names are easier to remember than convoluted ones.  This is certainly true of Spanish artists, whose names are vulnerable to small errors in spelling and association. For the Cortés family, 4 generations of painters from Joaquin Cortés in the 18th century to the neo-impressionist Edouard Cortés (1882-1969), similar names and styles has seen the contribution of one artist entangled with that of another.
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The same thing happened to the orientalist Diego Marin Lopez, who signed ‘Marin’, much like Enrique Marin Sevilla… and Enrique Marin Higuero, also orientalists and natives of Andalusia.   
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But there are solutions. Pablo Ruiz Picasso discarded his father’s “Ruiz” for his mother’s “Picasso.” Similarly the poet Federico Garcia Lorca might have struggled to leave as much of a mark writing under the name of “Garcia.”

21/03/2024

Noticed an old friend on a recent visit to :  the first time I’d seen a picture I once owned hanging on the wall of a museum
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Penzance is the final destination on the railway line, but museums are the end-of-the-line for the art market, where paintings can be seen and appreciated safely away from the dealers.
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In a roundabout way it got me thinking (a dangerous pastime!) about what a strange place Penzance is, with its disproportionate number of museums, archives, galleries and auctions. It is also far enough away from a large city to have developed a distinct, insulated artistic identity.  
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The Newlyn School benefitted a great deal from the coal and steam that it sought to escape, and from about 1859, providing the train left on time, it was possible to have breakfast in London… for a late-dinner in Penzance. By 1877 it was also possible to reach St. Ives, the even smaller town, just 7 miles away, that in artistic terms would begin to eclipse Penzance just a few decades later.

20/03/2024

Pencil portrait of Dorjay Pasang (“Thunder Wednesday”) made in Darjeeling exactly a 100 years ago, shortly before the ill-fated Everest expedition of 1924.
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Aside from George Mallory (1886-1924), Pasang was the only person to attend the first 3 expeditions to Mount Everest and is described in 1924 as “Mallory and Bruce’s leading porter, their first pick and one of the men on whom our highest hopes centred.”
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The 1924 expedition is best remembered for the disappearance of Mallory and Irvine (last sighted around 800 ft from the summit), but it also laid foundations for the successful attempt of 1953. One development was the growing reliance on local guides, like Pasang, that would one day lead to the partnership of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
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The 1953 expedition also had the luxury of passing through the recently opened Kingdom of Nepal. Previous attempts were made from the less forgiving north face (Tibetan side), a route which till this day accounts for less than half of all successful climbs.

06/03/2024

Study of an Old man – Attributed to David Wilkie (1785-1841)
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Oil on Mahogany Panel,  126 x 110mm
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The following small panel bears an illegible Bayswater address, likely written by William Collins RA (1788-1847).
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Collins moved from Hampstead to Bayswater in 1830, to be in walking distance of his best friend David Wilkie (1785-1841), who was living in one of the now demolished villas near to Kensington Palace.
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Wilkie frequently visited Collins’s home before his death in 1841, drawing pictures of “barnyard animals” for his godson and namesake Wilkie Collins (1824-1889). 
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22/12/2023

A wise man told me never to publicise museum sales on instagram, until you see them hanging on a wall, but the is closed and I’m told that Dorrell will be on display when it reopens in 2025.
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He was painted in 1942 by Albert Huie, a fascinating artist who deserves to be better known. In 1937, as a 17-year-old, he wandered into the Jamaican National Institute with a folder of works, demanding an audience with the director. Earlier in the year, an aging Augustus John arrived in Kingston, looking to revive his career. Jamaica became the inspiration behind his resurgent exhibition of 1938, while he encouraged talented painters struggling on the periphery of a large empire. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
“In the beginning I bought enamels in small tins from a hardware store and this was the medium I used to paint The Dancers after I had observed the scene in a downtown piano bar. Not long afterwards, I took this painting along with a couple others and my sketches to the Institute of Jamaica to show them to Delves Molesworth. I was almost thrown out… Mr. Molesworth himself interceded, looked at what I had brought to show him and expressed an interest. He invited me to his house and commissioned a portrait of his wife. ” 
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Albert Huie (1920-2010)

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15/12/2023

Been working on oil portrait miniatures lately, which seems to be a forgotten area in British art history, caught between conventional miniatures (limnings) on one side and full-scale portraits on the other.
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I think they are best seen as the latter, reduced in scale to meet the 16/17th century demand for portable images.
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The “artists” of this period were not artists as we would know them, but jobbing craftsmen (“painter-stainers”), as likely to decorate a wooden carriage as they were to paint a portrait. Many had fled religious persecution in the Netherlands and their versatility / resourcefulness derived from the simple need to earn a living. Also suspect their main ambition would have been to earn enough so that their children would not need to be painters.   
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04/12/2023

David Waterson (1870-1954) spent most of his life painting the river next to his hometown in Brechin. The following picture captures it in autumn, partially frozen, with the leaves turning.
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It was painted in 1910, shortly after he returned from Stockholm (after being invited by the King of Sweden) and from Paris, where he remained long enough to reject “the business overtures” of two dealers.
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These trips seem to have taught him nothing of the commercial side of being an artist. His career seems to have been one long evasion of the unfortunate fact, that artistic potential depends as much on business practice as it does on talent. A mistrust of dealers and a disdain for money, saw that he sold his works from a folder behind the counter of his local stationers. He was notoriously difficult to get a price out of and was famous for saying “get them to give me what they feel it is worth.”
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01/12/2023

La Pieta, 1903 – Camille Alaphilippe (1874-1940)
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Camille Alaphilippe won the Prix de Rome in 1898 and spent the next 5 years training at the Villa Medici. The following marble suggests he saw Michelangelo’s nearby altarpiece in the Vatican.  
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Despite being among the most promising sculptors of his generation, Alaphilippe’s career fell to the simultaneous challenge of World War One and inflation. He volunteered at 40 and emerged 4 years later to find himself physically exhausted and unable able to afford the rising price of bronze and marble.
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His last 2 decades were spent as a teacher in Algeria (where francs went further). Must have been a dreary isolation for one who had known the artistic centres and who had given his career to a style exhausted by the industrial slaughter of WWI.
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The sharp, economic lines of modernism would fare better in a bankrupt continent than the expensive, time consuming ornamentation of artists like Camille Alaphilippe.
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10/11/2023

(5/5)
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“Lately my health is quite good, however… I’d dare to believe that if I were to spend a while with you that would have a lot of effect upon me... But it seems to me that there’s no hurry... and that we must consider calmly if this is the moment to spend money on the journey. Perhaps by sacrificing the journey one could be useful to Gauguin or Lauzet.”
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Vincent to Theo van Gogh, 12th February 1890
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Is there is a more poignant story in art history than that of Vincent van Gogh and younger brother Theo? The beleaguered dealer that financed his ambitions, gave relief in countless letters and tried to sell his paintings. Vincent died in July 1890, Theo 6 months later – many decades before either could see the fruits of their farsighted vision.
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Vincent van Gogh belonged to no artistic school; his defining period was spent alone, painting from a psychiatric hospital in Provence. The abiding belief of the Impressionists was that colour should remain faithful to nature, even when form does not. Van Gogh’s paintings were neither faithful in colour or form, superseding an impressionism yet to be accepted, preceding the label of “post-impressionism” by 2 decades.
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“You are as important as the artists you support, because without you we could no longer produce the art that is so important.” – Vincent to Theo.  
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09/11/2023

(4/5) The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel commissioned Lauzet to produce 25 etchings of works from his personal collection in 1892. The resulting “L’Art Impressioniste…” now stands as a seminal publication in the history of art, but this wasn’t always the case and when it was published, the reputation of the impressionists and the finances of their main patron were uncertain. Monet felt that without Durand-Ruel “we wouldn’t have survived.” Not until 1920 would Durand-Ruel feel able to say that: 
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“at last the Impressionist masters triumphed… My madness had been wisdom. To think that, had I passed away at sixty, I’d have died debt-ridden and bankrupt, surrounded by a wealth of underrated treasures…"
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08/11/2023

(3/5) Decades of auction records reveal just 3 paintings to Lauzet’s name, with much of his short career given to making prints that would amplify the reach of great artists and significant movements.

Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Rodin… all donated works for his charity auction in 1895. Paul Durand-Ruel (patron of the impressionists) organised the sale and bought 13 of the 90 lots. Armand Silvestre, who wrote the catalogue for the 1st Impressionist exhibition of 1873, wrote another for Lauzet.
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"I also come to ask you a favour. A comrade, Lauzet, very ill at the moment, is forced by the state of his health to stay in the south... As he is not very fortunate, we have decided to make a sale for his benefit. I would appreciate it very much if you could donate something. You will be in good company: Puvis [de Chavannes], Rodin, Pissarro, Signac, etc. Tell me if this is possible." -
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Maximilien Luce to Henri Edmond Cross, December 1894
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07/11/2023

(2/5) Lauzet and van Gogh bonded over a love of Adolphe Monticelli (1824-1886), the eccentric genius who Lauzet knew from his time in Marseille and whose artistic footsteps van Gogh had been tracing in the final year of his life. The van Gogh brother were among the first to collect Monticelli’s paintings and were excited by Lauzet’s project to produce the first prints after his floral arrangements.
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“He [Lauzet] came back the next day to ask me if there wouldn’t be some way of having another drawing you did… when you were at St-Rémy… a little thicket of dark trees against a sky with a crescent moon... He told me that he couldn’t get this drawing out of his mind… I suggested that he exchange it for a copy of his Monticelli album, which he accepted immediately.”  -  Theo to Vincent van Gogh, 22nd December 1889
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Image: Preparatory Study for “The Starry Night”, June 1889. (Untraced, but likely owned by Auguste Lauzet)
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06/11/2023

Still Life of Fish / Ingredients for a Bouillabaisse, 1882 -  Marie Auguste Lauzet (1863-1898)
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Painted by the 19 year-old Auguste Lauzet and dedicated to “l’excellent ami” Paul Guigou, who would have been 17. Both men would die from tuberculosis in their early 30s.
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The Marseille-born Lauzet was one of the few mourners at Vincent van Gogh’s funeral and is mentioned in 16 of his letters sent between December 1889 and his death in July 1890.
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Theo van Gogh suggested that the two artists share a studio in Paris. He also told him of Lauzet’s intentions to visit him in Provence. Lauzet never managed to visit Vincent at the asylum at Saint Remy (a letter from Theo suggests he couldn’t afford the trip) but he was among the first to see the visionary landscapes he painted there and was particularly taken by one with “a little thicket of dark trees against a crescent moon.”
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“I hope that Mr. Lauzet will come, I very much want to make his acquaintance. I trust in his opinion when he says that it’s Provence...”   -  Vincent to Theo van Gogh, 1st February 1890
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30/06/2023

William Fuller Curtis (1873-1938) travelled to Paris in 1890, entering the Académie Julian at 17. He returned to New York in 1893, having won first prize in drawing in his final term.
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His works (few and far between) are generally informed by medieval myth and legend. Such influences may explain why he painted Charles Eliot Norton in 1903, the aging critic who had known John Ruskin, was on friendly terms with Edward Burne-Jones and was largely behind the small ripples of pre-Raphaelitism flowing back across the Atlantic.  
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Though highly influential in Europe, such pictures were less suited to a younger, more practical land and it is perhaps for this reason that Curtis took entirely to the eccentric craft of engraving with a burning point following his return to America. It is less forgiving than drawing in pencil and much as etchings give little indication of the laborious efforts behind them, these works were later assumed to be mass produced, or dismissed as sophisticated examples of folk art.
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26/06/2023

This enigmatic portrait of a young woman was painted by August Johnsson (1873-1900) in the last 2 years of his life. It may depict the artist Alma Ekberg (1876-1924) also from Lund, and studying at Frederick Krebs’s school in early 1898 when Johnsson returned from Stockholm, having won the Hertliga Medal at the Royal Academy, and not yet diagnosed with tuberculosis.  
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Hopefully it was happy time for him. Articles of the period describe Johnsson as the “first among the painters of the Scanian twilight poetry of the 1890s”, how “he depicted his landscape with a poetic fervour.” They suggest such fervour wasn’t confined to painting and that he destroyed most of his works before his death at 27.
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17/06/2023

Couldn't afford my weekly issue of the Beano; bought the Financial Times instead. Luckily they've included one of my pictures!

Galleries are responding to a surge in collector interest with works by Gwen John, Winifred Nicholson and more