Sotheby's to Offer Four Works from the Collection of Modern Art Impresario & Legendary Dealer Ambroise Vollard

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Paysage de bord de mer
oil on canvas
Painted circa 1884
Estimate: $1,000,000 - $1,500,000

Paysage de bord de mer was created at a defining moment in Renoir’s career amid a period of newfound financial stability and artistic independence. During these years, Renoir concentrated on developing a new linear style which came to define much of his output in the early and mid-1880s. This work effortlessly captures the harmony of light and color with a vitality seen in his finest Impressionist works while also rendering the rocky landscape with a firmness and sense of volume Renoir which is evident in his later works.

In 1894 Renoir met Ambroise Vollard, a young and ambitious contemporary art dealer twenty-seven years his junior. At the time Vollard was growing in reputation and, despite the difference in age and place in their careers, the two formed a close kinship, in no small part due to their shared perceptions as outsiders — Renoir having come from the working classes, and Vollard from a colonial French isle. Renoir was already represented by both Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune but gradually began to offer his works to Vollard. In the years that followed their first meeting, Vollard would further establish Renoir's career by commissioning numerous prints from the artist, acquiring his works from other galleries and auctions and even encouraging new modes of creation, as he did with Renoir's first sculptures in 1907.

Ambroise Vollard: The Man at the Center of Impressionism
(1866 – 1939)

Arriving in Paris from the French island colony La Réunion in 1887 with the intention of studying law, Vollard happened upon a work by Paul Cézanne in the famed shop of Père Tanguy; “It was Cézanne who made me an art collector…Immediately the law seemed dead for me and as I stood looking at the canvas, I resolved that I would make every sacrifice to surround myself with art.” Changing course, despite his lack of contacts and credentials, Vollard dedicated his life to furthering the work of his artists. He would later go on to sell more than two-thirds of Cézanne’s oeuvre, generating enormous wealth and clout for the artist. Today he is revered for his unparalleled commitment to and patronage of 20th century avant-garde art and thus his pivotal contribution to the development of Impressionist and Modern art history.

Vollard’s breakthrough as an art dealer would come in 1895 when he staged one of his most significant exhibitions, a retrospective of works by Cézanne, followed later that year by one devoted to van Gogh, who was virtually unknown in Paris at the time. After the success of these shows, Vollard was able to move his gallery to larger premises on the prestigious rue Laffitte, which became a focal point of the Parisian avant-garde.

At the time of his unexpected death in 1939, Vollard was still fully enmeshed in his business, selling art and producing editions of sculpture, prints and illustrated books. His brother Lucien Vollard, along with art dealers Martin Fabiani and Étienne Bignou, aided in the theft of thousands of artworks belonging to the dealer and sold them. Although Ambroise Vollard passed away before the Nazi occupation of France, Lucien Vollard held close ties with the Nazis and sold artworks to members of the Nazi party while other pieces were offered to German
dealers and museums.

In 2010 Sotheby’s auctioned a long-lost trove of 140 works belonging to Ambroise Vollard including paintings, prints, books and drawings, discovered in a storage box in the bank vault of the Société Générale in Paris. The discovery in 1979 prompted an 11-year legal dispute over the vault’s ownership before an agreement was reached. The group made headlines all around the world and sold for over 20 million euros at Sotheby’s Paris and London.