The largest private collection of works by Théo Van Rysselberghe is not in Belgium or France, but in Turkey! In Izmir to be precise, at the Lucien Arkas Museum, which owns a good dozen of them, presented as part of a large collection devoted to Belgian art.
With his sublime painting La petite Denise, painted in 1889, Théo Van Rysselberghe entered the Metropolitan Museum in New York. By an amusing coincidence, Denise Maréchal was his niece by marriage, and also the niece of Georges Lemmen, who painted at least one portrait of her.
A few years later, Théo Van Rysselberghe painted another portrait of Denise Maréchal. This one went to another major American museum, the National Gallery in Washington, where it is on display thanks to a private loan.
Sold for €59,000 in 1989 and €82,000 in 1998, this view of Veere was offered by Bonhams on 21 November 2023 in London on behalf of a very greedy and optimistic Dutch collector. With an audacious estimate of £300,000 / 500,000, it naturally went unsold.
The star of the day’s Sotheby’s sale in New York, this large 1901 portrait fetched $1 million, well below its estimate ($1.2 to $1.8 million).
Alain Delon was the proud owner of this fine neo-impressionist canvas from 1892. But this did not persuade buyers to pay the $5 to $7 million expected by Christie’s at its New York sales. This is a new technique used by auction houses to avoid unsold works and bad statistics. Works with little chance of being sold are withdrawn outright before the sale. Technically, therefore, they are not unsold and avoid being published on auction results websites such as Artprice and Artnet. But we’ll keep an eye out…
A masterpiece of Neo-Impressionist drawing, this 1892 portrait of Verhaeren has aroused the passions of true connoisseurs. Sold for 150,000 euros in 2006, it was offered at the same auction house, Christie’s Paris, on 21 October 2023 with an astonishing estimate of 60-80,000 euros. After a fierce bidding war, it sold for €240,000. This works out at €302,000, with the buyer paying the substantial sales costs.
Sold for 32,000 euros, four times its low estimate, this superb painting from the early 1880s was rediscovered by Millon Belgique in a Brussels estate. Unsurprisingly unknown in Feltkamp’s self-proclaimed catalogue raisonné, the painting was accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Olivier Bertrand, whose authority reassured the market and collectors, as evidenced by the enthusiasm of the bidders.
This is a painting that has nothing whatsoever to do with Théo Van Rysselberghe, either in terms of its technique or its subject and the way it is treated through expression that verges on caricature. Yet it is listed in a publication, rightly criticised, with a date, 1884, and we have no idea why this year and not another… This painting is clearly not by Théo Van Rysselberghe. It is not a forgery in the strict sense of the word, but a work by another painter.
