ALEXANDRE DECAMPS ( 1803 – 1860 )
An important painting by Alexandre Gabriel Decamps depicting women with children bathing and taking water from a fountain, village in the background at sunset. The work is unlined on its original canvas and signed lower right to the edge of the fountain base. A superb painting with beautiful light and colour and in very good original condition. The artist is very highly regarded and examples of his work can be seen in dozens of museums around the world including The Louvre, The Hermitage and the Metropolitan Museum.
Title: “By the Fountain – Sunset”
Signature: Signed to edge of fountain basin
Medium: Oil on original canvas
Provenance: Private French collection
Size: c. 11.5 x 18 inches unframed / 17.5 x 24 framed
Condition: Unlined original canvas – very good for age – a few tiny marks
Alexander Gabriel Decamps was born in Paris on 3 March 1803. In a letter he says
... humorously that his parents were suspected of not registering his birth promptly because of his ‘huge size’, but goes on to say that this did not prevent him from ‘being sickly and puny.’ Part of his boyhood was spent at the foot of an almost deserted valley in Picardy.
Decamps developed a passion for travel that took him to Switzerland, then to the south of France, the Orient, Asia Minor and finally Italy. When, with Gameray, he was sent on an official mission to Greece and Turkey to collect documentation on the victory at Navarino, he returned with enough sketches and souvenirs to sustain his whole career as a painter of oriental subjects. He never returned to the East.
Decamps participated in the Salon until 1855, though with some irregularity and with varying fortunes. When he returned to Paris after his travels in the Orient Decamps exhibited at his first Salon in 1827, Hunting Lapwings, and when this went unnoticed he considered abandoning painting for lithography and caricature. He had his first success as a painter at the 1831 Salon with Cadgi-Bey, Chief of Police in Smyrna, Doing his Round, which gained him a second-class medal. Exhibited at the same time were View Taken in the Levant.
Museum and Gallery Holdings
Amsterdam: Truffle Hunter; Knife Grinder; Turkish Executioners; Neapolitan
Bayonne (Mus. Bonnat): Four Boats; Doe Lying on a Rock
Béziers: View in Holland
Bordeaux (MBA): Livestock Market; Landscape with Animals
Bucharest (Muz. National de Arta al României): Mosque
Caen (MBA): Orange Seller
Châlons-en-Champagne: Old Fisherman; Old Peasant
Chambéry (MBA): Landscape; Coming out of the Turkish School
Chantilly (Mus. Condé): Turkish Landscape (before 1833); Troop of Turkish Guards on the Road to Smyrna in Magnesia (1833); Memory of Asian Turkey: Turkish Children Playing with a Tortoise (1836); Turkish Children beside a Fountain (1846); Turkish Standard Bearer (c. 1839); Turkish School (1846); Rebecca at the Fountain (1848); Landscape; Bertrand and Raton (1846, according to the fable by Jean de La Fontaine); Child Feeding a Sheep (1847); Cavalry from Asiatic Turkey Crossing a Ford (1848); March of Bashi-Bouzouks (1846); View of Ebra in Palestine (watercolour and gouache)
Compičgne: Monkey Musicians
Frankfurt am Main: Yoke of Oxen
Glasgow: St Jerome
Graz: Storyteller
Lille (MBA): Hunting (1847)
London (Wallace Collection): Arabs Reposing or Eastern Figures Reposing (c. 1832-1833, oil on canvas); The Finding of Moses (1837, oil on canvas); A Well in the East (1847, oil on canvas); The Villa Doria-Pamphili, Rome (c. 1835, oil on canvas); The Bookworm (1846?, oil on canvas); The Roman Campagna (c. 1847, oil/panel); The Miraculous Drau
500 pieces of quality antique furniture at Country Homes Antiques Stirling Scotland. View website. Trade welcome
Plus BenView garden centre authentic general antiques shop, carrying around 400 select and rare antique items. Selected by Andrew Christie former Fine Arts Auctioneer. Antique ID Number (AIDN): SA828918
Dateline of this antique is 19th Century
Height is 44.4cm (17.5inches)Width is 61cm (24.0inches)Depth is 7cm (2.8inches)
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