A Pair of Chrysoberyl Ear Pendants and Ring, Portugal, Late Eighteenth Century– Photo courtesy of Siegelson

Portugal’s expansive naval exploration and subsequently extensive colonial trading empire during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries helped position the European empire as one of the world’s major economic, political and cultural powers. Just as with any other wealthy country at the time, jewels played a central role in displaying the inconceivable wealth attained by the Portuguese royal court. With the discovery of gold and gems in Brazil, a Portuguese colony, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a new era of overt opulence commenced. Diamonds, emeralds, tourmalines, rubies, aquamarines, topazes, amethysts, and chrysoberyls were found in abundance, vigorously mined and shipped back to Portugal. Once in the hands of craftsmen in the growing jewelry trade, Portuguese goldsmiths, lapidaries and gem setters created beautiful jewels that rivaled those of European makers.

Jewelry during the eighteenth century was usually large in size with gems, each cleaved by hand, set into gold or silver mountings, making this demi-parure a superb example of jewelry from this period.

Art Deco Diamond and Emerald Ring by Cartier, Paris, circa 1925 – Photo courtesy of Siegelson

Prized for thousands of years, these remarkably historic stones with their original antique cuts exhibit an unparalleled deep green color and rarely appear on the market. Most treasured by Indian Mughal emperors and maharajas, emeralds symbolized power and wealth while also possessing mystical powers. During the sixteenth century, the finest specimens came not from the ancient Indian mines but from rich deposits in Colombia discovered by the Spanish. These ‘old mine’ emeralds represent the emerald to the highest degree of perfection.

Timbale couverte en argent partiellement doré par Johann Fassnacht, Augsbourg, 1697-1699 - Sotheby's

sur trois pieds griffes. Haut. 13,6 cm, 246 g. Estimation: 4,000 - 6,000 EUR

A German parcel-gilt beaker and cover, Johann Fassnacht, Augsburg, 1697-1699

flutes alternately gilt, hairy claw supports, marked on body and cover; 5 1/4 in, 7oz 18dwt

Sotheby's. Orfèvrerie Européenne, Boîtes en Or et Objets de Vitrine. Paris | 26 juin 2013 www.sothebys.com

Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992), Three studies of Isabel Rawsthorne. Photo Sotheby's

signed, titled and dated 1966 on the reverse of the left canvas, oil on canvas, each: 35.5 by 30.5cm.; 14 by 12in. Estimation: 10,000,000 - 15,000,000 GBP

PROVENANCE: Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris
Private Collection, France (acquired from the above in 1971)
Sale: Christie's, London, Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale, 4 June 2004, Lot 26
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

EXHIBITED: Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Hamburg, Hamburg Kunsthalle, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, 2005-06, no. 50, illustrated in colour
Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts; Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Museum; Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery,
Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, 2006-07, no. 54, illustrated in colour
New York, Gagosian Gallery, Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers, 2008, pp. 38-9, illustrated in colour

LITTERATURE: John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1971, no. 82, illustrated
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon: full face and in profile, Barcelona 1983, no. 36, illustrated in colour
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Paris 1987, no. 34, illustrated in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, Milan, Palazzo Reale, Bacon, 2008, p. 60, illustrated in colour
Rina Arya, Francis Bacon. Painting in a Godless World, Farnham 2012, pp. 122-3, illustrated in colour

NOTE: Isabel Rawsthorne occupies a position unlike any other within Francis Bacon’s art. Of all his female subjects and many friends, she was the woman to whom he felt closest: the extraordinary number of portraits after her likeness command a rare heroic dimension at once testament to Bacon’s affection and reflective of Isabel’s remarkable magnetism as a person. Muse, mistress and friend of the Parisian avant-garde during the 1930s, Isabel was a compelling personality and alluring subject for André Derain, Pablo Picasso and most significantly, Alberto Giacometti, with whom she shared a drawn-out love affair. Undoubtedly enamoured by her sophisticated Parisian connections and impressed by her imposing presence, she was an irresistible source of inspiration for Bacon during the 1960s. Indeed, though indisputably homosexual, Bacon was far from impervious to her charms. After she died in 1992, he famously divulged to Paris Match: "You know I also made love to Isabel Rawsthorne, a very beautiful woman who was Derain's model and Georges Bataille's girlfriend" (Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, London 1994, p.167). Executed seventeen years after they first met, Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne utterly encapsulates this defining relationship, gracefully transmuting strong, handsome features with the fractured assault of Bacon’s dramatic painterly shorthand. Embodying the penultimate example from a series of five triptych studies of Isabel painted between 1965 and 1968 in the artist's iconic 14 by 12 inch canvases, the present work echoes with remarkable proximity the very first small-scale triptych in sharing a similar colour palette of dark ground and contrasting crimson red. Bought from Marlborough Fine Art by Sir Robert and Lisa Sainsbury almost immediately after its completion, this work now resides in the public collection of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia.
Following this first triptych, the cumulative experience of a year spent intently studying and translating her form is evident in the masterfully swift and spontaneous yet controlled facture of the present work. According to a diary recovered from Francis Bacon’s studio after his death, the present work was executed in just under two weeks between 21 October and 4 November 1966 (Ewbanks Auctioneers, Surrey, 2007, Lot 2004). Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne therefore stands at the very epicentre of intense focus on her likeness, a period between 1966 and 1967 during which Bacon would produce some of the most incredible portrayals of his career. Alongside the present work from 1966, the magisterial Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne in the collection of the Tate, London, and the powerfully animalistic Study of Isabel Rawsthorne, of the Pompidou Centre, Paris, would preface two of the most heroic and inventive of Bacon’s portraits, works both painted in 1967 and housed in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin: Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho and Three Studies for Isabel Rawsthorne. Simultaneously demonstrative of her profound power as one of the most significant muses of the Twentieth Century and Bacon’s inimitable powers as a portraitist, Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne crystallises a remarkable symbiosis between painter and subject.

An Artist’s Muse
“How I loved Paris – it gave me everything”
Isabel Rawsthorne cited in: Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, London 1994, p. 166.

The daughter of a master mariner, Isabel Nicholas was born in East London in 1912. As a child, her father’s work moved the family to Liverpool where she started her education at Liverpool School of Art. By the time she turned eighteen however, her father’s unexpected death at sea and mother’s subsequent emigration to Canada left Isabel to make her own way. After winning a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy she secured her return to London, where, to subsidise her own artistic training, she began modelling. Possessing striking, exotic features and a tall slender frame, a string of dalliances and affairs naturally ensued. When Isabel became assistant and model for Jacob Epstein she also became his lover, and by the age of twenty-two had given birth to his child. The Epstein family adopted the child and Isabel was encouraged to continue her studies in Paris. By 1934 after taking life classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse Isabel began socialising at Le Dôme Café and Le Café Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés where she was to meet the most prominent figures of the avant-garde, including the immediately enthralled André Derain for whom she modelled: “I adored Derain – he was the most French person youcould ever meet. That’s how I learned the language” (Isabel Rawsthorne cited in: Daniel Farson, Op. cit., p. 165).
However it was a relationship with Alberto Giacometti that would prove the most significant of these years in Paris. Following their first encounter at Le Dôme one evening, Giacometti and Isabel met daily. In her memoirs she recalled, “I already knew he had changed my life forever” (Isabel Rawsthorne cited in: Véronique Wiesinger, ‘Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Gagosian Gallery, Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers, 2008, p. 217). In return, she was to have an enormous impact on the trajectory of Giacometti’s practice. The countless portraits in two-dimensions and in the round after Isabel traverse a great transformation in Giacometti’s interpretation of the human form, indeed, it was a vision of Isabel standing in the distance on the Boulevard St Michel that inspired the corpus of small naked women planted on cubic bases, a precursor to his iconic mature style. Via Giacometti, she was received into the inner circle of the French intelligentsia: alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Bataille, and Simone de Beauvoir, Isabel forged particularly close friendships with the painter Balthus and the eminent man of letters Michel Leiris and his wife Louise – all figures, it must be noted, that Bacon held in the greatest esteem.
Though she had married Sefton Delmer in 1936, a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express, Isabel and Giacometti sustained an agonizing and protracted love affair that was to last over ten years; the intensity of their relationship only diminished with Isabel’s return to England following the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940.

By the end of the Second World War Isabel had divorced Delmer and following a number of sojourns in Paris with Giacometti married for the second time - in 1947 she wedded the composer and conductor Constant Lambert. Working alongside her husband, Isabel designed sets for many of the Sadler’s Wells ballet and opera productions. Indeed, these years during the late 1940s were devoted to developing her own art practice away from the indulgence of Paris’ cafés. Having established representation by Erica Brausen, she held her first solo exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in 1949, the very same year of Bacon’s seminal one-man show. First introduced by Brausen, it was during the months of preparation running up to their respective exhibitions that Bacon and Isabel became friends. Having returned from Monaco in late 1948 to complete the group of paintings that would secure his critical arrival, Bacon, undoubtedly in awe of Isabel’s Parisian connections, struck up one of the most important relationships of his life. For Bacon, Paris would always represent the very epicentre of the art world; though this seat of power was displaced to New York during the 1950s, Bacon’s love affair with the city never diminished and he considered the honour of exhibiting at the Grand Palais in 1971 his very highest achievement. This undiluted respect was anchored to the artist’s intense admiration for the pioneers of modern art who emerged from Paris during the early Twentieth Century: where Picasso was the catalyst for Bacon’s very first paintings of the 1920s, he attributed Giacometti with effecting the most profound influence upon his work. Giacometti’s dissolution of human appearance down to its very essence was for Bacon the closest parallel to his own ambitions, while the grandiosity of the older artist’s austere diffidence towards the comforts of success undoubtedly impressed Bacon’s generation - the chaos of 7 Reece Mews takes on emulatory significance in homage to Giacometti’s cave-like Montparnasse studio. Not only seduced by these Parisian links however, like his heroes before him, Bacon was captivated by Isabel’s magnetic charisma, disarming personality, and commanding presence. With feline grace and striking features, she was an attractive subject for an artist. Isabel’s appearance naturally leant itself to intense scrutiny and sustained intrigue: her high forehead, long cheekbones and arched eyebrows are as prominent in Giacometti’s busts as they are translated almost thirty years later in Bacon’s highly distorted yet astonishingly accurate portrait heads.

Constant Lambert died in 1951 and shortly after Isabel remarried, settling with Lambert’s close friend and fellow composer, Alan Rawsthorne. During this decade and into the next, Bacon and Isabel became close. Her friendships with eminent figures from the Parisian art world strengthened Bacon’s own ties to Paris; the dinner parties hosted by Isabel helped cement Bacon’s relationships, particularly with Giacometti and Michel Leiris, whom Bacon would later portray in paint with Leiris returning the compliment in one of the finest word-portraits of the artist ever penned. Bacon and Isabel spent the 1960s socialising in the same circle, lunching at Bernard Walsh’s seafood restaurant, Wheeler’s, spending days and long evenings drinking at the George, The French Pub or at the renowned Colony Room run bySoho legend and fellow portrait subject, Muriel Belcher. As central protagonists within this ‘gilded gutter life’, Isabel, Muriel and the gregarious Henrietta Moraes would collectively come to define Bacon’s treatment of the female form - casting a break from the male dominated paintings of the 1940s and ‘50s. Their presence would usher in a period retrospectively perceived as Bacon’s second great artistic peak: where the first belongs to the moment initiated by his series of 1949 Heads, the second coincides with Bacon’s portrayal of his Soho clique and the initiation of the small scale portraits from 1962 onwards. Where Henrietta, sprawled naked on a bed, occupies the tradition of the female nude, and Muriel, with her high hairline and sharp wit, is portrayed as sphinx-like in her wizened demeanour, Isabel embodies the heroic in Bacon’s art like no other individual: the sheer exuberance and almost mythical character of her life and Bacon’s profound respect for her radiates unreservedly from these remarkable portraits.

All the Pulsations of a Person
Across Bacon’s oeuvre, Isabel Rawsthorne is depicted as indefatigably enigmatic, exuding dignity and stature to match the artist’s high regard and deep affection. One of the finest paintings of Bacon’s career is the arrestingly bright blue full-figure portrait Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho, 1967, in the Nationalgalerlie Berlin. Standing vigilant and exuding assurance testament to a life’s worth of experience, Rawsthorne is imbued with a distinctly masculine heroism. In the words of John Russell: “that proud, watchful, experienced figure could be a captain on leave: a lifelong single handed adventurer stepping out from a blue-awning after an assuredly good luncheon, with a rakish open roadster of antique design drawn up at the kerb and a searching unembarrassed glance at the people who have stopped to watch him/her get in and drive off” (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 2001, p. 125).
Unusually attuned to the moods of a woman, Bacon felt a particular affection for Isabel, and even portrayed her facing George Dyer, the artist's most profound love interest and model, in a small portrait diptych from 1967. Bacon revealed this warmth in 1973 when speaking to Hugh M. Davies about the Sainsbury Collection triptych: “Because the others were too torn apart, in the third one I wanted to give the impression of her real physical beauty - with drink and age it’s gone but she was very beautiful” (the artist cited in: Hugh M. Davies, ‘Interviewing Bacon, 1973’ in: Martin Harrison, Ed., Francis Bacon: Centenary Essays, Göttingen 2009, p. 101). A similarity of effect is apparent in the present triptych: where the first two canvases possess an almost animal aggression, the third canvas delivers a graceful and flowing articulation of flattering forms undeniably characteristic of the many photographs of Rawsthorne taken by John Deakin. As outlined by Michael Peppiatt, “If a magnificent sense of dignity emanates from these studies [of Isabel], it is because the artist’s affection is greater, but only just, than the destructive fury with which he dislocated and twisted every feature” (Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London 2009, p. 257). As Peppiatt goes on to illustrate, Bacon’s portraits are an enactment of his own thoughts on the nature of real friendship; the artist is famously quoted saying: "I’ve always thought of friendship as where two people really tear each other apart", indeed, in his portraits Bacon mercilessly pulls, rips and cleaves the intricacies of his friends’ likenesses until their flayed countenances distil some essential physical and pictorial truth (Ibid). In the present work the quick-fire sequence of three alternating views from left to right each deliver a fury of contradicting examinations nonetheless unified by an overarching faithfulness to Isabel’s essential character.
Exploiting familiarity to his advantage, Bacon freely manipulated and wrestled with the physiognomy of those closest to him to engender an elemental painterly distillation in which facture and expression are resolutely interlocked. 
Representation is deconstructed to the point where features become indiscernable and physical states are superimposed. Nevertheless, the end result is unmistakable in subject. As outlined by John Russell: “although the features as we know them in everyday life may disappear from time to time in a chromatic swirl of paint or be blotted from view by an imperious wipe with a towel, individual aspects of the sitter are shown to us, by way of compensation, with an intensity not often encountered in life” (John Russell, Op. cit., p. 124). As prevalent within Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, the particular arch of her brow, the high cheekbones and handsome profile are compellingly portrayed. Dramatic blows of white are balanced against striking contrasts of red, orange and pink, accented with blueand thickly stippled with the smear of a cashmere sweater. The delicate treatment of the eyes and fluid accent of silhouette are set in dialogue with an almost porcine and mask-like aggression to deliver unbridled vitality of presence. 
They form a visual parity to Peppiatt’s impression of the fascinating variance of her character and expression as a person: “Her face would assume a look of extreme indignation, followed by one of raucous good humour, and then a glance of seduction, all dropped like masks and as rapidly replaced” (Michael Peppiatt, Op. cit., p. 251).

Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne illustrates a seismic shift in Bacon’s career at the beginning of the 1960s: moving away from emblematic forms - such as those extrapolated from Velazquez’s Pope, Muybridge’s figures in motion, Van Gogh, and Eisenstein - the impetus to harness abstract forces and emanations beyond the realm of appearance began to consume Bacon’s practice. Realising the need for a physical armature upon which to hang this ‘energy’ and ‘living quality’, Bacon turned to his inner social circle. Alongside Isabel Rawsthorne, the ensuing deluge of likenesses after Lucian Freud, Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes and George Dyer acted as the predominant physical catalysts for Bacon’s translation of an inner bodily reality. With some reflection in 1983, Bacon gave clear expression to this inquiry: “The living quality is what you have to get. In painting a portrait the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person… The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has to be caught is their emanation… I don’t know whether it would be possible to do a portrait of somebody just by making a gesture of them.
So far it seems that if you are doing a portrait you have to record the face. But with the face you have to try and trap the energy that emanates from them” (the artist cited in: David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London 2000, p. 98). During the 1960s Bacon commissioned his drinking partner, friend and Vogue photographer John Deakin to photograph Rawsthorne and the other protagonists of his Soho enclave to be used as shorthand visual cue cards. By the mid-‘60s, Bacon’s established practice of reconstituting and melding photographic source imagery with his own memory and powers of invention had long disposed of the need to paint from life. As he told David Sylvester, "I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs... It's true to say I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I don't know. But, if I both know them and have photographs of them, I find it easier to work than actually having their presence in the room" (David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 40). Alongside Rawsthorne, Bacon’s portrait subjects were people he knew exceptionally well; by wielding extraordinary powers of imagination concurrent with his own ‘memory traces’ in tandem with the catalogue of photographs taken by John Deakin, Bacon produced some of the most arresting portraits of the Twentieth Century, and of these, the small portrait heads constitute among the most remarkable portrayals of human appearance ever translated in oil on canvas.

Very much related to Picasso’s reworkings of the human head initiated in 1907, these works combine a translation of successive movement inspired by Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion, as well as Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Emulating mug-shot proportions of a photobooth portrait, the unadorned immediacy of Bacon’s small portraits radiate endurance, nervousness, and involuntary mannerisms: these heads truly embody Bacon’s desire to paint as close to the ‘nervous system’ as possible. To quote William Feaver: “‘Studies’ or exercises though they are, these small paintings are central to Bacon’s art. The scale of a bathroom mirror-image makes them one-to-one, and when they are paired, or grouped in threes, the differences animate them. No rooms, no thrones, no perfunctory landscape settings are needed. Without context or posture, the heads have nothing to do but look, sometimes at one
another, and wait” (William Feaver, ‘That’s It’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Francis Bacon 1909 - 1992 Small Portrait Studies, 1993, p. 6). A series and format first settled upon in 1961 and maintained until the very end, these intimately scaled works form the very staple of Bacon’s mature practice, acting as the primary locus for the ‘brutality of fact’ and most immediate site for loosening the ‘valves of feeling’ so frequently referred to by the artist. Unaccompanied and isolated within a dark emerald green ground, with Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne our sight is rapt by the visceral and psychological charge of Bacon’s distorted yet searingly honest vision of humanity.  
Delivering a masterful essay on the analysis of facial landscape, Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne is a deeply personal portrayal of one of Francis Bacon's closest friends. Of the handful of female confidants painted by Bacon,portaying only those he knew intimately, Isabel Rawsthorne provided unique focus for the artist: her astounding connections with the Paris art world strengthened Bacon’s own and his profound admiration for her inspired a greater number of small portrait canvases than any of his other friends. Painted over two decades after they first met, this spectacular portrayal illuminates a friendship that lasted until the very end of their lives - in 1992 they died within months of each other. Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne consummately illuminates Bacon’s breathtaking ability to navigate the very threshold of abstraction and figuration: remarkable portraits as unrestrained and exuberant as Isabel Rawsthorne’s uninhibited and extraordinary life.

Sotheby's. Contemporary Art Evening Auction. London | 26 juin 2013 - www.sothebys.com

Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992), Head III - Sotheby's

oil on canvas; 81 by 66cm.32 by 26in. Executed in 1949. Estimation: 5,000,000 - 7,000,000 GBP

PROVENANCE: Hanover Gallery, London
Wright S. Ludington, California
Galerie Beyler, Basel
Sir Edward & Lady Hulton, London (acquired from the above in 1976)
Private Collection, EuropeThomas Gibson Fine Art, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1997

EXHIBITED: London, Hanover Gallery, Francis Bacon Paintings. Robert Ironiside Drawings, 1949, no. 7
California, Palm Beach, Society of Four Arts, Contemporary British Painting, 1956
Toronto, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Francis Bacon, 1979
London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1985, p. 42, no. 8, illustrated in colour
Lugano, Museo d'Arte Moderna della Città di Lugano Villa Malpensata, Francis Bacon, 1993, p. 29, illustrated in colour, and p. 138, no. 9, illustrated
Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou; Munich, Haus der Kunst, Francis Bacon, 1996 -97, p. 291, illustrated
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Hamburg, Hamburg Kunsthalle, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, 2005-06, no. 3, illustrated in colour
Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts; Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Museum; Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, 2006-07, no. 5, illustrated in colour

LITTERATURE: Penguin New Writing, London 1949, no. 38, p. 64
Horizon, no. XX, December 1949 - January 1950, pp. 418-19
World Review, New Series, no. 23, January 1951, p. 64
Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, no. 22, illustrated
Hugh M. Davies, Francis Bacon, New York 1986, p. 19, no. 13, illustrated
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Paris 1987, no. 8, illustrated in colour
Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Ed., Francis Bacon, New York 1998, p. 18, illustrated in colour
Martin Harrison, Ed., Francis Bacon: New Studies, Göttingen 2009, p. 177, no. 119, illustrated in colour

NOTE: 1949 was a seminal year for Francis Bacon: it marked the full inauguration of an artistic vision that drew back the veil on the human condition with a rawness and violence never before witnessed. This was the year of Bacon’s very first one-man exhibition in which the extraordinary and historically important group of six Heads powerfully proclaimed his critical arrival. Designated as third in this crucial series, Head III was conceived as part of the most ferocious corpus of Bacon’s early career; a sequence of paint encrusted, starkly monochromatic pictures that navigates an evolution from the innate animalism of Heads I and II (housed in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Ulster Museum, Belfast respectively) to culminate in Head VI (Southbank Centre, London) as the very first in Bacon’s groundbreaking and iconoclastic pantheon of screaming Popes. Viewed as part of a metamorphic sequence, Head III is an extraordinary vision of abject and ‘all too human’ man arrested at an evolutionary stage between base animal instinct and howling patriarch. In context of this seminal revelatory moment, Head III is itself of great precedential significance. Preempting the gaping mouthed shriek of Head VI, this painting denotes the first explicit occasion in which the obsessively quoted broken glasses, or pince-nez, fully appear; Bacon famously lifted both glasses and scream from Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece of silent cinema, Battleship Potemkin. This work also significantly embodies the first irrefutable human likeness of Bacon’s professional career. Though not a portrait, the painting bears a resemblance to Bacon’s first significant benefactor and long-term companion, Eric Hall, and thus anticipates the way in which Bacon would later look to his social circle for principal inspiration. Having been exhibited in some of the most important museum shows of Bacon’s career, including the seminal 1985 Tate retrospective held during Bacon’s lifetime, alongside countless others at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Hamburg Kunsthalle; Haus der Kunst, Munich to name but a few, the historical importance and museum pedigree ofHead III is utterly beyond reproach. Further beyond doubt is the power and technical brilliance of this early work.
Extensively commented upon in contemporary reviews and admired in influential critiques of the Hanover exhibition, Head III was the first painting sold by the Hanover Gallery in advance of the private view in November 1949. The notable Californian collector Wright S. Ludington (1900-1992), who shared a mutual friend with Bacon in Graham Sutherland and is notable today for his crucial involvement in the foundation of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, was
the first to own this painting: he bought it on 28 October 1949 for £150. Possessing rich provenance, a profound history and a deeply evocative subject, Head III certainly holds a place of utmost importance within the arc of Bacon scholarship.

Following the intermittent early success of the first two masterworks, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 (Tate Collection, London), and Painting 1946 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), of which the latter was acquired for The Museum of Modern Art only two years later, the emergence of the Heads in 1949 indefatigably announced the arrival of Bacon’s genius and primary subject – the human-animal as unadorned, despairing, godless and alone. Though comprising only ten works in total, the Hanover Gallery’s now legendary 1949 exhibition reads as a roll call of Bacon’s early masterpieces. Alongside the series of Heads, the aforementioned Three Studies and the Tate owned Figure in a Landscape, 1945 (works both donated to the Tate in the 1950s by Eric Hall), were displayed alongside two larger scaled new paintings, Study from the Human Body and Study for Portrait housed in the collections of The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Apart from Heads IV and V, the inventory from this crucial exhibition rightfully resides across the world’s most prestigious museum collections; together these works embody a significant historical turning point in the development of perhaps the most important artistic career of the late Twentieth Century.

Pared down to a grisaille execution and stripped bare of the theatrical trappings witnessed in the first masterworks, Painting 1946 and Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Bacon concentrated his depiction of humanity on visceral animalistic drives: “no sides of meat, no bandages, no umbrellas or other props; simply a glimpse of mankind reduced to basic instinct, the mouth gibbering in fear or bared in attack, with the rest of the senses (and often, literally the rest of the head) obliterated” (Michael Peppiatt, Anatomy of an Enigma, London 2008, p. 153). The technical brilliance of Bacon’s ability to elucidate the instantaneous flicker of film noir or the granular blur of newsprint in the Grand Manner of oil on canvas mark these works as extraordinary feats of artistic creation. In this regard, Head III powerfully delivers great technical resolve, forcefully encapsulating Bacon’s professed desire from this early moment: “to paint like Velázquez with the texture of hippopotamus skin” (the artist cited in: ‘Survivors’, Time, 21 November 1949, p. 44). Unlike any works previously and in contrast to the extant works in the series, Head III delivers an extraordinarily unsettling depiction of man: out of a thickly painted pock-marked complexion a haunting and disarmingly human stare pierces the downwards drag of a diaphanous curtain. Dimly lit and dissolving into darkness, this turning bald-headed figure meets our gaze through shattered glasses - the notorious Baconian motif obsessively quoted from the screaming nurse of the Odessa steps sequence in Eisenstein’s Potemkin. Though dispossessed of the nurse’s ensuing scream that would come to define Bacon’s iconic corpus of Popes after Velazquez’s 1650 Pope Innocent X, Head III depicts a terrible moment of silence in which this anonymous man’s disturbing countenance and penetrating glare projects directly out of the black abyss to meet with our own. Not only does Head III possess the first fully formed pair of eyes in Bacon’s work since the 1930s, it also represents the first recognisably human facial study in Bacon’s mature expression. At once evoking the frail physicality of a cleric or hunchbacked civil servant, Head III foreshadows the nameless businessmen of the landmark Man in Blue paintings whilst inaugurating the defining subject of Bacon’s career - the unadorned translation of human presence. In this regard such was the arresting power of Head III in 1949 that esteemed critic Robert Melville was impelled to comment in his influential review of the Hanover exhibition: “how did this man come to get a skin of such a disquieting texture? I cannot divorce the facture from what it forms. I am prevented from going through my usual routine of art appreciation. Modern painting has suddenly been humanized” (Robert Melville, ‘Francis Bacon’, Horizon, December 1949, p. 423).

The 1949 Hanover Exhibition
Situated off Hanover Square at 32a St George Street, the Hanover Gallery was established by the visionary gallerist Erica Brausen in 1947. Having escaped the rise of Nazism in her native Germany during the early 1930s, Brausen developed a prominent profile in Paris among the elite of the contemporary artistic milieu. Arriving in London penniless after fleeing Fascist occupation of Mallorca, Brausen began working as a dealer at the Redfern Gallery before setting up her own enterprise with financial backer Arthur Jeffress in 1947. During this very year Brausen became Francis Bacon’s first dealer. Introduced by their mutual friend, Graham Sutherland, at Bacon’s 7 Cromwell Place studio in South Kensington, artist and dealer formalised a relationship that would prove instrumental for Bacon’s career.
Possessing an unimpeachable artistic eye, Brausen advised many of the world’s most influential curators and important collectors; after acquiring Painting 1946 during her first studio visit, Brausen wasted no time in securing this painting within the equally progressive and prestigious permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 
The significance of Brausen’s promotion and support during the first formative decade of Bacon’s career cannot be overstated and it was the prestige of obtaining this significant museum acquisition so early that cemented Bacon’s ascent to international renown. Following their first meeting Bacon agreed to produce for Brausen a body of new work in preparation for his first one-man exhibition to be held at the Hanover Gallery. With the £200 received from the sale of Painting 1946, a substantial amount for a little known and unrepresented artist, Bacon left almost immediately for Monte Carlo where he predominantly spent the next four years. Extravagantly languishing in the Mediterranean climate and indulging at the glamorous casinos - Bacon famously loved to gamble - very little work was produced until he returned to Cromwell Place in 1949. Nonetheless, that Bacon had conceived the premise for, and even started work on his next body of paintings is revealed in a letter to Arthur Jeffress sent from Monaco in 1948: “The pictures seem to be going well. I am at the moment working on some heads which I like better than any I have done before, I hope you and Erica will like them. I shall come back in November or December” (Francis Bacon, letter to Arthur Jeffress, 1948, Tate Archive, London, 863.6.2.1). Back in London in late 1948, the ensuing months of furious creativity leading up to the exhibition not only produced Bacon’s most formative and powerful early images, but also crucially established the serial working method that drove his mature practice.

Two years following the sale of Painting 1946, Bacon’s first solo show finally opened on 8 November 1949. This decisive exhibition (which he shared with a small installation of watercolours by Robert Ironside in the upstairs gallery) courted widespread controversy in the press, a considerable degree of attention that in turn precipitated the artist’s first significant critical appraisal. The reviews responded directly to the frightening nature of Bacon’s subjects, commenting on the disquieting evocation of “cruelty being committed out of sight”, and describing his pictures as “so repellent” they “leave in the mind precisely the same long-continued feeling of disquiet as a thoroughly bad dream” (Anonymous, ‘Art Exhibitions: Mr Francis Bacon’, The Times, 22 November 1949). In recounting “dismemberment by bomb splinters” these early critical appraisals identified Bacon’s work as a sensationalism of war’s horror, denoting “the high watermark of contemporary morbidity” (Neville Wallis, ‘At the Galleries: Nightmare’, The Observer, 20 November 1949, and, Maurice Collins, ‘Art’, Time and Tide, 26 November 1949). Nonetheless, positive criticism was substantial and Bacon’s technical mastery was universally acknowledged. The superb handling of grisaille punctuated with flashes of pink, blue or green was considered a painterly achievement likened to that of the Old Masters. In sum, the 1949 Hanover show was a triumphant critical debut bolstered by the successful sale of all but three of the pictures on offer. According to the Hanover Gallery’s ledgers and daybooks presently held in the Tate Archives, Head III is notable as the very first work from the exhibition sold by Brausen. Bought for £150, Head III was originally acquired by the California-based collector Wright S. Ludington. Before the war Ludington cultivated an exceptional collection of Modern art including works by André Derain, Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Miró, and Dalí to name a few; however it was military service in London that first exposed Ludington to the cutting edge of British art and sparked a friendship with Graham Sutherland. A staunch early supporter instrumental in Brausen’s introduction to Bacon, that Sutherlanddirected Ludington towards Bacon’s gallery debut here seems likely. Ludington’s acquisition of Head III shortly before the opening of the exhibition reflects the powerful intrigue cast by this very painting, a work of profoundly compelling nature contemporaneously verified in two of the most influential critical reviews of Bacon’s first exhibition.

Renowned critic Robert Melville wrote at length on the artistic success of the 1949 exhibition in Horizon, in which he poetically described the Heads as possessing “the colour of wet, black snakes lightly powdered with dust” (Robert Melville, Op. cit., p. 421). Directly in response to these works, Melville cited Bacon as “the only important painter of our time who is exclusively preoccupied with man”, concluding his article by recognising in Bacon a new hope for painting (Ibid., p. 423). This influential review devoted particular attention to an analysis of Head III: “A man turns his head and stares out of a picture through pince-nez; I am more conscious of the stare than of the eyes; the play of intervals between the eyes, the rims of the glasses and the shadows of the rims is further information about the stare – the man is ‘holding something back’; I do not think about spatial concepts when examining the relationship between head and curtain – I am too subdued by the fact that the curtain is sucking away the substance of the head; the subtle pinking beige paint that dabbles and creates the face is an exquisite foil to the greys” (Ibid., pp. 422-23). Similarly attuned to Melville, celebrated writer and painter Wyndham Lewis published his review in The Listener on 17 November 1949, praising the Hanover show for its “exceptional importance” (Wyndham Lewis, ‘Round the London Art Galleries’, The Listener, November 17 1949, p. 860). Describing an artist “perfectly in tune with his time”, Lewis prophetically assigned Bacon the status of “one of the most powerful artists in Europe today” (Ibid.). In this article, Head III was once again singled out. Recounting the “baleful regard from the mask of a decayed clubman or business executive - so decayed that usually part of the head is rotting away into space” Wyndham Lewis continued, “… these faces come out of the blackness to glare or shout. I must not attempt to describe these amazing pictures” (Ibid.).

In May 1949, some months prior to the exhibition, Wyndham Lewis enthusiastically published a preview of the show which announced the presence of Head III at the gallery some months ahead of the extant works in the series. Describing “a man with no top to his head”, Lewis noted the distinctive “cold-crumbling grey of the face” and “glittering white mess of the lips” particular to this remarkable painting (Wyndham Lewis, The Listener, 12 May 1949, p. 811). The early arrival of Head III perhaps hints at Bacon’s rare satisfaction with a finished work. Indeed, during these formative early years before the routine of frequent exhibitions motivated a prolific work ethic, Bacon was destructively self-critical. Though he maintained a deeply self-effacing stance throughout his lifetime, the ruthlessness with which Bacon liberally destroyed finished works during the late 1940s and early 1950s marks the survival and early exhibition of any work from this period as remarkable in itself. The Times review sensationally reported that over seven-hundred canvases were maimed in preparation of the Hanover exhibition; though undoubtedly an embellishment, during the seven years between 1944 and 1950 only fifteen works survived Bacon’s scrupulous working practice. In light of such critical reception and the artist's ruthless early practice, the significance of the works included in Bacon’s very first exhibition is truly seminal.

“The History of Europe in my lifetime”
John Russell described this series as conveying “what it feels like to be alone in a room… we may feel at such times that the accepted hierarchy of our features is collapsing, and that we are by turns all teeth, all eye, all ear, all nose… our person is suddenly adrift, fragmented, and subject to strange mutation” (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 2001, p. 38). These extraordinary variants of human drives and animalistic embodiment form a catalogue of fear, anguish and internal suffering - a “zone of indiscernibility” that Giles Deleuze defined as the “becoming-animal” in Bacon’s work (Giles Delueze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London 2002, pp. 15-19). As Bacon outlined in Time magazine in November 1949, “They are just an attempt to make a certain type of feeling visual… painting is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on canvas” (the artist cited in: ‘Survivors’, Time, 21 November 1949, p. 44). From the existential disintegration of bestial drives and impulses redolent in Heads I and II, through tothe pallid frailty and troubling human spectacle of Head III, and ending in the harrowing papal scream of Head VI, this series established a mythology for the contemporary moment. With these works and the magnum opus of Popes that shortly followed, Bacon inaugurated a modern-day revivification of the Tragic genre. Highly receptive to language, particularly the Greek tragedy of Aeschylus and the fusion of mythology with contemporaneity of T.S. Eliot, Bacon imbued his work with an elevated grandiosity absorbed from the realm of literature. In synthesising quotations from film, duplicating the out-of focus immediacy of news imagery, and loading a wealth of associations drawn from both contemporary visual culture and his most admired art historical Masters, Bacon thought of himself as a “pulverizing machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed” (Francis Bacon cited in: John Russell, Ibid., p. 71).

Head III and the series at large command an immediacy of sensation derived very much from a visual parity with film - a burgeoning artform in the 1920s of crucial import during the artist's impressionable years as a young man. Executed in series like a chain of film stills, these paintings are infused with the palette, striking composition and flickering light effects of early cinema. Though Bacon obsessively mined the emotive potential of the iconic screaming nurse in Eisenstein’s Potemkin, it was the pioneering filmmaker’s high-impact deployment of montage that strongly informed Bacon’s practice. As outlined by Martin Hammer, Bacon, akin to Eisenstein’s approach to film, was committed “to painting as a vehicle of expression that operates in terms of immediate sensation rather than narrative” (Martin Hammer, Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda, London 2012, p. 31). Bacon’s serious interest in silent-film melodrama insinuates the transposition of film techniques, such as superimposition, double exposures and dissolves, into paint.
David Alan Mellor explains that the series of Heads in particular owe much to the innovation of Fritz Lang, the forefather of film noir and director of the groundbreaking Metropolis (1927): “Bacon’s 1949 depictions of semitransparent portrait heads and later, in 1955, his reworkings of James S. Delville’s cast of William Blake recall a similar motif in Lang’s Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922), in which a murderous patriarchal head is superimposed on the floor of the Stock Exchange in the vast room’s perspectivised space” (David Alan Mellor, ‘Film, Fantasy, History in Francis Bacon’, in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Britain, Francis Bacon, 2009, p. 52). The way Head III appears to hover and disintegrate as though superimposed or projected onto a curtain parallels the sinister floating head of Lang’s Dr. Mabuse. Echoing these dramatic techniques Bacon employed the visceral charge of such filmic effects and motifs, not for their narrative suggestions, but for their strength and immediacy of expression.

Behind this absorptive association-led process, Bacon’s overarching impetus to capture in a single image “the History of Europe in my lifetime” illuminates a will to visually distil the self-destructivity of the Twentieth Century; an impulse at once symptomatic of the dismal post-war climate in which these early images came to light and accountable for the repetitive, serial inference of particular historical events (the artist cited in: Hugh M. Davies, ‘The Screaming Pope: Past Art and Present Reality’, in: Exhibition Catalogue, Lugano, Museo d’Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, 1993, p. 60).
Sam Hunter’s photographs of the visual compost found in Bacon’s studio at 7 Cromwell Place affirms the prominence of Nazi imagery in Bacon’s early work. The frequency with which figures appear behind microphone banks, mouths agape, in front of or disappearing behind heavily pleated curtains invokes the totalitarian imagery of Hitler, Goebbels and Goering in full oratory swing. However, alongside the open-mouthed scream and Eisenstein’s pince-nez stare, it is the isolating and confining presence of the vertically striated curtain or disintegrating veil that unite these early pictures. Drapery and the diaphanous effect of veiling denote a prominent early obsession for Bacon: the powerful downward brushstrokes that permeate Bacon’s fresh works for the 1949 exhibition continue with heightened vigour into the subsequent Pope paintings and beyond. Undeniably evocative of Titian’s half-veiled Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Achinto (1558), in Head III Bacon seems to combine this cutaneous dissolution with the enshrouding effect of shadow as apparent in Rembrandt’s early self-portrait from 1629. Not only are these effects evocative of dimly-lit and curtained interiors, the likes of which could also be found in Bacon’s own Cromwell Place studio (heavy curtains originally installed for blackouts during the war), these backdrops echo photographs of Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light, the spectacular expanse of vertical light-architecture devised for the Nuremburg Rallies. Such allusions to troubling historical spectacles do not dictate meaning in Bacon’s work, but instead act as vehicles through which thesepaintings draw their gravitas and pictorial power. Employed as a formal trope, the powerful erosive potential of the curtain disintegrates the top of the figure’s skull in Head III under which piercing melancholic blue eyes glare through Eisenstein’s broken glasses, a precursor to the series’ screaming climactic conclusion and the realisation of Bacon’s subject par excellence.

Where Bacon’s portrayal of the tyrannical father and ultimate patriarch found its finest incarnation in the 1953 Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, an alternate expression of this concern is very much at stake within a reading of Head III, particularly in relation to Bacon’s biography. Where this figure possesses the appearance of a bewildered clerk or aged politician, the austere suggestion of dress also implies the religious uniform of monastic robes. Here, Bacon’s portrayal of an aged father figure delivers an expression of waning power and weakness, a manifestation perhaps of the artist’s growing impatience and outgrowth of his long-standing partner of fifteen years, Eric Hall - a figure to whom Head III purportedly bears a likeness. As shown in a portrait by Roy de Maistre, this plump, balding and immaculately dressed man radiates a benevolence that bespeaks paternity, leaving in no doubt the father and son relationship shared between both men. Where Bacon’s brief upbringing had been far from nurturing (his father, Edward Bacon, was a retired Army Captain and horse-trainer with a weakness for military discipline) by the early 1940s Bacon had found a secure emotional and domestic foundation with Eric Hall and his devoted childhood Nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. A respected and prosperous businessman significantly older than Bacon, Hall scandalously left his wife and children to live in an openly homosexual relationship with the artist at 7 Cromwell Place. During these happy domestic years, Hall had an enormous impact on the young artist: not only an ardent early supporter and patron of his work, as a mentor Hall cultivated Bacon’s taste for fine dining, travel and the arts. He was the supportive father figure Bacon never had, and together with Nan Lightfoot, the trio lived happily together for some years as an unorthodox and peculiar family unit. By the late 1940s however, Hall was becoming an impeding presence for an artist gaining in stature and professional renown. Bacon became increasingly careless and a string of affairs undoubtedly eroded their relationship. Following the death of Nan Lightfoot in 1951, the last familial bond was severed and Bacon’s innate independence had finally, after fifteen years, outgrown this gentle father figure.
Significantly it was around this time that he first met Peter Lacy, the violent, tortured lover whom Bacon purportedly loved most because he made him suffer the most. Intriguingly, Lacy’s bold features can be distinguished upon the obsessively painted pantheon of Papal figures executed following the 1949 show. Interpreted in this regard, if indeed this painting bears a likeness to Hall, Head III represents the disintegration of paternal authority, gentility crumbling in the wake of terrible cruelty.

Into the present work Bacon poured his fixation with corporeal mutilation and glistening mouths, his obsession with Eisenstein, his rapture with film-noir, his indistinguishable preoccupation with terrible patriarchy and the history of Twentieth Century conflict. Mediated by the vicissitudes of biography, Head III is an incredibly pioneering and unique work that marks the very formation of Bacon’s painterly genius. Signalling the terrible and silent metamorphosis from inchoate bestiality towards the realisation of nightmarish patriarchy, with these works Bacon made the transformation from mythological creatures and theatrical ornament to psychologically charged humanity: the Heads erected the pictorial scaffold by which Bacon took command of his greater artistic vision. Melding bravura command of tonality with the granular monochromacity of black and white news reportage, the remarkably powerful yet tragic Head III captures the instantaneous impact of film through a masterful manipulation of oil paint. Against a contemporaneously prevalent post-war milieu of conceptual abstraction following the horrors of two World Wars, Bacon’s astounding series of Heads bravely restored the relevance of figuration for a confrontation of our “contemporary nightmare” (Kenneth Clark in response to Bacon’s work, cited in: Michael Peppiatt, Op. cit., p. 135).

Sotheby's. Contemporary Art Evening Auction. London | 26 juin 2013 - www.sothebys.com

Madeleine Vionnet n°65493 (probablement été 1937), Robe du soir. Photo Artcurial

en dentelle de Chantilly et tulle noir, encolure bateau, effet de manches ballon se prolongeant sur les avant-bras et se terminant par deux pans flottants asymétriques, découpe à la taille, jupe travaillée en biais ornée d'un travail d'inscrustations à décor de losanges, fond de robe en crêpe de soie chair, petit boutonnage pressions sur le côté gauche (griffe blanche, graphisme rose). Estimation : 7 000 / 9 000 €

Bibliographie : dentelle identique à celle du modèle 4356 de l'été 1937 reproduit p.234,235, 236 et 237 (silhouette, croquis et détail de la robe), catalogue de l'exposition Madeleine Vionnet - Puriste de le Mode , Pamela Golbin, Musée de la Mode et du Textile, Union des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 24 juin 2009 - 31 janvier 2010

Artcurial - Briest-Poulain-F.Tajan. Lundi 24 juin 2013. Drouot Richelieu - Salle 4 - 9, rue Drouot - 75009 Paris - www.artcurial.com

Christian Dior Haute Couture (P/E 1957) (modèle Zerline). Photo Artcurial

Robe d'après-midi habillée en taffetas de soie noir entièrement drapé, celui-ci retenu au niveau de la fermeture éclair située sur le devant, décolleté légèrement en pointe souligné d'un col pélerine et orné d'un noeud à longs pans flottants rehaussé d'une fleur, jupons de tulle et crin (manque griffe). Estimation : 6 000 / 8 000 €

Bibliographie : Robe identique reproduite p.108, fiche technique et illustration p.206, catalogue de l'exposition Hommage à Christian Dior 1947-57 , Musée des Arts de la Mode, paris, 19 mars - 4 octobre 1987 ; p. 62, 30 années de Mode à Paris , Regi Relang,, Éditions Hans Schöner Verlag, 1982 ; p.264 etp.267, Dior , Françoise Giroud, Sacha Van Dorssen, Editions du Regard, 2006 ; p.121, Dior , Farid Chenoune, laziz Hamani, Editions Assouline, 2007

Iconographie : Robe identique reproduite p. 147, Vogue , octobre 1957, photographie de Guy Bourdin

Muséographie : Robe identique présentée lors de l'exposition 200 ans d'élégance française au Japon en 1979

Artcurial - Briest-Poulain-F.Tajan. Lundi 24 juin 2013. Drouot Richelieu - Salle 4 - 9, rue Drouot - 75009 Paris - www.artcurial.com

An emerald and diamond necklace, Harry Winston. Photo courtesy Bonhams

Designed as cut-cornered rectangular-cut emerald, weighing 13.45 carats, within a pear and marquise-cut diamond cluster surround, completed by a similarly designed necklace; necklace signed Winston, pendant signed HW for Harry Winston; with signed box; estimated total diamond weight: 32.00 carats; mounted in platinum and eighteen karat white gold; length: 16in. Estimate:  $180,000 – 280,000

Accompanied by AGL report #CS 39043, dated July 17, 2007, stating the emerald as: natural emerald, classic Columbian origin, with evidence of faint clarity enhancement: Organic (Oil Type.

Bonhams. 19 Jun 2013. New York. Fine Jewelry

A late art deco sapphire and diamond double clip brooch, Raymond Yard, circa 1935. Photo courtesy Bonhams

Each of openwork geometric design, the transitional-cut diamond shield-shaped plaques decorated with variously-cut sapphires, enhanced by baguette, square and kite-shaped diamonds; signed Yard for Raymond Yard, with signed box; estimated total diamond weight: 6.55 carats; mounted in platinum; length: 2 1/4in. Estimate:  $20,000 – 30,000

Bonhams. 19 Jun 2013. New York. Fine Jewelry

A rare Byzantine gold solidus of the Empress Irene and her son, Emperor Constantine VI,  struck 793 - 797 A.D. Minted in Constantinople.

The obverse shows the crowned, half length bust of Irene. She wears the Imperial loros (a highly ornate and heavily jeweled toga worn by Emperors), modiolos (a spiked crown) and holds the cross topped scepter and globus cruciger (symbol of Christ's rule on Earth). The legend reads: IRInH AΓΟVSTI - "Irene, Augusta"

The reverse with the facing, half length bust of Emperor Constantine VI, shown beardless and wearing cross topped crown and chlamys (cloak) fastened with decorative, circular brooch, he holds a globus cruciger in his right hand. The legend reading: COnSTAn-TInOS bAS[ileos] - "King Constantine"

Irene was central to the restoration of the Orthodox tradition of worshipping Icons, which still continues to this day. She was the first woman to exercise sole rule over the Roman/Byzantine Empire, taking office in 780 and assuming power for her 9 year old son, Constantine VI. However, her rule was relatively short lived. She was ousted as a result of a palace revolution and exiled to the island of Lesbos in 802 A.D.

Constantine grew to become a cruel and incompetent ruler and the relationship with his mother soon turned sour. In April 797 he was captured by supporters of Irene who gouged his eyes out and imprisoned him, he likely died shortly after from his wounds. 

Diameter: 19.5 mm. Weight: 4.35 g. Price: 4.457,60 EUR

Provenance: Ex English private collection, previously European art market. artancientltd

A solid gold Byzantine solidus of Emperor Constans II, struck 651 - 654 A.D. at the Constantinople mint. 

The obverse with the facing bust of Constans with long beard and moustache, wearing cross topped crown and chlamys, and holding globus cruciger. The legend reading: D[ominvs] N[oster] CONSTANTINVS P[ater] P[atriae] AV[gvstvs] - "Our Lord Constantinus, Father of the People, Augustus".

The reverse shows cross potent on three steps. The legend reads: VICTORIA AVG ЧΘ - "[To the] Victory of the Emperors"

CONOB in exergue - Literally translated as, "Constantinopoli obryzum". The solidus weighed 1/72 (4.45g) of the Roman pound. "OB" was used as both an abbreviation for the word obryzum, translated as, 'refined' or 'pure gold' and as the Greek numeral 72. Thus, the exergue inscription CONOB may be read "Constantinople, 1/72 pound pure gold." -- Byzantine Coinage by Philip Grierson.

Diameter: 19.5 mm. Weight: 4.45 g. Price: 370,84 EUR

Provenance: Ex English private collection. artancientltd

Large Double-Sided Jade Carving. Photo © 2001-2013 Lang Antiques

A splendid double-sided jadeite carving measuring 2 7/8 inch by 2 5/8 inches. This elaborately carved, mainly mutton colored jade with a large splash of bright green on one side depicts, on the front: a Shishi - a legendary Chinese Guardian Lion with her cub at lower left. Upper right is a dog-like creature. On the reverse we find a spectacular ferocious fire-breathing dragon. A superb multi-dimensional and substantial jade carving. Price: $5,750.00

Lang Antiques - 323 Sutter Street - San Francisco, CA 94108 - (415) 982-2213 - http://www.langantiques.com/

Importante commode en vernis parisien. Attribuée à Adrien Delorme. Époque Louis XV, vers 1755. Photo Piasa

fond jaune de forme mouvementée, la façade ouvrantà deux tiroirs ; à décor d’arbuste, feuillages, fleurs et oiseaux dans le goût de l’Extrême-Orient ;belle ornementation de bronzes dorés : entrée de serrures, chutes et sabots ; dessus de marbre rouge du Languedoc à double mouluration ; estampillée FG et JME. Hauteur : 87 cm - Largeur : 129 cm, Profondeur : 64 cm. Estimation : 200 000 / 250 000 €

Bibliographie : T. Wolvesperges, Le meuble français en laque au XVIIIe siècle, Éditions de l'Amateur, Paris, 2000, p. 29.

Exposition : Biennale des Antiquaires 1992, galerie Didier Aaron.

Si l’on connaît un certain nombre de commodes en vernis parisien, plus communément désigné sous le terme de vernis Martin, présentant un fond de couleur blanche, du type de la commode livrée en 1742 pour madame de Mailly (musée du Louvre)
les meubles à fond jaune, dit jonquille,sont assez rare dans l’histoire du mobilier français du XVIIIe siècle.
Une petite série de meubles estampillés de François Rubestuck mérite cependant d’être citée.
Il s’agit d’une commode et d'un secrétaire à abattant d’époque Louis XV, ainsi que d’un autre secrétaire à abattant cette fois d’époque Louis XVI. Contrairement à ces trois meubles, la commode présentn e reprend pas les motifs traditionnede pagodes et paysages des laques orientales, comme le fait remarquer Thibaut Wolvesperges dans son ouvrage (op. cit. p.28) : (…) une splendide commode à fond jonquille de l’ébénistegnant FG, présente un décor inspiré de l’Arbrede vie, directement calqué, comme le remarquait Bill Pallot, sur es motifs d’étoffes de la Chine ou des Indes, importés en grand nombre par les compagnies des Indes .L’estampille FG n’est pas encore attribuée à ce jour à un ébéniste ; un certain nombre d’hypothèses ont été avancées dans le passé allant de François Gaudreaus (fils d’Antoine Robert) à François Garnier, père de Pierre Garnier.
Il semble cependant que ce dernier signait F. Garnier, ce qui n’exclut pas nécessairement qu’il ait pu utiliser également l’estampille abréviative FG.
Cette pratique caractérisait notamment l’ébéniste intervenant au titre de la sous-traitance pour des marchands-ébénistes ou des marchands-merciers.
Il est en l’occurrence très probable que FG soit intervenu ici à la demande de l’un de ses confrères et l’on pense alors immédiatement à Adrien Delorme.Delorme s’était en effet fait une spécialité des meubles en laque et en vernis parisien.
On connaît de plus un secrétaire de pente en marqueterie de paille et vernis Martin portant la double estampille de FG et Delorme. (vente Piasa, le 23 juin 2004, lot 74 bis).
Ceci nous permet de formuler la possibilité selon laquelle la conception de cette commode puisse plus certainement être attribuée à Adrien Delorme.
Cette commode peut également être rapprochée de la commode livrée par Joubert pour madame Adélaïde (illustration)
troisième fille de Louis XV, pour son appartement du château de Versailles qui occupait l’emplacement de l’ancienne petite galerie. Bien qu’ouvrant à vantaux, le gabarit et le dessin autant que le décor évoquent directement notre meuble, leurs dates de création devant également converger autour de 1755.

Piasa. Mercredi 19 juin 2013. Drouot Richelieu - Salles 1 et 7 - 9, rue Drouot - 75009 Paris

Deux vases d'ornement en ivoire tourné et sculpté. Travail probablement anglo-Indien, (Murshidabad) de la fin du, XVIIIe siècle. Photo Piasa

de forme Médicis, le corps à décor de rinceaux de feuillages (restaurés sur une des panses) et fleurs, flanqué de têtes de satyres grimaçant (petits éléments recollés) surmontant une frise de perles et une frise de godrons reposant sur un piédouche à base de marbre rouge griotte (d'époque postérieure) ; le couvercle à godrons en spirales terminé par une graine feuillagée ; les vases assemblés en cinq parties (le piédouche, le corps inférieur, la panse, le couvercle et la prise), le piédouche et le corps inférieur montés à tige filetée (montage transformé), le corps inférieur et la panse montés à pas de vis sculpté dans l'ivoire, la panse et le couvercle aujourd'hui fixés ensemble, la prise montée à l'aide d'une vis en bois tourné ; avec une étiquette ancienne au revers inscrite Jean Seligmann & Cie Paris.  Hauteur : 32 cm, (Restauration). Estimation : 30 000 / 50 000 €

Piasa. Mercredi 19 juin 2013. Drouot Richelieu - Salles 1 et 7 - 9, rue Drouot - 75009 Paris

Paire de grands chenets aux chinois, Époque Louis XV, vers 1750. Photo Piasa

à décor d'un homme et d'une femme assis sur une terrasse feuillagée en enroulement ornée d'un perroquet ; avec leurs fers. , Hauteur : 45 cm - Largeur : 46 cm. Estimation : 25 000 / 30 000 €

Piasa. Mercredi 19 juin 2013. Drouot Richelieu - Salles 1 et 7 - 9, rue Drouot - 75009 Paris

Important secrétaire en arte povera. Travail vénitien du milieu du XVIIIe siècle. Photo Piasa

formant commode en bois polychrome et doré, de forme mouvementée, la façade ouvrant à trois tiroirs et deux vantaux surmontés d'un fronton ajouré ; à décor de scènes pastorales, l'intérieur en arte povera sur fond vert.  Hauteur : 260 cm, Largeur : 120 cm, Profondeur : 60 cm, (Restaurations). Estimation : 10 000 / 15 000 €

Piasa. Mercredi 19 juin 2013. Drouot Richelieu - Salles 1 et 7 - 9, rue Drouot - 75009 Paris

Coffret dit en piqué en marqueterie de cuivre et cuivre argenté sur fond d'écaille brune. Travail italien, probablement napolitain du milieu du XVIIIe siècle. Photo Piasa

à décor d'angelots et oiseaux dans des rinceaux de feuillages et fleurs. Hauteur : 15 cm - Largeur : 24 cm, Profondeur : 14 cm. Estimation : 10 000 / 12 000 €

Piasa. Mercredi 19 juin 2013. Drouot Richelieu - Salles 1 et 7 - 9, rue Drouot - 75009 Paris

Tambour de pluie. Vietnam, Culture de Dong Son, Ve – Ier siècle av. J.C. Photo Thierry Desbenoit & Associés

à décor d'une étoile au centre entourée de frises et de quatre animaux en relief. En bronze à patine verte. H: 47 cm L: 71 cm. Estimation : 6 500 / 7 000 €

Thierry Desbenoit & Associés. Jeudi 20 juin 2013. Drouot Richelieu - Salle 12 - 9, rue Drouot - 75009 Paris. Tel: 01 42 46 04 27

Situle « thap ». Vietnam, Culture Dong Son,Ve – Ier siècle av. J.C. Photo Thierry Desbenoit & Associés

à paroi cylindrique et anses latérales moulées d'un décor géométrique. En bronze à patine de fouille. H : 36 cm D : 34 cm. Estimation : 3 800 / 4 000 €

Thierry Desbenoit & Associés. Jeudi 20 juin 2013. Drouot Richelieu - Salle 12 - 9, rue Drouot - 75009 Paris. Tel: 01 42 46 04 27