JEAN HIPPOLYTE MARCHAND (FRENCH 1883-1940)
PAYSAGE DE PARIS
Estimate: £700 - £1,000
Auction: 11 February 2025 from 10:00 GMT
Description
Signed lower right, inscribed with artist's name and title to stretcher verso, oil on canvas
Dimensions
53cm x 45cm (21in x 17.75in)
Provenance
From the Estate of Dorothy Bohm
Footnote
Parisian suburban life is evoked in this verdant oil by Jean Hippolyte Marchand. A walker, an agricultural worker and a figure on horseback are painted with post-Impressionist brevity, their white headdresses suggesting we may be glimpsing the cloistered world of a religious order. The trees’ spindly boughs appear to bend in the breeze, their canopies ripening to an autumnal gold.
Marchand imbibed the tonal vivacity and stylised naivete of French modernism. Often described as a cubist, it was in fact only his early work that explicitly channelled cubism’s crystalline delineation, and from the mid-1910s his forms assumed a gentler organic quality while retaining an avant-garde sensibility. Marchand attained the distinction of inclusion in Roger Fry’s 1910 Manet and Post Impressionism exhibition at London’s Grafton Galleries. He became acquainted with Clive Bell and henceforth folded into the Bloomsbury circle. A number of his works were acquired by the important collector Samuel Courtauld.
Dorothy Bohm was a British photographer based in London, known for her portraiture, street photography, early adoption of colour, and photography of London and Paris. She is considered one of the doyennes of British photography.
Dorothy Bohm was born in 1924 in Koenigsberg, East Prussia and moved to England in 1939. By the age of 21, she was running her own very successful portrait studio in central Manchester, known as Studio Alexander. In the mid-1950s, she lived for a while both in Paris and New York before settling definitively in northwest London.
Her first solo exhibition, People at Peace, took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1969, and 1970 saw the publication of her first book, A World Observed. Numerous more books and exhibitions would follow. In 1971 she was closely involved in the founding of The Photographers’ Gallery, and served as its Associate Director for the next fifteen years. By the 1990s Dorothy was firmly established as one of the doyennes of British photography, with work in numerous public and private collections, including Tate, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Guildhall Art Gallery and the Musée Carnavalet, Paris.