Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> It was in 1892 that Joseph Leger (1867-1925) whose father had moved from Ireland to London some years earlier began to deal in pictures as a sideline to his activities as a painter and as a restorer: a not unusual combination of professions in those days. The year 1892 saw a number of notable picture sales taking place with major paintings making what would now seem to be bargain prices. Indeed amongst the most delightful canvases sold that year was the beautiful study by William Hogarth of The Heads of his Six Servants which Charles Fairfax Mur-ray purchased for 155 gns and presented to the nation. In that first year of business Leger would prob-ably have seen a number of important pictures in the salerooms that were later to be purchased by his successors in this firm. Amongst these were the outstanding vignette by Turner The Sea! The Sea! which was sold for 76 Gns in the Dent Sale at Christies and which in 1988 was purchased by this firm in the same saleroom for ?88000. Romney’s Lady Hamilton as a Welsh Girl made the substantial price of 2100 Gns in 1892 and was later sold by us in 1965 to a private collector in Spain. Rossetti’s La Pia de Tolomei was also on the market in 1892; we sold this in 1957 to the University of Kansas Art Museum for $2000. The important early work by Gabriel Metsu The Expulsion of Hagar that the Stedelijk Museum at Leiden purchased from us in 1978 appeared in Paris in 1892; we lent it to the Metsu Exhibition at Leiden in 1966 on the first occasion that we owned it. (MP)