davinci diamonds Oh, to Own the Lost Portrait of Arthur Rimbaud!
The story sounds like the plot of a novel. It all started with a portrait of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, drawn in 1872 by his fellow writer and companion Paul Verlaine.
The picture is well known in France as the frontispiece of Rimbaud’s “Poésies Complètes,” which was published posthumously in 1895. It was often reproduced in textbooks, so the drawing is near-universally familiar.
But the portrait’s whereabouts and its ownership was unknown. It was never exhibited and was hidden in private collections for 130 years. That is, until this year, when the picture was found and sold at the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris for a record-breaking sum.
The work was found in the estate of Hugues Gall, who died last May at age 84. Mr. Gall was an opera manager who was once the head of the Grand Théâtre de Genève and the Paris Opera. Since 2008, he had been the director of the Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, where Monet’s water lily paintings were produced.
Mr. Gall was well known in France, and was an international personality in the theater world, said Vincent Sarrou, an associate auctioneer at Tessier & Sarrou & Associés, the house that obtained the estate. (Hôtel Drouot is a historic auction site that hosts sales for independent houses like Tessier & Sarrou.)
“He was given lots of items, such as paintings, as gifts,” Mr. Sarrou said.
When Mr. Gall died six months ago, leaving behind only a sister in Vienna, his estate included diverse treasures characteristic of a life well lived. There was a silver tea service from Russia, an Art Nouveau card table, an ancient medallion from Sicily bearing an image of Persephone, luggage from Louis Vuitton and Goyard, and drawings by the French poet and playwright Jean Cocteau.
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