A unique copy of 18th-century French painter and draftsman Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s illustrations for “Fables de La Fontaine” sold in New York on Wednesday at auction at Christie’s for $2.7 million.
This precious piece for bibliophiles is presented as a thick album of 138 detailed landscape drawings, framed by a blue outline, each illustrating one of French fabulist and poet Jean de La Fontaine’s famous tales, such as “The Frog Who wants to become as big as the calf”, “The grasshopper and the ant” or “The crow and the fox”.
The court painter of France under Louis XV, Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686-1755) had made them in the early 1730s with brush and black ink, but they were not immediately assembled.
It is “the only intact volume of Oudry’s illustrations for La Fontaine,” Stijn Alsteen, Christie’s international manager of old drawings, told AFP, adding that a second volume had existed but was “dismembered” and scattered among collections and museums.
A value that has tripled in 25 years
Jean-Baptiste Oudry is considered one of the best illustrators of La Fontaine’s fables, along with Gustave Doré and Grandville, and his drawings can be seen in the luxurious editions of Diane de Selliers in France.
The album, which sold at Sotheby’s in 1996 for £550,000, the equivalent of more than $850,000 at the time, was part of the JE Safra collection, of which 78 works from the 17th to 19th centuries sold for 18, 5 million dollars. Wednesday in New York.
The piece was estimated at between $1.5 million and $2.5 million by Christie’s, which did not immediately provide information on the buyer.
Last May, Christie’s sold a Michelangelo drawing, “Young Naked Man” (after Masaccio), in Paris for 23 million euros.
Source: BFM TV
