François-Nicolas Martinet was a French naturalist engraver, active in Paris around 1760.   Despite formal training as an engineer, printmaking garnered Martinet success and became his main focus. Appointed engraver to the

King's Cabinet in 1756, he immediately collaborated with the most influential 18th century French ornithologists, including Mathurin Jacques Brisson for Ornithology in 1760, and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon, Natural

History of Birds. He engraved almost a thousand bird illustrations in Europe and the Tropics.   He also worked on the Encyclopedias of (...) Read more

Louis-Alexandre Cabié was a French landscape painter born in 1854 in Dol-de-Bretagne (Ile-et-Vilaine, France) and died at Bordeaux in 1939.   He was a student of Henri Harpignies (1819-1916) and Hippolyte Pradelles

(1824-1912). Cabié then joined the Naturalist school of Port-Berteau (near Saintes, France), a center for outdoor painting that included such prestigious artists Gustave Courbet and Corot after 1862. Artists from

Port-Berteau emphasize nature by transmitting it with great realism. In their works, nature is not an accessory, but the object of (...) Read more

The classical body of this tripod vase with opposing wavy sides modeled by grasps gives it an air of complicity. It further stretches across three feet below the stirrup rim.

These distorted shapes alternate with drops pulled from the rim.   In the work of Augustus Jean, the vigorous treatment of the volume contrasts with the delicacy of Japanese-style decor finely applied

on the body: flowering branches and butterflies in metallic enamels evolving on the translucent surface with the lightest touch. The relief (...) Read more

        Bou-Saada, the wild queen dressed with obscured gardens and guarded by purple hills, sleeps voluptuously along the steep river bank where the water rustles over white pebbles and roses. Isabelle

Eberhardt (1877-1904): The Tears of the Almond Tree, 1903.   Maxime Noiré, Oued dans une oasis (A Wadi in an Oasis), sold by Expertissim.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    The text which starts with these lines, celebrates a

famous oasis of the wilaya in M'Sila, at the south-east of Algiers, also called “city of happiness” or “the desert door”. (...) Read more

Native from Romania, Ion PACEA (1924-1999) composed artworks with classical themes (such as still life, landscape or marine) to which he added a very personal momentum.   He was clearly figurative early

in his art career, and then abandoned it preferring works that tended toward an abstract composition. He created a very personal style tinged with expressionism based on the harmony of

shapes and colors. Pacea was particularly fond of bright and astringent colors, used in mixed media. He realized a series of (...) Read more