Paul-César HELLEU (1859 - 1927)

Lot 19
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Estimation :
3000 - 5000 EUR
Paul-César HELLEU (1859 - 1927)
Portrait of Ellen Helleu, the artist's daughter, with the egret hat. Circa 1905, Three pencils (charcoal, sanguine and white chalk) on paper, 41.5 x 32 cm., Signed on the right. The Association "Les Amis de Paul-César Helleu" has confirmed the authenticity of this drawing, listed in their archives under the reference APCH: DE1-1804. It will be included in the catalogue raisonné currently being compiled. A pupil of Gérôme at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, a friend of Monet, Montesquiou, Proust, Chanel, Helleu is known to be, like his friend Giovanni Boldini, the portrait painter of the high society of Paris during the Belle Epoque. In 1884, Helleu fell madly in love with the young Alice Guérin, 16 years old, whose mother had commissioned the portrait. He courts her for two years and then marries her. She remained his favourite model, along with Ellen, the daughter they would have in 1887. Their beauties will be the subject of many comments and even of certain "appropriations": one day when Helleu visited Ambroise Vollard, and leafed through the suite of lithographs of the Vues de Paris, recently edited by Pierre Bonnard, he exclaimed "But! That's my wife and daughter in this Retour du Bois!". Very attached to his family life, whose tenderness and harmony he captures from all angles, Helleu draws with ease and spontaneity in three pencils. Our portrait of Ellen, with a serious, almost sulky face, is distinguished by her very nervous and quick pencil work, especially in the execution of the hat. We find this same expression, without the hat however, in a sheet of three studies of Ellen, published in the sum on the artist, published in 2014 (Watrigant, Paul-César Helleu, Paris, Somogy, 2014, p. 218). The beauty of Alice, then of Ellen, was to continue to be passed on, since Ellen's second daughter, born Eliane Orosdi, was to be one of the muses of the couturiers René Gruau, Cristobal Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy
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