Charles Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran

(French, 1838-1917)

Portrait of Mrs Harry Vane Milbank, neé Alice Sidonie Van den Bergh

Footnotes

Provenance
From the sitter to her son, Albert de Belleroche (French 1864-1944)
Thence by descent

The present lot portrays Alice Sidonie Van den Berg, daughter of Desire Baruch of Brussels, and a prominent socialite in London and Paris. Alice hosted great parties in both cities and was a good friend of both the Impératrice Eugénie, Napoleon 3rd's wife, in Paris and the Marquess of Queensberry in London. Described as having an 'almost legendary beauty', Alice's first marriage, to Edmund Charles, Marquis de Belleroche produced a son Albert, who went on to become a celebrated painter. But the marriage ended unhappily, and in 1871, Alice married Harry Vane Milbank, the nephew and heir-to-be of the Duke of Cleveland and a celebrated duellist, huntsman and adventurer; he was also an inveterate gambler. The family moved to Paris, where many great writers and artists were frequent visitors to Alice's salons, notably the writer and humourist Oscar Wilde and the great American painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). It was at one such soiree that Albert de Belleroche met Sargent, who was so impressed by his drawings that he convinced the young man to join the atelier of Carolus-Duran.

Both Carolus-Duran and Sargent painted portraits of Alice; in 1882 Harry commissioned Carolus-Duran to paint his wife, while Sargent painted Alice a number of times, including a full-length portrait (which Richard Ormond dates to circa 1883-4), which is dedicated to Belleroche (see Sotheby's New York, May 24, 2001, lot 33).

The present lot pre-dates these portrayals of Alice Milbank. By the time it was painted in 1877, Carolus-Duran had established a well-regarded atelier in Paris. His methods were highly influenced by the 17th Century master Diego Velázquez (Spanish 1599-1660), who Carolus-Duran believed to be the 'most complete' artist ¹, saying of him 'he is the master who has taught me better than anyone else to say the utmost possible with the fewest possible words.'² Carolus-Duran's technique placed the emphasis on colour and form, using direct and painterly brushwork, in preference to smooth blending. As H. Barbara Weinberg notes, Carolus-Duran's canvases are 'painted quite broadly in even tones of flesh tint, and stood side by side like pieces of a mosaic, without fusion of their adjacent edges. No brushing of the edge of the hair into the face was permitted, no conventional bounding of eyes and features with lines.' ³

Carolus-Duran described his own work as an attempt to 'go straight to nature...my own art may be summed up in two words: I seek to give the impression of things which touch and surround me'. ⁴ This is echoed by Eugène Montrosier, a contemporary writing in 1876, who wrote that 'the grand success of Carolus-Duran is easily explained. He makes living beings, and he makes them thus because he so sees them. One feels that when he has a subject under his eyes, he scrutinizes the very soul. With a penetrating look he seizes the dominant passion, and this become the point of support for the whole work. With such a painter there are no trickeries, no feints, no implied meanings.' <sup>5

1</sup> Rowland Strong, 'Carolus-Duran–A Visit To His Studio In Paris', The New York Times, March 17, 1900
² Rollin Hartt, as quoted in Current Literature, A Magazine of Record and Review, Vol.XXXVIII, New York, page 368
³ H. Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers
⁴ Rowland Strong, 'Carolus-Duran–A Visit To His Studio In Paris, The New York Times, March 17, 1900
⁵ Eugène Montrosier, Galerie Contemporaine, 1876