421. Shads

Ioan Andreescu

1850, Bucureşti - 1882, Bucureşti

Estimate

EUR 25.000 - 35.000

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Session

Wed, 28 February 2018 19:30

Ioan Andreescu's biography was a continuous research, the short life of the artist being scrutinised by chroniclers at the recently established School of Fine Arts. Andreescu studied drawing there, but some of his biographers consider he also may have taken painting lessons (easy to assume given the school context). After graduating from the Bucharest School of Arts, headed by Aman, Andreescu found himself cloistered in an environment lacking a direct infusion of art: with great difficulty, in 1872 he was hired as a teacher at the Bishopric Seminary in Buzău. Isolated in the provincial town, he began to work by nature: landscapes, still lifes and portraits. He had the epiphany of painting in January-February 1973, when, on the occasion of the Exhibition of the Society of Friends of Fine Arts at the Herdan Hotel in Bucharest, Andreescu could admire about 150 works by Nicolae Grigorescu. This is considered the turning point in Andreescu's career, who devoted himself to painting from that moment on, and who became an artist of great quality in just 6 years, until he left for France. During the period spent in Buzău, in the mid-1870s, Andreescu became the modern painter we know today, the qualitative leap of his creation being easily identified from his early years of painting. Between September 1872 (his arrival in Buzău) and December 1878 (leaving for studies in France), Andreescu only worked in and around Buzău (the appearance of his first Impressionist landscapes), and his artistic attempts were supported by various local cultural figures. The brothers Alexandru and Iancu Demetriad, Alexandru Bellu (nephew of Georges de Bellio) or Gheorghe Pancu, all of them from Buzău, understood his work and supported the young painter who would make his debut in official galleries in 1876, at the third exhibition of the "Friends of Fine Arts" Society. These three patrons gathered about 50 works by Andreescu, the most important being by far Alexandru Demetriad, Andreescu's first collector. Coming back to the 1876 exhibition, it should be mentioned that one of the four works with which Andreescu participated was entitled "Fish". Given that the most informed expert in Andreescu's work, Radu Bogdan, confirmed in 1982 that the present work - "Shads" - is the earliest known painting of fish (compared to "Sterlet" or "Carp" in the collection of the National Museum of Art of Romania), we can assume that it is one and the same as the painting shown in 1876. There are not many occurrences of fish in Andreescu’s exhibitions, the following mention of this limited typology of works being in 1910, at the Andreescu retrospective exhibition at the Artistic Youth that year. On that occasion, he showed three still lifes with fish from Constantin Mille’s collection, which can only lead us to believe that "Shads" could have been one of those. What is certain is that between the death of Alexandru Demetriad (1897) and the rediscovery of Andreescu’s painting in 1955, we do not know its exact route, which only reinforces the rarity of this exceptional oil painting by Ioan Andreescu. The re-introduction of the work in the public circuit was due to the art historian Radu Bogdan, who made it public, analysed and showed it in 1982-1983, in the exhibition dedicated to Andreescu's Romanian creation.

References

Catalog "Expoziţia comemorativă Ioan Andreescu 1850 – 1882: Anii de creaţie în ţară", Cuvânt înainte, Studiu şi Catalog comentat de Radu Bogdan, 21 decembrie 1982 – 6 februarie 1983, Muzeul Naţional de Artă al României BOGDAN, Radu, "Andreescu. Volumul I: Artistul în epocă", Ed. Meridiane, Bucureşti, 1969 BOGDAN, Radu, "Andreescu. Volumul II: Posteritatea critică", Ed. Meridiane, Bucureşti, 1982

Dimensions

width 21 cm, height 37 cm, custom 21x37

Description

oil on canvas glued on wood, signed lower right, in red, "I. And"

Research information

Opera a participat la expoziția "Ioan Andreescu, 1850-1882. Anii de creație în țară", Muzeul de Artă al Republicii Socialiste România, 21 Decembrie 1982 - 6 Februarie 1983, Radu Bogdan și este reprodusă în catalogul expoziției, la pag. 30.

PROVENANCE

Collection of Av. Alexandru Demetriad (1843-1897). The first collector of Ioan Andreescu's paintings, Demetriad knew the painter in the period he spent in Buzău and acted as a patron of young Andreescu. The collection of oils by Andreescu included about 25-30 paintings, all from the period spent in Buzău, which entered the collection of Demetriad's inheritors after his untimely death in 1897. Brother Iancu Demetriad (1845-1917) and Alexandru's widow and two daughters shared the collection of paintings that are now scattered (lost, in the collection of the National Museum of Art, Iași and Brașov Museums); in 1955 his work was rediscovered by the art historian Radu Bogdan, when this work was part of the Aurelia Georgescu collection.

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