Horace Middleton R.B.A.

Sirens

Circa 1910

Mystical and mysterious, a mythological Ondine rests beside an ethereal forest pond in this majestic, original oil on canvas by French Symbolist Pierre-Amédée Marcel-Béronneau. A stu...

René Magritte 1898-1967 Belgian Le carnaval du sage (The Sage’s Carnival) Signed “Magritte” (lower right); titled and dated "Le carnaval du sage 1947" (en verso) Oil on canvas The enigmatic paintings of René Magritte have become some of the most familiar and celebrated of the Surrealist movement. Among the most influential of the Surrealist painters of the 20th century, Magritte is an artist of international renown, as beloved for his popular appeal as he is for the psychological intensity of his works. The present oil on canvas, entitled Le carnaval du sage, was executed in 1947 at the height of his career, and it is a tour-de-force example of the haunting, mysterious scenes that comprise his oeuvre. Painted in the years following the Second World War, Le carnaval du sage showcases several recurring themes from Magritte’s oeuvre. Chiefly, a juxtaposition between the visible and the hidden is keenly felt. Throughout his career, Magritte explores the psychological obsession with revealing what is hidden, particularly with regard to the human face. In his Le fils de l’homme, he obscures the face of a man in a bowler hat with an apple, while his Les amants (Metropolitan Museum of Art) conceals the faces of two lovers with white sheets. In Le carnaval du sage, Magritte juxtaposes the blatant nudity of his central figure by masking her face, simultaneously revealing and concealing her from the viewer. The work also incorporates two of Magritte’s most common tropes – the glass of water and the baguette. Lending the scene a strange sense of domesticity, they appear infinitely familiar and distinctly out of place, and thus heighten the uncanny effect of Magritte’s composition. In the background hovers a ghost obscured by a sheet, a figure which was of particular fascination to Magritte beginning in 1946. He once wrote to his fellow Surrealist Paul Nougé: "I saw in a dream an answer to the problem of the ghost: the traditional ghost draped...

This extraordinary Italian gouache and oil on canvas brings two of the most popular characters from Greek mythology vividly the life - the nymph and the satyr. Both creatures are famed for their carefree natures and lascivious temperaments, and tales abound of satyrs pursing nubile nymphs in order to rape or seduce them, usually with little success. One such narrative humorously unfolds in the present piece, which depicts an indignant satyr captured by three nymphs with a golden net. The relationship between these two mythological creatures was a popular one for artists throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, though its origins stretch back to antiquity. Both satyrs and nymphs...

French Academic painter Guillaume Seignac was renowned for his masterful treatment of the idealized nude. His languishing female subjects based on Greco-Roman prototypes were and rem...