André LHOTE (1885-1962) - Lot 107

André LHOTE (1885-1962) Tahitian Woman, after a painting by Paul Gauguin in the Ordrupgaard Museum, Copenhagen. Oil on canvas. 74 x 93 cm. A certificate from Madame Dominique Bermann Martin dated June 2, 2023 will be given to the buyer. Provenance: Gabriel Frizeau Collection, Bordeaux. André Lhote discovered modern painting, especially the work of Gauguin, through the Bordeaux collector and patron Gabriel Frizeau (1870-1938), whom he met in 1906. Guy Marandet in Cahiers drômois (2004, n° 16, p.14) reports that André Lhote: "was astonished to see works by Gauguin and Odilon Redon hanging in the large study. He admired five Gauguins: L'homme qui conduit un cheval dans une forêt, deux baigneuses de Tahiti, un dos de femme étendue, un paysage de Bretagne from 1894 and the famous canvas "Que sommes nous? Where do we come from? Where are we going?" now in the Boston Museum. André Lhote would copy these Gauguins in the weeks that followed. "I was a fauve by instinct", he would say. The thick canvas is characteristic of André Lhote's early work. Gabriel Frizeau would regularly commission André Lhote to copy works he wished to acquire from Parisian galleries, or paintings he wished to part with. In 1913, for example, a large Baigneuse from 1898, most probably this Tahitienne from 1898, was sold by Grabriel Frizeau to Léon Marseille, before the latter sold it to the Danish collector Wilhelm Hansen in 1917 or 18. The Hansen collection was bequeathed to Denmark in 1951. The painting is currently in the collections of the Ordrupgaard Museum near Copenhagen. It was this same 1898 Tahitienne by Paul Gauguin, seen at Gabriel Frizeau's home around 1905 by the poet Saint-John Perse, that inspired his poem L'Animale.