Centered around French Impressionism and early modernism, the collection of philanthropist and businessman Joseph Gottung includes a group of portraits by Degas.
Sotheby's will offer at this year's auction Chinese artistic antiquitiesand Impressionist portraits collected by a scion of one of Hong Kong's wealthiest families. The 400 works from the collection of the late businessman and philanthropist Joseph Gotung will be split between a Hong Kong sale in October and a London sale in December. Among the paintings is a portrait of Edgar Degas, given to Eugene Manet and Bertie Morisot at the wedding, writes The Art Newspaper.
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The aforementioned auction house will soon offer what remains of his collection, broadly divided into two categories: Chinese paintings, objects and antiquities spanning two millennia (to be auctioned on October 8 and 9 in Hong Kong), as well as European furniture and portraits 17 – the beginning of the 20th century (they will be presented on December 7 and 8 during the sale of works of Old Masters in London (SM – artists of Western Europe who worked before 1800 – ed.).
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French Impressionism and Early Modernism
Centered around French Impressionism and early modernism, it includes a group of portraits by Degas, a notable genre for the artist, as he never painted commissioned portraits. The most valuable of these is his portrait of Manet's younger brother, Eugène, from 1874, created as a wedding gift to the sitter and his wife, the artist Bertie Morisot. The work is estimated at £4-6 million.
Gotung, a member of one of Hong Kong's richest and oldest families, took up art collecting in the early 1970s after how he ended up in San Francisco due to a flight delay. To pass the time, he went to an antique store and found a pair of white jade bowls. In the 1990s, he moved from Hong Kong to Great Britain. Despite his wealth and fruitful support and patronage of artists, Joseph Gotung remained a relatively non-public figure throughout his life and kept his collection in his own house in London.
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