Edouard DÉTAILLE (Paris? 1848-1912) - Lot 196

Lot n° 196
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25000 - 35000 EUR
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Result : 69 552EUR
Edouard DÉTAILLE (Paris? 1848-1912) - Lot 196
Edouard DÉTAILLE (Paris? 1848-1912) The death of King Henry II at the tournament of the Hotel des Tournelles. Signed and dated lower left "EDOUARD DETAILLE / 1906". 226 x 386 cm Restorations, small accidents. Provenance: - George Dufayel's private mansion, Paris, 76 avenue des Champs-Élysées until its destruction in 1925. Bibliography: - F. Robichon, Edouard Detaille, un siècle de gloire militaire, Paris, 2007, p. 121. - Ader Picard sale, Tajan, March 8, 1978. Edouard Detaille was a pupil of Ernest Meissonier. As a painter of historical subjects, he represented contemporary events such as the battles of Rezonville and Champigny, but also older events. Here he deals with a significant episode in French history: the death of Henri II in 1559 during a tournament organized on the occasion of two great marriages, that of Marguerite, the king's sister, with the Duke of Savoy Emmanuel-Philibert, and that of Elizabeth, the king's eldest daughter, to Philip II, King of Spain. The tournament was held in the rue Saint-Antoine in front of the Hôtel des Tournelles, the king's usual residence. Henry II, while confronting Count Gabriel de Montgomery, was seriously wounded in the eye by his opponent's spear and died of his wounds at the age of forty. An inscription at the bottom center repeats Nostradamus' prediction about the king's death: "The young Lyon will overcome the old, In the field bellique by singular duel, In golden cage the eyes luy crevera, Two classes one then die cruel death." Detaille created this work, which he completed in 1906, along with several other decorative panels, to decorate one of the walls of the mansion of Georges Jules Dufayel (1855 - 1916), the businessman who founded the Grands Magasins Dufayel, the largest department store in the world at the time. Georges Dufayel bought a house on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées that had belonged to the Duchess of Uzès. He replaced it with a more imposing mansion described as "One of the most expensive and ostentatious houses in the world, it was built for the millionaire furniture dealer Dufayel before the [First] World War, but who, finding it too magnificent to live in, preferred to live until his death in a more reasonable house built in the courtyard." (Oil Giants Buy French Palaces, New York Times, December 8, 1920, p. 9.) The building was destroyed in 1925. A preparatory study of this work is kept in the Musée de l'Armée in Paris (gouache, pencil and watercolour, 57 x 105 cm).
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