From Chagall to Bugatti: A Taste for Order and Beauty
Born in 1872 in Marckolsheim into an Alsatian Jewish family, Charles Jacob Lévy—cousin of Théophile Bader, founder of Galeries Lafayette—built a considerable fortune over the course of a few decades in textiles and later in real estate. A passionate art lover, he began collecting in the 1920s at the Marcel Bernheim gallery, acquiring works by Renoir, Guillaumin, Sisley and Manet. Safeguarded during the Second World War in the vaults of the Banque de France, the collection survived intact before being passed down to subsequent generations.
Heirs to this ensemble, Paul and Janine H. acted as its careful custodians, further enriching it through new acquisitions. Today, following the death of Janine H., the last guardian of this legacy, her five children have chosen to bring this collection to light, invoking Baudelaire’s words that encapsulate its spirit: “There, all is order and beauty, luxury, peace and pleasure.”
The most anticipated work in the sale is the painting Les Amoureux de Vitebsk, painted by Marc Chagall in 1959 (estimated at €300,000–€600,000). This composition invites the viewer into the artist’s poetic universe and appears as a synthesis of his pictorial language: the figure of the bride, the rooftops of his native Vitebsk, the moon and the animals of his bestiary.
This attachment to a sensitive and contemplative form of painting continues in another major work in the collection, an Impressionist landscape by Armand Guillaumin, La Seine à Samois or Les Nuages roses (estimated at €20,000–€30,000), executed around 1900. At that time, Guillaumin regularly travelled to Sannois, where he painted a series of works on this motif, closely observing the play of light on water.
This mastery of Impressionist principles is also evident in a work attributed to Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, The Grand Path in Monet’s Garden at Giverny (estimated at €20,000–€30,000). Her landscapes, executed with great sensitivity, reflect a careful observation of nature to which she remained faithful throughout her career, without yielding to the radical developments that marked early twentieth-century art.
This predilection for painting is complemented by a marked taste for sculpture, embodied by a bronze Jupiter from the seventeenth-century Venetian School (estimated at €5,000–€10,000), acquired as early as 1922. This fine example comes from the prestigious collection of the Marquise de Ganay and may be compared to the version executed by Alessandro Vittoria, now held at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
A more modern echo is found in two delicate bronzes by Rembrandt Bugatti, cast using the lost-wax technique by A.A. Hébrard. Petites antilopes goudou ou koudou “Deux Amis”, a model created in 1911, circa 1904–1934 (estimated at €60,000–€80,000), and Petit Faon axis (estimated at €20,000–€30,000) convey with great accuracy the vitality and spontaneity of the animal world.
The collection then opens onto the decorative arts, with a group of Chinese and European porcelains, notably those produced at Meissen. An oval tureen from the late nineteenth century, decorated with dolphins and masks (estimated at €400–€800), as well as a chandelier centred on a porcelain bird’s nest (estimated at €500–€1,000), illustrate the collector’s taste for objects that are both decorative and expressive.
Finally, this dialogue between the arts extends into the field of jewellery with a neo-Renaissance bracelet attributed to Bapst Frères (circa 1830), set with emeralds, rubies and diamonds. It is said to have been a gift from the Duchess of Orléans to the Baroness of Saint-Joseph, wife of the general commanding the military division of Perpignan, in gratitude for her hospitality during an official visit to the South of France in the late 1830s.
