Oct 10, 2024 - Sale 2681

Sale 2681 - Lot 4

Price Realized: $ 1,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800

F. HUGO D'ALÉSI (1849-1906)

NICE. 1895.


42½x30¼ inches, 108x78 cm. F. Hugo d'Alési, Paris.
Condition B+: partially-replaced right margin; overpainting in margins and upper right image; repaired tears at edges, some slightly into image and upper text.

Romanian-born Hugo d'Alési was one of the earliest artists to design posters for the French railway companies. They were printed using a process similar to chromolithography called simile-aquarelle (literally, faux watercolor), that required up to 20 different colors to render the final image, making them much more richly printed, detailed and painterly than the travel posters from subsequent decades. By some accounts, he designed "hundreds for the railway companies" (Hillion p. 278). It was such an expensive process that it drove the artist into bankruptcy shortly before his premature death.

Riviera 418, Azur 43, La Mer p. 48, Stembera p. 16.