?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
F. HUGO D'ALÉSI (1849-1906)
MONACO. Circa 1900.
42x29¾ inches, 106¾x75½ cm. F. Hermet, Paris. Condition B+: replaced losses and punch holes and overpainting in margins and corners; repaired tears at edges, one into 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.
