?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
PABLO PICASSO Portrait de Vollard, III.
Aquatint, circa 1937. 347x247 mm; 13 3/4x9 3/4 inches, full margins. Edition of 260. Signed in red pencil, lower right. Printed by Lacourière, Paris. Published by Vollard, Paris. A very good, dark and richly-inked impression.
Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) was among the most important art dealers in French contemporary art at the beginning of the 20th century. Vollard was an early champion of both Paul Cézanne (see lot ) and Vincent Van Gogh (he bought out nearly all of Cézanne's work in 1895, some 150 canvases, for his first major exhibition). He followed this early blockbuster with seminal exhibitions for Picasso and Matisse in 1901 and 1904, respectively. Vollard counted among his top clients American collectors such as Albert C. Barnes (of the eponymous private collection now on view in Philadelphia), Mr. and Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, Gertrude Stein and her brother, Leo Stein.
Vollard commissioned Picasso's most ambitious graphic sets, among the most important printed oeuvres of the 20th century, known as the Vollard Suite, a collection of 100 etchings in an edition of 260 (plus a large-paper, deluxe set of 50), in 1930. Picasso completed the suite in 1937 and took a further two years for the printmaker Roger Lacourière to finish printing, but the death of Vollard in 1939 and the Second World War meant that the sets only started coming onto the art market in the 1950s. Bloch 232; Baer 617.
