Fruits on a Table or Still Life with Apples and Grapes (Nature Morte a la Comptesse de N) is a still life painting by French artist Paul Gauguin painted in 1889. [1] It was one of two works stolen from the private collection of Terence F. Kennedy in London in June 1970 and recovered by the Carabinieri in Italy in April 2014. [2] [3]
The painting depicts two bowls of brightly coloured apples and grapes, on a fringed white linen cloth, on a wooden table, with a small dog sleeping on the floor in the background. It is signed and dedicated "a la Comptesse De N (Nimal)". [4]
The painting, along with Pierre Bonnard's Woman With Two Armchairs (La Femme Aux Deux Fauteuils), was stolen from the flat of widower Terence F. Kennedy (whose wife Mathilda died in 1964) at Chester Terrace, in Regent's Park on June 6, 1970. [5] Press reports at the time said that Kennedy's housekeeper was duped by three men, one posing as a policeman and the others as burglar alarm engineers, and that they cut the paintings from their frames while she was making them tea. [2] After the theft, the paintings are alleged to have been smuggled through France on the Paris-to-Turin train, [4] and then to have turned up in the lost-and-found railway depot in Turin. It is said they were auctioned in 1975 and that a worker at the Fiat Factory bought the paintings for a small sum. [3]
The paintings are said to have remained in the factory worker's kitchen until an art expert's evaluation in 2014. Once they were identified the Carabinieri took the paintings into custody. Under Italian law the factory worker could have a right to keep them if he could prove that he bought them in good faith. [2] [6] In December 2014 they were returned to him by a court in Rome. [7] Simultaneously, the sole and universal heir of the original owner, Terence F. Kennedy, was found and has since made his claim to title. [8]
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer, whose work has been primarily associated with the Post-Impressionist and Symbolist movements. He was also an influential practitioner of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms. While only moderately successful during his lifetime, Gauguin has since been recognized for his experimental use of color and Synthetist style that were distinct from Impressionism.
The Nabis were a group of young French artists active in Paris from 1888 until 1900, who played a large part in the transition from Impressionism and academic art to abstract art, symbolism and the other early movements of modernism. The members included Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Édouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Félix Vallotton, Paul Sérusier and Auguste Cazalis. Most were students at the Académie Julian in Paris in the late 1880s. The artists shared a common admiration for Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne and a determination to renew the art of painting, but varied greatly in their individual styles. They believed that a work of art was not a depiction of nature, but a synthesis of metaphors and symbols created by the artist. In 1900, the artists held their final exhibition and went their separate ways.
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Homage to Cézanne is a painting in oil on canvas by the French artist Maurice Denis dating from 1900. It depicts a number of key figures from the once secret brotherhood of Les Nabis. The painting is a retrospective; by 1900 the group was breaking up as its members matured.
Events from the year 1920 in Italy.
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