Lot 12
Auguste Hiolle (French, late 19th/early 20th c.), "A Roman Couple Watching a Town in Flames", 1892, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right, 71 in. x 92 in., in a good period frame. ?
Symbolism, together with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, was one of the major movements in art and literature between about 1885 and 1905. "Symbolism rejects traditional iconography and replaces it with subjects that express ideas beyond the literal objects depicted. [Its] pictures appear more suggestive than descriptive ... [they are] evocative and emotionally resonant; ... their purpose was to render visible the invisible and to communicate the inexpressible." As a contemporary critic noted, almost precisely apropos of a painting such as this, "... a good painter will show a house lost in the country, ... a face or hands at rest, and these simple pictures will have a power of adding something to our awareness of life."
Auguste Hiolle was a member of a family of artists, including the sculptors Ernest-Eugène (1834-1886) and Maximilien-Louis (1843-1938). This large and impressive painting is clearly one of his major achievements, and-true to its aesthetic-leaves us both puzzled and fascinated with its implied outcome.
- Literature: Reference: Julius Kaplan, "Symbolism," Grove Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, 34 vols., London, 1996, vol. 30, pages 168-170. Maurice Maeterlink (1862-1949) of Belgium, in Le Figaro, Paris, 2 April 1894. Laure de Margerie, "Hiolle," Dictionary of Art, 1996, vol. 14 page 564.
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