Hugues Gall sketch fetches half a million
NewsWhen the former opera chief of Geneva and Paris died in May, followed days later by his husband, the couple were found to own an unknown drawing by Paul Verlaine of the poet Arthur Rimbaud.
Never seen in public, it was one of very few extant images of the writer. This week it sold at an estate auction for an unexpected 585,000 Euros, almost three times the estimate. The sketch has vanished once more into private hands.
I presume it is the sketch whose photo one can see at Artnet, drawn “from memory” by Verlaine in 1872. According to the description on the rear of the mount, it served as the frontispiece to the first Rimbaud collected edition of 1895, so people have been able to see its reproduction, at least, for over a century.