Zhang Daqian's Children Playing under a pomegranate tree (click to enlarge). UPDATE: This sold for 74,580,000 Hong Kong Dollars over a top estimate of 20,000,000 HKD.
Zhang Daqian’s (1899 – 1983) Children Playing under a Pomegranate Tree is a highlight of Sotheby’s sale of the Mei Yun Tang Collection in Hong Kong on May 31.
Zhang, whose name is also spelt as Chang Dai-chien was the fourth highest selling artist at auction globally in 2010, behind Picasso, Qi Baishi and Andy Warhol, and ahead of Giacometti. He was one of the most prodigious and celebrated Chinese artists of the twentieth century.
The Mei Yun Tang Collection is internationally recognised as the most preeminent and comprehensive private collection of Zhang Daqian’s paintings, assembled by the late Mr. Kao Ling-mei and his wife Jan Yun-bor since 1940s. All the works in this sale are offered on the market for the very first time. They are masterpieces from the 1940s to the 1960s.
Renowned in China as a “modern Impressionist and Expressionist painter”, he immersed himself in the art of the West, forming a particularly close tie with Pablo Picasso, whom he met in 1953, and to whom he gifted a set of his own brushes, in the hope that these would enable Picasso to paint as finely as he.
The sale features 25 paintings from this collection, and is expected to fetch in excess of HK$130 million / US$ 16.7 million. Children Playing under a Pomegranate Tree is estimated at HK$15 – 20 million / US$1.9 – 2.6 million.
See antiquesandartireland.com post for April 7.
UPDATE: The sale of the Mei Yun Tang Collection realised 680,740,000 HKD,