Claude Monet (1840-1926), Prairie à Giverny

Claude Monet (1840-1926)
Prairie à Giverny
signed 'Claude Monet' (lower left)
oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 32 in. (65.2 x 81.1 cm.)
Painted in 1885

Provenance
Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, by whom acquired directly from the artist on 23 April 1900.
Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd., London (no. 2540), by whom acquired from the above on 15 February 1951.
Major H. J. Dunsmuir, Ayrshire, by whom acquired from the above on 8 March 1951, and thence by descent to the present owner.

Pre-Lot Text
THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE SCOTTISH COLLECTOR
MAJOR HERBERT DUNSMUIR: COLLECTING IMPRESSIONISM IN SCOTLAND
Born in 1889 in a vast Scottish baronial mansion in the leafy Glasgow suburb of Pollockshields, Herbert Dunsmuir was the son of a brilliant sea captain and engineer, Hugh Dunsmuir, who had built up one of the most successful marine engine works on the Clyde. Educated at the fashionable Glenalmond School in Perthshire, Dunsmuir served in the machine gun corps in World War One, being posted to the Middle East where in fighting against the Ottoman forces he had his horse shot from under him. Returning to Scotland after the war, Dunsmuir with his brothers sold the shipping business at the height of the post-war boom and retired to the county of Ayrshire in south west Scotland, having married Aileen Boyd-Auld from an established county family with strong artistic interests, who lived in an arts and crafts house in the exclusive seaside resort of Troon.
Dunsmuir’s collecting dates from 1920 when, aged 31, he succumbed to the fashion for buying etchings by the leading topographical artists of the day, many of them Scots. Not only did this demanding genre train his eye but it also introduced him to a group of Glasgow art dealers, who in terms of the avant-garde, were way ahead of their English counterparts. The leader of the pack was Alexander Reid, who as a young man in Paris in the 1880s had worked with Theo van Gogh, younger brother of Vincent, in the modern painting section at the Parisian dealer, Boussod & Valadon, showing work by the likes of Degas, Gauguin and the leading Impressionists. Reid’s friendship with Van Gogh led to his sharing an apartment with him and his brother Vincent, sparking a short but intense friendship with the unknown artist who painted two portraits of the young Scottish dealer, one of which now hangs in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery.
Returning to Glasgow by 1889, Reid pioneered the sale of radical French painters at his newly established gallery, La Société des Beaux Arts, exhibiting work by Degas, Sisley, Pissarro, Monet and their contemporaries, as well as the more established Barbizon and Hague schools. His market was a small group of intensely competitive and outward looking Scottish collectors who had made their fortunes in the boom years of the industrial revolution. The shipper, Sir William Burrell, was his most important client, whose eponymous collection, now owned by the City of Glasgow, represents the acme of Scottish connoisseurship and taste of this period.
Although initially concentrating on etchings, Dunsmuir dipped his toe in the water with the acquisition of paintings by The Hague school and, closer to home, by the Glasgow Boys, who had made their name in the 1880s as cutting edge realist painters in the French manner. These purchases, which in the case of The Hague school were soon traded in, were made from leading Glasgow dealers in etchings, W.B Simpson and James Connell & Sons, but Dunsmuir soon found his way to the door of La Société des Beaux Arts where he swiftly fell under the spell of the Reids pére et fils. In 1926 and 1927, he bought works by the leaders of the Scottish Colourist movement, S. J. Peploe and J. D. Fergusson, two of the most radical painters in twentieth century British art, who had allied themselves with the Fauves in Paris before the first world war. Alexander Reid had been one of the first to recognize the importance of this revolutionary group of Franco-Scottish painters and his son went on to stage their first group show in 1924 in Paris. Thanks to the Reids, Dunsmuir became a lifelong enthusiast for Scottish post-impressionism, which explains the lack of French examples in his collection (apart from a work by Raoul Dufy, which had been bought on holiday in Cannes).
The recession-hit 1930s saw the closure of the Reids’ gallery in Glasgow. However, their London branch, established in 1926 as Alexander Reid & Lefevre continued to flourish. The move south signalled the arrival of a dynamic young dealer on the Scottish scene called Ian MacNicol, whose acute eye for a stand-out painting had been informed and sharpened by the taste of Alexander Reid. Fortuitously for Dunsmuir, MacNicol first set up shop in the industrial Ayrshire town of Kilmarnock, where Dunsmuir bought his first Boudin in 1935 - and in the following year two equestrian works by A. J. Munnings – another artist who was to remain an enduring passion.
Dunsmuir’s wider ambition as a collector of Impressionists first surfaced in the 1930s with his purchase from the Mayfair dealer Arthur Tooth & Sons of Camille Pissarro’s Maison du Père Gallien à Pontoise, 1866 (now in the Ipswich Art Gallery), which was one of a handful of early works to have survived the 1870 burning of the artist’s canvasses by Prussian occupying troops. This set the benchmark for his collecting which gathered pace through the 1940s reaching its peak in the 1950s. While confining most of his buying in Scotland to Ian MacNicol, he used a spread of London dealers to build up a collection along the lines promoted by Alexander Reid to the first generation of Glasgwegian collectors in the 1880s.
His buying included a grounding of Barbizon paintings by Daubigny, Harpignies and Corot; a handful of petit maîtres in Lepine and Guillaumin; examples of French Realism in Courbet and Diaz; a representative range of Impressionists focussing on Sisley, Pissarro, Renoir, Boudin and Fantin Latour, along with an outlier in Utrillo; and, as the pièce de resistance, Monet’s Prairie à Giverny.
The latter was acquired in 1951 for £1850 from one of his most favoured dealers, Dudley Tooth, with Dunsmuir trading in a Jongkind in part payment. On the same spree, he acquired a still-life by Fantin-Latour. With this deal, Dunsmuir acquired the outstanding painting in his already rich collection of French art. A precursor to two of the most important series of Monet’s career, Prairie à Giverny occupied a seminal place within the artist’s oeuvre, a position cemented by the fact that the painting remained in Monet’s personal collection until 1900 when acquired by the Galerie Durand-Ruel, the artist’s long-term dealers, with whom it stayed for over half a century. Dunsmuir was the first private collector to own the work and it has remained in his family ever since, despite his wider collection having been dispersed, not least by Dunsmuir himself who could not resist refining his collection. As such, Dunsmuir’s Monet represents one of the last great testaments of Scottish taste from a golden age of Scottish collecting to have remained in private hands.

Literature
L. Venturi, Les archives de l’impressionnisme, vol. I, New York & Paris, 1939, letter no. 250, p. 376 (as '1 toile prairie à Giverny').
D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, vol. II, 1882-1886, Lausanne & Paris, 1979, no. 992, p. 162 (illustrated p. 163).
D. Wildenstein, Monet: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, Cologne & Lausanne, 1996, no. 992, p. 372 (illustrated).

Exhibited
Lyon, Musée de Lyon, Salon du Sud-Est, June 1925, no. 1 (illustrated n.p.).
Paris, Galeries Durand-Ruel, Tableaux par Claude Monet, January 1928, no. 79, n.p. (dated '1883').
Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, Claude Monet: an exhibition of paintings, August - September 1957, no. 75, p. 53 (illustrated pl. 21b; dated '1884' and titled 'A Field Near Giverny'); this exhibition later travelled to London, Tate Gallery, September - November 1957.
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery, on extended loan (April 1992 - October 2017).
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, American Impressionism: A New Vision, 1880-1900, July - October 2014, p. 72 (illustrated).