Rating and value of paintings and drawings by Henri Regnault

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Artist's rating and value

Henri Regnault produced a variety of works, including paintings, watercolors and prints. He mainly depicted countryside landscapes.

His naturalistic landscapes are particularly sought-after at auction, and can fetch several hundred thousand euros in bidding.

As witness his oil on canvas Automedon and Horses of Achille, bid €200,000, whereas it was estimated at between €150,000 and €230,000.

Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

Henri Regnault's style and technique

Henri Regnault deploys a dazzling style of painting, where fiery gesture is combined with almost goldsmith's precision. Heir to academicism, he nonetheless hijacks its codes with a flamboyant approach, seeking less cold perfection than dramatic intensity.

His impeccably rigorous line comes alive under the impetus of a bold palette, where burning reds and sumptuous golds exalt his compositions.

Fascinated by the Orient, he transcribes its splendors with a luxury of detail that evokes Persian miniatures, but injects a dynamism derived from Baroque painting, playing on contrasts of light to amplify the effect of relief and movement.

His brush, agile and incisive, sculpts shapes in deep shadows, while the pictorial material, generous without being heavy, gives his works an almost tactile vibration. His attention to rendering, particularly of fabrics and armor, sometimes verges on illusionism, with every reflection and transparency rendered with dizzying precision.

But beneath this dazzling virtuosity lies a tension, an epic breath that inscribes his figures in a dramatic space where majesty rubs shoulders with fury.

Through this fusion of academic rigor and chromatic exaltation, Regnault fashions a unique style, at the crossroads of classicism and visionary orientalism, whose dazzling modernity would only be fully measured after his premature death.

The life of Henri Regnault 

Henri Regnault embodies that dazzling brilliance typical of fates broken too soon. Born in 1843 into a cultured family, he trained at the Beaux-Arts in Paris under the tutelage of prestigious figures, but it was the confrontation with the Academy that sculpted his ambition.

He quickly made his mark with the precision of his line and the power of his coloring, two qualities that placed him at the crossroads between academic classicism and the more innovative explorations of the time.

Winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1866, he stayed at the Villa Medici, where his work unfolded under the influence of tradition while being nourished by the discovery of Antiquity.

But it was above all in Spain and Morocco that he forged his artistic identity.

Seville, Granada, Tangiers: each stage nourished his eye, and Orientalism became a language that he appropriated with brilliance.

Regnault ventured into large-scale scenes, translating the light of these foreign lands with a vibrant palette, capturing the sublime in the dramatic tension of the figures he painted.

Salomé and L'Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade reflect this fascination with exoticism and restrained violence, where every movement is frozen in rare intensity.

With his bold compositions and powerfully expressive figures, he seems to capture the soul of the place, the brutality of the moment and the beauty of the light, while foreshadowing the more radical painting that was to emerge at the end of the century.

On the eve of the 1870 war, just as his career was shaping up to be triumphant, he voluntarily enlisted in the National Guard, an act that sealed his fate.

On January 19, 1871, he fell to Prussian bullets in Buzenval, aged just twenty-seven.

His name remains that of a virtuoso of dazzling talent, whose chromatic audacity and nascent modernity never had time to reach their full potential.

In just a few years, Regnault demonstrated his ability to break free from academic dogma, and will forever remain the painter of an era that was both moving and tragic.

Focus on Salomé, Henri Regnault, 1870.

In 1870, Henri Regnault painted Salomé (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), a work that not only renders the sensuality of the biblical character, but places her in a darker context, where beauty becomes an accomplice to violence.

Salomé, though a mythological figure of seduction, here becomes the embodiment of icy sensuality, a being suspended between desire and pain, in a moment of pure dramatic intensity.

Regnault, true to his bold approach, transforms this biblical scene into a kind of confrontation between eroticism and terror.

Salomé's very posture, frozen in a hypnotic dance movement, is enhanced by the brilliance of her drapery, where warm tones of red and gold seem almost to burn the canvas.

The light, playing on the reflections of her body, accentuates this sensation of contrast between the softness of the skin and the hardness of the message.

Everything in this work speaks of tension: the volumes of the body, enhanced by the light, the fixed expression, at once devoid of emotion and yet perceived as an act of violence.

This is no simple portrait of a woman; Regnault pushes the viewer to see beyond beauty, confronting him with the tormented soul of the character, while offering a fascinating vision of the ambiguity of desire.

Thus, far from being a simple image of seduction, Salomé becomes a tragic work where light and shadow intermingle, and where the viewer perceives the underlying dangers of a too-perfect universe.

Regnault succeeds in unveiling this double face, that of beauty and threat, in a canvas of rare power.

Henri Regnault's imprint on his time

Henri Regnault, in his time, embodied the archetypal painter whose imprint on the art scene went far beyond a simple aesthetic quest.

In the 1860s and 1870s, when art was searching between an academic heritage and the first influences of modernism, Regnault established himself as a resolutely audacious creator, transforming the representation of emotion and movement.

He moved away from the conventions of his time, notably the pompous classicism that still dominated the art world, to venture into territories where the character's psychology is just as paramount as the scene itself.

His compositions, marked by a palpable tension, bring a revival to genre and history painting, fields hitherto dominated by a more formal approach and devoid of the psychological depth he infuses into them.

Thus, in works such as Salomé or Le Bataille de Gravelotte, he would seek to highlight beauty in a new light, often more dramatic, more tragic, seeking to awaken in the viewer not only aesthetic admiration, but also a questioning of the human condition and its flaws.

In this respect, Regnault participates in an aesthetic evolution that undermines academicism, where protagonists are no longer simply depicted in idealized poses, but in moments of tension where emotion takes precedence over appearance.

This unique approach, blending the sublime and the dramatic, profoundly marked his period, placing Regnault at the forefront of an art that, while remaining attached to tradition, ventured towards new forms of expression and perception of the human figure.

Henri Regnault's stylistic influences

At the beginning of the 1860s, the influence of academism is still marked in Henri Regnault's work, particularly in his early historical compositions.

His admiration for Antiquity, the Italian Renaissance masters and Classicism is manifested in rigorous execution and meticulous attention to detail.

However, in the manner of Delacroix and l'École de Barbizon, Regnault's art gradually moves towards a more intense exploration of light and color effects.

This stylistic evolution was refined during his stay in Spain where, struck by the works of Velázquez, he learned to render a greater intensity in the rendering of human forms, while approaching characters with a whole new empathy.

Following this trip, the painter, while remaining faithful to an academic structure of composition, sought to insert a more narrative and expressive dimension into his canvases.

He also borrows from realist painting, adopting a more immediate approach to the subject and introducing elements of movement and dramatic tension.

This evolution, between the legacy of the classical masters and the emergence of a more direct pathos, crystallizes a reflection on the nature of beauty, which moves away from idealized representations to open up to the evocative power of reality.

His attachment to the representation of Orientalist subjects enabled him to establish himself as one of the most talented Orientalist artists of his time, alongside painters such as Henri Pontoy or Émile Aubry.

Through these influences, Regnault, at the frontier of several styles, builds a visual universe where the ideal is tinged with the complexity of emotion, oscillating between academic tradition and the search for a more personal art, more rooted in the reality of the subject. 

His signature

Not all of Henri Regnault's works are signed.

Although there are variations, here's a first example of his signature:

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