Lot 147: Léon-Gabriel Coffinières de Nordeck (Montpellier 1844-1898 Paris)

La Journée d'un homme du monde (The day of a gentleman-artist): A design for a fan
signed and dated 'Gabriel Coffinières de Nordeck 1877', inscribed 'Le Gaulois'
pencil, watercolor, bodycolor heightened with white
10 3/4 x 22 3/4 in. (275 x 578 mm.)

Paris, Palais des Champs-Elysées, Explication des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravure et lithographie des artistes vivants, May 1877, no. 2504.

L. Auvray, Dictionnaire général des artistes de l'école française, Supplément, Paris, 1886, p. 150.

Princesse Mathilde Bonaparte (1820-1904).

Princesse Mathilde, who acquired the drawing from Coffinières and lent the drawing to the 1877 exhibition, was the daughter of Jérôme Bonaparte, youngest brother of Emperor Napoleon I. She was first intended to marry Louis-Napoleon, the future Napoleon III, but in 1840 married Prince Demidoff, the brutal but extremely rich Russian. In 1846 she separated from Demidoff and met the Comte de Nieuwerkerk, an amateur sculptor, who was later the Third Empire's minister of the arts.
Coffinières was a pupil of Meissonier, and exhibited for the first time at the Salon of 1875. He was then living at the very fashionable address of 120, Avenue de Champs-Elysées, and is shown on the last image of the fan passing the Hotel Crillion returning home to the Champs-Elysées.