Rembrandt Bugatti valuation
Modelled animals from life at the Paris and Antwerp zoos, and died at thirty-one.
Rembrandt Bugatti was born in Milan in 1884 into a family of designers: his father Carlo made furniture and his elder brother Ettore built the cars.
What a work by Rembrandt Bugatti is worth
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Bio
Rembrandt Bugatti was born in Milan in 1884 into a family of designers: his father Carlo made furniture and his elder brother Ettore built the cars. Largely self-taught, he moved to Paris in his teens and spent his days at the Jardin des Plantes, modelling animals in clay directly from life, and from 1907 worked at the zoo in Antwerp. The bronzes of panthers, elephants, giraffes and antelopes keep the marks of his fingers and tools. The Paris founder and dealer Adrien-Aurélien Hébrard cast almost all of them and showed them at his gallery. Volunteering at a military hospital in Antwerp in the war deepened a depression, and he took his own life in Paris in 1916.
Nearly all the bronzes were cast by Hébrard by the lost-wax method in small numbers, and the Hébrard foundry stamp, the cast number and whether the cast was made in his lifetime are what a valuation rests on. Posthumous casts were made after his death, and later unauthorised casts and surmoulages, copies cast from existing bronzes, are a known problem, so surface detail and documentation need close examination. Véronique Fromanger's monographic catalogue is the reference.
Segantini, Hébrard and the Antwerp zoo
Bugatti was given his first name by his uncle, the painter Giovanni Segantini. He began working with Hébrard as a very young man, and Hébrard's gallery promoted his bronzes in Paris for the rest of his short life.
At Antwerp he was given the run of the zoo and a studio there, and his work was included in the art competition of the 1912 Olympic Games.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
