Important rare and undervalued work by Henri Huklenbrok at Horta Brussels

Horta, from Brussels, sells on 22 February 2016 a "Signed Huklenbrok" view of a quarry in Bouille, France, a quite large work of 116 by 89cm estimated at 400 to 600 Euro.

Huklenbrok is Henri Huklenbrok (1871-1942), a now forgotten but in his day very important Belgian (sometimes said to be German and/or French) post-impressionist, pupil of Gustave Moreau and friends with Henri Evenepoel and Henri Matisse. He was active mainly between 1895 and 1905, exhibiting at the Salon de Paris and in a two-person exhibition with Evenepoel in Brussels at the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in 1899, which was about the main location for Belgian avant-garde at the time. He also accompanied Matisse to Port-Croix in the late 1800s. You can read a bit about him (just enough to make you curious) in this NYTimes article.

Evenepoel died in 1899 and Huklenbrok dropped of the radar a few years later, supposedly being mentally deranged. He either didn't paint any more from them on, or his family destroyed most works: accounts seem to differ on this point, but the end result is that his work is fairly rare, and the artist mostly forgotten, while Evenepoel is now one of the most celebrated Belgian artists of right before 1900.

Huklenbrok is a very unusual name, and it turns out that his real name was Huichlenbroich, which is equally unusual and a lot harder to spell, or more likely Huklenbroich, which is slightly more common, especially in Germany; or most commonly Hucklenbroich.

The last Huklenbrok work to be offered by a major auction house was in 1992 (at Sotheny's Amsterdam), so comparing prices is hard. But the quality of the work, and his importance at the time, means that this should be worth at least 5,000 Euro instead of the extremely low 400 Euro the auction house suggests.

UPDATE: nice to see what an impact my blog has... Sold for only 240 Euro!