An early Belgian post-impressionist portrait for 70 Euro

Rops, from Belgium, sells on 22 October 2018 a "Men's portrait of Colbrandt 1907" estimated at 70 to 90 Euro.

Even as an anonymous portrait, it would be cheap to get this at 70 Euro, as the work is fairly well done and is  rather avant-garde for its time. But what's is strange is that the auction house seems to think this a portrait of Colbrandt, instead of this being a work by Colbrandt. Or at least they don't use their standard "signed Colbrandt" language, nor add "Colbrandt" or "Oscar Colbrandt" as the artist.

Oscar Colbrandt (1879-1959) was a Flemish painter who first specialized in portraiture, then turned to religious art, stopped exhibiting in 1925, and finally succumbed to "madness" (of whatever kind) and spent most of the last twenty years of his life in the well-known Guislain Institute in Ghent, one of the most modern mental institutions in the world at the time.

Little known during his lifetime, he got more attention afterwards, with solo or duo exhibitions nearly every decade.

He studied in Ghent shortly after 1900, together with people like Constant Permeke, Frits Van den Berghe, and Albert Servaes, who would become leading figures in the Flemish Expressionism. Servaes especially also turned to similar religious art. Colbrandt made very few paintings, and most of his known works are drawings. The only painting I could find in art sales databases was a Pieta which went for nearly 4,000 Euro. His drawings usually fetch around 1000 Euro though.

This work though is different, as it is a very rare example of his early work in portraiture, and not his later religious art. The work is strikingly fauvistic in it use of colouring, but the physiognomy, the look of the face is more realistic and already points to the later Expressionistic style of a Constant Permeke. The style may not strike us immediately nowadays as something special, but that is caused by the many later artists who used the same techniques to create portraits. In 1907 though, this was a novel, artistic choice, not a commercial thing.if the work had been painted in the 1950s, it would be a normal, neglectable work, but in this period very few Belgian artists showed any Fauvist influences, or general post-Impressionist characteristics. The combination of the wild colouring and the rough, anti-idealized features make this an unusual and very modern work.

It should be worth 1,500 to 2,000 Euro, but with such relatively unknown artists and very few comparable works, it is very hard to put a price on it. Still, 70 Euro would be an extreme bargain.