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Signed ‘Van Hasselt’ (lower left).
Sizes:
Frame: 53.5 × 61 cm | 21.1 × 24 in
Artwork: 38.5 × 46.5 cm | 15.2 × 18.3 in
Summer afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens: the great pond with its fountain, iron chairs set out on the pale gravel, strollers in the shade of the chestnut trees and a nurse with a pram at the water’s edge. The light is high and hazy, the greens deep, the figures no more than a few touches of colour.
Willem van Hasselt (1882–1963), born in Rotterdam and Parisian from 1903, belonged to the circle of Vuillard and Maurice Denis and became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1945. His Paris parks and river views, painted in thin, fluid oil with a silvery, Corot-like tonality, are his most sought-after works — and the Luxembourg, close to his studio on the Left Bank, the most frequent of them.
Signed ‘Van Hasselt’ at the lower left.
Private Collection, Spain.
Fair condition: an old repaired tear runs through the centre of the composition, from the fountain up into the sky, with retouching that is visible in normal light and confirmed under ultraviolet; the canvas is unlined and sound and the paint layer otherwise stable; rust staining at one tacking edge. Please contact us to request a detailed Condition Report.
Packed as size M (up to 80 × 60 cm) · 61 × 53.5 cm framed
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Willem van Hasselt was born in Rotterdam in 1882, the son of a tailor, and studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts. Diploma in hand, he moved to Paris in 1903, drawing for newspapers and painting theatre costumes to live while he discovered Corot in the Louvre. Around 1910 he befriended Jacques Salomon, Vuillard’s nephew, and entered the circle of Vuillard and Maurice Denis, whose intimate, tonal art shaped his own.
He served as an ambulance driver in the French army in the First World War, was naturalised French in 1933 and elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1945.
Van Hasselt’s pictures — the Luxembourg and Tuileries gardens, the Seine, Brittany and Normandy beaches, gardens and interiors — are painted thinly and fluidly in a silvery, Corot-like key, with figures reduced to a few touches. He exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Tuileries and with the galleries Druet and Charpentier.
His work is in the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and many French provincial museums. From 1957 he lived at Nogent-sur-Marne, where he died in 1963.
Willem van Hasselt (1882–1963), Rotterdam-born member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and painter of the Luxembourg and Tuileries gardens, and his Luxembourg pond offered at Aurora & Athena.
Highlights of the Aurora & Athena autumn sale on 17 October 2026: Bridget Tichenor, Nicholas Roerich, Konstantin Korovin, Gerard Sekoto, Jan Zrzavý, Pan Yuliang, a Miró lithograph and the painters of the École de Paris.
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