Five European Views Under 2,500 €: Venice, Amsterdam, Catalonia and a French Harvest

The Rialto market from the water, orange sails and crates of produce on the quay, 2,300 €. The Westerkerk over a sunlit Amsterdam street, 1,500 €. A Venetian girl with a yellow jug on her shoulder, 600 €. A misty river clearing in the Garrotxa, 900 €. Haystacks in a French field in the summer of 1926, 2,000 €. Five views by five painters from five countries, all in our gallery in Barcelona and none over 2,500 €. Here is what each one is and who painted it.

Lucien Frennet, The Rialto Market, 2,300 €

Lucien Frennet (1888–1949) trained at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in his native Liège and painted in the Belgian Luminist manner, the local answer to Impressionism that cared above all about sunlight on surfaces. The Rialto Market takes that light to Venice: market boats with orange-red sails against the palaces, merchants unloading onto the stone quay, the canal broken into reflections. Oil on canvas, 40.5 × 50.5 cm, framed to 57 × 67.5 cm, signed L. FRENNET in blue at the lower left. It is the largest and the most fully worked picture of the five.

Herman Bogman, View of Amsterdam, 1,500 €

Herman Bogman (1890–1975) was the son of a decorative painter in The Hague, studied at the city’s Royal Academy of Art and under Willem de Zwart, and belongs to the last generation of the Hague School. He is best known for still lifes, which makes a cityscape of this quality the rarer thing. View of Amsterdam looks down a street of brick gables to the tower of the Westerkerk, the church beside the Anne Frank House, with figures in the sun and shade. Oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm, framed to 70.5 × 50 cm, signed H. Bogman lower left.

Josef Syrový, Venetian Girl with a Water Jug, 600 €

Josef Syrový (1879–1956) studied under Brožík and Hynais at the Prague Academy, left for Italy at twenty, and from 1911 spent twenty-eight years in Paris showing at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne. His Venetian water-carriers and market girls, painted in short bright strokes like mosaic, were what the Paris critics knew him for; we told his story in Josef Syrový: A Czech Painter in Venice and Paris. Venetian Girl with a Water Jug is the type piece: a dark-eyed girl in a red blouse and green fringed shawl, a glazed yellow jug on her shoulder, the lagoon and a campanile behind. Oil on cardboard, 26.5 × 21.5 cm, framed to 42 × 37 cm, signed J. Syrový lower left. At 600 € it is the least expensive painting in the gallery by a painter with a Salon record.

Joan Colomer Valls, Clareja Vora el Riu, 900 €

The one living painter here, and the local one. Joan Colomer Valls was born in 1965 in Sant Feliu de Pallerols near Olot and learned to paint with his father and siblings in the tradition of the Olot school, the Catalan landscape painters who worked outdoors in the volcanic Garrotxa, before studying in Madrid. Clareja Vora el Riu, “clearing by the river”, is a marshy bend in low light, pools in the foreground, a dark treeline behind. Oil on canvas, 50 × 60 cm, in a classical gold frame to 70 × 81 cm, signed on the front and signed and titled on the reverse with the archive reference AG-469.

Louis Bougues, Hay (1926), 2,000 €

Louis Bougues, recorded as Louis de Bougues-Montès (1904–c. 1979), is the least documented of the five: a French landscape painter whose gardens, poplars and village views pass through the regional auction houses of Lyon and the Toulouse area, with no dealer archive or exhibition record found so far. We say so on his page rather than fill the gap. What the picture itself says is enough: Hay is a harvest field of sheaves and stacks under a pale sky, in the broken, dabbed brushwork close to pointillism that his recorded works share, signed and dated Louis Bougues 1926 lower right. Oil on panel, 45 × 67 cm, framed to 57 × 78.5 cm.

How to buy

The price on each work’s page is the price; gallery sales carry no buyer’s premium. Buy now reserves the work for 48 hours while you pay by bank transfer or card. Shipping is quoted separately, with an estimate on the page for your country; the work travels framed, packed by our shipping partner in Barcelona and insured for its price. All five are catalogued under the artist’s name without qualification and covered by our five-year guarantee of authorship. Viewing in Barcelona by appointment; photographs of the reverse and signature on request.