Henry d’Anty: Montmartre and the Palette Knife

Red roofs, a church tower, a sky of broken cloud and a crowd streaming along the road in black, blue and red, all of it laid on with the knife in slabs of paint that catch the light like enamel. Anyone who has handled a canvas by Henry d’Anty (1910–1998) knows the surface before reading the signature. His Village Fair with Figures is lot 19 of our Modern Masters: 20th Century Art sale.

From Belleville to Picasso’s studio

He was born Maurice Henry in the Belleville quarter of Paris on 8 September 1910 and spent part of the First World War with his grandmother at Saint-Cast in Brittany, where, he later said, he understood that only painting could render the power of light. He studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Julian and joined the École de Paris in the 1930s. Mobilised and taken prisoner in 1940, he settled after the war in Montmartre, in the former studio of Pablo Picasso, and exhibited for decades at the Salon des Peintres Témoins de leur Temps.

The knife and the ruby red

D’Anty’s subjects are the ones the Butte has always loved: villages and harbours, flowers, clowns, the coasts of Brittany and the Mediterranean. What sets him apart is the handling. The paint is applied almost entirely with the palette knife, in thick, glowing planes, with a warm palette in which a rich ruby red keeps returning. His lithographs spread the imagery widely, and by the time he died at Villejuif on 4 December 1998, museums in France and North America had acquired his work.

Collecting d’Anty

His canvases appear regularly in the French and American sale rooms, the larger village and harbour scenes fetching the strongest prices. Condition matters more than usual: the heavy impasto is vulnerable to flattening and loss, so an untouched surface like the one on our lot is worth checking for. More on his artist page.

At Aurora & Athena

Village Fair with Figures, c. 1960s, oil on canvas, 46.5 × 55 cm, framed, signed at the lower left and again on the reverse, is offered on 17 October 2026 with an estimate of 600 – 800 €. Photographs, condition summary and bidding on the lot page.